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Comment Re:Um, right. (Score 5, Insightful) 278

To be honest my mom never understood some of the things she helped me with. What she did was read the textbook, see what I was having issue with, have me explain to her what I was trying to accomplish and how, and if she still didn't have an insight, she would tell me to ask somebody else. She knew her limitations (perhaps because her education is high school, and a bad one).

Comment Re:use this extension when you cannot stand austra (Score 1) 256

I don't like their logic regarding functionality. "If only a small subset of our population uses that feature, then it belongs in a add-on". It makes sense to reduce as much as you can the many points of failure. Sure. But, it's kind of like the same complaint people point towards arma: they rely too much on add-ons and things like that, and the base experience turns out to be rather mediocre to a subset of people. On the bright side, since they rely so much on the community, add-ons do get made, forks exists and there is about something for everyone.

Comment Re:Prison is more than punishment (Score 5, Insightful) 914

I don't think a 1000 years punishments would do much to... rehabilitate prisoners. If anything, it'll break them beyond breaking or turn them into madmen that will be your worst enemy on they get out.

The idea of "punishment" for a crime makes little sense beyond a certain point. Sure, you want to punish behaviors as a way to reduce them (the same way we punish kids for behaving incorrectly) but there gets a point where going beyond in the scale of punishment is futile and even counter productive, specially because most of the time all you are doing is giving the satisfaction to the victims that somebody is still being punished (paying for what they did), instead of becoming a better person (which should be the aim of jail time but isn't).

And, on topic: if living for 1000 years for a normal person would usually result in worse than bad results (loss of friends, lack of usual boundaries/inhibitions because you just need to wait), never mind them being locked up (imagine watching the same place and for years at a time, following the same routine over and over again, or in the case of the drug, watching a wall for the equivalent of months at a time)... It'd take a specially strong mind to withstand that and still be functional afterwards. And it's that kind of people that you don't want locked up ever (instead you want them following the law, or for the second option, dead). If you just lock them up, they are going to hate you afterwards for it, if they don't try to escape during sentence.

Comment Re:knowledge is what matters. (Score 1) 281

I wonder if those are good companies to work at. I understand that they probably use it to filter through applicants quickly, but ignoring a person with 20+ years of experience without even giving them the chance of, I don't know, presenting recommendation letters or even practical tests seems silly. Specially since you were already employed.

Comment Re:Doesn't solve the big problem (Score 1) 413

There is compressing, distorting, and cranking up to 11... and then there is brickwalls (which is the previous, except over 9000).

See, there is nothing wrong with compressing, distorting and cranking your guitar(or some other instrument) up to eleven. It's all right. However, you probably don't want to do that to all tracks. If you do, you are exposing yourself to ending with a dull, flat, boring result (I've heard a few. Sure, there was guitars and drums and stuff.. but it all sounded so dead and flat it sounded bad regardless of what was actually playing).

Now, I do agree that live is (or should be) better than a recording.

A quick listen to a something I found on Xerath resulted in this: I hear clipping (could be from where I found it, or could also be present on the CD). It's also loud, but it's not uncomfortable to listen to. Different instruments feel like distinct, and the audio doesn't sound like an indistinct mass. Which is quite nice. And it doesn't all exactly sound like it's at the same volume all the time.

Comment Re:A 10 year old rendering engine? (Score 1) 132

I think it's the new one:

"During presentations and hands-on demos at Crytek's GDC booth, attendees can see for the first time ever full native Linux support in the new CRYENGINE.

That's what the summary says. I assume it's not that one, but the newest (which would be 4, according to wikipedia).

Comment Re:That second rule... (Score 1) 479

Well... I suppose I mostly saw that passwords managers as an extension of my brain. Also, because I usually trust the systems I use my passwords managers. Also because I trust from where I got the binary. And because I trust the implementation.

I will consider it, though, in the future. I'm not entirely sure what I'll do to solve the "learn all those randomly generated passwords AND remember exactly which one is for what" issue of having unique, as strong as universally possible passwords for every website (that matters). And no, the horsestaplecorrect is NOT a valid option for me. There are websites that limit password length to 16 characters, and the example above is larger.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Password replacement?

An anonymous reader writes: In the comment sections of several slashdot stories, slashdotters have suggested that we should replace passwords. If you were to design a new system to replace passwords (as a concept), what would you do? Where would you begin? What would you suggest?

The way I see it, storing your password (or really, an authentication key) in a device isn't really replacing passwords — you are just changing where it is located and how it's going to be obtained; using biometrics is basically just reading information from you body to produce a password no different than using mouse swipes as a password no different than touching parts in a picture. Two factor authentication is barely more than a longer password (or really, two passwords) with the biggest different being the method of obtaining/keeping the different parts. Ultimately they rely on the user inputting a piece of information (a password, maybe with a matching identifier/username) that will get compared to stored records and will allow access if there is a positive match.

Comment Re:Also time to stop (Score 4, Interesting) 479

The thing is, there is the general public definition of hacker (ie a criminal), and then there is the definition of hacker by other people that is something along the lines of: somebody who likes to take things apart, exploring the system's limits; an expert on the field. The later definition includes people like the Elf Lord you mentioned, Abby (from the same show), most security consultants, criminals, etc.

Therefore, his comment is valid for a certain definition of hacker (and most hackers don't reach the news because they are security consultants, or work in IT in a company, or report the issues to the companies who don't go "YOU HACKED INTO MY SYSTEM NEED TO SUE"). And thus: the biggest problem IT people have when communicating with the rest is that neither side really talks the same language. How are we going to communicate effectively and solve issues if we don't really share the same language?

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Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags. -- Sidney Paternoster, "The Folly of the Wise"

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