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Comment IR5 (Score 1) 132

because after all, it's not like they can be taken utilized without a legal key

Who you trying to convince, there?

Win7 had such a flawed, easily circumvented activation system that many suspected MS did it deliberately just to get market share on a new OS post-Vista.

You can literally keep using Win7, fully functional, forever without a crack (note that the tool mentioned in my subject line doesn't "crack" or install anything, it just automates a few steps you can run, from the command line purely by hand, on a stock Win7 box).

Comment Re:About time... (Score 1) 158

Minimize the amount of work necessary to complete your work. (emphasis mine).

Some of us aspire to a bit more than shuffling tasks from our in-box to our out-box. Some of us want to produce functional, resilient, maintainable code. Some of us want to actually understand how it works, not just trust that it works. Some of us want to write code, not the compiled equivalent of shell scripts that do nothing themselves but pass inputs and outputs between different external blobs.


I'm paid to build. I don't get paid to pat myself on the back.

I get paid to meet an SLA, not just to say "well it compiled, didn't it?" and throw my hands in the air with vague complaints about bugs in library X. If I build some fragile piece of shit out of a dozen other fragile pieces of shit all held together by spit and string, I haven't done my job, no matter how quickly I did it.

Yes, "not invented here" counts as its own problem; it surprises me to hear that its opposite can count as a problem, though, because why does any organization with that culture employ programmers in the first place?

Comment Re:file transfer (Score 1) 466

It's a machine before the TCP/IP and Internet times.

And?

I remember the joy of using machines back then, and that convinced me of the awesomeness of Linux... Flat memory? Every device (with suitable physical capabilities) can act as storage, or network or an input method? Awesome!


The "right" answer here, pull the drive. The second choice, install Linux to a FAT partition and tell it to use either SLIP or PLIP to talk to the outside world, then just transfer the files via RSync. Simple as that.

Comment Re:verified (Score 1) 311

Funny, all three of your examples are consensual activities. Posting nudes without permission of the model? Isn't.

Biiig difference between banning links to "revenge porn" and banning all links to porn without the explicit permission of the model.

Sure, it sounds nice and progressive and kum-ba-ya-bullshitty to say that even "real" porn models have a right to control the distribution of their images. In practice, you need a bigger stick than Reddit has to force that genie back in the lamp. Hell, you need a bigger stick than world governments have - See how long it takes you to find all the dirt on Max Mosley despite France ordering the internet to forget about him.

As a result, we end up with "fake havens", echo-chambers where everyone can pat themselves on the back about how much of a difference they've made, essentially by doing nothing more than ignoring the rest of the world. "Good job, guys! We sure showed them! Hey, where'd everybody go?"

Comment Re:verified (Score 1) 311

If you think that I as a host should not have the right to throw abusive visitors out of a gathering at my place, you're a fucking idiot.

When you've advertised your party as a "come one, come all, visit the tea room for the lace doilies, or the BDSM dungeon, or jump into the political mosh pit!", then yeah, it takes a lot of damned gall to draw lines around one particular niche puritanical issue after everyone shows up to the party. "Whoah now! Sure, we said we'd have beer for everyone, but we didn't mean beer beer, we meant O'Doul's!"

That said, you technically have it right - The owners of Reddit have every right to decide what content to allow on their site. Decisions like this have consequences, however, and we've seen it on site after site after site - Get too popular, start banning "offensive" content to appease the advertisers, and watch your userbase move on to the next "Wild West" site.

If they really want to ban something to promote harmony among the users, they could just get rid of TwoX - But of course, that would look bad, so instead, they will slowly ban everything incompatible with that sub (ie, everything else).

Comment Re:cost analysis (Score 4, Insightful) 87

A better approach is to simply ask - and listen - to the employees about things they consider wasted time. They know more about it than any tracking system.

1) People don't typically give honest responses when the CEO asks if they consider his meetings a waste of time.
2) You assume the people wasting others' time actually want to know the truth, rather than using the data they can collect as an excuse to implement whatever new policies they want.

"The data shows that you all become drastically less productive for two hours after our weekly meeting. Clearly, the amount of content I present at those meetings simply overwhelms you all; so to break it up a bit, we will start having slightly shorter daily meetings."

Comment Not what it sounds like (Score 5, Informative) 398

FWIW, TFA talks about the therapeutic index (LD50 vs effective dose) of these drugs, not their long-term effects.

So no, this doesn't add more information to the "alcohol is good for you this week / alcohol is bad for you next week" debate. Just saying that we typically drink a significant fraction of the amount it would take to kill us.

Comment Re:Ha! (Score 1) 127

I have some ukrainian hryvnia to sell you, and some russian rubles too! I will give you a great price.

You realize, of course, that Rubles count as a pretty damned good deal right now? First, the Ruble usually varies pretty much directly with oil, which has pushed it waaay down on the short term; then Pooty's pissing around has given it another good hard kick down. Eventually, both of those factors will go away, and the Ruble will return to its former level.

"Buy low, sell high" doesn't mean "sell in a panic at the bottom of a dip".

Comment Re:So how are they dealing with the overheating? (Score 4, Insightful) 32

Are they just going to let someone fry their GPU and turn it in for warranty repairs now?

Perhaps just more aggressive thermal throttling in newer driver versions? "Sure, overclock all you like, but at 80C core or 40C ambient, you may a well have an IGP".

Though as I understood their original announcement, they hadn't so much seem a wave of outright DOA returns, as much as expressing concerns that prolonged pushing of the envelope would lead to reduced lifetimes. In that case, as long as the parts can outlast their warranty, NVidia may simply have come to the conclusion that earlier death means earlier replacement.

Comment Re:Of course (Score 1) 127

There. FTFY. The government has already meddled.

Not really - FINRA has issued guidance for those trying to stay legal; the government has made some high-profile arrests; the FBI has confiscated individual wallets through physical seizure of the machines they lived on. But overall, the government hasn't done (and realistically, can't do) a damned thing to substantially interfere with the core functionality of BitCoin.

Sure, they could impose some draconian "death penalty for using or posessing BTC or any of its associated software", but even that would only apply to those under US jurisdiction, and the system itself would keep chugging away merrily.

Comment Re:What about the online use of these cards? (Score 2) 449

The way it's done with my bank is that you set a phrase that only you know, which is displayed when the page is spawned.

Bruce Schneier (IIRC) described the obvious hack for that the day Visa came out with it...

The attacker (whether a fake merchant, or a MitM) waits for a request for you to verify your identity. It then presents your information to the real site (keep in mind the attacker builds this connection, so encryption doesn't mean a damned thing). The real site responds with your known prompt-phrase, so you "know it's legit". Attacker then prompts you with that phrase, and waits (and records) your response. Attacker passes your response on to the bank, and the transaction goes through successfully.

Except, that the attacker now has everything he needs to produce as many fraudulent charges as he wants.

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