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Comment The best solution is to lock down Silverlight (Score 2, Insightful) 153

For plugins like silverlight that run code rather poorly sandboxed, you should lock them to a whitelist, so that only web sites you have preapproved can use them.

Additionally, you should only run them on an unpriviledged user. (Something many Windows users don't do with anything as a regular practice.)

These two measures won't eliminate your risk, but they will dramatically reduce it.

Comment Low persistance has upsides and downsides. (Score 5, Informative) 55

Low persistance displays are a tricky issue.

They obviously don't have the issues that high-persistance displays have of holding frames for too long. However, they have another annoying effect, commonly referred to as the strobe effect. This has to do with each pixel being lit for only a minute duty cycle on the display. This causes bad flicker at low refresh rates.

Early low persistance displays obviously were not very good on this issue. This is because the displays used very slow technologies such as oscolating mirrors.

By the details I've read on their blog, I'm pretty certain Valve has gotten down that they need a high refresh rate to get the VR to work right. They have identified strobe effect as a problem, and have identified that while the traditional 60Hz rate, while tolerable, is far from ideal for low persistance displays. They seem to believe they can push the refresh rate high enough to deal with strobe effect. I have confidence that they can.

Higher refresh rates also have other advantages for gaming as Internet router designs improve and ping times drop, the latency produced by interpolation becomes more substancial, and the best way to reduce it is to push more physical frames. If you are pushing more physical frames, there are clear advantages to pushing more visual frames to match.

Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 35

I don't have a complete list.

However, a lot of hardware has quite open specifications for making drivers, even if open source drivers aren't available yet.
(For instance all Radeon hardware has had complete developer's documentation released, but the Open Source drivers for the latest cards are far from complete.)

Comment Re:Hardware is useless without a HOST file... apk (Score 1) 35

I've always thought they should replace the single "hosts" file with a "hosts.d" directory.

This would reduce conflicts between programs that edit the file, and improve flexibility.

p.s. we don't need 2 paragraphs about why all your posts are currently downgraded. (A single one line is fine.) Furthermore, you don't need to make such a long argument on your main post either. More words just make it seem you like to hear yourself talk.

Comment Re:this is useless (Score 1) 92

Lets face the facts: That privacy culture is exactly why they are the target of these investigations.

I agree, it is unfair that Google is being held to such a higher standard. However, I also think with their privacy culture, they SHOULD be putting their money where their mouth is, like this, and hire a team of specialists to address privacy issues with their products.

The fact that other companies sweep their problems under the rug and that we instead complain about Google for the problems we admit, only propagates the problem of sweeping privacy issues under the rug.

Comment Actually, laws people don't obey have no effect. (Score 2) 335

From what I've experienced here in Ohio, people who talk on the cell phone while driving do so anyways even with the laws banning it.

The people who do this are the self-absorbed reckless fools who feel those sorts of laws apply to everyone but them. They are the kind of person that will nearly wreck into you while talking on the cell phone, then blame you for it. It's not them who are reckless, it's everyone else. They are convinced they can drive perfectly safe while talking on the cell phone, so the law doesn't apply to them, it's not like they will get caught, or so they tell themselves.

Comment I prefer the idea of Medicare buy in for the US (Score 2) 732

I prefer the idea of Medicare Buy in for all in the US. It's been proposed several times, and never passed. The fact is, that if Government health care is so incredibly awful, why are the for-profit insurance companies afraid of a system in which they would have to compete for it? This is the question that they avoid.

Comment Comics and animation are a great medium (Score 1) 1

I may not be traditional in thinking this or I'm too traditional, back to the origins of the comic before they got dumbed down and censored. However, comics and cartoons are an excellent medium for illustrating news and points. If anything, the fact that people don't get as easily offended by them makes opinion pieces less likely to receive a negative response, and thus more likely to be understood, even if they aren't agreed with. Additionally, illustrations and animations make for the ability to create graphs and other representations, that you just can't get across well in text. Generally people scoff at the idea, saying it's for those with short attention spans, or they fear the dancing Bologna phenomena that came with the dawn of the animated GIF. However, I think most of us here are sophisticated enough not to make such terrible mistakes, and those of us who aren't will be weeded out by the Karma System

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