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Comment Re:Smart==unhappy (Score 1) 769

I have noticed a disproportionate number of intellectuals are depressed. Probably because they are smart enough to know no matter what you do you are screwed. This in turn leads to acting out against the dumb/happy people. The dumb/happy people are generally unphased because they didn't even realized you just dissed them making the intellectual even more furious. Which in turn leads them to target the dumbest group of all...that's right...government officials which gets twisted to be a political statement instead of the "kill all dumb people" it was truly intended as.

Smart parent... you get it pretty much on the nose. The technical term is "depressive realism".

Comment hm (Score 1) 167

CMU had a similar site pop up entitled "Before We Leave", which to my knowledge has not garnered any scorn from the administration.

From their FAQ page:

Life should be lived with no regrets. Undoubtedly there are people that you know (or know of) that you've always wanted to 'encounter' physically. With graduation right around the corner, these final weeks are your last chance. This site is devoted to facilitating those encounters.

So... you enter the andrew IDs of the top five people you have always wanted to get with. If they also list you in their top five, we will email both of you-- the rest is up to you. If nobody matches with you, c'est la vie-- at least you tried. It's as simple as that.

Your top five are safe: your desires will only be revealed if the other person also desires you. Otherwise they will be kept secret forever.

Comment meh (Score 1) 383

You can do this with commodity hardware. CMU's GREY program has been letting users not only open doors, but manage issues such as access control lists, key management, and usability issues associated with such a system. There's been a considerable amount of information published as a result of their research. They've been doing this since about 2005. It is by no means a new idea.

Comment insiders? (Score 1) 332

Insiders being paid off to look the other way?

Maybe.

Or maybe it's a gas station that isn't manned 24/7?

I've seen gas stations in the suburbs where they only have a clerk from say, 8am-8pm. During late hours when they don't get much business, you can use a credit card at the pump, but there's no clerk.

Comment protip (Score 1) 359

Macbook cameras are wired such that the green light HAS to come on if the camera is activated. This is at harware level - the current must flow through the LED to power the camera, and it would require physical tampering to disable this privacy feature.

If your Macbook's iSight light glows green randomly, that should set off MASSIVE red flags.

Comment trespass analogy (Score 1) 271

In my state, if an area is not obviously private land, you have to post a "No Trespassing" sign. (Similarly, a business/gov't agency would have to mark an area "Restricted" or "Employees Only".

If no sign is posted, and the police are called, the police inform you you're trespassing, give you a little paper to this effect, and if you come back, you're arrested. But if the property owner tells you to leave, and you do, you have committed no trespass.

I see this access of the Australian Government's documents analogous to a hiker who was exploring public land, and wandered into a private field. Without a fence, or a posted sign, they had no way to know they were trespassing, and any charges to that effect would be easily overturned.

Comment hash (Score 1) 578

Systems like this generally don't store an actual image of your fingerprint, just a hash. Not out of any sense of social justice, just because a hash takes less storage space than an image of your fingerprint.

So some scenarios you might be imagining might actually be out of the question. For example: no one is going to break into the database, steal your fingerprint, and frame you for a crime.

Comment pfft (Score 1) 292

Screw opera. You know what I want on my iPhone? A text browser like links.

Most of what we read on the go (news, blog entries, tweets, facebook, etc) is text. It'd be nice to be able to use a text browser for these types of sites - I'll bet browsing would be a lot faster.

Comment infosec (Score 1) 945

As much as I loved my macbook, it couldn't do basic tasks I need to do as an information security professional.

No promiscuous mode. Tools like wireshark, aircrack, fakeap, etc all didn't work properly due to issues with closed source wireless drivers.

There were two things keeping me on OSX for a while: iTunes and Photoshop.

Well, CS3 now runs in Wine, which left iTunes. I used to like iTunes as a music player, but lately I only keep it around to sync my iPod - songbird has gotten quite mature.

I after years of having utter disdain for "smartphones" I caved in and bought an iPhone. Initially I loved it, but little things like the inability to say, listen to last.fm in the background while tooling around in iCal really is starting to grate on me. I already do most of my day to day college work on a netbook, and when I graduate and can afford a new laptop and my phone contract ends, I will probably be sporting a Thinkpad and some sort of android phone.

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