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Comment Re:More sources (Score 1) 3

I think Fox is wrong. I believe the explanation I quote below, from this link, is correct.

http://www.zdnet.com/what-happened-to-the-new-york-times-website-7000019453/

Specifically, according to a source close to the NYT, the primary cause for the outage was due to bad firewall configuration change that blocked all incoming traffic and for some reason the IT staff wasn't able to rollback the change.

Comment Re:upside down keypads? (Score 1) 120

That's amusing. It's definitely possible to interpret the text the way you describe, and looking again, I'm sure that's what the author intended. But not only is the preceding phrase describing 123 on the top, so is the following phrase. So the parenthetical phrase refers to the 123 on the bottom, but in "it made for more accurate dialing," "it" flips back to 123 on top.

Comment Re:upside down keypads? (Score 1) 120

Yes, the upside down keypads are his "fault." The obit has the info wrong. Adding machine keypads always had the lower numbers at the bottom, and so do computer keypads. You can google for about this, but I think he figured that American phone users (who mostly weren't adding machine users) were used to reading from left to right and top to bottom, hence the order.

Comment one-quarter the size (Score 4, Insightful) 123

These high-tech mystery machines — 29 feet long — are about one-quarter the size of NASA's old space shuttles and can land automatically on a runway.

The X-37B is not one-quarter the size of the Space Shuttle, it's one-quarter the length of the Space Shuttle. The launch weight of the X-37B is 5.5 tons. The launch weight of the Space Shuttle is 125 tons. This ignorance about the meaning of dimensions reminds me of the Stonehenge scene from Spinal Tap.

Comment Re:Guns? (Score 1) 572

Guns can be used for attack and defense. They can be used for killing innocent people, they can also be used to protect innocent people. It has been said, "God made men, Samuel Colt made them equal."

Comment it's easier than Japanese. (Score 1) 421

From tfa:

Inspired by the dictate within its Japanese parent company Rakuten to have all its employees become fluent in English, Jaconi decided to have everyone, from himself down to the interns, learn to code.

In other words, if anything, he should really be inspired by his parent company to force all his employees to learn Japanese, but JavaScript is easier.

Comment Re:who gives a (Score 2) 3

re paying for a script, the value of a software product is not determined by whether its code is compiled or interpreted. re running old anti-malware, i assume you'll be able to update the control files for that over the web. re USB devices being writeable, I think a call to "mount -o ro,remount" on the stick solves that, doesn't it? re web surfing on an infected machine, usually it's the hard drive that's infected, and this system won't be using the hard drive as source for program files. if the nvram was corrupt, i assume this tool would be smart enough to deal with that too.

Comment Re:Ask a better question (Score 1) 288

Articles mentioned him copyrighting the term EMAIL (and I repeated that non-fact), but his claim is really on the name EMAIL and his copyright, which was on his program and user manual, as noted on his web site here.

http://www.inventorofemail.com/

He calls himself the "inventor of email" which is silly. He registered a copyright with the US copyright office. Again, there did not seem to be any innovation involved. He wrote an email program, and registered his copyright. The only remotely interesting thing about it is that it was named EMAIL. If he had produced a television and called it TELEVISION, and it was after other people had already produced and refined televisions, it would be false to claim to be the inventor of television.

Comment Re:Ask a better question (Score 2) 288

RFC 524 proposed a networked mail protocol in 1973. It notes that there was already a MAIL command for sending networked mail (on the ARPANET).

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc524

I agree that the guy's claim is dopey, and I'm not paying careful attention to Chomsky's claim, but I suspect that here he is playing some semantic game that he finds relevant in theory, but serves no useful purpose in fact.

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