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Comment Hanoi Snowden (Score 0) 224

"speaking about his objections to mass indiscriminate surveillance by governments"... From the warm embrace of a totalarian state and from under the approving gaze of it's thuggish leader, Putin. He is both a "tool" and a tool of Putin's propaganda machine. Perhaps, he should have invited to his broadcast the just released from Russian prison system Pussy Riot band members.

Comment Re:Sensation! (Score 1) 144

Lol. Siamese are wonderful cats. IMHO, they actually bond with their pet humans, well, selectively bond. Seems like they can live an exceptionally long time as well. My family had a spectacular Siamese. She lived into her 20's. However, she preferred killing birds to eating mice. Never ate the birds. Instead, she'd leave them for us, placing them ever so conspicuously at the front door threshold.

Comment About $13,000 per issue for content and design! (Score 1) 57

Don't know about the magazine itself, but the project's indiegogo FAQ is worth a read, http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/linux-voice/. Some interesting info describing the cost associated with producing (not including print costs) a magazine these days. Some back of the envelope math suggests that they've raised enough to produce... But not print... One year worth of content. Not bad considering that they can still draw on subscription fees and advertising.

Comment Couldn't disagree more! (Score 5, Insightful) 115

I have surveyed several coursera courses and completed a couple. Being a Comp Sci, telecoms professional, I derived tremendous value from Coursera material related to these disciplines. Only cost is my time. The video lectures are gold. Most classes that I've seen are project based. Learning is doing. In general, I've found that course difficulty usually floats somewhere between college senior and first year grad student. Some are just insanely hard. One has to accept that one bit of important material is missing, proofs. Just no way to auto-grade them, in general. I haven't seen anything to complain about.

Comment Swoden Files: NSA Hacks Solar Wind (Score 1) 75

In an unexpected turn of events, The GuardTimesPost Daily Speigel reports that recently detected changes in the solar wind are the results of heretofore covertly secret and highly clandestine spying activities by none other than the National Septuagenarian Association (NSA)!

According to documents provided by Beatrice Snowden, former NSA Social Activities and Black Ops Administrator, NSA Director General Keith-Tricky-Dick Cheney personally authorized a highly trained cadre of HVAC technicians to construct an unholy abomination known as the Passing Solar Wind-inator (PSW). Completed in January of this year, the PSW secretly ties into the HVAC systems of ALL American households with a mean household occupant age of 70 years old or greater. In a clear breach of U.S. Constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure, the PSW siphons off all human, canine, and feline bodily emanations from the affected homes, concentrates them, and then funnels the emanations into a giant, multi-thousand dollar underground collection facility buried somewhere in the deserts of Utah.

The exact methodology is still unclear, however, the flatulance concentrate is then force fed to baby artic seal pups transforming their mitochondrial DNA into super powerful rare earth magnets. Simultaneously and inexplicably the baby seal pups also gain the ability to psychicly control ambient magnetic fields. Naturally, full baby seal cranial evacuation is the final step in the transformation process. The end product is a biomechanical monstrosity, the PSW.

Multiple power point presentation provided by Snowden show General Cheney sitting astride his massive heap of squirming and super magnetically charged seal pups. Heaving to and fro, the pups writhe in ecstasy as the general directs their collective psycho-magnetic powers, altering the path of helium atoms traversing our solar system.

The end result, of course, is that the NSA can now listen in on every canasta game in the world! Russian President Putin has yet to comment on this matter.

Comment Limits are self imposed (Score 1) 520

Since graduating from high school in 87 I've had several careers: linguist, nurse, CS, network security, and now am looking for an entree into the world of crypto. Yes, this has translated into lots of school (2 BS, 2 MS). Career change is possible if you are driven and are willing and able to start at the bottom again after starting in a new field.

Comment Reducing choice, increasing dwell time (Score 1) 267

If I were feeling particularly cynical, I'd be inclined to see the interface change as a means of reducing the variability of title selection and increasing page dwell time. It's now takes much longer to search through Netflix's movie options. Given this, people will probably tend to examine movie descriptions more closely and choose a title that appears on one of the first few pages of available choices. This could be a rather effective means of shaping which movies get selected the most frequently. Personally, I dislike the new interface. It blows.

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