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Comment Re:Here come the certificate flaw deniers....... (Score 1) 80

Signing certificates are normally encrypted. Stealing the file will do no good unless you know the decryption passphrase. For example, to get a package into our local debian repository such that it can install/upgrade in our production environment, you'd not only need the gpg signing keys, but the 60+ character passphrase (which is NOT written down) to go with it.

Comment Re:I've hired people with misdemeanors before (Score 1) 720

> Would you want to hire someone who was convicted of violent assault?

It depends why. Were they the initiator of agression, and beat up their spouse? Perhaps not.

Were they defending themselves from a bully? Yes, I would hire them.

A 40 year old who was convicted at age 17 when he flew off the handle for some reason, but has not been in trouble since? Yes, I would hire them.

Comment Wow, seriously? (Score 5, Insightful) 239

Dear Google,

Hi. My name is grasshoppa. You may know me from such famous threads as "Windows 8 Sucks" and "Windows 8 User Interface, wtf?". You may remember that I, along with a multitude of others, warned MS about making such a radical change to the desktop. No, wait, that's not quite right; we warned against FORCING such a radical change to the desktop. But we were assured by various astroturfers that windows 8 was the bees knees, the mutts nuts and various other wonderous bits of animals ( thank you, Sir Terry Pratchett, for that phrase ). We were called all sorts of various names for our opinions. Yet many of us stuck to our guns; we knew that a mobile interface force fed to desktop users was a recipe for failure.

Please. Listen to us now. This is a remarkable bad idea. This is the kind of idea your competitors DREAM of you implementing. It's really the only way they can get a foot hold into your market. And make no mistake; a foot hold will be all they need, because once you start down this road ( and, inevitably back track a week later due to overwhelming user criticism ), you have lost your momentum. You have lost the confidence necessary to stay that one step ahead of them. And they will then proceed to eat your lunch.

Who am I? No one really. Just some poor schmuck that will have to work with YOUR end users when you force feed them a UI change. And I'm already resentful for it.

So please. For the love of all you hold dear, PLEASE DO NOT FORCE A NEW INTERFACE on people.

Comment Re:Finland will save money on napkins (Score 2) 523

Wiritng cursive has crossed the line for decades (just teach them so they can write legibly, which is still required - but all that cursive shit, no).

However long division and other things such as doing multiplication by hand are important skills that should still be taught: it internalizes the idea that a big difficult calculation can be made easier by turning it into several smaller calculations. It's a bit like learning asm in computer science - you're (probably) never going to use it in the real world but it's important to know in the understanding of how a computer actually works.

If anything I think schools need to be able to get more people to be able to do mental arithmetic and estimation. If you understand these even if you only ever use a calculator it gives you the skills to sanity check the result (how many times have I thought "that's not right" after entering something into a calculator because it disagreed with a mental estimate, then discovered I had miskeyed a number, especially on a touch screen)

Comment Dalek? (Score 1) 140

Doesn't look at all like a Dalek to me, it looks more like something that Aperture Science would design. (And it would say "No hard feelings" if you pushed it over, assuming you could push over this lumbering 300lb thing)

Comment Re:Tetris is based on a Russian board game (Score 1) 37

The original game is fun to play. Last month at Retromañía in Spain we had the original game running on the Russian pdp-11 clone for which it was created (unfortunately the pdp-11 clone had to be emulated - we actually have a real pdp-11 but it's a DEC built one and the original code won't work very well on it due to the lack of the Cyrillic character set). It's a good bit harder than the PC version which I think was the next version of Tetris to be written.

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