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Comment Fine with me (Score 1) 373

I'm all for this change. Currently upon installation you are given the choice of whether you want to activate the filters; in effect this change just means that you would also be able to choose "yes, but only for horrible ads". It might make those who create ads think about in which category they want to be.

I love ADP, but personally I never use the built-in filters. I just create custom-filters for really annoying ads on the sites I frequent. My experience is that I don't need that many rules to make browsing tolerable.

Comment Re:No a Linux system (Score 1) 76

I mean why choose BASIC? .. I loved my ZX Spectrum and the old BBC Micro, but in retrospect this was in spite of BASIC, not because of it. Nobody knew any better then.

They do say "basic-derived language". But otherwise I agree, a small and more modern language would have been a better match. Lua comes to mind.

Comment Re:NAT to the rescue! (Score 1) 232

Collections of active IP addresses will be readily available tomorrow, just as rainbow tables and collections of active email addresses are today.

The saving grace will probably be the sheer size of the address pool in a local network. Unless you sniff the traffic (or look at DNS or ARP), knowledge of active IP addresses is hard to come by via scanning. Scanning a 2^64 range for active hosts will take a few years, which will slow down any worms that attempt to spread in that manner.

Comment Re:Yes, Unicode is "the new black" (Score 1) 728

The practical reason for using ascii only is interoperability between tools that deal with the source (humans with keyboards being one of the tools).

That said, I have experimented a couple of times with national non-ascii variable names, and I think that such programs are actually easier to read and more fun to write.
In particular when the problem domain is highly national it often is counter-productive to try to invent english names for variables, since these names would not be the ones used by the customer or related documentation.
So my programs use ascii for variable names (obvioulsy) but often in a mix of english and my own language, the ratio somewhat depending on the problem. Even standard english actions such as get/set/create... might be followed be national words.

Comment In other news ... (Score 1) 232

Wikileaks supposedly has access to loads of US classified information. Its primary spokesman may have to flee to Iceland.
Iceland votes "yes" on proposed news haven.

In other news, yesterday US sent official greetings because of the national day June 17th, reminding Icelanders about good old times and promising friendship and support during the current financial crisis. (text Icelandic only, but there's a Hillary video)

Comment Re:If you can't handle calculus, science isnt for (Score 1) 467

In my experience, you need dozens of hours of practice before you get it. Buy an algebra textbook, and do every odd problem in every section until you are reliably getting everything right. My experience = flunked high school math and went back to college 10 years later....

Precisely my experience too. Being ten years wiser and more motivated made all the difference in the world.
Do -not- just read about the stuff, practice! Make errors, figure out what you did wrong, do it over again. And again. Though this may sound terrible now, finally getting the hang of these things will actually feel nice.
I also found it useful to make my own quick references (cheatsheets). The formulas stick better when written down by yourself. It's a bonus if you are allowed to use them on the exam, but if you really practice a lot you won't need them anyway.

Comment Re:Bye Ubuntu, was nice knowing you. (Score 1) 984

... Change the way file sizes are read so that User X and User Y see different file sizes using the same filesystem, even potentially the same remotely mounted disk?

Honestly I don't see your problem. When working with files and drives, approximate sizes usually suffice. Give or take 10%, it rarely matters.

Now, if I really need to compare sizes, I use the single bytes. And if the numbers are big, SI prefixes *just work* unambiguously.

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