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Comment Re:What else should the government save? (Score 1) 262

Phone booths have been replaced by cell phones

Ah, but a homeless person cannot hide from the rain in his cell-phone! Ergo, we must fund the phone booths!

Paper books replaced clay tablets and should be saved.

Saved by the government?

What will completely replace AM radio?

Replace in what?

If not radio waves

Oh, it would still be radio waves, I'm sure. WiFi, LTE....

Comment Re:Bah (Score 2) 110

You do realize that the entire population of Israel is not superstitious

Superstitions — like fears of number 13 and black cats — are what people resort to, when religion is taken from them :-)

Many Israelis don't give a flying fuck what rabbis say.

Most care, though.

What you could've pointed out is that it is not wrong for observant Jews to produce non-Kosher foods — as long as they don't eat them. That would've been a valid point.

But you didn't — such was your urge to attack the religious, it blinded you to anything else :)

Comment Still not Kosher (Score 1) 110

The eel meat was produced by Forsea Foods in Israel

The rules of Kosher are simple: if it lives in the water, it must have scales to be edible. This excludes eel (as well as crab, lobster, oysters, sturgeon and catfish)...

Now lab-grown could work — because it is fake — but, given rabbinate's earlier refusal to approve fake pork, I doubt, they'll approve fake eel either. Then again, fake crab is fine — because it is made from regular (scaly) fish...

Comment XFCE4 on FreeBSD (Score 4, Interesting) 155

And the article also points out that one of those early Unix desktops "is still alive, well ...

My XFCE4-desktop is awesome, thank you very much. Last uptime was 386 days — and it only went down, because the video card's fan stopped working...

Firefox, Thunderbird, and Libreoffice have to be recompiled on occasion, but that's nothing compared to the forced biweekly reboots my corporate desktop is undergoing — running the OS, that is alleged to have "won"...

Comment Re:Just imagine... (Score 1) 96

The government isn't paying a witness. It's buying information to find a crime.

Nonsense. Paid informants would often alert police to crimes, that cops didn't know about either.

linked to life experience

I'm not that old :-)

Read the article that your link points too.

My link points to the story of one (in)famous paid informant. Christians — and all of the Founders were such — universally disapproved of the man, but the practice of paying such people for their aid to law-enforcement was not banned by them.

Comment Re:Just imagine... (Score 1) 96

Exactly, as he said it was unimaginable that a private entity could harvest this information. Yes at great cost for one person, completely unimaginable to do it for the entire population, even the paper to write it down would have bankrupted them.

It was just as unimaginable for a government — any government — to amass it too.

Yet, the concept of using paid informants was known for millennia — and none of the Founders thought about forbidding their use.

Comment Re:Just imagine... (Score 1) 96

At the time of the constitution it was unimaginable that a private entity could harvest this information.

The concept of "private detective" existed for centuries.

If Sherlock Holmes (fictional) and Pinkerton (very real) could sniff out information, why couldn't the government then obtain it from them? Perry Mason wouldn't get anywhere without his trusty private detective agency — with office on the same floor as his own. Hired by the clients — who'd inevitably be falsely accused of murder — they had to share information with police on pain of losing their licenses. Such was already the state of affairs in the 1930-ies!

If today's technology existed back then and we followed the spirit of why the constitution was written I can guarantee that this would be illegal

Sounds like an attempt — an unconstitutional attempt — to ascribe to the Constitution, what is not there...

Finally, how is "buying information from data-brokers" different — in principle — from obtaining it from paid informants?

Comment Re:Just imagine... (Score 1) 96

Unconstitutional activity is still unconstitutional even if the government pays a third party to do it.

Could you cite the part of the Constitution being violated here?

You cannot. The whole problem is that there is nothing illegal — much less unconstitutional — about it all.

It makes sense logically too — if a private dick can know it, why can't the government buy it from him?

Comment Re:I wonder when we'll drop the notion... (Score 3, Interesting) 95

The point is to prevent "tearing". A lot of effort has been put into solving that problem.

If the pixels were updated in some random or semi-random pattern on the screen it would probably be unnoticeable, but I suspect that either a lot of architectural changes would be needed both in software and hardware, or you would effectively have to achieve a 480Hz full-screen refresh rate to achieve it without doing things like attaching an address to each pixel output so the rendering device didn't need to assume sequential pixels should be drawn sequentially.

Comment Re: Does Wayland support drawing tablets yet? (Score 1) 99

There is such a thing as taking the "Unix philosophy" to a non-functional extreme. If you took the Wayland approach to shipping a Linux distro, you would ship only a kernel and a libc and maybe Bourne shell and a few GNU utilities and it would be up to the user to decide which other libraries and utilities they want to compile to actually get the system booted and get work done. And if you really want to, you as a user can do that and it's a very educational adventure. But most people expect a system they can actually use after installation, and most distros understand that giving them that is a good thing. If Wayland shipped as a full replacement stack for X11, with a fully-featured desktop-oriented reference compositor and basic utilities that could be swapped out for distro or user choices of different components and configurations, then the Wayland folks would be entirely correct to say "we shipped a fully-capable replacement for the old system, any choices users or distros make that replace the default components with less-functional or incompatible ones are not our problem". But that's not what they did; they did create Weston, "a minimal and fast compositor", but it's described as "suitable for many *embedded and mobile* use cases" (my emphasis but their words). And it ships with "a few demo clients". Wayland + Weston + that handful of clients is not an X11 replacement. We saw this play out also with GNOME 3 and extensions. Iâ(TM)ve been actually using GNOME Shell as my default desktop for the last almost-decade and with *every release* some extension I installed and built my workflow around has stopped working. (And in some cases those extensions were installed to undo unwanted changes in GNOME Shell's own behavior, like showing the overview by default on startup.) The change didnâ(TM)t *reduce* the amount of work involved in maintaining a functional desktop â" it just *shifted* it out of the GNOME dev team to all GNOME users (and an ecosystem of extension developers that became necessary to give those users back a semblance of what they had before).

Comment Re: Ruby on Rails Creator Is Opinionated? (Score 1) 54

I'm not even a developer (sysadmin by training and experience), and I learned to avoid RoR whenever possible early on. Getting a Puppet server working using mod_rails in 2011 was a ton of "X depends on Y, but Y can only be a version *after* a.b.c, meanwhile X also depends on Z but Z requires a version of Y in an entirely disjoint set from what X requires⦠oh hell, I have to use old versions of X and Z to have them both agree on a version of Y they like, don't I?" Querying other folks who supported teams developing Rails apps or that used apps that were built on Rails led me to believe this was entirely common and that it was made worse by a general attitude in the Ruby community of "that version of that gem is *six months old*, why would anyone still be using that garbage?" Looking at current-version install docs it looks like the only supported avenues today are distro packages, and thank God for that, because the old way was just a mass of tentacles.

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