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Comment Re:No kidding? (Score 1) 111

Several years ago I wrote a transport mechanism on top of VNC that allowed you to access high end graphics services (read OpenGL) from devices without any hardware acceleration to speak of

What was this project called? The functionality sounds very similar to VirtualGL, but the history sounds like a different project.

Comment "WTF were they thinking?" (Score 5, Interesting) 187

In that (quite interesting) post the author frequently wonders "WTF were they thinking?". E.g. did they think we would not notice that the screens on all the computers on both floors were identical? My wife is from China where not so long ago everthing was identical, down to the progaganda art on the wall. Her immediate answer when I asked her was "duh, they don't care what the delegates thought, the whole exercise is to show pictures to the local NK population about how the great foreign technical leaders liked the NK technical office". I think we tend to forget that: it isn't the delegates that Pyongyang is afraid of, its their own people.

Comment One more step: Conversations Add-on (Score 1) 464

If you want Thunderbird to act like Gmail then you need to:
  • 1. (like above) put replies in folder being replied to. (I also put sent messages there, so the whole conversation's in one place)
  • 2. Install the Thunderbird Coversations add-on. I like the conversation view better than Thunderbird's default. It also lets you reply on the same page if you want.

Comment Re:I just hope they don't get discouraged (Score 1) 280

Ultimately, eCommunism is parasitic.

Just look at the software universe with all these individuals and companies using GPL products, contributing back so everyone benefits. If this parasite continues who knows how many hours might get wasted on doing real work instead of reinventing the software wheel, and messing with licensing servers.

Oh, wait, trying to compare communism to GPL software (which is what Stallman promotes) is like saying "I don't want everyone to share this nice view," since if we had a painting of the view and all tried to posess it simultaneously it wouldn't work. Software isn't a physical good; you can copy it without taking it away from someone else.

Comment Heart Terminated Remotely (Score 1) 128

Karen Sandler has a great talk about how pacemaker-type devices (she has one) are completely closed-source, nobody (including the doctors who install them) cares, and the FDA doesn't/can't do much more than rubber stamp the software. Most of these devices now have unencrypted wireless access.

sudo kill -9 heartbeat Is a real possibility with these devices.

Comment Re:Use cases (Score 1) 212

For places that need better passwords, $ md5sum - lot of random text pounded on the keyboard and result is something like 24a53bc05c6f216e340aa8d5dc08b605

That checksum becomes the password.
 

Using an md5sum greatly reduces your keyspace, so while it may still be strong enough for your needs, it's significantly weaker than you'd expect for a 32-character password.

[0-9a-f] is 15 characters. 15^32 = 4 x 10^37

Using a normal key range:
[0-9a-zA-Z+symbols] 62 + ~32 symbols on a standard US keyboard = ~94 characters. 94^19 = 4 x 10^37

Thus, you are entering in 32 characters but only getting the strength of 19.

Comment "it's a wonder that any one would be against..." (Score 1) 533

"It's a wonder" NIK282000 can spout off like this. It's very easy to be against having a wind tower in your back yard. Many people buy or live on rural properties for the aesthetic value. They're sick of the skyscrapers downtown. If you put up wind towers it looks like an alien moonscape to many (and in case you haven't actually been around, out in the country they go up in droves; there's never one, there's rows of them stretching to the horizon). So, drastically affect the aesthetic value then a) people want to move out and b) people don't want to move in. It doesn't take a genius to see what's going to happen to property values. (I know someone who's ~$1million farm lost 30% value). If what is essentially a lack of zoning took $300k from you then you'd probably be "wondering" a little less.

Again this is a zoning issue. We have laws so you can't open a gravel pit/industrial factory/etc. wherever you want so people can have peace of mind about property values. Wind towers are no different, except since it's "green energy" people seem to put on their stupid hats before thinking about it.

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As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein

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