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Comment Dating sites simply lie. (Score 2, Interesting) 161

Try this the next time you want to try an online dating site: Create two profiles, a "real" one and a fake perfect match to your real profile and see how long it takes for the site to claim that your fake perfect match has attempted to contact you and for only $4.95 you can sign on to the paid service and reply.

Comment If datacentres take over, new coins will be made (Score 2) 250

Anyone throwing a huge amount of money at ASIC mining doesn't know where the profitability is in cryptocurrency. The place to earn your money is in the first few weeks of any new coin, even more so if they offer a hashing algorithm that is resistant to ASICs or GPUs. It's savvy technicians getting pools up for the launch of new coins that should be doing well, not bloated companies who mindlessly throw more SHA-256 hash at bitcoin.

Comment Re:Gridcoin (Score 2) 203

I love the idea of Gridcoin, but the implementation is shocking. For a start, way too much trust is placed in the client to identify BIONC and increase rewards. This will get hacked so you don't have to run BOINC. Also, it only cares about CPU usages. I have a 2000-series ATI card that's no good for hashing, but will accelerate SETI@home. The Gridcoin client doesn't consider I'm doing work if I'm using a GPU, so I'm encouraged to drop GPU accelerated work and use a less efficient CPU. Not to mention that mining with the wallet is the only way to earn a bonus, making a range of hardware useless, plus making pools unattractive.

Comment Re:Why's this on Slashdot? (Score 1) 417

That's not entirely fair.

The girl told police that Cesmat had taken away her cell phone away when she went to bed, telling her he did not want her texting all night.

So the girl had no phone, just her iPod, which I assume was an iPod touch. She wasn't able to make a call from it, or an SMS, but she could send a Facebook message (or an email, or with the right software an IM to pretty much any service).

This is a story about how important communication can now be made by devices other than a phone. Or how children now not only have a mobile phone, but often a second gadget capable of keeping them connected.

And it's not like she didn't use Facebook and an iPod.

Comment Dell really are worse than most (Score 1) 604

While other manufacturers hardly have a spotless record (I'm looking at you, Sony, Acer and Gateway) Dell has been well below average for years now. For those of you that got a Dell and never had any problems with it, congratulations. But just like how it being cold where you are today doesn't mean global warming isn't real, just because your one PC didn't have any problems doesn't mean Dell's quality control has been shit for coming on 10 years.

But somehow, when it comes to management, Dell is Teflon coated. I wish this was the death knell for Dell, but it just isn't going to be.

Comment Carabiner. Belt Loop. Several keyrings. (Score 2, Insightful) 763

I have my keys on a Carabiner. The core set stay there all the time, other groups (like car keys) or tools (like a little USB Swiss army knife) get clipped on and off as needed. The set then gets clipped on the belt loop nearest my pocket and slipped into the top of the pocket. The weight never pulls on the pocket itself.

Comment Re:$199 too high! (Score 3, Insightful) 217

A small, fast flash drive is preferable to a big slow hard drive. I know, because someone at work bought one of the newer EeePCs with a 160Gig drive and it was basically unusable until we swapped in an expensive flash drive as a replacement. Until the extra money was spent on it, my 4G Eee was much better, even if I do have to manage my use of the system drive very carefully.

Since I'm posting, the AA batteries are a HUGE advantage. I've refused to buy any digital camera that doesn't take AAs for ages now and the result is that the last three cameras I've bought are all still perfectly usable. Meanwhile, I'm onto the second battery for my Eee (which I effectively got by buying an entire 2G Eee fairly cheap), and my early digital cameras (which I spent quite a bit on) are glorified paperweights. There are some very, very nice rechargeable AA options out there and some seriously good chargers. I've invested in some of this stuff and would love to be able to use it with my netbook.

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