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Comment What is google going to do to fix this? (Score 1) 546

Google and the valley are increasingly hostile towards conservative values. I don't want to read rebuttals from google executives, I want to know what exactly they are going to do to make sure google is a safe workspace for conservatives and that conservative viewpoints can be openly expressed by those who work there.

Comment Forget global warming (Score 1) 414

Forget about "escaping global warming". Earth at its worst will be better than Mars at its best.

The real benefit of moving to Mars would be to get away from earthbound governments and their desire to control everything in sight: encryption, bitcoin, guns, speech, genetics, what you drink, what you smoke, what you eat, the internet, the DMCA, the Patriot Act, and so on, and so on. Being able to jettison all the governments on earth and live self-sufficient on Mars would be highly tempting to me.

Comment Re:As a wise man once said (Score 1) 319

I'm guessing you don't seek any medical attention or do any kind of banking as that kind of information is also stored in computers now.

You guess wrong. I do indeed seek medical care and carry out banking. However, I do so under the assumption that everything I do could easily become public. Consequentially, I am circumspect about what I tell my Doctors. I would never reveal anything to a physician that I didn't want on the front page of the newspaper. Similarly, I don't carry out any financial transactions that I wouldn't want disclosed.

Fortunately it is still possible to pay cash for many things, including limited medical services provided under an false name.

Comment Primary sources used to be preferred (Score 3, Informative) 333

I'm ancient by the standards of both Slashdot and Wikipedia.

One thing that is pretty much forgotten on Wikipedia is that Primary Sources used to be preferred for references. There were a series of edits over time to the reliable sources policy, each one appeared mostly grammatical at the time, and nobody really picked up on the fact that Primary Sources had been demoted in priority and Secondary Sources had been promoted in priority. There was basically zero discussion at the time that a fundamental sourcing policy had been radically changed.

Those changes went unchallenged, newbies joined the project and were taught that Secondary Sources were preferred, and eventually most people forgot that the policy used to be effectively the reverse and that the change had been made accidentally without significant review.

Comment This doesn't address the problem (Score 2) 179

This proposal seems to be all about cookies. This doesn't address the real problems of computer fingerprinting and flash objects.

Ideally, it would be impossible for a web server to leave any persistent data on your machine, and impossible to determine anything about your machine other than your IP address and possibly your browser version.

Comment Re:Don't do it (Score 5, Informative) 606

I agree with everyone saying "don't do it".

I used to work as an engineer for one of the top US computer makers. Most people have no idea how much testing the big computer makes put into integrating their systems.

Say we wanted to support shipping 3 different sizes memory sticks from 2 different vendors. We would test every possible permutation of size and vendor in loading the memory slots. The test systems were run in an environmental chamber where we ramped the temperature from the minimum to the maximum operating ranges. We also ramped the power supply from -10% to +10% of specification.

Say one of the disk drive vendors wanted us to qualify a new capacity disk drive. That too took a similar amount of testing; racks full of computers reading and writing to the disks while in the environmental chamber.

This testing *did* uncover problems frequently. We would discover that (for example) we couldn't use a certain Hitachi memory stick with a certain Samsung memory stick if the temperature rose past a certain point. We would find that a specific Western Digital drive had errors under certain conditions with a LSI controller but no problems with an Adaptec controller.

The point of all this is that there is just no way that a small shop is going to have the resources that a major computer maker does to test their integration. There is more to successful system integration then just grabbing a bunch of off-the-shelf components.

Comment Nvidia Ion (Score 1) 516

Since you are happy with XBMC, you just need a smaller box to run it on.

Buy an Acer Revo, Asus EEEBox, Zotac Zbox, or something similar. Pretty much anything built on the Intel Aton/Nividia Ion combination is going to be able to play full 1080 content with XBMC.

Or you could go for a Popcorn Time box, or even a boxee box.

I'd still recommend XMBC on an Ion.

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