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Comment Non-story (Score 4, Interesting) 251

So if you own a AMD system you will not receive audio, chipset, video, or any other drivers for your XP system and must upgrade or use an outdated legacy version.

Ummm, yeah. Microsoft is going to stop releasing security patches for the OS. If you're still running XP, using older video drivers should be the least of your concerns.

Networking

ICANN Set To Broaden World of Domain Names 41

hypnosec writes "ICANN, as a step towards expanding global top level domain names, has approved a new Domain Name Registrar Accreditation Agreement that is expected to bring about waves of continued improvements in the domain name ecosystem (PDF). The new agreement is a result of efforts of over a year of negotiations that took place between ICANN and Registrar Stakeholders Group. The new agreement brings quite a few improvements, including making it mandatory for registrars to appoint a point-of contact for reporting abuse, and to establish registrar responsibilities for reseller compliance, enhancement of compliance tools, audit rights, and certification requirements, among others."

Comment Re:AltaVista (Score 1) 176

Granted, that was back when "www.hp.com" was an invalid URL and you had to use "www.hp.boise.com" to get a printer driver, but still....

Was that also back in the day when the search engine was altavista.digital.com?

Comment Re:Genetically speaking... (Score 1) 814

Compared to asking each person to self-identify, which has a success rate of 100.000%.

Not if the whole reason for recording your gender in a database has to do with other people identifying you. If you self-identify as female but I think you look like a guy in a dress, that may not qualify as a success.

Comment Re:Why do we need this? (Score 1) 257

It's my understanding that phones have a limited life outside your hands -- thief doesn't get the charger, you report the phone stolen and the SIM card is deactivated, boom. Done. And if you're smart you already had a lock on your phone and/or encryption, so it's not like they're going to get your personal info either. Why do we need a way to remotely deactivate cell phones?

The thief sells your phone to someone who will ship it to another country, wipe it to factory defaults, and sell it on the black market - possibly repackaged as new, if it's in good enough condition.

You said the thief doesn't get the charger, but I can buy an iPhone 4 USB cable for about $6 retail, which means the wholesale price is closer to $2, and I'm sure they can be obtained for less. The new iPhone 5 ones are probably a little more just because they're new. I expect many other phones use Micro USB, since that's the official standard in Europe, and obviously those are dirt cheap.

An international stolen device registry would prevent these stolen phones from operating, which means people will stop buying them, which means the market will dry up, which means people will stop stealing them because they no longer have value. It won't happen overnight, but if everyone's on board, it will help a lot.

Comment Re:This guy needs a legal defense fund (Score 2) 860

Sliding? Hell... We're FALLING at terminal velocity towards a police state... I'm 63 years old and unless I die in the next year or so, perhaps much less than that, I'm gonna see the country I love torn by civil war, and become a Soviet-style police state. I weep...

Oh come on. We're far too apathetic to commit to an actual civil war. It's gonna take a lot longer than a year or two to get normal people upset enough to start killing people. At this point it's not even the lunatic fringe yet.

Comment Re:Another false dichotomy (Score 1) 434

True. The only thing you lose is "miracles" - resurrections, staffs into snakes, that sort of thing.

You lose some of the miracles, but not all of them. Sometimes a "miracle" is just a totally naturally occurring phenomenon, which God set in motion from the time of Creation just so that it would happen at a specific place and time so that it would have a special meaning in the context of what was going on.

If you take the Bible to be a record of the stories a people told about themselves, then there is no real contradiction. If you take the Bible to be Revealed Text, then you've got a real problem with a scientific approach, and should probably abandon it.

If you use the Bible as the foundation upon which to build your hypothesis, then you can use real science to test it, and when you've disproven your hypothesis you go back to the Bible to seek out a better interpretation and form a new hypothesis you can test. That sounds crazy to some, but it's totally consistent with the scientific method.

Comment Re:Why is so much JavaScript being used? (Score 1) 318

You're also forgetting the part where W3C was sitting in their ivory tower doing nothing useful, so the browser vendors (sans Microsoft) got together and formed their own group, WHATWG, which created HTML5. W3C only decided to adopt HTML5 after it became clear that all the browser vendors (except Microsoft) were already committed to implementing it. (Microsoft didn't get on board until W3C's adoption.)

But you're right, the expectation is that JavaScript is a big part of how the web is supposed to work.

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