Comment Social? (Score 1) 371
I sometimes wonder how justified the 'Social' is in 'Social Media'.
Comment Re:Advance to Go (Score 1) 155
The rank on boardgamegeek of Monopoly is 10464. According to quite a large community it is quite easy to beat Monopoly.
Comment Delicate (Score 1) 174
Why is that I only ever see 'delicate' attached to eco-system and never 'robust'?
Comment Safe versus fun (Score 1) 336
It seems that these days safety is all important. When I see the announcement these days they are 'Have a safe holiday'. No mention of having fun during the holidays. Even in the elementary school that my kids go to, it's all about safety in the playground. Whereas for many years all grades were allowed in both playgrounds, suddenly with a new principle one of the playgrounds was deemed too dangerous for kids.
I'm fine if one of my kids gets hurt in a game, that's just part of growing up. Sometimes teachers lose track that the goal of an education is to prepare someone for real life.
Comment I'm Dutch and wearing a helmet in Canada (Score 1) 1651
I grew up in Holland and never wore a helmet. Currently I live in Canada and it's mandatory to wear a helmet. A couple of years ago I was involved in an accident (not my fault, but in the end who cares about that) that caused me to fly off my bike and land on my head. I was seriously injured and my helmet was cracked. However, I survived this accident thanks to the helmet. Cycling in Holland is safer because the infrastructure is made for it and the drivers are aware of cyclists. In Canada, the infrastructure for cycling is poor compared to Holland and the drivers are less aware of cyclists, thus it's more dangerous to cycle, so wearing a helmet makes more sense.
Microsoft Kills Support For XP SP2 315
Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft's announcement this week that it is preparing to end support for machines running Windows XP SP2 not only represents a challenge for the thousands of businesses still running SP2, but also is the end of an era for both Microsoft and its customers. It wasn't until 2004 that the final release of XP SP2 hit the streets, but when it did, it represented a huge step forward in security for Windows users. It wasn't necessarily the feature set that mattered as much as the fact that the protections were enabled by default and taken out of the users' hands."
Air Canada Ordered To Provide Nut-Free Zone 643
JamJam writes "Air Canada has been told to create a special 'buffer zone' on flights for people who are allergic to nuts. The Canadian Transportation Agency has ruled that passengers who have nut allergies should be considered disabled and accommodated by the airline. Air Canada has a month to come up with an appropriate section of seats where passengers with nut allergies would be seated. The ruling involved a complaint from Sophia Huyer, who has a severe nut allergy and travels frequently. Ms. Huyer once spent 40 minutes in the washroom during a flight while snacks were being served."
HP Patents Bignum Implementation From 1912 144
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The authors of GMP (the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library) were invited to join Peer-to-Patent to review HP's recent patent on a very old technique for implementing bignums because their software might infringe. Basically, HP's patent claims choosing an exponent based on processor word size. If you choose a 4-bit word size and a binary number, you end up working in hexadecimal. Or for a computer with a 16-bit word and a base-10 number, you use base 10,000 so that each digit of the base-10,000 number would fit into a single 16-bit word. The obvious problem with that is that there's plenty of prior art here. Someone who spent a few minutes Googling found that Knuth describing the idea in TAOCP Vol. 2 and other citations go back to 1912 (which implemented the same algorithm using strips of cardboard and a calculating machine). None of this can be found in the 'references cited' section. Even though the patent examiner did add a couple of references, they appear to have cited some old patents. The patent issued a few months ago was filed back in October of 2004, and collected dust at the USPTO for some 834 days."
Comment Another excuse for raising taxes (Score 1) 84
Well, past experience has shown that eventually these things affect politicians. They see variations on the same thing proclaimed by multiple groups and think they have to do something. That something is usually increasing the levy/fee/tax on blank DVDs and CDs, coupled with proclamations that you are championing Canadian home-grown talent. The difference between levy and tax? You can put GST (5%) on a levy, but you can't put GST on a tax.
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