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Comment With one hand he giveth; with the other he taketh (Score 4, Insightful) 177

I would much rather the devs at skype/microsoft take the time to fix the features that used to work, which has since the new "alpha" been broken like video calling, which was one of the MAIN features of skype and on of the few applications that allowed cross platform video calling.

This is much more desirable than sending messages via SMS.

Comment This isn't a victory for Behring-Breivik. (Score 3, Insightful) 491

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

Comment Re:Running power through wires shock!! (Score 1) 303

I remember in college, they actually did have unconnected ethernet outside of the engineering building. Of course, it hardly mattered since we were the first school in the country to have wifi. Unencrypted, open 802.11b. Oh, and the network was entirely flat and without any firewalls to the dorms. You could drive by, connect to wifi, and execute NETBIOS attacks against students in the dorms.

Comment Re:UE4 engine... (Score 1) 51

I'm not sure Unreal Tournament 4 is a good comparison to anything. It's stupidly fast. It may easily have the most beautiful graphics of any game I've ever played, yet plays effortlessly >60fps at 4k with a R9 390 with ultra settings. Keep in mind, too, how fast the action in this game is.

Games like Battlefield 4 and Tomb Raider on the other hand, play at 60+ fps only with slightly tweaked settings and still have occasional frame drops during moments of high action. They're really not any prettier. The Batman games do well with FPS but still stutter for reasons unknown, but seemingly related to CPU (PhysX? Texture loading?). Point is, UT4 might be in a class of its own.

By the way, one other thing I've noticed is that older games do not necessarily run much faster with beefy hardware. This surprised me. Some such as Doom3 scale well with the newer hardware, whereas games like ROTT 2013 and Serious Sam 3 don't, having worse graphics and performance than newer titles.

Comment Plot of Continuum (Score 3, Interesting) 534

This is basically the plot of Continuum [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(TV_series)], which is currently in its third season.

I know this is a tangent, but there is a pretty good intersection of interests here on Slashdot between science-fiction and rights of the people versus government. The show makes it interesting because the viewer is meant to basically hate both sides, plus it has time-travel.

*shrug*

Comment Re:Kind of on topic (Score 2) 232

Nobody should intend to film in portrait mode except in rare conditions that do not apply here with phones. The reason people do it is because it is the natural way to hold the phone, not because it is the natural way to watch the video. The phone should fix their mistake by cropping the image down to landscape or square. I don't understand what you mean by "sensor space that would rarely be used". With a square sensor, the recording would ALWAYS be square regardless of portrait or landscape orientation. It might be different than what users expect, so the cropped area on the display could show application icons for various features that are often hidden in pie menus.

Comment The USA is just one of many bad eggs (Score 1) 406

Even if the rest of the world did this, too many other countries (notably those part of FIVE EYES / FVEY) will simply share data back to the USA. Then, you have the problem that other countries such as China, Israel, Singapore, and Korea will simply do the same sort of surveillance as the USA is doing today. In fact, if you think those countries aren't already engaged in such activities, even if only to a smaller extent than the USA, you're living under a rock.

Comment DRM to protect servers (Score 3, Interesting) 684

My employer as well as our direct competitors are looking to use what might be considered DRM to protect servers that run hypervisors for untrusted VMs.

We use SecureBoot to make protect against attacks against our unattended installation / provisioning layer. We use it to make sure binaries aren't seeded into our environment. I.E. we're using trusted computing.

Comment Yes and no... (Score 2) 232

Basically, I haven't done so yet, but I need to get serious about storm preparations tomorrow. I'm in Philly where we expect to get hit hard, and my wife is 9 months pregnant.

We're electric everything here without any gas backups. I'll run out tomorrow and grab propane for the grill, and I've got charcoal and cast-iron, if I need it. We've lined up a generator rental, since we can't find one for purchase, and we're discussing if we want to go forward with it. More likely, I'll get myself an indoor-rated, portable propane heater and some extra tanks.

Not much in the way of dry and canned foods, but I'll pick up what I can tomorrow at the store. Perishables tend to go quick, but the items that actually matter such as cans and UHT pasteurized products, don't go quickly at all. UHT milk will stay good on the shelf for >6 months. Plus, we have enough to last us the next week if I rationed (my wife can't, being pregnant)

Overall, not prepared, but will be... I hope.

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