* Posts by xpusostomos

59 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Dec 2012

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James Damore's labor complaint went over about as well as his trash diversity manifesto

xpusostomos

What everyone is ignoring is it doesn't matter if you agree with damore's science. The issue is that it IS science. It's backed by good quality research, even if you prefer some other supposedly better research. If quoting well researched science is now potentially illegal, this opens the floodgates to all manner of abuse.

xpusostomos

Re: controversial bro-grammer ?

For fuck's sake, Cherry picking one anecdote is NOT science. Yet you criticise Damore. Everything Damore wrote was scientifically backed. Science is always up for discussion and debate and revision, but saying "my great auntie blah blah" is not science.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has made a hash of the census

xpusostomos

hash no good

Hashing achieves nothing much. It would take a computer half an hour to hash every name in Australia. Then having made such an index, you just compare hashes to names, and voila! All your data is suddenly re-identified. It wouldn't even be hard to speculatively hash many names. For example, take the 100 most common first names and surnames, and voila, probably 10% of your leaked data suddenly is re-identified. Expand to the 10,000 most common first names and surnames and you've probably re-acquired 90% of the data. In other words, hash is a fool's paradise.

Australian ISPs agree to three-strikes-plus-court-order anti-piracy plan

xpusostomos

Re: The dog ate my homework

Ignorance of how to secure it? Sorry, but I make it open ON PURPOSE, because its a socially responsible and sharing thing to do. Google "open wireless" to see the many people who think the same.

xpusostomos

Re: Blimey!

"I don't think that's a good excuse."

Actually, it may be a legal excuse to make fair use of a small portion.

xpusostomos

Re: To State The Obvious...

"If anyone is paying $pittance for a VPN service ONLY to hide their tracks while torrenting, why not just pay $pittance for Netflix or similar?"

Because there is no porn on netflix.

Oh, and netflix doesn't have everything.

Cracking copyright law: How a simian selfie stunt could make a monkey out of Wikipedia

xpusostomos

Monkey?

Monkeys are pretty smart. I would not assume that the Monkey did not know what a camera is, and did not deliberately decide to pick up the camera and take a picture, knowing full well what cameras do.

Now there may well be legal impediments to monkeys registering copyrights, but assuming that they don't understand cameras would not be a great argument.

xpusostomos

Oh yes? And who "took" the picture? The one who set it all up, or the one pressing the button?

'Apple is terrified of women’s bodies and women’s pleasure' – fresh tech sex storm

xpusostomos

From what we know about Tim Cook's personal predilections, no he hasn't heard of a clit, to answer those tweeters.

Secret Senate software stoush: Greens intervene

xpusostomos

I find it completely outrageous that they would attempt to label him vexatious, just because he vigorously pursues the release of one particular FOI request. It's not a case of him lodging 500 requests or something to bog down the system. He just wanted one thing, and wasn't happy with the response. Really outrageous.

Google: Glass goggles are a 'fairly lousy surveillance device'

xpusostomos

Re: Presumably..

It's way easier to hide and disguise a smart phone than this thing sitting in the middle of your face.

xpusostomos

Re: Worthless conditionals

It's called Quantum laws. You can never say what it says until you go to court, then there are only probabilities of outcome. Don't whine, it's science.

Seagate brings out 6TB HDD, did not need NO STEENKIN' shingles

xpusostomos

No Mac

You won't get the 3TB macbook because they went to all SSD solid state.

NSA gets burned by a sysadmin, decides to burn 90% of its sysadmins

xpusostomos

Closing the stable door....

Does the expression "closing the stable door after the horse has bolted" mean anything to ya, NSA?

Six nations ask Google for answers on Glass privacy

xpusostomos

OMG

OMG, The only difference between Glass and thousands of other devices on the market, is that Glass has some plasic rods allowing you to hang it off your ears.

Kim Dotcom victim of 'largest data MASSACRE in history'

xpusostomos

Re: Shrobbery

Yeah, it's not paranoia when they really are after you, and arrive on your doorstep in helicopters in the middle of the night to take you away.

REVEALED: The gizmo leaker Snowden used to smuggle out NSA files

xpusostomos

Re: Root password, sure, but why wasn't the data encrypted?

They are using Windows so that the NSA can break into its secret backdoors. [ chuckle ].

Bjarne Again: Hallelujah for C++

xpusostomos

OMG

So C++ is actually 2 turing complete languages: the language itself, and the template system.

When will everyone just use lisp and be done with it?

NSA: We COULD track you by your phone ... if we WANTED to

xpusostomos

Yeah right

Even if they can't be bothered, how long can it be before they CAN be bothered? There is nothing stopping them, ergo, its merely a matter of when, not whether.

Red Hat to ditch MySQL for MariaDB in RHEL 7

xpusostomos

Re: another one bites the dust

You forgot the part where Oracle eventually has to purchase MariaDB, rinse, repeat, start again.

SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix

xpusostomos

Hurrumph

I thought the outcome is, Novell won proving they own UNIX. That Linux actually doesn't contain any UNIX. (not to mention Oracle lost recently in the claim that APIs are copyrightable, which was SCO's only hope in the first place). This is deader than the deadest dead dog.

Ex-Microsoft man plans brand of consumer marijuana 'fine cigars'

xpusostomos

Balmer

Ask Balmer what to call it. I reckon he ingests an awful lot more pot than any of us, judging by his behavior.

Optus: Australian telcos are RUBBISH

xpusostomos

Bravo for recognising a massive moral failing. Now where is the solution??

Who did Apple LIE TO: Australia or America?

xpusostomos

Yeah it's inconsistent, but I can't for the life of me see what difference it makes. The issue at stake is whether the price is (a) unfair to Australian consumers or (b) involves a wholesale transfer pricing that is unfair to the Australian tax office. Whether the price is set in Australia, Cupertino, Ireland or Timbuktoo hardly matters.

WikiLeaks party flirts with Oz law by taking Bitcoin gifts

xpusostomos

Yeah but...

OK, so they should report who made the donation. But Bitcoin makes it easy to donate bitcoins anonymously. So how would they report on information they don't know about?

World's richest hobo (Apple) has worked 'tax-free' in Ireland since '80s

xpusostomos

Trousered

They trousered $74bn? That's one big pair of trousers.

A backdoor into Skype for the Feds? You're joking...

xpusostomos

Re: Mr C

There are ways to encrypt stuff so that you can plausibly deny you have the ability to decrypt it any more.

Budget could mean more paperwork for contractors

xpusostomos

Re: Are you sure???

Companies with yearly tax over about $30,000 already have to pay monthly, so not sure what you're on about.

Cat ladies turned brand-squatters poke fun at religious right

xpusostomos

Erk

Unless you are coca-cola, not much point grabbing every possible domain. There are far too many, and ICANN is planning a whole lot more.

TomTom brandishes new strap-on in Amsterdam: The wristnav

xpusostomos

Except...

Good product until next month when Apple takes away their business with an iWatch.

Java 8 release date slips again, now planned for 2014

xpusostomos

Re: A struggling platform

It's not anything like Windows 8. Win 8 being a consumer platform (primarily), time to market is critical to get consumers interested. Java 8 holds nothing interesting for consumers. It's interesting for developers, who are hardly going to jump ship to something else because of a delay.

Tech is the biggest problem facing archiving

xpusostomos

Yeah but...

Surely the frantic evolution in technology will slow down and stop sooner rather than later. As long as it is evolving, those upgrades bring benefits of much more data per tape, which presumably is worth the upgrade. But this can't go on forever. Will there really be 20 more generations of tape? Will there even be tape in 20 years? Who knows.

'Australia's so big freight costs are high' claims don't add up

xpusostomos

Re: hmmmmmmmm

Yeah, maybe that graphic designer HAS to charge more because people like Adobe are bloating out their input costs, and if the good 'ol USA stopped ripping us off, the designer could charge less and the whole economy becomes more efficient.

Oz shop slaps browsers with $5 just looking fee

xpusostomos

Better to...

I would have thought the better solution would be to charge $10 for advice than to charge $5 just to browse.

Lightspeed variable say intellectuels français

xpusostomos

Re: Answer: Almost 3 hundred thousand km/sec

I thought the point of the story is that there is no proper vacuum.

West Virginia seeks Google Glass driving ban

xpusostomos

Ground control calling

Ground control calling the 20th century... people have been using GPS units for a long long time. And who is to say that Google Glass isn't a safer way to access GPS than something stuck to your windscreen? Certainly not this lunatic idiot politician who by his own admission never used Google glass. So because someone COULD watch a cat video, we are going to ban a technology that might actually IMPROVE safety? What a clown.

Sony: Can't beat Apple and Samsung, so let's be the Other Guy

xpusostomos

There is more hard fighting being done over the #3 spot than there is for the #1 spot. I'm not seeing Sony as the ones with a hope of getting #3 anytime soon. In fact, I'm struggling to see them impacting at all.

Apple 'insider' explains why vid adapter hides ARM computer

xpusostomos

Don't be silly

lightning is WAY better than micro-USB. A good connector OUGHT to be tight. And because of the nature of the uses put to it, often is the main thing holding devices into their cradles. And it works both orientations. Micro USB is extremely fiddly, hard to slot in, and has no holding power. As for speed, lightning is basically USB, so no pros or cons as far as that. Probably lightning will become USB3 at some point.

Yeah, micro-USB is a standard, it has that advantage. But even ignoring Apple's desire to keep it proprietary, its a way better connector for the situation.

Bill Gates: Windows Phone strategy was 'a mistake'

xpusostomos

Re: Gates quote

None of these things in your list could, nor ever had a hope of moving the MS stock price up. Sure, MS can from time to time put out solid products. That's all they are: solid, not exciting, not life changing, not enough to make the needle move. If you want to be in charge of the (formerly) world's biggest consumer software company, making a new version of SQL server that doesn't blow up, really is not good enough.

xpusostomos

I like their strategy

I like Ballmer's strategy. I like it a lot.

http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/06/29/iphone-turns-5-here-are-the-naysayers/

Windows Phone 8 hasn't slowed Microsoft's mobile freefall

xpusostomos

Re: Who would have thought?

You're really still enamored with a half decent desktop OS when there are fully decent options out there? Like or loath Metro, at least (finally) MS had a rethink of the vast cruft and user antogonistic interface that was Windows since the beginning.

A new Mac Pro coming this spring? 'Mais oui!'

xpusostomos

Later next year?.... or Later, Next Year. ?

Boffins propose satnav tracking for 'KILLER KOALAS'

xpusostomos

Re: Ony one known way

It's a good solution to the drop bear, but the land octopi then have to be rooted out with tree-dwelling platypus.

xpusostomos

They can't even get their story straight. The museum page says it lacks canine teeth. But that photo sure looks like canines.

Netbooks were a GOOD thing and we threw them under a bus

xpusostomos

ipad

You didn't really say what you are trying to achieve, but an ipad with a bluetooth keyboard case, sounds like it fits the bill. I realise it may not, but like I said, you didn't really tell us why it might not.

'Gaia' Lovelock: Wind turbines 'may become like Easter Island statues'

xpusostomos

So what?

Let's say it is 3000 or 5000 turbines. So what? We aren't told why I should care about it. Is it cost? Environmental impact? Just spouting a number, by itself doesn't prove anything.

Apple confirms 128GB iPad. A hundred bucks for an extra 64GB

xpusostomos

Re: Braindead idiots trying to store their digital world on their device.

Yeah, well, when the cost of bandwidth makes it feasible, your pie in the sky theory can be reality!!!

Megaupload outed file-sharers to Feds months before Dotcom raid

xpusostomos

So Dotcom complied with search warrants. Like, did he have any choice? I don't think so.

Dotcom's Mega smacks back: Our crypto's not crap

xpusostomos

Stupid critics

1. random() is sketchy IF YOU CAN GUESS THE STARTING SEED. But how would you be able to guess a number on someone else's computer, years after the fact?

2. I fail to see how deduplication is difficult, even accepting Mega doesn't know what the unencrypted data is. And I also fail to see how deduplication "leaks" information about the data.

3. They'll fix this. Not a biggy.

4. That's kinda the point. If Mega COULD restore your password, the critics really WOULD be up in arms!!!! Store your password somewhere else - somewhere it can be recovered if you're worried. 1Password on your iPhone perhaps? The choices are endless.

Telstra inks 4G roaming deal for Hong Kong travelers

xpusostomos

Unaffordable

Unaffordable at 3G speeds. Now REALLY unaffordable at the rate you can stream 4G. Thanks Telstra.

NOT!

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