* Posts by Grant Bearman

12 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Apr 2007

Wal-Mart pressured into tune keys life support

Grant Bearman
Paris Hilton

Clueless Walmart

Try even seeing the "MP3" section on walmart.com using linux. Get error message saying your OS is not supported.

Try it with Opera on linmux masking as IE.

You then get the telling message:

We notice you're not using Windows Media Player 9 or later.

If they had even a small clue, they would know it would not matter. DRM = Dolts, Rubes and Morons.

Woman accuses RIAA of killing dolphins

Grant Bearman
Flame

She is my hero

Only fantasy, but would be nice to see a thuggery of RIAA execs handcuffed and jailed for a decade or so.

The number of cases that could be turned back on the RIAA as "malicious prosecution" of some sort must number in the hundreds, if not thousands. But most people either don't know their own power, or simply can't afford the money and time.

Thuggery - a collective noun.

Pennsylvania officials bail after voter reg site springs a leak

Grant Bearman
Happy

Stupid Programmer Contest

This time the voter registration machine developers win, defeating the voting machine programmers by a half-decayed bit.

Napster spins music for the web

Grant Bearman
Unhappy

Not in Canda

We get nothing here, primitive protected backwater that sometimes is.

Every napster site redirects back to the Windows Only napster.ca.

A trip with Firefox on TOR show me the joy unavailable to we of the land of the yellow snow.

Ballmer: I will buy 20 web companies a year

Grant Bearman
Alien

A better buy for Ballmer

A smart Ballmer would limit his purchases to companies using linux/apache so he can force convert them to Winders/IIS.

IIS is catching up with Apache on Netcraft's surveys, and if it ever exceeds it, the MS shills will go crazy. MS stock will soar. Yadda yadda.

OpenSUSE 10.3 opens for business

Grant Bearman

Save the religious arguments, just give me the good stuff.

Never mind the ideology. I just want a quality distribution that does what I need. I've been with SuSE since 6.4. I've tried others (and some are quite impressive), but SuSE/opensuse keeps me coming back for more.

It is now Day 2 if my opensuse 10.3 torrent download. 71% complete. I'll be busy in another 10 to 12 hours...

Webmail-creating Trojan targets Gmail

Grant Bearman

Programmatic and fun

Another scenario that could work:

The garbage set up a website - lets call it "Eye Games".

You are presented with a set of images and try to decode them to achieve a best time with highest accuracy (feedback from the account-creating engine would give you the accuracy part). User scores are posted to keep things interesting and get players to return for more.

New images every time. Captcha images.

Brainless civil servant amazes doctors

Grant Bearman

Typical civil servant

Whenever I drive by a city-run facility or park where the water sprinklers running during a rain storm,. I will be reminded of this story.

This happens frequently where I live, and I always wondered why. Mystery solved.

Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale

Grant Bearman

Harsh Realm - Yet Again

A simulation for wargaming with the entire population in it?

I think it was done rather well in the tv series Harsh Realm, complete with glitches and bugs, back in 1999.

Bible heads for Hong Kong's top shelf

Grant Bearman

Not a book for children

There isn't a crime I've ever heard of that is not advocated by the bible, generally under orders from god - from scorched earth policies, to killing children for cursing their parents (Jesus says so too: Matt 15:4), and when it comes to women, there is nothing like killing everyone in a city except for the virgins and handing those out to the victors. This is a major theme.

I don't advocate banning it. A more perfect example of how bronze age butchers, psychopaths and paranoid schizophrenics you could not hope to find anywhere else. If it can teach us anything, it is that it stands as an example of the worst in us. It's time to move on and leave this monument of hate literature to the field of abnormal psychology.

Southern Ocean calls time on carbon sinking

Grant Bearman

If you believe the end-is-near crowd

Oil will run out in a few decades.

End of problem. We will all suddenly be far below Kyoto limits.

UK Gov deploys lie detectors on benefits claims

Grant Bearman

Why not Sylvia Browne too?

VSA was initially marketed on the claim it was 'better' than the conventional polygraph. Hmm, 10 times 0 = 0.

The polygraph worked not as a lie detector but as a liar intimidator. If the suspect believes the machine works, he is more likely to confess without ever being hooked up. There is also the little matter of of being asked and required to answer questions that in a normal police interview would not be permitted by legal counsel. It's all about the intimidation factor.

So along comes VSA which measures even less than the polygraph - but essentially the same thing - and through the power of the beliefs of the purchaser, can uncover remotely what the polygraph could not under any circumstance.

Both are worse than useless,both have cult-like followings, and both remind me of some of the magic tech I have seen debunked on James Randi's site.