Posts by J 3

Re: INFANT?

...and in Westeros and surrounding localities you are a (wo)man grown by sixteen and can even be an unsupervised Monarch! Hell, they frequently kill their first victim by age 10 there.

Re: ..."a whopping 80 per cent of crashes ... involved male drivers"

Yup, caught my attention too: "a whopping 80 per cent of crashes that killed or seriously injured pedestrians involved male drivers"

You'd expect The Reg, being such a tech oriented place, to be better at this statistics business, instead of just parroting any old number without thinking about it first, providing context, etc. Oh, well, who am I kidding? Media is media.

Re: Firefox WTF?

"Is it any wonder punters haven't a clue what version they should be using?"

The latest?

Would a version number like 6.1.298a be any better to give a people clue? We like it or not, them things will be updated continuously if we are to be kept (relatively) safe(ish).

Re: Get a proper job!

There is ALWAYS a post like this one above, how predictable...

Yes, but...

Yes, but the "more savvy than the average Linux installing person" will create a restricted account for mom to use, so she cannot install anything -- even if she knew what "install" means, which I'm pretty sure my mom doesn't.

I'm sure it's not 100% tight, but better than leaving administrator access open. Now, the question is: how many friendly Linux installing people are doing this, specially at the risk of being even more in support duty over the phone later? :-)

Re: Should I know

I don't know about existence, but your happiness will be much obliged if go on not hearing her music. Pictures are fine though.

Re: Inheritance

Why would they? Well, obviously they wouldn't do it out of the goodness of their little black hearts. But that's what laws are for. If there was one that said that DRM that can't be validated (due to the provider disappearing, for example) becomes null and void, immediately freeing the file in question, you can be sure they would be implementing the "inheritance scheme" very quickly indeed.

The tech aspects of this (namely, how to determine if the DRM is now dead) are of course open for debate. A non-profit or gov server to check whether the DRM in question is dead (as a fall back when the provider's server disappears) would be a possibility, I think.

Real solution would be the end of this silliness called DRM, but I guess it is a tough one to get.

Re: And yet, and yet ...

If you need that kind of power, you are a crappy photographer. The icon should be a half-joke one, actually.

Re: Several points

"Although I'm not sure if rats, like humans only have 1 liver & 2 kidneys"

Yup, rodents have one liver and two kidneys. Actually, most vertebrates are the same way. Snakes are more modified, given the constraints of space.

I agree he is right that what Canonical did was bad, etc., but as someone mentioned above, he does not need to be a condescending paternalistic douche about it.

"Even if the feature were disabled by default, he says, allowing users to opt in still puts them at risk, because most won't fully understand what they're getting themselves into."

Don't take me wrong, I'm a fan of RMS and his work, but even if he's right that most people are too stupid to be discerning about this, no one has appointed him or anyone else the guardian of the innocent of the world, last I looked. If grown ups are not allowed to take responsibility for their own choices, then the world RMS wants (and I do too) will never come.

And, anyway, I suspect that whomever is too thick to understand what opting in to the Amazon search means is also very unlikely to come across it to even start wondering if it's a good idea, so opting in would not be that much of a big deal. Too bad it's still opt out.

Re: RE.What a load of bollocks!

...and they keep using economic ideas from the 1700s, with ideal little villages where there are 10 cobblers and you (the customer or worker) can just as easily go to another one if your regular one is misbehaving. Kind of hard to believe that type of thinking is still applied to another planet. I'm sure much else has been added to it, but still.

Also, corporations and capital can move around freely and much more easily than physical people. Might seem counterintuitive, but think about it.

And finally, if the EU corporations are not burdened by the costs of the corporate tax described, I imagine their workers must be better off there and the corporations' products must have a lower price (before sales tax, VAT, whatever) than in the UK. I don't know if that is the case, but I seriously doubt so.

Re: It's life, we're not that special...

Funnily enough, this reminds me of a "talk" I saw in 2003 or 2004, which was supposed to be about life on Mars. It was at around a table at a restaurant during quiet hours, with this engineering (as he described himself, although I doubt) guy speaking and some 6 or 7 people there to watch, and discuss afterwards. The title, which I don't remember, was intriguing. So I went.

Getting there, I found out it was arranged by some ministry. OK, that does not mean it will be bad. The guy started, and it soon became clear it was a creationist propaganda event, and all kinds of (the same old and discredited) attacks on the feasibility of evolution. The Mars thing? Well, the speaker's conclusion was that there could not be life, specially intelligent life, on Mars (or elsewhere) because such life would have to be "saved" (in the Christian way). And to be saved, there would have to be sacrifice of Christ over and over again. And apparently god "can't afford" (I remember those were his words) to do that. How about that, this guy knows god personally! Who'd have thought.

Of course this happened in America. The capital of Virginia, to be precise.

Re: How about actually making Ubuntu work?

Just because you don't know how to use it it does not mean it doesn't work. If you don't know/remember what the image editor is called, write "image editor", or even just "ima", and you get a list of image related programs with pretty obvious descriptions. But yeah, categories are gone, and that sure is not to everyone's taste. I say good riddance, because back then the struggle many times was to remember, or hunt down, in which category some more obscure program you needed would be. At least with Linux we have options for every taste -- which some will promptly say is Linux's limiting factor, but that's another can of penguins.

Re: It didn't.

Apple didn't decide my desktop should be a sterile wasteland without shortcuts, and without files.

I don't believe people are still talking about that. I am running the latest Ubuntu with Unity, and I have a bunch of files on my desktop area. Have no clue whether Gnome 3 also allows it though.

Re: Sheepsung?

Schrödinger's sheep/monkey (sheenkey? moneep?)