Posts by Chairo

Re: it is on a volcano

Hawaiian volcanism is of a different kind than the one found around the ring of fire or other continental fault lines. They are shield volcanoes, fed by a hot spot. Their magma is very hot and much less explosive than what is found in other places (Japan or Indonesia, for example). That said, Yellowstone caldera is also fed by a hot spot and it is a monster. Good old earth has a lot of nasty surprises for us, but the Hawaiian islands are probably one of the safer spots.

Re: Surprised this still happens

I'm assuming this is just some developer testing feature that got left on

Sure, with two servers, connected to the internet that receive user data of a million readers. These just happened to be set up by accident and no-one noticed...

(Where is the irony icon?)

Re: "bad actors doing bad things"

Are they talking about miming "I will survive" while wearing too many sequins?

No, I am quite sure they are talking about "trying to evade profiling and thus reducing our loot ad revenues".

Re: Just to be absolutely, totally clear here.....

... what they really want is privacy?

No, they already sold away their privacy to a tabloid which wants to make sure the rights stay exclusive. I wouldn't be too surprised if all these security measures are part of the contract.

Re: Safari

It's the changes to Safari that bug me.

No problem, just install another browser that suits you better...

(obvious trolling)

Re: with Bing

... It must be crippled in some other way as well.

As written in the article. The screen size is limited. That said, I wonder if there are other limitations, similar to the castrated XP they shipped with the netbooks. Those were limited to 1024x600 resolutions and 1GB memory. Also the Netbooks were all 32bit, though I am not sure if that particular limit was mainly imposed by Microsoft or by Intel.

The netbook portable described in the article has 1024-by-600 resolution and ships with 1GB RAM. Happy swapping time! Don't damage your eyes!

3D is annoying and should go away, especially as an additional cost, as if you don't want to watch it in 3D you get stuffed into a small screen - if I wanted to watch on a small screen I would be at home. Films like Dredd were actually worse for the 3D too (highlighted the noise in the dark scenes).

I completely agree with you. I don't understand why movie theaters don't offer special spectacles with two identically polarized glasses for people that don't like 3D. That would be trivial to implement with negligible additional cost.

Does it fit in an average pocket still? If not, then you may as well have a 7 inch tablet instead.

I heard that the reason, why it is named "Passport" is because it has the same size than a passport.

So yes, just like a passport, it will fit in most pockets.

Re: OMGeeez!!! What a DISASTER!!! We're all DOOOOMED!!! Etc.

Yes, there are a lot of posters her that don't want to agree with what I post, who downvote with alacrity, yet seem unable to post a reason for their disagreement. That implies their disagreement is not based on facts or reasoning, but on emotional baaaah-liefs.

Think about it - I'd say about 75% of your downvotes are directly because of your attitude. Those downvoters will never answer, anyway. Another 25% don't agree with your statement and facts. They might answer your post and explain the downvote, but that's much more effort than just pushing the downvote button and hoping someone else might explain it to you.

Anyway - you have a good point insofar as my whole post had no actual relevance to the thread.

Let's change that:

If The Man or any of The Minions have 'misused' the data then there would be some proveable 'harm', surely? If not, how could they have 'misused' it? You want to baaaaah-lieve in The Great Conspiracy To Oppress Us All, so show me some effect of the supposed conspiracy.

In a dragnet data collection of Stasi or Gestapo style, it is completely irrelevant if the data is misused or not. The very fact the data is collected, already creates a feeling of uncertainty and pushes the subjects to preemptive obedience. That's why oppressive systems never hide the fact, that data is collected. Obviously the NSA tried very hard to hide their data collection. So probably no conspiracy here. Move along, nothing to see.

".....and because 'victims' of any misuse will not necessarily know where their problems came from." I am not asking you to show conclusive proof that The Man 'harmed' them, just anything that these people underwent that you want to propose was caused by The Man. Then we can all have a good laugh at your paranoia. Come on, back your witless bleating up for once.

Now, unfortunately there have been incidents with people, that were put on "No Fly Lists". Once your name is on such a list, your are in trouble. There is virtually no way to get you cleared. I would say this counts as harm. Accidential harm, perhaps, but nevertheless. Apart from that, the fact that it is now known that all this data is collected, will certainly have some negative influence on our society. The terrorists' goal is to fight our liberal society, our freedom to do, think and believe as we wish. The actions of the NSA damaged our society far more than any terrorist bomb could have ever done. Just by creating a feeling of fear and uncertainty. I would call that harmful behaviour.

Another point is that once such a organisation is set up and working, it can be easily turned into an instrument of oppression. The Gestapo didn't just appear from out of nowhere. Neither did the Stasi. Democracies are very fragile things. People tend to flock around strong leaders and leaders tend to strife for as much power as possible. And you know what - it's always the other ones that are the sheeple...

Re: XP

I "upgraded" our family netbook with similar hardware spec to xubuntu and installed Libreoffice. The Missus was surprisingly happy about it. She still calls Firefox "Internet Explorer", however.

There were some quirks, like the thing going in hibernation, whenever the lid was closed, but apart from that, it was a surprisingly painless operation. Base installation took about 30min. and went through without too much trouble. It even remembered the WIFI setup, I entered prior to the installation. Printer setup was easy, too.

It took me a bit time to set up the keyboard in a convenient way, but I suppose not too many people are going to mix several different layouts, including Asian ones. Still, remembering the pain of mixing 105 and 109 key keyboards in Win7, ubuntu was far less painful.