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Comment Of course bankers are pissing themselves. (Score 4, Interesting) 238

On a radio program today someone stated money was ultimately a way to transfer debt. If I have money, ultimately that means someone owes me work. To a degree I can randomly choose who that someone is depending on my needs. If, in an extreme case, all the work is being done by robots, nobody would owe anyone any work, money would no longer represent anything and banks would go out of business, which is not something bloody likely for them to let happen.

Comment "Let me ask you something." (Score 1) 216

Let me ask you something. If a store sells knockoff designer handbags, why is it okay for police to come in, confiscate the illegal merchandise, and arrest and fine the store owners? It’s because the store is profiting from the sales of these illegal goods, in the same way Google can increase its advertising rates because these illegal sites increase the number of users it attracts.

Fan of analogies, is he. The question is, if a store sells knockoff designer handbags, why do you want the police to go after the store, rather than after the people who publish the Yellow Pages and the phone book?

Comment Lack of ASLR is not a bug (Score 3, Insightful) 132

Lack of ASLR is not a bug. It's a lacking feature. Arguably, it's the compiler's responsibility to make it happen. Having said that, I find it real hard to get virus infections nowadays. There might be something to this "common sense" thing about not running any software from untrusted sources. That, and user/kernel space separation.

Comment Summer, hands down. (Score 1) 346

Summer is the freedom to leave the house without a coat, without having to worry about getting cold or rained on.

Everyone that said fall or autumn is just kissing up to the new season in the hope that they'll be treated well by it.

Comment Captcha is necessary. (Score 1, Interesting) 558

Captcha fulfills a need - it is, as the name implies, a test to completely automatically tell computers and humans apart. It's necessary to keep spambots from registering accounts and spamming the hell out of us. Granted, the "type this wobbly word" may not be the most practical (nor safe) solution. It's easy enough to come up with alternatives- Perhaps show four photographs and ask the user to click on the one that doesn't belong (maybe the kitten out of a picture of 4 cats). Coming up with good ideas? Much harder. Complain about it all you like. Come back if you have a better alternative.

Comment Re:Pre-consumer waste, maybe (Score 1) 242

It has already been invented. It's called pancakes. Your toddler will still get all the nutrition that the egg has to give. Put some freshly made strawberry sauce/jam on top and nutritional content will be better than that of just scrambled eggs. If you're worried about blood glucose spikes, use xylitol instead of sugar.

Comment That's you're view. (Score 1) 147

Syaing "I've already got [whatever platform], how do I make it do what I want?" is often not a helpful approach."

Sure. But saying "Swap to Windows" isn't exactly any more helpful, is it? I'm not going to shell out for a Windows license and I'm not going to install it illegaly. If I can't play netflix on the operating system of my choice, they're not having my business, simple as that. Besides, at the price I would pay for a netflix movie, I'll get the DVD instead; sometimes at a car boot sale, sometimes at the thrift shop, sometimes at poundland, and I even pay full price, at times. It might score slightly lower on the "instant gratification" scale, but at least I'm watching the films on my own terms.

Comment The interesting bit is this: (Score 4, Insightful) 124

"Zopfli is a compression-only library, meaning that existing software can decompress the data." (source: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/294495_Google_Compression_Algorithm_Z). As long as the compression can be done on cached pages, hey- that's another 3-8% more people served with the same amount of bandwidth, without any additional requirements on the client side.

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