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Comment: Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL (Score 1) 203

If you want to fix the imbalance in STEM, fix this one first. There was a study a few years ago that showed that female primary school teachers who were insecure about maths were the biggest reason that girls were put off mathematical subjects. Girls, on average, develop empathy at a younger age and if they have a maths teacher who is not confident, then they pick up on it. If it's a male teacher, it doesn't have any effect. If it's a female teacher, then they learn that maths is hard for girls. Boys at that age tend to be totally oblivious to whether the teacher is unsure of the subject.

There are two ways to fix this: more men, or more women with a decent education in maths, in primary education. Given the shortage of the latter, more men seems an easy solution. Shame that we've decided that any man who wants to be a primary school teacher is pedophile...

Comment: Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL (Score 1) 203

I've seen zero indication it's for any reason beyond a lack of interest on the part of females

That's certainly true by the time that you get to university level, but the important question is why? One of my hats is to be responsible for computer science admissions at an all-women Cambridge college. From what we see from international applicants, it's pretty clear that there are cultural factors putting off women in the UK and US from the subject. We're losing out on some of the top talent because something is putting them off even considering the subject by the time they're 14-16 years old (applications are at 17, but A-level selection is at 15-16 and that's strongly influenced by GCSE choices at 13-14).

Comment: Do you mean getting 1099'd? (Score 2) 74

If you do mean getting a 1099 for the "loss", then you're wrong. Getting 1099'd (1099A or 1099C) is dischargeable in bankruptcy, even if you get the 1099 after you're discharged. All you do is file Form 982 with your taxes and it's gone. (Of course, IANAA - I am not an Accountant...) I filed BK7 in 2011, got discharged in 2012, and had a property foreclosed on that was discharged, and got a 1099-C in 2013. The full amount of the 1099-C was not considered income on my 2013 taxes (filed & payable in 2014...)

Comment: Re:Biometrics (Score 1) 56

Good enough. Is the key.
If you go too crazy with security. People will find shortcuts around the team in charge of security.
Too lax you are open to problems. Biometric in generally is the sweet spot.
Good enough to to keep people secure without becoming overly burdensome.
For your phone or your pc, being that you are not a direct target to get your account. You prevent people from getting into your system. If you are some person who has access to hard to get to data. Then yes you may need to go more secure.

Comment: Re:Shop elsewhere... (Score 2) 108

by TheRaven64 (#48685315) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Dealing With Companies With Poor SSL Practices?
Depending on your locale, the purchase might be covered by distance selling regulations. In the UK, you have a few days in which you can cancel the order for any reason. Cancel the order citing their poor security practices as the reason, keep a copy of any correspondence, and forward it to your credit card company if they try to charge you anything.

Comment: Re:Get on my level (Score 1) 178

by hairyfeet (#48684421) Attached to: Know Your Type: Five Mechanical Keyboards Compared

Got a buddy that works for the city with strict orders to bring me any clacky boards that pass through, be surprised how many businesses go to get a new PC and toss their clacky. Oh well, more for me ;-)

Ditto on the IBM, great boards, but don't knock the first Compaq and MSFT boards as they were also built like fricking tanks and took insane amounts of abuse. I tried using modern non claky keyboards at the shop...blech. Can't never tell when its registered a stroke or not,all the letters wore off in not time flat, the new boards just suck. So tomorrow I gotta drag out the desk and plug into the KVM this big old Compaq, so old its got the old style monster DIN plug but I got an adapter or five sitting in the desk drawer, much better than the new crap!

Comment: Re:Do Not Track never meant anything (Score 1) 132

by TheRaven64 (#48683815) Attached to: Google and Apple Weaseling Out of "Do Not Track"

If you can agree to contractual terms by clicking through some agreement, you can agree to "waive" your DNT setting

In the US and UK, the requirement for a contract to be enforceable in court is that the side wishing to enforce it must demonstrate that a meeting of minds has occurred. It's far from a binary decision. Some things, such as witnessed signatures at the bottom with each page initialed, have large amounts of case law backing them up, so you need a very strong argument if you want to discount them. For click-through licenses, there's a lot less case law and everything on the opposing side helps. If you can demonstrate that you have actively opted out of tracking and then been presented with a click-through license that, buried somewhere in legalese, there is a permission to track, it's easier to argue that the contract is invalid.

Either way, I am not sure what court is going to protect you from malicious actors that would not follow DNT.

The various European data protection offices would be a good bet.

We should be working on stopping the ability to track, not about making statements of intent for possible future litigation in a court of law.

Making it impossible to track means making clients indistinguishable, which is very hard. Making tracking without consent illegal is much easier, because the companies that you really worry about doing the tracking are the ones with large and expensive data centres where they can process the data, and these are nice big targets.

Comment: Re:There's no such thing as a free lunch (Score 2) 132

by hairyfeet (#48683721) Attached to: Google and Apple Weaseling Out of "Do Not Track"

Considering more than 80% of the "content" seems to be on the intellectual level of "How many inches has Kim Kardashian's ass grown today?" ask me how many fucks I would give if all this "content" were to dry up and blow away along with the malware ridden shitstains they call ads which I have to clean up after when they trash my beautiful creations....answer? ZERO, absolute zero fucks would I give.

The simple fact is you get rid of ads and POOF! Malware be gone, in fact I can't even remember the last malware infection I cleaned that didn't come from somebody that didn't know about adblocking. And wadda ya know I block the ads and tada! They only need to come for me for upgrades....ahhh, you smell that? That is the smell of smugness as I do my little part to help slowly strangle the rotten to the core industry known as Internet advertising. It smells like happiness and cookies!

Comment: Re:Bombs in the US? (Score 1) 268

by TheRaven64 (#48683635) Attached to: The Interview Bombs In US, Kills In China, Threatens N. Korea
It's not the Cold War anymore. You don't have to pretend that any country that you don't like is communist. The hereditary dictatorship in North Korea is about as far as you can get from communism and stopped pretending to be communist some time ago. It still claims to be democratic though, so if you're going to object to political philosophies based on the buzzwords that dictators use, you should probably be complaining about democracy, not communism...

Comment: Re:Great (Score 1) 42

by TheRaven64 (#48683621) Attached to: Phoronix Lauds AMD's Open Source Radeon Driver Progress For 2014

No. The nVidia drivers share around 90% of their code between all platforms (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris) and the open source ones all use the Gallium framework, which is designed for portability from the ground up.

Modern GPU drivers require a set of services from the kernel, mostly related to memory management. They need to be able to get access to the device's I/O range in the physical address map and they need the kernel to grant access to texture memory in both main memory and the device. That's about all that they need from the kernel.

At the top, they need a state tracker that manages 3D API state (which is fairly minimal on modern APIs, as they aim to be stateless for performance reasons) and that translates the shader programs into some intermediate representation.

The majority of the device-specific driver code lives between these two layers, which are usually handled by abstraction layers so that they can be plugged into different APIs. You use the same Gallium driver with an OpenGL 2, OpenGL 3, OpenVG or Direct3D state tracker.

Comment: Re:People Are Such Babies (Score 1, Interesting) 208

by TheRaven64 (#48683603) Attached to: Facebook Apologizes For 'Year In Review' Photos

The only person who should be curating personal photos in Facebook is the profile owner.

You mean the person who clicked through the ToS that grant Facebook a perpetual, commercial, sublicenceable, license to use the photos however they wish? Including (as they've done in the last) licensing them to third parties to use in adverts?
