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Comment: Re:/user (Score 1) 101

by akirapill (#46476103) Attached to: Tested: Asus Chromebox Based On Haswell Core i3
/usr is a directory for storing user-level programs and files (bin, lib etc), as opposed to root or kernel level programs and files. The reason it's its own top-level directory is for historical (or contemporary in embedded environments??) purposes. You could boot up linux using only the small number of core programs in the /bin, /sbin etc directories, then mount /usr to get your user-level stuff. You could also store /usr on its own drive or partition that way for space/performance. Nowadays it's kind of redundant to have BOTH e.g. /usr/bin and /bin. (someone correct me if I'm wrong) /user is the old name for the directory of users' home directories. If your username is myUserName, then ~ would point to /user/myUserName. Nowadays it's called /home (again I could be wrong about /user not being used anymore. Been a linux user for 10 years, but haven't strayed far from debian)

Comment: Re:One bias frequently overlooked (Score 1) 383

by akirapill (#46455893) Attached to: Men And Women Think Women Are Bad At Basic Math
It might surprise you that I'm not a fan of the term 'misogyny' or the coopting of the word 'hate' to mean 'bigotry and stuff' (although I support 'hate crime' laws, just wish they were called something else). As for 'patriarchy', sorry bro but men still hold the cards politically, socially, and economically. It's not really relevant who's 'fault' that is - the word just describes the power imbalance, and in this case we're talking specifically about when that power balance is NOT men's fault. But yeah, in general i agree that 'buzzwords from the feminist dictionary' are lame. As for 'all heterosexual sex is rape/ all men are rapists', that's a very outdated viewpoint in feminism that was fringe even when it was the most popular in the 80s. The 3rd wave feminism/intersectionality that's mainstream in feminism now really addresses how ridiculous the black/white feminism from that bygone era was, and looks at things like male-on-male rape, the role racism plays in sexual assault cases, and having respect for women who choose to take on traditionally female roles (or don't).

Comment: Re:One bias frequently overlooked (Score 1) 383

by akirapill (#46455811) Attached to: Men And Women Think Women Are Bad At Basic Math
No, you're wrong. He said that a certain ('the oldest') professor was especially harsh on girls because she wanted to 'drive out' the supposed women "cruising through on their backs". He didn't say that these women actually exist. Then he said 'careful about letting female engineers interview other potential candidates unless they are known to be genuinely fair-minded', implying that this was not a fair-minded assessment, followed by describing what the professor was doing as 'discriminating'. And i mean honestly - have you ever seen someone 'cruising through on their back' in this industry? like ever? I've seen high-performing women get illegally fired by male bosses for getting pregnant, but never someone actually sleeping their way into any kind of professional position in tech.

Comment: Re:One bias frequently overlooked (Score 1) 383

by akirapill (#46454501) Attached to: Men And Women Think Women Are Bad At Basic Math
As a male feminist ("kumbaya!"), I agree with you about women often being the roadblock to other women's success (example: http://science.slashdot.org/st...), but I think it only reinforces my viewpoint about the pervasiveness of the patriarchy. Our society makes women feel that they have to compete with each other as opposed to competing with men. I think this is due to the real or perceived notion that there are only so many 'slots' available to women especially in technical fields, and the real or perceived idea that non-technical qualities (attractiveness, submissiveness) are unfairly considered when judging women moreso than men. That's something that must fundamentally change before we start seeing economic equality, and its something men and women must work equally hard to fix.

Comment: Re:They should catch up fast ... (Score 4, Interesting) 250

by akirapill (#45856289) Attached to: China: The Next Space Superpower

dramatically less of a "defense contractor welfare" bloat that drags down NASA.

Genuinely curious why you think this? It's been my understanding that there are strong ties between the government and the defense contractors, and the defense industry there is fairly shrouded in secrecy, making corruption easy to pull off. Do you think the Chinese government is more capable of taking an 'agile' approach to a space program than the US?

Comment: Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score 4, Interesting) 208

by akirapill (#45401337) Attached to: The State of ReactOS's Crazy Open Source Windows Replacement
I think it's actually a little of each. Look at the apache POI project for supporting microsoft document formats in enterprise java apps. from wikipedia:

The name was originally an acronym for "Poor Obfuscation Implementation", referring humorously to the fact that the file formats seemed to be deliberately obfuscated, but poorly, since they were successfully reverse-engineered.

The other acronyms in the project, such as HSSF (horrible spreadsheet format) are equally revealing.

Comment: Re:Rule of thumb (Score 5, Insightful) 274

by akirapill (#44644345) Attached to: Fukushima Actually "Much Worse" Than So Far Disclosed, Say Experts

s/government/big corporation.

Mod AC up. If anything, this incident shows that corporations are _at least_ as bad as the state when it comes to managing nuclear power. Nuclear may be scientifically safe and sound, but the lumbering bureaucracy (public or private) required to actually build and operate a plant guarantee that this type of disaster will keep happening for as long as this technology is in use.

Comment: Re:why (Score 1) 117

by akirapill (#44543659) Attached to: Elementary OS 0.2 "Luna" Released
Highlight middle click copy paste is a bloody UI abortion. I applaud any application that breaks this convention. From freedesktop.org:
  • 1. It's inconsistent with Mac/Windows;
  • 2. It's confusingly. Selecting anything overwrites the clipboard;
  • 3. It's not efficient with a tool such as xclipboard;
  • 4. You should be able to select text, then paste the clipboard over it, but that doesn't work if the selection and clipboard are the same;
  • 5. The copy menu item is useless and does nothing, which is confusing;
  • 6. If you think of PRIMARY as the current selection, cut doesn't make any sense since the selection simultaneously disappears and becomes the current selection.

I would like to add that this behavior completely takes over the middle mouse button, rendering the input useless except for this application which is only efficient in a very specific use case (you want to paste the thing you just highlighted)

Comment: Re:So, let me get this straight (Score 1) 284

by akirapill (#44496369) Attached to: Comcast Working On 'Helpful' Copyright Violation Pop-ups
Just a clarification, I don't think this scheme actually uses deep packet inspection. Comcast contracts MarkMonitor to monitor P2P networks for known infringing material. MarkMonitor's IP addresses are blocked by several popular P2P blocklists, including Bluetack so it's unlikeley that they'll catch many infringers except the low hanging fruit who aren't using blocklists or proxies. Another reason I don't think DPI is involved is because right after 6 strikes was implemented, I got a letter from Comcast specifically saying that they would not use deep packet inspection for this. Now I know that Comcast is slimy, but I don't think they'd reneg on such a specific customer promise so fast and voluntarily largely because of the two costs of DPI you touched on - the additional hardware/support for the program, and loss of goodwill among their customers.

Secondly, the 'pop-up' isn't actually a 'pop-up' per-se. They aren't actually interleaving javascript into your web pages to make a popup appear on a normal web page you'd browse to (how would you even do that?). Instead, they will serve a whole web page with the warning when you make an http request, which doesn't require DPI or but merely requires that they know you're visiting an http address, which they know from your port and/or url.

All in all, except for the marginal benefit to their NBC counterpart I don't see anything for comcast in this except to do the bare minimum so they can appear like they're helping to curb piracy to keep pressure off them from the government and IP lobbying groups. They know that their most active customers, the ones they can sell higher bandwidth to, are largely copyright infringers. But by doing this, they can appear to be doing something, because there is a significant amount of infringes who are using P2P and taking zero precautions so Comcast can come back and say 'yes we caught X bad guys, we are helping'

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