Forgot your password?

Comment: Translation: (Score 0) 331

by Cute Fuzzy Bunny (#44470771) Attached to: Why PBS Won't Do Android

"We're apple snobs who want donation money from people who blow money on i-products. Now roll out the usual lame claims about fragmentation and cheap flaky devices, which is totally overblown and irrelevant. Please don't ask how it is that everyone else on earth manages to turn out ios and android versions of anything and everything, and it works just fine for everyone except the people who bought knock off chinatabs and chinaphones, who aren't affected and don't care because half of the rest of the apps they try don't work either".

The sad truth is that the vast majority of android devices run on three versions of android and it hardly rocket surgery to get an app to work on those. Or you can do what many ios developers do and only allow the app to run on the more recent versions of android. I have a number of ~3 year old apple devices that won't run ios past v3 or v4, and lots and lots of apps that require 4 or 5 to operate. Why a recipe app requires ios5 is a mighty fine mystery to me, but there it is.

It is absolutely, positively no harder or more expensive to build an android app that runs only on gingerbread/ics/jellybean and only runs on majority well established devices than it is to write an app to work on ios v3-5. A choice was made, and that choice has absolutely, positively no grounding in technical complexity, market factors or anything else. The choice was "We're only going to spend $xxx, lets write for the audience we'll get the most donations from".

Comment: The truth is (Score 3, Informative) 707

by Cute Fuzzy Bunny (#44344401) Attached to: The Man Who Convinced Us We Needed Vitamin Supplements

that almost everything you know about nutrition is wrong, often started up by one person or a group of people who failed to prove even loose correlation, yet people take up their suggestions and after a while they become 'common knowledge'.

Most multivitamins contain ingredients that pass through your digestive tract without even being absorbed. What does get absorbed is excessive and the system is unfamiliar with these huge doses of bioavailable vitamins and your system works overtime to eliminate it. Puts a real beating on the kidneys.

To extend the ridiculousness, nobody has ever proved that fat or meat are bad for you, yet people avoid them both and suffer nutritionally. In the 50's, Ancel Keys wrote a paper on his lipid theory where he 'proved' that fat was bad for you by eliminating the data from 17 of 23 countries he studied. The 17 he threw out were large consumers of fats with no problems with heart disease or cancer, such as the Innuit and Masai. He also noted in his study that there was no connection between dietary cholesterol and cholesterol levels in blood, but everyone seems to have skipped that part.

50 years of studies showed that salt was also not at all harmful to the average person, but doctors couldn't shake the idea of salt raising blood pressure temporarily so they gamed a study called Intersalt, where...you guessed it...they deleted around 40% of the data that included people who ate plenty of salt and led perfectly healthy lives. The excuse? "We already know that salt is bad for you, so if people say they ate it and were healthy, then they were lying". Hmm. It should be interesting to note at this point that all these studies do go on what people say they did and didn't eat and did or didn't do. Faulty data in the first place.

No study has ever proven that MSG is bad for you, in fact its approved by each and every equivalent of the FDA worldwide with zero dissenters, and its been eaten by billions of people for a century with no ill health effects. All it does is make healthy food taste better so you're more likely to eat it. In fact, the studies that were run showed more false positives as a placebo effect than actual reactions. Fun part is the whole thing goes back to one doctor who wasn't a nutritional expert writing a letter noting a possible 'chinese food syndrome' that he suggested at random might be MSG related. Its an amino acid derived from boiling kombu seaweed.

Meat is bad? The studies that say so point out that most of the people who eat meat, bacon and so forth also smoke, drink, don't exercise and live a lousy lifestyle. Of course they do, we've been telling people that meat is bad for them for 60 years, so anyone that eats it doesn't care about their health. Yet there is no study whatsoever that ever tested perfectly healthy people with a good lifestyle whose health suffered when they ate meat.

What IS bad for you are most pills, supplements, things in cans, fake 'diet' brownies and cookies, sugar, processed foods, vegetable oils except for olive, processed starches, and high energy/low nutrition foods that make up the bulk of the 'western diet'. Eat meat, quality fats, whole fruits and veg and steer clear of the high profit, easy to produce items made from grains and processed starches.

If that seems hard to believe, recall that we were told for decades that cigarettes were good for us, with doctors recommending particular brands. We were also moved from relatively healthy animal fats/butter to transfats, partially hydrogenated fats and so forth. That recommendation probably killed millions. Eggs are bad/good/bad/good/bad/good. By the way, they're just fine and a great source of B vitamins and protein.

Comment: Re:Definitely a problem (Score 2) 835

The real problem with this is simple escalation. Its rare for a government agency to get smaller or spend less, rather the opposite. We had huge growth in law enforcement during prohibition, and when prohibition ended we needed something for all of those people to do so as to maintain headcount and budgets, hence the war on drugs. When you max out reasonable law enforcement activities, you train a swat team and buy tanks for suburban neighborhood management. Gotta keep the budgets and headcounts heading north.

Comment: Definitely a problem (Score 4, Informative) 835

To preface this, I live in a fairly affluent area with extremely low crime. My town has no standing police force, just a satellite sheriffs office. Next town over has about the same demographics but has a 300+ member police force. A few years ago they trained a swat team and bought a very expensive 'urban assault vehicle'. I'm not sure for what, there is zero gang related activity, almost no drug stuff aside from the usual medical marijuana, and as far as I know no dangerous criminals have ever been brought in from the community.

Of course, this comes at the expense of things like schools, where we're jamming 30+ kids in a classroom and the teachers can barely do classroom management, let alone actually teach something.

Comment: Re:Maybe somewhere along the line... (Score 1) 70

by Cute Fuzzy Bunny (#41303595) Attached to: A Few Photos From Secretive Blue Origin: Is That a Crew Capsule?

...someone should have mentioned WTF "Blue Origin" is. Apparently its so secretive, I have no idea as to what it is. Not interested enough to find out either...

Yes, we do a shitty job of reporting information, like leaving out large portions of "what the hell is this and what does it mean", and thats worthy of a -1 troll rating.

I used to think the group moderation scheme was a good one, but apparently many people don't understand how it works. You see, a 'troll' is when someone posts something wrong or unnecessarily inflammatory, with the primary intention of riling people up.

Reporting a story saying "Wow, this is really exciting!" without saying what it is, or why its exciting...well...thats a little less than worthless. If you already know, then you didn't really need the news. If you don't, then reporting incompletely stories isn't particularly worthwhile.

Comment: Re:First Step: ban tv (Score 1) 93

by Cute Fuzzy Bunny (#41299903) Attached to: The Fight To Reform Forensic Science

So, what is a high confidence level? 90% 99%? 1 part per million error? What is considered good enough statistics for a conviction??? What does "beyond a reasonable doubt" mean? If I'm only 99% sure someone did it, should I convict?

(this is why I'm never picked for a jury).

I think its important to follow the whole process from start to finish. Since I've been on both side of this issue, several times, perhaps I have a unique perspective.

The bottom line: you get the justice you can afford.

The system relies on scaring the crap out of people charged with a crime so that they'll avoid the option of a jury trial, since that costs $3000-15000 and up, depending on the scope of the case. This forces people to plea out even if they're innocent, because most people can't afford justice. If you're indigent, you'll get a free lawyer thats worth somewhat less than they're paid.

If you're serious about proving your innocence, you can probably get off if there isn't concrete evidence, although even there a five figure trial and a stupid jury will work in your favor. Most juries are people found to be less than smart, without a lot of well developed opinions, easily swayed by clever commentary. In other scenario's, they're called 'voters'. The only time I get picked for a jury is when I act dumb and appear to have no fixed opinions.

On the other side of the table is the police, who will make up stuff on police reports, labs full of incompetents who produce the "evidence" necessary to force a plea deal, and a DA measured by conviction rate, not just conviction rate. Couple that with a system of fines and high dollar privately operated penal institutions, and you get the idea that we're just herding people through the system to keep the conviction and incarceration rates up.

Lets look at my situation. I was charged with a misdemeanor that carried a couple of grand in fines and related items. Got a lawyer locked in for the case for $2500. He looked things over for a few weeks, we poked the cop and the DA for a couple of hours in court, and he said we could go forward as is and I'd lose. For about $7k we could hire "Some whore experts that will say whatever we want, 50/50 whether the jury goes for it" and for about $14-15k we could "Hire some top notch highly respected experts and put on a show. That'll scare the DA off his plea deal and he'll probably give you something lesser with a smaller fine, and theres a good 80-90% chance of acquittal...but you never know what a jury will do for sure".

In the end I took the original plea deal and bought a bunch of stuff with the money I saved, to make myself feel better about being convicted unjustly. I was able to pay for the couple of days of jail time to serve at home, while the guys with no money had to go sit in jail for a couple of days. I also could afford the fines, while most people would have been seriously screwed. Oh, and I could afford bail, so I got to sleep at home the night of my arrest while most people spent it on a concrete floor.

So we have at least 3 kinds of justice. The kind where many people because of skin color, neighborhood of residence or wallet thickness end up taking the pipe and paying up or sitting in jail, the kind where you can throw a little money at it and get a reduction or practical elimination of consequences, and when you're filthy rich and somewhat less than ridiculously guilty and you get off entirely.

On the jury end of things, I really never saw a concrete case. Lots of slip shod evidence and procedure, questionable test results passed off as solid, lots of 'he said/she said', circumstantial junk and I was never sure enough to put someone in jail. Everybody else wanted to get it over with so they could get home, they 'had a feeling!'.

Lab wise, in my case there was a test involved. The test was apparently done at the beginning of the month, recorded somehow (although its not clear how) and then that recording transferred to the official forms almost a month later. But that process isn't how its supposed to be done, and it appeared that there were many places along the process where procedures weren't followed and the likely result was a bad test. The same lab was later found to have samples with mismatched DNA from the alleged source people.

Yet the DA and the judge were unswayed by this, and said they'd allow the evidence to be presented with our rebuttal. Then the judge told my lawyer that he would have to try the case that week, when my lawyer was already booked for another case, he refused a continuance, and then said he was considering revoking my bail because I was "being difficult". Turns out he was retiring and this was his last case, and he wanted to get it over with. He'd also been censured for looking up hot womens names and addresses in the DMV database from license plate info given to him by a friend, so the friend could then harass the women. Real quality fellow, and a real upholder of the law.

So thats what you get from a close look at both sides of this. Thankfully I'm a wealthy white man that lives in a nice neighborhood. If I were a black kid in a hoodie, apparently I'd be dead or in jail.

Comment: Re:any decent computer, with Linux (Score 1) 423

by Cute Fuzzy Bunny (#41299497) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Computer For a 7-Year Old?

Again, I'm looking for the "aha!" in the linux home desktop space where windows and os x fall down, but linux works or has something the others don't.

I'm not sure I want to claim that there is any slam-dunk feature where Linux smokes the competition.

But the Linux package management system is so much better than the Windows situation. The Windows model is: go to web page, download installer, run installer, trust that the installer is not doing anything bad. Note that these are the same steps whether you go to "SafeVettedKidsSoftware.com" or "MalwareToWreckYourComputer.com".

With Ubuntu, you can get the packages from an "app store" GUI application that pulls from the Ubuntu repositories. You can find a category (like "Games") and click around in the GUI, find something interesting, click, and it downloads. I don't care if you are an adult or a 7-year-old, that is just easier than Windows.

Windows wins on software availability. Almost all the software available on Linux is also available cross-platform, but the converse is definitely not true. But there is a ton of free cool stuff on Linux, and he is less likely to end up with malware installed and popping up porn ads.

I know a high-school boy who is has learned Linux; he wipes computers, installs Linux, installs additional packages... he doesn't use the "app store" GUI but rather uses the low-level tools. He has a better skill set than I had at his age (albeit he also had access to all this cool stuff and I didn't). I don't know if he will study computers when he goes to college, but if he does, he already knows a lot of the stuff that the intro classes will cover. Linux has been good for him.


The only problem with your thesis is that you presume there is a great chance of getting malware from non repository software.

Sorry, but I'm unlikely to get malware from Disney, Nickelodeon or the long time developers of Kidzui.

Plus my 7 year old appears to have mastered finding the software he wants, asking if he can install it, and doing so. So it seems to be not that complicated.

How many times have we gotten malware on our 7+ home computers? Never. Couple of times malwarebytes or security essentials complained about something, and on occasion they block access to a web site because its been reported to have malware. Zero infections, because we don't surf russian porn sites, we don't install shovelware, and we don't click OK on anything that pops up and says "Hi, can I install your free ?". Pretty straightforward.

Then there is the associated funny business with well established software, which mimics my linux OS installation experience. You always have to edit some files, find some obscure software, or use odd troubleshooting methods to make simple things that work just fine under windows work under linux.

To wit, here's the minecraft for linux download link description:


MIGHT work as is. Or just use this obscure launch string to try to make it work. When that doesn't work, you can post a question on some forum, where 20 eleven year olds will taunt you to read the 400 page wiki, search the last 3 years of threads, and then declare you a dumbass because you can't figure it out on your own. Oh, and someone want to clue me in as to how my 7 year old will determine if he's having a memory issue or not?

Wizard 101 (the other hot elementary school kids game) has two pages of instructions on how to install on linux, including installing Wine and tweaking stuff. On the flip side, the 8 year old from across the street installed it on one of our windows machine, with a few helpful tips from my 7 year old. While my wife and I were watching tv undisturbed.

Then we're back to the original point of "Why do this when the computer already comes with windows, windows works fine, everybody knows it, they use it at school, and we've already determined that there is no killer app or capability that linux has that windows doesn't"?

Answer: People are fond of it for various reasons, but there isn't any good reason to foist this on a young child. You're going to give them something unfamiliar, complicated, and they won't derive any benefit from using it. About the only outcome of that is to make the child more dependent on you to resolve their issues, and when you have kids, you'll find that what you want is the opposite of that. You want to enable them to figure things out on their own.

Oh, and whoever keeps modding me 'troll' on this, grow up. Your little tech toy operating system isn't appropriate for small children or most other people for that matter. Get over it. At best you're limiting their worthwhile development scope by foisting this on them. At worst, you're teaching them stuff they'll have no use for, while skipping a prime opportunity for them to develop skills they can use on the computers at school.

To wit: my kid helps me start up all 30-something computers in the school lab, helps other kids log in, run the browser and get into their apps. He can do this because he's been given experience in the platform that ~95-something% of schools use. His peer students think he's a superhero. If he used linux at home? He'd have almost zero applicable skills to help his fellow students.

Once again, to get people to adopt something, you need a compelling story and capability set that is so much better or only available on a platform that it overwhelms the cost and hassles of adoption. That isnt and has never been the case with linux. Its a solution in search of a problem.

Comment: Re:First Step: ban tv (Score 3, Insightful) 93

by Cute Fuzzy Bunny (#41294255) Attached to: The Fight To Reform Forensic Science

People watch shows like Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime and think forensic results are infallible and always available in less than 40 minutes.

I was on a jury a few years back, and the first thing out of the prosecutors mouth was "This isn't csi. We don't have DNA evidence. We aren't going to bring out 10 dramatic witnesses", etc. Made me wonder why we're contemplating putting someone in jail for the rest of their lives if we aren't interested in spending the money on the evidence needed to really confirm a jury finding.

I know some things that happen on tv aren't even plausible in real life at any price. But some of the stuff that gets passed in front of a jury is pretty weak.


by Cute Fuzzy Bunny (#41294007) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Computer For a 7-Year Old?

Anyway, when I'm browsing all the free stuff I can get from the Ubuntu repositories, I sometimes get a "kid in a candy store" feeling. My hope is that an actual kid might get that feeling also. And he won't need to spend his allowance.


There is an awful lot of very well vetted windows and mac software specifically slotted for kids, and as a parent of a computing child...I'll be involved with the selection of every piece of software he installs. At least for an approval and checkout.

While I'm no expert on repositories and other free stuff, I can't think of a thing that I can't get for Windows that I'd think would be available for linux, at least in the kids education space.

Plus my kid could go to someone elses house and use their computer, and vice versa. I have 2 or 3 kids frequently in my living room playing minecraft or wizard 101 or whatever the game of the week is.


Don't get me wrong, I started out putting together Imsai's and Altairs and writing bios/bdos for some early versions of cp/m, and Basic was a pretty common language back then. But when I was 7 I was riding a big wheel and shooting a cap gun...we didn't even have a tv set yet. So I make sure to think about how different things are. He's pretty far along, but it'll be a while before we start installing and troubleshooting OS's and building applications. But he's had some fun with Scratch, for whatever thats worth!

Comment: Re:Good idea, excessive price point. (Score 1) 163

by Cute Fuzzy Bunny (#41292561) Attached to: Toys R Us Unveils Android Tablet For Kids

Yep, once I clicked on the article to find out the most crucial aspect of this - the price - I said it was about $50 too much. Considering you can get a $200 used ipad 1 or a $300 refurbished ipad 2, $150 is too much for a second tier chi-tab with a few apps on it. Shoot, over a year ago I bought a $150 android tablet with about the same guts as an ipad 1. I could probably pick that up for $80-90 now.

Kindle Fire's aren't much more than this either, and they have one heck of an ecosystem for free movies/tv shows, apps, music and so forth...especially if you're a Prime member.

Comment: Re:Even better (Score 1) 423

by Cute Fuzzy Bunny (#41292505) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Computer For a 7-Year Old?

From experience doing repair work, I have to ask - how did you prevent your 2-year-old from physically destroying the laptop? This isn't a software question; I've had repair cases where a child's "play" managed to unseat the processor daughterboard, or wireless card, etc. Generally, the younger the child in question the more likely the damage was hardware vs. software related.

I said "Don't pick at it, don't smash it, don't move it when its on, and don't drink or eat anything near it or it'll break and I won't get you another one".

Seemed to do the trick. Granted when he was 8 months old and I let him have at a 150MHz pentium laptop from around 1996, he managed to get half the keys off of the keyboard within about 5 minutes.

He did also have a leapfrog thingy that came with a keyboard and mouse and you could play simple games on it, and that was pretty close to indestructible without tools/rocks, and he used that until I gave him the laptop.

I also put him into a standard user account until he got the hang of installing and tinkering with software/settings (under supervision). At this point he's got so many minecraft mods installed, I'm pretty surprised the game still runs.


by Cute Fuzzy Bunny (#41292447) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Computer For a 7-Year Old?

Yep, when the teacher found out I used to work in high tech before I retired, she asked if I could come in and give the second graders a powerpoint tutorial. I may have saved their lives by begging off on it, saying I wasn't particularly familiar with powerpoint, although I used to knock out about 100 slides a week...

It did however provide a nice generational bridging opportunity when I told my son about tinkering with one of the first word processing systems about 35 years ago. I had to write a 10 page paper on something for high school, and I only had a little over 9 pages. So I tinkered with the pitch and yaw on the daisywheel and got ten pages by very slightly increasing the character and line spacing, but it still looked standard.

Of course, you can slightly change font size on a laser printer to turn his 3 page paper into a 4 pager. Dad was a genius, yet again :)

Comment: Re:Even better (Score 1) 423

by Cute Fuzzy Bunny (#41287365) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Computer For a 7-Year Old?

This. I predict 99% of the people who are going to reply below this line will have no idea what a 7-year-old is like.

Expose him to computers, sure, but don't try to make them a central focus in his life.

Right, Reading and figuring things out should come second to...ehhh...what now?

Give him his own PC, and he's likely to still want to use the same one as dad or mom.

This as well...

I know a brazillion people. I've yet to see a kid with their own machine want to play with mom and dads. Well, thats where the parents bought their kids a good computer, not some cheap 10 year old POS. Once they got their own, not only no interest in mom and dads, try and pry it from their little fingers.

But since I see a lot of people in this thread saying to buy a cheap crappy machine for their kids (why is a mystery) maybe thats the problem. When you can buy a refurb or scratch 'n dent dual core sandybridge machine from the lenovo outlet for $199 or less, this seems like a false economy in many ways...you're not saving money, you're getting a shitty computer, and your kid is trying to learn on a slow, crappy computer that'll be completely useless in a year or two. But you saved $100.

My 7 year old reads 5 grades up, has the vocabulary of a grownup, runs his own minecraft server and installs his own software and mods, etc. Because he's had his own computer to work with anytime he wants, and its a damn decent machine...i5-3570k on a z77 motherboard, 8gb ram, a 240gb SSD in an Antec Skeleton case. When his games get more complicated, I can drop a 7770 gpu in it. Since I can upgrade it to an i7, 32GB of ram and pretty much any gpu and its completely overclockable, it should remain a good computer for him for the next 7-10 years.

Whats really cool is you can see all the components, and it has a huge rotating color led fan blowing down on everything.

Your good nature will bring you unbounded happiness.