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User: Your.Master

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  1. Re:Enough to go around on 'Revenge Porn' Operator Gets 18 Years In Prison · · Score: 1

    You're losing track of the argument. The AC above said that society was guilty and the revenge porn operator was innocent. He lieterally said

    Nothing to do with pictures

    . The person you're quoting is pointing out how stupid that is. You are attacking a straw man.

  2. Re:Caution: Autoplaying video on 'Revenge Porn' Operator Gets 18 Years In Prison · · Score: 1

    It should be disabled by default, and optionally re-enabled to support video streaming sites where autoplay video makes some sense.

  3. Re:Bright side on Stanford Turns To Pair Programming: 1 CS Education For the Price of 2? · · Score: 1

    You are implying the GP is objectively describing reality, rather than making things up.

  4. Re:c'mon on Al Franken Urges FBI To Prosecute "Revenge Porn" · · Score: 1

    Reduction in suicides is a good thing. Relative rates of suicides between male and female people might inform what solutions are effective, but no, parity between males and females is not particularly important or "good" here. In exactly the same way that it's not important that we have parity in the number of men who are sexually harassed by their bosses at work.

    Parity is a reasonable goal for allocating limited amounts of a good thing in many cases.

    Instead of saying we shouldn't do something about this, how about suggesting ways we can reduce suicide that helps male people who commit suicide? Then you can assemble an argument this action on the basis of resource allocation.

  5. Re:So What on Poverty May Affect the Growth of Children's Brains · · Score: 2

    That's rather Lamarckian though. You'd have to demonstrate a selection mechanism that applies to those who have power in society, which has lasted for enough generations to generate a measurable response.

  6. Re:One more view. on Ellen Pao Loses Silicon Valley Gender Bias Case Against Kleiner Perkins · · Score: 1

    And even when pointing out glaring hypocrisies: there are several branches of feminism, and the particular one you are debating does not support that particular contradiction.

    Isn't this obviously true?

    Surely you can't deny that there are non-feminists who engage in human trafficking for sexual slavery. Thus, not being a feminist means you support sexual slavery. Right?

    Or are there multiple branches of non-feminism?

  7. Re:stupidly weak on Generate Memorizable Passphrases That Even the NSA Can't Guess · · Score: 1

    No, a single character (on a primarily Latin-based writing system, anyway) can represent between 2^6 and 2^7 possibilities, which is not coincidentally the size of the ASCII set.

    The 7776 words in this dictionary comes to not quite 2^13.

    So a random dictionary word should be treated as about 2 *random* characters. Of course memorable passwords are not typically composed of random characters, so it's better than 2 actual characters.

    "1 2 3 4 5" is itself a likely example of a dictionary phrase, so you defeated your own point -- by your own logic, that's one character.

  8. Re:xkcd... on Generate Memorizable Passphrases That Even the NSA Can't Guess · · Score: 2

    It's difficult to quantify "hard to remember-ness" but I strongly suspect that if you could normalize for difficulty remembering a password, adding more words is more efficient that mutating existing ones for a looooong time.

    It's not that hard to memorize Shakespeare's "To be or not to be" soliloquy character-for-character even though it uses terms and turns of phrase that are no longer current or even grammatical. I had to do that in grade 11, I thought it was dumb, but I remember it to this day, complete with the punctuation used in my copy (I know different copies can punctuate a little differently, but we had to get the punctuation nonetheless).

    If I took every word and made a single-character mutation (insertion, deletion, or replacement), and raced you against somebody memorizing the text straight up (assuming neither of you are really familiar with the speech), I bet by the time they had it solid you wouldn't have even a quarter of it.

  9. Re:a bid to foil the NSA, John Stewart says on To Avoid NSA Interception, Cisco Will Ship To Decoy Addresses · · Score: 5, Funny

    The plural of John Stewart is John Stewarten.

  10. Re:Define "Lackluster" on Steve Jobs's Big Miss: TV · · Score: 1

    Comcast lifted the HBO Go on Roku (at least) restriction months ago.

  11. Re:Common ground. on Why There Is No Such Thing as 'Proper English' · · Score: 1

    And that is through the principles capitols off the English's peeking world.

    I'm afraid this part doesn't support your point. I understand "the English's peeking world" is "the English speaking world" but I don't at all understand "through the principles capitols off".

  12. Re:The fallacy of labels on Ask Slashdot: Why Does Science Appear To Be Getting Things Increasingly Wrong? · · Score: 1

    If you think Gödel's incompleteness theorem means that math isn't about provability, then you don't understand Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

    The incompleteness theorem, very basically, says there are statements that are true but not provable. It definitely does not say that there are no statements that are not provable. That would contradict itself.

    I'll assume your use of the word "probability" was a typo, but I can't figure out what you actually meant with the first sentence.

  13. Re:Swiss vs Apple marketing on Swatch Co-Inventor Predicts Apple Will Bring an 'Ice Age' To Swiss Watch Market · · Score: 1

    physical things have historically proven to last a lot longer than virtual things (See the Pyramids for example)

    I'm not so sure. The very oldest things we have are physical, but we have numerous virtual things. For instance, the story of Noah's Ark is over 2000 years old, and possibly almost as old as the pyramids themselves. A lot of the bible is from that time. Of course, the actual books of the bible are themselves physical, but the stories predate the bible. Other mythic stories have lasted longer than the new testament, and some longer than the old testament. It is, of course, difficult to ascribe exact timelines to when these ideas started.

    Yes, some stories have been twisted and altered. At the same time, the Pyramids don't look today like they did at the time of their building. Same basic shape, but smooth, shiny, and white.

    Then there's language. Language is a virtual thing that mutates fairly rapidly on the scale of history, but eg. Proto-Indo-European has been somewhat reconstructed and is thought to be almost 6000 years old or more.

  14. Re:We've redefined success! on Mental Health Experts Seek To Block the Paths To Suicide · · Score: 3, Informative

    Who hasn't had an urge to throw himself of a bridge once upon a time?

    Without actually having statistics to back me up, I'm guessing most people. Certainly not me.

    Some statistics I found from a Google search suggests about 3/4 of people never have: https://www.thecalmzone.net/20.... Some Korean statistics go as high as 35%. I never saw higher without breaking it down into specialised at-risk populations (war veterens, LGBT people).

    I'm honestly shocked that you think it's normal. Clearly it's not rare. 25% isn't low. But it's nowhere near universal.

  15. Re:What is your definition of AAA title? on In the Age of Free AAA Game Engines, Where Does Our Open Source Engine Stand? · · Score: 1

    In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

  16. Re:As an Engineer/Journeyman Machinist I can tell on The Origin of Life and the Hidden Role of Quantum Criticality · · Score: 1

    any more than atheist stops seeking truth because they have no reason for living.

    And here is where you reveal that you're trolling, rather than just making poor arguments.

  17. Re:What about turning blue eyes brown? on Make Those Brown Eyes Blue · · Score: 1

    Reminds me of the Sneetches.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  18. Re:Ok then... on How Activists Tried To Destroy GPS With Axes · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No. Science fiction, as a whole, has no innate purpose.

    Some science fiction his constructive criticism of society. Some is totally nonconstructive criticism, some is about abstract philosophical concepts, and some is just about cool robots fighting.

    Terminator leans toward the latter.

  19. Re:"taxes are write-off expenses" on Apple, Google, Bringing Low-Pay Support Employees In-House · · Score: 1, Informative

    You're thinking of income tax deductions. Value-added taxes aren't the same thing at all, and percentages don't enter into it.

    If you have a value-added tax of, say, 10%, the total money collected by the government on the sale of a final good is 10% of the final good's value. And ultimately the person who pays that money is the end consumer.

    How do you figure out what a final good is? In a value added tax, the answer is you charge the tax on *every* sale, but when it comes time to give the taxes to the government, you pay the difference between the tax you collected on your Widget, and the tax you paid on the various goods and services devoted to making that widget.

    So company A sells a GrappleGrommet for $50 before tax (for the sake of argument, it was made from nothing of substance), to company B, who tools it up and resells it to the end user for $100 before tax as a Widget. GST is 10%.

    Company A charges $55: $50 plus $5 GST. The $5 GST is handed to the government, and they keep the $50 that was the price before taxes. So in a sense, they didn't really pay any tax at all, Company B did.

    Company B charges $110: $100 plus $10 GST. They only have to remit $5 GST to the government, because they deduct the $5 they already paid to company A. So having paid $55 to Company A, and $5 to the government, that's $60 out, and $110 in, for a net profit of $50. That's exactly the same amount as if there was no 10% tax in this scenario*, so in a sense they didn't really pay any tax at all, the customer did.

    End-user pays $110, and they have a Widget representing $100 of value aside from taxes, which they consume and never sell. They were the one who truly "paid" the $10 GST, it just happened that all of it flowed through Company B to get there, and half of it also flowed through Company A.

    The Government has received $10 total, which is, unsurprisingly, 10% of the final good's value.

    There are other sales taxes on final sales that try to define the final sale by defining what is and is not a retailer and wholesaler etc., and maybe that's what you're used to. Value added taxes are actually a rather elegant solution in theory, but they can generate a lot of paperwork in order to match the taxes you paid to the taxes you collected.

    Or you might be imagining that sales taxes go to non-final sales, which is really uncommon because that leads to multiple taxation and discourages specialization and componentization in businesses.

    * I'm ignoring the fact that taxes can affect setting prices for the sake of exposition.

  20. Re: Let them choose on Ask Slashdot: Should I Let My Kids Become American Citizens? · · Score: 1

    Are you kidding?

    I know of no 16 year old that would do that.

    Kids in the US are eligible to claim residence in another state. How many bail out to do that at age 16?

  21. Re:Bad French, man on Quebecker Faces Jail For Not Giving Up Phone Password To Canadian Officials · · Score: 1

    Wendy's and McDonald's still do it:

    http://i.imgur.com/XrHObuG.jpg

    Tim Hortons used to.

    Some older locations retain signage with the company's name including a possessive apostrophe, despite the fact that the official styling of the company's name has been Tim Hortons, without an apostrophe, for at least a decade.[16] The company had removed the apostrophe after signs using the apostrophe were interpreted by some to be breaking the language sign laws of the Province of Quebec in 1993. The removal of the apostrophe allowed the company to have one common sign image across Canada.

    cite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

  22. Re:you care more for your own kind, its science! on Racial Discrimination Affects Virtual Reality Characters Too · · Score: 1

    You don't think it might have something to do with Hawaiians stuck on a small series of tiny islands, while Europe is a piece of the largest contiguous populated landmass in the known universe?

  23. Re:Revisionist history? on Star Trek Fans Told To Stop "Spocking" Canadian $5 Bill · · Score: 1

    I'm Canadian. I guess I don't use cash enough, because I don't remember ever seeing Spock (I do remember one instance of it being made to look like the devil with horns and a goatee).

    And I'm way too young to have Canadian $1 bills be a thing.

  24. Re:Alternate Bank of Canada Press Release on Star Trek Fans Told To Stop "Spocking" Canadian $5 Bill · · Score: 1

    Can you explain what happens if a restaurant comes up with a bill, and a reasonable attempt to pay the bill in full is made with cash, which the restaurant refuses? By reasonable, I mean in appropriate denominations with no particular reason to suspect fraud and which pass reasonable anti-fraud validation (so sufficient defacement is unreasonable).

    I really have a hard time believing the claim that you will be charged with theft in this scenario. Can you cite an example?

    I'm not trained in law but surely you see this defies common sense.

    Also, lots of people are citing US law, but this is a matter of Canadian law. Are you sure of your statements in a Canadian context, a US context, or both?

  25. Re:Alternate Bank of Canada Press Release on Star Trek Fans Told To Stop "Spocking" Canadian $5 Bill · · Score: 1

    They would owe you money because the entire premise of this discussion is that they have a debt to you. A debt literally means they owe you money.