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User: Your.Master

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  1. Re:of course it wasn't NK on North Korea Denies Responsibility for Sony Attack, Warns Against Retaliation · · Score: 1

    You are claiming that 9/11 wasn't done to the US?

  2. Re: of course it wasn't NK on North Korea Denies Responsibility for Sony Attack, Warns Against Retaliation · · Score: 1

    Everyone and their mother would have bought this movie via vod on Christmas day If they put it up for sale.

    I think you're forgetting that the ads to this movie didn't look very good in the first place.

    If Korea hadn't made a fuss I doubt most people would remember the movie existed in six months.

    I'd watch this movie on an airplane, or if I'm sick and bedridden. I wouldn't buy this movie on Christmas day (with my family?), regardless of the geopolitical posturing.

  3. Re:Wrong way of thinking. on What Happens To Society When Robots Replace Workers? · · Score: 1

    No, we don't.

    It seemed like you were suggesting we try free markets, but now you're agreeing with people who are pointing out that they "cannot exist".

  4. Re:Wrong way of thinking. on What Happens To Society When Robots Replace Workers? · · Score: 1

    Perfect knowledge by all participants is impossible, which makes the claim that free markets haven't been tried vacuous.

  5. Re:What the hell is wrong with Millennials?! on Peru Indignant After Greenpeace Damages Ancient Nazca Site · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To make it a fair comparison, you must move the time window such that the oldest boomers alive are the same age as the oldest millenials are now. That makes it the late 70s at earliest.

    In the late 70s, the World Wide Web did not exist yet, and would continue to not exist for a decade.

    The Internet was invented by the generation before them, and it was not yet all that important.

    If you want to do intergenerational comparisons, you need to do one of three things:

    1. Wait ~50 years.
    2. Restrict yourself to the world as it existed when the oldest Boomer was in their early 30s (even if they already a great thing, it must be recognized as a great thing).
    3. State your values clearly so we can know what defines "improvement of America".

    I don't find Barack Obama particularly damning as a Presidential choice (it's not like he was a big drop-off from the last guy). You obviously don't value social media, which is kind of interesting actually, given that:

    - In my experience things like facebook are more widely appreciated by the older generations than by the Millenials.
    - Web forums, including slashdot, are social media. Forums were invented at the tail end of the pre-millenial generation, so you get a bye on using social media to complain about social media's worthlessness, but what makes you like forums but dislike others? What is the essential difference that makes the latter worthless?

    why again do we have to let men who "feel like" women into the lady's room?!)

    This is not a new issue; this is not a Millenial invention.

    They've destroyed traditional cultural norms.

    First: so what?

    Second: literally every generation ever has done that. The US had a cultural norm that slavery was okay, and it was later replaced by a norm that slavery was abhorrent.

    Note: I'm not an American so I have no horse in the "who improved America most" race.

  6. Re:What the hell is wrong with Millennials?! on Peru Indignant After Greenpeace Damages Ancient Nazca Site · · Score: 1

    And we all know that if even one person survives in the West, then civilization is saved!

  7. Re:The battle of extremes. on Hollywood's Secret War With Google · · Score: 2

    I don't know what point you think you're making. She's a religious person who is *herself* damaged by religious fanaticism regarding abortion.

  8. Re:Externality--tax it! on U.S. Passenger Vehicle Fleet Dirtier After 2008 Recession · · Score: 1

    Everything ends up hitting poor people though. That's the problem with poverty.

    If you just outright banned dirty gas, prices would rise and that disproportionately impacts the poor.

    If you just outright allow whatever to happen, then health costs will rise and will disproportionately impact the poor.

    Poverty means everything impacts you disproportionately, including inaction. Money provides cushioning.

    Is there a way we can attempt to solve this problem in a way that is not overly onerous on the poor? Instead of just deciding not to do anything?

  9. Re:One good turn... on James Watson's Nobel Prize Medal Will Be Returned To Him · · Score: 2

    You're thinking of net income. Median net worth is closer to $81k (as of 2014), and the mean considerably higher than the GP's estimate.

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

    Regardless though, there's a huge problem here where there is an assumption that the total charitable contributions of this guy in his lifetime is encompassed by one charity auction purchase.

  10. Re:programming on AI Expert: AI Won't Exterminate Us -- It Will Empower Us · · Score: 1

    Let's flip that around:

    Right, it will go on a spree to exterminate all humans. Like every other program.

  11. Re:programming on AI Expert: AI Won't Exterminate Us -- It Will Empower Us · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How can you be so sure?

  12. Re:How about a straight answer? on Warmer Pacific Ocean Could Release Millions of Tons of Methane · · Score: 1

    Seriously? You seriously believe that?

    If there is no opposition, then let's do it already. Sounds like everybody is for it.

  13. Re:And they said we'd have flying cars long before on 45-Year Physics Mystery Shows a Path To Quantum Transistors · · Score: 1

    Then stop coming to a tech news site.

    This is literally what slashdot is here for.

  14. Re: Let's talk about sex, baby on Overly Familiar Sci-Fi · · Score: 1

    The rings are not mandatory and signal unavailability.

  15. Re: Let's talk about sex, baby on Overly Familiar Sci-Fi · · Score: 1

    Those words aren't contradictions.

  16. Re:Which is why Norway is the most powerful on Ask Slashdot: Can a Felon Work In IT? · · Score: 1

    Powerful is one thing, and unclear whether it's an important thing.

    Wealthiest? Not quite, but it's up there and it beats the US, which is the only country it was being contrasted against:

    http://www.worldatlas.com/arti...

  17. Re:Welcome to the Actual Universe on Aliens Are Probably Everywhere, Just Not Anywhere Nearby · · Score: 1

    But regardless of how fast you travel, you still can't go back in time.

    Just pull the same trick again, now that you're far away, and the distant observer is *past you*. Now you're talking to yourself in the past. Then actually go to past you. Keep doing the trick as you approach to make your past self observe you in a causality violating way.

    Even if you got there instantaneously, you would still be there right now, and never before now.

    This is a vacuous statement. The word "now" doesn't have a global meaning in this context. Simultaneity does not exist in an absolute sense -- going there "instantly" can't possibly mean you're there "right now" because "right now" is a property of your current position, and you just said that you changed position.

    The light that we see is not the event itself, it's simply how we perceive it.

    It's not about the light itself. Information propagates at the same speed as light does. In other words, central to the theory of relativity is the idea that *the actual event* propagates at the speed of light, not just our perception of such. This is why the word "now" is ill-defined in relativistic terms, and simultaneity does not exist.

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

  18. Re:Paradoxes Be Damned on Aliens Are Probably Everywhere, Just Not Anywhere Nearby · · Score: 1

    No, you missed the other part about the lightspeed barrier being overcome. If you can overcome it, then either humans are the first to ever overcome the lightspeed barrier, or we never do, or there is a gigantic coincidence where two species evolve exactly in sync to the scale of mere hundreds of years, despite having billions of years to develop.

    Of course there is a last option: aliens exist, have overcome lightspeed, but are for whatever reason uninterested in galactic colonization.

  19. Re:Paradoxes Be Damned on Aliens Are Probably Everywhere, Just Not Anywhere Nearby · · Score: 1

    it's reasonable to assume that the speed of light barrier will be overcome

    No, it's not at all reasonable to assume that. And the massive scientific progress in the last 300 years has made it *substantially less* likely than it was before (300 years ago we didn't have any notion that there *was* a theoretical barrier to speed). It's reasonable to assume that it can never be overcome. It is *conceivable* that there might be a workaround that doesn't require infinite energy and give you infinite mass and infinitely compress you into a black hole, but it is unreasonable to believe it's nearly as likely as that there is no such workaround at all. Part of learning is discovering what is not possible. I know this isn't what people want to hear, and that's why it's rejected.

    I don't mean this as an insult, it's an honest suggestion -- you need to read up on this way more than a forum comment can adequately describe to see why that's the case. There's a famous result that is tricky to understand that shows that faster than light travel is tantamount to time travel into the past, which means now you have to resolve the grandfather paradox, and figure out not only why we haven't been contacted by aliens, but also by our future selves (start at Light Cones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...).

  20. Re:Birthday paradox? on Aliens Are Probably Everywhere, Just Not Anywhere Nearby · · Score: 1

    Paradox doesn't need quotation marks. Paradox doesn't mean false, it means seemingly contradictory on the face of it, whether or not it's contradictory upon further examination.

  21. Re:More important garage on Woz Downplays the Significance of Apple's Startup Garage · · Score: 1

    His point is that the startup garage might be significant after all. What's your point?

  22. Re:Damn Dirty Apes on New Effort To Grant Legal Rights To Chimpanzees Fails · · Score: 2

    Not even if humanoid aliens landed?

  23. Re:LMFTFY on Two Google Engineers Say Renewables Can't Cure Climate Change · · Score: 1

    Even assuming significant abiogenic sources of hydrocarbons, you *still* have to reduce your rate of consumption to the rate of generation.

    Anyway, wikipedia can tell you how the hydrocarbons came to Titan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L....

  24. Re:What is it? on What Canada Can Teach the US About Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    Usage-based billing is not treating packets differently, because packets aren't treated with bills.

    Throttling is, sort of, because the destination is your computer and that is throttled, so pre-throttle packets are privileged.

    I'd go with the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N....

    I would generally say that bandwidth throttling a user based purely on the volume of use is *not* a neutrality violation, even if you could kind of stretch the argument that it discriminates against bandwidth-heavy content. It's not treating packets differently because of anything particular to that packet.

    What frustrates me about Net Neutrality is that, in principle in an otherwise-perfect world, Net Neutrality is sub-optimal. There absolutely is such a thing as a higher-priority bitstream. Typically, background software updates (as opposed to user-initiated software updates) could be very low priority compared to streaming video, which shouldn't drop packets. Chat is a little less than streaming but still pretty important. Email a little less.

    Support for Net Neutrality therefore stands as the position that these negatives are outweighed by the potential harm in more malicious or incompetent traffic shaping (or censorship, but I don't think censhorship laws have to be tied to arguments about bandwidth prioritization).

  25. Re:Wait, a level playing field? on MasterCard Rails Against Bitcoin's (Semi-)Anonymity · · Score: 2

    Okay, that was a lot of talk about people being raised in shitty situations, which totally happens.

    I still say that you don't need a financial education to know that you shouldn't buy something you can't afford, or that you should read the credit card application that you're filling out. A much better argument could be made about extreme emergencies that can hit poor people ("my kid broke his arm, we have no health insurance, no cash on hand, but there was this credit card...").