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User: Your.Master

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  1. Re:Polygraph on FBI Says It Will Hire No One Who Lies About Illegal Downloading · · Score: 1

    Your prize is the slightly higher income.

  2. Re:funny that.... on Ebola Vaccine Trials Forcing Tough Choices · · Score: 1

    That article cites a vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline that started human trials on September 2nd, and also mentioned the Public Health Agency of Canada vaccine. These aren't hypothetical. They are untested, but not hypothetical.

  3. Re:Wait... on Fusion Reactor Concept Could Be Cheaper Than Coal · · Score: 1

    Why are people pretending not to understand what they're talking about?

  4. Re:So.. on Studies Conclude Hands-Free-calling and Apple Siri Distract Drivers · · Score: 1

    there writing a "rule" down on a piece of paper is not going to have a measurable effect on whether I crash or not in a given period.

    Citation needed. Writing a rule down on a piece of paper leads to enforcement of such rules, and enforcement of such rules typically leads to people avoiding breaking those rules *even if they disagree with the rule and are only trying not to get caught*. If the rule happens to promote safety, then it would be expected that writing that rule on that legal piece of paper could promote safety.

    For a non-safety-related case, you could just walk around in Seattle after the first legal pot shops opened and smell the Marijuana everywhere in a way you didn't the previous week. Some of that was just excitement about a change, to be sure.

  5. Re:So, it has come to this. on Complain About Comcast, Get Fired From Your Job · · Score: 1

    Given that "citizenship" and "national origin" are protected classes, the only people who are not in a protected class are by definition American-born American citizens, who still obviously have legally-encoded special rights in the United States eg. hiring Americans preferentially to via workers. So even they are "protected" in a sense -- we can fairly say that everybody is in a quasiprotected class.

    So in any organization that has international employees, basically everybody is in a quasi-protected class, and therefore the documentation requirements are incumbent upon everybody.

    Of course another aspect of this is that, with frequency that may surprise you, people will say out loud with witnesses, or in writing, or whatever, that they are letting somebody go for one of those reasons that is explicitly illegal. That sort of statement makes it an open-and-shut case.

  6. Re:Bullcrap on Possible Reason Behind Version Hop to Windows 10: Compatibility · · Score: 5, Informative

    Type this into powershell:

    (Get-WmiObject Win32_OperatingSystem).Caption

    There's your marketing name.

    Took about 60 seconds of Googling to not only find this, but to find it in code that was making the same sort of error we're talking about (not literally the number 9). See this: http://ss64.com/ps/get-wmiobje... -- that's using the -match operator which is a regex comparison, and thus inferring whether it's a server build by a mismatch between the marketing name and the build name..

    Granted, I don't think powershell existed on Windows 95. I expect it's just wrapping an API that did exist. If it comes right down to it, the registry itself has the versioning information available to anybody who can use ctrl+f in regedit to find the key, and people do indeed do that.

    Trust me, MS doesn't give the slightest concern about any broken Java apps.

    No, I don't trust that statement in the slightest. Why would you think that? It's very contrary to Microsoft's behaviour in the past.

    I have no idea why they chose to name Windows "Windows 10", and I'm not convinced of this, but this is not so implausible as you seem to think.

  7. Re:How badly coded are Windows applications? on Possible Reason Behind Version Hop to Windows 10: Compatibility · · Score: 1

    Even in the Windows 95 days this was both unacceptable and probably less performant than using the API that was already built in.

    I would say that this is not just lazy programming, it really is bad programming. Laziness can be bad and it can be good. This laziness is bad.

  8. Re:How badly coded are Windows applications? on Possible Reason Behind Version Hop to Windows 10: Compatibility · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Well, even that is stated with a Linux-centric perspective. The Windows perspective on that would be:

    Mac and Linux take the philosophy that the user's poor experience is not the OS's problem because the bug is not in the OS.

    Windows takes the philosophy that the user's poor experience is always the OS's problem, regardless of who wrote the bug; and therefore, all compatibility bugs in some sense *are* OS bugs.

  9. Re:Tech Companies have become warring fiefdoms on Will Apple Lose Siri's Core Tech To Samsung? · · Score: 1

    No it isn't. Do you remember 2004?

    In 2004, most people did not have phones that could stream video. In the US, about 1/3 of adults didn't even have any cellphone (cite: http://www.pewinternet.org/200...). Most people age 15 and younger did not, and now they are 25 and younger and thus probably make up a nontrivial portion of the slashdot userbase.

    I got my first cellphone in mid-2004 (note: I am not from the US). It certainly could not stream video. I don't remember when I first saw a cellphone streaming video, but I think it was years later (I think it was post-iPhone). I had barely seen it on a desktop computer. Remember, youtube didn't exist yet. Mostly it was one-off shockwave flash cartoons of the type you'd find at albinoblacksheep.com, and a few embedded quicktime or windows media player clips. And oh how people hated quicktime.

    Besides which, it might not be innovation *in a phone* to just increase/decrease the number sizes or improve the adjectives, but those improvements aren't possible without real innovation. 32GB was literally impossible without innovations to storage technology that allowed us to pack more memory units per unit area and manufacture them at scale. HD video playback on the phone required big advances in screen technology, network infrastructure technology, battery technology, and hardware video processing technology.

    At some point everything, everything is incremental, but that point is beyond the point of absurdity. An incremental change is swapping out an off-the-shelf 16GB chip with an off-the-shelf 32GB chip of the same size. But it took a lot of innovation to make that first 32GB chip in the first place.

  10. Re:I don't think we are giving anything up. on Lost Opportunity? Windows 10 Has the Same Minimum PC Requirements As Vista · · Score: 1

    All of the resources windows consumes are resources denied to other applications.

    It's really not that simple -- it's entirely possible to consume a small amount of resources to improve the overall resource allocation to other applications; or you could change certain space/time tradeoffs between memory and CPU if you fiddled with the requirements. Also, just because the requirements go up, doesn't mean Windows is consuming on them, it means Windows is relying on them. Those are different things.

  11. Re: feminists controll the law! on CEO of Spyware Maker Arrested For Enabling Stalkers · · Score: 1

    Read the article. This software was "expressly designed for use by stalkers and domestic abusers". Apple and Microsoft have not expressly designed anything for those purposes.

  12. Re:It's true on Former GM Product Czar: Tesla a "Fringe Brand" · · Score: 2

    Why would I want a car I can't afford to drive? A car that costs more than my entire car to repair. A car that's worth more than my house!

    Because then you can do the other thing you said:

    If you gave a Ferrari, I'd sell it ASAP.

  13. Re:What the fuck are you talking about? on The Odd Effects of Being Struck By Lightning · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Professor is an English word, albeit one with a Latin origin, and it has been an English word for about 700 years. Most English words do not get inflected by gender. It must be admitted that many occupation-words that can be used as pronouns are inflected (actor/actress, waiter/waitress, etc.), but professor is not among those words. Professora does not appear in any English dictionary I tried, such as dictionary.reference.com. Professor, emeritus, and emerita all appear in every dictionary I tried.

    Furthermore, "Professors Emeriti/ae" is often used as the plural. The 's' plural demonstrates that "professor" is being used in its English-language form.

    Surely if a student were to talk about their "professors", you would not lecture them on their ignorant use of plurals. Why, then, do you insist that the professor is "professor emeritus" is actually a different word in a different language and therefore subject to different inflections?

    And if that isn't convincing, there's the fact that "Professor Emerita" is an officially-conferred title, and therefore it is correct by definition:

    http://www.sfu.ca/policies/gaz... -- an example from Canada
    http://www.ucc.ie/en/academics... -- an example from Ireland
    http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/artic... -- an example from the United States

    What I find particulary fascinating though is the insecurity apparent in perhaps a large number of readers who prefer to defend and repeat a corrupt usage from someone who may not have known better, lest their own competency in English be considered.

    The pot calling the kettle black.

  14. Re:I still don't get this. on Consumer Reports: New iPhones Not As Bendy As Believed · · Score: 1

    Looks like about 75% of people uses cases (http://www.tomsguide.com/us/smartphone-owners-spurn-cases,news-18024.html), and considerably skewed toward iPhones having cases. That's higher than I thought, but still much less than "practically everybody".

    Your argument only makes sense if you're going to replace the case with a thicker phone. I suspect most people with cases will chuck a case on just about any phone.

  15. Re:In lost the will to live ... on How Our Botched Understanding of "Science" Ruins Everything · · Score: 1

    If you think that we're just collections of cells, then the only thing you should care about is your own personal survival and comfort, and nothing else.

    What? That doesn't follow at all. Consider that you could replace "just a collection of cells" with "just a soul and its mortal vessel" the sentence makes the exact same amount of sense.

    Most people seem to use "karma" (or "what comes around goes around") as a not-quite-as-supernatural-as-an-omnipotent-God reason for following the Golden Rule.

    You seem to conflate god with ethics.

    You don't have to avoid an appeal to emotion to make a persuasive argument to an atheist. Atheists aren't robots. They do things because that's the result of the chemical processes in their brains, and those chemical processes lead to ethics. ...but even if you do, there's enlightened self-interest.

    Are you really telling me the only reason you don't go on a rape spree is that God told you, plus fear of the police? Because that sort of person terrifies me. That's the sort where you could convince them that god told them to do some really awful stuff, and they'd be compelled to do it.

    After all, people over the world have different ideas of what god's rules are.

  16. Re:Mythbust this! on Microsoft On US Immigration: It's Our Way Or the Canadian Highway · · Score: 1

    You're better off now than you would have been 4 years ago, or 14 years ago. Shit happens, frequently.

  17. Re:People are not (necessarily) interchangeable on Microsoft On US Immigration: It's Our Way Or the Canadian Highway · · Score: 1

    You can go here and plug in "Microsoft Engineer" and get a sense of the H1B salaries for different titles: http://www.h1bwage.com/index.p.... The salaries aren't super low, especially considering that the Redmond area is not entirely cheap but certainly cheaper than Silicon Valley.

    The "ridiculous requirements" thing isn't H1B visas so much as it is green cards (H1Bs don't actually require extensive advertisement). And the problem with green cards is that you can't use any experience that you had in the United States to justify your employment, but to apply for the green card (down this employment path) you had to have been in the US on a visa, most likely an H1B visa, for years.

    But the point is, just because Microsoft had layoffs, doesn't mean they laid off any qualified people.

  18. Re:Emma Watson is full of it on Emma Watson Leaked Photo Threat Was a Plot To Attack 4chan · · Score: 1

    Do you think this is sufficient to explain the gender pay gap?

    Anyway, I wouldn't be opposed to efforts at spreading safe and dangerous jobs more evenly. Be my guest.

    As a man working in a job with about as low risk of death as you can get, I don't happen to feel particularly pressured to take dangerous jobs due to my gender.

  19. Re:Emma Watson is full of it on Emma Watson Leaked Photo Threat Was a Plot To Attack 4chan · · Score: 1

    Let's just start by pointing out that we have copious examples of the fact that markets are not actually efficient (eg. http://www.newyorker.com/news/...).

    We'd also need to explain why the wage gap has been closing. Have women become more competent / men more incompetent? Has industry moved toward things that women are relatively better at? Were businesses not insatiably greedy 50 years ago?

    I propose that discrimination against women in, say, the 1950s, was worse than it is now, and that these changing attitudes can, at least partially, account for the closing pay gap.

    On a related note -- what is the right "natural" level? Why is the assumption that the world is right today, when there is clear evidence of change that has continued into very recent history? To be perfectly fair it is plausible that we could keep asking this question after we've overshot some omniscient objective notion equality.

    There's also the fact that businesses are composed of people rather than perfectly rational actors with infinite loyalty to their business principles. It's perfectly plausible for the business as an abstract whole to explicitly preferentially hire women, but a critical mass of employees are dickheads. I'm not saying that's true in any particular case, just that it's a plausible explanation for why the invisible hand isn't working.

  20. Re:fuck american hegemony on Not Just Netflix: Google Challenges Canada's Power To Regulate Online Video · · Score: 1

    "How would that affect Canada if Google search were not available there?"

    The biggest thing is screwing up the service integration of Android phones -- there's the opportunity that Blackberry and Microsoft have been salivating over. The next biggest is @gmail.com email blinking out, which would be chaos (maybe you want to exclude gmail from the services that are withdrawn?) and people would probably scatter first to ISP-allocated email (because they already have that, like it or not) and then maybe later to various competitors. Search from a PC is the next biggest, but that one gets solved when everybody's techie nephew or niece goes around switching homepages and search boxes to bing.com and uninstalling Chrome, or failing that when all the major browser other than Google push out updates that redirect existing google settings to their favourite default (IE - Bing; Firefox - locale-specific, usually Bing; Opera - dunno; Safari - between Bing and Yahoo).

    As a wholesale, things would have to get far worse than its ever likely to be before that made any sense for Google.

    Pulling out of Canada would hurt Google more than it would hurt Canada. Essentially, if Google pulled literally all their services from being accessed in Canada, even for a relatively short period like a month, they could *never* come back, because such an action is indistinguishable from extreme technical unreliability. I strongly suspect such an action would lead to people in other countries fleeing their services (particularly businesses). So it's not going to happen.

    It would also be a giant middle finger to any third party trying to sell Android devices in Canada, which is of course the companies as are trying to sell in the US and so forth.

    People used to talk about this with Microsoft and the EU back when Windows was more dominant (Microsoft didn't say anything like that, cynical slashdotters did), and it obviously didn't happen because it would have been ridiculous even in that case. But in that case, it wouldn't have been so bad because they weren't talking about retroactively removing Windows from EU computers. Here we're talking services, so if they go, they are gone in a flash.

    So this goes back to maybe removing all video services like YouTube, and maybe some services that nobody uses, but leaving all the critical non-video services. I think Google / Netflix would still take it in the chin not just in Canada but also abroad as others see that Google was willing to squeeze customers, but it's more plausible. I can imagine a world in which Google or Netflix feels it is untenable to service Canada because of the legal ramifications, although I don't think we're there right now or in the near future.

    Google and Netflix are still probably the losers in that exchange. The result will be somebody else coming in and serving that niche in Canada, a force which may eventually be able to expand outward into Google and Netflix territory -- a force they would want to nip in the bud with their superior market presence. It's not like the secret of streaming video technology is unknown to Canadian engineers, and its not like Netflix or YouTube are so critical to Canadian day to day life that to cut off Netflix access would cause an overnight revolution.

  21. Re:I'll just let my sig do the talking on US Strikes ISIL Targets In Syria · · Score: 1

    That link shows the US is deeply in debt, not that it is bankrupt or insolvent.

  22. Re:I might've sided with Netflix... on Canadian Regulator Threatens To Impose New Netflix Regulation · · Score: 1

    He didn't specify who the "they" were. I assume that he didn't really know and wasn't guessing that it was any particular entity. You seem to assume he was talking about Netflix, which I think is unwarranted.

  23. Re:Wake me when chimpanzees invent smelting on Study: Chimpanzees Have Evolved To Kill Each Other · · Score: 1

    it must be modified by unnatural means

    "Unnatural means" is extremely ill-defined, and in common understanding it's by unavailable to nonhumans *by definition*, not because of a shortcoming of the animals. You look up antonyms for "natural" and one of the first is "man-made".

    Fire is a particularly interesting choice of discriminator, because it is a natural phenomenon that happens all the time. You of course mean a contained fire that was intentionally instigated by chimpanzees.

    Regardless, I'm missing the point of this argument -- you said to wake you up when they invented smelting, and then talked about what your yardstick was, but I don't know what it's a yardstick for.

  24. Re:Didn't we already know this? on Europeans Came From Three Ancestry Groupings · · Score: 1

    I almost wonder if it was ever knowledge... Consider that the most effective way of spreading religion is to have children and indoctrinate them into the same religion.

    You can imagine 10 different sects popping up with different versions of the dietary rules. The ones that happened to align with health and reduced death would have an evolutionary advantage, and ultimately become dominant.

  25. Re:The Truth about ISIS on ISIS Bans Math and Social Studies For Children · · Score: 1

    They are monstrous enough that they deserve real insults.

    A made-up insult like this one makes it sound like you don't have any *real* awful things to say about them. To Godwin the argument quickly, it's like saying the problem with Nazi Germany was that Hitler's mustache was ugly.