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User: Man+On+Pink+Corner

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  1. Re:we need a litmus test on US House Science Committee Member: Evolution Is a Lie From Hell · · Score: 2

    Nope, because that alienates non-crazy religious individuals, who end up despising both the crazy ones as well as rationalists.

    If that were true, we'd all be Scientologists or Moonies. I believe (but can't immediately prove) that the main reason why people remain superstitious in an age of scientific enlightenment is because of superstition's longstanding social value. As a result, I also believe that making fun of people's superstitions is a very good way to drive those superstitions underground and lessen their influence on secular society. Laughter is certainly a better offensive weapon than violence, right?

    Americans have this bad habit of thinking the world is like their country,

    As an American citizen and voter, I'm not the least bit concerned with countries other than the US. I'm not responsible for the government in those countries. They can do what they want. However, that being said....

    Do this: search around. You won't find a single country other than the USA where creationists have either the political power or the infiltration within Christian branches as they do over there

    OK, I "searched around." The evidence I've found suggests that the influence of religion on secular education is not a concern limited to either the USA or Christianity. Did you have a point you'd like to make with respect to these findings? Do you believe that it's healthy for civilization to see these beliefs growing in influence over the course of the 21st century, rather than diminishing as any sane person would have expected?

    If you don't believe that, then chances are, we agree more than we disagree.

  2. Re:we need a litmus test on US House Science Committee Member: Evolution Is a Lie From Hell · · Score: 1

    It's like a friend of mine once told me: "Atheists are very boring. All they talk about is God, God, God..."

    That's OK. You keep your head in the sand, and we'll keep trying to come up with a way to save our country from people like the legislator described in the article.

    Making religion a subject of widespread mockery will be part of the solution, whether you like it or not.

  3. Re:Good for them! on Foxconn Workers On Strike Over iPhone 5 Production · · Score: 2

    If they purchased a boat, it was an investment boat

    Stop. You're killing me here.

  4. Re:Where were they getting the phone numbers? on Regulators Smash Global Phone Tech Support Scam Operation · · Score: 0

    I would like to hear more about how these guys got their phone number lists..

    Pick up your phone and dial a random number in a valid exchange. You will only have to do this a few times before you reach someone who is having problems with a Windows computer.

    This is why Apple is the most valuable corporation on the planet right now.

  5. Re:More important... on Singer Reportedly Outbids NASA for Space Tourist's Seat · · Score: 2

    TLDR; 0.1% of the cost of this joyride could completely change the lives of a family in fairly short order.

    That is not how money works.

    Start by reviewing the studies of what happens to lottery winners.

    Finish by worrying more about the contents of your own bank account and less about other peoples'.

  6. Re:Like he said on Microsoft Co-founder Dings Windows 8 As 'Puzzling, Confusing' · · Score: 1

    Also, Apple Maps works just fine, and there are no American tanks within 1500 miles of Baghdad.

  7. Re:Just pay for proper spectrum already! on LightSquared Wants To Share Weather-Balloon Frequencies for LTE · · Score: 1

    Why can't Lightsquared build towers that operate at power levels comparable to GPS signals?

    To answer your question, it's because GPS signals arrive at roughly the intensity of a 40-watt light bulb, observed at the distance between the United States coasts.

    GPS receivers demonstrate that it's possible for a handheld device to receive GPS reasonably well, below the noise floor or not (and nearly every smartphone does, already), so why must these hypothetical towers operate at such radically higher power levels?

    Briefly, it has to do with the bandwidth requirements. GPS uses exotic signal processing techniques that are only useful when the amount of information to be transmitted is very small relative to the bandwidth being occupied.

    LTE is exactly the opposite. For broadband Internet, you need to squeeze a large amount of information into a relatively narrow channel. That requires large amounts of power. (In engineering terms, if you wanted to kill an afternoon or two coming up to speed, you could do a search on the Shannon channel capacity equation.)

  8. Re:Dumbed down musums on Computer History Museum Gets the Attention It Deserves · · Score: 1

    It's not clear whether he grew dumber or smarter, but he certainly made the transition from respected engineer to patent troll effectively enough.

  9. Re:LOL, American "democracy"! on Federal Judge Says No Right To Secret Ballot, OKs Barcoded Ballots · · Score: 1

    When did Venezuelans line up for days for a piece of shit phone?

    Good point, things must not be all that bad here.

  10. Re:Good luck with those new map service. on iOS 6 Adoption Tops 25% After Just 48 Hours · · Score: 1

    Right, and so did Apple. It was Apple's responsibility to start working on their in-house solution early enough to have it ready by the time the Google contract expired. Failing that, it was their responsibility to pay whatever it took to renew the contract.

    Instead, Apple turned their own customers into pawns in their "thermonuclear" pissing match with Google.

  11. Re:What's the benefit? on iOS 6 Adoption Tops 25% After Just 48 Hours · · Score: 1

    There are some significant UI performance improvements in Jelly Bean. Scrolling is much more iPhone-like, for want of a better comparison, than it was under ICS.

  12. Re:Good luck with those new map service. on iOS 6 Adoption Tops 25% After Just 48 Hours · · Score: 2

    Not clear how a product-planning fuckup on Apple's part constitutes an emergency on Google's part.

  13. Re:LOL, American "democracy"! on Federal Judge Says No Right To Secret Ballot, OKs Barcoded Ballots · · Score: 1

    So what's the next step in your plan, after we turn the US into Venezuela?

  14. To which the school will respond by sending you a link to a picture of your transcript.

  15. Re:No my argument is not invalid on Are Commercial Games Finally Going To Make It To Linux? · · Score: 1

    Come play! Here, we have a pen drive you can boot to that doesn't have this buggy Windows crap."

    Don't worry, Microsoft is working on fixing that little vulnerability as well. With grandson-of-UEFI in place, nobody is going to boot anything but Windows 11 and later versions.

    It's for "security reasons," dontcha know.

  16. Re:Dissonance on Apple Wins Again — ITC Rules They Didn't Violate Samsung Patents · · Score: 1

    Algorithms are mathematical expressions by nature, and math isn't supposed to be patentable. They are also ideas by nature, and ideas aren't supposed to be patentable either.

    The only way you can patent software, in fact, is by patenting "a machine which executes Algorithm X." Most sane people would agree that this is a pretty goofy loophole.

  17. Re:Oh yeah?? on Apple Announces iPhone 5 · · Score: 1

    ROFL.... good point, I guess I'm "holding it wrong."

    Galaxy Nexus ordered, should be here Monday.

  18. Re:Woohoo! on Mesa Finally An OpenGL Implementation (On Intel Hardware) · · Score: 1

    Interestingly, that was also true of GLQuake back in the day. You could run under Mesa and it would render more or less correctly at about 1 FPS.

    That suggests that GPUs and CPUs have been on a similar performance slope for the past 15 years, despite massive divergence in features and architectures.

  19. Re:Oh yeah?? on Apple Announces iPhone 5 · · Score: 1

    What Apple is missing is a couple of demographic points:

    1) Older people have more money to spend on expensive smartphones.

    2) For older people, readability is more important for "ergonomics" than the hands.

    3) The competition's phones are wider. As a result, they're slightly harder to control, and much easier to read.

    Few people wanted a longer iPhone. Many people wanted a wider one. This was a mistake on Apple's part, "less space than a Nomad" snark notwithstanding.

  20. Re:I have the desire! on China's Alibaba To Outsell Amazon, eBay Combined · · Score: 1

    It's cheap enough that if you get screwed 25% of the time, you still come out way ahead.

  21. Re:Unsurprising. on Finnish Bureaucracy Takes Issue With Crowdfunded Textbook · · Score: 1

    My government has the obligation to provide numerous services such as roads, police, courts, fire service, libraries, and numerous other functions which it is obligated to provide as a condition of its existence.

    Where are you from, exactly? If you're an American, you should spend some time looking into the fine print behind those so-called "obligations." You may be in for a surprise.

    You are obligated to pay taxes for things like police protection, but the government is by no means obligated to provide what you're paying for. So much for the "social contract."

  22. Re:.gov gone wild on Finnish Bureaucracy Takes Issue With Crowdfunded Textbook · · Score: 1

    What I "know" is that I don't believe any surveys that claim that the Finns are the happiest people this side of Disneyland, given that they seem to off themselves at a rate comparable to an extinct tribe of Samurai lemmings.

  23. Re:How it seems... on Apache Patch To Override IE 10's Do Not Track Setting · · Score: 1

    NEARLY ALL THE TIME, PEOPLE DON'T WANT ADVERTISING, RELEVANT OR NOT (caps to make it easy on the stupid Googlebot ;-)

    Well, I don't want to work for a living, either, but I have to, because I will miss out on a lot of good things in life if I don't.

    Same is true for putting up with ads. You may be one of those Luddities who wants to go back to the WWW of 1994, but for my part, I'd appreciate it if you left me out of your Utopia.

    Intrusive ads (Flash, etc.) should be blocked without mercy, but the "tracking" process that shows me ads from SparkFun and DigiKey and SourceForge rather than Cosmopolitan, the "Try this 1 Weird Trick to Lose Abdominal Fat" people, and the Westboro Baptist Church is just fine by me, thanks. Let's focus on fixing the actual abuses.

  24. Re:Cody claims teacher performance doesn't correla on The Gates Foundation Engages Its Critics · · Score: 0

    Shhhh, someone will hear you.

  25. Re:WTF. on Torvalds Takes Issue With De Icaza's Linux Desktop Claims · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Put a a member of a lost tribe in front of a Windows computer...

    People have done exactly that sort of experiment, but with iPads.

    And what do you know... the grandmother, toddler, or lost Amazonian tribesman invariably takes to it like a fish to water.

    Those who ignore the lesson that's implicit in your snarky comment are in more danger of obsolescence than they can possibly imagine. Being usable by a member of a "lost tribe" is not a joke or a straw-man argument, but a requirement. Miguel shows signs of getting that. Does anyone else?