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User: ElectricTurtle

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  1. Re:Really bad idea. on Roundabout Revolution Sweeping US · · Score: 2

    Anecdotal evidence and all, but some places don't like roundabouts even after decades. I grew up in Edmonds, WA and my parents still live there. The city put a roundabout in the center of town before I was born, and they've been trying for years to put one in a neighborhood tellingly called 'Five Corners' near where my parents live. Every few years they have meetings of the local residents trying to sell them on 'improvements' including a roundabout for Five Corners. Almost all of the residents hate the idea, have always hated the idea, and have no fondness for the roundabout that is already in place in downtown Edmonds, even after more than three decades.

    Of course the city planners don't seem to care that the people who live there don't want what they're trying to sell. Some democracy. I figure there's a good chance that if they ever go through with it a few councilmembers will end up looking for something else to do.

  2. Re:NTD TV is run by Falun Gong on Chinese Censorship Gets Blasted By NTD TV · · Score: 1

    I have watched several NTDTV broadcasts, and their reporting on China is not 100%, quite the opposite, they are advocates of Chinese culture and values to the world. You could reasonably argue that their reporting on the CCP is 100% negative, and like a good 50center you want people to think that the CCP is China, which is a false conflation.

    NTDTV is not unbiased, but who is? Xinhua? What a joke. Even Western news agencies like BBC or CNN are biased, just not as overtly, and they don't really understand China. NTDTV is not a perfect source, but I don't think it is a bad source vs. most others, and because it is mostly Chinese people producing/editing/reporting it tends to have more insight on Chinese issues than Western news agencies.

    Furthermore, all religions are cults. I don't have any more or less respect for Branch Davidians than Catholics, and just the same if Falun Gong is sillier than Buddhism or what-have-you, I don't care. All religion is stupid, and having a competition to see who is stupider is not useful. If a stupid organization can do something good, that thing can stand by itself.

  3. Re:Highly-trained my ass on Time To Close the Security Theater · · Score: 1

    Perhaps you were thinking of these people?

  4. Re:NTD TV is run by Falun Gong on Chinese Censorship Gets Blasted By NTD TV · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Thanks for the propaganda Mr. 50center AC. Yeah, NTDTV is tied to the Falun Gong. That doesn't mean that it isn't useful. I don't like the Catholic Church, or for that matter, any church, but that doesn't mean I think we should close all the church-run orphanages and soup kitchens and what-have-you. Just because an organization has silly beliefs doesn't mean everything it does is intrinsically worthless.

  5. Re:Reminds me of Intershop on Chinese City Wants To Build a Censorship-Free Hub · · Score: 1

    Bad political/social acts do not erase good ones, nor vice versa. It is necessary to face the reality that Deng Xiaoping both raised the quality of life for many Chinese and killed thousands of protesters, both through the instrument of the state. One is good and the other is bad, but they are both real products of the same leadership.

  6. Re:Reminds me of Intershop on Chinese City Wants To Build a Censorship-Free Hub · · Score: 2

    Obviously you've had your head in the sand for a few decades. China's already had its Gorby, and that was Deng Xiaoping. Difference being that his reforms didn't lead to the collapse of the state. There is no longer a second rate economy in China, anybody who has the money can buy or go where they please. There are not 'foreign only' shops or businesses like other ostensibly communist nations (such as Cuba).

    China's tiers are no longer (artificially) economic, but political. China's broader citizenry are second class to those of the SARs like HK. HK people are able to access a less filtered internet and are less likely to be censored themselves if they start saying things the government doesn't like. The CCP has largely succeeded so far in keeping these compartmentalizations viable, but in the long term the Chinese people will eventually start questioning more and more why the controls on their expression are so necessary in the mainland to keep 'harmony' but somehow HK SAR and others do fine without it.

  7. Slashdotted, lol on 30 Creative 404 Error Pages · · Score: 1

    I take it that the plain old "Error establishing a database connection" is not supposed to be one of these.

  8. Re:As an American Conservative... on US Supreme Court: Video Games Qualify For First Amendment · · Score: 1

    Argument from tradition is a fallacy, and it disheartens me to see Justice Scalia resort to it, even if I agree with his ultimate position. At best it just shifts the question to 'why is it right for children's stories to be violent but not sexual?'

  9. Re:So they sacked them too early on Lawsuit Claims Sony Canned Security Staff Just Before Data Breach · · Score: 4, Funny

    Those responsible for sacking have been sacked. They've all been replaced at the last minute at great expense by trained llamas.

  10. Re:Yahoo Sucks on Hulu For Sale: Is There Good News For Users? · · Score: 1

    Yahoo operates in a reality distortion field which, unlike Apple's, only affects Yahoo employees. For chrissake they erected a monument to their fight against Gmail as though they were actually a contender.

    Yahoo always thinks they can get ahead by buying whatever they think is 'cool and hip' except that they then proceed to suck those qualities right out of it because they, as a company, are not and never will be again. Their audience is mostly old people and boors who don't want these 'cool and hip' products in the first place. Yahoo tries to please them by changing the product, losing the user base they had when they bought it, and can't successfully court their own user base to move to it because they're old and/or stupid. It's lose, lose and they keep doing it over and over.

    Yahoo died when they refused the MS bid. That was their last chance to leave with some pretense of dignity. Now they're doomed to slowly deflate while desperately flailing for anything cool to arrest their decline, and if they want to succeed at that, they should tear a page out of AOL's book (which is a company that is probably the most pro at such situations) and make sure that their tainted failed brand identity is kept as far away as possible from whatever 'cool' acquisition(s) they hope will keep them out of bankruptcy. (*cough* Like Bebo, TechCrunch, etc.)

  11. This again? on Learning Programming In a Post-BASIC World · · Score: 1

    It seems like a version of this comes up on /. at least every quarter. What does it say about programming that so many people look back at BASIC with a mix of nostalgia and disdain? What paradox is embodied in the idea that BASIC isn't good enough for any 'serious' programming and yet nothing else is as good as BASIC in providing an easy to use interpreter that introduces programming concepts and structures in a way that satisfies the neophyte?

    Sure, everybody will trot out supposed successors like Python or JavaScript, but the fact that we still ask ourselves the same question, 'is anything as good as BASIC', every few months betrays the fact that many people must not accept that these successors accomplish the same results for whatever reason.

    No other language I know of has the same instant gratification as BASIC. The strength of BASIC for me was if I wanted to draw a box, all I had to do was set the screen resolution and the coords of the box. That was it, two lines. I didn't have to load a bunch of libraries or write a bunch of arrays or design some placeholder interface to put the box into. I don't think any language will be able to take BASIC's mantle until it regains that level of simplicity and the ease of running and testing what would be to most other languages wholly incomplete or broken programs. There's a lot more opportunity in BASIC to just ask oneself 'what would happen if I did this?' without worrying about creating some huge framework just to test one concept.

    From the age of 12 to about 15 I was really into QBASIC, but all the bad habits I learned from not having to structure things made it basically (heh) impossible for me to move into a 'real' language. I don't know that the paradox can be reconciled that BASIC's strengths are its weaknesses and vice versa. With 'successors' like Python there is an intent for the language to be 'valid' as a 'real' programming language, so it has to be structured in a less forgiving way than BASIC which makes it less approachable, but it makes it easier for those who do work with it to transition to other languages.

    Maybe its better to accept the barriers to entry than to try to come up with another language that is a fun dead end. In some ways BASIC is a trap that should be avoided.

  12. Re:Study Design a Must on There Oughta Be a Standard: Laptop Power Supplies · · Score: 1

    Standard USB cannot, but the derivative Power USB can. I actually used to have a fan monitor/card reader that had Power USB ports, but I never had any Power USB devices to use with them.

  13. Re:The PCeU was assisted by the FBI on LulzSec Suspect Arrested By UK Police · · Score: 1

    In GP's defense, he's probably just used to forums that autocensor. Being in environments like that train people like the dogs they are. Furthermore, 'middlesex' is funnier. It's like a geographic DP threesome.

  14. Re:Focus, please on LulzSec Teams With Anonymous, In Operation AntiSec · · Score: 3, Informative

    All they have to do is get the raw data and dump it to the internet. Crowdsourcing will do the analysis, just as has been done with all previous email and doc dropping leaks. If you drop it they will come, bored or curious persons of all skillsets.

  15. Re:Must be junk science on Researcher Claims Magnets Can Affect Blood Viscosity · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I'll bet they've never heard that one before...

  16. Re:Ignorance of net neutrality on Inside the DOJ's Domain Name Graveyard · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wow, that's an awesome strawman. I mean who else would have thought about comparing freedom of expression to violent crime? I suggest you wrap that up and put it in a field somewhere for the crows.

  17. Re:Alleged picture on Anatomy of a Privacy Nightmare · · Score: 5, Informative

    You're assuming that whenever somebody hacks something the first thing they do is change the access credentials. However, doing that is actually more likely to clue in the person being hacked about the compromise. If you don't change the credentials you can sit on the access for a length of time until you've done all you want with them.

    However in this specific case I agree it probably wasn't a real hack. For chrissake he won't even deny the picture was of himself.

  18. Re:Clever but inane on School Super Asks Governor To Make His School District a Prison · · Score: 1

    I would mod you up had I the points. It is disingenuous, and really to me all it indicates is how much egregious waste there is in the corrections system.

  19. Re:This is a SIGNIFICANT problem on No Moon Needed For Extraterrestrial Life · · Score: 1

    The singularity is actually a rather amorphous potential event for which there are many definitions, the complete use of a star's output is only one (and a rather arbitrarily grandiose one at that).

    I also don't think it naturally follows that a civilization's ultimate achievement is using stars. Stars are awesome and all, but couldn't there be a more efficient energy source than a huge blob of hydrogen fusing in the middle of space? I think there might be sources of energy heretofore barely imagined, like the idea of tapping differential physical constants between multiple universes as Isaac Asimov mused about in The Gods Themselves. (I suppose this speaks to your 4th possibility.)

    The answer to the Fermi Paradox I think is the Apes or Angels principle. Due to the distances and times involved, any extraterrestrial life is likely either so far beneath us that it can't have any interplanetary effects or is so far beyond us that we can't understand what they are doing or even observe it, just as no other animal can understand a nuclear powered aircraft carrier.

  20. Re:Don't we fail the Copernicus test? on No Moon Needed For Extraterrestrial Life · · Score: 1

    Anthropic principle. This place is coincidentally conducive to life, therefore there is life here to wonder why it's so coincidentally conducive to life that it couldn't be coincidence. Further, it wouldn't matter if we were further out from the galactic core. So long as the sun is the same, the solar system has very little if any meaningful interaction with objects outside of the system.

    (Also, you are wrong about there being no giant stars for hundreds of ly. Pollux is a giant, and only 33 ly distant. Arcturus is as well, at ~36 ly. Beta Triangulus Australis and the Capella binary at 40 and 42 ly respectively. etc.)

  21. Re:A few too many zeros on Discovery of Water In Moon May Alter Origin Theory · · Score: 1

    By your logic, we should be viewing and judging Islamic history based on the beliefs of the Bahai, or something. You're quoting the writings of a Christian philosopher who was working before the Nicene Creed even existed. Many of his beliefs were declared anathema even before the Great Schism.

    So you are cherry picking something which proves no more than a few people in the early church believed some of the Bible to be allegorical (people who were unsurprisingly less religious and more philosophical, even materialistic, as one of the anathemas of Origen was having denied the real and lasting resurrection of the body). The historical fact that you are trying to obscure is that this in no way reflected the views of orthodox Christianity as practiced by the majority of Christians in that time or the centuries that followed. This is ignorance at best and disingenuity at its highest at the worst.

  22. Re:Who Gives A Flying Fuck on Anti-Porn Facebook Page is Deleted, Then Restored · · Score: 1

    This deserves to be modded to the moon. What hypocrisy, though that's par for the course for moralists.

  23. Re:It's an old story on Researchers Grow a Brain In a Dish · · Score: 1

    The thing is that it seems the neuroses and psychoses of sensory deprivation are generally catalyzed by loss, not lack. When you look at things like the 'Total Isolation' experiment there are obvious signs of mental distress even to the point of regression/debilitation. However, these same symptoms do not occur in the congenitally blind. The congenitally blind don't see things that aren't there because they don't have any experiential reference for 'seeing' in the first place. Nor do they have any inherent deficiencies with memory or task performance etc. This would all suggest that humans can be damaged by sensory loss, but does not support any inherent deficiency of mind caused by sensory lack. As disturbing as the idea of sensory lack is to the fully able person, those who have been congenitally deaf who have been enabled to hear through surgery/implants actually find the introduction of the sensory capacity disorienting and even damaging. I'm out of time at the moment, but I think the summary I'm going for here is that the brain is damaged by sensory change, whether it is loss or even addition, regardless of its starting state. The brain prefers whatever sensory level it has developed to know and understand and make use of.

  24. Re:Streisand Effect on Doctors To Patients: First, Do No Yelp Harm · · Score: 1

    I don't know if an NDA is legally binding.

    There is a reason that NDAs are standard procedure almost everywhere. It's not theater. About two minutes of research turned up a couple example cases: Coady v. Harpo, Inc., 308 Ill.App.3d 153 (1st Dist. 1999) and RKI, Inc. v. Grimes, 177 F. Supp. 2d 859 (N.D. Ill. 2001) Believe me, NDAs are very enforcible, so long as certain parameters are followed, e.g. an NDA will not protect information that is otherwise generally available. NDAs are enforcible only if reasonable efforts made to keep information confidential.

    Certain parts of this post were blatantly plagiarized, but this isn't research, and I'm still not a lawyer, so whatevs.

  25. Re:Streisand Effect on Doctors To Patients: First, Do No Yelp Harm · · Score: 3, Informative

    Then no NDA would ever work. You can contractually waive certain rights within limits defined therein. It's not so much 'taking away' as 'voluntarily waiving'. Duress itself invalidates a contract. IANAL etc.