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User: jedidiah

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Comments · 20,933

  1. Re:Elves?!! BAAAH!! on Using Your Open-Source Contributions To Land a Full-Time Job · · Score: 3, Funny

    You probably don't want a VULCAN as a boss either!

  2. Re:Is that it? on How Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel Plans To Live 120 Years · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You are confused. His goal is not to improve humanity by creating cures for all of the things that will kill him before he turns age 120. His goal is to give a big "f*ck you" to the society that will create all of those cures for him.

    He intends to benefit from society without contributing to it.

  3. Re:Who wants to live forever? on How Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel Plans To Live 120 Years · · Score: 2

    Wait until you are looking death in the face. You may change your mind.

  4. Re:Dementia will get'm long before 120 on How Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel Plans To Live 120 Years · · Score: 1

    > He's 47. He's got more than two decades before those are likely to affect him.

    That's just a guess. He could be caught off guard by something manifesting before the "designated time". There probably isn't even enough suitable diagnostic procedures to screen for all of the possibilities.

    Just because something usually hits after people are 65 doesn't mean that it will necessarily only hit YOU after you're 65. Those are just averages and people fall outside those averages.

    On a certain level we are all unique snowflakes. We are all one-off forks of a massively complex biological code base. We don't understand that entire code base yet.

  5. Re:Another paleo-wanker... on How Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel Plans To Live 120 Years · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ultimately, you can't be a slave to any ideology or fad. You have to actually have some self knowledge. You need to observe yourself and adjust accordingly.

    We are not factory stamped duplicates. We are each a very complicated machine each a fork of some very complex bio-mechanical software. The idea that we are not all the same should be obvious to anyone on this site.

    The idea that some of us thrive on habits that would be bad for others should be not terribly controversial.

    You just have to be methodical and make the observations and sort yourself out and not blindly follow anything else.

  6. Re:Slashdot sociopaths... on Argentine Court Rules Orangutan Is a "Non-Human Person" · · Score: 2

    What suffering? If it's a modern zoo then they were doing everything they could to make this animal feel as comfortable as possible. The lack of gawkers might be a bit of an improvement. However, the do-gooders really only traded one guilded cage for another one.

    The creature in question has no real legal rights or self-determination in either case.

    This creature has just had one master traded for another. Beyond the sensationalist headline, this situation is really indistinguishable from a sales transaction.

    This ape is still being treated as someone's property. Except it's now some class of person. Great precedent there.

  7. Re:Monkey Business on Argentine Court Rules Orangutan Is a "Non-Human Person" · · Score: 3, Informative

    She's still just an inmate. She's still being held against her will and being treated as a sub-human. The conditions might not even be that much better.

    That all boils down to how primitive zoos are in Brazil.

    Even if she were due some "big fat settlement" in a manner similar to a wrongfully convicted criminal, she still is in no position to manage it. Trying to pretend that she's a person really doesn't change this.

    She has had no say in this process.

  8. Re:Us, not them on Argentine Court Rules Orangutan Is a "Non-Human Person" · · Score: 1

    What if you're just making dinner?

    We're a part of nature, not something above it or separate from it. That includes using other animals for our own benefit. We are not true herbivores, so some "animal cruelty" is likely to occur eventually.

  9. Re:Monkey Business on Argentine Court Rules Orangutan Is a "Non-Human Person" · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This leads to an obvious followup question...

    If this ape is a person then who is responsible for his care and feeding? Normally, an adult person is responsible for their own care and feeding including any required payment.

    Will he be on the dole? Will he manage his own money? Will he do his own grocery shopping and cooking? Will he have a lease? Does he know he's supposed to use the toilet? Can he use the toilet? Can he manage putting on his own diapers if not?

    Is this ape going to get a job? Or will it still remain effectively a sub-human in a different type of cage?

    It looks like not much really changed here...

  10. Re:false summary is false on Chromebook Gets "OK Google" and Intel's Easy Migration App · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No. The real kicker is the Apple fanboys calling Education an "obscure niche" as soon as someone else gives them a bit of competition.

    Even if you take the revised numbers provided by Apple partisans at face value, it still doesn't bode well for Apple. They are seeing stiff competition from a surprise "Dark Horse" product that no one would have ever expected capable of this.

    They can try and spin things as much as they like but it won't really change the reality of the situation.

    Education has long been thought of as an Apple stronghold which is why anyone cares about this.

  11. Re:Dish Customer Here on Dish Pulls Fox News, Fox Business Network As Talks Break Down · · Score: 1

    The real retards here are the poople that will flee a cable service just because they stand up to an upstream content provider.

    This is not about the bill going down. This is about the bill going up. Fox wants your cable bill to go up and Dish is fighting that.

    Like any sane business, they don't want their costs going up. Unfortunately, they are dealing with monopoly products that have a single supplier.

    It's high time that ALL cable providers itemized prices so that when channel X raises the bill, it is obvious that channel X is the greedy bastard that made your bill go up. No more hiding behind the reseller.

  12. Re:The day the music and freedom died. on The Beatles, Bob Dylan and the 50-Year Copyright Itch · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mickey Mouse is a trademark.

    That's a different kettle of fish. That's the problem with everything getting thrown together as "intellectual property". It muddles together things with very different requirements and considerations.

    Abuses and backlash will be inappriately applied.

  13. Re: Who? on FBI Confirms Open Investigation Into Gamergate · · Score: 1

    Unless you've ever interacted with the cops you really have no reason to say anything about anything. Many people have this romantic idealized notion of the cops (or FBI) giving a f*ck when they usually do not.

    One troll threatening another on the Internet is probably not enough to get them interested.

    These people have important things to do and they have their careers to think about. They aren't going to waste their time chasing their tails over every random piece of bullsh*t. Sorry, but YOU and your problem are probably not important enough for them.

    A threat against a school is probably something that they are more interested in. Better collar. More interesting media potential.

  14. Re:Media blackout on FBI Confirms Open Investigation Into Gamergate · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No. It looks like a coward backed down as soon as things got interesting. She fancies herself as some sort of activist but as soon as things "got real", she ran away like a frightened child.

    She's just like the trolls that everyone is supposed to be so afraid of.

  15. Re:Media blackout on FBI Confirms Open Investigation Into Gamergate · · Score: 1

    The "corruption" angle of this is far more pervasive than just games or game reviews. It was an interesting coincidence that a Jewish reporter in Israel was complaining about media corruption from a different angle when this story was being broken.

    Her perspective was that inconvenient facts and stories are not published. Things that don't support the dogma that your editors want to push are suppressed. Reality doesn't matter. The media wants to push it's view of things and "the news" is really just a work of fiction. Anything that doesn't support the narrative they want to present is ignored.

    I'm not sure if it's shared ideology driven by the state of journalism academia or if it's mainly more crass corporate considerations but there's a definite group think at work.

    Professional journalism at this point can be at best described as a form of political propaganda.

  16. Re:Most Unbiased Slashdot Gamergate Article on FBI Confirms Open Investigation Into Gamergate · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you troll all of your customers, don't be surprised if you end up with a few wing nuts going off the deep end.

    The "journalism" response to this entire affair has been shameless pandering to some notion of political correctness and shameless exploitation of the situation. That's been true pretty much across the entire media spectrum starting with the very first set of trolling click-bait articles generated by the gaming and tech press.

    Anyone that disagrees is branded as some sort of anti-feminist misogynistic scum who's opinions don't matter.

    It's a perfect example of the "liberal media" that tea baggers like to whine about. The dogma behind the narrative is more important than anything else.

  17. Re:Who? on FBI Confirms Open Investigation Into Gamergate · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Being a victim requires actual harm. What actual harm does a threat from some chickenshit web troll really do you?

    If anything, the so-called victims here are happily basking in the glow of the spotlight happy to be the center of attention.

    The real victims are people that have bought into all of this nonsense and have had the view of their own real world warped by it. There's the real psychological harm.

  18. Re:Actually on Reaction To the Sony Hack Is 'Beyond the Realm of Stupid' · · Score: 1

    South Korea is really the only reason we are pulling our punches with these guys or even care.

  19. Re:How? on Over 9,000 PCs In Australia Infected By TorrentLocker Ransomware · · Score: 1

    Those require certain filesystem attributes to be set regardless of what the name on the file is.

    On the other hand, if your OS and user shell and email application simply avoid the equivalent of "bash you-don't-know-where-I-came-from.zip", you easily avoid a lot of this nonsense.

    You would never consider taking random things you find on the floor or street and putting them in your mouth, but that's exactly what some "modern" software does.

  20. Re:How? on Over 9,000 PCs In Australia Infected By TorrentLocker Ransomware · · Score: 2

    > I've received dozens of these. All via hijacked SMTP hosts.

    Any time I see one of these I examine the headers and invariably it is some end user desktop running off of a dynamic IP from some ISP.

  21. Re:Water it down on New AP Course, "Computer Science Principles," Aims To Make CS More Accessible · · Score: 1

    It could also improve the general state of CS knowledge. If people are less ignorant or frightened of technology then that is not a bad thing. Not all CS education has to be directed at code monkeys.

  22. Re:Sorry, poor Appalachian white boys on New AP Course, "Computer Science Principles," Aims To Make CS More Accessible · · Score: 1

    Most racism is less blatant any more. There are no "whites only" signs and blatant discrimination can get you sued. A lot of the problems of the "oppressed" are self inflicted and are the lingering effects of institutional discrimination that for the most part is now banned.

    Of course any true egalitarian should object when blatant discrimination is practiced. It doesn't matter what the lame excuse is.

    You either believe in equality or you don't.

  23. There are differnences in PEOPLE. Usually these differences cut across conventional "seggregation" lines. There may or may not be different distributions of characteristics in genders or races. A lot of this stuff is just nonsense cultural baggage.

    It has to do more with indoctrination than actual characteristics and again the "geeks" are the tail end of the problem and the least relevant "perpetrators".

  24. Re:First amendment? on Sony Demands Press Destroy Leaked Documents · · Score: 2

    ...and just who is going to enforce any action against the parties that Sony wants to stop here?

    Without the government, none of Sony's threats have any teeth.

  25. Re:Hope they keep Stallman off the stand... on The GPLv2 Goes To Court · · Score: 4, Informative

    RMS only commissioned the license. He did not create it. The lawyer that actually drafted the license would likely be a much better "witness" assuming that such things would even be considered in this case.

    Amicus briefs are likely the only means of being seen or heard in a case like this.