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User: Stiletto

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Comments · 1,657

  1. Re:um... on Women Skip Math/Science Careers To Have Families · · Score: 1

    simple logical consequences: if you don't have children, your value system will simply die off

    Jesus Christ, Mother Teresa, George Washington, Joan of Arc, Arthur C. Clark, Lawrence of Arabia, Florence Nightingale, Immanuel Kant, Emily Dickinson, Ayn Rand, and (for full irony) Gloria Steinem, never had children. Would you say that their "value system" died off with them? Would you say their lives were not important or meaningful because they ddin't have children?

  2. Re:you're intellectually dishonest on Women Skip Math/Science Careers To Have Families · · Score: 1

    No, but we, as a society, would still rather have more women bear children than less - because our society is built on the notion that population at least stays at the same level, and doesn't decline.

    For the vast majority of countries, having a declining population has never been even a remote possibility, let alone a problem. Besides maybe Japan and a few countries in Europe, most of the world is FAR, FAR above replacement birthrate. Overpopulation is more of a problem than under-breeding.

  3. Re:you're intellectually dishonest on Women Skip Math/Science Careers To Have Families · · Score: 2, Interesting

    so i say it to you: why not give women, who bear children, special consideration for that?

    Nobody is putting a gun to their heads and forcing them to bear children (at least not in the developed world).

    In this day and age, in modern culture, having children is purely a choice women make or don't make, knowing full well the career, financial, and lifestyle consequences. These consequences are real, and trying to "make biology fair"--meaning give childbearing women special privileges over non-childbearing women--is not fair to the people (men and women) who chose not to have children.

  4. Re:From across the pond on March 14th Officially Becomes National Pi Day · · Score: 2, Informative

    Everyone you know must be American.

  5. Re:A "Weapon" isn't what you think it is... on Suspect Freed After Exposing Cop's Facebook Status · · Score: 1

    In this day and age, it's very understandable to think "holy cow, idiot terrorist with plastique!!!!"

    Actually, it's not understandable. Unless you have a warped view of what's "understandable".

    If someone sees a bunch of wires or a lump of clay in someone's hand and their first reaction is "OMG Terrorist!" they need to seek psychiatric help.

  6. Re:What the hell? on Suspect Freed After Exposing Cop's Facebook Status · · Score: 1

    But, the fact of the matter is, police officers are always going to have the benefit of the doubt over a supposed criminal (as they should).

    Ahh, but a defendant is NOT a "supposed criminal". He is presumed innocent. The fact that (in your previous post) you refer to someone merely accused of a crime as a "criminal" explains a lot.

    And, why would you simply take one person's (the officer's) word over another, all things being equal?

  7. Re:Hibernation? on Quick Boot Linux Hopes To Win Over Windows Users · · Score: 1

    "We don't have anyone willing to use a shovel anymore to do real work for less than a living wage."

    Migrant construction workers seem to be living fine on their wages, so much so that they often send quite a bit of their savings back home to their family.

    So what exactly about their wage isn't "living" enough for us?

  8. Re:Blurring only targets makes them easy to pick o on Calif. Politican Thinks Blurred Online Maps Would Deter Terrorists · · Score: 1

    Nine percent of voters in the last election listed terrorism as their TOP CONCERN. Extrapolate that out to the entire population and we can estimate that not only are 27 million people in this country scared of terrorism, but it's their top concern.

    I think my top concern now is how stupid my fellow Americans are.

  9. Why work for that kind of employer? on The CDA Is Dead, But States Are Trying To Revive It · · Score: 1

    If you were ever passed over for a position because of Internet search results, consider yourself lucky.

    An employer who is going to base their hire/nohire decision on what they find in a Google search or a chat room is not the kind of employer you want to work for, trust me. If they're that petty and ignorant when it comes to staffing, imagine what the office politics and management style is going to be like! No thank you!

  10. Re:Nobody should be able to issue a "takedown noti on The CDA Is Dead, But States Are Trying To Revive It · · Score: 1

    If the statements are false (truth is an absolute defense against libel)

    Not in all countries. In fact that principle might be unique to the USA, not sure.

  11. Re:No hulu for boxee means... on Boxee Drops Hulu Support · · Score: 1

    Now I want to tell you I'm 30. And I want you TV executives to imagine the 25% of the 18-35 year olds that are moderately technically savvy switching to my setup. Now I want you to imagine them helping their friends set it up.

    Moderately tech savvy 18-35 year olds? That's what, 0.001% of the national population? Plus or minus a zero or so. The networks don't care about you, honestly. They're not shaking in their boots, sorry to say.

    The networks care about the 99% drooling masses who come home from work (or the bingo parlor, depending on whether they're retired), flop down on the sofa, and happily watch the advertisements and "info-tainment" that is pumped to them, slack-jawed, for 5 hours before passing out in a TV-and-prescription-drug-induced stupor. These people wake up the next morning and work so they can buy all those shiny products that were advertised, only to flop down on the couch again and again for their nightly commercial brainwash. They do it willingly and gladly, and they are why network executives drive around in Porsches and Mercedes.

    The networks learned a lot from the MP3 player phenomenon. Maybe the time will one day come where your nerd-box becomes packaged up, sold in Best Buy for $199, and turned into a sustainable business, but I doubt it will happen soon. The last company that attempted to do it was obliterated by the networks.

  12. Re:Finally, Verizon, Finally!! on Verizon.net Finally Moving Email To Port 587 · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    From the parent's posting:

    After talking with SORBS, I contacted Verizon and found out that, even though we signed up for Verizon Business, they limit the amount of email I can send a week to 500 messages.

    Sounds like commercial mail to me. Sounds like SPAM.

  13. Re:awww poor casinos on Casinos Warn iPhone Card-Counting App is Illegal · · Score: 1

    You think casinos can be successfully sued?? In NEVADA??? LOL!

  14. Mass treatment on Drug Deletes Fearful Memories · · Score: 1

    Pipe it into the U.S. water supply, and maybe we can all forget the last eight painful years...

  15. Re:Makes you wonder... on CCP To Discontinue EVE Online Support For Linux · · Score: 1

    I don't think anyone's said "incompetent software engineers" yet, so I'll stick my neck out and say it.

    Portability is not hard. Porting is hard--and usually, unnecessary.

    If you're serious about portability from the start and you are a careful and disciplined programmer, support for another platform is just a small, isolated submodule. The developers who complain about how difficult writing portable software is are the idiots willfully using non-portable APIs where portable alternatives exist, assuming that later on they'll try to port it.

    I just love being called in to port a project over to a non-Windows platform, where the original developer decided it would be cool to litter the entire source willy-nilly with Win32 system calls. I do a quick scan of the tree for calls to ReadFile (where fread() would have been just fine) and laugh with glee as I add up the billable hours up in my head.

  16. Re:Authenticity on The Deceptive Perfection of Auto-Tune · · Score: 1

    What the fuck is authentic these days?

    Wow. The fact that someone is even asking this question is scary. Have we gone so far down the artificiality road where this line has been blurred? Since, sadly, people have seemingly totally forgotten what authentic music is, let me refresh our memories:

    * Authentic music happens when something is rubbed, blown, vibrated, struck, etc. making it naturally produce a sound. Pressing a button and making a computer play back a pre-recorded jazz band is not authentic.

    * Authentic singing is the sound that happens when someone blows air through their vocal chords. Passing that sound through a series of DSPs and filters until what comes out the other end has little to do with what came in is not authentic.

    I'm sorry if this definition excludes someone's favorite "genre" but sometimes the truth hurts.

  17. Re:For god's sake, STAND UP FOR YOURSELF on A Teacher Asking Students To Destroy Notes? · · Score: 1

    Why are so many people so freakin spineless?

    Because unlike adults, minors have vew few rights, and STUDENTS have virtually none. As a student if you stand up to any government authority figure, pretending you have rights, you are going to get steam-rolled. You'll be lucky to stay out of jail, let alone leave without a disciplinary mark on your permanent record (which WILL absolutely prevent you from getting into every top university).

    There's no way to say how it would pan out, but you have the advantage that, in the eyes of the law, you are in the right and they are in the wrong

    Incorrect. See my other post. As a student, you simply are not protected by the various rights and freedoms that adults have. From the moment you step onto school grounds, you are essentially stepping onto another country, a totalitarian dictatorship, where the laws that protect the rest of us don't apply.

  18. Re:I would go further: on A Teacher Asking Students To Destroy Notes? · · Score: 1

    Outside? Outside what? Outside the lines of the students' legal rights? Schools, Colleges and Universities are not a magical place where their laws trump the law of the land.

    Actually, they are.

    Students are not protected by the 1st Amendment while on or even off school property.

    Students are not protected by the 2nd Amendment while on school property. (numerous links, as you can imagine)

    Students are not protected by the 4th Amendment while on school property.

    Students are not protected by the 5th Amendment (Bartlett, Larry. Self-Incrimination and Public School Students, Journal of Law and Education, v15 n2 p167-80 Spr 1986).

  19. Re:Notes? on A Teacher Asking Students To Destroy Notes? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would go further and say not stupid but compliant. Students are becoming more and more compliant.

    Well what do you expect?

    From the moment they entered primary school 15 years ago, they have been under the boot of a "one-strike" "zero-tolerance" public school system that rewards blind obedience and conformity and punishes individuality and critical though. They've walked through metal detectors every weekday of their lives. They have been subject to the threat of daily, random searches of their person and locker. They know that if they even hint that they are not going to follow their arbitrarily assigned authority figures' arbitrary rules to the letter, they will be disciplined, and that discipline record will prevent them from succeeding in the future.

    You expect these people to all of a sudden become curious, critical thinking citizens???

  20. Re:It's a good day. on Breathalyzer Source Code Ruling Upheld · · Score: 1

    As you probably know, certification does not mean "verified to be bug free". It simply means, "verified to have been run through the expensive and time-consuming certification procedure". It is quite common, particularly in industries with strict certification requirements, to have a policy not to touch a product once it's certified. Often companies will NOT fix known defects because they'd have to re-certify.

    Requiring certification can (and often does) result in even lower quality products.

  21. Re:Companies should bear the cost on The Scope of US E-Waste · · Score: 1

    That idea seems rather unworkable. Companies will just pass the recycling cost on to the consumer; there will be no savings.

    Which is the whole point. If toxic products just got a lot more expensive (for example, your LCD monitor just got $80 more expensive because the cost of disposing an LCD monitor properly is $80), consumers would think twice about buying environmentally-unfriendly crap. Subsequently demand for said crap would decrease, and less would be produced/disposed, which is good for everyone.

  22. Companies should bear the cost on The Scope of US E-Waste · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've always said, companies should be responsible for the entire lifecycle of any product they produce, including its safe disposal. The way things are now, they are allowed to just dump that cost onto the public, and everyone has to pay the price of mass-consumption, which is mass-disposal.

    If your company's monitor costs $30 to dispose of properly, that cost should be your company's responsibility. Of course, the company will just pass the cost on to the customer, but that's OK, since it's the customer who's wallet is hit, not the general public. Products that are toxic and cause cancer if they seep into the groundwater SHOULD cost people much, much more, to disincentivise companies from making them in the first place. Maybe higher prices for toxic difficult-to-dispose goods would get people to repair things instead of just tossing them into the bin. At least the extra cost would get them to consider that whatever they are buying is expensive to toss into the Earth.

    As it is now, people just buy the cheapest product they can find without regard for the damage it does to the environment, because that damage is done to "those other people somewhere". Make that damage hit their wallet, and you'll see change.

  23. Re:Amazing on Lexus To Start Spamming Car Buyers In Their Cars · · Score: 2, Informative

    "dangerous shapes?" Are you kidding? The only people you have to worry about on your commute to work are people who drive dangerously. And these folks can be found in both $1000 pickup trucks and $100,000 Porsches. While the color red may annoy you it's not going to leap through your windshield. Get a grip!

  24. Re:sprawl on The Illuminati Project Pushes For Dark Skies In 2009 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So buy it

    It's unfortunate that so often our answer to an injustice against someone is that the victim should fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars if he wants it rectified.

  25. Re:Subject on Time Warner/Viacom Rift Healed, Pending Details · · Score: 1

    For its part, TWC has agreed to rape its customers with even less lube to make up the difference.

    It's not rape if the customers pay for it, and continue to pay for it.

    I always chuckle when someone says "XYZ company is raping/screwing/(other sexual act) its customers!" It's not like someone's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to buy TV service!