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User: Alomex

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  1. Re:What would Machiavelli do? on Success Not Just a Matter of Talent · · Score: 1

    Are they smarter? Stronger? No. They're simply more evil.

    This is extremely self-serving: "see Ma, I'm a failure not because I'm a dead beat who lives in the basement and doesn't even look for a job, but because I'm not evil like all those other successful people out there".

    Can we mod the parent (Score 5: Self-serving)?

  2. Re:Obama's Decision? on Obama's Impending NASA Decisions · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I know Reagan spent a great deal on rebuilding the military which eventually led to the end of the cold war.

    Actually, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it came out that there was an ultra-secret meeting of the Soviet Union senior politburo in the mid-to-late 70s. That is while Carter was president and before Reagan took over. In that meeting the top echelon was informed by their war planners that the USSR had lost since their economy couldn't keep up with the US and they asked the politburo to start work on a disengagement plan.

    Not much seems to have come out of that meeting except for one thing: an unusually young (by politburo standards) attendee by the name of Mikhail Gorbachev happened to be there. It is now believed that the seeds of glasnost, perestroika and eventual peace with the West were planted in his head there, much before Reagan had time to spend money in war planning. This is not to say that Reagan's expenditures were of no use, rather that it's value seems vastly overstated, while the long term cost to the country is understated.

    In Soviet Russia, Reagan bankrupts you!

  3. Re:Yeah, and? on Internal Emails Released In Vista Capable Debacle · · Score: 1

    which is get a bunch of third-world programmers in a room and churn out very lackluster code, and then keep redeveloping it until it works "good enough".

    Most Microsoft programmers are from the first world and/or live in a first world country. They are top notch programmers, though fresh out of the undergrad. The problem is not in the brain capacity of microsoft engineers, but in company's lack of ability to harness that power in a software process that converges to higher quality.

    Essentially their entire software process is modeled after whatever worked in the past when developing Microsoft Word. As such they are sorely lacking in management skills for long-lived extremely complex software projects such as an OS. This is why they had to bring Ray Ozzie from the outside. They had no internal equivalent.

  4. Re:just to preempt all of the obvious comments on Woman Admits Sending $400K To Nigerian Scammer · · Score: 1

    The flaw here is to presume that culpability adds to a fixed amount. Only under that assumption if the victim is partially culpable then the attacker is less so. But the fact that culpability is not a fixed amount should be no surprise. Say, killing the victim does not reduce the amount of criminality from the aggresor: to the contrary it increases it .

    So if the total amount of culpability is variable, we have no problem here. Rape is rape and you go to jail for it. That is independent and irrelevant of the fact that it was not prudent to walk late at night, drunk, through a bad neighbourhood and as such the victim also gets a certain number of "culpability" units. Points which are, by the way, totally minimal compared to those of the aggresor given the enormity of the crime.

  5. Re:No, really, this is clever... on Boot Windows Vista In Four Seconds · · Score: 1

    Mod parent down. What really happens is:

    Creates a clean boot image once. Then hybernates to that one instead of to your current one. Very simple and very clever.

  6. Re:It looks just like Vista now because... on Is Windows 7 Faster Or Just Smarter? · · Score: 1

    When Vista failed, they rolled back to an earlier version of the code. I understood that this earlier version was still part of the rewrite, but this I don't know for sure.

  7. Re:*sigh* on Obama Launches Change.gov · · Score: 1

    Of course, there are no numbers which support your opinion. Here are a few facts about CCW permit holders: "Permit holders are a remarkably law-abiding subclass of the population. Florida, which has issued over 1,346,000 permits in twenty years, has revoked only 165 for a "crime after licensure involving a firearm," and fewer than 4,200 permits for any reason."

    You got it bass-ackwards. Of course permit holders are law abiding. What gun registration does is that it allows us to is to place illegal gun holders in jail.

    Suppose you are an upstanding citizen and wishes to have a gun to "defend your house". You get a permit and buy a gun. On your way home a policement stops you and upon seeing a gun on the seat of your car asks for a permit. Since you have one, you go on your merry way. A few minutes later, the same policeman stops Joe the Gang-Member and coincidentally he also spots a gun in the seat of the car. Since Joe does not have a permit, Joe the Gang Member goes to jail.

    Ain't that great? Here's an idea that allows law abiding citizens to keep their guns while making it easier to put in jail people who ought not to have one.

    How exactly is that an unreasonable restriction of your 2nd amendment rights?

  8. Re:Ah, windfall tax on Obama Launches Change.gov · · Score: 1

    Generally, hoarding is not considered an acceptable way to attain profits. (Now one can argue how much of that hoarding is done by traders vs. oil companies).

    Who defines "excessive"?

    The Congress of the United States, just like every other conduct it regulates.

  9. Re:It looks just like Vista now because... on Is Windows 7 Faster Or Just Smarter? · · Score: 1

    Do you think Microsoft re-writes the OS from scratch every time? No, they just incrementally change the previous version, and this happens slowly over the course of development.

    Actually, from what I hear Vista was very close to a rewrite from scratch which is why it is such a fiasco compared to the previous transitions (NT 3.5 -> NT 4.0 -> Win2k -> WinXP) which were not rewrites.

    Having said that, I agree with your main point that Win7 is likely just Vista code cleaned up and optimized.

  10. Trendiness bias on Press Favored Obama Throughout Campaign · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The press at times seems to show clear bias, but aside from openly partisan forums (fora) like
    MSNBC and Fox News, the press seems slanted towards stories that resonate with the public.

    For example, the New York Times, which is the favorite flogging horse of the right, pursued the dead-end Clinton Whitewater scandal long after it became clear there was nothing there. Conversely they gave eight columns of uncritical support to the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

    It is just that at that point in time, headlines about Whitewater and WMDs sold newspapers.

    In fact, Obama had cinched the election long before the election (at least two weeks earlier by McCain's own internal polling as reported after the election in CNN). Did the supposedly Obama-biased press report this? Of course not. They went on pretending it was a nail bitter right until the second the California polls closed, when they informed the nation that Obama had lapped the field and would become the next president.

  11. Quality on Press Favored Obama Throughout Campaign · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Obama makes a major speech on race, lauded by all sides, which is dully reported by the media. Did Obama dominate the headlines for a week round that, under a positive light? You betcha.

    McCain "rushes" to Washington, suspends his campaign and accomplishes exactly nothing, which is dully reported under a negative light? of course!

    This isn't media bias. It is candidates getting their just desserts.

    Media bias would be if McCain had given a historic speech, defining his candidacy away from Bush, Rove and the religious right and it didn't get reported. But that, my friends, never happened.

  12. Re:I'd rather see someone involved in Free Softwar on Bill Joy For New National CTO Post? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I just don't see RMS doing that, he's too much of a man of principle.

    It goes beyond that. Certain people define themselves as opposition, as being not-the-man, and as such are uncomfortable in any position of authority, even if their principles were in no way being challenged.

    These people serve a valuable role in society, but it is not within the corridors of power.

  13. Re:Two words on Barack Obama Wins US Presidency · · Score: 1

    They aren't even on the same league. Fox news will straight out lie just to drive a point. Examples? they kept on reporting that Obama had attended a Madrasa long after it had been disproven.

    Other news organizations, while somewhat biased, at least try to stick to a slant on the facts, as opposed to fabricating them wholesale.

    Just a month ago I sat down for an hour of Fox News with a notepad. I counted four straight out-and-out lies put forth by their commentators to make a political point. I'm talking about straight uncontestable facts here, not subjective opinions.

  14. Re:OK so what does Change really mean? on Barack Obama Wins US Presidency · · Score: 1

    Will change mean that slavery is now something that can finally be put to bed 145 years after it ended?

    It is up to the people out there who even today, "145 years after slavery" (TM) are more willing to hire a white ex-con than a black candidate with a clean slate (you can read the study in any of the major newspapers where it was summarized).

  15. Re:No more registry? on Hands-On With Windows 7's New Features · · Score: 1

    Somebody mod the parent up. A single central location where settings are stored makes sense. Had the registry been compartamentalized so that errant applications couldn't brick the system, it would have been most welcome.

    As it is often the case with Microsoft, it was subpar execution of what at core is not a bad idea. Heck, it applies to almost all Vista features.

     

  16. Re:Usability Glitch? on Finnish E-Voting System Loses 2% of Votes · · Score: 1

    Yeah, the good old "blame the user" solution,

    Hey, the entire FOSS movement is based on it you insensitive clod!

  17. Re:The oldest democracy on the planet on Finnish E-Voting System Loses 2% of Votes · · Score: 1

    How about conforming to the social standards of every western country at the time? While the USA has been at the forefront of many reforms such as democratically elected governmnet and women sufrage in terms of racial discrimination it has trailed most western developed countries.

  18. Re:5-10 years on 100x Denser Chips Possible With Plasmonic Nanolithography · · Score: 1

    Huh? AI has been over-promising and underdelivering since from day one, when its founders (McCarthy, Minsky) defined its aim and scope.

    Now you are trying to rewrite this into "it is not that we are failing, it is that the goalposts keep moving". Are you a spin doctor for the republican party by any chance?

  19. the worsest OS on Linux Kernel Surpasses 10 Million Lines of Code · · Score: 1

    Back in the day when Windows NT first reached over 3.5 million lines of code this was used by Linux fanbois as proof positive that NT was a bad operating system. So I guess this means that Linux is now three times worse.

  20. Re:Stallman is always right on Yahoo Changes User Profiles, To Massive Outrage · · Score: 1

    I call BS. His detractors number in the hundreds of thousands who make a living in the proprietary software industry. In fact the only success one can find for RMS-like philosophies is Linux and the reason why it succeeded is because it shedded most of the "free software" ideas of RMS.

    First sign someone is right, his enemies attack him on non-issues.

    The whole GNU/Linux naming debate is not a non-issue. Is a Bush-style attempt to rewrite history in a way that is more kind to the failure of his arguments. He might as well hang a banner saying Mission Accomplished at the FSF headquarters. Are you so naive that you can't see that?

  21. Re:Playing the numbers on Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings · · Score: 1

    Correlation with another measure is in no way an argument against the original measure. Net income is highly correlated to where you live, this in no way implies that net income is a bad or irrelevant economic measure.

    A measure is shown to be bad if it consistently and inexplicably gives a different ranking than the natural order of what is supposed to be measuring.

  22. Kennedy and Illinois on How Close Were US Presidential Elections? · · Score: 1

    Observe that Jack Kennedy would have won even if Illinois had gone to Nixon. Republican pundits like to claim that Joe Kennedy bought the presidency for JFK there, yet the data shows that while Joe might have played dirty in Chicago, this was in the end irrelevant. Jack would have won regardless.

  23. Depends on the person on Canadian Researchers Say Hard Thinking Leads To Big Meals · · Score: 2, Interesting

    taxing mental effort appears to cause people to eat significantly more food, even though it doesn't burn many more calories than sitting around and relaxing.

    For the average person mental tasks do not significantly increase the consumption of energy, however there is a correlation between IQ and amount of energy that can be brought to bear. Moreover, thinking dramatically increases the consumption of glucose by the brain, so feeling hungry after thinking might be a reasonable response from the body to request replenishment of basic sugars.

  24. Re:You meant the wrong way on Founder of the Secret Society of Mathematicians · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There were no gross errors found by the Bourbaki group. This is why their horrible formal writing style died out: it increased the pain of writing without the gain of the previous waves of math formalization.

  25. Re:Changing is easier said then done. on The US Swim Team's Secret Weapon, Science · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've witnessed swimmers in college that have bad habits that they gained as youth and they can't seam to shake them.

    About twenty years ago, famous golf swing coach Butch Harmon saw Tiger at a day camp for kids. At the end of the day he knew Tiger would be famous one day but not because of the way he hit the ball. It was because of the way he took direction and coaching advice. Butch said that over the years he had seen quite a few kids hit the ball better than Tiger, but none so eagerly seek advice and apply it on the field as Tiger did.