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User: cas2000

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  1. two responses are inevitable on The Robots That Will Put Coders Out of Work · · Score: 2

    the first, due to happen right now, is a bunch of smug posts claiming that programmers are too smart and talented for anything like that to happen to them. obsolescence is for the merit-less poor, people doing crappy non-programming, non-geek jobs - people who actually deserve to be treated like shit. it could never happen to them, they're far too important.

    in a few years, when it is actually happening to them, there'll be a bunch of whining posts about how unfair it is that programmers have to compete with machines for their jobs, that was never supposed to happen to the super-smart, super-talented entitled rich white dudes...they'll all be crying something like "Google, why hast thou forsaken me?"

    even then, these stupid entitled fucks will cling to their idiotic libertarian beliefs and refuse to believe that the owner class, the 1%, the bosses, the venture capitalists don't give a fuck about them and never have - if they think of programmers at all it's with resentment that they currently need some people who are difficult to replace....all worker units are meant to be slot-in replacements for each other, and they'll invest large sums of money to make sure that's the case for everyone.

  2. Re:democratize machine learning on How Machine Learning Ate Microsoft · · Score: 1

    it's bullshit. they're not "democratizing" anything, because selling a product and democracy are completely unrelated.

    the word they should have used was "commercialise". or perhaps "commoditise". either of those are far more appropriate in that context, and actually make sense.

    but they sound like grubby self-centred commercialism in comparison to something noble and uplifting like democratise.

  3. Re:Probably just to prevent accessory competitors on Apple Patents Head-Mounted iPhone · · Score: 1

    you know what the problem is with the "everyone else is an arsehole so i have to be an arsehole too" excuse?

    the problem is that you're still an arsehole. and a lame excuse is still just a lame fucking excuse.

  4. Re:I blame the FDA on Smoking Is Even Deadlier Than Previously Thought · · Score: 1

    wrong. on multiple counts.

    firstly, i have no objection at all to laws banning smoking inside buildings - even dens of stupidity like casinos. but not because second-hand smoke is harmful to passersby and others who experience short-term or casual exposure, but because *workers* shouldn't have to spend hours trapped in *prolonged* exposure - unlike casual exposure there is some evidence of that causing health problems. employers have an obligation to provide a safe workplace for their employees and that includes reducing or eliminating the risk of toxic exposure. customers and other visitors can leave whenever they want. employees can't, not if they want to eat or pay their bills or rent.

    as for vaping, there's no harm from that so there's absolutely no justification for banning it anywhere - it doesn't even smell bad.

    secondly, i'm not a smoker, i'm an ex-smoker. unlike many ex-smokers, i don't need to bolster my will-power by demonising cigarettes or smokers. i don't like the smell of cigarette smoke any more, but that's MY problem...same as it's my problem that i can't stand most perfumes including the ghastly crap in stuff like shampoo, and absolutely loathe the smell of petrol and, even worse, diesel. i wouldn't want to be trapped in an enclosed space with any of them but out in the open I don't have any right to impose my preferences on anyone else, especially not by redefining the law merely so that i don't have to smell bad smells.

    So take your sanctimonious bullshit attitude and shove that up your fucking arse.

    ps: casinos are for fucking idiot losers who refuse to understand even the most basic statistics so who gives a shit what happens to them, anyway? in that situation, any health problems from second hand smoke are merely evolution in action.

  5. Re:Smoke weed every day on Smoking Is Even Deadlier Than Previously Thought · · Score: 1

    it's also useless for 99.99999% of the illnesses that those pharmaceuticals are used for. cannabis is a useful treatment for some diseases. it's not a panacea. nothing is.

    "natural" is not a synonym for "better" or "harmless". those who think it is are idiots - for example, i once knew one idiot hippy who routinely kept her child sedated with valerian and thought it was OK because "valerian is natural"

    you know what else is "natural"? strychnine from the nux vomica plant is fucking natural.

  6. Re:I blame the FDA on Smoking Is Even Deadlier Than Previously Thought · · Score: 2

    so by your "logic", we should ban cars and trucks that use petrol or diesel - both of which cause far more damage to people forced to breathe the exhaust fumes than smoking or especially vaping. diesel exhaust is especially dangerous - highly carcinogenic.

    btw, even for actual smoking, second-hand smoke has no health effect on casual exposure. there has been a small effect proven for people forced to work for long hours in extremely smoky environments (like bars were before smoking bans) - workplace regulations enforcing adequate ventilation would have been at least as effective as smoking bans.

  7. Re:Hexagonal Graphene on Scientists In China Predict Pentagonal Graphene · · Score: 1

    and anyone who cares that much about corporate branding exercises is a fucking moron.

  8. Re:Soap Box time! on Peak Google: The Company's Time At the Top May Be Nearing Its End · · Score: 1

    you may as well stop wasting your time - he thinks that because some marketing vermin use "exponential" to mean "magical and amazing" that that actually supercedes the word's real meaning.

    this kind of idiocy is. of course, a triumph of image over substance...marketing can redefine reality to suit itself and where reality disagrees, it is reality that is wrong.

  9. he's just committed to transparency on Jeb Bush Publishes Thousands of Citizens' Email Addresses · · Score: 2

    now lets see him release audio and video recordings of every meeting and informal chat that lobbyists and corporate representatives have with him, and all correspondence to and from them too.

  10. Re:For us normal folk... on Measuring the Value of Open Hardware Designs · · Score: 1, Informative

    i'm sick of sites that require javascript just to read the content of the site or for simple navigation. javascript is for optional bells and whistles, not for basic functionality.

    my attitude is that if they demand the ability to run scripts on MY computer then they are inherently untrustworthy and untrustable.

    that's what the close tab or close window button is for.

  11. Re: uh... on Silk Road Drug Dealer Pleads Guilty After Federal Sting · · Score: 1

    you're not very good at this thinking thing, are you?

    here, i'll explain it in simple terms for you:

    because cocaine use was perceived (rightly or wrongly) as being mostly used by blacks, marijuana by mexicans, opium by the chinese. the original banning of cocaine, for example, was "justified" with lots of propaganda about cocaine-fueled blacks raping white women.

    it demonises the users (and their entire race or subculture - "dirty hippies") and gives the cops an excuse to arrest them and the courts an excuse to convict and sentence them....and for the last few decades with for-profit privatised prisons it's a way to legally enslave them.

    (it's not just corrupt cops and politicians and high-level drug dealers who are against legalisation of drugs, the private prison lobby is dead set against it because legalising drugs would greatly reduce the number of potential slaves)

    it's not the USE of the drugs that suppresses people, it's the fact that certain drugs associated with particular subcultures were made illegal - the same way, for example, that banning rap or hiphop music (while laudable in itself) would disproportionately affect black people. or, for a real world example, the refusal to play black music like jazz on radio until whites like presley started appropriating it in the 1950s.

  12. Re: uh... on Silk Road Drug Dealer Pleads Guilty After Federal Sting · · Score: 1

    Most voters are deeply reactionary (in the sense that they are very reluctant to accept any change from status quo, whether good or bad), and the current view of most ordinary people is that 'drugs are bad'.

    that's largely because of nearly a century of anti-drug propaganda.

    same as socialism is now a dirty word in america, but up until the 1940s it was still a large and fairly mainstream political movement.

    non-stop propaganda is effective.

    Drug barons

    a very loaded propaganda term in itself, guilt by association with your monopolist robber barons.

    Legalising drugs in any form would hurt their business

    which, of course, is one the many reasons why drugs should be legalised. it's reason enough in itself, without even considering the human rights issues involved.

  13. Re:Freedom Will Not Be Tolerated on Silk Road Drug Dealer Pleads Guilty After Federal Sting · · Score: 1, Informative

    you know, nobody in the entire history of the world has EVER seen or heard drug dealers talk or act like that outside of moronic american movies and TV. it just doesn't happen, ever.

    that's because addiction doesn't fucking work like that. it takes a lot more than a few hits of ANY drug to addict someone - and even then the addiction potential has a lot more to do with social and environmental conditions (like poverty, or hopelessness) than it has to do with the drugs themselves.

    get yourself fucking educated on the topic before opening your idiot mouth.

  14. Re: uh... on Silk Road Drug Dealer Pleads Guilty After Federal Sting · · Score: 2, Insightful

    no, your government bans drugs because it's a useful way of suppressing blacks, mexicans, chinese, hippies, dissidents and other undesirables.

    it's also a great way of disenfranchising them from their vote when posession is treated as a felony.

  15. Re:I don't think this [release] matters at all... on Xfce Getting a New Version Soon · · Score: 1

    it's nice to see the americans in the crowd demonstrating their unrivaled capacity for insightful and witty commentary. thank you for your valuable contribution to the discussion.

  16. Re:As a parent, which requires no testing or licen on Ask Slashdot: Pros and Cons of Homeschooling? · · Score: 1

    "benefits" are something that undeserving human scum get due to society caving in to their entitlement issues.

    "bennies" OTOH are something entirely different, something that nice people get as a reward for their talent, hard work, and general awesomeness.

    it's not surprising that he'd want to avoid applying the bad word to himself - a lot of money has been spent on cultural programming to achieve that.

  17. Re:Required vaccine? on New Nicotine Vaccine May Succeed Where Others Have Failed · · Score: 1

    no, but 10000 cases because of all the fuckwit anti-vaxers would be.

    because vaccines have been so successful, people have forgotten how deadly and devastating diseases like mumps, measles, rubella, polio, smallpox and many others *were* - note that past tense, they were major killers now they're almost non-existant. however, they'd make a comeback if people stopped vaccinating against them.

    the idiot population focuses on self-serving fake research like Wakefield's "vaccination leads to autism" bullshit and on the one in a million that has a bad reaction to vaccines, whilst completely ignoring the millions who are prevented from being killed or cripppled or born deformed because of easily preventable diseases.

    vaccinating against diseases serves a useful, life-saving, purpose. it works for those who are immunised and it also works for those who, for whatever reason, can't be vaccinated (or the vaccination didn't work - e.g. vaccines often don't work for transplant patients because of the drugs they have to take to suppress their immune systems to prevent rejection) because it reduces their risk of exposure.

    otoh, vaccinating against drugs is just inflicting someone else's "morality" on people.

  18. Re:It all comes down to payroll on The Tech Industry's Legacy: Creating Disposable Employees · · Score: 1

    yeah, but that doesn't matter because it'll be in the next financial quarter - and management can always fire a few more workers to cover the difference.

  19. Re:The very first thing out of his mouth on Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users' · · Score: 1

    That's a lot of projects created to replace something that didn't need fixing. Seems to me there must have been a lot of affected people, not "a vanishingly small number" to make all those projects happen.

    and NONE of them (with the possible exception of upstart because it was the default on ubuntu) gained a "market-share" of more than a few percent *UNTIL* systemd forced itself on people by becoming a hard dependency for consolekit/logind, gnome, and soon udev.

    that indicates to me that whatever problems sysvinit might have, they're not annoying enough for most people to care about....and certainly not annoying enough to do anything about.

  20. Re:Just keep it away from Gentoo and I'm good on Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users' · · Score: 1

    Sysvinit requires a f'ing shell to operate.

    no, it doesn't. there's nothing in sysvinit that requires init.d scripts to be shell scripts - they can be perl or python or anything else. they don't even have to be scripts, they can be compiled binaries.

    the fact is that people write shell scripts - for sysvinit and for other tasks - because it's an easy and convenient language to write in.

    ps. sysvinit isn't the only alternative to systemd. there are others, like openrc, that offer the fairly trivial init & cgroups features of systemd without the huge disadvantages of monolithic borging of networking, logging, ntp, udev, login etc.

  21. Re:Please remember... on Systemd's Lennart Poettering: 'We Do Listen To Users' · · Score: 1

    the two most important things you're forgetting are a) that 99% of that functionality is in the kernel, not systemd and b) it's possible to have an init system that assists configuration and use of those kernel features without borging dozens of other unrelated functions (like logging, ntp, networking, firewall, udev, consolekit, and many more)...openrc manages to do that, for example.

    if systemd restricted itself to just init+cgroups, it wouldn't be hated anywhere near as much as it is - because there would be nothing to really hate.

  22. IoT is a solution looking for a problem on The 'Radio Network of Things' Can Cut Electric Bills (Video) · · Score: 1

    where the fuck do these idiot boosters get their moronic examples of how wonderful IoT would be? nobody would want their fridge to turn off if the electricity price went up.

    my fridge needs to keep things cold even if the price of electricity goes up for a few hours.....ruining hundreds of dollars worth of food to save 10 cents on electricty is not a good idea. food poisoning's no fun, either.

  23. Re:not just a game on Is 'SimCity' Homelessness a Bug Or a Feature? · · Score: 1

    it doesn't have to be conscious and deliberate to be propaganda. simcity definitely pushes specific beliefs about how cities work and people behave. to play the game, you have to internalise those beliefs, at least for as long as you're playing.

  24. Re:So.... on Apple Awarded Gesture-Control Patent · · Score: 2

    patenting particular methods or specific inventions is such an old-fashioned and obsolote view of patents.

    no, these cunts don't patent a particular method for doing anything - they claim ownership of the entire fucking idea so that nobody can come up with any alternative non-infringing method.

  25. not just a game on Is 'SimCity' Homelessness a Bug Or a Feature? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    the thing that most players don't realise about games like simcity (and other "simulation" games including civilisation and clones, the sims, and many others) is that they're not just simulations, they're also propaganda tools with a particular model of how reality is, or should, be.

    for the most part, these games push the theology of "meritocratic" free market laissez-faire capitalism - with the deserving rich being those who worked hard and the undeserving poor being worthless lazy slobs. this simulates american moralising and judgemental opinions fairly well, but not the real world.