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User: Mike+A.

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Comments · 485

  1. Re:Afghanistan already has U.S. Prisoners!!!! on A Tale of Two Media:Tragedy and Images · · Score: 1

    This has been common knowledge for a while, if you know where to look. Maybe your average Joe watching the evening news wouldn't hear about it, but if you ever turn beyond page 1 in your newspaper you can find this sort of thing, to say nothing of getting your news online.

  2. Re:You primitive Americans! on More Links And Reports On Terrorist Attacks · · Score: 2

    Except it's not. It's been pretty thoroughly confirmed that the explosions in Kabul are part of an ongoing internal rebellion.

  3. Re:Chickens coming home to roost, sadly on World Trade Towers and Pentagon Attacked · · Score: 2

    And NONE of that is an excuse for what the terrorists did.

  4. Re:I don't buy it on Slashback: Errata, Futurity, Portality · · Score: 1
    Certainly it's effectively the same as a wiretap, but the law doesn't work that way. Since the law doesn't actually say anything about keyloggers, it's up to the courts or legislature to make that decision. This case may, in fact, be the one that establishes keyloggers as effectively identical wiretaps in the eyes of the law.


    IANAL and all that sh<beep>t.

  5. Re:Missing the point on Microsoft Fakes Citizen Letters of Support · · Score: 1

    Speaking of missing the point, those statements you quoted were not the actual opinion of the Slashdot editors at all, but a subtle dig at Microsoft's Astroturf campaign; the two parts of that compound sentence were each common components of all the letters.

  6. Re:Waste on Nuclear Booster Rockets · · Score: 1

    There's a cliche that "once you get to earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere". It turns out that the thrust needed to get from the ground to low earth orbit is, to within an order of magnitude, about the same as the thrust needed to get from earth orbit to solar system escape velocity. In any case, you don't need to get it out of the solar system entirely. If you boost it to a high enough ellipse, it could easily be millions of years before the next intercept, by which time nearly all of it will have decayed down to lead.

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  7. Re:Penal colony.... inmates. on Aussie Bill Would Ban Hacking Tools, Virus Code · · Score: 1
    DMCA. Microsoft XP copy protection. DeCSS lawsuits.

    Can you really claim that Australia is that much worse off than we are?

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  8. Re:Frightening thought on MSDN Subscriber Forced to use Passport · · Score: 2

    That's incorrect. Microsoft "encourages" OEMs to offer restore disks instead of a full copy of the OS.

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  9. So register as foobarbazquux@hotmail.com on MSDN Subscriber Forced to use Passport · · Score: 2

    And give your "real name" as Heywood Jablomi, and make up some random ZIP code (20036 is in the Washington, DC area, 98052 is in the Redmond area, pick whichever one you're not - or claim that you're from Malta or something). Just remember what Passport name you created, that's all.

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  10. Re:Er, they missed a hol bunch.. on @Home Cuts Newsgroups Due to DMCA Complaints · · Score: 1
    Because @Home doesn't really care whether people trade copyrighted pr0n or movies, they just don't want to get sued. So they're going to let whoever's suing them do the work of figuring out which groups are a "problem".

    Excite@Home is basically taking the path of least resistance here.

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  11. Re:STOP IT!! on Suck Stops Sucking · · Score: 1

    Well, how about the very most recent article? (URL stabilized for the convenience of archives-trawlers.)

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  12. Re:Corporations are imaginary on The Corporate Death Penalty · · Score: 1
    If you were to "kill" corporation X, what happens to its assets? What happens to your grandmother who lives off a pension that is heavily in X's stocks and bonds? Just liquidating a company gives you its book value, which is generally nowhere near its market capitalization... What happens to the employees?
    Same thing that happens to the stay-at-home wife and kids of a convicted murderer when you imprison their only means of financial support. Do you suggest that we shouldn't imprison convicted murderers?

    Criminal corporations just have a lot more dependents than criminal individuals do, that's all.

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  13. Re:Ummm? Faith anyone? on Questioning C-14 Dating · · Score: 1

    I notice you picked on the one thing I didn't claim to be able to do.

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  14. Re:Ummm? Faith anyone? on Questioning C-14 Dating · · Score: 1
    Why shouldn't there be flying, swimming, or egg-laying mammals? Do birds have the patent on fish, or fish the patent on swimming? Did birds license the patent on egg-laying from reptiles or the other way around?

    For the record, we don't have very definite evidence on the matter of bat evolution - bats are small and fragile and don't fossilize well. But we have some excellent fossil evidence on the land-based ancestry of cetaceans - and if mammals evolved from reptiles, it's not at all surprising that there may be egg-laying mammals (since the evolution of live birth and of mammary glands are not required to take place on the same timetable).

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  15. Re:Getting right into it on Questioning C-14 Dating · · Score: 1

    Even if there were no Creationist postings on the topic at the time, it was inevitable that there would be eventually. One of the common misconceptions Creationists have, after all, is that so many of them don't know the difference between radioisotope dating and radiocarbon dating.

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  16. Re:Is this really news? on Questioning C-14 Dating · · Score: 2

    If you think that C-14 has anything to do with evolutionist or creationist theories, your private school isn't nearly as good as you think it was. Evolution deals on far larger time scales than C-14 can reach, usually using isotopes of minerals, such as uranium, potassium, etc.

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  17. Works in Netscape 6... on Netscape Says No RSS 0.91 For You · · Score: 1

    So it seems that they only work in Netscape 4.x, IE, and Netscape 6, and that they look at the user agent to decide which they're supporting. One of the less than amusing side effects is that they don't work for Mozilla, which uses a different user agent string than Netscape 6... I have to acknowledge that this isn't an encouraging sign.

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  18. Re:This is how addictive EverQuest is: on Everquesters Suing Sony Over Virtual Ownership · · Score: 1

    It's, I say, it's a joke, son.

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  19. Re:Why the movie is ho-hum on "Traffic" · · Score: 1
    The reason no one talks about the Asian approach is that we'd have to make the US a virtual police state to implement it. We've got huge borders and coastlines, countless acres of empty land in which to hide illegal operations, and let's not forget a population that's used to a high level of personal freedom (to say nothing of a Constitution that still provides at least some protection of that freedom).

    When you think you can get public support for a bill providing a prison sentence for spitting on the sidewalk, then we can talk about implementing the "Asian approach".

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  20. Re:What were they thinking?! on "Traffic" · · Score: 1
    And alcohol prohibition in the 1930's did not solve or even noticeably ameliorate those problems, PLUS it more or less created the foundation for organized crime.

    Drugs cause problems. Prohibition makes those problems worse.

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  21. Re:Not self-defense... on E-Bay Patents Thumbnail Galleries · · Score: 1
    However, until the patent system is seriously overhauled, a company is at risk of frivolous but potentially winnable lawsuits over bad patents, and applying for the patent yourself is nearly the only way to defend against it.

    Should eBay be granted the patent, and then turn around and sue someone else over it, then we should put them in the same category as Amazon. Until then, I say they're innocent until proven guilty.

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  22. Re:just keep the damn things up there on NASA's Odds For Iridium De-Orbit Casualties · · Score: 2
    What goes up must come down, particularly in LEO (Low Earth Orbit). Natural variations in the thickness of the atmosphere, caused by the 11-year sunspot cycle, mean that anything in LEO has to fly through a few wisps of atmosphere every so often. Add to this the odd micrometeoroid or other bit of space junk smacking into the things and any given LEO object only stays up a century or so.

    All working satellites have attitude jets and a limited fuel supply to deal with life's little calamities - but that has to run out sometime.

    Personally, I think this 1 in 250 figure is highly suspicious. There's a lot of ocean out there, and I'd be willing to guess that they've got a reasonable amount of maneuverability to the point that they can drop one of these within a few thousand square miles of ocean. Surely there's plenty of such spots in the Pacific that don't hit an island, and probably they ought to be able to miss shipping lanes too.

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  23. Re:Just a question on The Bells, The Bells, Only The Bells · · Score: 1

    On the other hand, it's a lot easier to just build another tower than it is to dig up hundreds of miles of city roads to lay new land lines. The tricky part is the wireless spectrum licenses...

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  24. Re:Unpleasant dreams on Iridium Saved By the US Dept of Defense · · Score: 1

    Neither Galileo nor Cassini had nearly enough radioactive materials to give any significant radiation dosage. The only risk was if some of the plutonium became powdered or vaporized and then inhaled, and the canisters it was stored in are extraordinarily sturdy. I have no idea what you mean by raising the "temperature", but it sounds ludicrous.

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  25. Are you mad? on Florida Election Votes Certified · · Score: 1
    Assuming that the electoral college vote ends up being for Bush, what flight of paranoia makes you think, even for a moment, that Clinton might not step down? Even if I were to step into your paranoid world long enough to accept that possibility, Clinton doesn't have the support of the military, which he'd need in order to pull off such a goofball stunt.

    Or have I been trolled?

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