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Comments · 1,677

  1. Arg, not Slashdot too on Doxing Victim Zoe Quinn Launches Online "Anti-harassment Task Force" · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Her name is Zoe Quinn. It's not a pseudonym, that's her actual name - she doesn't need to be doxxed. She's not a "victim" of doxxing, we already know who she is. Frikkin' hell, did someone hack her RAMs too? Was her CPU phreaked by 1337 script kiddies?

    There was a headline the other day about saying that Sony had been doxxed.

  2. Re:ExFAT on Librem: a Laptop Custom-Made For Free/Libre Software · · Score: 1

    Given what they're charging for components, $100 for 4 GB RAM, $150 for a 250 GB SSD (plus the cost of the HD that it replaces), I have trouble giving them that kind of a pass. I bought a 240 GB SSD just a few weeks ago for $80.

    I'll grant that it's pretty unreasonable to expect some little independent group to get by on the 5% profit margins that Dell does, but that isn't what we're talking about here: these are Apple prices. This feels exploitative.

  3. X-Rebirth has 4 GB as its min reqs, and 8 GB as recommended. What do you gain from doubling the recommended reqs? (or quadruping them in the case of the laptop) Extra RAM isn't going to help you if the game doesn't have a mechanism to take advantage of it.

    Also, what kind of netbook has a dedicated GPU?

  4. Re:I moderate a small local community forum on EFF Takes On Online Harassment · · Score: 1

    All right, fair enough. I don't think this personality trait is really so unusual though, different people just express it different ways.

  5. What is it that you're doing on a laptop which requires so much RAM? Certainly there are some workloads like that, but none that I can think of which would justify shoving 16 GB into a mass-market netbook.

  6. Re:I moderate a small local community forum on EFF Takes On Online Harassment · · Score: 1

    The key here is the anonymity, none of the other junk. What you seem to be suggesting is a board with mostly non-anonymous members, but one anonymous one who harasses the known ones using personal information. Is that accurate? If they were all anonymous then this would be annoying, but not really a problem (despite being small and local). If none were anonymous then, according to you, it wouldn't be a problem, though I think I'd disagree there. I've known plenty of non-anonymous people who have made life miserable for the people around them.

    This is beside the point though. What I was asking before was: What do you mean by "opposed and dealt with"? The only options that I see are either stripping anonymity or ensuring anonymity (plus, perhaps, some manner of user moderation to address bad comments). These are obvious answers though, just typical board admin stuff, tantamount to shrugging your shoulders and saying "oh well." By your tone you seem to be pushing for something more drastic, so I'm asking what that might be.

  7. Re:I moderate a small local community forum on EFF Takes On Online Harassment · · Score: 1

    Okay, so what is good enough then? You've brought up a worst-case scenario, but one that isn't unheard of. It's a fair point, but unless there's some way to address this then saying "oh well" and shrugging your shoulders is as much as you can do.

  8. Re:As much as could be expected on White House Responds To Petition To Fire Aaron Swartz's Prosecutor · · Score: 1

    The point I'm making is that she was following the rules. You can punish her and say, "This is about what you did and not about who you did it to." the whole time you do it, and maybe even believe it as you say that, but the fact is that you have failed to punish her and other prosecutors like her for many years as they have done the same thing to other people. It's clear in that case, from your actions, that your words are untrue.

  9. Re:As much as could be expected on White House Responds To Petition To Fire Aaron Swartz's Prosecutor · · Score: 1

    Oh for the sake of Pete... I wrote a lengthy reply to this, but then my hand brushed the back button. I'm not going to try to write it again, short answer: Yes, I see it differently. I think the difference is that because what she was doing is so commonplace, other prosecutors are not going to see her as a "bad prosecutor" because they don't see themselves as bad. They're going to see people making an example out of her the same way that she tried to make an example out of Aaron and ask themselves, privately, what she did wrong. And since what she actually did was business as usual, what she did can't be the answer. The answer has to be who she targeted. In other words the message that you send is that it's okay to keep doing this as long it isn't to people who are wealthy and famous and well-connected.

    Now pretend that I said that longer and more convincingly.

  10. Re:As much as could be expected on White House Responds To Petition To Fire Aaron Swartz's Prosecutor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's scapegoating in that it's pinning the problem onto a single person, who ultimately isn't responsible for a systematic issue. This is not a case of crooked individual undermining a fair and just system - what she did was commonplace, it just doesn't usually happen to someone with whom you've heard of and sympathize with. Saying, "Let's get her!" and then going home satisfied that you've beaten the bad guy is exactly how this sort of thing is allowed to continue.

    Note: I am not defending her any more than I'd defend the gangster used as a classical scapegoat. Neither of their hands are clean. Does she deserve to be fired? I don't know, maybe, but it wouldn't actually do anything.

  11. Re:Forget these bills on Bill Would Ban Paid Prioritization By ISPs · · Score: 2, Informative

    Exactly. There is a reason the democrats did not push this forward when they had the Senate.

    Nonsense. They did try and have tried multiple times in the past.

  12. As much as could be expected on White House Responds To Petition To Fire Aaron Swartz's Prosecutor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is probably the best response possible to an "I demand you fire that person who has made me angry" rant. The petition could have asked for some reform to the prosecutorial discretion system which allowed her to hound Aaron in the first place, or maybe to the ridiculous wire fraud law that she used, but demanding the head of someone who annoys you is, one: ineffective scapegoaterry, and two: asinine entitlement.

  13. Re:Just what we need on FCC Revamps Customer Complaint System · · Score: 2

    A lot of people here are confusing the comment system, where people comment on pending FCC action, with the complaint system, where people notify the FCC when they see what they perceive as a violation of FCC censorship policy. As you say, streamlined complaints likely means increased censorship. An effective protest might be to complain about censorship - file a complaint whenever someone gets bleeped or they blur a person's middle finger. If the people doing this ever became a large majority of the complaints that the FCC receives it might induce some change on the matter.

  14. Re:Klayman on The 5 Cases That Could Pit the Supreme Court Against the NSA · · Score: 1

    You can't abolish precedent, that's rediculous. Might as well abolish laws. Precident is just the interpretation of law - the thing that says, "Here is what this law means in this situation." WIthout it, you'd have no way of knowing how the law applied to a given fringe case. It would be entirely up to the capriciousness of whatever the judge / jury felt like at the time.

  15. Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works on Tech's Gender Gap Started At Stanford · · Score: 1

    Why do you think WWII was necessary?

    It wasn't necessary of course. It happened for many reasons - overpopulation, inefficient farming, and abusive reparations after the First World War were big ones. Though you could combine the first two I suppose. It really depends how you look at it though: some might point the finger at a system of adversarial government, which was unable to satisfactorily solve the problems of overpopulation and inefficient farming, and which allowed the abusive reparations to be levied. Other people might point at specific politicians... Once again, I don't understand where you're going with this.

    The first part of your comment: is that a complicated way of saying that women should not be allowed to have jobs before their childbearing years are finished?

  16. Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works on Tech's Gender Gap Started At Stanford · · Score: 1

    It's immoral to allow other people to implore a woman to do something? That's pretty messed up, but I'm going to assume that was unintended statement on your part.

    If I had a daughter, what I'd want for her is a life without children of her own. I'm lost on the point that you're arguing for here - is it fucked up that people would want children so badly that they would go to such extreme lengths to ensure that they could have one? Yes it is, certainly. We would all be better off if people did not want children so badly.

    But maybe you're arguing for children and against having a career? You're suggesting that women should stick with the traditional domestic role, so that they won't have to give up their child bearing years? Or maybe you're arguing against the idea that the child bearing years and career-having years should overlap at all? Perhaps this is a subtle argument against age discrimination, your point just isn't clear.

  17. Re:How about ignoring it? on Colorado Sued By Neighboring States Over Legal Pot · · Score: 2

    The first part is true - marijuana has more carcinogens than tobacco does. The fact that a marijuana smoker smokes far less in quantity than a tobacco smoker makes a much bigger difference though. There's was also a suggestion, at one point, that THC might slow the growth of tumors.

    So that's certainly something, but absolutely not 100% bullshit. "Mostly bullshit," perhaps.

  18. Re:To be entirely fair... on Peru Indignant After Greenpeace Damages Ancient Nazca Site · · Score: 1

    It's unlikely that Peru really cares about them. These sorts of situations are usually more about political posturing than about the actual people or event.

    It's funny... there's one picture showing a huge amount of damage caused by their footprints, even deeper and more visible than the landmark lines in places, and in the rest of the pictures you can't see any damage at all.

  19. Re:Its own editors said so on Facebook Founder Presents Vision For The New Republic, Many Resign In Protest · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't know anything about The New Republic, but I do know that the opposite of conservative is progressive, not liberal. A liberal conservative isn't an oxymoron, nor is such a person necessarily a moderate - some of the most strongly partisan conservatives are also liberals.

  20. Re:Innaccurate on Australian Target Stores Ban GTA V For Depictions of Violence Against Women · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What you've described is sex (for which you gain health) followed by violence. I'm familiar with both of those things, they've been in previous GTA games, but the point is that they're unrelated. For the sake of the video the player has chosen to do one right after the other, but they could have just walked away after the sex or committed the violence without the sex.

    Your suggestion that sex should render the NPC invulnerable is... odd. Before the sex she's an NPC just like any other, after the sex she's an NPC just like any other.

    All right, lets look at this another way: in Halo players have the ability to crouch, this serves a functional purpose. There's a rather juvenile tradition in Halo of killing another player in a multiplayer match and then standing over their corpse and crouching. The existence of the corpse and the ability to crouch are entirely separate from one another, each there for a good reason, but when the player decides to combine them in this way they do so with the intent to suggest a humiliating sexual act. There are ways that Bungie could prevent this one particular act if they chose to do so - they could eliminate corpses, they could make the areas around corpses impossible to crouch in, they could remove the ability to crouch entirely - but the act exists because the players wanted it and created it themselves. So in other words: 1) The fact that people use the game as a medium for their expression, and that expression in undesirable, does not mean that there's anything wrong with the game. 2) Any attempt to censor this sort of thing is likely to get worked around. 3) Free expression isn't always nice, it doesn't always make you feel good about humanity, but it is always valuable.

    So how does that relate to a single player game like GTA? Ultimately what I'm saying here is that the player makes the game what they want it to be.

  21. Innaccurate on Australian Target Stores Ban GTA V For Depictions of Violence Against Women · · Score: 4, Informative

    I haven't played GTA 5, but I've played all the others and this: "incentive is to commit sexual violence against women, then abuse or kill them to proceed or get 'health' points." is bullshit unless things have changed dramatically. Violence, yes. Plenty of violence, but the player never commits sexual violence. That would be thematically way out of line with the series. And you don't get 'health' points by abusing or killing women either. You can certainly rob them of their money... Is that supposed to be the same thing?

  22. Re:Nope on What Canada Can Teach the US About Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    The only way you'd have a choice of 10 ISPs is with government regulation.

  23. Re:Logic fail on Pizza Hut Tests New "Subconscious Menu" That Reads Your Mind · · Score: 1, Insightful

    If you've only ever lived in cities known for their pizza, Pizza Hut seems like cheap junk. If you've ever lived in one of the many many places where people don't even know what good pizza tastes like, you'll learn to appreciate Pizza Hut for being, at least, edible.

  24. Re:Have't looked at one at all. on Forbes Revisits the Surface Pro 3, Which May Face LG Competition · · Score: 2

    This is inevitably what goes through my head whenever I see a device with some clever hardware tchotchke - "That nice." I say, "But it'll only work as long as the device is using their software, which ties me to their OS and possibly configuration, limits my privacy options, etc." So a laptop with a second screen, like the Razer Blade Pro, or a phone like the Yota, is ultimately pretty useless.

  25. Re:All right, allow me to expose my ignorance on Debian Forked Over Systemd · · Score: 1

    Thanks. I guess you got downmodded for the ex-Windows comment, but it was still a helpful reply. Appreciated.