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  1. Re:Yeah, right on Employers Worried About Critical Thinking Skills · · Score: 1

    Because it seems to me that what they really want are employees who are willing to implement the latest stupid-assed plan a bunch of pointy-haired, mid-management, sociopathic dipshits have come up with, without question or comment.

    Right, critical thinking. When the boss says "jump", you don't just blindly lift both feet off the ground, you thoughtfully ask "How high, sir?"

    I mean, c'mon, man! Without critical thinking, you might not jump as high as he wanted! Or you might even jump too high, wasting precious company time waiting for gravity to bring you back to the ground so you can take the next jump.

    No one wants a "yes" man. They want a "yes SIR" man.

  2. Re:Confirming the Brady-Curran model on Decades-old Scientific Paper May Hold Clues To Dark Matter · · Score: 2

    Oh dear. Well consider me properly embarrassed. I just assumed the link went to the something about the same sort of dark photons mentioned in TFA. Heh.

  3. Re:Steering? on How To Beat Online Price Discrimination · · Score: 1

    No, that makes it discrimination.

    Although most people don't realize this - Discrimination doesn't break the law, except when done against a very small list of federally protected groups.

    Giving senior citizen discounts? Cool. Giving non-senior discounts? Crime! "Ladies' night"? Kosher. "Mens' night"? Treif! Scholarships for blacks? Awesome! Scholarships for whites? You gonna get raped, son.

    Unless Amazon specifically has code in place to detect screen readers or "old people typing" or Christian-themed plugins, they can charge whatever the hell they want, moment by moment.

  4. Re:Confirming the Brady-Curran model on Decades-old Scientific Paper May Hold Clues To Dark Matter · · Score: 3

    Dark photons, or darkons , emitted by the boundary layer could simultaneously explain the missing mass and energy of the universe. Do I smell a Nobel prize?

    Well, perhaps, but the referenced study failed to find any, thus ruling them out as an option.

    Granted, science technically treats negative results as equally important to positive ones; society and the Nobel committee, however, have a pesky bias toward positive results.

  5. Re:No, wait, do-over! on German Publishers Capitulate, Let Google Post News Snippets · · Score: 1

    Whoosh!

  6. Re:die by taser or gas? on Incapacitating Chemical Agents: Coming Soon To Local Law Enforcement? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Also, if you can save 400 of 500 in a hostage situation and catch all the 10+ terrorists. Go for it. The terrorists would kill them anyway and if they escape, they can continue their business.

    Meanwhile, if you have 5000 peaceful protesters refusing to clear out of a park, hey, so a thousand accidentally die. Meh, go ahead and gas 'em, Lou!

    I think you underestimate the mindset of the police. The People had it way better when a cop needed to decide whether you posed enough of a threat to actually shoot you, and then need to justify that decision later. Now, they tase first and ask questions later. 6YO girl crying because you arrested mom? Tase. 85YO confused grannie in a panic over a situation she doesn't understand? Tase. Passenger in a car peacefully insisting you respect his civil rights? Tase.

    ICAs will just make it easier for police to apply the same reasoning to large groups, rather than to individuals.


    BTW, a clarification on the FP - The "unknown" agent used by Russia consisted of a fentanyl analog - An ultra-strong opiate. For reference, as high as 9% of people have a potentially fatal allergic reaction to opiates; on top of that, individuals have a wide range of responses even when given a known dose; some people can take enough morphine to kill an elephant, while others take half of a Tylenol-II and drool on themselves for the next six hours. Using opiates as crowd control will both cause needless deaths and leave a significant fraction of the crowd basically unimpaired.

  7. Re:No, wait, do-over! on German Publishers Capitulate, Let Google Post News Snippets · · Score: 2

    And Google gets nothing out of the relationship I hear you say.

    You'll feel relieved, then, to know that modern atypical antipsychotics work much better, and with far fewer side effects, than the old-school phenothiazines.

    Of course Google gets something out of the relationship. Google exists to make money. They don't, however, sell news. They don't sell content. They sell us. And in that regard, Google really doesn't care in the least if the newspapers decide to play ball or give up the single best source of eyeballs from across the globe they've ever known - Google can simply filter them out and only the newspapers themselves will even notice the loss.


    But I no longer have as many bookstores I can go to, to look at books, find something I might not have picked before, have a coffee, talk to real people.

    Amazon doesn't sell friends (you need to go to Facebook for that). Amazon sells stuff.

  8. Re:No, wait, do-over! on German Publishers Capitulate, Let Google Post News Snippets · · Score: 1

    The number of people required for "Collusion" aside - Not as different as you might think.

    Both situations involve a company providing a distribution channel for third party content creators. Both situations involve those third parties thinking they have an unconditional "right" to access that channel. Both situations involve those third parties pissing and moaning over the owner of that channel not actually caring in the least about the loss of any particular group of content producers.

    I'll admit that the Google situation has a bit more of a karmically-satisfying edge to it, by virtue of the very thing the newspapers want physically requiring the very thing they complain about. In Amazon's case, a bit less of a clear-cut "Ha-ha!", but still just an absurd level of entitlement by Hachette.

  9. Re:No, wait, do-over! on German Publishers Capitulate, Let Google Post News Snippets · · Score: 1

    Beat me to it.

    As I said - Rational thought just seems to hit a brick wall when you mention the likes of Amazon and Google. Free advertising becomes stealing (free) content; one-on-one vendor negotiation becomes collusion.

  10. Re:The internet is for porn. on The Inevitable Death of the Internet Troll · · Score: 1

    This one will do nicely, thanks.

    Whoosh!


    You're going to be the one who'll have to leave, unless you grow up and decide to join the civilized community. :)

    Have fun finding enough people to fix it when it breaks. :)

    Nah, just screwing with you. Sure, you can have this one, we'll gladly take your money to keep the ol' girl running as an echo chamber as looong as you want. We'll just make our own new and improved (and you-less) fork, while yours slowly devolves into "TV v.2"

  11. Re:Free aggregation? A problem? on German Publishers Capitulate, Let Google Post News Snippets · · Score: 2

    I'm trying to wrap my brain around how these news outlets thought it was bad for Google to send traffic their way.

    Because they myopically stop thinking at "Google steals our content, grar!"

    On a somewhat more excusable level, they just haven't yet come to terms with how people read news today. People (under 60) don't casually read the whole newspaper over breakfast anymore; they go to a news aggregation site and skim the headlines. When they find something of interest, they click through to read more - But, they don't necessarily click through to the Nowheresville Tribute, they click through to WaPo or NYT, or perhaps to a media outlet that focuses more on a preferred aspect of most stories (for example, reading about German newspaper contractual negotiations at Slashdot vs reading about them at Groklaw vs reading about them in Time).

  12. No, wait, do-over! on German Publishers Capitulate, Let Google Post News Snippets · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Wait wait wait! We still want the free advertising that comes from Google's use of our content! We just want Google to pay us for the privilege of giving us a service we would otherwise have to pay for, in exchange for displaying content we already give away for free online!"

    Sad. I get so sick of people griping about the effects of Amazon and Google (etc), without giving a second thought to just how much they already get in return for the relationship. Same idea goes for Amazon and Hachette - They have every right to refuse to sell at the price Amazon wants; they'll just never sell another eBook.

  13. Re:Semantics on The Inevitable Death of the Internet Troll · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I agree, but what is your point? We should ignore sexual harassment because the police and society are bad at dealing with it? Shouldn't we try to fix that?

    Did I say anything about ignoring it?

    The great-most-parent of this thread wrote:

    The definition of harassment, at least where I live, is "unwanted sexual advances", meaning the distinction between flirting and harassment is purely based on subjective experience.

    You responded to a clarification that referenced a specific country's (Norway's) wording, to claim that one of two equally subjective words ("troublesome") made it just peachy that we had a victim-subjective law.

    I disagree with your assertion. That doesn't mean I approve of sexual harassment in the workplace; rather, that if we want people to take it seriously, we need to come up with a reasonably objective metric that doesn't reduce to "don't behave in a way that might offend the most fragile person around you, oh and BTW you won't that threshold until you've crossed it".


    As for whether or not people really think like that - I have seriously gotten into arguments with SJWs over whether or not merely complimenting (once, politely and legitimately, not talking about catcalls and shouting "nice tits" at every woman walking by) a stranger in a public place counts as "harassment", only to endure a subsequent rant of "imagine if you had to put up with that everywhere you went, no matter what you did, whether you wanted it or not". Hmm. Yeah, people complimenting me too often, you poor, poor thing! Consider me properly chastised, yup.

  14. We have more but we USE more. on Ask Slashdot: Smarter Disk Space Monitoring In the Age of Cheap Storage? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Today, however, with a lot of file systems in the Terabyte range, a 90-95% full file system can still have a considerable amount of free space but we still mostly get bugged by the same alerts as in the days of yore when there really isn't a cause for immediate concern.

    When we had drives in the 100s of MB range, we used a few MB at a time. Now that we have drives in the multi-TB range, we tend to use tens of GB at a time. In my experiences, a 90 percent full drive has as much time left before running out as it did a decade ago.

    Perhaps more importantly, running at 90% of capacity kills your performance if you still use spinning glass platters as your primary storage medium (not so much when talking about a SAN of SSDs). In general, when you hit 90% full, you have problems other than just how long you can last before reaching 100%.

  15. Re:No chance on The Inevitable Death of the Internet Troll · · Score: 1

    Seems like you are likening legitimate issues to trolling. Busting down barriers for women's rights and segregation are valid. Comparing trolling grammar to suffrage is a bit of a leap.

    Tough to blame that on the parent post, when the FP made that particular leap for us right out of the gate.

  16. Re:Semantics on The Inevitable Death of the Internet Troll · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No, first a police officer, then a public prosecutor and finally a jury of your peers define the conditions under which it is considered sexual harassment.

    By the time you get to "police", the accused has already lost his (or her) job, because employers hate dealing with shit like this but can't risk looking soft on harassment.

    So as I said, wake of ruined lives while the Violets struggle to figure out why every man they meet runs screaming from them as a sign of unwanted affection.

  17. The internet is for porn. on The Inevitable Death of the Internet Troll · · Score: 1

    Too many people do too much online for things to stay the way they are

    If you don't like it, leave and get a new internet.

  18. Re:Semantics on The Inevitable Death of the Internet Troll · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So the GP missed the key point there, which is that it has to be both unwelcome and troublesome.

    No, you missed the point that the "victim" defines both of those conditions subjectively.

    With normal, socially-well-adjusted folks, that doesn't really present a problem. At the one extreme, however, we have the chronic harasser who really sees nothing wrong with friendly backrubs at work; at the other, we have "professional victims" who get to ruin as many lives in their wake as they want. Both of those extremes make such definitions unworkable in any fair and objective system of justice.


    it's only once it starts causing them trouble (like being very persistent when she has clearly rebuffed you) that it turns into sexual harassment.

    The fact that you needed to clarify the meaning of "troublesome", as you interpret it, nicely illustrates the real problem here.

  19. Re:Kinda funny how taxes set back the internet on Hungary To Tax Internet Traffic · · Score: 1

    But if it's anything else, taxes are so great.

    Wait, what? We reading the same website here?

    The same website where we routinely see rants about attempts to tax Amazon? Where people seethe over paying POTS-era taxes on data-only cell plans? Where people routinely complain that we need to do away with SS and privatize all retirement benefits? Where Obamacare causes flamewars and we consider WIC a necessary evil?

    Offhand, I can think of only a single pro-tax issue generally considered "great" among Slashdotters - Eliminating the double-Irish-dodge and getting multinationals to pay their fare share. And personally, I'd say that has less to do with "pro-tax" than "anti-corporate". Other than that, we seem like a pretty anti-tax anti-government crowd, overall.

  20. Re:Nah, this is just stage 1 on Hungary To Tax Internet Traffic · · Score: 1

    So why does he get so much credit on slashdot? Is this the new libertarian conservative shithole of the internet?

    Nice throwaway slam - Want to borrow a crowbar to get that foot out of your mouth?

    Because, for the most part, Libertarians hate Reagan. Despite how you might prefer to demonize Libertarians, laissez faire doesn't mean "subsidize the rich".

  21. Re:Can we stop trying to come up with a reason? on NPR: '80s Ads Are Responsible For the Lack of Women Coders · · Score: 5, Insightful

    These aren't just whatever, "it's just people making choices". It's clearly social and political influence.

    We "clearly socially and politically influence" people to hold down a job, not smoke, refrain from promiscuous sexual behavior, and a wide variety of other behaviors.

    And yet - We all still have the right to live under a bridge, smoke, fuck anything that moves, yadda yadda yadda.

    When women want to go into tech and can't, we have a problem. When women don't want to go into tech... Hey, start your own marketing campaign like Google has done, but lose the guilt-tripping SJW faux indignation BS.

    Thanks.

  22. Re:Don't on Ask Slashdot: LTE Hotspot As Sole Cellular Connection? · · Score: 3, Informative

    It is expensive and unreliable.

    The combined 4G/802.11 hotspots you get from the cell carriers pretty much suck across the board.

    Get a Cradlepoint router and a compatible USB 4G modem (under $100 total). It takes the USB in from the modem, and gives you 4 ethernet ports plus WiFi, and knows enough to reset the stupid 4G modem when it has its hourly crash. Net result, near perfect uptime, weather aside. Oh, and and use a 6ft USB cable to move the modem a bit away from the router if you plan to use the WiFi feature of it - People have reported the two interfere with each other and greatly reduce the performance of each unless you separate them by a few feet.

    That said, yes, still expensive. But like you, I have no alternatives, so if I need to pay for it, it may as well work.

  23. So, any WAP running DD-WRT plus a thumbdrive? on Eggcyte is Making a Pocket-Sized Personal Web Server (Video) · · Score: 1

    Revolutionary! So instead of needing to actually install DD-WRT and buy a separate thumbdrive... They'll include it all in one tidy package!

    But but but... "Cloud"!

  24. Re:Already gone on Technology Heats Up the Adultery Arms Race · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do you also think it's not possible to rape your spouse?

    So, when did you stop beating your wife?

    Ahem.

    The law doesn't distinguish between the two "owners" of shared marital assets. How, therefore, can it count as "stalking" to install a GPS tracker - Which have a plethora of entirely legitimate uses - in my own cars? By the same reasoning, does it also count as "stalking" to take advantage of all the insurance companies' offers to track your kids' driving habits with similar devices?

    As for email, I maintain our home network. By the same weasel-logic corporations use to spy on their employees' emails, if I "just happen" to come across a damning email in the course of a routine security audit of my home IT infrastructure, how exactly does that count as unkosher?

    Now, I wouldn't do any of that, because I trust my SO. I still, though, have an awfully hard time understanding how a court can draw arbitrary lines between "allowed" and "illegal" based on something they can't physically know - My intent.

  25. Re:Cost of Production on The Great Robocoin Rip-off · · Score: 5, Informative

    What's the energy cost to physically produce a bitcoin? Anybody know?

    With a Butterfly Labs' Monarch (700GH/s)), at a difficulty of 19,729,645,941 and a block reward of 25...

    655 kWh per BTC, on average, or roughly one third of the current USD:BTC exchange rate in power costs.