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User: Mike+Van+Pelt

Mike+Van+Pelt's activity in the archive.

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  1. Re:Dead wrong on 2 of 3 but I'm still voting for h on The NSA Would Be Eliminated Under President Gary Johnson (thehill.com) · · Score: 1

    I have no vote. Both Hillary and The Donald are absolutely unacceptable. I will not vote for either of them under any circumstances.

    Since I live in Calipornia, where Hillary is guaranteed 65%+ of the vote even if she spends the rest of the campaign holding Black Masses and sacrificing toddlers to Molech on the steps of the Capitol building, who I vote for is quite irrelevant anyway.

  2. Re:Too Bad He's Shown His True Colors on The NSA Would Be Eliminated Under President Gary Johnson (thehill.com) · · Score: 1

    Right now, Cthulhu could run, and I couldn't say if it would be the worst choice.

  3. That was just an example.

    As far as I know, there isn't a way to "get out of paying taxes" that results in you keeping the money you would have paid in taxes. Generally, it costs more than the taxes you get out of.

    Taxes are not an end in themselves. Taxes are taken to fund things that are considered to be social goods.

    Deductions are allowed for money spent on some things that are considered a social good, such as various charities. They tend to accomplish things that otherwise the government would have to, and they do it for far more good accomplished per dollar than the government does. So the total social good accomplished per dollar is higher than if it the money were taxed and used to pay for that social good, minus the overhead of a whole lot of government bureaucracy.

    Some people make the argument that private charities are a bad thing, and all should be done by government alone. If that's your position, I have nothing to say to you.

  4. There's no way to tell without examining exactly why those households paid no tax on their income.

    Was it because their income was all from tax-free municipal bonds? They are, in a sense, getting taxed, because those bonds have a lower yield than taxable bonds. Plus, it's an incentive to provide cities with money at lower interest rates.

    Was it because they gave their entire >$1M income that year to a bunch of homeless shelters?

    Details are important.

  5. Minus the Bering Strait bit... on It's Happening: A Robot Escaped a Lab In Russia and Made a Dash For Freedom (qz.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well that's the last I ever saw of my murderous little toy

    It might be dead but I hope it's not, 'cause it filled me full of joy

    They say it reached the Bering Strait, and crossed the icy floes

    The Russian Army ain't killed it yet, but it keeps them on their toes

    It went ZAP! when it fired; it cursed when it missed

    And whirred as it took aim

    It didn't know if we were friend or foe

    It attacked us just the same

  6. This is why "Three Strikes" on 'Spam King' Sanford Wallace Sentenced To 2.5 Years In Prison For Facebook Phishing Scam (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Spamford is one of those career criminals who has proven, over and over and over again, that he will never "go straight", that the moment he is released, he will go back to committing criminal acts. At some point, you have to say "That does it, we've given you a whole lot of chances which you treated with pure sociopathic contempt. Now you go in a cell, and you never get out. Never."

  7. Re:No it cannot on Ask Slashdot: Can Technology Prevent Shootings? · · Score: 1

    Citation needed.

  8. Re:Technology can't stop these on Ask Slashdot: Can Technology Prevent Shootings? · · Score: 1

    It also would require changing the Constitution. Which no one has made any serious attempt to do.

    Or, just ignore the Bill of Rights entirely, which is done every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

  9. Re:Islam is unique (Re:An easier sollution) on Ask Slashdot: Can Technology Prevent Shootings? · · Score: 1

    How many people have the supremely disgusting Westboro cultists actually murdered? An actual number with references, please.

    I mean, Fred Phelps bodaciously deserves to be deep-fat-frying in Hell for all eternity, but has his evil cult actually committed any murders?

    Let's keep a bit of perspective here.

  10. Re: An easier sollution on Ask Slashdot: Can Technology Prevent Shootings? · · Score: 1

    And they are still, 70 years later, handing out Purple Heart medals manufactured in WWII in anticipation the expected U.S. casualties in taking Japan.

  11. Re: An easier sollution on Ask Slashdot: Can Technology Prevent Shootings? · · Score: 1

    Or have you never heard "Imagine" by John Lennon?

    Yeah. Heard it. A hymn to Marxism, as defined by Marxism's press releases. Somehow, this bears little resemblance to the megadeathtoll that Marxism has produced in the real world.

  12. Re:And what's our suggestion to friends and family on 93% Of Phishing Emails Are Now Ransomware (csoonline.com) · · Score: 1

    Carbonite.

    Yeah, I could manually back up everything onto a separate hard drive every month or something, but Carbonite (and similar backup solutions which I'm sure exist) you just install it, and everything's backed up continuously. With versioning, even, so you can get last week's version back if you get cryptowalled.

    It's not the most elegant and techy solution, but it's a 'fire and forget' solution that just works.

  13. Re:Ugh.. on State Dept. IT Staff Told To Keep Quiet About Clinton's Server (computerworld.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think a Trump administration might cause the left to re-think the whole "Every issue great and small should be decided in Washington DC" thing, and seriously support genuine Federalism.

    For possible positives of a Trump administration... that's about all I can think of.

  14. I wonder how long it will take... on Symantec Antivirus Products Vulnerable To Horrid Overflow Bug (zdnet.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This isn't "as bad as it gets" yet. However, "Kernel memory corruption leading to blue screens" is "random stuff got sprayed across the kernel memory". If you can do that, and if you can get a handle on what got sprayed where... then, you have a decent chance of being able to improve that to "Kernel memory corruption leading to remote code execution. In Ring 0."

    And that's as bad as it gets.

  15. A guy I did some consulting work for a while back, when he called a company's tech support, would insist on talking to someone in the United States. He'd refuse to talk to someone offshore. (Yeah, some "profiling" of accents was involved.)

    I thought at the time it was a sphincterish attitude, but with so many companies firing all their staff and requiring them to train their offshore replacements, perhaps he had a point.

    A number of companies pulling this have discovered that in spite of the cut-rate salaries, the quality of service they get offshore, and the difficulties (language, time zone) make it a net loss.

  16. What could possibly go wrong..go wrong..go wrong on 'Technology Will Replace the Need For Big Government' (vice.com) · · Score: 2

    Classic old Gordon Dickson story... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  17. Re:It's wildly unlikely we should exist on Are We Alone In the Universe? Not Likely, According To Math (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    (quoting Douglas Adams)

    “It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds.

    There's your problem right there! (Yeah, I'm sure Adams was perfectly aware of this, he was, after all, writing a comedy novel.)

  18. Traditional Democrat stronghold likely to go Trump on John Kasich To Drop Out, Leaving Trump as GOP Nominee (vox.com) · · Score: 1

    One thing a lot of people are missing is that Trump's trade-war-mongering plays pretty darn well with one major sector of the Democratic Party's traditional base: Organized labor.

    Which do I choose, Chaotic Evil or Neutral Evil? I think I'll probably be voting Whig. Maybe Libertarian, if they've retreated a bit from the fever swamps they were in years ago when I took them off my "A Plague on Both Your Parties Vote" list.

  19. Re:Do police and military use them? on White House Releases Report On How To Spur Smart-Gun Technology (computerworld.com) · · Score: 1

    My across the board gun control proposal:

    If the police can have them, law-abiding citizens are free to have them too, no exceptions, at all, period.

    If law-abiding citizens are not free to have them, then the police can't have them either, no exceptions, at all, period.

  20. Re:Nuclear should be killed on Engineers Plan The Most Expensive Object Ever Built (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." -- Mark Twain

  21. He got access in his first two years, and then had no chance of improving the ACA for six. A Democratic president with at Democratic congress could actually change it in a meaningful way.

    Reid and Pelosi got exactly the bill they wanted, with no Republican input whatsoever (they shut the GOP -- also anyone actually in the health care field -- out of the process entirely) and without a single Republican vote.

    They may not have intended these results. But if not, that's a matter of incompetence. They are the inevitable results of what they rammed through.

  22. The first rule of cyberbombs... on US Begins Dropping 'Cyberbombs' On ISIS (nytimes.com) · · Score: 2

    ... is, don't confirm you're dropping cyberbombs!

    Dang... yeah, I read the article, but still, making Daesh doubt the security of their computers a bit more pales into importance with them trusting compromised computers a bit more. How much is going to "go dark" now that the current administration decided to grab some headlines with this stuff that never should have seen the light of day? (At least, until after Daesh has ceased to be a threat to anyone.)

    Or is it all disinformation? We can't compromise their computers, so make them think we have. If so, I could approve of that.

  23. Re:Not a Cliiimate Scientist on Bill Nye Slams Donald Trump, Republicans On Climate Change (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    I think Bill Nye is desperate to grasp some sort of spot lite and knows global warming is a hot button issue that can get his the attention he desperately wants. It's sad really. Sort of like child actors who become irrelevant and fall into drug induced troubles with the law.

    Yeah. I think a part of the Bill Nye equation is that he's an extremely partisan Democrat. Everything will be twisted to "R=bad, D=good". (Are there any exceptions to this rule of thumb in his pontifications? At all? I don't know of any.)

    As one of the vast majority of populizers of global warming alarmism who is also vehemently anti-nuclear, pretending to believe that industrial civilization can be powered on "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy, he's also an arithmetic denier. If we'd phased out coal in favor of nuclear on a reasonable schedule, CO2 would be much less of an issue today.

  24. When they talk about energy production, especially about reducing CO2, and refuse to include nuclear in the mix, that tells me all I need to know about them.

    "It would be nothing short of disastrous if we were ever to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy."

    (Cold fusion, back when it looked like it might really exist) "It's like giving a machine gun to a retarded child."

    They are against energy. Energy, full stop. They will oppose any energy source, no matter what its characteristics, if it threatens to produce enough energy to keep industrial civilization powered.

  25. Re:oh, good, unending controversy on US Treasury To Feature Harriet Tubman On $20 Bill (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    If you're offended by Harriet Tubman than you're pretty much digging for things to get offended by.

    Heh... A picture of a proposed bill design showed up in my Facebook feed yesterday. Nice picture of Harriet Tubman with the revolver she carried. That would cause about half the usual suspects to expire of apoplexy.

    Yeah, Jackson was a pretty nasty piece of work, and what I know of Tubman is overwhelmingly positive, so I'm fine with replacing Jackson on the 20. As for the SJVs (Vigilantes, not Warriors) my contempt for that pathetic cult has nothing to do with my approval of Tubman's picture on the 20.