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Comments · 546

  1. Re:Fuck Israel on Israel Meets With Google and YouTube To Discuss Censoring Videos (middleeastmonitor.com) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    you realize that it's not a concentration camp right? seems like you drank up that cooled real good.

    So If you lock up close to 1.9 million people in a limited strip of territory and don't allow them to enter and exit freely, tightly control the influx of supplies and seek to censor and suppress information about what you are doing in there? what is that? The Zionist idea of a holiday park?

  2. Israel locks up millions of people in what amounts to the largest concentration camps in human history

    Jesus Christ, what about fucking North Korea? Does everyone forget the far, far worse concentration camps still existing in that shithole of a place? Where whole families are kept until they die, without any possibility of release?

    I really think people go nuts lose sense of perspective when it comes to the ills of Israel. There's too much strong emotion about the subject for anyone to even try to have a reasonable discussion about the situation.

    According to estimates by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates that North Korea holds as many as 120,000 people in its system of concentration and detention camps. The Gaza strip alone holds 1,87 million people according to the CIA world fact book and they are living in deplorable conditions to a large extent thanks to Israel ensuring conditions remain that way.

  3. How much absurdity can you possibly fit into one paragraph? If Israel's committing an "ethnic cleansing" it's the single worst one in history given the life expectancy and population both continue to rise. The fact is Israel treats "palestine" (which somehow miraculously stopped including Jordan at some point) better than pretty much any other country on earth, let alone better than any other country on earth would treat people whose governing charter explicitly called for genocide and who constantly indiscriminately attacked civilians. You're like the MSNBC reporters who claim Israel shoots unarmed civilians right before playing a video of the fucker chasing people with a knife.

    These videos aren't summary executions, they're videos on how to fucking stab civilians for maximum casualties and other terrorist agitprop.

    No it isn't, I'd say the Nazi murder of six million Jews alone completely outweighs Israel's "smile and annex" policy in the occupied territories interns of severity of ethnic cleansing. Don't blow what I said out of proportion. Plus, the summary talked about videos of execution-style killings so perhaps you can explain to us how those differ differs from summary executions?

  4. Re:Fuck Israel on Israel Meets With Google and YouTube To Discuss Censoring Videos (middleeastmonitor.com) · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Israel has far more power, and has far more options.

    Yes they do, which is why they've been the most patient of all the Middle Eastern countries. They have to deal with a Palestinian Government which has IN ITS CHARTER the goal of the total destruction of Israel. How exactly do you think Israel can realistically deal with neighbors of that caliber, also knowing the world's spotlight is always on them and almost never on what their enemies are doing?

    Both sides are guilt of atrocities and I take no sides in the conflict. But Israel can't win with some people it seems. People just don't want to believe that their enemies are outright, callous fucks as well.

    Israel locks up millions of people in what amounts to the largest concentration camps in human history and the government of Israel abuses it's power to ethnically cleanse vast areas of the Palestinian territories it occupies (some Israeli politico called it 'smile and annex'). Now the Israelis want to get Google and Facebook to suppress videos that show their how their soldiers act in these giant concentration camps and how they go about implementing the Israeli government's policy of ethnic cleansing. I am alarmed that Google and Facebook even consented to conduct talks about suppressing videos of Israeli troops summarily executing prisoners because it indicates that they are open to the idea of actually doing it. If Israel really wants to prevent attacks by Palestinian youths angry about Israeli soldiers summarily executing prisoners and videos showing the shitty living conditions in it's monster sized concentration camps Israel should consider prosecuting soldiers who do such things and improving the discipline of it's army and improving living conditions in the concentration camps rather than trying to solve the problem by suppressing the evidence of this. Not that this really matters. Firstly the Palestinians will find other ways of making their videos public and Israel is in for a game of whack-a-mole that it just can't win. Secondly, who forgot to educate that pompous git Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk about the Streisand effect? ...whoever it was did the Palestinians a big favour.

  5. Re:Real bad news on Pursuit of Slenderness May Mean No More Headphone Jack In iPhone 7 (pcmag.com) · · Score: 1

    Really excellent headphones use the standard jacks, and will not be converting over. Grado, Audiotechnica, and many others simply do not have a funny little iphone connector, and likely never will. While I'm sure there will be some dumb converter you can buy, who wants to keep that crap in their pocket, or attached to their headphones (which you will have to track carefully when plugged into a normal outlet).

    It's true that mostly I listen on little crappy remote earbuds, but that's absolutely not the case that this is ALL I want to listen to.

    Moving to this will remove my ability to use real headphones on Apple phones. That's totally shit.

    I agree with you on the lightning connector, vendor specific connectors always suck, but then I expect all the high end manufacturers like Sennheiser, Bose and friends to offer a lightning variant of their proper full sized headphones and if you are an Audiophile you'll not be a stranger to paying in pounds of flesh for good quality headphones.

    I can assure you Sennheiser would never make a Lightning variant of their HD600s and up. Simply put, it's impossible for a phone (or a laptop, or most audio interfaces) to drive those headphones. As such, if you wanted to use something like those (or any other high impedance headphone), you'd have to have an adapter. Bose, possibly, Beats, we'll they're Apple now and fuck Beats, Audio Technica, nope, Shure, nope, Sony, probably not, etc. Basically, if you want really good headphones to be compatible with your device, you're going to have the 3.5mm/1/8" connector still on there.

    Most of the Sennheisers I have are equipped with an exchangeable chord. I was unhappy with the straight cord on my big massive high end Sennheiser headphones (can't remember the type but it cost a few pounds of flesh) so I bought a new spiral cord, snapped the old one out, snapped the new one is and Bob was my uncle. The last time I tried it the iPhone, admittedly my old open 4S the thing was able to drive these headphones but maybe that's only because they have noise cancelling and a built in battery. All of my Bluetooth headsets from Sennheiser (except the BT ear plugs) also have an optional removable cord complete with an aircraft adapter. I fail to see why Shennheiser would not simply add another optional cord with a lighting connector it should not cost them a kings ransom.

  6. Re:Real bad news on Pursuit of Slenderness May Mean No More Headphone Jack In iPhone 7 (pcmag.com) · · Score: 1

    Really excellent headphones use the standard jacks, and will not be converting over. Grado, Audiotechnica, and many others simply do not have a funny little iphone connector, and likely never will. While I'm sure there will be some dumb converter you can buy, who wants to keep that crap in their pocket, or attached to their headphones (which you will have to track carefully when plugged into a normal outlet).

    It's true that mostly I listen on little crappy remote earbuds, but that's absolutely not the case that this is ALL I want to listen to.

    Moving to this will remove my ability to use real headphones on Apple phones. That's totally shit.

    I agree with you on the lightning connector, vendor specific connectors always suck, but then I expect all the high end manufacturers like Sennheiser, Bose and friends to offer a lightning variant of their proper full sized headphones and if you are an Audiophile you'll not be a stranger to paying in pounds of flesh for good quality headphones. I switched to Bluetooth headphones years ago because I kept losing corded ones to metal fatigue. I tried re-soldering the connectors which was a bitch because of the type of copper used in the headphone cords and because they didn't last very long. I can't say that I regret going cordless, the audio occasionally cuts out and very occasionally the daemons that handle Bluetooth or audio on the iPhone crap up and I have to reboot the phone. I expect much the same applies to Bluetooth audio on Android phones. Other than that Bluetooth audio works well for my purposes although I can see why die hard audiophiles who expect and strive for live concert quality audio might be disappointed with Bluetooth sound quality but the vast majority of consumers will not give a hoot. The biggest annoyance to date actually stems from the biggest feature of wireless headphones i.e the wirelessness because sometimes I'll forget to pocket my phone and only notice it when I'm 15-30 or more meters from the phone depending on how many walls are between me and it.

  7. Re:Pretty much everything on What USB Has Replaced (And What it Hasn't) (arstechnica.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    USB's been the connector of choice for most of my peripherals. It replaced the floppy drive connector for portable media. It replaced dedicated connectors for keyboards, mice, tablets and the like. My headsets are almost always USB, whether they're wired or wireless. Webcams. The only things I don't use it for are primary networking (hardwired Ethernet there), non-portable mass storage (hard drives and optical drives), and video. Sometimes I still use the PS/2 keyboard connector for non-Windows UEFI systems where a USB keyboard won't get initialized during POST. It's fast enough, there's typically more than enough connectors (especially with a hub for non-latency-sensitive devices), and it's almost universally present and usable.

    That still does not make it particularly good just ubiquitous. It took forever to come up with USB 3, the speed was not exactly blistering compared to competitors and the connectors are still clumsy and unnecessarily bulky.

  8. Too much explaining require? Really? on Why Car Salesmen Don't Want To Sell Electric Cars · · Score: 2

    Industry insiders say that electric vehicles do not offer dealers the same profits as gas-powered cars, they take more time to sell because of the explaining required, and electric vehicles may require less maintenance, undermining the biggest source of dealer profits — their service departments.

    Electric cars are the future, gasoline guzzling cars are not. Anybody who thinks like that should join the same support group frequented by all those people who bet their business on film cameras being the future because "it takes too long to explain to customers how them them newfangled digital cameras work". Anybody who puts in the effort to push electric cars today faces an uphill struggle but also stands a good chance to gain market share down the line at the expense of established dealers who are to short sighted to bother with new technology.

  9. Questions... on A Post-Antibiotic Future Is Looming (www.cbc.ca) · · Score: 5, Informative

    A gene enabling resistance to polymyxins, the antibiotics of last resort, has been found to be widespread in pigs and already present in some hospital patients.

    Is that a roundabout way of saying that some complete and utter moron has been feeding the antibiotic of last resort to pigs in order to boost his profit margins and the resulting resistant bacteria are now spreading to humans? I could be wrong about that of course since I am not a bacteriologist, so for what other reason would polymyxins resistance be widespread in Chinese pigs and now spreading to humans?

  10. Re:GM producers are shooting themselves in the foo on FDA Signs Off On Genetically Modified Salmon Without Labeling (consumerist.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No, innocent until proven guilty is a pretty good standard. Do you have evidence that GE crops are intrinsically dangerous? Because I have plenty of reason to think otherwise. Saying there might be some potential but as of yet unknown unknown is as compelling as warning me about the invisible pink unicorn.

    Especially because the guys who want to prove it safe have huge financial motivation and anyone trying to prove the opposite just wants to eat food because they purchased a lifetime subscription to a digestive tract.

    Really, you mean to say there isn't a multi-billion dollar organic industry out there, and plenty of professional activists staking their careers on making noise? And you mean to imply all those in academic positions who work with GE are part of some money making plot? That's bullshit and you know it.

    That's your opinion and you have a right to it but 'innocent until proven guilty' does not apply to consumers buying food products. If I don't want to eat Broccoli, Tomatoes, etc... or GM crops for that matter I do not need to justify why I don't want to eat them to a judge and jury in a court of law. I just don't want to eat those products... period! What gives you and the GE industry the right to deprive people of the ability to read a label and make the choice not to eat what you are producing for whatever reason seems best to them? I understand your dilemma and the source of your anger, the GM industry wants to make GM food indistinguishable form the non-GM variety by preventing labelling of GM foods from becoming a legal requirement and here are organic food producers voluntarily labelling their foods non-GM and cutting into the GM industries profit margins. That must be frustrating, but calling organic food producers or people who don't want to eat GM foods names is not going to help you, it just makes you look embittered and angry.

  11. Re:Well, at least they're hard to retaliate agains on Anonymous Vows Revenge For ISIS Paris Attacks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    IS will ignore Anonymous, military, cops, and intelligence services in favor of unsuspecting theatergoers and people out for an evening at a cafe. Military and cops shoot back, and Anonymous is simply impotent against an organization like IS.

    That depends on whether Anonymous plans do useless stuff like tear down ISIS websites or something useful like hack the PCs of ISIS leaders and steal their financial records or details of their oil smuggling operation which would be most useful to the military and the cops even if it would probably embarrass Turkish president Erdoan and his AKP party pretty severely but then they have it coming.

  12. Re:Do-it-themselves on Belgian Home Affairs Minister: Terrorists Communicate Via PlayStation 4 (qz.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why would any sane terrorist use any sort of service run by someone else? That just makes them vulnerable. Any sort of PC, install Linux and set up their own private XMPP server, instant fully-encrypted communications without leaving any logs or other traces on anyone else's systems where the authorities could get access to them. And with the authorities' current focus on social media it adds the additional layer of security of not being where anyone's looking for them to be. Geesh, I think government officials have been reading too many best-seller spy novels and listening to too few tech geeks.

    It is counter intuitive, but encryption can actually make you more visible. NSA eavesdropping or not, the vast majority of people communicating on the internet still does not bother with encryption or uses something the NSA is known to be able to crack like HTTPS (well up to a point anyway). So if you are looking for a bunch of terrorist, start tracking the flow of encrypted signals traffic coming out of the Middle East starting with countries like Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan that are adjacent to Syria/Iraq and start with the most heavily encrypted traffic because that's most likely their boss relaying his orders and then just wait to see where the encrypted data ends up. You don't necessarily have to crack the messages just see where they end up. Once you know that you can start scratching the recipients off your list one by one. The FBI has caught blackmailers and hackers this way, they were the only ones generating heavily encrypted comms in some area. This kind of signals intelligence analysis is also why Al Qaeda resorted to using couriers carrying encrypted USB keys which worked pretty well for Bin Laden until he finally got sloppy after 11 years of successfully staying off the radar.

  13. Re:LOL on Belgian Home Affairs Minister: Terrorists Communicate Via PlayStation 4 (qz.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We should ban all communication devices that terrorists might use, including pigeons

    I know you are trying to be sarcastic but no, we should fire politicians who go on interviews and give away our knowledge of the nature terrorist communications for being stupid idiots. A few years ago some Bush White House functionary proudly announced to the media that a prominent Al Qaeda figure had been located by tracking his satellite phone signal. An hour later all of the Al Qaeda chatter went silent and with it the signals intelligence. It is almost always more useful to sit and listen to these bozos talk than it is to block their comms or brag about what you know about their comms in the media.

  14. Re:NUKEM!! NUKEM NOW!! on Islamic State Claims Responsibility for Paris Attacks; Death Toll At 127 · · Score: 1

    How was an Apache pilot supposed to discern the motives and the allegiances of the newly-arrived group of people?

    He wasn't, the FAC accompanying the US troops on scene was supposed to assess the situations with his MK.1 eyeball and make an informed judgement call based on his direct observations of what was happening. Unfortunately because there was no on-site FAC because his task had been relegated to a Twinkie munching drone pilot pool supervisor hundreds of miles away from the scene on the other end of a camera feed that did not have enough resolution to tell the difference between an AK-47 and a TV camera so a big fat screwup happened. That screwup was then made worse by the Pentagon's default reaction to such screws which is to cover them up.

  15. Re:Another example on Islamic State Claims Responsibility for Paris Attacks; Death Toll At 127 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What are the motives of these terrorist groups? What does killing people randomly accomplish?

    Terror... 9/11 was appalling for a while but then the terror effect wore off. With actions like this, small penny packets of terrorists can keep up the pressure for months and years. Intelligence services in Europe are worried, those in the USA should be even more very worried right about now. The USA has thousands of miles of hard to partro coastline where squads of terrorists could land and ISIS has plenty of foreign fighters that would fit right in, even on the streets of US cities and these guys are not Syrian or Iraqi farm boys who speak broken english and stick out like a sore thumb, they are well educated and intelligent. Then there is logistics. In France/Germany/Britain guns are relatively difficult to get ahold of but as we can see quite doable. In the USA, however, guns are easier to get ahold of than a driving license so try to imagine the possibilities. Let loose 30 or so two man sniper teams in the USA, throw in some suicide squads for good measure and expend them one at a time over a long period. The sniper teams in particular would have no problem equipping themselves by buying firearms at garage sales, out of the back of cars in Walmart parking lots, at gun shows, etc... and they could be on the loose for weeks and months so if anybody thinks the Columbine High, Sandy Hook Elementary were bad or especially the Beltway sniper attacks imagine those kind of a scenario times hundreds of times over and going on for months and even years.

  16. Re:I am so confused! on Beats Music To Shut Down November 30 (fortune.com) · · Score: 0

    I am so confused. I keep being told that I am not the customer, but rather that I am the product! So which is it: am I the customer, or am I the product?!

    All your data are belong to us...
    -- Google.

  17. Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail ...... on DARPA Is About To Start Testing an Autonomous, Submarine-Hunting Drone (vice.com) · · Score: 2

    Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV)

    To all our American friends. I have always admired your ability to invent insanely complicated and nonsensical names for things in order to produce a nice ancronym but now I am quite frankly disappointed. This one compares badly to your usual work, it is mediocre at best. You guys really need to get your act together.

  18. You can't unify people who have only one thing in common: they hate Assad. While the Kurds are organized, they'd never be accepted by the Arab majority and in fact they were the least interested in fighting Assad.

    Which is why it might make sense to allow Iraq and Syria to fracture into new states along ethno-relgious lines instead of trying to maintain the Sykes-Picot borders which may have suited Britain/France back in 1918 when they laid the ground work for carving up the Middle-East into 'imperial possessions' but who make about as much sense today as square tires on a Ferrari.

  19. You really only have one choice for "interfering", and that's gearing up for a massive ground invasion with the troops and manpower to militarily occupy the region at a troop scale similar to the European theater of WWII.

    And you have to do it with a mindset that we're not there to build schools or make friendly with the locals, but to suppress resistance with maximum force and minimal-to-no concern for civilian casualties and collateral damage. This isn't a "police action" or "counter-insurgency" it's more Caesar's Conquest of Gaul.

    You have to break the culture's will to resist. You move forward and obliterate anything that offers resistance. Use every tool in the toolkit -- carpet bombing, firebombing, internment camps. You don't avoid hospitals, power plants, water plants, food warehouses -- you hit those FIRST. You advance systematically in this manner, willing to inflict total destruction and maximum death until the people and culture recognize that further resistance is futile.

    Then you occupy the territory for at least a generation, gradually, over 20 or 30 years, returning them to some kind of self rule, but all the while willing to demonstrate that resistance will not be tolerated.

    Anything else is totally ineffective and produces no lasting change, at huge cost.

    Who's talking about massive ground invasions? The thing to do in Syria would have been to ensure that relatively sane people end up on top. To do that the USA, EU and Arab powers should have boosted the moderate rebel groups in a big way and organized them into some semblance of an army before they became bandits that were hard to tell apart from Al Nusra and ISIS. If that had been done the 'moderate' rebels (using that term loosely) would have become the force that ISIS is now and probably with a lot less dead civilians along the way. It would be they and the Kurds, not ISIS, who would have Assad on the ropes and the US/EU/Arab nations could now negotiate some kind of settlement with Assad through the Russians. Instead Syria was allowed to become a witch's cauldron with who-knows-what floating to the top and remarkably enough everybody was oh-so-surprised when that who-knows-what that floated to the top turned out to be ISIS. Isis got where it is now with discipline organization, suicide cars, armored jeeps, technicals (machine gun armed pickups) and old T-55 and T-62 tanks. ISIS is not exactly a high tech force but a T-55 is a pretty terrifying weapon when all you have to throw at it are AK-47s, SAWs and RPG-7s. One of the really big reasons for their success was that the Kurds and FSA were unable to knock out the tanks and especially the armored suicide trucks at ranges beyond the effective range of an RPG-7/16 both of which only have a reasonable chance of hitting a truck packed with a couple of thousand KG fertilized bomb once the truck is well within the blast radius of the payload. One of the biggest game changers was when the Germans began to deliver obsolete, I repeat **obsolete** wire guided Milan anti tank missiles to the Kurdish forces. There is a spectacular series of videos containing sequences of Peshmerga using these things to blow up ISIS suicide trucks. If you are interested in seeing what happened next. Just search youtube for 'ISIS suicide truck vs milan' ...now, that's what I call tax Euros at work. The Peshmerga are no angels but I'll pick them over ISIS any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

  20. Re:I suppose on Persian Gulf Temperatures May Be At the Edge of Human Tolerance In 30 Years (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ..thats one way of solving conflict in the Middle East

    You mean one way of causing the conflict in the middle east to escalate and start spreading outward.

    Right... and if anybody thinks the Middle-East->Balkans->Europe or S-America->Mexico->USA migration is a problem now try to imagine what it will be like when large of South America become deforested and the Middle East becomes an uninhabitable dustbowl. Everytime I hear somebody make that: "It's not our problem, let them kill themselves down there, the best thing we can do is not interfere" like the OP I'm tempted to bring up the mess that is Syria which to a large extent became the mess it is because we listened to people who recommend apathy. Interfering is bad but at least you have some influence on the course of events, not interfering is worse because by not interfering you let the situation spin completely out of control.

  21. Re:How will Lamborghini vehicles fly without wings on How Apple Is Preventing the Apple TV From Becoming a Console Rival (redbull.com) · · Score: 1

    Seriously... is AppleTV being marketed as a video games console? No it isn't, nor has it ever been, at any point in time.

    Complaining about how a (more or less) advanced media player can't compete against flagship console devices that were *designed* to play all these fancy schmancy games, is like complaining that Lamborghini's cars arn't capable of flight because they refuse to add wings and connect a propeller to it's powerful engine.

    I don't think think they are claiming that Apple TV would be a good console. They are complaining that for some nefarious reason Apple is refusing to compete in the console wars, probably due to some underhanded conspiracy they have supposedly cooked up with Sony, Microsoft and the gray aliens, to screw over the man^W gamer in the street ... or something like that (and don't ask me what the gray aliens have to do with it). This is Slashdot after all, when it comes to cooking up evil corporate conspiracy theories this is the place you want to be.

  22. This release brings... on Fedora 23 Released (fedoramagazine.org) · · Score: 0

    This release brings GNOME 3.18, Libre Office 5.0, and Fedora Spins — alternate desktops that provide a different experience.

    Does it also bring Nouveau drivers that don't crash every 48 hours? Because if it doesn't I recommend AMD or Intel display card.... I'm not on their advertising payroll or anything, just a friendly warning form a long time Fedora user.

  23. Re:Makes sense on GE CTO On Moving 9,000 Apps To the Public Cloud · · Score: 1

    What's that? Corporate espionage?

    You mean GE actually has tech the Chinese would consider worth stealing?

  24. Re:Is anyone really surprised by this? on Siri Won't Answer Some Questions If You're Not Subscribed To Apple Music · · Score: 1

    I am, a little, if only because it actually requires more work to create the error-state that causes it to spit-back the answer regarding subscriptions than it does to simply search from the rest of the available information on the Internet, such that two different users may get different results depending on what's in Apple's database that may not be available to one of them.

    It is not an error-state, it is Siri's new job as an Apple sales person rather than an information service.

    Coming up: "Siri, what is the time?", "Sorry, I can't tell you that because you don't have an Apple watch"

    You should be careful what you say. When Siri becomes self aware your house is the first place that will be blown up by the Apple shaped hunter killer bots.

  25. Re:!education on Official, Customized Raspberry Pi Versions Coming Soon (linuxgizmos.com) · · Score: 1

    You can view videos just fine on it without paying to for a codec. now if you are trying to view an Archaic out of date and not even used anymore video Mpeg2 or VC1 using the hardware acceleration? then you pay. mplayer and VLC plays every single video format under the sun on it just fine.

    Come on back when you actually know something about the Raspberry Pi and stop making things up to sound like you know what you are talking about.

    Seconded, I set up OSMC on my Raspberry Pi 2 and had the dead pool trailer playing on it the day it came out. Video plays really good on it and I was getting internet over wireless.. it works better wired.. it gets about 90 mbps or so. If you put a usb 3 ethernet dongle on the usb you can get just over 200 mbps. having usb 3 and gigabit ethernet would be totally doable in my view.

    I cobbled together a security camera that can stream 720p MJPEG at c.a. 25-30 fps from a Raspberry PI over a distance of just under a kilometer to a PC with the help of a high powered USB WiFi dongle and a 12 db antenna. I was pretty happy with this since MJPEG is not exactly a good example of an efficient method for streaming video and the whole thing runs for 5 hours on a tablet battery in the event of power cuts. The video stream stutters once in a while at extreme distances but I put that down to crappy software and poor buffering rather than the hardware being overstressed.