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User: snerdy

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Comments · 55

  1. For who, now? on Dutch MP Fined For Ethical Hacking · · Score: 1

    breaking and entering the system of the Dutch medical laboratory Diagnostics for You

    Hey, I never asked him to do anything!

  2. Re:Racism is a cause, on Racism In Online Ad Targeting · · Score: 2

    Ask yourself why.

    That's an interesting thought. The simplest explanation, though, is probably that racism and sexism aren't the same thing -- they have different root causes, different modes of expression and different results.

  3. Re:Don't get it on Connecticut Group Wants Your Violent Videogames — To Destroy Them · · Score: 1

    Go far enough back and i'd put good money that someone thought opera was the reason for violent crime.

    Fear of media is as old as media. For instance, Socrates apparently thought writing was a problem:

    In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.

  4. Re:Not all that hard on Brainstorming Ways To Protect NYC From Real Storms · · Score: 1

    FDR Drive may need a flood wall south of the Brooklyn Bridge.

    The FDR may need some kind of protection against flooding, but not the part south of the Brooklyn Bridge -- it is an elevated roadway at it's southern end, from Pitt street (north of the Manhattan Bridge) to Whitehall street at the entrance to the Battery Park Underpass. The underpass, which is a tunnel, definitely needs some kind of protection against flooding (Sandy filled it end-to-end with water) as does the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (now the Hugh Carey Tunnel, also filled with water by Sandy and still not operational), the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel and the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

    More importantly, those are just the problems that we had with this hurricane. The shoreline of southern Manhattan has actually been extensively expanded over the last 200 years. Protecting that man-made land from rising water seems likely to involve significant unforeseen difficulties. It seems safe to say that the whole city hasn't been built to withstand this kind of environmental attack (mostly because it seems safe to say that work in Manhattan has been done as cheaply and quickly as possible). What if the foundations of the towers for the Brooklyn Bridge finally wash away? They're not resting on bedrock. Much of the Lower East Side and Chinatown are built over land that used to be a swamp.

    Finally, while this thread is limited to consideration of how to protect the borough of Manhattan, pretending that the other boroughs and neighboring states don't exist makes this a foolish exercise. The question shouldn't ever be "How can we protect Manhattan?" It should be "How can we protect the tri-state area?" In the words of Harry Buttle,* "We're all in it together."

    * I mean Tuttle!

  5. Re:Roulette on Blackjack Player Breaks the Bank At Atlantic City · · Score: 1

    P.S. Clams got legs!

    Careful -- you could get kicked to death talking that way.

  6. Re:Good! on Amazon Bypassing Publishers By Signing Authors Directly · · Score: 1

    Next up: record executives, realtors, and oil prospectors.

    You forgot telephone sanitizers, account executives, tired T.V. producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards and management consultants. Plenty of space in the B Ark!

  7. Battle Los Angeles on Astronomers Find Largest Known Extraterrestrial Water Reserve · · Score: 1

    Someone should go nail this article to the foreheads of everyone involved in creating the movie Battle Los Angeles (in which aliens invade earth in order to steal all of our precious, precious water).

  8. Re:Tradition & Intuition on Experts Say Gestural Interfaces Are a Step Backwards In Usability · · Score: 1

    you don't need the language part of your brain

    my brain feels far more engaged

    It's interesting that you feel your brain is more engaged when you're not using all of it.

  9. One medium in various forms on Angry Birds Exec Says Console Games Are Dying · · Score: 1

    The existence of mainstream casual and blockbuster video games is a fairly new development, but both types of games are part of the overall medium.

    As was the case with other forms of media over the past 150 years or so, video games are going to start to become more diverse. Up until fairly recently it wasn't entirely nonsensical to simply say "I play video games." Today, though, that doesn't mean anything. One may as well say "I read books."

    This is an exciting time for video games as a medium -- it's become a genuinely mainstream medium. That doesn't mean its less mainstream aspects will die. There's room for all types. People watch TV shows and feature-length films. People read short stories and epic trilogies. People play casual, simplistic or linear games, they play esoteric, deep or complex games, and they will do all of this on a wide variety of platforms in a wide variety of situations.

  10. Re:HHGTTG Connection as well... on Doctor Marries Doctor's Daughter, TARDIS Explodes · · Score: 1

    She's the daughter of a Trillian but not the Trillian.

  11. Re:bullcrap on Countering a DMCA Takedown In the Magnet Wars · · Score: 1

    There's no reason a good quality stove shouldn't last you 50 years or more.

    My parents happen to be stove enthusiasts (yes, I know that's pretty weird) and I helped them pull some clandestine intra-family action in order to secure my great-great-grandmother's stove. I have to admit that it's quite a prize, this is a machine that worked through the American Civil War. It currently bides its time until it heats a home again ...and, I suppose, cooks food -- it's just way over powered for such a simple task.

    A stove that lasts 50 years? Get off my great-great-grandmother's lawn!

    P.S. I love the subject line for this thread.

  12. Re:Nuclear Thermal? on SpaceX Unveils Heavy-Lift Rocket Designs · · Score: 1

    Space is the "somewhere else".

    Did you just declare the ultimate NIMBY?

  13. Re:False assumption on Sentence Spacing — 1 Space or 2? · · Score: 1

    Hey, neat. Thanks for checking it out!

    I took a look at MS Word 2007 on the PC I'm sitting in front of when I wrote my previous comment and didn't find any difference in the space, but I didn't use anything more fancy than a ruler. I'm happy to accept your findings. Perhaps there's a difference between Word on a PC and Word on a Mac?

    So I accept the concept you're presenting, but it doesn't seem like an actual solution to the problem. If there is always more space after a period, there will be spaces after sentences, sure, but there will be spaces within sentences as well, which defeats the whole point. Does that make sense?

    In order to have additional space only after sentences, you must have a decision made by something that can parse actual grammar. Machines cannot do this consistently. People can. ...Err, people are more likely to be able to. ;)

  14. Re:False assumption on Sentence Spacing — 1 Space or 2? · · Score: 1

    a word processor will space a document properly, such that the space between sentences IS wider than a space between words.

    MS Word certainly doesn't do this. What you're describing is an extremely difficult problem, having software find the beginning and ending of sentences. I'm pretty confident that no standard word processing software even attempts to tackle this problem, but I'd be happy to be surprised -- what word processor do you think does this?

  15. Re:False assumption on Sentence Spacing — 1 Space or 2? · · Score: 1

    we could simply write software to be intelligent enough to automatically add a space between sentences when it detects a period-space-word starting with a capital letter.

    This would wreak havoc on citations in legal documents.

    The truth of the matter is that it's simple to remove the two spaces but difficult to add them. The best practice, therefore, is to type the two spaces by default.

  16. Re:Terrorism is rare on Top Secret America · · Score: 1

    What about the bombing of Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1970?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Hall_bombing

    If you're just working off the numbers, this was probably not as large a disaster as the World Trade Center disaster or the Oklahoma City bombing, but it has great historical significance nonetheless.

    I just happen to know that one off the top of my head and I'm sure there are other people who could do the same, but I imagine that people who actually know what they're talking about could provide an extremely dismal list on this topic.

  17. Re:video games are an escape from reality on Chinese Internet Addiction Boot Camp Prison Break · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Video games can provide an escape from reality. They can also be a unique tool for understanding the world.

    These two statements are also true of any media you can name, or which will ever be invented -- books, magazines, newspapers, movies, music, theater, dance, whatever.

  18. Re:Arbitration is Binding on Emergency Dispatcher Fired For Facebook Drug Joke · · Score: 1

    Arbitrator also says my link sucks. Here:
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-binding_arbitration

  19. Re:Arbitration is Binding on Emergency Dispatcher Fired For Facebook Drug Joke · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Arbitration in the US is binding.

    Unless it's non-binding arbitration. The TFA only says that the woman "appealed to an arbitrator."

  20. Re:A big Slashdot-y example of this from my life on Rich Pretexter, Poor Pretexter · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That's a pretty good point. On the other hand, it's also true that public perception of this type of activity changed dramatically in the year that passed between those two events and the response by authorities had shifted considerably. 1989 was a pretty unique year.

    For this reason, it's somewhat difficult to compare the two situations on the same grounds. It is unlikely that economic disparity is not the only influential factor.

  21. Re:Modern Warfare: The Return of Christ on Religion in Video Games · · Score: 1

    Christ is risen, and boy, is He pissed.

    I think the tagline you're looking for is:

    Jesus Is Back and He's Mad as Hell.

  22. Re:[verb] like a [animal] on $10M For Unmanned Aircraft That Can Perch Like a Bird · · Score: 2, Funny

    In the future I expect robots that can

    • fly like an eagle

    They would fly like an eagle, to the sea, fly like an eagle and let their spirits carry them?

  23. Re:Unfortunate on Square Enix Shuts Down Fan-Made Chrono Trigger Sequel · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's fourteen titles off the top of my head: Half-Life, Neverwinter Nights, Quake, Doom, Unreal, The Sims, Spore, Elder Scrolls, Civilization, Fallout 3, Bard's Tale, Lode Runner, Boulder Dash and Raid on Bungling Bay.

    Some of those titles can be broken down into additional individual games (for example, The Sims was a significantly different game from The Sims 2, especially from a modding perspective) so this list could be expanded quite a bit. Some of them make modding a necessary part of their structure (Spore) and others wouldn't have garnered any attention at all if not for their mod tools (Raid on Bungling Bay) and others have just been outright owned by the mod community (Doom). And it's worth noting that even this short list of games represents a substantial portion of the entire market for video games on personal computers. The Sims and Half-Life alone have sold more games than the rest of the top ten list put together, and that includes World of Warcraft.

    So, yes, modding is a significant factor in the success of "a lot" of great games on the PC.

  24. Re:Outstanding. on North Korea Launches "Communication Satellite" Rocket · · Score: 1

    Coup d'etat. Replace the paranoid, militaristic North Korean regime with a new government--possibly one backed by the United States or her allies.

    Or, more likely, a new government backed by China. Otherwise, how has the situation not simply escalated?

  25. Re:concerns of racism? on Review: Resident Evil 5 · · Score: 1

    "The game makes no effort to distinguish from zombiefied africans from non-zombified africans, both are presented as "The Other". . . . The only identifiable black character is a ready-for-hollywood light skinned Anglo action chick, "one of the good ones"."

    You didn't find any difference between the presentation of Josh Stone's "Delta Team" and the zombies? Or did you not play the game up to that point? Or did you not play the game at all?

    Delta Team is presented as a mixed-race group of powerful, competent soldiers who save the main characters at the end of the first chapter of the game. After that event the game goes completely through the looking glass (as if it wasn't there already) and you'd be hard pressed to make a case for anything but the most distorted reflection of reality from there on out -- the remaining 85% of the game.

    Sheva's unlockable outfits are hilariously ridiculous but before you go getting all offended, you might want to check Chris' second unlockable outfit. All of the material there is quite clearly done tounge-in-cheek, when taken as a whole.