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User: skywire

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Comments · 409

  1. Re:A win for freedom on U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Religious Objections To Contraception · · Score: 1

    I've worked for everything from tiny startups to massive multinationals, and have never been given that option. The larger companies tend to be paternalistic. They think they know better than you do what's in your interest.

  2. Story passes off propaganda as simple reporting on U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Religious Objections To Contraception · · Score: 2

    Those exceptions, which authorize insurance companies to provide the coverage instead of the employers

    If ever there were a case of smoke-and-mirrors, this is it. Saying that the insurer, not the company paying for the policy, is (wink, wink) paying for a benefit offered to the insured under the policy, a benefit the insurer does not simply give away to all comers, is transparently absurd. Whatever you may think about forcing companies to pay for policies that cover particular things, at least be honest about it.

  3. Re:A win for freedom on U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Religious Objections To Contraception · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But an employer has no more right to say how an employee uses a benefit as they do their earned money.

    Oh, really? They do it all the time. An employer's very choice to give you a particular defined benefit rather than the money they pay for it is itself saying how you can use it. Just try to get a large employer to give you the money in lieu of the benefit. Or even to buy a different kind of insurance plan than the one they dictate. Good luck with that.

  4. Re:8 million? on US Government Introduces Pollinator Action Plan To Save Honey Bees · · Score: 1

    Not a rounding error. A decimal point shifted left three places.

  5. Pesky Humans! on Yahoo's Diversity Record Is Almost As Bad As Google's · · Score: 1

    Always self-selecting. If we are to achieve diversity, the US state needs to drop the bourgeois freedom thing altogether, and simply assign its subjects into educational tracks and positions in public corporations.

  6. On the nature of Ikea's lies on Ikea Sends IkeaHackers Blog a C&D Order · · Score: 1

    Any ten-year-old, and any honest judge, knows that "Ikea Hackers" are not Ikea.

  7. Re:I'm sick of people suing government on $57,000 Payout For Woman Charged With Wiretapping After Filming Cops · · Score: 1

    If you believe that money which has been taken from you by threat of violence somehow remains "your" money, you are pathetically delusional.

  8. Toothless Ruling on $57,000 Payout For Woman Charged With Wiretapping After Filming Cops · · Score: 1

    In typical deference to the police, the court has technically ruled against them whilst explicitly communicating to them what will be accepted as a workaround: "a police order to stop filming or leave the area."

  9. Re:Point Roberts on AT&T Charges $750 For One Minute of International Data Roaming · · Score: 1

    This beautifully illustrates the arbitrariness of the whole thing. It costs not a penny more for the signal to cross the political boundary. Even the old Bell system was just one US/CA network, yet they pretended that crossing that imaginary line somehow cost a great deal. It was always a Big Lie, and so is this.

  10. Insanity on Thousands of Europeans Petition For Their 'Right To Be Forgotten' · · Score: 2

    The fundamental flaw in all this is that Google is not a big website full of content that they publish. Google indexes content on other websites. If someone wants to use the state to force others not to publish truthful information about them (questionable in itself), then let them go after those doing the publishing. Google is the wrong target.

  11. Accusation of Anti-Vaccine Stance on Jenny McCarthy: "I Am Not Anti-Vaccine'" · · Score: 1

    >'If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the f--king measles.' That missing line rather changes the tone of her position considerably, writes Phil Plait and is a difficult stance to square with someone who is not anti-vaccine.

    There is nothing necessarily anti-vaccine about her words here. The devil is in the details -- the relative risks of each choice for the individual child, and the risks to the population from the reduction of herd immunity resulting from an individual child's being opted out.

  12. Re:So "nothing" has quantum fluctuations on Mathematical Proof That the Cosmos Could Have Formed Spontaneously From Nothing · · Score: 1

    You're saying that the "standard layman" does not use a common English word in its everyday sense -- in short, that he is not only not technically trained, but is an idiot.

  13. Re:Computable? Simulatable? on P vs. NP Problem Linked To the Quantum Nature of the Universe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    whether the world really exists or could be a simulation/fantasy/etc

    Anyone who thinks there is a distinction between the two has not thought enough.

  14. Re:DMCA is an Illegal law... Take it to Court on Dropbox's New Policy of Scanning Files For DMCA Issues · · Score: 0

    If I read you right, you are saying that it is illegal to use a technological measure such as encryption to prevent others from accessing data that are not copyrighted works. Please cite some authority for that claim.

  15. Insanity on Brazil Blocks Foreign Mobile Phones · · Score: 1

    It may be true, but it is nonetheless a joke.

  16. The Icing on the Cake on Paris Bans Half of All Cars On the Road · · Score: 1

    And to top off the insanity, a so-called "hybrid" (a purely petrol-fired vehicle with regenerative braking) will be exempt, while a non-"hybrid" that gets better mileage will not? Idiotic.

  17. Re:Bitcoin as a government experiment on The Future of Cryptocurrencies · · Score: 1

    Scathingly brilliant, sir.

  18. Re:Crypto-coin advocates = anarchists or libertari on The Future of Cryptocurrencies · · Score: 1

    You failed to engage the implicit argument of noblebeast that states cannot be trusted to manage a currency that they can create by fiat, and offered no evidence that your criticisms of cryptocurrencies do not apply equally to state currencies. But then, spouting unsupported assertions is characteristic of trolls, so I guess my replying means you can chalk up a success.

  19. Re:decimate means to reduce by 1/10 on VA Tech Experiment: Polar Vortex May Decimate D.C. Stinkbugs In 2014 · · Score: 1

    Originally, it meant to reduce by one tenth. It has evolved to mean "nearly wiped out".

  20. Re:We do -- and don't -- live in a simulation on Mathematician: Is Our Universe a Simulation? · · Score: 1

    I had exactly the same thoughts upon first encountering Conway's Life Game. You, too, have probably had difficulty persuading others that the seemingly complex relations within a simple mathematical object or function do not need to be derived on a computing device, but just are.

  21. Re:Maths Argument on Mathematician: Is Our Universe a Simulation? · · Score: 1

    I think a momentary glitch in my wetware would be a more parsimonious explanation.

  22. Maths Argument on Mathematician: Is Our Universe a Simulation? · · Score: 1

    There is reason to believe that a 'real' universe would not also be describable by mathematics.

  23. Re:Alls not well. on Zuckerberg To Teach 10 Million Kids 0-Based Counting · · Score: 1

    >0 is the first index of a typical storage location, it isn't because it is useful for counting, it is because it is base10.

    This is to bring your typo about base10 to your attention so you can correct it before you get flamed.

  24. They don't. on Zuckerberg To Teach 10 Million Kids 0-Based Counting · · Score: 4, Informative

    Iterating through offsets beginning with zero is simply not counting. The writer is confused.

  25. Innocent Man not Arrested! on US Gov't Circulates Watch List of Buyers of Polygraph Training Materials · · Score: 1

    If writers now feel it necessary to inform us when someone with whom any state employee is not perfectly pleased has not been arrested, we are in a sorry state indeed.