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User: LeftCoastThinker

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  1. Right, but copyright functions significantly different from patents. If you write a novel about green monsters from space invading earth and dying because of disease, and I write a similar novel with essentially the same story line but do not copy any passages from your book word for word, both works stand on their own, and mine is not infringing on yours.

    Similarly, if I write code that executes online transactions, and then you write code that executes online transactions without copying my code, both should be allowed, and copyright would allow this, whereas with patents, I could sue you for patent infringement (as has happened) for duplicating the effect of my code (rather than copying it word for word in whole or part, which is what copyright protects).

    Disney on the other hand has trademarked Mickey Mouse (and likely it's other characters), which gives them rights to the characters in perpetuity (similar to what the heirs of Edgar Rice Burroughs "Tarzan" did to protect that character) but Steam Boat Willie etc will become public domain.

    The length of copyright is also out of hand (life plus 70 plus years). It is annoying, but it is not damaging the productivity and stifling innovation like software patents have been, since it is a much more limited, narrow scope than patents.

  2. Re:Curse them for revealing the DNC's voter fraud! on US Intel Officially Blames the Russian Government For Hacking DNC (theverge.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This exactly. We already know that Hillary has lied to congress (said she turned over all her emails while holding thousands of classified, work emails back; that's a felony), lied to the American people numerous times, and now, a disenfranchised DNC member (Seth Rich) leaked information to Wikileaks showing how Hillary stole the primary from Bernie Sanders and when Hillary found out about it she or someone else at the DNC had him murdered. So you can vote for a lying, murderous career politician lawyer (Hillary), Donald Trump, or vote for a libertarian like Gary Johnson who actually wants to protect the constitution and the freedoms that it gives us. The two party system only works until we stop voting like lemmings for one or the other and pick the best candidate.

    If a third party candidate were ever going to win (and ever needed to win) now is the time. Both Hillary and Trump have sub 50% likability numbers, and if all the people who dislike Trump and Hillary voted for Johnson, we would be close to a three way tie out of the gate.

      OTOH, as Kaang (or was it Kodos) once said "Go ahead and vote for a third party; throw your vote away! It's a two party system people, you have to vote for one of us..."

  3. This. A simple google image search shows no zoomed out large scale images of this supposed patch. You can bet if there were one, we would have photos of it plastered everywhere. Yes, there are zoomed in pictures of floating trash, but that is hardly some great floating mat of garbage. Further, we know that under direct sun plastics rapidly break down.

    The ocean is the world's toilet. Even first world nations expel their treated sewage into the ocean. Third world nations dump their raw sewage into rivers that eventually empty into the ocean. They also dump their trash into these rivers that empty into the ocean (see Brazil as one example among many). This trash rapidly decays and sinks, except for plastic, which tends to float around for a number of months before breaking down.

    http://www.latimes.com/world/m...

    If we are really concerned with this kind of trash making it into the ocean, I suggest we focus our efforts on stopping the source. The US and most other first world countries contribute very little plastic waste to the ocean. We bury ours in landfills and only the errant wind blown bag from a beach party makes it into the ocean (as evidenced by the fact that our beaches are usually devoid of anything more than the occasional piece of trash). On the other hand, undeveloped countries are putting tons of plastics and other garbage/toxins into the ocean every day that do take time to decompose and can cause damage. The best bang for your buck is to bring your big ass net or sieve to Brazil and mount it at the mouth of their rivers. You will catch metric tons of trash every day. Just put the net on a conveyor that dumps it all back on land and then haul it to a land fill. Doing that at the mouths of 20 of the largest rivers around the planet would go a long way towards cutting the pollution, but that is a non PC, real world solution to the problem, so it will probably never happen.

    The peasant culture may not be ready to accept basic environmentalism yet, but that doesn't mean we are powerless to mitigate their pollution. And we sure as hell are not going to accept the blame for this pollution/littering, when it is very clear who is doing it these days.

  4. Re:Toys on FAA Sued Over Federal Drone Registry (technical.ly) · · Score: 1

    Point 1 - assume you are not a place you are legally allowed to be. I.E. over my property/over a sidewalk/street with children playing in it. Regardless of the drone position, photographing the inside a home through the windows or doors without the owners permission for the purpose of observing someone in a state of undress is the definition of peeping in most states, which is a crime. If you cant legally do it yourself, neither can your drone. The fact that you think you can is one of the reasons the FAA is cracking down and licensing drone operators etc. Once you get a misdemeanor for peeping, you will know who is ignorant of the law.

    Point 2 - Not sure what you are all excited about. I said nothing about optical zoom, just resolution. Many if not most multirotors over $100 have an HD camera attached. It is trivial to slap a Gopro on the higher end models, which will shoot 12MP stills and 4K video. There is no need for zooming in if your drone is capturing 20 feet from the target, but even at 100 feet from your target, with 4K video you can do quite a bit of digital zooming and still have a decent image. My point is it would be different if we were talking about a 320x240 video capture, which would be sufficient to navigate the drone, but at 100 feet up, spying on someone would be irrelevant because they would only be maybe 8 pixels.

    Point 3 - I believe I stated it was trespassing (typically, unless you live an an apartment or asses to elbows development, if you are in front of a residential window, you are trespassing, there are minimum setbacks from the street/other houses on most homes), but as I covered above, even if you are not trespassing, you can still be guilty of peeping.

    Yes, drones are quite loud, but the issue is not covert observation, but the difficulty in tracking the operator down. If the operator is out of LOS, right now he can fly his drone over the neighborhood (and this has happened multiple times to a friend of mine) and fly the damn thing around over peoples back yards, looking in their 2nd story windows, and short of getting out a shotgun and shooting it down (illegal) there is nothing currently that can be done, and the local LEOs have no clue how to deal with it. Whether it is some 40 year old pervert trolling for nudes of his neighbors, some 14 year old kid or a burglar casing houses, he is violating trespassing laws and peeping laws as well as violating FAA regs by operating his drone beyond LOS and dangerously low over playing children/people/moving vehicles and he/she needs some attention from LEOs. At minimum this kind of behavior should ban you from drone ownership/operation for 5 years. Second strike is a lifetime ban.

    At some point LEOs are going to have to start using a shotgun or something to take down these rogue drones so they can trace their serial numbers back to the owner and then hunt them down and charge them with the appropriate violations. (Don't tell me it is unsafe to use a shotgun to take down a drone, there is risk, but is is minor, shotgun shot loses its velocity rapidly and is designed to be safely fired up into the air.)

  5. Re:Anything important will be preserved on Vint Cerf Warns About the Perishability Of Human Knowledge (vice.com) · · Score: 2

    Honestly I worry more about our ability to destroy our data than time eating away at the data. A few dozen first strike EMP detonations could take out most of the internet infrastructure and electronics on the planet. I still have a lot of my reference books and journals laying around, but I have many colleagues who literally hunt for paper to get rid of both at home and at work. They think that it simplifies their life to have everything on their PC/tablet/phablet/cloud. Those types will be pretty much useless after such an attack, and people with hard copies are slowly disappearing.

  6. Epinephrine is old and is or should be generic. The auto injector is a drug delivery system, and should I think be treated separately.
    It could deliver any injectable drug no?
    That there are no effective competitors to Mylans EpiPen reeks of impropriety.
    This is DEMOCRAT CRONY capitalism at its finest. Every DEMOCRAT wants government mandates and protection for its monopoly. More money that way. When poor people get money from the government it is socialism, and when DEMOCRATS gets money from the government it is capitalism?

    FTFY. The CEO of Mylan Heather Bresch is the daughter of Democrat Govenor/Senator Joe Manchin. We already know that she lied about having an EMBA from WVU and used her fathers influence to get a fraudulent, backdated degree. After a big SNAFU over it, a number of WVU top executives had to step down. She is politically connected and likely behind the failures of the other injectors. The EpiPen was invented in 1977. The technology is ancient and simple and Mylan doesn't even make it, they buy it from Pfizer for $34.50 each...

    Capitalists want the government to ensure a fair and even playing field, not put their finger on the scale for one side. Corrupt businesses/CEOs may want unfair advantages, but they are not capitalists, they are criminals.

  7. That is the problem for these single source drugs where someone can literally die if they don't have the drug. Do you fork over the $600 for the EpiPen that could save the life of a loved one in the case of anaphylactic shock, or not? Of course you do.

    The reality is that FDA regulators need to fix the price and peg the rate of price increase to inflation for products or drugs that get transferred or bought by another company. Mylan did not invent the EpiPen, and jacking the price of a lifesaving product like that from $50 to $600 is criminal profiteering, the same kind that lands people in jail during natural disasters. Mylan executives should be prosecuted under the same statute. They have no justification for the price increase, they were presumably profitable at $50. The design of the EpiPen did not change or become more expensive to produce in the last 10 years. Perhaps the best punishment would be to invalidate all of the patents surrounding the EpiPen based on the fact that Mylan has abused those patents and already extracted the maximum profit that society should tolerate, seeing that they did not even invent the damn things in the first place.

    When a drug first comes to market, there are very large costs that have to be recovered, and it is acceptable for drugs to be expensive. However, there is just no excuse for buying a 50 year old device from another company and then jacking up the price 5X just to make as much money as possible over threat of someone's life.

  8. Re:Toys on FAA Sued Over Federal Drone Registry (technical.ly) · · Score: 2

    Pretty sure that we aren't going to have a revolution over the regulation of drones. You have no constitutional right to record your neighbor changing clothes through their second story window. The reality is that we have had hobbiest aircraft for a long time as the original article points out, the difference now is that nearly all drones come equipped with an HD video camera, and many can be operated beyond LOS and that is at the root of the problem.

    The reality that the idiot drone operators (not all just the idiots) fail to acknowledge is that your rights end where mine begin. To start with, drone operators need to know the rules and what the consequences are if they break the rules, thus the licensing. Next we need some kind of highly visible ID tags for drones such that they can be identified in flight and traced back to their owner if they are violating the rules/trespass/peeping laws. If you are flying your drone at a drone park, that is fine. If you are hovering 10 feet off the ground in front of my daughters bedroom window, you are trespassing and peeping and need a visit from a LEO. The third step is for the justice system to be brought up to speed on the flying camcorders and prosecute their operators with the trespassing/peeping laws already on the books.

    Remember, your rights end where mine begin. Too many drone operators have been infringing on others property and right to privacy, and now you have the consequence.

  9. Re:Microsoft SOP on Microsoft Bungles This Week's Windows 10 Anniversary Update (zdnet.com) · · Score: 2

    Except that, Apple has rolled out OPTIONAL updates for the past 10+ years with only minor hiccups, and they have a rock solid support setup complete with Apple stores and stand by their products 110%.

    MS is throwing out shit updates that break 10% of their install base after they know there is an issue with their guinea pigs. This has been their SOP for years, but now that Windows 10 has mandatory updates, they will be driving away hordes of customers. With so much of peoples lives on the computer, it is entirely unacceptable to break a PC with a shitty update. These days it is equivalent to an automaker forcing you to update their firmware with a patch that causes 10% of their cars to stop working. With any other industry, MS would be facing a massive lawsuit (oh wait they are being sued). What MS doesn't realize is that the PC industry has matured without them, and they are driving away customers in droves.

    Watch for an uptick of Apple desktops and laptops sales.

  10. Meanwhile on Slashdot the only people actually acting like SJWs are the people who use the term SJW...

    No. Calling out PROGRESSIVE totalitarians is not the same as seeking to actually DO the things (like squelching speech through the power of government) that PROGRESSIVE totalitarians actually do. Though you are performing the approved-by-liberal-elites correct response to being called out - immediately lie about it in hopes that will deflect reality.

    FTFY - While I agree that the progressives have co-opted the liberal title, the reality is that the fascists that we have in government trying to take away your constitutional rights to free speech (oh noes its hate speech, ban it!), gun ownership (guns are bad, right?) or religion (your religion doesn't agree with my world view, therefore I must sue you and take away your livelihood) or association (no, you can't have a male only fraternity) are all PROGRESSIVES who use the label of liberal but generally wouldn't know a true liberal if one bit them in the ass. Very liberal people are known as libertarians, and they have all shifted to the Republican party because the Democrat party is full of fascist Progressives that are diametrically opposed to classical liberalism.

  11. Re:Wherever data is collected, it is abused on Across US, Police Officers Abuse Confidential Databases (ap.org) · · Score: 0

    I have no problem with unseverable liability for gross negligence on the part of LEOs. I think that if they knew they were facing a misdemeanor and $5K in restitution for shooting a family pet when no criminal evidence or behavior is found, they would be much more likely to ignore, taze or pepper spray the dog unless they could show in the body cam that it was a real threat.

    If you fill out a warrant and incorrectly list the address, you should be liable for filling out a false police report plus $10K plus any actual damages incurred in restitution. In situations of life and death, there should be zero tolerance for clerical errors.

    I think that to get a no knock warrant where the police forcibly enter your home, use tear gas or flash bangs, they should have to submit their evidence to a jury first to get that warrant and justify to them why a normal warrant is insufficient. No knocks are at the very edge of constitutionality and should be reserved for situations where there is a known great danger to officers serving a warrant. After they serve it, body cams on all of the officers should be reviewed by a jury with the ability to remove officers from the SWAT team permanently. Accountability encourages good behavior. It might also be a good practice to regularly give SWAT a psychological eval and have them attend a course on professionalism. In some of these cases, it seems that once they are in control of a scene, they need to remember the presumption of innocence still applies.

  12. Re:Pay your fair share! on Across US, Police Officers Abuse Confidential Databases (ap.org) · · Score: 0

    A medium of exchange. Some way to normalize the value of the hours that you work with the goods and services that you want in return.

  13. Re:Pay your fair share! on Across US, Police Officers Abuse Confidential Databases (ap.org) · · Score: 0

    "the vast majority of terrorists in America are white"

    I suspect you are trolling, but on the off chance that you are serious:

    Only if you redefine the meaning of the word terrorist. In the last 16 years, virtually every terrorist attack in the US and in fact on the planet has been radical Islam in origin. Not sure how you square that circle.

    http://www.wnd.com/2015/07/big...

    https://www.thereligionofpeace...

    Deranged gunmen with a history of mental illness and road rage/workplace violence do not count as terrorism, no matter how hard you squint at it. Those are baked into our society and something that we can work on with involuntary commitment reform and more effective policing. Terrorism is an external threat created and bred by Islamist countries to deflect the internal anger over their own deficiencies onto the American people.

  14. Re:The most most seriously needed LEO database on Across US, Police Officers Abuse Confidential Databases (ap.org) · · Score: 1

    It sounds like you personally haven't had any experience with the police, but you recount two incidents in a very negative light for your small town sheriffs department. Lets look at them a bit:

    "...an officer in my town shot and permanently disabled a young black man for stealing beer and brandishing a skateboard"

    Since the officer didn't go to jail or get fired, I am assuming that the thief/thug was coming at the officer with the skateboard? I guess in your world, the officer should have let the thug club her in the head a few times? Maybe knock her unconscious and take her gun? Once he was a real threat and had committed more crimes then it would be OK to shoot him? Sorry, that is not the way the law works. LEOs are charged with bringing a suspect into custody and escalating force as necessary to protect themselves and the public. The thug made bad choices and now he has to live with it. The fact that a shot went wild is likely due to the fact that she waited until the last moment to fire, hoping that the thug would back down. Point blank shots are more likely to be wild as your aim point is approaching half a sphere.

    "I saw other officers giving him high fives after he knocked a homeless man's head into the ground and that man had a seizure and died shortly thereafter."

    What was the homeless man doing? Did the officer just prevent the homeless man from knifing a little girl? Police do not knock people around unless they are resisting arrest or otherwise need it. In the modern age of cell phone cameras, violent behavior without justification is still an extreme rarity. If the physical altercation was not justified, the officer would have been facing negligent homicide charges because the man died.

    I guess crap pay is relative, $48k is pretty low around here.

    Do you have a few drug convictions that you don't want to get out? Maybe you beat your wife and aren't too proud of that? If you aren't a criminal, I'm not sure what you are worried about. If a LEO does do a background check on you, it will come back with nothing other than name and address, like mine does. Convictions are not exactly confidential information, any citizen can request a criminal background check on a roommate or tenant etc. At least in my book being a LEO gives them the right to find out about anyone they are interacting with, on or off the clock.

    I'm not sure why people are so excited about this, its not like they are listening to your phone calls or reading your email...

  15. Re:The most most seriously needed LEO database on Across US, Police Officers Abuse Confidential Databases (ap.org) · · Score: 1

    In response to your first point: LEOs are never really off duty. They take off their uniform, but they are usually armed because the criminals they put away might come after them etc. Think through your assertion. What happens to a LEO who starts dating a drug dealer without knowing it? She could be pulled over for a broken tail light and if her dope dealing boyfriend drops his stash in her car, now what would be a legal problem for any of us is a career ending problem for her.

    Same thing with neighbors. I used to live next door to a LEO. Everyone in the neighborhood knew he was a cop. We would sometimes call him if there was an issue in the neighborhood and he would look into it. In order for him to interact with the neighbors I want him to know which ones have a criminal history, a violent history etc. I could care less if he looked me up and found out I had a speeding ticket 15 years ago.

    Regarding your second point. Suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but until you are in custody, you are not in a controlled courtroom setting. You could be armed and intent on murdering police until they can kill you. The moment a police officer starts to interact with you, he is collecting clues, both verbal and non-verbal. If you are telling him that you are a criminal, or a threat to him, he has every right as a LEO to exert as much force as is necessary to keep himself and the public safe. Disobeying, talking back, hiding your hands, running, reaching for things are all good ways to get shot, and the officer will be perfectly justified as well. Disrespect the authority of the police at your own peril.

    Little known fact: resisting arrest is the most dangerous interaction between police and suspects. If someone, either an officer or a suspect are going to get shot, this is when it will happen. Virtually zero people in the history of the US have been shot while complying with every police command and moving in a slow and calm fashion. The hands up don't shoot lie in Ferguson was just that: a lie, proven by 5 black eye witnesses on the witness stand in court. It was so incendiary because we expect the police to show restraint when suspects are compliant. And the fact is they do as was proven in court in the Ferguson case!

    Regarding your last point, you may want to do a little research. In nearly all jurisdictions, disobeying verbal police commands and concealing your hands or reaching into an area that could conceal a weapon are legitimate grounds for a police officer to shoot you, and it will be classified as a legit shooting. For your own safety, you need to educate yourself on this.

  16. Re:The most most seriously needed LEO database on Across US, Police Officers Abuse Confidential Databases (ap.org) · · Score: 1

    I did not attack you personally, I pointed out that your position flies in the face of reality based on the facts that I cited in my post.

    If we are giving paid leave to LEOs who murder innocent civilians as a matter of course, then it should be easy to give me five examples of cops from 2005 to 2010 (so we give the justice system time to investigate and prosecute them) who murdered people and were not prosecuted (we have over 800,000 LEOs in the US). Shooting deaths in the last 18-24 months cannot yet be judged because the investigations in many cases are still ongoing.

    You cite one 911 call where there was a miscommunication by the dispatcher (not a sworn officer) and conflate that with cops murdering people for fun? It was a tragedy, for sure, but the criminals still perpetrated the violence in that case, not the police. And that is one 911 call out of ~240,000,000 per year. As I said earlier, no system is perfect, but ours in the US is a damn sight better than most.

    It is unfortunate that the ladies in that case lived in disarmed DC. Elsewhere in the US they might have had a firearm to even the odds, in which case the two knife wielding rapists would have had a much different experience, most likely ending in soiled underwear or a fatal case of lead poisoning, depending on how dumb they were.

  17. He faces up to five years in prison, but prosecutors are recommending a lesser sentence since he accepted responsibility, according to terms of the plea agreement.

    I thought the U.S. had a third party consent doctrine, whereby no warrant is needed if your data is stored with a third party, in this case, Verizon. So, I don't understand what they're being charged with in this case.

    This. I would think that at worst he would be guilty of breach of contract, exposing him to civil penalty, but I'm not sure what they can charge him for, unless it was something along the lines of hacking (i.e. gaining access to computers that he was not authorized to) or corporate espionage.

  18. Re:The most most seriously needed LEO database on Across US, Police Officers Abuse Confidential Databases (ap.org) · · Score: 1

    You seem to have a rather tenuous grasp on reality. There is nothing that is 100% pure/perfect/certain etc. in the real world (except for death and taxes as the saying goes). With the numbers that I cite, the number of bad actors is extremely small. There is no such thing as a perfect organization, but 0.0045% of LEOs who are questionable (not even for sure bad, just questionable) is pretty damn good. Do we condone the true bad actors? No, we put them in jail with the rest of the criminals, but your perception of reality is in direct conflict with the way things are based on the stats. You can put on your tin foil hat and say that the whole system is rigged etc, but at that point we can't even have a reasoned discussion, you are just admitting you are nuts. If it is really that bad, you should try moving to Singapore. I hear they put up with all kinds of criminal behavior over there. Or you could try Somalia or Saudi Arabia, I'm sure their LEOs are much better.

    The next time you hear a window in your house shatter at 2am, try calling the fire department and let me know how that works out for you. Fire fighters are good guys too, but they face a known quantity that has no intelligence of it's own, and even though it might seem like it, is not devious with intent to murder like criminals can be.

  19. Re:The most most seriously needed LEO database on Across US, Police Officers Abuse Confidential Databases (ap.org) · · Score: 1

    While it is true that there are a few officers that deserve jail time (and the do get it most of the time) 99.99% of the LEOs our there are the good guys. They go out every day with a target painted on their back to protect the rest of us for crap pay. I am fine if they want to make sure their neighbors/acquaintances/dates don't have drug or assault convictions. Using that information to blackmail is different, but just having the information is fine as long as they are responsible with it.

    Regarding your post Pudding, with almost every recent, politically incendiary case of someone being shot and killed by police, after protesting, rioting, burning businesses and injuring other police, it ends up being cut and dried justified. In all of the shooting cases, they were doing something criminal or insanely stupid or both.

    Chris Rock has the right idea, and it doesn't mater what color your skin is, don't do this shit:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    The sad thing is that these days it is hard to tell the difference between a joke and real life.

    In 2014, 14,300 people were murdered, while local police killed around 400 people, over 91% of which were easily and immediately justified (armed criminal either attacking or advancing on officers/threatening others, etc.) Another 4% are unclear and actively being investigated, and the remaining 5% were questionable. So roughly 36 shootings per year are questionable (not murder, just questionable, a few might be manslaughter, not murder which requires premeditation and malicious intent). There are roughly 800,000 officers, so any given year there are 0.0045% of officers involved in a questionable shooting (a microscopic minority). On the citizen side, your odds of being shot by police in a questionable shooting are ~1 in 8,000,000. Your odds of dying in a car accident (which we think are acceptably minimal) are 1 in 48,000 in the same year, or 16,667% higher. Unless you are a thug or criminal or act like one, you have nothing to fear from the police.

    There might be one or two LEOs in the entire country who wake up in the morning thinking that they want to kill someone, but your odds of meeting them on the street are massively less likely than you dying in a car accident, and even then, with dash cams and body cams, as long as you don't act like a complete jackass, your interaction will probably still be safe.

    In nearly all of the questionable shootings, the officer makes an error in judgement, out of fear for their own lives brought about by the suspect engaging in certain types of behavior that the vast majority would never do. Put yourself in their shoes. Your job is to catch the bad guy before he hurts innocent citizens, and you have some guy that you stopped for a minor offense and now he is acting very dangerous (putting hands in pockets, not obeying orders, being combative with you, etc.) You have no clue if he just murdered his girlfriend, has $5M in heroine in the trunk, is off his meds or is high out of his gourd. If he disobeys, your job is to subdue him, if he starts to run away, your job is to catch him. If he is not obeying orders and is putting his hands in places where a weapon might be concealed, you have a very reasonable fear for your life. So while not 100% of police shootings are justified, you are a sociopath if you can't at least empathize with the people in our society who put their lives in danger to protect us from the criminal element.

    Here are some other facts to consider:
    http://www.dailywire.com/news/...

  20. Permanent ban is the appropriate recourse on Mozilla's Proposed Conclusion: Game Over For WoSign and Startcom? (google.com) · · Score: 1

    In an industry where trust is essentially the product, and critical to the system, Mozilla should have permanently banned them along with a lifetime ban on the executive level management. Punishment for abuse of the trust system should be harsh if an independent audit shows wrongdoing.

  21. Re:A simple reality check on Scientists Study How Non-Scientists Deny Climate Change (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    It is unfortunate that you appear incapable of having a discussion without reverting to ad homonym attacks, which typically indicates a weak argument in combination with strong emotional attachment to said argument. You might want to take a step back and reconsider your approach and/or your position.

    As far as I am aware I have not named any names, and in general, I think the lot of climatologists are of dubious competency based on the performance of their models (I would probably be fired for models that were that inaccurate) and would never lump them in with Newton and Einstein, both of whom made real contributions to science that had a significant impact on the modern world.

  22. Sounds great, sign me up on ISP To FCC: Using The Internet Is Like Eating Oreos (consumerist.com) · · Score: 1

    Having read the article I agree wholeheartedly. Broadband should be sold exactly the same as oreo cookies. No contracts allowed, no monthly service fees and one price for all, with a 50% markup margin over wholesale. Wholesale backbone data is ~$0.04/GB, so, being generous they can mark it up to $0.06/gb. So my ISP bill, which is now $70/month with a soft data cap and 50Mb/sec speed goes to zero and I pay only for what I use. If I download 500GB/month, I am looking at a $30 bill. On months when I use less, I pay less. Sign me up. Oh, and this would also motivate the ISPs to provide faster service and minimize down time. If you use more, they make more money, but if you cant use their service, they make zero...

  23. Re:Modding != Cheating/Hacking on UK's Top Police Warn That Modding Games May Turn Kids into Hackers (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    I agree that blocking achievements in Fallout 4 when mods are enabled is an over reaction. It is a single player game, and many of the mods add to the game, and don't give the player any kind of advantage. The article seems to conflate modding, which is an acceptable behavior in many cases, with cheating, which by definition is never acceptable when interacting with other people.

    On the other hand, there are any number of highly competitive online games where hacking in order to cheat ruins the experience for other players. Your rights end where mine begin, and in this case every player has a reasonable expectation to a fair and even playing field for all players in the online environment.

    The real world equivalent is steroid abuse, adulterating the ball in football or baseball etc. We don't tolerate cheaters in the real world, whether it is at the pro level or the local little league, there is no reason that should change just because the game is virtual.

  24. Re:Private industry doing it better than governmen on As We Speak, Teen Social Site Is Leaking Millions Of Plaintext Passwords (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Pretty sure they are both doing a crap job at securing sensitive data. The good thing about private industry is that there are laws penalizing them for this kind of behavior, and they can also be sued. For all intents and purposes it is impossible to sue the federal government so there is very little accountability.

  25. Re: A simple reality check on Scientists Study How Non-Scientists Deny Climate Change (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Sorry, that site is a waste of space. I checked out the link, and they are just cherry picking the time frame. By the end of the 70s it was clear that the planet was not cooling. From 67-74 there are ~5 global cooling articles out of 14. While not a majority, there was definite discussion with factions in the journals pushing the global cooling theory. This does not account for who was more vocal with the public which is honestly more significant.

    Beyond that if you check out their "debunking" of the top objections to global warming, they put up straw man arguments, and even then, they can barely manage any science in the "debunking", opting instead to conflate disruptive change "disruptive change has usually caused mass extinctions in the past" with gradually increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere over decades. The man made increase in CO2 levels is hardly a catastrophic event such as a volcanic eruption or meteor strike which happens in a day. They even acknowledge that CO2 levels have been higher in the past and that it was great for life at the time, but now somehow it is bad because man is doing it... except that they have no scientific proof of any kind, just ramblings.