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User: dvdeug

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  1. Re:awww jeez, not this $#!^ again on TSA Limits Lithium Batteries on Airplanes · · Score: 1

    It's not true that there have been only four hijackings for the purpose of killing everyone on board. A Fed-Ex flight was almost hijacked by a ride-along pilot and crashed so his family would get insurance money. Samuel Byck in 1972 tried to hijack a plane to try and crash it into White House, and Algerian hijackers took Air France Flight 8969 in 1994 and are believed to have been planning to use it as a flying bomb.

    Another disputable claim is that most hijackings are done by well-trained terrorist groups. A lot of them are done by solitary idiots and looneys; a notorious disaster was caused when an African plane was hijacked and the hijackers refused to understand that it didn't have the fuel to take them to Australia.

    More importantly, while guns would be a bad thing, even with no guns, I doubt many hijackers will be successful any more. Oh yes, Mr. Hijacker, I trust you that you aren't just going to kill us all. But you know, I would trust you a lot more after we kept you out of the cockpit and we broke a few bones of yours for good measure. You've got a bomb; even if you're telling the truth, why should we trust you not to use it?

  2. Re:Duh? on Most Parents Don't Game With Their Kids · · Score: 1

    So do you make sure that she does nothing alone? I seriously suspect that if she has tendencies to do things in the basement with the blinds drawn alone, that she will, whether that is reading, hacking, game-playing, or any number of activities.

  3. Re:Prosecute them. on Wikileaks Releases Sensitive Guantanamo Manual · · Score: 1

    The world respects our word? You mean like Canada, who discovered that the North American Free Trade Agreement doesn't mean anything to us?

  4. Re:From the Report: on Wikileaks Releases Sensitive Guantanamo Manual · · Score: 1

    Nowhere in this document is the word torture mentioned, because (a) one of the ways otherwise good people torture is by rationalizing it as not torture and (b) nobody is going to put the word torture in writing; if you don't write down, people can't use it against you.

  5. Re:Every Federal Law is an enemy of freedom on Russian Software Piracy Crackdown Restricts Free Speech · · Score: 1

    The only reason the Russian government needs these laws as excuses is because other countries with strong federal governments are glaring at them. You don't need a complex system of federal law to shoot someone in the head and throw their body into the dumpster.

    Furthermore, what difference does it make whether it's federal or not? Federal is an artifact of our system, and many people have been harassed by selective enforcement of purely local law.

    Why do we have a government that anyone is afraid of? Because a government that no one was afraid of wouldn't be much of a government. Whether you enforce ten thousand laws, only ten commandments, or only "Thou shalt not murder", someone is going to be afraid that you're going to get annoyed at them for hacking their husband to death.

    If you have but one law, murder, and that enforced at at a local level, there will still be people who are afraid of the government possibly selectively enforcing the law, perhaps on the innocent, perhaps only to be kingmaker among gangs and mobs. The only solution to this is making sure those creating and enforcing the law are behaving in a just manner, which, for all their failures, the current American government (along with those of western Europe and most of the first world) beats a lot of other governments, both currently in existence and historically.

  6. Re:Stupid article on Why the US Consumer Doesn't Deserve A Decent Robot · · Score: 1

    HDTVs are still way more expensive than SDTVs, and a TV usually lasts long enough that many Americans last replaced their TV before HDTVs were really on the consumer market. There's no reason to assume that people who won't spend a lot of money to fix what isn't broken (their existing TV or the SDTV standard) are technology-phobic.

  7. Re:No teeth. on Microsoft XML Fast-Tracked Despite Complaints · · Score: 1

    How about the standard includes *2* different language tagging systems based off the obsolete ISO 639-1 standard, with a frequently harmful mandatory country tag? This means that you can't properly tag Low German, or Scots, or Cherokee, or any one of hundreds of other languages that are supported by ISO 639-2, which will be ten years old next year.

  8. Re:Public Domain on WIPO Creating New IP Rights Over Web Content · · Score: 1

    Sure. It used to be very common for small, non-network TV stations to show whatever movies they could show cheaply. In many cases, that meant movies that fell into the public domain, like many cult sci-fi movies and what not. Several old movie channels, like TCM, also show public domain material as part of their regular fair. I, for one, have recordings of several silent movies that were so old to fall into the public domain.

  9. Re:Who in the feck writes this titles? on Indians Use Google Earth and GPS To Protect Amazon · · Score: 1

    I don't think there are even any aboriginal Americans who like being called "Indians," so it is insensitive as well as ignorant.

    From what I've read, most aboriginal Americans, at least in the US, use the word Indians to describe themselves. Not to mention that they're a large enough group that it would be absurd to expect unanimity among them.

  10. Re:Speaking as an artist... on Cutting out the Naughty Bits Ruled Illegal · · Score: 1

    How are you going to deal with the fact that they will change things? Unless you're George Lucas, someone else is going to make and offer a censored version to the airlines, someone else is going to cut parts to fit it in whatever space CBS had left after the commercials, that someone else will translate it, adapting it as they go along. That's assuming you have any real control at all; if you merely wrote the book or even movie script, the producers may decide to move your story of gay lovers in 18th century Scotland to 20th century New York and cast Meg Ryan and Sean Connery from the leads, and there's nothing you can do about it.

  11. Re:Legal second opinion (from an engineer) on Cracking the GPS Galileo Satellite · · Score: 1

    The timing signal and satellite ephemeris are creative content

    Really? What's creative "I am here..." and "the time is now..."?

  12. Re:Its all about the money on Google Violates Miro's Copyright? · · Score: 1

    Anything created by IBM, for instance, had its origins in the brain of a human being or group of human beings, and the maximum copyright term ought to be the same as it would be had it been created privately by that person.

    The problem with that is that it is hard to figure out who should be credited for many works. A movie may have three writers, one director, fifteen people who created the backgrounds, seven people who created the wardrobe, a couple dozen musicians who worked on the soundtrack, and at least a half dozen other people with misc. creative input. This also makes the length of the copyright the lifespan of the oldest person in the group. Imagine trying to figure when that fell out of copyright even if the credits give you the name of Joe Smith (1 of 100,000 people with that name in the US) and the other people who worked on it.

  13. Re:Its all about the money on Google Violates Miro's Copyright? · · Score: 1

    There is no justifiable reason whatsoever for copyright to last a second past the creator's death.

    Ulyssus S. Grant wrote his memoirs on his deathbed, so that his family would have some money to survive on after he was dead. He wouldn't have done that if copyright had ended on his death.

  14. Re:Make the schools pay for the books. on DRM Lite for Electronic Textbooks · · Score: 1

    Yeah, they'd be happy to force DRM textbooks on a proprietary reader on us. Why would the college care that we couldn't highlight it or refer to it after graduation?

    I'm sure professors would be happy to stop listing books as required, but I'm also sure they would refer to them just as much. You'd still have to buy them, but they'd be listed as recommended or suggested.

  15. Re:Limits will always be tested on When an Algorithm Takes the Wheel · · Score: 1

    Not to mention what happens when inexperienced drivers learn to drive with this stuff and then move to a vehicle without it.

    The logical implication of that, is that we should all be driving Model-T's, since anybody who learned on a more advanced car will have trouble driving a Model-T. I can't drive stick, and my solution to that problem is to never get a car that uses a stick control.

  16. Re:Yes, But. on Is the Physical CD Still A Viable Market? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Fair use isn't trivial. It depends on what you copy (not just how much) and why. Ripping a library CD probably wouldn't be fair use, since it impacts the commercial value of the CD and there's no mitigating purpose.

  17. Re:I can vouch for this. on Loss of Applied IQ Among UK Youth? · · Score: 1

    There are several problems with that statement. It's antedotal, and could just be coincidence. Of course your sister's friends are like her; people tend to gather around similar people. Furthermore, the later children in a family tend to be less intelligent; I could speculate about getting less attention as a child and getting more and more complex social stimulation, but it's a statistical fact.

  18. Re:Yeah, great, guess what on Cringely on Domestic Eavesdropping · · Score: 1

    An enemy of the state? Now that's a scary phrase that strikes me more worthy of a totalitarian country. The problem with terrorists is that they are an enemy of the _people_.

    So that whole part of the text about warrants is just moot? Is it okay to search an entire city block warrantless because there might be a murderer there? More people died on September 11, 2001 from automobile accidents than in the twin towers and the Pentagon. By that measure, we could do warrantless searches whenever you hit the road.

    If he's got good reason to suspect I'm talking to an enemy of the state, he should have no problem getting a warrant. Otherwise, no, it's not reasonable to listen to everyone's conversation. We have had dangerous enemies for at least 50 years now; I think a horrible idea that we should raise a generation or two with the concept that the government has the right to listen into their conversations to protect them from the big bad enemy.

  19. Re:Roadblocks on Debian Team Discusses GPLv3 · · Score: 1

    How many companies produce games for Linux anyway? I don't know that ID has ever used DRM in thier games.

  20. Re:Eduflation? on College Students Lack Literacy · · Score: 1

    Juvenile language learning has little to do with intelligence or later language learning. Children of average intelligence have been known to pick up eight or nine languages with little more than contact with speakers.

  21. Re:Yeah, great, guess what on Cringely on Domestic Eavesdropping · · Score: 1

    It doesn't apply to my international phone calls? Why?

    It says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

    That doesn't say anything about the location. Even if you read "the people" as "American citizens", it still protects your international phone calls to other American citizens abroad.

  22. Re:Blame Windows on Computers Top BBC List of Stress Producers · · Score: 1

    But the car in that instance worked precisely correctly. It stopped within specs, and any problem with that is due to things outside the car's control. A better analogy is a tire blowing out. I don't expect my computer to work when I pour water into it, but under normal operating conditions crashing is soley the computer's fault.

  23. Re:old news on Humans Hard-wired for Geometry · · Score: 2

    There's a big difference between a philosopher's speculations and actual scientific evidence. Kant also believed that our percieved universe was Euclidean and that we couldn't conceive of a non-Euclidean geometry.

  24. Re:Blame Windows on Computers Top BBC List of Stress Producers · · Score: 1

    This is like complaining that your precious family heirlooms were stolen when you left them unattended in a busy location for a couple hours.

    Precious family heirlooms are usually stored in a safe place and only brought out in private once or twice a year. Computer programs are something we have to work with constantly, and having to deal with their failure is unreasonable. They don't have to be written by God himself; cars weren't built by God himself, but manage to be vastly more reliable.

  25. Re:Censure is a common practice on Dental School Blogger Punishment Reduced · · Score: 1

    There's a difference between belittling and critiquing. If he complained that the teacher lectured facing the chalkboard, that's one thing; calling him a cockmaster is another. It's one thing to criticize the observed effects of a program, and yet another to call the creators assholes.