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User: neminem

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Comments · 1,608

  1. Re:Why ban? on Blizzard Bans 100,000 Cheaters In Massive "World of Warcraft" Ban Spree · · Score: 1

    That already totally exists, in the form of private servers. Private servers are full of people who might/will cheat, and you are probably not going to get banned for cheating. (They're also generally buggy as frack, but still.)

  2. Re:How long before I can get... on Here Comes the Keurig of Everything · · Score: 1

    Hodor?

  3. Re:they should have asked ebay on World's Rudest Robot Set To Simulate the Fury of Call Center Customers · · Score: 1

    Would you really want to do business with the company again at that point, anyway?

  4. Re:Chris Cox on Top Publishers To Post News Stories Directly To Facebook Timelines · · Score: 1

    The coincidence presumably being that they're a bunch of Cox?

  5. Re:and nearly any other drug you can imagine on After Over a Year of Police Action, Dark Net Black Markets Still Growing · · Score: 1

    Indeed. Do they have ThreeEye from the Dresden Files? Spice melange from Dune? Glitterstim from Star Wars? Jet from Fallout?

  6. Confusing title on Will Robot Cars Need Windows? · · Score: 1

    I clicked on this article expecting it to be another instance of Microsoft deciding to play follow the leader, that if Google is making a Google autonomous car, then drat it all, we must have a Windows Car! Even though that makes no sense! I was going to say, frack no, robotic cars definitely do not need Windows, please god no.

    The answer to the actual question posed, is of course, no they don't technically *need* windows... you don't *need* to give passengers in busses or trains or airplanes windows, either, but you do it anyway, because natural light is good, and because, yes, why *wouldn't* we want to look outside? (Also because there still needs to be a way to take manual control in case of emergency, in which case we'd need to be able to see out for that.)

  7. Re:$250 on Examining Costs and Prices For California's High-Speed Rail Project · · Score: 1

    From what I can tell, the Acela is kind of a ripoff. I just looked into the train from DC to NYC. Acela is 250 bucks, and takes a little under 3 hours. Or I can take the normal train for like a quarter of that, which only gets me there like 20 minutes slower. That seems like a pretty good tradeoff...

    LA->SF, on the other hand, is way further away, so a high speed line would definitely be worth it at, or even perhaps a tiny bit above, the cost of an equivalent flight - trains are way more comfortable, and tend to leave out of more conveniently central locations, or at the very least, tend to leave at locations more conducive to using *existing* public transportation.

  8. $732,713 is a statistical tie? on Poker Pros Win Against AI, But Experts Peg Match As Statistical Draw · · Score: 1

    Awesome. I want to play poker with these guys... we can just draw right at the beginning, and they'll give me 700 grand, right?

  9. Re:What does "breaking bad" mean? on 'Breaking Bad' Crypto Ransomware Targets Australian Users · · Score: 2

    Stupidly easy google search, "break bad" (because obviously "breaking bad" will just get you hits for the show): http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/...

    I didn't know that either - I always assumed it was a made-up phrase for the show that just sounded cool, but apparently it's a midwestern phrase meaning, appropriately, "to turn to a life of crime". Of course, now if you say someone's breaking bad, anyone, or at least anyone outside that geographic region, will just assume it means they're cooking meth. I've heard it used that way colloquially a few times already.

  10. Re:Makes Skynet's job on Amazon's Delivery Drones Will Be Able To Track Your Location · · Score: 1

    That post lacked obligatory xkcd, so I have fixed that for you.

  11. Re:So now we're against government regulation? on Voting With Dollars: Politicians and Their Staffers Roll With Uber · · Score: 1

    The difference is that industries like energy companies and internet providers are generally trying to ram through their business models which consist primarily of "screw you, customers, we're a monopoly and you can suck it!", while Uber is attempting to bypass regulations that are primarily designed to *protect* a monopoly (taxi companies - there might be multiple, but if they all work together, it comes to about the same thing). More competition is *always* good for consumers.

    Could Uber use a bit more regulation? Maybe. But taxi companies' regulations are *not* primarily about insuring safety, unless you count the financial safety of the taxi companies.

  12. Re:What could possibly go wrong on Self-Driving Big Rigs Become a Reality · · Score: 1

    Ok, at that point you're just describing highway robbery. What's to stop you from doing 100% exactly the same thing you just described on a truck right now? Human truck-drivers are going to stop just as much if they see a car parked in the middle of the road they're trying to drive on.

  13. Re:Problem? on Google Can't Ignore the Android Update Problem Any Longer · · Score: 1

    My phone is on 4.1.2 (I just checked). I haven't run into a single application I couldn't run on it. Fragmentation just means a bunch more work for app developers to support multiple environments, but they should be used to it - after all, it's still massively superior to the literally millions of different potential environments a PC application could be run under...

    That said, I have a device that runs Android 1.6.x. That is basically equivalent to not even running Android, and was even when I got it several years ago. But even 2.x is sufficient for most things.

  14. Re:Deliberate provocation on Two Gunman Killed Outside "Draw the Prophet" Event In Texas · · Score: 1

    If they're really truly free speech people? Probably most of them. Long as you aren't doing it in a public space, not because of the bible, but more because of the defecation.

    In any event, disregarding the difference between drawing a picture of something and taking a *dump* on it, there's an event huger difference between saying "taking a dump on something I hold dear is massively disrespectful and I will be angry if you hold a rally and encourage people to do it", and "taking a dump on something I hold dear is literally grounds for me to go up to you and shoot you to death". One is reasonable, the other is... not so much.

  15. Re:Color me Old Fashioned. on SurveyMonkey's CEO Dies While Vacationing With Wife Sheryl Sandberg · · Score: 1

    Good for her. Why should she? Maybe it made sense when women were expected to stay at home, but these days, just getting married doesn't in any way remove any part of a woman's identity any more than it does a man's, so why should one lose their last name and not the other? (When we got married, we were totally going to hyphenize, until we actually looked into how much effort it'd be, and decided to just both keep our original names, at least until/unless we ever have kids. Note: I'm male.)

  16. Re:Not just managers on Yes, You Can Blame Your Pointy-Haired Boss On the Peter Principle · · Score: 1

    Because engineers, sysadmins and tech support drones are generally still doing the job they were hired to do initially. Maybe they've been given additional responsibility they didn't deserve, but it's still the same *type* of job. Management is the weird one out, because it's so common for a company to say, "you are an excellent engineer/sysadmin/tech support person/etc., so we are going to 'promote' you to a job you are totally unqualified for, have no desire to do, and that isn't why we hired you." That doesn't generally happen with other jobs.

    I'm very happy that I've so far managed to avoid that fate (by very clearly and consistently announcing to basically everyone just how much I like engineering-type work, and how much I would not like to be given a job where my primary responsibilities were not actually directly creating things.) It has come up several times. I really don't understand the sadly-common feeling that programming is for peons, that if what you want to do with your life is program, you are somehow limiting yourself, and that people who want to program should instead want to tell *other* people what to do and fight office politics fights. Both are essential, but they are not even remotely the same type of job.

  17. Re:IT workers could fix situation, but won't on Disney Replaces Longtime IT Staff With H-1B Workers · · Score: 1

    I feel like most companies that would pull that to begin with, would go more like this:
    Management: "train your replacement, or you do not get any severance."
    Entire IT staff: "you try to pull that bullshit, and we all walk out"
    Management: "fine then, you're all fired, we'll just hire your replacements and not train them, we don't give a crap."

  18. Re:Home or Phone? on Uber Testing Massive Merchant Delivery Service · · Score: 1

    My complex has never signed for packages; there wouldn't even have ever been that ability, nobody would be there to sign for it. If a package can be dropped off without signature, they'll just leave it in the lobby sometimes (occasionally they don't feel like it, which is annoying).

    However, given that I have a job and am thus not there during the week during the day, if I know a package will require a signature, I have it *sent* to my work. My work receives packages all the time, so it doesn't mind occasionally signing for an employee's package and having that employee drop by the mailroom at the end of the day to pick it up. You could see if yours does that too.

  19. I love cloudtobutt on IBM CIO Thinks Agile Development Might Save Company · · Score: 3, Funny

    "...as it attempts to transition from a hardware-dependent business to one that more fully embraces my butt..."

    Well, that about sums it up, IBM-wise.

  20. Re:Quite an image actually on Crashing iPad App Grounds Dozens of American Airline Flights · · Score: 1

    That would be "grinds" (or "ground"), not "grounds".

  21. Re:Link to the Onion on The Sun Newspaper Launches Anonymous Tor-Based WikiLeaks-Style SecureDrop · · Score: 1

    I saw your post title, and was super confused. Normally when someone says "Link to the Onion", it looks more like, say, this.

  22. Re:Bring your products to new cities on Comcast Officially Gives Up On TWC Merger · · Score: 1

    That'd be nice - even if I have no desire to ever touch Comcast with a 100 foot pole (unless it had a dagger on the end and I could touch them... forcefully), just having them in the same city would force whoever was already there to stop sucking so much themselves. Sadly, there are usually laws specifically designed to protect whichever ISP is already entrenched, because competition hurts whoever already has a local monopoly, and money can do almost anything. Amazingly, not this time, but still, this was an outlier.

  23. Fine by me... on Microsoft, Chip Makers Working On Hardware DRM For Windows 10 PCs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You know the content will still be uploaded to thepiratebay literally within seconds of release (or sometimes before... thanks, anonymous GoT leaker!), right? And everyone who wants to pirate it will just do that still? So this is only going to hurt, or at least vaguely annoy, people who weren't going to pirate it anyway?

  24. Re:And no one cares on How and Why the U-Pick Game Marathon Raises Money With Non-Stop Gaming (Video) · · Score: 1

    Now I'm imagining "competitive Comcast customer support calling", where teams compete to see who can get Comcast to actually fix their problem fastest.

    I would totally watch that over football.

  25. Most ironic comment on Comcast Officially Gives Up On TWC Merger · · Score: 1

    From Consumerist, where I got this news a couple hours ago: "Comcast wonâ(TM)t want to sit idle; theyâ(TM)ve got $45 billion burning a hole in their pocket and will want to spend it on something."

    Gee, maybe if they would take that 45 billion dollars and invest it in not totally freaking sucking at everything, the public wouldn't hate them so much and want to block their attempts to get any bigger than they already are? Maybe invest in internal infrastructure and better processes so that they don't keep getting egg on their face for yet another boneheaded thing they did every other month?

    That said, it is pretty impressive that the US government is actually doing their job for once, of protecting us against corporations with giant moneybags wanting to come in and screw us over for their profits, instead of just taking the bribe^Hdonation and rolling over like normal. Good job! (Until next time.)