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User: Eskarel

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Comments · 2,494

  1. Re: First Things First on Non-Coders As the Face of the Learn-to-Code Movements · · Score: 1

    Most big name coders also seem to think this idea of trying to teach coding to non coders is rather idiotic. There are better ways to teach the basic skills and the detailed skills are all going to be silly.

  2. Re:Works for Slashdot as well... on EA's Dungeon Keeper Ratings Below a 5 Go To Email Black Hole · · Score: 1

    You can dislike Javascript interfaces, but the war to stop them was lost more than a decade ago. When you bitch about them now, you just look old and resistant to change. Javascript performance on a PC is a non issue for anything as simple as this site and the current UI doesn't work for shit on mobile anyway, so what's there to lose.

    The UI designers are making the decision that Dice doesn't want to maintain a mobile interface which supports touch and an outdated PC version which doesn't so they're upgrading the main site to something touch compatible so they can have everything work the same. It reduces code rework, makes testing and security easier and has a whole mess of other benefits. Whatever you or I might think, they're not going to back down from that, and realistically they probably shouldn't.

  3. Re:Slashdot takes advise from EA on EA's Dungeon Keeper Ratings Below a 5 Go To Email Black Hole · · Score: 1

    Javascript is fine, there's liabilities in terms of allowing arbitrary javascript to execute, but Slashdot doesn't and never has allowed that, adding some javascript onto the site is perfectly fine. It's only really a problem when you're allowing XSS and since slashdot doesn't allow javascript in comments you're pretty safe from that unless the site itself gets hacked in which case you're done anyway(you can do anything you could do with javascript on the server side. Heck Slashdot already has plenty of javascript.

    The reason the current UI has to go is that it's shit on mobile. They've built a new mobile interface, but it's so vastly different from the dated crap they've got currently coded that they have to maintain two entirely different interfaces which to be honest, costs them more money than the anti-javascript brigade will cost them if/when it leaves. Hell, the current UI is fairly crap on a regular PC.

    Even if you believe that Javascript spells a massive change(which it doesn't) a security vulnerability(which it doesn't), or some other horrible violation of your rights, the constant bitching about the new beta is doing more damage the "quality comments' whatever those might be when they're at home than the new UI could even it didn't allow for posting at all, which it does.

  4. Bullshit on Cops With Google Glass: Horrible Idea, Or Good One? · · Score: 0

    Just because the news stories stop after "administrative leave" doesn't mean they don't get punished later.
    Cops get a lot of leeway because they make split second decisions on inadequate information as part of their job, but usually in cases like this the homeless man either wasn't actually all that innocent or the cops actually do get punished.

  5. Re:Can a bitcoin advocate explain.... on Florida Arrests High-Dollar Bitcoin Exchangers For Money Laundering · · Score: 1

    As a non currency a Bitcoin exchange would have been legally liable to report any purchases of Bitcoins over $10,000, but unless they got caught under some sort of investment legislation that would have been it. Regardless of what they should or shouldn't have been doing no one was doing anything about it so whether it was legislated de jure, de facto it wasn't.

  6. Re:Slashdot takes advise from EA on EA's Dungeon Keeper Ratings Below a 5 Go To Email Black Hole · · Score: 1

    Well the thing is there are two different issues with it. The first is that the newest version of the beta performed shockingly under load. I couldn't even get it to load replies, that's unacceptable and needs to get fixed. A few things like playing videos I could give a crap about, but that sort of stuff should be fixed too.

    The "it uses too much javascript" which is the essence of most of the complaints, isn't a flaw. I have no real beef with the actual layout or design, just want it to actually function as it said on the tin.

  7. Re:Slashdot takes advise from EA on EA's Dungeon Keeper Ratings Below a 5 Go To Email Black Hole · · Score: 0

    Please, stop now, a new interface is coming, hopefully it will work better than the beta and I can't stand to hear any more bitching about it.

  8. Re:Works for Slashdot as well... on EA's Dungeon Keeper Ratings Below a 5 Go To Email Black Hole · · Score: 0

    That could be because we're all sick to tears of every single thread being nothing but bitching about the new beta interface instead of discussing the actual topic.

    We get it, the beta is seriously buggy and shouldn't have been release. We get it, Slashdotters have an irrational fear of any kind of UI change whatsoever, even to try and make the site actually usable on a mobile or capable of doing anything interesting. In particular they have an absolutely irrational hatred of all things Javascript even though that battle was, for better or worse, lost on the web more than a decade ago.

    I'm ok with people criticizing the beta, but FFS I wish all the idiots who just scream that they'll quit over the new UI would just quit already, it's been physically impossible to have a decent conversation on Slashdot lately and it's not because the beta doesn't work well, it's because of the idiots the admins are rightfully banishing to the pits of hell where they belong.

  9. Re:Can a bitcoin advocate explain.... on Florida Arrests High-Dollar Bitcoin Exchangers For Money Laundering · · Score: 1

    That's sort of a bit open to interpretation. A bitcoin exchange only looks and smells like a bank if you consider bitcoin to be a currency and it was unclear whether the government saw it that way. You can buy and sell WoW gold for cash for instance but that most certainly isn't considered a currency and Blizzard isn't a bank. Exchanges probably should have been doing this stuff, but they weren't and no one was being or has been charged for activities prior to the announcement.

    In any event no one was reporting and no one was looking, and you could hide a lot of income through the fluctuations.

  10. Re:Matter of time on Florida Arrests High-Dollar Bitcoin Exchangers For Money Laundering · · Score: 1

    The "barter system" doesn't scare anyone because on a macro scale it doesn't work and never has. The fact that it doesn't work is entirely why currency was invented in the first place, nothing to do with taxes, taxes existed just fine in pre-currency economies, they just required your labour or the fruits thereof rather than cash.

    Leaving that aside, Bitcoin isn't a barter system, it's a currency just like US dollars. It's a deflationary currency with huge privacy and security issues, but it's still a currency. Barter is the direct exchange of value for value (goods for other goods or services).

  11. Re:Can a bitcoin advocate explain.... on Florida Arrests High-Dollar Bitcoin Exchangers For Money Laundering · · Score: 1

    Essentially up until fairly recently Bitcoin wasn't considered a "real" thing of value by the US government, which means that bitcoin exchanges weren't required to submit any of the kind of documentation that a bank or forex market would be required to. Specifically in relation to this case, suspicious activity reports. The drastic fluctuations in pricing also made it particularly easy to hide ill gotten gains. Essentially it was under regulated and vastly unstable which made it perfect in a lot of ways for money laundering.

    Now of course you won't be able to move more than 10 grand in Bitcoins through any US exchange without them notifying the feds, and other countries will probably follow suit, China has essentially shut down the Bitcoin market there. You're going to have to house exchanges in seriously dodgy places to be able to do anything anonymously and the risk just probably won't be worth it.

  12. Re:Why do they always make grand inaccurate claims on Florida Arrests High-Dollar Bitcoin Exchangers For Money Laundering · · Score: 1

    It means that the federal government is serious about treating bitcoins as a real currency. Which means that if you're an exchange you better file suspicious activity reports and comply with all the legislation and if you're an individual you better pay taxes on whatever you own. It's going to be incredibly difficult to convert bitcoins from anything like silk road into US dollars because you're going to get reported to the government at some point along the way.

    It also means that pretty soon that anyone doing legitimate business in Bitcoin is going to be identifiable in the transaction history, which is going to be kind of interesting and make the feds wet themselves with glee. Bitcoin is not anonymous, it was only anonymous because the exchanges weren't following the law.

  13. Don't use Jquery on HTML5 App For Panasonic TVs Rejected - JQuery Is a "Hack" · · Score: 1

    If all you're doing is short cutting the ajax call (which has actually been reduced to one line now anyway) the don't add a large third party dependency.
    Hell, if you are building an application which will only ever run on a single platform, don't use JQuery, most of the ugly calls have been reduced dramatically in length anyway.

  14. Re:Is AxialExchange open source? on Former Red Hat COO Helps Health Care Providers Work Together (Video) · · Score: 1

    Given that something like Axial Exchange can't actually work regardless of the technologies in place, they're either insane or fishing for a VC buyout or large government grants. There's a crap load of money to be made in failing to solve eHealth.

  15. Re:Why do Free/Open Source gurus use Google+? on Linus Torvalds Gives 'Thumbs Up' To Nvidia For Nouveau Contributions · · Score: 1

    If it were really a community of developers who want their software to be "free" they'd release everything public domain. That's not what they want. They want software which will remain "free" which requires enforcement of the terms they place on it. Without copyright it is impossible to keep software free as in speech in any meaningful way. Anyone can modify it, keep those modifications private and contribute nothing back.

  16. Re:How about "play by your own rules", eh? on DEA Presentation Shows How Agency Hides Investigative Methods From Trial Review · · Score: 1

    It came about because of activity you weren't smart enough to hide the evidence of. Yes you might never have gotten caught, but you also might have. I'm perfectly happy to have a discussion about whether this sort of thing is good or bad, but you'll get nowhere fast trying to pretend it's unconstitutional because it violates your right to face your accuser. Two centuries of case law indicate that whether the actual interception of your communication is lawful or not(which is a separate issue), parallel construction is perfectly constitutional. It's no different than when a police officer is just convinced you did it and goes searching for evidence, so long as they don't violate your constitutional rights while doing so you've not got a leg to stand on.

    You get to face your accusers, anyone else who might want to accuse you can't and so you don't have to face them. I realise you're either a pro freedom nut job or possibly a pro drug nut job, but please, for your sake, stop trying to live by constitutional rights you don't have.

  17. Re:Omitting Stuff from a Warrant on DEA Presentation Shows How Agency Hides Investigative Methods From Trial Review · · Score: 1

    True, but beside the point, this isn't fruit of the poisoned tree, it's parallel construction.

    This is where you have no admissible evidence against a person, but you know they did it, so you send a police officer to follow them(which is legal in public) or you make a routine traffic stop in states where there is no probable cause requirement for such a thing. You can't get a warrant so you can't search their home or for the most part their car, but you can sure as heck tail them around. It's identical to any case you might encounter but instead of "having a deep suspicion" that someone is guilty, they actually know they are. In the end though if they can't come up with other evidence you walk, just like any other crime.

  18. Re:How about "play by your own rules", eh? on DEA Presentation Shows How Agency Hides Investigative Methods From Trial Review · · Score: 1

    EXCEPT YOUR RIGHT TO FACE YOUR ACCUSERS DOESN'T APPLY HERE.

    You get to face your accuser for the crime for which you are facing prosecution, not any crimes you may have committed for which you are not being charged and not non exculpatory evidence which the prosecution chooses not to use in court. In this case that accuser is the law enforcement officer who caught you red handed with your stash of drugs. You might not like that, but stop pretending you have rights you don't.

  19. Re:Why do Free/Open Source gurus use Google+? on Linus Torvalds Gives 'Thumbs Up' To Nvidia For Nouveau Contributions · · Score: 1

    Just because the ability for someone to run a FOSS environment is largely because of work done by Linus, doesn't mean he's actually a FOSS advocate. He's always used the best tool for the job be that open source or otherwise. Usually he'll eventually write some alternative that fits his needs better (see Git), but I doubt he plans on writing a social networking tool.

  20. Re:How to escape "The Pleasure Trap" on Super Bowl Ads: Worth the Price Or Waste of Time? · · Score: 1

    Your citations include a single internist who has no scientific research to back up his claims and is widely regarded as a quack and a website which stuck "As seen on CNN" on it's home page, both of which are trying to sell weight loss solutions. Then you have an opinion piece by a computer programmer. A very clever computer programmer, but none the less someone with absolutely zero qualifications in the area they are asserting. Again, I know it's popular to claim that with willpower everything could be solved, because then we don't actually have to fix anything.

    As to your comments on women, you're cherry picking statistics and reading articles which also do so. In addition to Dutch women(who do work by the way, just not on average full time) being happier than American women, so are women in most of the rest of Europe including countries where women often do work full time even after being married or having kids, and for that matter a whole mess of countries where women don't work. The men in these countries are often happier(though the correlation isn't quite as clear) as well. This includes a whole mess of former Soviet Block countries which would appear to be barely functioning. These countries have a social safety net supporting women and families where the US most definitively does not. Oddly enough from what I remember the UK, despite having something of a safety net, is actually more generally miserable than the rest of Europe both among men and women, read into that what you will.

    In terms of the 60's vs today. No one said freedom made you happy, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing. On top of that women in the early 60's were expected to be happy with their lives whether they were or not and the people conducting the survey also expected and wanted them to be happy in their lives, take the results with a grain of salt.

    I'm not suggesting we be inactive, I'm suggesting that pretending that if we just regulate something or if people would just try harder the problem will go away is idiotic and unhelpful action. Your evidence for there even being a "pleasure trap" let alone one that is easily "wrestled with" or "escaped" is thin at best. It's virtually impossible to effectively regulate food because all the things that you're trying to regulate are also things that people need to live, you can't just ban sugar, fat, and salt, so you need to somehow regulate the level of consumption of those things, which is impossible without some seriously draconian legislation.

  21. Re:Ads are toxic. on Super Bowl Ads: Worth the Price Or Waste of Time? · · Score: 1

    In this case yes, you are purely correct. I'm far from a libertarian, but the level of regulation and control required to make this work goes far beyond what I consider acceptable. The kind of regulation which would actually solve the obesity epidemic would be little different than mass slavery. We could pass a bunch of idiotic laws to make food more expensive, to ban certain kinds of restaurants, but none of that would actually work. Controlling everyone's daily intake and exercise would, but Jesus Christ that's a scary thought.

  22. Re:Ads are toxic. on Super Bowl Ads: Worth the Price Or Waste of Time? · · Score: 1

    Well yes, but if you add flour to water is that not "adding sugar in any form"?

  23. Re:Ads are toxic. on Super Bowl Ads: Worth the Price Or Waste of Time? · · Score: 2

    And how do you think the internet finds out about a product? Where does the seed for the great tree of pointless bitching which is your average review site come from? If I make the next video game, movie, car, and I'm not allowed to tell you about it, how do you know? How does anyone know? You have no idea how much of the information you get comes at least in part from advertising, even the review sites you go to are sponsored by it. Hell Slashdot, this website on which you and are I discussing this very issue is sponsored by advertisements.

    I'm not suggesting that we don't need some further regulation of advertisement, we almost certainly do. I am suggesting that the idea that all advertisement is evil and must be expunged is idiotic. We couldn't even if we wanted to and if we could it would make things far worse than they are now. Stop thinking in black and white, it never works. Things simply aren't all good, or all evil, not even the things you wish were. Proposing impossible things doesn't fix the world, proposing possible ones does. Suggest some advertising reform that could actually happen, find or start a group pushing that agenda, lobby the government, speak to your community, get their support(yes, that's advertising too), get things changed.

  24. Re:How to escape "The Pleasure Trap" on Super Bowl Ads: Worth the Price Or Waste of Time? · · Score: 1

    The few weeks of discipline crap has been disproved, both scientifically and by human experience over and over again. If all it took was to stop eating sweet crap for 90 days fat farms would have 100% success rate, they don't, not even close.

    It's nice to talk about things like "restructuring our dwellings and towns", but it's a god damned fantasy, nor do I see how any of your other suggestions would really help at all. In the modern era we have freed women from the household. There has been a cost to that in terms of the amount of time that is available for common household tasks, but short of either imprisoning someone in the home again or a radical shift in the way our society functions to something that makes those hippy communes of the 70's look like hard line free market societies, I don't really see how you're going to get it back.

    This is part of the true problem of the modern age. For better or worse the old ways are dead, and can never be resurrected. The average family will never again have a member(s) whose sole duty it is to cook, we will never be primarily agrarian, we will never be largely manual labourers. In many ways that's a good thing, but it came at a price, not least to our health. We can sit here trying to turn back time for the next century and failing, or we can move forward. To what, who the hell knows, hopefully to something better than what we have today, but we can't go back, not even to the past that actually existed, let alone the fantasy.

  25. Re:Ads are toxic. on Super Bowl Ads: Worth the Price Or Waste of Time? · · Score: 2

    But everything does come and always has come filled with sugar. Sure we add some artificial stuff, but every single fruit and seed in all of creation is full of one form of sugar or another. Carbohydrates, complex and simple are everywhere in all our food, the few foods which aren't full of carbohydrates are full of fat. If you think there's any diet on earth where you can escape sugar and survive you're insane. Even vegans are exposed to large amounts of sugar. We love sugar and fat and salt, WE NEED THOSE THINGS TO SURVIVE, we are hard wired to like sweet things, to like fatty things and to like salty things. So, to one extent or another is every species of life on this planet. Yes fast food vendors have something to answer for, but get off your high horse and stop pretending it's just something we can legislate away. You and I and everyone else aren't addicted to sugar because the big bad fast food companies made us that way, we're addicted to sugar because our bodies are still the same as they were a million years ago and we're all of us, every single one of us, wired to scarf down sugar and fat. Some of us more so than others, but all of us to one degree or another.