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User: monoqlith

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  1. Re:How long before civil war breaks out in America on Online Call To Shoot President Ruled Free Speech · · Score: 1

    That must be why 60 Republican House members held U.S. credit-worthiness and the economy hostage on behalf of the Tea Party. You are right that there seems to be a split in the Republican Party between the establishment and the Tea Partiers. In party identification, they both belong to the Republican Party. Similarly, there's also a split in the Democratic Party between progressive and DLC liberals. But, for the most part, both wings go under the name "Democrats."

  2. Re:Wait, they have the internet in Missouri? on Missouri Law Says Students, Teachers Can't Be Facebook Friends · · Score: 2

    Either way it is a penalty and an attempt to regulate freedom of association outside of school. I'm not sure if it qualifies as a rational interest for the government to prevent "friend-ing" online - someone would have to prove that it really does bring down incidences of inappropriate contact/sexual molestation/etc. And if we can't trust our teachers not to molest our children, using Facebook or any other conduit, then aren't there deeper problems here?

  3. Re:How long before civil war breaks out in America on Online Call To Shoot President Ruled Free Speech · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wouldn't say that. What the Tea Party is: a successful re-branding of the Republican Party. There is no "Tea Party." It's the Republican Party.We've allowed the Republican party to effectively change its name after being poisoned by the Bush years, without asking any questions of any kind about its democratic legitimacy (such as whether or not it is actually grassroots and not a magnificent example of astroturfing). It allows Fox News to continue to create the illusion that the Republican Party is a sufficient vehicle to channel the democratic impulses of the right-wing working class, and to keep people with actual libertarian or conservative impulses inside the Republican tent. In fact, the Republican Party is just as corporate as ever, and has no intent on working to shore up its relationship with the working-class in actual policy measures.

  4. Re:deja vous, anyone? on Are Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player Legal? · · Score: 1

    Here was the problem, according to the article.

    Like Apple's service(which is licensed), Mp3.com's unlicensed service did not ask users to upload all the tracks. If it already had a track with the same fingerprint somewhere on its servers, it would just copy and save the user the time/bandwidth of the upload.

    That was the legal snafu that got them in trouble, for some reason. Even though it's functionally identical to having the user upload every single track, the court wants the service to keep a unique, individual copy of every track the user owns. It's kind of absurd, because this means the service will have to store millions of copies of the same song.

    Google does this already. They store millions of extra tracks. That's why they feel like they can win the legal case.

  5. Re:deja vous, anyone? on Are Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player Legal? · · Score: 1

    Oh, no. I'm talking about the labels. The labels are the idiots here. Google and Amazon clearly have rationally weighed the cost-benefit analysis of moving forward without licensing, and decided it's worth it, since their model is akin to the Cablevision model (re: the article) which won its own case about storing content. And they're probably right.

  6. Re:deja vous, anyone? on Are Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player Legal? · · Score: 1

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but there were months of licensing negotiations between Google and the labels that ultimately fell through. I don't know about Amazon.

    (http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/12/what-stalled-negotiations-between-google-and-the-music-industry/)

  7. Re:deja vous, anyone? on Are Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player Legal? · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's not greed. It's stupidity.

    They rejected every deal these services had to offer, not realizing the obvious financial advantage of having an agreement before launch. They walked, and now they have to play legal catch-up in order to ultimately get probably less than they would have gotten if they had just agreed to the worst deal.

    Sigh. Someone on the negotiating team should have known that these companies feel that they could absorb whatever the costs of being sued would be and still walk away profitable. But they didn't. So they have the business sense of gnats.

  8. Re:File size range on BitTorrent Turns 10 · · Score: 2

    Unless the files are zipped into an archive, a lot of clients will let you choose which particular files you download from the torrent and skip all of the other ones.

  9. Re:PC manufacturers and affiliate marketers on Chrome Hits 20% Share As IE Continues Slide · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I can understand why that might be annoying, but I would hardly count Chrome among other installer crap-ware. Chrome is by far the fastest browser I've ever used. It is quite snappy and responsive. It beats out Safari and Firefox- which has become, for me, unusably bloated - on an iMac Core 2 Duo by a pretty sizable speed margin. Since its layout engine is the same as Safari's, this must mostly be due to V8, which is lightning fast. Pretty amazing work, honestly. I can see why it's eating away at Microsoft's market share.

    If you submit, those pesky installation questions will disappear. I submitted, and I'm happier now. If I'm a Google shill, I can deal with that.

  10. Re:You underestimate the value on Ask Slashdot: CS Degree Without Gen-Ed Requirements? · · Score: 1

    How so? Am I missing something or are Bachelor's degree recipients paid a median salary several thousand dollars more than associate's degree recipients and about twenty-thousand more dollars than high-school-only students?

    Or are you saying because graduates with advanced degrees beyond (but including) Bachelor's earned more that specialization is more valuable?

    No, not all liberal arts majors are prepared for all jobs. People with bachelor's degrees, however, earn a lot more because the economy still demands them. Why?

    I don't know the statistics on this but I would reckon most people who have ever taken a gen-ed physics course know that perpetual motion is impossible. I'm biased because I'm a physics major. On the other hand, natural sciences were a gen ed requirement at my school, as they are in most liberal arts schools. Either you know a small subset of admittedly dim-sounding college graduates, or are exaggerating to justify your prejudice.

  11. Re:Should we worry? on Asteroid To Pass Near Earth On Monday · · Score: 1

    Knowing about the threat would sure help us develop those means, though, right? You may have accidentally seen at least one asteroid movie (I don't blame you if you haven't, though). The response to the threat, and all of the attend technological innovations, always comes about *after* the Earth is facing imminent destruction. Seems unlikely, but in a world where Steve Buscemi can be selected to be on an Earth-saving mission to Space, anything is possible.

    "He's got space dementia!"

  12. Re:You underestimate the value on Ask Slashdot: CS Degree Without Gen-Ed Requirements? · · Score: 1

    There's a reason why liberal arts students are still the most economically valuable in the US and people still pay tens of thousands dollars a year to get a liberal arts bachelor's degree. It's not because they're saps. It's because, unlike those who specialized early on, liberal arts students are applicable to almost all of the tasks that are asked of them. They can be assigned to fulfill complex functions and are able to learn on the job, quickly. Instead of narrowing their focus colleges spent an enormous amount of time teaching them *generalized critical thinking* above and beyond what they learned in secondary education. Generalized critical thinking, it turns out, can be applied to nearly everything.

  13. Re:In all seriousness on Turning Memories On/Off With the Flip of a Switch · · Score: 1

    Wow, that sounds like the plot-line for a new uber-meta Michel Gondry indie film. People turn off their memories of watching the Hangover 2 (you're referring to the second one, right? they were both underwhelming), only to end up watching it again. Call it "Be kind. Switch off all memories of or related to the movie Hangover 2." It's gold.

  14. The Real Tragedy for Vancouver? on Using Crowdsourcing To Identify Vancouver Rioters · · Score: 2

    People in Boston, upon hearing about the victory, said "eh." And then resumed shouting at each other in traffic.

  15. Re:Well shit on Terry Pratchett Considers Assisted Suicide · · Score: 1

    You are quite correct in saying that there are no guarantees. However, it is worth pointing out that our failure to cure the common cold isn't due to any scientific inadequacies. It's mostly due to the fact that 99.9999% of all common-cold sufferers get better and do not die. If as much research was devoted to finding a common cold cure as is devoted to HIV research, I'm fairly sure some headway could be made. But it's good that the level of attentions given to these two diseases are so lop-sided.. I wouldn't haven't any other way. I will almost certainly not die of the common cold, although it's possible that I will die of the common cold as an opportunistic infection secondary to AIDS (but thanks to research, not by much.) (I don't have AIDS.)

    As the average life expectancy gets longer and longer, more people are going to end up dying of diseases like Alzheimer's just as research funds were allocated to AIDS in direct response to the unconscionable suffering of the AIDS pandemic. The moral imperative (and basic impulse to self-preservation) for curing it will increase in direct proportion to the number of people suffering from it.

  16. Re:Is the gold rush over? on Ask Amir Taaki About Bitcoin · · Score: 1

    It's all perceived value which floats up and down. It has absolutely nothing to do with history or tradition. Nor does it have anything to do with "real value" - there is no such thing. Value is always imposed by demand. There's absolutely no reason that Bitcoins can't be as valuable as a dollar or gold.

  17. I can hear the conversation right now on State of Alaska Prints Out Palin's E-Mails; Online Distribution 'Impractical' · · Score: 5, Funny

    Alaska official: Hey IT guy, we have 24,000 of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's archived e-mails. That's too many to be stored in electronic form, though, right?

    IT guy: Uhm, why, no, not at all. I'm not sure if you know this, but e-mail is short for "electronic mail," and the Internet is also electronic. In fact, e-mail comes from the Internet. So the e-mails you are talking about are already electronic.

    Alaska official: Right, but converting all of these would be impossible. There are waaaaay too many, right?

    IT guy: No, actually. I could convert them to HTML or PDF format right now if you'd like, and we can post them to the state of Alaska web site immediately.

    Alaska official: What I'm hearing from you is that it is possible but very, very, difficult.

    IT guy: No, it's quite simple, really. I actually did it while you were saying that sentence.

    Alaska official: You're fired.

  18. Re:They Probably Had a Hard Time Finding an OEM on Will Microsoft Release Its Own Windows 8 Tablet? · · Score: 1

    The other thing about Android is this: It is in the exact same position re: mobile devices as Windows was to PCs in the nineties, except for getting it into more devices isn't as difficult for Google because Google doesn't employ Microsoft's coercive, agressive licensing practices. Thus, saturation of devices with Android is likely to be even quicker than the saturation of PCs with Windows.

    So if you are a commodity OEM manufacturer - why not put Android on your TV? Phone? Blu-Ray? Air Conditioner? (Hopefully not.) If I were Microsoft, at this point I would seriously consider giving Windows Phone away to any manufacturer who will take it. It's more important at this point to have a foot inside the mobile business than to be making a profit off of it. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), Microsoft will not do anything without aggressive licensing practices, and since it considers software its main business, they will not do anything with software where the road to profitability isn't direct and obvious, so that kills that idea.

  19. Re:Software To Organise a Heterogeneous Mix of Fil on Ask Slashdot: Software To Organise a Heterogeneous Mix of Files? · · Score: 1

    Also, to elaborate on your specific requirement for "multiple categorisations", and so that I might save myself from a "smart-ass" mod, here's a possible suggestion: http://www.tagsistant.net/ It's a tagging file system. You didn't specify which operating system you were on, but this works with Linux/BSD. Not quite mature, but I could see it potentially going places. At the very least, the idea of implementing tags directly in the filesystem might trickle up to extfs or NTFS or hfs+ eventually.

  20. Software To Organise a Heterogeneous Mix of Files on Ask Slashdot: Software To Organise a Heterogeneous Mix of Files? · · Score: 1
  21. Re:Screening for appropriate skills on Note To Cheaters: Next Time Hire the Brains · · Score: 1

    I'm under no illusions that House isn't firmly in the realm of the fictional. Obviously, every difficult case isn't going to have a happy ending, diseases aren't very clear cut, and doctors never have one patient at a time.

    Still, as someone who has had an intractable, difficult to diagnose, but still curable illness, I went through 8 doctors before one figured out what it was. The illness does have characteristic symptoms - they are multi-systemic, but if one of the doctors along the way had just sat down and thought about how things in the body relate and what was going on, I would have been diagnosed much sooner. Instead they couldn't wait to get me out the door with a new, overpowered prescription that didn't treat the problem(unnecessary prescriptions also raise the cost of health care.)

    No - doctors can't, and shouldn't, all be exactly like House. However, just the thinking like House would be nice.

  22. Re:Screening for appropriate skills on Note To Cheaters: Next Time Hire the Brains · · Score: 1

    (People don't die of those diseases...in rich countries I mean. In poor countries it's still just awful.)

  23. Re:Screening for appropriate skills on Note To Cheaters: Next Time Hire the Brains · · Score: 1

    That seems to be the big problem with medical training.

    The medical community (along with technology) as a whole has done a great job bringing up the baseline life expectancy for the population over the course of the last few centuries. People don't, by and large, die of what used to be commonly fatal illnesses. They can even cure the plague (until it becomes resistant, at least.)

    But when it comes to the rare, outlier, but still treatable cases Drs are pretty much useless, unless you get lucky and get a physician who 1) can think independently 2) has enough time (read: few enough patients) to do so.

    What's scary about TV shows like "House" isn't that the doctor is being praised for breaking all the rules (though that is scary). It's that his diagnostic methods are used by such a minority of physicians that they are considered to be exemplary, even without the rule-breaking.

    To all physicians: Every time you come across a seemingly intractable case, do what House does. And by that I mean DON'T commit every conceivable serious ethical and legal infraction to solve the case, but DO get yourself a white board, write down the symptoms, sit down, and think about them. Think about them for awhile. Remember all those systems you learned in med school? You learned about them for a reason! And it wasn't just to catalog its symptoms and diseases in your long term memory.

    The body: It's like a machine, for crissake! Debug it!

  24. Re:What fallacy? on Does Quantum Theory Explain Consciousness? · · Score: 1

    That's kind of the Daniel Dennett route, but I don't think it holds water. You still have to explain the capacity to have illusions. Experience is experience is experience - you can't dismiss it as nothing, because it's not nothing. It, in fact, is the thing we are most certain of, and the only thing we are rationally justified to believe in. It is the only situation we know of where appearance most definitely is reality. Daniel Dennett wants to deny that this problem exists by saying that qualia is too confused a concept to discuss. But it's just hard to discuss, because there still is a quality of what it's like for me to see red, and there's a reason when I see red that I don't see not-red instead.

    Why? It might very well be impossible to answer that question, but that doesn't mean that experience doesn't exist.

  25. Re:What fallacy? on Does Quantum Theory Explain Consciousness? · · Score: 1

    *Oy. I said it was Jeffrey Chalmers. It's David Chalmers.