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User: epyT-R

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  1. Re:Learning from what other countries have done? on The Savvy Tech Strategy Behind Obamacare · · Score: 1

    only as free as the government will tolerate the expenditure. If it decides your behavior is too costly (or just uses cost as an excuse to kill behavior it finds 'dangerous' to its powerbase), it will get taxed into oblivion, or made outright illegal...and if you're caught, you lose your healthcare...permanently. I prefer the current system over that because I still retain the choice and the power. healthcare is just one of the current beachheads for socialist governments to chip away at liberty in other areas.

  2. Re:Learning from what other countries have done? on The Savvy Tech Strategy Behind Obamacare · · Score: 0

    In general, if you speak your mind and criticize politically correct positions in these countries, some statesman will find a way to get you into jail. After all, there's no freedom of speech in these countries. Oh, and you pay nearly 50% of your income +25% VAT to the state. I fail to see how that's 'fair.' Keeping what you earn is what's fair. The socialist definition of 'fair' is childlike at best.. like a 6 year old screaming that he only got $5 allowance for setting the table while his 12yo brother got $15, when he did so for accomplishing tasks much more complex and difficult than his younger brother's.

    Like I said, there's no utopia. Everything is a cost/benefit analysis. I prefer to live in a society that lets me have more control over my property and wealth, and fewer limitations on how I get it and live my life. I don't want nannies artificially limiting my available choices or my opinions because some group is butthurt or jealous about it. Worse, many times, these nannies are responsible for breeding said group's entitlement attitude in the first place, just to get votes! Real egalitarian societies wouldn't have laws favoring one set of supposedly irrelevant attributes over another under the guise of fighting discrimination over said attributes! All countries with such policies fail this litmus test. They are not egalitarian, period.

    Does liberty have drawbacks sometimes? Of course, but you can't tell me those countries are just so much better off. They're not. They made tradeoffs just the same, tradeoffs I wouldn't want to live with.

  3. Re:Learning from what other countries have done? on The Savvy Tech Strategy Behind Obamacare · · Score: 1

    their citizens also have few rights, are manipulated by punitive taxation, then routinely have their life choices dictated by the state so that it can cut costs. these savings go right into funding more bureaucratic growth. in many of these countries, life has already hit not worth living status imo.

    while there is no free lunch, ill take freedom over socialism anyday (that includes political shitpiles like obamacare). it's too bad washington doesnt care any more about freedom than these so called 'enlightened' countries do.

  4. Re:I have a better idea on Iris Scans Are the New School IDs · · Score: 2

    I wonder when it will all unravel..

  5. I have a better idea on Iris Scans Are the New School IDs · · Score: 1

    1. remove all surveillance and tardy punishments. They aren't needed.
    2. the kid doesn't have to be in class everyday as long as he passes his tests and hands in his projects on time. if his grades suck, he fails the course and has to retake it.
    3. repeat offenders are dealt with according to their situations.

    This saves buttloads of money because the kids who want to learn or at least graduate will do so, the teachers wont' have to waste time with those who don't want to be there, and when those people do finally drop out, they will flip burgers instead of filling university seats because they can play football. Maybe the NFL can set up recruitment camps for them.

  6. Re:Farts in their general direction. on Dropbox Wants To Replace Your Hard Disk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's not just about privacy.. it's about dependency. Considering the current crop of 'cloud' providers, whether they be storage or applications, truly be trusted? Current trends suggest not. Google keeps changing shit the fuck around just because they can, and megaupload was wiped out by a government that didn't give two shits whether your data was legal or not.

    Having reliable tools is only part of it.. They also have to be reliably available. If they are not then that is an even greater inconvenience.

  7. javascript is slow on Why JavaScript On Mobile Is Slow · · Score: 1

    javascript is slow, period. It's an interpreted language. The best optimization you get is some kind of preprocessed bytecode, and that's still not as efficient as native. You might not notice this on a modern desktop, and while little mobile cpus may clock at 1500mhz, they're not much faster than a pentium 2 300.

  8. Re: Racist. on The Black Underbelly of Windows 8.1 'Blue' · · Score: 1

    with all the entitlement driven political correctness 'concern trolling' going on these days? It's honestly hard to tell. I'll bet there's a growing group of people out there who'd say something like this in all seriousness.

  9. Re:Same as Google on The Black Underbelly of Windows 8.1 'Blue' · · Score: 1

    95%? you must play a lot of bingbong with mary jane.

  10. Re: what?? on The Black Underbelly of Windows 8.1 'Blue' · · Score: 1

    Not really.. kernel land is riddled with binary only drivers for many platforms.

  11. Re:SecureBoot has no place as implemented on Secure Boot Coming To SuSE Linux Servers · · Score: 1

    Considering technology trends today, it is a likely possibility.

  12. Re:SecureBoot has no place as implemented on Secure Boot Coming To SuSE Linux Servers · · Score: 1

    ..and when all hardware vendors refuse to allow user generated root keys?

  13. Re:Weasely "interpretation" of Constitution on According To YouGov Poll, Snowden Support Declining Among Americans · · Score: 1

    no, the fbi does the grunt work to bust up groups that might pose credible political threats to the status quo. the nsa directly or indirectly provides them with surveillance data. same difference.

  14. Re:Most people CAN'T on Ask Slashdot: Will the NSA Controversy Drive People To Use Privacy Software? · · Score: 1

    While I agree, I don't think proprietary documentation is any better.. Crypto is a complex subject and complex subjects are hard to simplify without compromising core functionality. Unfortunately, today's trends show that developers are doing it anyway and the result has been software that is compromised into uselessness.

  15. Re:Of course it's global on Why Are Japanese Men Refusing To Leave Their Rooms? · · Score: 1

    uh right.. like socialsm and communism have such great track records.

  16. Re:Can we face the fact People Violent Creatures? on New Study Fails To Show That Violent Video Games Diminish Prosocial Behavior · · Score: 2, Insightful

    just because someone likes playing mortal kombat doesnt mean they "aren't very good" which im assuming means "low functioning individual." if this is what you meant, you are dead wrong.

      violence has always been a part of life. the problem is that the soccer mom hamsters running things now ('prosocial' is a newspeak term) naively assume that whitewashing away all aggressive expression and capability from society will eliminate violent action. it doesnt. if anything, the resultant bottling up that occurs when people try to comply with such inhuman expectation triggers more extreme responses to mundane situations. there is nothing wrong with having outlets no matter what the oprahs and dr phils preach. they provide a needed pressure release valve do today's ever more passive aggressive culture, which, for the high functioning rational people who must live in it, is essential. the people who cant or wont see this are the low functioning hamsters.

  17. Re:Cue anti-union rage on BART Strike Provides Stark Contrast To Tech's Non-Union World · · Score: 1

    To me, unions are an example of market forces where employers are undervaluing employee time and effort (ie overworking financially or in terms of healthy living). If employees perceive that they are getting a fair pay/workload balance, they won't be motivated to unionize. Unions cost employees money too. Private employers with crazy strong unions often have a history of completely unacceptable employee abuse (unionization in public services is a whole other bag) and have been chewed up by them as a result. Neither extreme is healthy.

    At this point, most IT workers suffer from lack of overtime, lack of sane hours (they're almost always working way more than 40hrs a week), and unrealistic expectations of management (you have a 24hrs to make-it-go-like-in-the-movies). This is something unions could fix....or employers could, if they want to avoid unionization. At the end of the day, it all boils down to market demand. How much crap are employees willing to take from management? How much crap from unions are employers willing to take?

  18. Re:Uh, duh? on Beware the Internet · · Score: 1

    Today america faces a worst-of-both-worlds situation: a corporate oligarchy controlling/enabling/building an overreaching government to act by proxy. When one side hits a legal wall, the puck is tossed over it, dealt with by the other, and tossed back. On one side, myopic cults passing themselves off as 'social activists', dictate reality to politicians who then pass legislation that needlessly curtails liberty. On the other, we have incestuous financial greed. The net result is that we have the worst toxins of socialism and capitalism focused, and then amplified by the state, on the people least able to resist: the average american citizen near/at the bottom of the pyramid.

    The solution is coming one way or another. Either america will wake up and kick these guys out of office, or the whole state will become too top heavy to function at all, and collapse. I was kinda hoping it would happen in my 30s rather than in my 60s, but alas...

  19. Re:Depends on the energy source duh! on Electric Vehicles Might Not Benefit the Environment After All · · Score: 1

    No, instead you have more power plants dumping particulate matter into the air, whether your car is on the road or not, in order to keep power available...and you'll have more carbon per mile ejected into the atmosphere to compensate for transmission losses.

  20. Re:Depends on the energy source duh! on Electric Vehicles Might Not Benefit the Environment After All · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Electricity is mostly used as an energy transfer medium because it sucks as a method of storage. It does have loss, too, from resistance, inductance, and capacitance of the conductors. Shifting the energy to/from electric/magnetic fields, a typical process for any electric device, also incurs loss. The fact is, per mile driven, it's more efficient to store the carbon on site and burn as needed, than it is to burn it in a plant and transmit the resultant energy down electric power lines.

    Energy generation is the real issue. The only zero greenhouse gas emission technology that can generate the scale of power needed is nuclear, and the earth firsters won't go for that. Things like wind and solar are ok as supplements but they cannot possibly meet the current growing energy needs, never mind such needs plus electric cars. The more exotic systems like ocean wave energy are experimental at best. We need a stepping stone if we want to move to all-electric. At the moment, that stepping stone is nuclear. Without it, electric cars are actually worse for the environment than the current situation.

  21. Re:Javascript can still be disabled on Firefox 23 Makes JavaScript Obligatory · · Score: 1

    What simple mistake is that?

  22. Re:Where is the problem here? on AMD/ATI Drops Windows XP Support · · Score: 1

    With today's slavish devotion to surveillance, it sounds prudent.

  23. Re:Meh. on AMD/ATI Drops Windows XP Support · · Score: 1

    1. Any real architectural improvements done to vista were obscured by the clusterfuck that is the new GUI/explorer. ..and what justifies the huge memory footprint increase over xp? Not a damn thing, even accounting for superfetch. Turn it off and it's still a crazy large footprint. So no, it is not a stretch to see that windows 7 really is vista sp2 with a few mild aesthetic changes.

    2. 2k/XP's configurability was never something to write home about, but it's sure as hell a lot easier than vista/7..and 8 is even worse than they are. Seems like with every new release, microsoft wants it to take longer to get the system from stock to usable state. They hide critical functionality behind a ton of useless wizards/windows, or 'charms', with generic sounding text instead of having it all in one central location, clearly labeled and defined.

    3. optimizations at this point have to do with specific use-case instruction sets. compilers for x86/64 are about as optimized as they're going to get and have been for a decade now.

  24. Re:Dropping AMD/ATI support on AMD/ATI Drops Windows XP Support · · Score: 1

    You should always assume the system's not secure whether you have patches for it or not. Think about it, if there were patches yesterday, and you can assume there'll be patches tomorrow, that means it's still not secure right now. This is true for any software really.

  25. Re:Irrelevant news for nerds on AMD/ATI Drops Windows XP Support · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ..and at least one of us is a myopic projectionist who is unable to see past his own shit.