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User: phantomfive

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Comments · 31,362

  1. If Google's motto was "don't be evil," Facebook's was always "be evil."

  2. If the roads weren't so heavily subsidized, the U.S. would be more like Europe and would make greater use of rail transport for both cargo and people

    The biggest problem is population density. In areas where population is dense, we already have pretty good transit systems in the US. Even in smaller towns like Modesto, CA you can get around without a car.

  3. You think we can save a trillion dollars a year off the budget by switching to single payer? Not going to happen.

  4. Re:Top of Dotcom Bubble 2.0? on Internal Microsoft Poll Shows Employees Are Less Satisfied With Pay (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Yeah, it actually is. The only startups I've seen using C# are in Seattle.

  5. Re:bad idea on Oath is Killing Off Yahoo Messenger on July 17 (betanews.com) · · Score: 1

    They have more revenue generation capability than Squirrel does. Either kill them both or make them compatible, either one of those would have been a defensible decision.

  6. bad idea on Oath is Killing Off Yahoo Messenger on July 17 (betanews.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I feel no love for Yahoo messenger, but if you are planning a replacement, discontinuing the current one is a really bad business decision. All your users will leave, when they could have been transferred easily by merely updating their clients.

    This is how Microsoft went from 14% of the smart-phone market to 1% of the smart-phone market: by bringing out an incompatible version (in their case it was especially pathetic because the underlying OS was still based on WinCE, they just chose not to expose that to developers).

  7. Re: Well that's just depressing on Emirates Planes Could Be Going Windowless (abc.net.au) · · Score: 1

    That's true. Last time I rode on the tailfin it was not comfortable. Budget airlines: one star. Would not recommend.

  8. Re:No surprise here . . . on Sucking CO2 From Air Is Cheaper Than Scientists Thought (technologyreview.com) · · Score: 1

    Plan 4: Replace desktop computers and server racks with wind powered abacuses

    I've done that.

  9. Re:More eco-fascist climate change spam on Sucking CO2 From Air Is Cheaper Than Scientists Thought (technologyreview.com) · · Score: 0

    Now you're lucky if you get that on a programming site.........

  10. If 10m millennial women suddenly dropped out of the workforce over a decade to be stay at home wives**, they'd probably call them unemployed.

    What adjustments to your measurements would you make to detect such a thing? Maybe you could ask them if they are currently looking for a job, or if they want a job. Do you think the labor statistics department does that?

  11. Re:Top of Dotcom Bubble 2.0? on Internal Microsoft Poll Shows Employees Are Less Satisfied With Pay (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    I'm betting a huge chunk of cloud consumption is startups selling bags of dog food and AI-powered, IoT driven, blockchain-enabled subscription boxes online.

    I think most companies have started moving to the 'cloud' in one way or another. Most of those startups aren't using Azure, that's for people who use C# or want to be integrated with Microsoft technologies, and this is what startups think of C#.

  12. U6 is low, too. But anyway, U6 is the wrong number to use: unemployed people who can't be bothered to even apply for one job a month have mental problems not economy problems.

  13. You need to do the opposite, tell them you won't work for less than $200 an hour. Be completely serious, because if they do offer you a good number, you'll be interested.

  14. Depending on who runs the numbers under Obama the national deficit rose by 7 to 10 trillion dollars.

    No, you are wrong! At least get the terms "deficit" and "debt" right. The federal deficit will be $985 billion in 2019 (estimate). Deficit is completely different than debt, and using those terms wrong make you look ignorant. Here are several charts that show the historical and current deficit numbers.

    For people who are too lazy to look it up:
    National debt: total amount of money we owe.
    National deficit: amount we are adding to the debt (this year).

  15. Re: *Premliminary* is the key word, here on YouTube Can Be Liable For Copyright Infringing Videos, Court Rules (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 1

    There is a setting in youtube that can slow down the speed of movies fwiw

  16. Re: They have no idea how Pluto formed on Is Pluto Actually a Mash-Up of a Billion Comets? (smithsonianmag.com) · · Score: 1

    You are right about sherlock holmes. But you haven't eliminated all the alternatives yet. I can show you why. There was a time when no one knew how diseases spread. Some people said it was bad air, but you could eliminate that. There were no known possibilities. Eventually though, someone invented the microscope and germs were discovered.

  17. Re:Well that's just depressing on Emirates Planes Could Be Going Windowless (abc.net.au) · · Score: 1

    I've seen that on some flights, and while it's really cool, the camera is much lower quality than the view you get with your eyes.

  18. Re:Is being unpredictable his strategy? on Trump Strikes Deal With China's ZTE on Sanctions (usatoday.com) · · Score: 2

    As a negotiation tactic, the goal isn't to kill the other side, the goal is to let them realize you can kill them. From a game-theory perspective, you don't actually want to use your big weapon, because once you use it, you have no more threats. Again we can see the same principle from a cold-war perspective: Russia (or America) can say, "If you do that, I will use nukes," and influence America. But if Russia ever used nukes, then they have no more influence over America's actions.

    So the threat of action is more powerful than the actual action.

  19. Re: Two problems here on YouTube Can Be Liable For Copyright Infringing Videos, Court Rules (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 1

    How is that better than what youtube does right now?

  20. Re: *Premliminary* is the key word, here on YouTube Can Be Liable For Copyright Infringing Videos, Court Rules (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's practically impossible to prevent copyrighted things from being uploaded illegally. So if it comes to that, Google may decide to shut down youtube in the EU because there is no other option. What a shame that would be.

  21. Re: If Republicans were serious on Judge Orders EPA To Produce Science Behind Pruitt's Climate Claims (scientificamerican.com) · · Score: 1

    And the American public supports both parties in their excesses. Oh, there is talk of self control, but anyone who raises taxes or cuts benefits gets voted out of office. So there it is: you can expect to see this through to bankruptcy, however long that takes.

  22. Re: They have no idea how Pluto formed on Is Pluto Actually a Mash-Up of a Billion Comets? (smithsonianmag.com) · · Score: 1

    Now you are doing it again. You are saying, "I have explanation A, B, and C......but none of those work so it must have been God." Sometimes the answer is that we don't know yet, but we will know eventually.

  23. No, not for a while it seems:

    In the short term, we won't be making significant changes to what's arriving on Steam until we've finished some of the tools we've described in this post.

    From the official announcement.

  24. Dystopia-fearing voters is a large part of why T won:

    Interesting point.

  25. Re:*sigh* The vulnerabilities are not what we thin on US Government Probes Airplane Vulnerabilities, Says Airline Hack Is 'Only a Matter of Time' (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Attack vectors would be for a passenger or someone on the ground to jam and spoof GPS signals,

    This can be done from a laptop on a plane, too, fwiw.