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User: ATMAvatar

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  1. Re:Making sure it stays dead on House Kills SOPA · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If there is one thing they fear more than their desire for campaign funds, it's getting voted out of office.

    Unfortunately, they aren't as afraid of that as you would like to believe.

  2. Re:Lockheed gonna get sued? on Could a Dirty Rag Take Out a $2 Billion Satellite? · · Score: 1

    Tolerance for failure is inversely proportional to the number of digits in the price tag.

    Whether it is the engineer who left the rag in the fuel line or (more likely) the upper-level manager that decided to skimp on QA - someone's going to get fired, and rightly so. This wasn't a thousand- or million-dollar mistake. This was a multi-billion-dollar failure.

    That it was a stupid mistake that should have been caught in preliminary testing makes it even worse.

    And, to add insult to injury, this isn't a mistake that cost some third-party. The cost came out of our pockets.

  3. Re:Can't wait on Lawmakers Intent On Approving SOPA, PIPA · · Score: 2

    If the page shifted to a sorted list of MPAA/RIAA donations to senators and a bulleted list of negative outcomes of this bill, people might take notice at how blatant the bribery is. At the very least, it might scare a few senators with the prospect that they might not get re-elected.

  4. Re:market share v. reality on Nginx Overtakes Microsoft As No. 2 Web Server · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You mean like all the press Microsoft got for the very same behavior with Windows and Internet Explorer prior to US v. Microsoft?

    Putting your trust in the media to inform you of anything beyond celebrity news or Republican primaries imitating reality TV is foolhardy.

    That said, it would be nice if the GP provided more than flimsy personal anecdotes.

  5. Re:P&T on handicapped parking on In New Zealand, a System To Watch for Disabled Parking Violators · · Score: 1

    Likely both the GP and yourself need to look more often. The trouble is that, as a non-handicapped driver, the GP is going to disproportionately notice the times when the spots are empty due to the annoyance. Similarly, as a handicapped driver, you are going to disproportionately remember the times when they are full.

    In my personal experience, it is rare (if ever) that I see handicapped spots all full. Most of the time, there are 0-2 (out of 5-10+) spots filled, and then, it's about a 50/50 shot whether the cars have tags. I admit, I suffer the same bias as the GP, though. I would be curious to see some geniune statistics.

  6. Re:Jeff Goldblum on Insects Rapidly Becoming Resistant To GM Corn · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don't you think that GM researchers *also* stimulate evolution in those plants ?

    No, I don't. Many if not most GM plants are rendered sterile so that you are forced to purchase new seeds from year to year, thus making further evolution impossible. In the off-chance that some GM plants manage to produce offspring, the farmer involved (intentionally or no) sued and the crops destroyed.

  7. Re:Not to mention totally legal on SOPA Creator In TV/Film/Music Industry's Pocket · · Score: 2

    Trading money for votes may be legal, but it is neither fair nor ethical. Stop being a shill.

  8. Re:In other News on Rare Earth Magnets Pose Threat To Children · · Score: 2, Informative

    I believe the point was that a parent of a child who swallows a rare-earth magnet is an idiot. Killing off the offspring of a lesser-fit being because they fail at parenting is just as much natural selection as killing off the lesser-fit being before they procreate in the first place.

  9. Re:They don't want to on Congress's Techno-Ignorance No Longer Funny · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A big step in fixing the problem would be to filter out a lot of the noise that goes through Congress.

    Just taking a look at some of what was introduced yesterday:

    • HRes 499 - Congratulating the students, staff, faculty, and alumni of the City Colleges of Chicago on the 100th anniversary of the institution.
    • HRes 498 - Recognizing and commending Baylor University quarterback Robert Griffin III for winning the 2011 Heisman Trophy and for his academic and athletic accomplishments.
    • HRes 497 - To provide for the placement of a statue or bust of Sir Winston Churchill in the United States Capitol.

    Why does any of that require time in Congress? That's time that could be spent better investigating and analyzing *real* issues.

  10. Re:Users disagree with him on The Condescending UI · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Agreed. I have found that it is usually less effort to code up a TeX document nowadays than continue to use Word because I seem to have had a penchant for using obscure features. I used them often enough in older versions of Word to remember where they were in the old menu system, but not so often as to memorize keyboard shortcuts, so they are effectively unusable with the Ribbons.

  11. Re:This should be illegal on Two SOPA Writers Become Entertainment Lobbyists · · Score: 2

    That works great at the local level. My father decided one year that he did not want to allow his city representative to run unopposed, so he campaigned against her and ended up winning. He has remained the local representative since, and he does a pretty good job communicating with his constituents and voting what he believes is in everyone's interests.

    However, at the national level, this breaks down. It now takes millions of dollars to run for national office (nearing one billion for the President's seat). That makes it difficult if not impossible for someone to run who isn't either in one of the two major parties or independently wealthy. Even ignoring that, there is a significant portion of our voting public that automatically vote for the guy with the correct letter next to their name. Normally rational and intelligent people fall to this quite frequently. Without having a D or R next to your name, you have no shot, but to get that D or R next to your name means to sell out to corporate interests.

    It would take some big event to prompt a protest group like OWS starting up, pull in an order of magnitude or more people, and form another political party. I think you realize (as I do) how likely that is anytime soon.

  12. Re:Oh look, the pendulum. It swings back. on TSA Facing Death By a Thousand Cuts · · Score: 4, Funny

    Teamwork is socialist. In a capitalist society, we're *supposed* to be fighting one another. We don't come by optimal results by joining together - we do so by pitting everyone against one another and eliminating all but the strongest.

    Why do you hate America?

  13. Re:Don't want on Draft Alternative To SOPA Released · · Score: 2

    With our current system, that's about as likely to happen as printer companies suddenly developing a standard, interchangeable ink cartridge.

  14. Re:It's Not ALL Bloggers on Bloggers Not Journalists, Federal Judge Rules · · Score: 1

    And yet we have had multiple retractions from journalists who used blog posts as primary sources...

  15. Re:Vroomm, Vroomm a thing of the past? on Gas Powered Fuel Cell Could Help EV Range Anxiety · · Score: 2

    You never really stop and realize how terrible most drivers are at yielding to others until you almost get hit/run over by one that should have done so for you. Cross-walk signs and lights may as well be invisible in most places for about as often as drivers will stop for them.

  16. Re:Tex Richman won't allow it. on Gas Powered Fuel Cell Could Help EV Range Anxiety · · Score: 1

    No, they'll just be cruising through stop signs and red lights,

    Many street lights still use road sensors, which fail to detect smaller vehicles such as motorcycles and bicycles. As such, many municipalities (like my own) have adopted "dead on red" laws, which allow said vehicles to pass through red lights when it is safe to do so.

    Stop signs are a different story, of course, but I see cars running those at least as often as I see cyclists do it.

    ...moronically suicidal asshats that make up far too large of a percentage of the bicyclists.

    I'll admit my bias, but my experience has been quite the opposite. More often than not, it is the cars who do not know how to be courteous on the road which end up nearly hitting me, largely because they are not paying attention. Occasionally, I have come across someone intentionally trying to run me off the road (generally in trucks and SUVs).

  17. Re:I see this in code I work on all the time on Institutional Memory and Reverse Smuggling · · Score: 2

    In any decently large system, you could have pristine code with perfect documentation and *still* run into problems when a new person tries to maintain it due to lost integration knowledge.

  18. Re:So what? on Have Walled Gardens Killed the Personal Computer? · · Score: 1

    Let's assume that these devices are incapable of downloading or running code not provided through the app store. Then, you simply have people focusing on attacking the distribution servers, either by hacking them to include malware within approved apps or by simply DDOSing them.

    These walled gardens seem like a cool idea until you realize they introduce a single point of failure.

  19. Re:I am planning to move to NC on US Senator Proposes Bill To Eliminate Overtime For IT Workers · · Score: 1

    Keeping your wallet in your back pocket both makes it easier to steal and can cause Priformis syndrome if you sit on it for long periods of time.

  20. Re:Great on Anonymous Threatens Robin Hood Attacks Against Banks · · Score: 1

    You sound vastly better off than my younger brother, who has lived off assistance from my parents for several years now. He has only finally weaned himself off that recently and started to scrape a little savings together because he's now living with me free of charge. All the while, he's been stuck working for lower wages than I used to get for my miscellaneous summer jobs during high school and early college 10+ years ago. He only has a working vehicle because of a recent inheritance from a dead relative (with some extra padding from mom and dad again).

  21. Re:Great on Anonymous Threatens Robin Hood Attacks Against Banks · · Score: 1

    I'll bite... and exactly what would you advocate to "fix the distribution of wealth in this country"? Wholesale theft and armed robbery (but we'll call it taxes and execute it through the government so it'll be okay)?

    I do not advocate as such, but if the current direction of increasing the wealth gap fails to turn around, ultimately that will happen via angry uprising on behalf of the lower 99%. We just haven't reached the tipping point yet.

    Unfortunately, there is no indication that the problem is going to fix itself. One alternative would be massive regulations and redistribution of wealth via government policy. It is certainly not ideal. The other relies mostly upon industry naturally and graciously trimming the gap on its own. Both prospects seem dubious if not outright laughable, because both rely upon the very people who created the problem and continue to exacerbate it.

    We shall see one way or the other in due time.

  22. Re:This is a surprise on Debt Reduction Super Committee Fails To Agree · · Score: 1

    From what I'd read, it was more that the Republicans decided their 5% cost (raising taxes slightly or eliminating tax breaks) wasn't worth it, and were going to vote against anything that didn't give them 100% of what they wanted. That isn't to say the Democrats were necessarily in the right, but the Republican side went into the whole thing with the hard-line stance that any tax increases at all were going to be cause to kill the deal, essentially going into the discussion in bad faith. The blame here is hardly even.

    Truly, the solution presented to we voters is to vote out the lot of them and start with a clean house. Congress has proven itself ineffectual in solving any *real* problems.

  23. Re:Windows Phone 7 is a good solution on Are There Any Smartphones That Respect Privacy? · · Score: 1

    But can you really trust Google as a source regarding iOS vulnerabilities?

  24. Re:Hmmm. on Universal Music Demands Insurer Pay For Infringement Damages · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you want to be cynical, CEO's and directors get higher pay because they hold the purse strings. It is pretty rare to see a CEO who's a visionary leader and single-handedly drives a company to fame and fortune. It is nearly always a team effort, even when you *do* have visionary leadership. The CEO and board merely get to claim credit for all successes (and "trim the fat", blame the market, etc. for failures).

  25. Re:Robots will replace blue collar labor on Is American Innovation Losing Its Shine? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A mass of educated voters would be a huge threat to the existing power base. Good luck with that.