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User: GerryGilmore

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  1. Re:I can see this running afoul of.... on California Senate Approves School Vaccine Bill · · Score: 1

    OK, fit this scenario into your argument. I was raised by Jehovah's Witnesses (true!). JWs do not believe in accepting any blood transfution as it's against their religious beliefs. Now, say, I - as a a 10-year-old child of said JWs - was shot through the finger by his brother (also true, sadly) - and needed a blood transfusion to survive (NOT true). Should the parent's religious belief trump the medical necessity to save said child (me)? Being a little bit closer to this stuff can give you a whole different perspective.

  2. Re:Hostility to debate on Is Facebook Keeping You In a Political Bubble? · · Score: 1

    You're right - most spewage that we hear from most media (I use PBS NewsHour and The Economist magazine myself) is "eristic" dialogue such as one would hear on talk radio, a lawyer trying to win a case, etc where the goal is to "win" the argument by convincing the other that they are wrong and you are right. True dialogue is "dialectic" where the goal is to - as you said - truly try to reach a deeper understanding of the underlying issue and most crucually, be willing to alter your belief if that deeper discovery brings new information to light. It's a truly wonderful thing to not be mentally bound by belief based on nothing but feelings/opinions.

  3. I once asked Linus about this on Why Was Linux the Kernel That Succeeded? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While working at Intel, we had a large Linux conference with Linus and a few other noteworthy OSS dudes. Afterwards, while we were all millng around, I found myself next to Linus Himself and asked this very question. My belief was that it was the GPL vs BSD license which forced all changes to at least be available for inclusion in the next version. Linux felt that it was more of a timing thing where Linux just kind of hit at the right time. Who really knows?

  4. Re:Would anyone deny? on House Panel Holds Hearing On "Politically Driven Science" - Without Scientists · · Score: 1

    Yes - me. While I acknowledge that there are some minor discrepancies in *some* of the data, it does not negate the overwhelming consensus of current knowledge and - quite frankly - the costs of the deniers being wrong are dramatically more than the costs of (gasp!) getting cleaner air if they should happen, against all odds, to be correct. PS - you betray your political orientation by throwing out an alphabet soup of gummint agencies and then use "tyrannical" to describe the scientists working there. Rrrrriiigghhtt, big fella.....

  5. Re:Just Like the "Liberal Media" on House Panel Holds Hearing On "Politically Driven Science" - Without Scientists · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's even worse than that. It's one thing to demonize political groups for political gains - that's how the game is played, sadly. However, when you then take the same level of hypocrisy, bumper-sticker-thinking, and plain old crazy, paranoid delusion and apply it to science, then that's taking things jusy way too far. Of course, these boneheads have been repeating this stuff to each other for so long, they really do believe it! Now *that* is some scary shit!

  6. Re:Title II on Rand Paul Moves To Block New "Net Neutrality" Rules · · Score: 1

    Let me try....Basically, unless you live in an already heavily-wired are with several combinations of fiber, cable, and DSL it is economically unviable for anyone to expand the physical infrastructure of the internet. This leads to monopolies of the existing, legacy telecom companies. Here in North Georgia where I live, I have exactly one choice (omitting satellite because the cost and latency is horrible) which is Windstream DSL. Over the last several years, Windstream has had several lengthy outages caused by edge route rupgrades blowing up and so forth. Absent net neutrality, no other ISP can connect to Windstream's existing wires (paying for that access, of course) and offer me an alternative. Real free-market access to the physical infrastructure much like, say, a shopping center can open along a publicly built and maintained highway. Good for everyone except the companies who want to maintain their monopoly. PS - I used to gate-bang DG Nova III CPU, memory and controller cards. Fun days!

  7. Re:Damn... on Woman Behind Pakistan's First Hackathon, Sabeen Mahmud, Shot Dead · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Actually, we did. Like most Americans, sadly, you know nothing of history beyond, say, 1980 or some such. If you did know some history, you would know that - before the enactment of the Constitution - most states had their dominant sect, and those not in that sect were *legally* persecuted and often killed. Check out the history of the Baptists and Quakers in early New England for one example. Or, how about the Christian justifications for the genocide against American Indians. If you want to get even more recent, check out the legal filings in Loving vs Virginia where lines of Christian preachers submitted tons of briefs, all saying that their Christian God had deemed that black people were inherently inferior and not worthy of any basic human rights. Yeah, you Christians are really, really superior to other religions....

  8. Re:Quit whining! on 'Mobilegeddon': Google To Punish Mobile-Hostile Sites Starting Today · · Score: 1

    Sorry to reply to myself, but I hit submit too soon. The last sentence should be ...drop your "tr" and "td" layout scheme...I was helping a friend on his older site and it was all hard-coded tr/td/styling intermingled with hard-coded colors, etc. I dumped the whole thing and redid it and it looks a lot better *and* is responsive.

  9. Quit whining! on 'Mobilegeddon': Google To Punish Mobile-Hostile Sites Starting Today · · Score: 1

    Look, I am just starting with HTML and CSS after several decades of C and shell scripting in order to create a new website fo the small company my son and I are starting. Him, being a young stud instead of an old fart like me, convinced me to start with a design that was "responsive" in NewSpeak. Basically, all that means is: establishing the viewport; determinging several sensible breakpoints at which certain styling elements change; establishing when, say, to transition from a standard horizontal ring menu to a menu button that drops down a vertical menu; and a couple of other small things. At the end of it, it was no BFD and the site works from the exact same URL as the desktop, uses the exact same HTML code, and works on *every* device which can access the site. Finally, I ran our site through the google test tool and it came back as: Awesome! So, stop whining and drop your and layout scheme and just do it. Crikey!

  10. Word proximity on Ask Slashdot: What Features Would You Like In a Search Engine? · · Score: 1

    Being able to say "find 'blah' when it is within X words either side of 'bleh'......"

  11. Re:The Republicans have my vote. on Republicans Introduce a Bill To Overturn Net Neutrality · · Score: 2

    No reason to downvote - once your argument/reasoning devolves to "BULLSHIT" in all caps and then throw in "liberals" and "regulate" as if the last two were the equivalent of the first, you identified yourself quite clearly as on of those hyper-partisan types who intellectually (and I use that term very broadly) subsist on the cargo-cult, talk-radio crowd who feel at their best when engaging in loutish, barron-stool rantings accompanied by your favorite sayings/slogans of the day. You really should consider doing this: listen-to/watch/read *only* the following for one month. 1) PBS/NesHour for real news and *sane* discussion of current events. 2) Economist magazine for world perspective, outstanding, deep-thought analysis (of which I occasionally disagree, but still respect their perspective) of current events, including America. PS - Economist magazine is the one news/analysis source that is equally respected by Ds and Rs who have a brain. The Tea Pary types like, sadly, you, I suspect, only do Fox and talk radio.

  12. The best compliment I ever had on Why You Should Choose Boring Technology · · Score: 2

    I'd once written what I thought at the time was a fairly simple C program to interface with a medical lab system, calculate the checksum (a very, very basic CRC), and pass the results to a file. For the record, I'm a self-taught programmer who started with the Data General Nova assembler, but I digress....Several years later, I happened to meet a programmer who'd inherited my code and, basically, said that it was the best commented, self-explanatory code he'd ever seen and later changes were really easy to make. At the time, I'd just written a device driver was so feeling all punky, but later I realized that what that dude had told me was the highest compliment I could ever receive. $.02 brothers and sisters....

  13. I'd start with on Ask Slashdot: What Makes Some Code Particularly Good? · · Score: 1

    ...not having your fucking article spread across 9 pages with about one paragraph per page. That would be a great start!

  14. Re:Same Thing Almost Happened to Me on Comcast's Incompetence, Lack of Broadband May Force Developer To Sell Home · · Score: 0

    Excuse me, but - FUCK YOU! How in the hell can you think that having emails or any other correspondence would make one fucks worth of difference? In today's America, when Corporate America(TM) fucks you, you lie down and take it like the good Consumer(TM) that you are, with no rights at all. You are no longer a Citizen(TM), just another sucker fed your appetite of ${YOUR_PREFERENCE} partisan crap.

  15. Re:Underlying problem on ISPs Worry About FCC's 'Future Conduct' Policing · · Score: 1

    I suspect that you are confusing regulation of "content" vs regulation of "access". I know that it's part of Conservative PC to assume that any regs would be about content, but that is clearly not the case here.

  16. Re:Regulations are all bad in the long term on FCC Posts Its 400-Page Net Neutrality Order · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I do have mod points, but I'd rather respond directly. You do know, don't you, that you undercut your own argument by referencing the superior state of internet access in Europe? Especially as Europe is, in general, much thicker in regulations than here in America. Besides the national laws (and, again, this is Europe we're talikng about), you have an ever-growing raft of EU-wide regulations. Please square that logical circle for us, if you logically can.

  17. Exceptionalism on Ask Slashdot: Should I Let My Kids Become American Citizens? · · Score: 2

    As a fierce American patriot, I have to recognize that what originally made America so special was the core liberal values that are now much more universal, esocially in Europe. (PS - I do not mean the "Liberal" caricature that is standard fodder on American media today, but basic liberal values as defined universally: universal suffrage; free press; no state religion; representative democracy with regular election cycles; military subservience to civilian, elected control; respect for private property rights; and full legal equality for all citizens.) More so, given the seemingly mad rush to insanity encompassing us here today, I would encourage you to give very, very serious consideration to staying more "European". Sadly, we are becoming much more "Idiocracy" than we should, and I see no real benefit to becoming American. Unless, that is, your religion is the Gun, and you are willing to make regular sacrifices of your children and fellow citizens to appease this American God(TM) In that case, sign them up and arm them well and train them well in how to pray to their new God. (PS - I own 3 firearms: a Ruger 10/22; a 1911 ACP clone; and a Ruger .357 magnum. I like my guns a lot, but I do not love and worship them. If the local police - and I live in a rural Georgia county, so that ain't likely - for whatever reason asked me to register and/or test fire my weapons for them to help with solving a crime, I would have no problem with that. But, that's the difference between liking something and worshiping/sacrificing citizens to something.) Cheers!

  18. Re:More than curious, on Software Freedom Conservancy Funds GPL Suit Against VMWare · · Score: 2

    Of course not. Why would you even think that? If VMWare loses, which they should, IMO, all that will happen is that they'll either pay $$ to Christoph or just rewrite the offending sections. VMWare isn't going anywhere...

  19. Re:How do we know? on FCC Approves Net Neutrality Rules · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    You forgot Rush Limbaugh's latest insight into the *real* reason for NN - it's so that Obama can regulate Fox News and talk radio out of existence! I shit you not - he's been going off on it for a couple of days now. Just when you think the paranoid, delusional mindset cannot sink any lower, BAM!

  20. Re:Last week ... on How Walking With Smartphones May Have Changed Pedestrian Etiquette · · Score: 1

    "Personally, I'd rather be dead than know that I caused the life of someone else to end without cause." I call 100% organic, dolphin-free BullShit. Especially when the "cause" is simple narcissitic stupidity and inattentiveness to the most basic awareness for which you are responsible - your survival. I'm sure it feels all superior and noble to say what you did, but you're delusional if you really believe in a Real(TM) situation that you'd give up your life to save an asshole.

  21. Re:That clinches it. on PC-BSD: Set For Serious Growth? · · Score: 2

    Depending on your definition, the "Year Of The Linux Desktop" could be any year from, oh, about 2003 or so to now and into the future. If your definition means: " the year that Linux has greater marketshare than Windows", well that's not likely to be aytime soon at all. OTOH, Apple is the most valuable company in the world by current market valuations - hardware, software, oil, you-name-it, by relying on non-Microsoft OSes, and they are obviously pretty successful. Me? I've been dual-booting for several years and last year took the plunge to pure Linux. No MS or Apple, and I'm hanging in there just fine.

  22. Re:They're all frauds on Another Bitcoin Exchange Fraud · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I would actually challenge the use of the term "dubious commodity". How, pray tell, can the result of some math-hashing scheme be even remotely considered any kind of "commodity" (i.e. something that has some intrisic value)? Totally bizarre that anyone in their halfway-right mind would put something (real American dollars) that does have intrisic value - being "valid tender for all debts public and private" - into something that does not? A fool and his money, brothers and sisters!

  23. Re:Okay, so... on Woman Suffers Significant Weight Gain After Fecal Transplant · · Score: 1

    I don't have the links handy, but The Economist magazine has been regularly reporting for several years that the bacteria in our gut contains *trillions* of bacteria. The particular mix and types of bacteria comprise what is known as the "micro-biome". It is now known, without a doubt, that these bacteria have a *radical* effect on how food is metabolized in the human body. So, the old saw about "just eat less and you will lose weight" is not strictly true. BTW, I say this as a formerly fat person who did lose lots of weight by eating less, but that does not alter the reality of how our gut bacteria has a profound impact on not just our weight, but health in general. Very, very much worth investigating fellow /.ers...

  24. Re:In other words on DOT Warns of Dystopian Future For Transportation · · Score: 0

    (Betting you're a "Conservative") And yet, if the Defense Department wants more funding to send $1M+ missiles after $Terrorist_Group_De_jour, I'd be willing to bet that *that* "gloom and doom scenario" would get an enthusiastic thumbs-up from you. Thought so....

  25. Re: Why different in America? on Ask Slashdot: Pros and Cons of Homeschooling? · · Score: 1

    I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that *you* were home-schooled....