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User: mrchaotica

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  1. Re:Bad idea on FBI Seeks To Legally Hack You If You're Connected To TOR Or a VPN · · Score: 1

    Why would a corporation care?

    Because their competitor corporations might have hired a dirty FBI agent to steal their secrets.

  2. Re:So how are they on Star Trek Continues Kickstarter 2.0 · · Score: 1

    Deep Space 9 did live up to the original (and perhaps surpassed it), and even Enterprise was better than most people give it credit for. It was only the mirror episodes, not the series they were in, that sucked.

  3. Re:So how are they on Star Trek Continues Kickstarter 2.0 · · Score: 0

    They've only made 3 episodes, and one of them was a fucking mirror one? The DS9 ones sucked; the Enterprise one sucked, and I can only assume the TOS one sucked (I haven't actually seen it). Even the Star Trek Online mirror missions suck! Of all the things to waste their limited money on...!

  4. Re:Amazing work.. on Star Trek Continues Kickstarter 2.0 · · Score: 1

    Hey, Chekov was decent (mostly because he didn't get enough screen time for the demented monkeys running the show to fuck up his characterization too badly).

  5. Re:Holy Carp! on Drug Company CEO Blames Drug Industry For Increased Drug Resistance · · Score: 2

    If its just one river that's not much more than creek being tested right next to the waste pipe of a pharma factory its still entirely unacceptable, but not quite as alarming as the statement would have us think.

    The issue is not drug factories illegally dumping; the issue is that sewage treatment plants don't actually remove all contaminants from the water (just solids and bacteria, really) and that India has a whole lot of people. The drugs that are in the water got there by being prescribed to and passed through people. The only ways to fix it would be to design much more thorough (and expensive) sewage treatment, or for people to use much lower quantities of medicine.

  6. Re:Microsoft needs to undercut the competition on Windows 10: Can Microsoft Get It Right This Time? · · Score: 1

    My $263 laptop might be slow and not particularly durable, but it's fast enough (including 4GB of RAM) and light enough (with an 11" screen, not a 14" one). Besides, unless you really need a fast CPU (and most people don't, nowadays) "ultrabook-class" hardware has no advantage over "chromebook-class" hardware.

    In other words, HP's 11" StreamBook is a step in the right direction (other than lack of storage space), but they should have been making things like it years ago.

  7. Re:Microsoft needs to undercut the competition on Windows 10: Can Microsoft Get It Right This Time? · · Score: -1

    For $800 you must have been looking at the Surface Pro 3. I don't think an Android tablet is an apples-to-apples comparison. The Surface Pro 3 runs a full Windows 8 OS. It is basically a laptop without a permanent keyboard.

    No it's not; the last laptop I got cost $263. The Surface Pro 3 is overpriced even if you compare it to laptops!

    Admittedly, a Surface Pro 3 has pretty good specs... but there's no reason why you should have to pay that much just to get "real Windows" when some $200 "celeron" or "pentium"* based tablet would be just fine.

    (* Or whatever they call the Intel CPU between the Atom and the i3 these days...)

  8. Re:Who would ride with these dongles anyway? on Insurance Company Dongles Don't Offer Much Assurance Against Hacking · · Score: 1

    In some areas, literally 100% of drivers are speeding. Does that mean they're all selfish assholes, or does it mean the speed limit is too low?

  9. Re:Meh, gender diversity sucks in tech on Lies, Damn Lies, and Tech Diversity Statistics · · Score: 1

    No, that's not it: at my company, the hours are actually pretty close to the normal 40, and QA works just as many hours as programmers (if not longer, since they have to be around for deployments).

  10. Re:Useless summary is useless on The Free Educational Software GCompris Comes To Android · · Score: 1

    You are quite rude with us.... Many contributors are not native English speakers but we make an effort to do everything in English to have a wide audience and ease the translations.

    FTFY.

  11. Re:Meh, gender diversity sucks in tech on Lies, Damn Lies, and Tech Diversity Statistics · · Score: 1

    So yes, gender diversity sucks in tech, but when women aren't applying for the jobs, how can we diversify?

    This is the real issue: women just aren't as likely to want to be programmers as men.

    I work at a company where almost all the programmers are male, while QA is probably close to a 50/50 mix or even majority-female. Seeing the (female) QA person on my team write some SQL during the course of her testing and being obviously competent at it, I asked her if she'd ever want to be a programmer instead of QA.

    She laughed in my face and said something to the effect of "oh HELL no!"

    I have no idea why. Keep in mind that she could be working at the exact same company with the exact same coworkers and the exact same supervisors and be in the exact same environment, and the only difference is that she'd be doing programming instead of testing. And her reaction is that, while she likes testing, she apparently would hate programming. I'm mystified by that -- I'd be saying "oh HELL no" to doing QA! -- but that's why there are few women programmers, not discrimination.

  12. Re:The (in)justice system on Innocent Adults Are Easy To Convince They Committed a Serious Crime · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Or, would you rather a world where the prosecutors just pursue the most egregious criminals given the limited resources they have, and put everyone else right back out on the streets with no deterrent whatsoever?

    YES, GODDAMNIT!

    That's EXACTLY what we want and what you should want -- unless you're a fucking totalitarian sociopathic boot-licker -- because we're living in a goddamn police state that contains 25% of the WORLD's prison population even though we only have 5% of the world's population overall. Damn right we need to only pursue the "egregious criminals," because in every civilized country on the planet, what you call the "egregious criminals" are the only criminals!

  13. Re:The (in)justice system on Innocent Adults Are Easy To Convince They Committed a Serious Crime · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The alternative is the prosecutors office being required to pursue every single case. 5-17 year old took a nude picture of herself? Child Porn charges. kill in clear self defense? Murder charges. transpose two digits on your tax return? Tax Fraud charges. There wouldn't be enough people to serve on the juries for the people that missed jury duty! There wouldn't be enough people to serve on the juries for the people that missed jury duty!

    GOOD! Then we might finally get some of these arbitrary, capricious, unconstitutional, bullshit laws off the books!

  14. Re:The (in)justice system on Innocent Adults Are Easy To Convince They Committed a Serious Crime · · Score: 1

    The law frequently gives a range of punishments, e.g. upper and lower limits for fines or jail time, and the judge can pick something lower if the defendant saves everyone a bunch of time by just admitting it.

    You misspelled "...and the judge can punish the uppity defendant for having the audacity to actually insist on due process!"

  15. Re: Yeah on Obama: Gov't Shouldn't Be Hampered By Encrypted Communications · · Score: 1

    If someone creates the cure for the common cold and keeps it secret even to their grave, that's entirely their business.

    In that case, does it even count as "information?" It might as well have never existed, since it makes no difference. It also, of course, would have no value, because nothing was ever done with it.

    It would also have no legal protection. Patent law wouldn't apply, because it wasn't disclosed to the patent office. Copyright law wouldn't apply, because it wasn't published. It wouldn't even qualify as a trade secret, because there was no "trade!" Such a piece of alleged information would really be no such thing, because it would be effectively nothing at all.

    In other words, information figuratively "wants" to be free because until an idea is shared, it doesn't even count as "information," and once it is shared, it's fundamentally impossible for the originator to prevent it from being shared further.

  16. Re:Linus and Martin Luther King are in agreement on Linus On Diversity and Niceness In Open Source · · Score: 1

    Poor Dr. King... he never dreamed his children would actually be judged on the quantity and pettiness of their lawsuits.

  17. Re:And so on. on Eric Holder Severely Limits Civil Forfeiture · · Score: 1

    they have to have some sort of evidence that you might be involved in child pornography. Even flimsy evidence.

    "Your cellphone includes a camera and there is a park/school/daycare/child of any sort somewhere within a 10-mile radius."

  18. Re:forfeiture is sometimes better than incarcerati on Eric Holder Severely Limits Civil Forfeiture · · Score: 5, Insightful

    forfeiture is sometimes better than incarceration

    Sure, except that's not the damn choice! The actual choice is between due process (i.e., outlawing civil forfeiture) and lack of due process (i.e, shitting all over the Fourth Amendment), and that should be an easy choice for anyone who isn't a totalitarian sociopath.

    Choosing between fines and prison as a punishment after trial and conviction is a wholly separate issue.

  19. Re:There is a better way on To Avoid Detection, Terrorists Made Messages Seem Like Spam · · Score: 2

    Because now they have found the link between sender and receiver. With email if you get one person, you can then start looking for other connections that person made and see where that leads you.

    What are you talking about? It's spam. The terrorist sends it to a million random addresses; one of which is the other terrorist who knows how to interpret it.

  20. Re:NSA Spam Filter on To Avoid Detection, Terrorists Made Messages Seem Like Spam · · Score: 1

    NSA, Google, same diff...

  21. Goddamnit, Slashdot! on To Avoid Detection, Terrorists Made Messages Seem Like Spam · · Score: 1

    The ONE TIME one of those weird gibberish leet-speak "first-post-bsd-is-dying-you-fail-it" spam posts would be on-topic, I can't find one to cite!

  22. Re:Is that a typo? on Google Releases More Windows Bugs · · Score: 2

    It should read "Google discloses more Windows bugs."

  23. Re:Glass was doomed from the start on Google Glass Is Dead, Long Live Google Glass · · Score: 1

    The privacy issues are a little exaggerated because if a Glass user went around recording everything then his battery would be dead in half an hour. However, I don't disagree with you. I should have written "regardless of the privacy issues" instead.

  24. Re:Glass was doomed from the start on Google Glass Is Dead, Long Live Google Glass · · Score: 2

    Oh good... now all they need is a Twiddler2 and a software stack that doesn't upload your entire life (and the lives of everyone around you) to be data-mined and then it'll not suck.

  25. Re:Glass was doomed from the start on Google Glass Is Dead, Long Live Google Glass · · Score: 1

    On the contrary, his devices had a lot fewer limitations! Sure, they were bulkier, but he had a real input device (chording keyboard) and longer lasting batteries (not to mention the ability to change batteries).

    Not to mention, the main "killer app" he used to use (IIRC, custom Emacs macros for note-taking and looking up stuff) is nowhere to be found on Glass.