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User: Entrope

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Comments · 2,152

  1. Re:Really "no way to discern"? on Two More 'SWAT' Calls in California -- One Involving a 12-Year-Old Gamer (ktla.com) · · Score: 2

    Sure, any call to the police could be a hoax. The issue is that this kind of hoax is both dangerous and somewhat frequent, so it is worth considering how to identify such hoaxes quickly.

  2. Re:Yeah, they kinda did on BuzzFeed Unmasks Mastermind Who Urged Peter Thiel To Destroy Gawker (buzzfeed.com) · · Score: 1

    So what? If they could have put up a bond for the damages, they could spend the rest of their money on appeals. How many parties get to spend money on an appeal without putting anything away to pay the damages they already owe?

  3. Really "no way to discern"? on Two More 'SWAT' Calls in California -- One Involving a 12-Year-Old Gamer (ktla.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If there is really no way for a 911 dispatcher to tell that a call is arriving from somewhere outside the local area through a commercial VoIP service, that is a shameful state of affairs that needs to be addressed. Probably all SWATing hoaxes involve that kind of proxy to reach the target dispatch, and probably vanishingly few legitimate emergency calls use those services.

    If a dispatcher sees a VoIP call that indicates a high risk of violence or strongly points to heavily armed response, that should be good grounds to watch out for a hoax.

  4. Re:GOOD. on BuzzFeed Unmasks Mastermind Who Urged Peter Thiel To Destroy Gawker (buzzfeed.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    Technically, they received stolen property.

    Considering that Gizmodo paid $5000 cash for it, it easily exceeded the $950 threshold below which "receiving stolen property" is a misdemeanor.

  5. Re:Yeah, they kinda did on BuzzFeed Unmasks Mastermind Who Urged Peter Thiel To Destroy Gawker (buzzfeed.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That is a hell of a lame dodge. You don't even have the guts to make the (risible) claim that Gawker faced a show trial. They faced a fair trial, dug their own grave, jumped it in, and dared the court not to bury them.

    If Gakwer did not commit serious torts, then aggravate those by defying legitimate court orders, they would not have faced the damages verdict that bankrupted them. Instead, they made it clear they didn't care who they wronged or what they got wrong as long as they got clicks.

  6. Re:I disagree on Maine Dairy Company Settles Lawsuit Over Oxford Comma (bostonmagazine.com) · · Score: 1

    Why do you say that? I cannot find anywhere that Oakhurst (or its lawyers) agree there is a grammatical error. The alleged error is also apparently too obscure for you to identify.

    As a side note, the court -- and the union -- made a big point of how most items in the list are gerunds, but "distribution" is not. They must therefore think that it would be idiomatic English to write "distributing of perishable goods", which goes a long way to show how tenuous their grasp of English is.

  7. Re: Dumb court ruling is still dumb on Maine Dairy Company Settles Lawsuit Over Oxford Comma (bostonmagazine.com) · · Score: 1

    The court in question is a federal one. Federal judges in the USA are not elected, and are supposed to be non-partisan. Maybe you should learn something before you run your mouth.

    There is no reasonable ambiguity in what the text of this law meant. The claimed alternative reading gives a sentence that is grammatically wrong, is written contrary to the legislature's rules for syntax, and has a further inherent ambiguity stemming from the grammatical error. It was gross error for the court to accept such a reading as plausible.

  8. Re: Dumb court ruling is still dumb on Maine Dairy Company Settles Lawsuit Over Oxford Comma (bostonmagazine.com) · · Score: 1

    It is fair to argue that the law is dumb, but it is wrong for judges to apply their political disagreements to distort plain writing. The court should have said something like "The Maine Legislative Drafting Manual obliges lawmakers to omit the suggested comma. Even if they were permitted to include it, to construe the list as ending with an item of 'packing for shipment or distribution' would render the sentence ungrammatical and introduce a further ambiguity as to whether the list is meant to apply when any one, or when all, of its elements are met. The suggested alternative reading is unsupportable, and the union and its lawyers are hereby ordered to pay fees and reasonable costs sustained by the defense in arguing this motion."

  9. Re:I disagree on Maine Dairy Company Settles Lawsuit Over Oxford Comma (bostonmagazine.com) · · Score: 1

    There is no grammatical error if you assume that the legislature followed their Drafting Manual and omitted the serial comma between the last two items in the list ("packing for shipment" and "distribution"). If you take the last item as "packing for shipment or distribution", then you introduce both a grammatical error -- a missing conjunction -- and a violation of the Maine Legislature Drafting Manual.

  10. Re:I disagree on Maine Dairy Company Settles Lawsuit Over Oxford Comma (bostonmagazine.com) · · Score: 2

    There is also the fact that the Maine Legislature explicitly tells people to leave out the Oxford comma. Part III, Chapter 4, Section 2, part A: "Although authorities on punctuation may differ, when drafting Maine law or rules, don't use a comma between the penultimate and the last item of a series. Do not write: 'Trailers, semitrailers, and pole trailers' Do write: 'Trailers, semitrailers and pole trailers'".

    That is followed with a warning to be careful "if an item in the series is modified" (as is the case here). That warning is in the previous (2009) version of the manual, and so predates this dispute, but I am not sure whether it predates the overtime law in question. Both grammar and the law indicate that the court got this wrong.

  11. Dumb court ruling is still dumb on Maine Dairy Company Settles Lawsuit Over Oxford Comma (bostonmagazine.com) · · Score: 1

    If you try to read the sentence as ending with "... storing, packing for (shipment or distribution) of", where is the conjunction that ties together the activities being enumerated?

    But I'm pretty sure this was discussed to death the last several times it was on /..

  12. Re:Eletrical grid Energy doesn't come from oil on New York's $6 Billion Plan For Offshore Wind Shows That Oil Drilling Really Is On the Way Out (businessinsider.com) · · Score: 2

    Oil heating is on the decline with electric heating in many cases replacing it. Heat pumps are more practical now than they used to be.

    Heat pumps work terribly when the outside temperature is low, which is the common condition for winter in New York. The coefficient of (heating) performance for a heat pump drops from 4 or more when heating is barely needed to about 1.5 when the outside temperature is below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Oil furnaces are about 85% efficient, because they generate enough exhaust gases that some heat escapes out the chimney; natural gas furnaces can be up to 98% efficient, which is better than you can get with your 60% efficiency estimate and a COP of 1.5.

    (A few winters ago, my house's 40-year-old fuel oil furnace failed. After doing a lot of research and investigation, I replaced it with a hybrid heat pump/oil system. Most of the time, the heat pump works well, but winters still get cold enough often enough that a furnace is more cost-effective. There are no natural gas distribution lines in my neighborhood, so natural gas was not an option, and a geothermal system would have cost about $40,000 more, which is decades worth of heating oil and electricity bills.)

  13. Re:Eletrical grid Energy doesn't come from oil on New York's $6 Billion Plan For Offshore Wind Shows That Oil Drilling Really Is On the Way Out (businessinsider.com) · · Score: 1

    Can you elaborate? Your argument sounds suspiciously like "Jacobson's bias is acceptable because I agree with it, theirs is not because I disagree with them".

    Jacobson et al. investigated the criticisms of Jacobson et al. and found that Jacobson et al. were totally in the mainstream (liberal) academic/quasi-governmental-organizational mindset, and so the criticisms of Jacobson et al. must be wrong. They investigated themselves and found no wrongdoing! Could they not find anyone else willing to defend their work?

  14. Re:Is this a surprise? on Camera Makers Resist Encryption, Despite Warnings From Photographers (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    This would not require a special encryption chip. Most high-end cameras are built with ASICs that are designed by the manufacturer. There is an extensive market of reusable logic cores, including ones that perform encryption and decryption, that can be integrated into an ASIC. Most modern encryption algorithms are designed to need very little in terms of hardware resources, so it should not significantly increase the size of the ASICs in question.

  15. Re:SD card feature? on Camera Makers Resist Encryption, Despite Warnings From Photographers (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    The problem is key management. A camera does not have a good way to enter a long password or passphrase, and an SD card is worse. It seems just as feasible to plug the memory card into a laptop (or into an adapter attached to a phone) that can apply whatever encryption the photographer wants.

    A country could, of course, outlaw the use of apps to do that -- but they could, and presumably would, do the same for cameras that incorporate strong encryption.

  16. Re:Exclusive! Must credit crackpots dot com! on Investigators Crack DB Cooper Code, Identify Suspect With Possible CIA Connections (seattlepi.com) · · Score: 1

    Who did you think was finally able to decipher the code?

  17. Exclusive! Must credit crackpots dot com! on Investigators Crack DB Cooper Code, Identify Suspect With Possible CIA Connections (seattlepi.com) · · Score: 1

    The coded letters, reportedly sent by D.B. Cooper, actually reveal that D.B. Cooper wrote the Voynich manuscript while deployed to the grassy knoll so he could fake the moon landing videos.

  18. So which talking points misspelled Nunes's name? That's about the fifth time I've seen it wrong, usually by people who want to derail a thread.

  19. An ideology of overthrowing democracy often includes things that are not specifically overthrowing democracy. So what if ArmoredDragon characterized calling for violent attacks on Ajit Pai an example of the ideology of overthrowing democracy?

    The only thing I will apologize for is not immediately correcting your misunderstanding and misuse of the phrase ad hominem attack. I apologize for the delay in correcting you on that subject.

  20. Besides the fact that you keep misquoting ArmoredDragon, most people do not use the dim-wittedly narrow definition of "democracy" that you do, as explained by the article I linked earlier, among many others.

    Attacking a high-level federal official because of their official actions is an attack on the legitimate US government and its democratic underpinnings. Most of the people who currently claim the US isn't "democratic" are only doing so in a fit of pique that their preferred candidate isn't president right now, as evidenced by your earlier raising of an irrelevant criterion for that election.

  21. Re:Stolen email on Dutch Intelligence Agents Watched Russia Hack the DNC (volkskrant.nl) · · Score: 1

    Again, receiving opposition research is not treason, no matter how many times you might claim it is. It isn't even illegal, and it sure falls short of the constitution's very explicit criteria for something to be treason.

  22. Uh, no, ArmoredDragon's words were "this ideology of overthrowing democracy". That's different. A straw man attack is any time that you attack some version of an opponent's position that you have simplified in order to make it easier to attack.

  23. So you've spent how many comments attacking a straw man? (Hint: Maybe *you* should have read more carefully at the start of the thread. Or maybe you should just go seek that psychiatric help. Or both -- they're not exclusive, and they will probably both help.)

  24. To recap: you idiosyncratically define "democracy" such that the US isn't one, you cite non-democratic methods a a way of divining what "democracy" would demand, and you attempt to justify violent insurrection on the basis that the government doesn't fit your definition of "democracy". You might want to seek psychiatric help, champ.

  25. Re:Stolen email on Dutch Intelligence Agents Watched Russia Hack the DNC (volkskrant.nl) · · Score: 1

    Getting oppo research on Crooked Hillary is not treason, no matter how much you want to pretend it is. That's the only thing Trump Jr clearly jumped at.