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User: dbIII

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  1. Big hole in that theory on Study: Science Still Seen As a Male Profession · · Score: 1

    Too bad it became more complicated and scientific

    It started that way FFS. Seriously guys, how many PHP cut and paste dudes know assembly for a CPU, any CPU? Programming has got a lot LESS complicated and scientific over time, far less than when Grace Hopper was at the keyboard.

  2. The Friday night fight is late this week on Study: Science Still Seen As a Male Profession · · Score: 0
    The Friday night fight designed to get those "Men's rights" types out from under their rocks and looking at whatever ads Dice puts up is late this week.

    Yes I know some of the MRA types got that way from not being able to see their kids or something - rant at the courts and not some feminists who still can't get into a movie awards night without wearing high heels - go for the people with real power instead of the almost totally powerless.

  3. Re:More than PR on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 1

    who just opposed renewal of the Patriot Act ... by filibustering it at a crucial period prior to its renewal.

    Not critical enough that such a delay achieved anything other than sending a message.
    BTW, I completely agree with your text I cut out, but my point is that it's the actual votes against it that matter and various proceedural games are mostly pointless unless they influence that in some way.

    I see the filibuster as a flaw in democracy (like the shutdown trick Cruz pulled) and not the person, despite my rants about an author that it turns out he wasn't named after, and disagreeing with some (but in no way all) of his policies. It's sad that he can't just vote against it and get media attention for that, but instead has to be a roadblock for ten hours to get the message out.

  4. Re:Win95 the GUI for MSDOSv7 - see wikipedia on 25 Years Today - Windows 3.0 · · Score: 1

    "Bootstrapped" implies it goes away instead of being an active layer handling memory management etc - so it's incorrect.
    MSDOS stayed resident and was used by Win95 etc.

  5. There is an example of how it does in TFA on 25 Years Today - Windows 3.0 · · Score: 1
    From the article:

    Now, there are parts of MS-DOS that are unrelated to file I/O. For example, there are functions for allocating memory, parsing a string containing potential wildcards into FCB format, that sort of thing. Those functions were still handled by MS-DOS

    So in terms of actually getting stuff done (eg. memory management) MSDOS was there to do it - thus for all practical purposes the Win32 was running on top of MSDOS. It wasn't "just a bootloader" as various people in this thread have been ranting about.

  6. Re:More than PR on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 1

    it's quite clear that everything is deliberately vague beyond the borders of the US

    It's her ignorance of the USA, especially functioning capitalism and a functioning state with elected officials where she has such breathtaking ignorance. Atlas Shrugged could be renamed "Bring back the Tsar and his petty nobles to run the place", so much of it is about the horror of dirty little serfs like the science guy having positions of power.

    And seriously, how is Rand supposed to have undermined democracy anyway?

    Her aristocratic manifesto was taken seriously be far too many people who take it far more seriously than a shallow SF book should be.

    I note that we in the US currently have a president who is the antithesis of anything Rand believed in,

    If you pay attention you'll notice that they have ALL been that from George Washington onwards. IMHO that shows more about Rand's lack of understanding of the USA in the years when she wrote the novel than anything wrong with the United States.
    It's a European novel about aristocracy (screwing their way to the top as jailbait no less), highly critical about egalitarian colonials like the people who built the United States and those who carry on inspired by them. It's had a LOT of influence on people who didn't know better and it's distorted their view of reality.
    If you want to read something to defuse such shit try some Joseph Conrad - well written, lots of it is short, and he made sure he had a very deep understanding of the topics he wrote about. "Under Western Eyes" shows what Rand had to be afraid of in her earlier years and it's a pity she never wrote something like that instead of her big insult to the west "Atlas Shrugged".

  7. Again with the names on NSA-Reform Bill Fails In US Senate · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "USA Freedom Act" - what evil manipulative piece of shit gave that name to a bill on communication monitoring?

  8. Win95 the GUI for MSDOSv7 - see wikipedia on 25 Years Today - Windows 3.0 · · Score: 1

    I don't know where you got that from. It ran on an updated MSDOS with 32 bit capability (MSDOSv7) but it was still MSDOS.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS

  9. Re:For me it's Windows NT 3.1 on 25 Years Today - Windows 3.0 · · Score: 2

    Windows was not a true OS until Windows 95

    That ran on MSDOS as well, all the way up to Win ME. WinNT was the cut down VMS inspired thing that finally got us off the cut down CP/M clone.
    Microsoft have always been a "me too" company, which is a description not a criticism since it was often about doing something involved on far cheaper hardware than the competition.

  10. Re:More than PR on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 1

    That makes far more sense than the article I read some years ago about his father being so batshit insane as to give his child the name "Rand".

  11. Re:More than PR on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 1

    I just can't see why so many people think of her in an American context when she knew fuck-all about the west. If Stalin had parachuted a writer into the USA with instructions on writing something to undermine democracy it wouldn't have been as effective as the damage that Rand did with her rants about anything that wasn't aristocracy.
    It's "twilight" for people who think they were born to rule.

  12. Re:More than PR on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 1

    The entire theme was anti-cronyism

    How do you explain Dagny if that was the case? The theme was about how nice it would be to have the nobility, such as Dagny, back in charge

  13. Re:Effect? on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 1
    Translation for the slow - name dropping tells me nothing especially since what you have referred to has nothing to do with paralysis of government.
    So, instead of hiding behind name dropping that has nothing to do with the topic please let us know why you think a government that is unable to function, thus letting the unelected run things, is such a good thing?

    Until you have, there is no possibility of having a rational discussion.

    Pretending to take offence and be too stupid to get the point is cowardice.

  14. Re:Effect? on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 1

    Then what exactly are you saying you want? Don't hide behind the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers and tell me exactly what it is you are advocating that is in some way different to what George Washington delivered.

  15. Re:Effect? on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 1

    Again, rather than tossing accusations & insults

    Good point, it appears that instead you may be advocating something more like the Iranian model where there are elected officials but they have no actual say in running the country.
    Is that more like it?
    If not, then say what you mean instead of this childish shit of suggesting we are better of with something other than an elected government.

  16. Re:Effect? on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 1

    "Check the facts" from some guy that thinks constipation is an effective form of government? I think you need to heed your own advice instead of blindly handing it out.

  17. Re:similar question on The Brainteaser Elon Musk Asks New SpaceX Engineers · · Score: 1

    I'm not so sure about the story of the guy stepping on one that I relayed, but this much at least is real and leads on from Pfhorrest's comment:
    http://www.insidescience.org/content/new-research-reveals-how-polar-bears-stay-warm/1559

  18. Re:It showed a lot on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 0

    The main lesson of the "Patriot" act is that putting such names on bills and forcing them through without allowing them to be read before voting is an abuse of the system. One guy was willing to commit what looked like political suicide (possibly close to real suicide if the press had crucified him and a loony with a gun decided he would be a good target) by voting against a thing designed to make anyone voting against it look as if they were voting against Patriotism. What made things worse is for all they knew the bill they didn't have time to read may have actually been as good as was promised.
    I'll bet Bin Laden used that event to show his followers that he had "won" and changed the USA from a Democratic Republic into something where the votes of the citizens no longer mattered. I like to think it was only temporary, so not a real win for Bin Laden.

  19. Re:Effect? on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 1

    So that the NSA et al can just get on with business as usual without elected officials telling them what to do?
    You'll love China. They've got all that without those expensive elections. Or how about the colonies when the King was in charge?

  20. Re:More than PR on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 1

    and libertarians have never heard of the tragedy of the commons.

    Or, like Koch and some others that have run under that label, they have heard of it and wish to exploit it as much as possible.

    I feel sorry for Rand though. Named after a writer who saw America as a Capitalist dystopia with the riff-raff having a say in who got to run the place, so she wrote a manifesto about how everything would be better with Tsar-era nobility running the place qualified by their bloodline (eg. her jailbait princess screwing her way to the top is an ideal leader, because her Grandad ran something large). Anyone sucked in enough by such anti-American trash as to name their child after the author is really going to give the child some fucked up ideas.

  21. It highlighted the ideal of on What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"? · · Score: 1

    It highlighted the "libertarian" ideal of the wishes of one man being far more important than an elected majority.
    So more in keeping with the style of George King of England than George Washington.

    The filibuster is a bug in the system kept for convenience of game playing factions instead of being a working part of the machinery of running the country.

  22. Y2K problem resurfaces and will again on How 1990s Encryption Backdoors Put Today's Internet In Jeopardy · · Score: 3, Informative

    In 2008 the Macromedia flexlm program (an annoying thing with the role of sporadically preventing you from using the software you have actually paid for - thus punishing people who didn't pirate it) had a bug where permanent licences, given a date of "00", were mapped onto the date of 1st January 2000 and thus had expired. Annoying. Even more annoying was the "expert" I dealt with on the issue said "what's a Y2K bug?".
    Such stupidity took a full two weeks to fix.

  23. Re:"Logjam"? Seriously? on How 1990s Encryption Backdoors Put Today's Internet In Jeopardy · · Score: 1

    If that's remotely possible it would mean a very poor diet.

  24. Re:similar question on The Brainteaser Elon Musk Asks New SpaceX Engineers · · Score: 4, Funny

    Funny thing, those hairs block infra-red pretty well too, as discovered by a guy that stood on a polar bear while wearing night vision goggles. Luckily he also discovered he could run quite a long distance while the bear was waking up and wondering who stood on it.

  25. Re:similar question on The Brainteaser Elon Musk Asks New SpaceX Engineers · · Score: 1

    oh come on - a white polar bear

    Given the four sides it has clearly transformed into a cartesian bear :)