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User: tsotha

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  1. Re:I wouldn't hold my breath on Time To Discuss Drug Prohibition? · · Score: 1

    Not everyone on both sides of the law could profit, or it would be perpetual money motion.

    Heh. We already have a perpetual money machine called "fractional reserve banking".

  2. Doesn't matter on Obama's "ZuneGate" · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I seriously doubt Obama loads his own mp3 player, and that's a good thing. He's got lots to do before his first day on the job, and screwing with computers isn't on the list.

  3. Cross platform? on Sun Releases JavaFX · · Score: 1

    It is Sun's first Java release to include standardized, cross-platform audio and video playback code (in the form of On2 licensed codecs). The lack of a Linux or Solaris release is a notable absence.

    So... cross-platform means PC and Mac? Or just PC?

  4. Re:Mod parent -1 (Stupid) on Teacher Sells Ads On Tests · · Score: 1

    Or do you just want a return to "separate but (un-)equal" school systems using a tiered system of private and (due to money migrating away to private schools) crappy, underfunded public schools?

    I assume by this you mean vouchers. But when a student leaves the public school system he takes expenditures from the system as well as money. Why do you assume this will make the public school worse? I see no indication there's any sort of economy of scale in education. Quite to the contrary, large school systems, like any large organizations, seem to attract layers of bureaucratic parasites that just suck up money without providing benefit.

  5. Re:Works For Me on Teacher Sells Ads On Tests · · Score: 1

    The story of education in California in the last 30 years is one of exploding budgets. In constant dollars, we're paying twice as much per pupil as we did a generation ago, and they're doing worse. The DC school system consumes the most dollars per pupil of any in the country, and yet it's a freakin' disaster.

    We do pay for a quality education system. We're just not getting it.

  6. Re:Silly gun nut on Bush Demands Amnesty for Spying Telecoms · · Score: 1

    Well, Johnson was using the FBI to gather information on people he considered subversive. For example, Martin Luther King Jr's phone was bugged by the FBI - he had a huge file detailing every part of his life, including personal stuff like marital infidelities. They bugged phones and kept files on almost every anti-war or civil rights leader at the time.

    Nixon did the same thing, but to a greater degree. Not only did his administration watch "subversives", he also used government personnel to keep tabs on political opponents. The Nixon administration was the closest we've ever had to a surveillance state. The only reason he didn't do more of it had to do with the limits of technology, not the limits of law. Hell, FISA was written as a result of some of Nixon's shenanigans.

    From what we know the Bush program tapped phones of people making calls to or receiving calls from a person in a foreign country who is already suspected of being part of a terrorist organization. That's way, way more restrictive than the other two. As far as Habeas Corpus not applying to enemy spies and saboteurs... meh. That was never a provision of the law until the Supreme Court conjured it out of thin air. When German saboteurs were apprehended in the US during WWII, they were tried and executed by military courts without ever having access to the civilian court system. I think you'll find now that the election is over everyone will start to remember this isn't a change from how things have always been done.

  7. Re:Silly gun nut on Bush Demands Amnesty for Spying Telecoms · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bush has violated more freedoms than any president before and you gun nuts have done absolutely nothing. I call your bluff!

    This is the most historically ignorant thing I've read in awhile. Bush is way, way down on that list. Wilson goes at the top. Above Bush we'd find FDR, Jackson, Nixon, LBJ... and probably a few others I don't know about.

  8. Re:Glorified network effect on Censorship By Glut · · Score: 1

    What do you mean? Every year is the year of the Linux desktop.

  9. Should be okay... on Drinking Coffee From a Cup In Space · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...as long as they don't eat too much asparagus.

  10. Re:Like to see this replicated on German Doctor Cures an HIV Patient With a Bone Marrow Transplant · · Score: 1

    This is mostly wrong. I live in Northern California, which is (or was) the epicenter of AIDS in the US, and the care gaps for these patients revolve more around things like getting meals delivered because they don't have enough energy to shop. California has a program called Medical which covers people who are too poor to afford care. People you read about who come to the emergency room as a the first contact with care either have a genuine emergency (as in a car crash), or they've been ignoring symptoms in lieu of dealing with the bureaucracy. Nobody likes to fill out forms, but I don't accept that as a reason to switch to a European-style system.

    The last thing in the world I want to see is a system similar to Britain or Canada. They get appalling care compared to Americans for anything more complicated than a broken bone.

    P.S. is that the right link? I'm not sure what you're trying to point out.

  11. Reaches my comfort level on Search For the Tomb of Copernicus Reaches an End · · Score: 1

    A computer-generated facial reconstruction is said to also bear a resemblance to contemporary portraits of the scientist."

    Oh, really? Generated by an actual computer? Well then, that's good enough for me.

  12. Re:Dupe from 1973 on Spider Missing After Trip To Space Station · · Score: 1

    Yep. They've pretty much done all the "will x grow in space" experiments. Even if they hadn't, you could get the same results with orders of magnitude less money by launching an unmanned, disposable lab. Can someone point to a single experiment they've done on this turkey that a) hasn't been done already, and b) matters? Do we even care if spiders can spin webs in space? Why?

  13. Re:Like to see this replicated on German Doctor Cures an HIV Patient With a Bone Marrow Transplant · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm not sure a form to submit complaints really buttresses your argument. I've never heard of an instance in the US where someone was denied medication for HIV for any reason. Not even money. I'm sure it's happened, just because with a large enough sample group you'll get any behavior you can imagine. But it's a small enough chance as to be functionally zero. In most places a pharmacist who refused to provide a lifesaving drug for pretty much anything would be run out of town even before the government started in on him.

  14. Re:What This Means on Google Kills Yahoo Ad Deal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh my God, no it wasn't. Yang was treating Yahoo like it was still his company, when in fact it belongs to the shareholders. There was no reasonable way to run Yahoo's numbers and think the stock would be worth what Microsoft was paying within any reasonable time frame.

    Actually, this is something of a coup by Google. They screwed both Microsoft and Yahoo without spending a dime.

  15. Worthless on Poll Finds 23 Percent of Texans Think Obama is Muslim · · Score: 1

    Bah. This is just another one of those polls they do so people on the coasts can get their USRDA of smug. First of all, it's a self-selected internet-only poll, which tells you right off the top we're not dealing with science here. It oversamples young people, Democrats, hispanics, and people without a college education. Also, it doesn't make the distinction between people who just don't know anything about him and people who think he's lying.

  16. Sure on Microsoft Documentation Declared Unfit For US Consumption · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."

    And still others realize their documentation is probably no crappier than anyone else's.

  17. Re:Cartoon battlefield on US Congress Funds Laser Weapons · · Score: 1

    Why not use that money to feed your own poor?

    Have you seen our poor? Food isn't what they need.

  18. Re:Cartoon battlefield on US Congress Funds Laser Weapons · · Score: 1

    No, it's not bullshit at all. In Iraq you're allowed to have a gun, no problem. But you're not allowed to take your gun from the house. It's against the law. People out-of-doors with guns, and especially rocket launchers, are assumed to be bad guys. These are the rules, and everyone knows it. The Iraq of today is a very different place than NYC, where, incidentally, you're not allowed to have a gun in public either. I can almost guarantee you'd be shot if you walked down Park Avenue with an AK-47.

    The WWII statistics are probably wrong as well, but I'd guess they're a lot more reliable because nobody had a reason to game them. People killed in uniform were military deaths. People killed out of uniform were either civilians or spies (spies being statistically insignificant). In Iraq the bad guys don't wear uniforms, and they have a huge vested interest in pretending their dead weren't insurgents at all but peaceful gentlemen out for a smoke. For political reasons there are factions around the world who'll take that assertion at face value (cf that ridiculous Lancet study). Far from pulling this from my ass, it should be obvious to anyone who keeps up with the situation. The soldiers complain about it endlessly.

  19. Re:Cartoon battlefield on US Congress Funds Laser Weapons · · Score: 1

    Well, to be honest, I read the summary under the video. It's possible they were lying.

  20. Re:Cartoon battlefield on US Congress Funds Laser Weapons · · Score: 2, Informative

    I see. And how many of those civilian deaths were actually investigated instead of just recorded as civilian? My point is the bad guys in Iraq are all civilians - that's the nature of asymetrical warfare. I have seen tapes of groups of men with AK-47s and rocket launchers getting blown up and then later recorded as "civilian". It's absolutely, positively impossible those numbers are accurate to within a tenth of a percentage point.

  21. Re:Cartoon battlefield on US Congress Funds Laser Weapons · · Score: 1

    Not buying it. Not by a long shot. In Iraq after a crew of bomb planters gets obliterated the family always claimed they were simple shepherds out for a midnight stroll. The idea somebody has done enough investigation to invalidate those sorts of claims is hard to believe. Who collected these numbers, and who paid for the study?

  22. Re:Cartoon battlefield on US Congress Funds Laser Weapons · · Score: 5, Informative

    We have seen every development of new more advanced weapons lead to more and more killing and less and less regard for human life. Rather than stopping the killing of civilians, it just makes it more acceptable by giving cover to those who killed the civilians.

    This is simply wrong. The peak of civilian killing was WWII, when entire cities were targeted because that's as accurate as the bombers could get. Not only did this culminate in the complete destruction of two Japanese cities, but the US had already killed far more civilians with firebombs than it managed to kill with nukes. And the Japanese were hardly in a position to complain after their own actions in Korea and China.

    Now we have weapons that are precisely targeted. So much so we can use bombs filled with concrete to destroy AA installations parked in civilian neighborhoods without killing people in the house next door. That AA position would surely have been destroyed in earlier wars as well, and it would have been done with 2000 pound bombs dropped on the entire neighborhood, or, more recently, a more precisely targeted 500 pound bomb that destroyed the AA installation because it was accurate enough to hit the house next door. Which is worse, do you think?

    The laser would give us the option to be very precise, to the point where we could destroy vehicle tracks on an advancing armored column without injuring the soldiers inside. Someday that will be SOP, where countries that inflict unnecessary losses on enemy soldiers will be roundly criticized.

  23. Re:I disagree on IT Workers Cushioned From US Economic Downturn · · Score: 1

    I could make this amount of money working as an Armored Car Guard and not work as hard.

    To be fair, you're unlikely to be shot as a helpdesk schlub. "Armored car guard" is one of the most dangerous jobs in the market.

  24. Will the hardware mfgrs go for this? on RIAA and MPAA Developing Domain-Based DRM · · Score: 1

    There are still lots of people who think the hardware is broken when they run into a DRM problem. I refuse to buy anything blu-ray because of the DRM system they have in place.

  25. Premature my ass on In Leaked Email, NASA Chief Vents On Shuttle Program's End · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Premature"? The shuttle program should have been terminated decades ago when it was clear it wouldn't meet stated design goals, i.e. low cost transportation to orbit. The termination of the shuttle program is very, very post-mature. The only reason it survived is the number of jobs it provided in the right congressional districts.