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User: pjt33

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  1. Re:Depends on your perspective and tastes on Jimmy Wales: London Is Better For Tech Than "Dreadful" Silicon Valley · · Score: 1

    Silicon Fen in Cambridge has also existed for decades already. Dundee's biggest advantage over Cambridge might be that it's too far to commute to London: Cambridge is already part commuter town, which is putting pressure on housing.

  2. Re:Depends on your perspective and tastes on Jimmy Wales: London Is Better For Tech Than "Dreadful" Silicon Valley · · Score: 1

    It's anyone's guess why Cameron chose London as the UK's tech hub

    Not really. Like many others of his class and professional background, he only occasionally remembers that there's life outside the M25.

  3. Tendentious summary on Cuba Forms a CS Professional Society -- It's No ACM · · Score: 5, Informative

    For example, one must apply to the Ministry of Communication to be accepted into the UIC

    Shock horror! You don't become a member just by putting MUIC on your business cards! I bet that you don't get admitted to the ACM without applying either.

    A CS degree is required (sorry Bill Gates).

    If the submitter (presumably the author of the blog from the second link) had actually read the two-week-old comments in the first linked page then they would see that this isn't true. A CS degree is sufficient, but not necessary: the statutes clearly say that membership is open to professionals in other areas "with experience in support activities for the IT sector". So basically that's about the same as e.g. the venerable British Computer Society.

    UIC members must be Cuban, while ACM has chapters in 57 nations

    I don't see any nationality requirements in the statutes. It just seems to be a standard national professional body. And it hasn't even formally come into existence yet, so how would it have tentacles spread across the globe?

    The only thing which seems to be both accurate and potentially upsetting to some people is the political side: that the application form asks about membership of political organisations, and one of its objectives relates to defending the Revolution. But that's completely unsurprising to anyone who knows anything at all about Cuban society, and it's a bit rich that someone from a country which propagandises primary school children by making them recite a Pledge of Allegiance every day (have you seen George Takei talk on the Daily Show about having to do this in an internment camp for Japanese Americans?) should complain about it.

    (If I've just fed a troll, then I apologise to the Internet at large).

  4. Re:It's not just speculation. It's a form of relig on Have Some Physicists Abandoned the Empirical Method? · · Score: 1

    Unless you consider "Hope that you don't piss the gods off" to be a guiding philosophical principle, that's still a fairly restrictive definition of religion. Consider, for example, Roman religion: it provided structure to daily life, but was largely orthogonal to the philosophical guidance of schools such as stoicism and epicureanism.

  5. Re:Nearly impossible to get everyone vaccinated on Diphtheria Returns To Spain For Lack of Vaccination · · Score: 2

    And who knows how many more forgotten samples are out there?

  6. Re:Parents should be liable on Diphtheria Returns To Spain For Lack of Vaccination · · Score: 1

    How about parents who smoke in the house? You can prove that by checking conicotine levels in the kid's urine.

    Only once you've ruled out consumption of tomatoes and aubergine.

  7. Whoosh!

  8. Re:Working links with pictures on Galapagos Island Volcano Erupts After 33 Years, Threatening Fragile Ecosystem · · Score: 5, Informative

    FWIW, the Spanish-language version of the last link has much better pictures than the English-language version.

  9. Re:just what we all love on Amazon Decides To Start Paying Tax In the UK · · Score: 1

    The "loophole" that Amazon has been using is nothing more than the EU single market, in all its glory, exactly as it was intended to be used. ...

    When the EU and its predecessors were being set up, governments were all super keen to establish this sort of single market because they saw it as a way to allow their own home-grown champion companies to expand, by selling to people elsewhere on the continent.

    You're contradicting yourself. Was the single market set up so that national companies could start selling to other EU countries with minimal red tape, or so that multinational companies could pick a country and negotiate with its tax authorities prior to setting up a "headquarters" which consists of a P.O. box? And if it was the latter, why is the Commission investigating whether the arrangements negotiated between various companies and the Luxembourgeois tax authorities constitute illegal state aid?

  10. Re:Transparency on Researchers Devise Voting System That Seems Secure, But Is Hard To Use · · Score: 1

    Here in Spain elections are always on Sunday. (In fact, we have elections tomorrow). However, I don't imagine that that would be very popular with certain constituencies in the southern U.S.

  11. Overblown on Bank of England Accidentally E-mails Top-Secret "Brexit" Plan To the Guardian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The headline exaggerates, anyway. The e-mail doesn't contain a Top-Secret "Brexit" Plan: merely the top-secret fact that the bank is going to be working on a "Brexit" plan. It's neither a surprise that they're doing this, nor a surprise that they want to keep it secret: the finance ministers of certain other European countries were already offended by the Bank of England having a Grexit plan.

  12. Re:And to think on GCHQ Officials Given Immunity From Hacking Charges · · Score: 2

    You seem to have made the easy but very big mistake of believing Braveheart to be historical. There are some bits of history mixed into the plot to support the illusion, but there are also massive errors of fact, and that is one of them. (Don't get me started on the chronology...)

  13. Re:Bad good idea on European Telecoms May Block Mobile Ads, Spelling Trouble For Google · · Score: 1

    I just disable JavaScript. Works beautifully at blocking ads on the sites I visit from my smartphone.

  14. Re:Just my take on Who Owns Pre-Embryos? · · Score: 1

    (I like the English "not proven" wording better)

    It's only a side point, but for what it's worth that's a possible verdict under Scottish law, not under English.

  15. Re:We Greeks invented drunkardness also! on Ancient Hangover Cure Discovered In Greek Texts · · Score: 1

    The tree is willow, but I understood that Hippocrates used its bark rather than its leaves.

  16. Re:GCHQ on Twitter Moves Non-US Accounts To Ireland, and Away From the NSA · · Score: 1

    You give the impression of not having read more than the first sentence of the post you replied to.

  17. Re:Indeed... on Twitter Moves Non-US Accounts To Ireland, and Away From the NSA · · Score: 1

    US law should have absolutely no meaning for anyone outside the US. Why would an EU citizen expect US law to have any relevance at all?

    Have you read Twitter's Terms of Service? Even the soon-to-come-into-effect version says that

    You understand that through your use of the Services you consent to the collection and use (as set forth in the Privacy Policy) of this information, including the transfer of this information to the United States, Ireland, and/or other countries for storage, processing and use by Twitter.

  18. Re:What's the problem? on Social Science Journal 'Bans' Use of p-values · · Score: 1

    I agree with you. Yet no need for the quotes around social 'scientists.' Psychologists, socialists, etc. employ the same experimental designs and mathematical techniques in experiments as doctors or others performing drug efficacy or medical outcome experiments, for example.

    That sounds like an excellent reason to use scare quotes around "scientists". When only 25% of published biomedical results can be reproduced, that field needs to do work to justify the claim to be science as well.

  19. Re:Hasn't this been proven to be junk science? on A 2-Year-Old Has Become the Youngest Person Ever To Be Cryonically Frozen · · Score: 1

    The original word for the final evil in the box, elpis, has roughly the same range of meaning as the Spanish esperanza. Linguistically it's as likely that the thing which remained trapped in the box was expectation of evil as that it was hope, and if that's understood as foreknowledge of the evil that will befall you then it's both easy to see why Zeus (or Hesiod) would consider it worse than those which escaped and to hold the aetiology as consistent with the state of things which it's supposed to be explaining - whereas positive hope is clearly not outside the range of human experience.

    TL;DR: Nietzsche is probably working with a bad translation of the Greek.

  20. Re:Because beating up the clergy always works so w on Turkish Hackers Target Vatican Website After Pope's Genocide Comment · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would have thought that most of his Turkish friends would have a low opinion of him already for choosing a Greek handle.

  21. Re:Check their work or check the summary? on No, It's Not Always Quicker To Do Things In Memory · · Score: 1

    Some research into what proportion of programmers do know this kind of basic stuff would have made a much better paper.

  22. Re:It depends on No, It's Not Always Quicker To Do Things In Memory · · Score: 1

    It is bad, but I've seen worse.

  23. Re:Sure, great, new comms channel on Hack Air-Gapped Computers Using Heat · · Score: 1

    Interdiction or USB. NSA has plenty of experience in that side of things.

  24. Re:Bad Title on Hack Air-Gapped Computers Using Heat · · Score: 2

    Stenography is typing. You mean steganography. But even that is missing the point, which is one thing the title does get right: air-gapped. There's not supposed to be any communications channel at all between the two computers, but this technique creates one.

  25. Re:Be Still, My Heart on Court Overturns Dutch Data Retention Law, Privacy More Important · · Score: 2

    Ah, looking at the other answers it turns out that I'd missed that the Data Retention Directive has been overturned by the ECJ. Still, I hope I've given you a useful framework for understanding other news about European legislative matters.