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User: LihTox

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  1. Re: Maybe it's time these companies learn... on SeaWorld and Others Discover That a Hashtag Can Become a Bashtag · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And if Walmart has the lowest prices in town (or maybe the ONLY prices in a small town), and if you're on a tight budget, you might not have a choice in where you shop, love it or hate it. It's like saying, "Wow, everyone must love the DMV, there's always a long line whenever I go!" :) Or as another example, I lived in Chicago for 5 years and I took public transportation everywhere, and I HATED it, but I hated the thought of driving in Chicago even more.

  2. Re:But *are* there enough eyes? on 2014: The Year We Learned How Vulnerable Third-Party Code Libraries Are · · Score: 1

    Potentially, yes. But open source may be running into the Bystander Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect):
    "The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present. The probability of help is inversely related to the number of bystanders."

  3. Re:Are they really that scared? on Why Elon Musk's Batteries Frighten Electric Companies · · Score: 1

    Can you resell your power to your neighbors directly, and skip the company altogether?

  4. Re:Is it just me ... on First Star War Episode 7 Trailer Released · · Score: 1

    Or maybe it's body armor that he picked up at the Army/Navy Surplus Store. It's been 30 years: if there are still "stormtroopers" they might have changed uniforms.

  5. China wants in on this deal too on Google Told To Expand Right To Be Forgotten · · Score: 2

    If Europe can regulate what the whole world sees on Google, why not China?

    If they do go through with it, let's at least have a www.google.us without the censorship. (Probably a good idea anyway.)

  6. Ambiguous on In UK, Internet Trolls Could Face Two Years In Jail · · Score: 1

    The use of the words "Internet trolls" and "venom" leave a lot to the imagine. If we're talking about people who make death or rape threats, then I can see their point. But when I read "Internet troll" and "venom" I think of teasing, mockery, and people saying "you suck!" None of which should trigger a criminal investigation. I hope the law isn't as ambiguous as all that.

  7. Re:Hardly surprising on Why Do Contextual Ads Fail? · · Score: 1

    The only advertisements that I find useful are billboards on the highway, when I'm doing a long drive and don't want to bother fiddling with the GPS. "Oh good, there's a restaurant in about 20 miles." (And if there's one restaurant at the exit there's probably more.)

  8. Re:Write-protect the microcontroller firmware, sil on Hacking USB Firmware · · Score: 1

    Or even just "You have attached a keyboard," and delay 3 seconds before the keyboard is active. If you see that message when you plug in a USB drive or printer or something, you say "Oh crap!" and unplug it quick.

  9. Let's go back to feudalism!

  10. Re:why does the CRTC need this list? on Canadian Regulator Threatens To Impose New Netflix Regulation · · Score: 1

    And Netflix provides *different* content in Canada than it does in the US (or other countries, presumably). They might have a better argument if they provided an identical product to anyone in the world who signed up for it, but in this case their product is specifically for the Canadian market.

  11. Tcl is strange in a number of ways. One is that you don't assign variables by saying "x=5", you write "set x 5" instead. Nor can you do any calculations outside of the expr command (in most cases), so instead of writing "x=5*y+3", you would write "set x [expr 5*$y+3]"

    I'm still fond of Tcl/Tk, in spite of that. :) What other language can give you a text editor in one line? "pack [text .t]"

  12. No one's mentioned Objective-C's bracket notation for calling methods. Instead of obj->method(argument) or obj.method(argument), it's [obj method:argument]. Perfectly logical I'm sure, but the few times I've tried to write Objective-C code I've always had a hard time wrapping my brain around it.

  13. Re:In-class exams are the problem. on How the Outdated TI-84 Plus Still Holds a Monopoly On Classrooms · · Score: 1

    If they have access to the web, then they have access to chatrooms and instant communication. Would you be okay with students bringing in a physics post-doc to answer the test questions for them? That's what Internet access would allow.

    I get your point, but it opens a whole can of worms. If we could trust all the students to only refer to reference materials on the webmaybe if students valued the exam as an educational experience more than as a contribution to their GPA. But changing that is a much bigger task than just letting students use tablets or laptops during an exam.

  14. Re:TI calculators are not outdated, just overprice on How the Outdated TI-84 Plus Still Holds a Monopoly On Classrooms · · Score: 2

    Entering the numbers into the calculator and pressing enter isn't a complex task, there is no need for that to be part of the test.

    It's not quite as trivial as that. I have engineering students in college who use the "10^x" button for scientific notation instead of "EE" (or whatever it's called on your calculator), and so when asked to calculate 4/(2e3) will end up with 2000 instead of 0.002 (because they type 4 / 2 x 10^3).

  15. Re:Just proves the point on Anita Sarkeesian, Creator of "Tropes vs. Women," Driven From Home By Trolls · · Score: 2

    I remember being thirteen. I did not go around threatening to rape or kill people. Maybe these assholes will grow out of it, but at the moment they are thirteen-year-old assholes, and their age is no excuse.

  16. Re:Netflix Time Now? on Babylon 5 May Finally Get a Big-Screen Debut · · Score: 1

    Agreed; why would JMS spend his own money to redo something he's already done?

    So while everybody here is talking about B5, we really should be talking about those subsequent series/movies and how they measure up.

  17. The arbitrariness of a "semester" on MIT Considers Whether Courses Are Outdated · · Score: 1

    The duration of a semester *does* put some strange, artificial restrictions on classes. In the introductory physics classes I teach, we have two big units during the course of the year—mechanics, and electricity & magnetism—but there are also smaller topics which get shoehorned in wherever there's room in the schedule: waves, optics, thermodynamics. Then there's topics I never have time for, like relativity. If we had more flexibility in course length, we could set up those extra topics as additional month-long classes instead of cramming them in at the end of the semester.

  18. Makes total sense on Ancient Skulls Show Civilization Rose As Testosterone Fell · · Score: 4, Funny

    You can't build a civilization with *alpha* males; they have to *at least* be in beta.

    (Preferably release versions, but you take what you can get.)

  19. I don't get it on 'Just Let Me Code!' · · Score: 1

    First of all, let me say up front: I'm not a professional programmer, just a hobbyist. I could understand the need for complicated tools when you're part of a large-scale operation or programming for a corporation. But the author's not talking about that at all.

    On private projects, I keep hearing myself spit out between expletives, "I just want to code."

    Why don't you? I write little programs all the time, in Tcl/Tk, in Javascript, in C++, in Python. I don't use an IDE. I don't use any version control though I probably should. (I'm starting to learn about Git and Github.) My bug tracker is a bunch of comments at the top of the source file, or if I'm feeling ambitious, a separate text file called "NOTES".

    But what I don't do, for the most part, is share my programs with anyone else. If I were planning to release something to the public, I would have to spend a lot more time figuring out all the dependencies of my software, putting in more robust error checking, writing documentation, submitting the program to an App Store or at least putting it up on Github, etc etcyeah, that would be a drag. But I don't know that any of that is necessary; it's just important if I want other people to find my software to be useful. If all you're interested in is the problem-solving puzzle aspect of programming, or in writing something to make *your* life a little easier, then there's no need to follow the herd. Do what the heck you want; all the old tools are still there.

  20. The danger... on Bot Tweets Anonymous Wikipedia Edits From Capitol Hill · · Score: 1

    ...is from kneejerk partisan/anti-government types who automatically revert every change reported by his bot, because of course politicians are always wrong. For an example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... and the history changes that follow.

  21. Re:What's a music video? on Google: Indie Musicians Must Join Streaming Service Or Be Removed · · Score: 1

    OK, I think I get it: what Google wants to do is to give viewers the option of paying a flat rate, which will remove ads from all of the music videos on the site as part of their streaming service. And they need the labels to agree to these terms. And if they DON'T agree to the terms, then Google would have one of three options: either maintain the status quo (which they don't want to do), show those videos sans ads (which would be a copyright infringement since the artists wouldn't be paid as per the original license agreement), or remove the videos altogether.

    Does that sound right?

    If so, that doesn't sound nearly as evil as it first sounded, if Google is only taking down videos that it was basically paying to host.

  22. Re: Overreach as a bug, not a feature on Canadian Court Orders Google To Remove Websites From Its Global Index · · Score: 1

    Could they spin off Google Canada as a separate company? Google Canada would have to abide by the court's decision, but Google proper wouldn't be affected.

  23. Re:Do No Evil so why not delete the info? on Google Has Received Over 41,000 Requests To "Forget" Personal Information · · Score: 4, Funny

    You're a bit insane, you know that?

    Oh certainly, but that's beside the point. :)

  24. Re:Do No Evil so why not delete the info? on Google Has Received Over 41,000 Requests To "Forget" Personal Information · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If Google is all about doing no evil and playing nice, why wouldn't they delete the information?

    Because some of those requests are almost certainly from nasty people wanting Google to cover up their crimes?

  25. The NSA let this random guy Snowden walk away with all of their secrets. Snowden isn't some genius mastermind; if he could do it, I'll bet there are other people who did it too. Only they didn't go public, they just sold the information to China or Russia or al Qaeda (assuming they weren't spies to begin with).

    So it doesn't matter what Snowden announced to the world, because chances are the people we're most worried about already knew about it.

    If the bloody National SECURITY Agency can't secure itself, we can't rely on it to secure anything else.