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User: antifoidulus

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  1. Re: Why? on China Staging a Nationwide Attack On iCloud and Microsoft Accounts · · Score: 1

    Do you realize what the "made in" actually means? It means simply where the final assembly was done. Final assembly is not a complicated process, you obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

  2. Re: Why? on China Staging a Nationwide Attack On iCloud and Microsoft Accounts · · Score: 2

    How many people were saying the same thing about the Japanese economy in the late 80s? Answer, almost all of them. Do a google search for China and debt and you will see what I mean. They are also not the "sole manufacturing center for most of the west". Very little value is added in China, and it's manufacturing that can be done elsewhere, and is increasing done elsewhere as China gets more and more expensive, both economically and politically. Crappy hardware trade shows do not an economy make.

  3. Re: Why? on China Staging a Nationwide Attack On iCloud and Microsoft Accounts · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's only going to get worse as the chinese economy stagnates. I've been saying this for years, but people are finally starting to realize that China copied the post-war Japanese model right down to the bad loans, today's China is pretty much where Japan was in 1988, barreling towards the cliff. The difference between the 2 countries is the government though. Outside of the economy the CCP has been deeply unpopular for years. However there was little unrest since the economy was booming. However what will happen when growth slows is much more unclear. Hong Kong like protests against the government would probably be the best case. More likely is large scale riots as unemployment coupled with a large # of men being unable to find a wife is a recipe for disaster. The CCP knows they are living on borrowed time and are going to do everything in their power, including perhaps returning to the days of the cultural revolution if it finds it necessary. In the short term expect spying incidents like this to become the norm.

  4. Re:The Conservative Option on Texas Ebola Patient Dies · · Score: 4, Funny

    So you'd have to somehow engineer a way to walk around in public bleeding, puking, ejaculating, and defecating on people around you - all without it being obvious that you were very unhealthy.

    So.....basically you should attend burning man?

  5. Re:Taxes on US Remains Top Country For Global Workers · · Score: 1

    And Obama and the Democrats made it worse with this FACTA bullshit. Basically as a US citizen abroad, both me and my family have to report stuff to the IRS(bank accounts, investment accounts etc) that I wouldn't have to report to the IRS if I were in the United States. And if you fail to report they will help themselves to your bank account, even if you didn't actually do anything other than forget to file. And it doesn't apply to just individuals, any American with signature authority on a foreign account, be it business or personal, has to report the details of that bank account to the IRS.

    And here is the kicker, the whole thing is actually predicted, even by the supporters of the bill, to be revenue negative. Meaning they are SPENDING TAXPAYER MONEY to fuck over Americans living abroad. The sheer stupidity of this bill is staggering. I had up to that point always been a democrat and a supporter of Obama, but this just drove me away from both. I even donated some money to a Republican-led campaign to challenge this incredibly unconstitutional bill in the supreme court. This bill is responsible for an almost exponential increase in the # of Americans getting rid of their citizenship, perhaps most famous among them Tina Turner, who is now a Swiss citizen.

    (Un)fortunately, I live in a country that is basically beholden to the US and as a coder I don't expect to be in charge of corporate bank accounts , so it's not a huge deal, but it's just the principal of the thing. More here

  6. Re:How much of a vested interest do they have? on One In Three Jobs Will Be Taken By Software Or Robots By 2025, Says Gartner · · Score: 1

    They aren't targeting consumers, they are targeting myopic, greedy executives who want to do something really simple and claim themselves to be geniuses who deserve gigantic paychecks.

  7. How much of a vested interest do they have? on One In Three Jobs Will Be Taken By Software Or Robots By 2025, Says Gartner · · Score: 1

    How much of a vested interest does Gartner have in this technology? My guess is a lot, it's 2003 all over again. In 2003 Gartner predicted that within the next 10 years over 50% of IT jobs would be sent overseas, and by the way we also happen to have an offshore IT consulting service, what a coincidence, totally unrelated to our over exaggerated findings, really!

  8. Are these issue really female-specific on Fortune.com: Blame Tech Diversity On Culture, Not Pipeline · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Did they try to find men who left the field as a control group? The reasons cited in TFA also applies to a lot of men I know that have left the industry. I would like to know if it really affects women, also whether or not a higher % of women leave the tech industry vs men, esp. if you control for being a parent.

  9. Al Lowe on Possible Reason Behind Version Hop to Windows 10: Compatibility · · Score: 1

    I always just assumed they were inspired by Leisure Suit Larry versioning system.

  10. Re:"Contrary to what we were sometimes taught" on Antarctic Ice Loss Big Enough To Cause Measurable Shift In Earth's Gravity · · Score: 0

    We were taught that in high school physics where I grew up too(the US, though admittedly a richer part of the US). The weaker gravity is the reason space missions are launched from places that are close to the equator, Florida in the US and French Guiana for the ESA. Though granted the reason for this discrepancy(distance to the center of the earth is greater near the equator due to the earth not being a perfect sphere) is different than the reasons for this most recent change

  11. Simple(x)st explanation on Mysterious Feature Appears and Disappears In a Sea On Titan · · Score: 1

    It's planetary herpes

  12. Re:Completely Contained? on Ebola Has Made It To the United States · · Score: 5, Funny

    My advice is not to tongue kiss people who just got off the plane from west African countries and you should be fine.

    The terrorists have already won.

  13. Re:If Ebola cross-mutates with the on Ebola Has Made It To the United States · · Score: 1

    So you mean I can continue to make sweet, sweet love to rats without worrying about whether or not doing so will cause the apocalypse?

  14. Re:About fucking time. on Hong Kong Protesters Use Mesh Networks To Organize · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, speaking from experience in the Japan 2011 earthquake, you are kind of on the mark kind of not.

    b) it won't really work in major natural disasters, because, well in order to maintain the density of devices, a large number of people need to have continuous access to power, which is unlikely if a disaster is so severe that communication infrastructure is offline (I imagine celltowers are less fragile than power lines).

    After power was turned back on, I, and a lot of other people, went out and bought a hand-cranked USB charger(also doubles as a flashlight and radio, a handy device to be sure). It doesn't take that much energy to power a cell phone.
    As for the tower issue, the towers where I was at(Tsukuba, which is about halfway between Tokyo and Fukushima) all kept power even after the quake but since so many people were using their phones to either call people or check the news it was almost impossible to get through(the bandwidth of the tower may have very well been degraded as well). A mesh network *might* have been useful there, but it would have had to have enough density to work. Really the biggest problem with using a mesh network for disaster is that anywhere you have enough people to support a mesh network, you could probably just as easily use a bullhorn to communicate.

  15. Obligatory Dave Attell on The Odd Effects of Being Struck By Lightning · · Score: 1

    " A lot of people think if you get struck by lightning you will get magic powers. Like the ability to read minds or shoot lightning from your hands. Not me. I got the ability to shake on the ground and shit my pants. Will I use these powers for good or for evil?"

  16. Player Piano by Vonnegut on Sci-fi Predictions, True and False (Video 1) · · Score: 1

    Kurt Vonnegut had a chillingly accurate prediction of the economy of the future in "Player Piano". While of course it contains the standard 1950s era scifi references to huge computers filled with vaccum tubes and it doesn't accurately predict what will happen with sending work abroad but his point about what we do with the now "useless" people is spot on.

    In the book you are either one of the lucky few who have the skills and opportunity to become an engineer or else you have meaningless work found for you, either in the army or one of a large number of mostly pointless public works projects. This is eerily similar to the economies of a lot of the rich world, especially the U.S. while the rabid flag waivers don't want to admit it, most soldiers in the U.S. army today are only there because becoming a soldier was their only real chance to live something resembling a middle class lifestyle. We also have huge numbers of menial jobs whose only real purpose is to create busy work selling chinese made goods to each other. I highly recommend the book to anyone who wants to see the downside of the "maker economy"

  17. Re:US investors don't have shares in Alibaba ... on Is Alibaba Comparable To a US Company? · · Score: 2

    My understanding is that Chinese law doesn't allow foreigners to own a Chinese strategic asset.

    Yes, which is exactly why China's campaign to make the yuan a major world currency is laughable. People aren't going to buy a currency just so they can buy consumer goods from you, they are going to want to invest it, and current Chinese law pretty much makes that impossible to do in any sort of meaningful fashion. China is trying to "have it's cake and eat it to" by throwing it's weight around like one of the big boys but still being ultra-protectionist like a developing economy. Sooner or later this is going to catch up with them, and it's not going to be pretty.

  18. Re:correlation vs causality on College Students: Want To Earn More? Take a COBOL Class · · Score: 1

    Um, COLBOL is probably one of the few languages out there that DOESNT have a dedicated fan-boy following. Seriously, watch this thread and see which of the following statements gets the most hate:

    Ruby, as an untyped language, is incredibly slow and thus should not be used for large scale systems

    Node.js encourages unmaintainable code because of "callback hell" and prototype inheritance is an abomination

    Java is way too verbose to be useful, and the JVMs gc sucks

    Python is a fractured environment and should only be used for small-scale projects

    COBOL is a dinosaur language that is only useful for maintaining crufty legacy code.

  19. Re:Easy solution on When Scientists Give Up · · Score: 1

    Except for most of that "debt" was actually accrued by GW Bush resolving his daddy issues, Obama simply stopped playing games with the debt. The deficit is now lower than it was at any time under Bush..... but silly me, debating a Republican with facts. We all know Republicans are immune to them.

  20. Re:Easy solution on When Scientists Give Up · · Score: 1

    But hey, Bush was able to work out his daddy issues, doesn't that count for something?

  21. Re:As much as I hate Apple on Apple Said To Team With Visa, MasterCard On iPhone Wallet · · Score: 1

    You are also oh so conveniently ignoring one tiny little fact, year over year DEVICE SALES ARE GOING UP! Yes, market share is going down, but that's largely because the smartphone market has been growing so fast, Apple's share of it hasn't been growing as fast as the market has. You want to know whose sales have been dipping recently? Samsungs!. But don't let those silly facts get in the way of your baseless ranting!

  22. Re:I can't believe we're afraid of these assholes on Grand Ayatollah Says High Speed Internet Is "Against Moral Standards" · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Which is part of what drives the radicalism of the Islamic clerics. They have a perverse incentive for keeping things as fundamentalist as possible. They look to what happened to the clergy in Europe, who in roughly a 100 year span went from being basically on top of the social hierarchy to near the bottom, and are scared it might happen to them. In their eyes the situation in Europe was brought around both by the clergy actively supporting reform, but perhaps even more importantly the clergy not fighting back against reform hard enough(read cutting the heads off of reformers). In a society where your social status not only dictates the amount of property you have, but also your access to women, it's not surprising that the Islamic clergy are scared shitless of modernization and are doing everything in their power to stop it.

  23. Re:There's something to it on The Evolution of Diet · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's why I only eat the meat I catch using nothing but a club. Chasing those damn deer through the parking lot does really help keep off the fat, and keeps the neighbors talking.

  24. Re:But but... on Study: Seals Infected Early Americans With Tuberculosis · · Score: 4, Funny

    Well, in the future here is a handy rule of thumb that has helped me throughout my life: if someone offers to have sex with you in exchange for a bucket of fish, run.

  25. Re:See what happens when you whine enough? on Skype Reverses Decision To Drop OS X 10.5 Support, Retires Windows Phone 7 App · · Score: 1

    That's not entirely true, you have to have a 64 bit boot loader to be able to run the latest and greatest OS X. The first generation of Intel Mac Pros had a 32 bit boot loader and are thus officially unable to run anything post Lion(there are workarounds however)