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User: MightyMartian

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Comments · 19,559

  1. Re:The other campaign on WikiLeaks Calls for Pardons From President Obama -- Or President Trump (wikileaks.org) · · Score: 1

    You can't turn back the tide. If those factories start up again, they'll be with greater automation. Anger and kicks to the political class's balls will not change the hard facts.

  2. Re:BBS on Re-Discovering The 'Lost Civilization' of Dial-Up BBS's (ieee.org) · · Score: 1

    I originally started using OS/2 for that very reason. I was running a Waffle BBS, which, with a decent modem and UART driver, was a pretty resource-friendly BBS. So I through OS/2 2.1 on my machine, got that UART driver installed, and I could even play Windows 3.1 games while the BBS ran. It did slow down sometimes, but all in all, I could run my BBS in the background. The biggest problem I had was paying for the phone line.

  3. Re:Nope on WikiLeaks Calls for Pardons From President Obama -- Or President Trump (wikileaks.org) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been thinking about this in the context of global warming. While the Obama Administration did see increased use of renewables, in the end he actually did very little to curb fossil fuels. Yes, the coal-fired power plants are being idled, but that has a lot more to do with market forces (cheaper shale oil, for instance) than with any grand policy to keep goal in the ground. Trump is not going to make coal somehow viable again. As to the Paris Accord, well, I have my doubts that any major government will put that much effort into it. Canada is going to institute a carbon tax, but it starts at such a small amount that it isn't likely to significantly impact fossil fuel production and use. In the end, I doubt there will be any great impact on fossil fuel use, and the march of renewables will go on, if too slow to prevent some of the nastier aspects. I suspect that the graph of emissions after four years will look the same as if Clinton were in charge.

    Trump basically promised a lot of people a lot of things he can't really deliver, or he doesn't dare deliver. Look at Obamacare, over the last two or three days it has become clear that while there will likely be changes, and heck they may even repeal it on paper, the ACA will survive in one form or another, because as angry as people are at cost increases, no one save the hardest core Libertarian types actually wants to go back.

    Yes, pushing the Supreme Court further towards the Right is troubling, but it's not like Scalia and Roberts could prevent some of the very rulings that have the social conservatives all riled up. And unless Trump and the GOP brass are complete idiots, they know damned well that Trump didn't win because a bunch of social conservatives, Evangelicals, and the like put him there. They would have voted for him no matter what. So anything that pushes too far towards the social conservative spectrum and lights up the culture wars again would almost certainly damage the Republicans.

    No, underneath all the bluster and bravado, I'm really beginning to feel that Trump is no revolutionary at all, and that his shtick is just that, some fancy colors on a price sticker, but the sticker still reads the same price.

  4. Re:The other campaign on WikiLeaks Calls for Pardons From President Obama -- Or President Trump (wikileaks.org) · · Score: 1

    While I agree with you to some extent, the rules are the rules, and if Clinton lost, it was as much because she made the enormous mistake of assuming that this election was going to be Obama Part 3, and fought it that way. I can't say she was the only one fooled by that, I certainly assumed that this would be a traditional election and that the polls and the poll aggregators were by and large going to give Clinton a win, if a little tighter than at first assumed. What it did mean is that while Trump seemed to be campaigning in nonsensical states, it's pretty clear that his people understood the game on the ground in those battleground races a lot better than the Clinton team did.

    So yes, the rules are something to talk about (although the States could fix this to some extent themselves by moving to proportional systems for selecting electors), Clinton entered this race knowing the rules, and if she misjudged her response to changing conditions in critical states, that is still on her.

    I personally find Trump's victory troubling, if not downright odious. A man who believes AGW is a lie, who happily cozies up to some of the most backwards of social conservatives, who talks about abandoning allies abroad, who wants to tear up trade agreements and who used pretty blatantly bigoted language and symbolism in his campaign is going to potentially making an incredibly damaging leader at home and abroad. But if you put that aside for a moment, you see some pretty strong correlations between the Trump victory, Brexit, and the rising fortunes of the far right in Europe. People are bloody angry, feel like they've been betrayed by a generation of political leaders, and have become so frustrated that they will take the proverbial wrecking ball to the system. Now I think these people are behaving insanely, and that whatever they think the likes of a Trump administration or pulling the UK out of the EU will do, they'll find they've made the problems worse, and that underlying all of it is the fact that a lot of jobs are never coming back no matter how angry they get and how many demagogues they put into positions of power, and even worse, what's left of many of those well paying manufacturing jobs will inevitably shrink over the coming decades.

    Someone at some point will have to square the circle, and my feeling is that the industrialized world will, despite the wishes of its leadership and the corporate powers that they dance with, have to go to something like Universal Basic Income, and will have to make post-secondary education a lot more affordable, because in a hundred years, the idea that someone could just magically turn back the clock and make the Rust Belts of the world into what they were three or four decades ago will seem ludicrous.

    And all those Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Bangladeshis, and all the other people working for dirt poor wages relative to the West making our stuff for us, you're next. At some point, and I suspect the tipping point will come within a decade or two, even your cheap wages won't be able to compete with the robots, and you'll be just as angry, and governments will be just as unable to turn back the clock.

  5. Re:Cleaning the swamp? on Peter Thiel Is Joining Donald Trump's Transition Team (theverge.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    So you think poisoning the environment is somehow going to help society?

  6. Re:TPP is dead on Peter Thiel Is Joining Donald Trump's Transition Team (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    And you think Canada.is.jusy going to allow its exports to have tariffs thrown up but allow American goods through unmolested? What does "renegotiate NAFTA" even mean?

    And before you answer, ponder that 38 states have Canada as their largest trading partner.

  7. Re:he bet on the winner on Peter Thiel Is Joining Donald Trump's Transition Team (theverge.com) · · Score: 2

    So Trump's cozying up to Evangelicals, conservative Catholics and other social conservatives with pretty strong guarantees of a Supreme Court willing to rip up abortion and gay rights didn't happen?

  8. Re:Congratulations! on Peter Thiel Is Joining Donald Trump's Transition Team (theverge.com) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I can't wait to watch the intellectual contortions you put yourself through as you and your fellow Trump supporters being to realize what it is you actually elected.

  9. I'm sure when the FBI is going after drug gangs and cartels, they will go a lot deeper than just busting the street dealer. And as others have pointed out, these are seized sites being used as honey pots.

    I'm not clear why, providing it has been approved by a judge, anyone would have a problem with this. Undercover cops will embed themselves a helluva lot more than just keeping a server up and running and logging user details.

  10. Re:Introductions on BlackBerry's Keyboard is Coming Back for One Last Dance (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    The problem for BB is the niche is too small to sustain them. And lots of mobile devices that have ssh clients. My Android phone has one

  11. It seems little different from any other kind of sting. Whether you have cops posing as drug dealers, prostitutes, or posing as public officials taking a bribe, so long as the perp is not enticed by the undercover officer or his associates into committing the crime, honey traps are permissible.

  12. Re: Just sayin' on FBI Operated 23 Tor-Hidden Child Porn Sites, Deployed Malware From Them (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You've described the Libertarian alt-right future, where not only will you have the freedom to starve or die from treatable injuries and diseases, but where you'll have the added liberty of selling your children into sexual slavery.

  13. The problem with your notion is that somewhere someone has to get people under the age of majority to take their clothes off. This means in most jurisdictions the photos themselves were produced unlawfully.

    And, of course a great deal of child porn is far more than simply naked under age people posing.

    So do you still think people should be able to look at pictures, even the most benign of which are in most, if not all cases, produced criminally involving at least one party who cannot lawfully grant consent?

  14. Introductions on BlackBerry's Keyboard is Coming Back for One Last Dance (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Nostalgia, meet irrelevance.

  15. Re:First ladies and personal decisions on Russian Banks Floored by Withering DDoS Attacks (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    You know she couldn't actually make people do this and it was actually schools that instituted luncb reforms, right?

  16. Re:Mixed Feelings on Dungeons & Dragons Inducted Into Toy Hall of Fame (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    I wouldnt' go so far as to say it saved my life, but as a pretty shy kid, being able to play a character like a brave and charismatic Palladin who ultimately lead an army against an evil Sorcerer King somehow gave me a few tools to deal with situations where my introverted nature would otherwise have me running for the door.

    My high school was really great that way. One of the teachers let us form a roleplaying club and gave us the lunch time access to his classroom, and it really was a safe haven for four or five kids who didn't fit in anywhere else. That, and god almighty, there were certain campaigns that I can still recall to this day, they were that engrossing and that fun. I've partook of all sorts of entertainments, but none have ever delivered the same thrill to me as tabletop roleplaying.

  17. Re:Seriously? on Dungeons & Dragons Inducted Into Toy Hall of Fame (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    That's why you graduated to AD&D and then, if you wanted a sane system, something like Gurps. In the long run, I've moved on to a very light version of Fudge, but the PBEMs I run (one a Harn game and the other a Palladium Rifts game) are narrative in structure, and the Harn game in particular has virtually no exposed mechanics at all.

  18. Re:so it wasn't so bad after all then? on Dungeons & Dragons Inducted Into Toy Hall of Fame (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    I grew up in a Jehovah's Witness household, and believe me, the evils of D&D were loudly pronounced by members of my church and my family. Of course, my best friend (also a JW) and I were fanatical roleplayers. He wouldn't touch D&D, so we played such fine upstanding God-fearing games as the post-apocalyptic war game Twilight 2000 and a few Palladium games. When I was 13 or 14, I started hanging around some other kids who did play AD&D, so I got my fix that way. When I was just about 16, I got a girlfriend and told my family I would no longer being attending the Kingdom Hall, that I wasn't religious at all, and then set about playing games like Rifts, AD&D, Palladium Fantasy, and various other SF and fantasy games, not to mention C'thulu!

  19. I tend to agree with Zuckerburg. It wasn't the fake news on Facebook, it was the fake news on Fox, CNN, NBC, in newspapers, blogs and on message boards, that were responsible. Even Slashdot had more than a few posters talking once again about voter fraud like it was a statistically significant thing, quote mining Podesta's emails to make it appear as if he was some sort of Joseph Goebbels, propagating bizarre claims about the Clintons being some sort of mafioso who assassinated people on the street.

  20. Re: So much for Kremlin doing the Hacking on Russian Banks Floored by Withering DDoS Attacks (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    What does that matter anymore? You have a guy who isn't even apparently very good at business and who never held a political position of any kind now the President of the United States. If Trump is qualified to be President, then I figure you can into the nearest shopping mall right now, right into the middle of the food court, close your eyes, spin around a dozen times, point in the direction you end up at, and the first person you point out will have all the qualifications needed to be the most powerful person in the world.

  21. Re: So much for Kremlin doing the Hacking on Russian Banks Floored by Withering DDoS Attacks (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    In other words, your poor kid is being made to eat a healthy lunch with appropriate portion sizes. What an evil witch!

  22. Re:There is such a thing as name recognition. on Russian Banks Floored by Withering DDoS Attacks (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 2

    I honestly doubt it. Now that it is clear having the last name "Clinton" means the alt-right will literally accuse you of anything up to and including assassinations and mass murder.

    No, if the Dems do anything at this point, they'll find a Liberal version of Donald Trump, so we're probably talking about a younger version of Bernie Sanders. After all, other than the hatred of climate change, gays and women who control the activity of their uterus, there now appears to be little that is different between the Alt-right and the traditional US far left. Both believe in borrowing trillions to spend on infrastructure, in an almost Communist fervor for starting up idled factories for no other reason than to provide jobs for people whose skills are a decade or more out of date.

    Sanity has left US politics. While I expect for the next couple of years, Congress will try to check Trump's excesses, but after 2018, when both parties are increasingly dominated by their fringes and by entryists from beyond the fringes, you'll see the kind of utter madness that tossing out the "elites" (read: people who actually understand what government is) and replacing them with ideological fruitcakes will produce.

    The ship will obviously right itself in 8-10 years, once the full social, economic and environmental effects of trying to make-believe it's 1950 again become painfully clear, but by that point, it's likely the rest of the planet will have moved on, and the US, while still the dominant power, really will have been critically weakened.

  23. Re:And the hits keep on coming ... on Trump Picks Top Climate Skeptic To Lead EPA Transition (cbsnews.com) · · Score: 2

    Sooner or later this anti-science attitude is going to hit the US where it hurts. If it alienates major tech centers like Silicon Valley, the people that actually produce the technology will walk.

    If I were Canada and the EU, I'd be looking at dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into building Silicon Valleys in their own backyards, and offering citizenship to any and all engineers, programmers and other R&D types in the US. Offer double what any US company is paying with ten year employment contracts, and then just suck the US dry. It can keep the evangelicals, the Breitbart alt-right types, and they will sink into the mire.

  24. Re:I'm all in for on Trump Picks Top Climate Skeptic To Lead EPA Transition (cbsnews.com) · · Score: 1

    So, in other words, you do believe that if you lived on a block with some murderers, your solution isn't to call the police, but to pick up the ax and join them in the killing frenzy.

  25. Re:The EPA on Trump Picks Top Climate Skeptic To Lead EPA Transition (cbsnews.com) · · Score: 1

    Well, don't worry, with deregulation and the likely defunding of any federal body with any ability to monitor such disasters, you'll never really know if you're being poisoned. You'll be a good citizen, crawl your ass to the voting booth every couple of years, blaming them damned Liberals for saying your sick, even as your body fills with toxic levels of metals and with tumors.

    We saw this already with GWB, but the Trump presidency is literally going to terminate any government ability to monitor the ill effects of just simply allowing private interests to shit over the environment and the global climate. Of course some states, mainly blue ones (which tend to be the richest states anyways), will continue to do their best to monitor and alleviate the situation, but those are those damned Liberals again, trying to make God-fearing fag-hating oil-drinking Americans feel bad about themselves, and this is all about making AMERICA GREAT!!!

    Meanwhile, the rest of the planet will have to try to make do, and in the end, they'll probably have to start erecting their own trade barriers against US goods to try to keep a country now run by anti-intellectual anti-scientific morons who somehow believe making some wealthy industrialists even wealthier is the prime directive of a nation of over 300 million people to make sure that the US's newfound love of vomiting CO2 into the atmosphere and poisoning two oceans is properly priced.