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User: MightyMartian

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Comments · 19,559

  1. Re:well on Actual Results of Crimean Secession Vote Leaked · · Score: 2

    A self appointed government, mind you, that was little more than a Russian facade. Even where foreign powers like NATO have gone in and essentially forced a referendum, like Kosovo and Iraq, there were international observers and general agreement that, whatever you thought of the legitimacy of the events leading up to those points, the elections themselves were free and fair.

    Nothing like that exists for Crimea. It was a scam referendum with a preordained conclusion.

  2. Re:RightsCorp on RightsCorp To Bring Its Controversial Copyright Protection Tactics To Europe · · Score: 1

    And how do you propose going about changing the rules when an incredibly well-funded lobby essentially has the bulk of Congress in its back pocket, and no way to ever dislodge them?

  3. Re:Again? on Actual Results of Crimean Secession Vote Leaked · · Score: 1

    The one truth we know is that Russia has violated Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

  4. Re:well on Actual Results of Crimean Secession Vote Leaked · · Score: 2

    Is this some sort of justification for a fake referendum overseen by Russia? The US, all in all, doesn't have elections that are that problematic or fixed.

  5. Re:Again? on Actual Results of Crimean Secession Vote Leaked · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How could the West have fiddled the Crimean referendum when the Russians controlled the territory, ran the polls and had a willing and colluding agent in the government of Crimea?

  6. Re:well on Actual Results of Crimean Secession Vote Leaked · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If the actual poll results are true, it suggest Ukraine is not that divided fundamentally at all, and that a small group of pro-Russian agitators lead by Russian military personnel out of uniform are creating this civil war.

  7. Re:Translation on Microsoft Cheaper To Use Than Open Source Software, UK CIO Says · · Score: 2

    Things look a bit better for the Win 8/Server 2012 network stack, but my experience with Windows in high connection rate environments is that it just doesn't compare to some of the *nixes.

  8. Re:Sure... on Microsoft Cheaper To Use Than Open Source Software, UK CIO Says · · Score: 1

    Not to mention the software and licensing fee hikes that small and medium sized businesses have endures so Microsoft can sell heavily discounted licenses to large organizations to bring that magic TCO down.

  9. Re:Help Wanted Linux Medical Assistant/Secretary on Microsoft Cheaper To Use Than Open Source Software, UK CIO Says · · Score: 1

    I'm not clear here, does Linux use some different keyboard and file system paradigm than Windows?

  10. Re:Not suprising on Students Remember Lectures Better Taking Notes Longhand Than Using Laptops · · Score: 2

    When I learned to type back in the day, we were basically taught not to read what we were typing. We could literally type copy from gibberish and get it right, precisely because we were not trying to comprehend what we were typing.

  11. Re:Is This Friday's Troll Topic? on Why Microsoft Shouldn't Patch the XP Internet Explorer Flaw · · Score: 1

    I'm a guy on the Internet saying "Shut down XP", you insensitive clod!

  12. Re:Re-release of 2004 turkey? on Review: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 · · Score: 1

    The reboot Star Trek movies, particularly the last one, are just plain baffling films. The quick cuts, the brainless dialog that serves no other purpose than to push the plot along, they rob the franchise of its soul. Watch the interactions between Kirk, Spock and Bones in ToS or the ToS films, and you have rather incredible chemistry (I'd argue that Star Trek would have died around 1967 if it hadn't been for Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley's onscreen chemistry). Now watch Pine, Quinto and Urban, and while they might do a reasonable facsimile of Kirk, Spock and Bones (Quinto, in particular, is pretty darned good), they just don't jell.

    Even in ToS episodes and films that were pretty shaky affairs (cough.. Star Trek V cough...), you at least had the three stars' chemistry to rely on. Without that, you just have what feel like amateurishly written and filmed movies, with crap cinematography that actually makes the 1960s series seem like a high point of production values.

  13. Re:Re-release of 2004 turkey? on Review: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    All these reboots and reboots of reboots are making me dizzy. Actually they've reached the point where I could care fucking less.

  14. Re:What's the problem? on Oklahoma Botched an Execution With Untested Lethal Injection Drugs · · Score: 1

    I'd be a little happier with all of that if the consequences of the execution of an innocent man was that the investigating officers, prosecutors, judge and jury, upon finding that an innocent man were killed, were taken out and shot.

    Instead states that do execute people seem to take a great deal of effort never to properly review evidence of wrongful executions.

  15. Re:it wasn't botched on Oklahoma Botched an Execution With Untested Lethal Injection Drugs · · Score: 1

    It was an execution that almost certainly violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

  16. Re:Eh... on Star Wars: Episode VII Cast Officially Announced · · Score: 1

    "Luke, I am the force ghost projection of your father..."

  17. Re:Security through obscurity on US Nuclear Missile Silos Use Safe, Secure 8" Floppy Disks · · Score: 1

    If the computer is airgapped and guarded by guys with guns and orders to prevent (even shoot) anyone that comes with a thousand yards of the machines, I'd wager they'd be safe.

  18. Re:Thank you Kemeny and Kurtz. on 50 Years of BASIC, the Language That Made Computers Personal · · Score: 2

    I learned to program on 8 bit computers (Tandy and Commodore), all of which were running BASIC interpreters, and I had no problem moving on structured programming like Pascal, and ultimately OOP languages like Java.

  19. Re:Was FORTRAN really that hard? on 50 Years of BASIC, the Language That Made Computers Personal · · Score: 1

    I can't speak to Fortran, having no direct experience with it, but every Cobol program I saw in the youth of my career was interpreted. I administered a multiuser Cobol-based accounting system on a Xenix box in the early 1990s (still probably the best accounting program I've ever seen, BTW), and it was was all i code that ran on a Cobol interpreter. I imagine that for most of Cobol's history the majority of its software has run this way.

  20. Re:Security through obscurity on US Nuclear Missile Silos Use Safe, Secure 8" Floppy Disks · · Score: 1

    Indeed. The principle security here seems to be that they are in a well-secured facility and are airgapped. Windows 95 would be relatively secure in such an environment.

  21. Re:Security through Antiquity? on US Nuclear Missile Silos Use Safe, Secure 8" Floppy Disks · · Score: 2

    Indeed. How long has it been since anyone manufactured 8" disks? Twenty years at least, I'd say. I inherited an old Tandy 6000 computer running Xenix which had an 8" drive back in the early 1990s, and I remember even then they were special order items. At that point high density 5.25" inch and 3.5" drives were coming into their own.

    Not only are the floppies old, but the drives are old, and keeping old floppy drives going can be a pain.

  22. Re:Economic reasons on How Concrete Contributed To the Downfall of the Roman Empire · · Score: 2

    The empire was having some pretty severe probls before the Edict of Milan. The divisionof the Empire, for instance, was first attempted by Diocletian, to try to reform serious administrative and political shortcomings, and he was seriously anti-Christian.

  23. Re:Wow - talk about missing the point. on How Concrete Contributed To the Downfall of the Roman Empire · · Score: 1

    Er, I mean fourth and fifth centuries...

  24. Re:Wow - talk about missing the point. on How Concrete Contributed To the Downfall of the Roman Empire · · Score: 1

    Once Rome had drawn its line in the sands in north and central Europe, Asia Minor and the Middle East, for the most part it actually retained its territory for something like two centuries before the decline saw territories lost (like the abandonment of Britain). Clearly Rome was not completely reliant on simple expansionism, and was far more complex than the all too often put forward caricature of the out of control military state. It was a complex society (or rather a complex collection of societies). Certainly military expenditures ate into the treasury, but if that was the cause, why didn't Rome collapse after it had achieved, by and large, its maximum territorial extent in the second century? Rome as an at least semi-united political entity persisted for nearly two centuries after that.

    Again, people like to find nice neat explanations, but it's never going to be that easy. There were a whole host of internal and external problems that lead to the collapse of the Western Empire. Who knows, if the Asian Steppe hadn't started puking forth hungry legions of semi-barbaric peoples looking for greener pastures (let's remember here that some of the forces that smashed into the European parts of the Empire were also being experienced at the opposite end of Eurasia), maybe Rome could have withstood the catastrophes of the third and fourth centuries.

  25. Re:LOL on How Concrete Contributed To the Downfall of the Roman Empire · · Score: 1

    Armchair historians comes up with ideas like "lead poisoned Rome." Proper historians understand Rome's collapse was very complex, and there were a host of internal and external factors that lead to its decline; everything from some pretty bad plagues to barbarians pushing other barbarians westward as the Asian Steppe began pouring forth displaced peoples.