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User: MightyMartian

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Comments · 19,559

  1. Re:a tragedy all around on A Sea Story: the Wreck of the Replica HMS Bounty · · Score: 2

    Are you seriously asserting that most humans have had funds or an education?

  2. Re:a tragedy all around on A Sea Story: the Wreck of the Replica HMS Bounty · · Score: 0

    Please explain precisely how laws stop Darwinan selection from working. As well explain why a society should be governed by are likely buffoonishly simplistic versions of natural selection.

  3. Re:Translation: on DOJ, MIT, JSTOR Seek Anonymity In Swartz Case · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A scumbag? I'll wager he accomplished more in his brief lifetime than a pointless AC like you ever will.

  4. Re:Google should be concerned... on New Facebook-Branded Android Coming? · · Score: 1

    Except for the problem that none of MS's offerings could possibly installed on a low yo medium end smart device.

  5. Re:An explicit return to the failed timesharing mo on The Twighlight of Small In-House Data Centers · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is why Bill Hicks plead with marketers to kill themselves.

  6. Re:WW2 on United States Begins Flying Stealth Bombers Over South Korea · · Score: 2

    Prior to WW2 there was little enough fear of Communism in France and the UK. There had been concern in Britain after the collapse of Czarist Russia but that was at the tail end of WWI.

    Germany wasn't allowed to rearm out of some fear of the Reds, but because there was a general desire not to place the Allied Powers, greatly preoccupied with domestic problems, on a collision course with Germany. Russia, eating itself alive on Stalinist purges, barely factored into anyone's equations.

  7. Re:It is bullshit on Largest DDoS In History Reaches 300 Billion Bits Per Second · · Score: 1

    I second this. I loathe these guys. I've had more pains in the arse with them because they blacklist IP ranges and never bother to retest. A pox on both their houses, I say.

  8. Re:This is discovery of fact on You Don't 'Own' Your Own Genes · · Score: 1

    It's because we aren't advocating the immediate disbarment of about 75% of the lawyers in North America. If I had my way, there would be a random lottery that would cull three quarters right now, and would maintain that ratio to the rest of the population for the rest of time.

  9. Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck on PayPal To Replace VMware With OpenStack · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For now. But I've found hyper-v is at best an adequate product and VMware is obscenely priced, so in the end enterprise software houses will adapt as they did to a landscape that shifted away from closed source *nix solutions like SCO and Solaris. Sure, they may only support Redhat as far as distros go, but the fact is that VMware and Microsoft's shoddy little product hardly rate as the only virtualization solutions out there.

  10. Re:LUKS and LVM2 on Ask Slashdot: Simplifying Encryption and Backup? · · Score: 2

    It depends on how important encrypting all critical data is. In particular leaving your swap file/partition unencrypted could allow someone to gain some access to sensitive data.

  11. Re:Online only lies on EA CEO's Departure Might Be Good For the Company · · Score: 1

    This is beginning to sound like a Dan Simmons novel.

  12. Re:Everything gave us civilization on How Beer Gave Us Civilization · · Score: 5, Informative

    The first evidence of the growing of grain predates the first evidence of beer by a considerable length of time. We don't know all the answers, but we do know that the earliest grain crops were grown in northern Iraq and northern Iran, and that it appears that it started as a sort seasonal planting by semi-nomadic groups that would return to harvest the grain later. The innovation, whatever drove it, was to be able to learn sufficiently advanced techniques to increase yields so that you could stay by the crops; to defend them, to maintain them. That's the feedback right there.

    Beer is something that comes along, by the looks of it, after we have pretty much all the basics of sedentary agricultural societies already in place.

  13. Re:Advanced? on How Beer Gave Us Civilization · · Score: 1

    You must be a fun guy at parties.

  14. Re:It might be true but on How Beer Gave Us Civilization · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The early beers and wines had pretty low alcohol levels, so the downside of alcohol consumption was likely pretty minimal. I agree that if they'd gone around drinking some of the wild high alcohol beers and wines out on the market now, hydration would have been a massive problem.

  15. Re:Everything gave us civilization on How Beer Gave Us Civilization · · Score: 2, Informative

    I doubt that claim as well. Beer was a byproduct of agriculture, not a causative agent.

  16. Re:Everything gave us civilization on How Beer Gave Us Civilization · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Agriculture gave us civilization. Agriculture allowed people to transition from fully nomadic or nearly fully nomadic lifestyles to settled ones. It allowed relatively small areas to be settled by sedentary populations and then gave the techniques to support the growth of those civilizations.

    Why anyone would attribute booze or dogs, or imagine that somehow we were fucking cattle before we started to drink (and I'm sure humans started to drink a looong time before we ever settled down) is beyond me. I guess you've got to sell something to a newspaper, but there's little enough mystery as to why civilization arose, and certainly there are enough examples to show the same thing over and over again... Agriculture, agriculture, agriculture.

  17. Re:Not a huge surprise... on Hacker Skips SimCity Full-Time Network Requirement · · Score: 2

    Gamers are not idiots. They accept network connectivity for multiplayer games, knowing the downside that goes with that. But I've seen enough posts on other forums to suggest that they are getting right pissed that a single player game should require always-on connectivity, and may in the future make that requirement a factor in the purchase of future single player games.

  18. Re:Why is this not an even bigger story? on Evidence For Comet-Borne Microfossils Supports Panspermia · · Score: 1

    In other words, Wickramashinge is a more accredited version of Archimedes Plutonium.

  19. Re:A Sad Day for Canada on Canadian File Sharing Plaintiff Admits To Copyright Trolling · · Score: 3, Informative

    There are no lack of European countries with proportional voting systems who are taking hard lines on copyright issues. It seems to matter little how elected representatives are chosen, what seems to matter is that mainline political parties in most countries are sucking at the teat of Big Media.

  20. Re:Analytics on SXSW: Nate Silver Discusses Data Bias, the Strangeness of Fame · · Score: 1

    In the case of elections, leveraging analytcs means "create a political platform that people will vote for".

  21. Re:That's true on SXSW: Nate Silver Discusses Data Bias, the Strangeness of Fame · · Score: 1

    I'm amazed. There are still Republicans stupid enough to believe that kind of nonsense. I pity you.

  22. Re:silver is honest on SXSW: Nate Silver Discusses Data Bias, the Strangeness of Fame · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Mod up! This is exactly what happened last November. It wasn't the politicians who Nate revealed had no clothes, it was the pundits. While stories abound about Romney's supreme overconfidence, I think one could tell from the Republican rank and file that they knew months before the election that Obama was going to win a second term and there was little likelihood that they could gain a Senate majority.

    But the pundits, now that was a group that was utterly stripped of any illusion of wisdom. They were proven to be absolute fools, little more than shouting ignoramuses. I hope that Silver and the other statisticians working on electoral prediction continue to hound this overpaid talking heads to extinction. In no small part, politics is as bad as it is because of the pundits.

  23. Re:LUCAS was negotiating their deals? on Lucas Says Ford, Fisher and Hamill May Return For Next Star Wars · · Score: 1

    I think he's now a sort of Roddenberry for the Star Wars franchise. They'll use him as a consultant.

  24. Re:Woo hoo on Google and MPEG LA Reach VP8 Patent Agreement · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, so in reality, this is actually still counted against freedom. This is fundamentally no different than allowing someone to patent Pi, and then someone and paying for a license so all their customers don't have to pay to calculate the properties of circles.

  25. Re:So what's KVM got over other virt tech? on Kernel-Based Virtual Machine Ported To ARM64 · · Score: 1

    I used virt-manager for quite a while to hold my hand when making and administering guests, but I've always found it a little buggy, and now pretty much work exclusively out of virsh itself. Maybe some day I'll get up the guts to go straight to using kvm itself.