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User: The+Mighty+Buzzard

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  1. Re:There's no doubt that... on Ask Slashdot: How Can We Improve Slashdot? · · Score: 1

    Kudos. It's really not that difficult. The main problem I could see /. having is having to down the site to convert the database over to utf8 or utf8mb4. That would take a non-trivial amount of time compared to when we did it over at Soylent News. Otherwise there's very little in the way of tweaking that needs to happen with Apache2.2/mod_perl2. Blob fields in the db will be the main gotcha. We only had to use about a dozen [de|en]code_utf8 calls over the entire codebase and about half a dozen uses of _utf8_on. Granted you lot have diverged significantly since the codebase we started with was released but if I can do it all by my lonesome, you guys can surely kick its ass in short order.

  2. Re:I'm male but... on Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Or we could, you know, let people who find open source find it interesting and leave those who don't alone. It beats trying to brainwash children into your own personal vision of how society should be.

  3. Re:Wacky thinking on Kansas To Nix Expansion of Google Fiber and Municipal Broadband · · Score: 1

    My refusal to disbelieve stems from M theorists predicting 12 dimensions and our knowledge of the 4 we can directly observe being just pathetic. We're just not currently qualified to even speculate. Science, yo; if you can't prove something, you don't go around saying it's true.

    Also, it's just prudent to not go around giving the finger to things that can lightning bolt your ass unless you're absolutely certain they don't exist.

  4. Re:Wacky thinking on Kansas To Nix Expansion of Google Fiber and Municipal Broadband · · Score: 1

    If you say so. It's been my experience that most anyone who brings up their atheism is very vocal in their gnosticism; usually to the point of being an intolerant dickhead about it. Which is why, despite not being a theist myself, I flatly reject the label of atheist.

  5. Re:Wacky thinking on Kansas To Nix Expansion of Google Fiber and Municipal Broadband · · Score: 2

    That's closer to the definition of agnosticism. Atheism generally indicates an active disbelief without making any statement on whether the subject is willing to be convinced otherwise.

  6. Re:Pffft on Atlanta Gambled With Winter Storm and Lost · · Score: 1

    That's some quality irony there.

  7. Re:Pffft on Atlanta Gambled With Winter Storm and Lost · · Score: 2

    Nope, just the regular ones. Oklahoma doesn't get enough snow to make snow tires worth it, just enough that we're not all total noobs when some happens to fall.

  8. Re: Pffft on Atlanta Gambled With Winter Storm and Lost · · Score: 1

    One state up from Texas, so not especially blizzardville. We do plow it though because we're not likely to get another foot or two on top of it when we get 2-3 inches.

  9. Re:Pffft on Atlanta Gambled With Winter Storm and Lost · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why? 2-3 inches here and the only things we do different are leave earlier and drive slower. No chains. No pre-salting the roads. Just slow the fuck down until the roads get plowed or melt.

  10. Re:Retire from sailing the Bay in search of booty. on Online Streaming As Profitable As TV, Disc Sales By Charging Just a $15 Flat Fee · · Score: 3, Informative

    Erm, bit of a problem there. First, DRM was never removed. Second, streaming is still only available at shit quality. Third, prices haven't dropped on any service that even looks like it might in the future become useful.

  11. Re:a pittance in ayn rands america. on Facebook's Biggest Bounty Yet To Hacker Who Found "Keys To the Kingdom" · · Score: 1

    You're an idiot. No group of devs, no matter how good they were or how many were hired, ever wrote a single piece of software more complicated than Hello World without bugs in it. Paying for bug reports instead of the standard of ignoring them or prosecuting the reporter is the right way to do things.

  12. Re:Everyone creates arbitrary lines on 200 Dolphins Await Slaughter In Japan's Taiji Cove · · Score: 2

    An interesting line of thought. By that reasoning you'd expect a venn diagram of vegetarians and abortion proponents to be two separate circles in all but the earliest term abortions. Based strictly on the average political affiliation of the two groups though, I doubt this would be the case.

  13. Re:Bitcoin on Ask Slashdot: What's the Most Often-Run Piece of Code -- Ever? · · Score: 4, Informative

    If it's not yet, it will be soon. At the moment the SHA-256 algorithm is being run in the neighborhood of 15,000,000,000,000,000 times per second by miners.

  14. Re:Privacy on Mozilla Is Mapping Cell Towers and WiFi Access Points · · Score: 2

    Yes, for a fairly broad definition of yes anyway. There's no need to ever actually connect to any network to map them, just slurp up SSID broadcasts, maybe channel and signal strength. There is no reason to ever write any traffic to non-volatile storage.

  15. Re:Most likely exists to prevent over-grazing.. on Why Transitivity Violations Can Be Rational · · Score: 2

    You know, I never liked the fried chicken or watermelon stereotypes. Who the hell doesn't like fried chicken or watermelon?

    Anyway, stereotypes exist because someone observed that, on average, foo is true of a significant portion of demographic bar. They simplify decision making at the expense of some accuracy.

    Like many things, there are times when stereotypes are useful and times when using them is a dick move. Recognizing that a fair majority of women like flowers and chocolate is generally fine to both use and say. Recognizing that a good percentage of pregnant women are often freaking insane is impolite to say but you'd damned well better be prepared to deal with it if you're married to one.

    Recognizing that most anyone replying like you did is a self-hating lib who cares about feelings more than truth and logic, that one's just too easy.

  16. Re:Most likely exists to prevent over-grazing.. on Why Transitivity Violations Can Be Rational · · Score: 2

    Stereotypes generally have a damned good reason to be stereotypes. Getting called misogynistic or not, if it's true of a significant enough subsample of the population, it can and should be used.

  17. Re:Well now you've gone and upset my digestion. on Why We Think There's a Multiverse, Not Just Our Universe · · Score: 1

    Which is exactly what you'd expect to see when your only view of them is coming filtered through a heavily left-leaning press.

  18. Re:Well now you've gone and upset my digestion. on Why We Think There's a Multiverse, Not Just Our Universe · · Score: 1

    Heh, if you think politics is about issues, you really haven't been paying attention. It's first, last, always, and only about power. If you ever manage to understand that, you'll be flying the tea party flag too. Until it inevitably becomes as corrupt as every other political group anyway.

  19. Re:Well now you've gone and upset my digestion. on Why We Think There's a Multiverse, Not Just Our Universe · · Score: 1

    Republicans and the tea party are not remotely the same thing. They simply overlap at the moment as both oppose increase governmental power under Obama. Will they all remain true to their stated goals when a power-hungry Republican is in office? Not a chance but I expect a significant portion of those who actually understood and believed in the impetus behind the tea party will.

  20. Re:here we go again... on Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts In High School · · Score: 1

    I thought it did. Your line of reasoning implies the claim that social inertia in the tech field is vastly higher than in the medical field. My reply was meant to convey that I understood what you were saying as well as my skepticism.

  21. Re:here we go again... on Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts In High School · · Score: 1

    If they did, switching from testosterone to estrogen would change a person's entire personality or set of interests instead of just making it a little easier for them to cry.

    Untrue. Neural pathway development that has taken place under one set of conditions is not instantly overwritten by changing the conditions.

    As for the rest, TG are possibly a valuable dataset but not an especially easy one to study as they've already shown one significant and poorly understood aberration from the norm. Also, I find it difficult to take you seriously if you find simple gender nomenclature offensive; it does not speak well of your ability to accept what is over what you wish to be.

  22. Re:here we go again... on Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts In High School · · Score: 1

    Which would be a valid point if we were arguing about this in 1965.

  23. Re:here we go again... on Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts In High School · · Score: 1

    Which would be a valid point were it not a strawman argument. Significant != primary. There likely isn't even a primary cause with as many factors as there are to take into consideration.

    It is extremely difficult to isolate a variable in living human beings' behavior yet you want to completely discount actual physical and chemical difference in the one organ that controls all decision making. That is willful blindness at best and at worst outright politically motivated fraud.

  24. Re:here we go again... on Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts In High School · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think there is a high likelihood that the differing brain structure and soup of hormones/other chemicals their brains swim in may play a significant role, yes. Throwing out from consideration a known variable before the experiment because you don't want it to be true is extremely poor science.

  25. Re:here we go again... on Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts In High School · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Probably for the same reason that women are capable of breast feeding while men aren't. They are not equal. Equality under the law does not, should not, and never will mean that men and women are actually the same.