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User: something_wicked_thi

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  1. Re:Sure, why not? on Obama To Ask For $1 Billion Climate Change Fund · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Like the free market never makes a bad investment. Is your argument truly that businesses fail sometimes, and therefore we should not bother trying to stop climate change?

  2. Re:There are no comments on Obama To Ask For $1 Billion Climate Change Fund · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Facts, evidence, and reason are readily available anywhere you want to look for them. At this point, about the only reason you left not to be familiar with them is willful ignorance. That's the reason you'll (hopefully) get modded into oblivion, not because there's a gospel or anyone's out to get you. Try reading a book once in a while that isn't written by someone working for an oil company.

  3. Re:Cult leader's son behaving like a cult leader on Rand Paul Files Suit Against Obama Over NSA's Collection of Metadata · · Score: 0

    You put facts in scare quotes and then argue with only two of them.

    But I can provide citations for both. Rand Paul on the environment and Rand Paul saying he likes Ayn Rand.

  4. Re:Cult leader's son behaving like a cult leader on Rand Paul Files Suit Against Obama Over NSA's Collection of Metadata · · Score: 1

    Rand Paul, an anti-abortion, anti-progressive tax, anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-environment moron who won't even answer a question about how old the earth is and ascribes to the philosophy that we should specifically ignore the best interests of other people in the interests of ourselves is the man you choose as your exemplar of someone who has the interests of the people at heart?

    Well, I'm not a Republican nor a Democrat. I'm a Canadian! And I'm amused!

  5. Re:Double bind on Man Shot To Death For Texting During Movie · · Score: 1

    Let's assume what you say is true for the moment (even though by all reports it's not). Are you seriously trying to claim that in a theater full of people, a 71 year old man being beaten by a 40 year old man had no recourse but to shoot him?

    This is the problem with gun culture in the US. As soon as you introduce a gun into a situation, people start dying when, in saner countries, things would have ended much more calmly.

  6. Re:Mavericks was glitchy? on The Year's Dumbest Moments in Tech · · Score: 1

    Turns out they did use 3DES, not 1DES. Still...

  7. Re:Mavericks was glitchy? on The Year's Dumbest Moments in Tech · · Score: 1

    Speaking of Adobe, how is the Adobe user account leak not on this list? Storing passwords encrypted rather than salted and hashed, using single-DES encryption rather than 3DES, using ECB instead of CBC, and storing the password hints in plain text? How in the seven hells did that not make this list when there's bullshit like the Mavericks Mail bug in here?

  8. Re:Betteridge's law of headlines on Chromebooks Have a Lucrative Year; Should WinTel Be Worried? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In this case, I think the answer is yes, but the headline is misleading nonetheless. First, some Chromebooks use Intel chips, so Intel is probably getting a cut of this. Microsoft has more to lose than Intel here.

    Second, Windows faces competition from a lot more than just Chromebooks, and I'd argue that Chromebooks aren't the reason why Windows is hurting. Rather, Windows netbooks and tablets have failed to be very compelling, so all the other competitors are doing well. I think that, while Chromebooks are getting more compelling, the biggest driver here is that WinTel laptops are getting less compelling faster.

    Third, aren't Windows sales dipping across the board, anyway, in favor of more mobile devices? That seems like the biggest threat to WinTel, not Chromebooks.

  9. Re: Hard to believe on What Would It Cost To Build a Windows Version of the Pricey New Mac Pro? · · Score: 1

    30 minutes might be pushing it if you're using optical media, but with a USB 3 flash drive and a moderately fast computer with an SSD, it's certainly possible. But then you spend the next four hours waiting for Windows Update to do its thing.

  10. Re: The worst thing... on GitHub Takes Down Satirical 'C Plus Equality' Language · · Score: 2

    You think you'll find out about the white supremacist atrocities from their own literature?

    Ah, yes, white supremacists. The poor man's Godwin.

    Your post is full of assumptions, fallacies, mistruths, and irrelevant information. It's a shame it's been modded so highly. Let me point out just a few in that confused jumble.

    Women are not only the majority of voters

    So what? Why do you believe that a group always votes in its own best interests?

    Even the president has spouted the wage gap myth despite all evidence proving that it does not exist -- Women do have babies

    Wow. Just... wow. Let's put aside the fact that research shows there is indeed a wage gap, though not 23%, and that I never said anything about men earning more than women for the same job. Nevermind those. Let's talk about how women have babies. What do you suppose the men were getting up to? Your implication that it's the woman's job to raise the baby while the man is free to pursue his career belies your attestations that you really care about women and men being equal. Should they also not share equally in the duties of parenthood? Why, then, is having a child more of a tax on the woman's career?

    The rest of your post is just as confused, misguided, and boring. Who said anything about giving women jobs they don't want, for example? Or Christians, Satanists, or KKK members?

    Anyway, it's been fun, but I've already spent more time than I should on someone who thinks that comparing feminists to white supremacists is in any way a useful analogy. So long.

  11. Re: The worst thing... on GitHub Takes Down Satirical 'C Plus Equality' Language · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, women rule over us. That's why they make more money than men, dictate what men must look like with fashion magazines, hold 90% or more of the political positions, and head up most corporations.

    Clearly, just because GitHub doesn't want to be associated with this idiotic and vile bullshit, they're being controlled by feminists. Quick, everyone, to the free speech mobile. Let's tell GitHub that it's us who get to tell them what they can use their own web site to say. In the name of free speech, of course.

  12. Re:Billions are larger than millions on Newly Discovered Greenhouse Gas Is 7,000 Times More Powerful Than CO2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You people should try reading a book once in a while.

    The water vapor problem is relatively minor because water vapor also causes cloud formation, which offsets the warming effect because it reflects light back into space. The science is still being settled about whether water vapor has even a positive or negative effect on the climate. They have studied it, but the situation is complex.

    Also, the idea that global warming has stopped over the last 15 years has been debunked time and time again. It's a result of dishonest people taking an exceptionally warm year (1998, which remains the third hottest year on record) and drawing a line to a less exceptional year or even an exceptionally cold year (2008, usually) in an effort to mislead people into thinking that global warming has stopped or even is reversing.

    The climate is cyclical due to El Nino effects, the solar cycle, and so on, so this is incredibly ill conceived. A running five year average is a better way to go, though given that the solar cycle is about 11 years, even that isn't perfect.

    The earth has continued to warm. The last five years have shown a slight pause because of a couple of slightly colder years, but there's no reason to believe this is anything other than a temporary slowing. The long term graphs, especially if you include all of the 20th century, clearly show the earth is warming, and continues to warm.

  13. Re:Intel on Intel Linux Driver Now Nearly As Fast As Windows OpenGL Driver · · Score: 1

    I think you haven't been paying attention.

    Take a look at this AnandTech review for one example.

    Intel has been making great strides in GPU performance, especially for notebooks. This is probably primarily driven by Apple, but if you ignore the 4x MSAA problems, it's quite competitive with an nVidia 650m. And I've heard they're working on some pretty big improvements in Skylake.

    Technologies like Crystalwell, and the amount of die space Intel is committing to this these days, make Intel a much more credible competitor for AMD and nVidia. Intel isn't going to unseat nVidia and AMD's dedicated graphics from the high-end gaming throne any time soon, but they're clearly angling for the mid-range market now whereas before, they were only after the lower end market. And given their significant power and thermal advantages, they've already got a pretty compelling offering.

  14. Re:Useless exploit, just gives admin to a local us on New Windows XP Zero-Day Under Attack · · Score: 2

    No, it is not trivial to go from a non-root user to a root user, at least in a properly secured system. That requires local root exploits such as these. This is the whole basis for running daemons as non-privileged users. Even if Apache has an exploit, if it's running as a dedicated, non-privileged user, you can't get root on the system.

    Local root exploits are serious, though obviously not as serious as a remote remote exploit. It's also true that they are usually easy to come by on unpatched systems. But your claim that it's trivial to go from a non-privileged user to a privileged one is incorrect.

    Your ideas about security are wrong, and you are missing the first rule of holes: when you find yourself in one, stop digging.

  15. Re:Google is a business... on Google Patenting Less Noble Use of Project Loon Tech · · Score: 1

    Hey now. He didn't say it was edited for the better.

  16. Re:Too little too late on Windows 8.1 RTM Trickling Out, With Start Menu and Boot-to-Desktop · · Score: 1

    The linked article refers to a start button, not a start menu. Furthermore, it would be odd indeed for Microsoft to add new features between the preview builds and the final build. The point of the preview builds, after all, is to test the real build. Adding a start menu at this juncture would be extremely strange from a software qualification perspective.

    Also, if Windows 8.1 were adding a start menu, you'd think Microsoft would say so in their Windows 8.1 feature list.

    Furthermore, from the Microsoft Windows 8.1 Product Guide:

    With new desktop enhancements, including the new Start button, workers can easily transition between the Start screen and the desktop. IT professionals can also customize the Start button to open the Apps view, which provides a complete list of installed apps. This list can be reordered by category, date, or name, and desktop apps can appear at the front of the list. Windows 8.1 can also boot right to the desktop. In fact, you can start directly in any view– the Start screen, Apps view, the desktop, or even a single app.

    Note that Apps view is not the start menu. Rather, it's the Start Screen's Apps screen. I.e. this.

  17. Re:NTFS on Microsoft Developer Explains Why Windows Kernel Development Falls Behind · · Score: 3, Informative

    Funny that when I upgraded my laptop from Windows 7 to Windows 8, the video stopped working, as did the accelerometer, and the bluetooth controller. Fixing the drivers required completely uninstalling all video drivers and reinstalling them. Even now, I've been unable to upgrade the video drivers in that computer past that one version I have working because new drivers cause it to BSOD.

    And then, masochist that I am, I upgraded my desktop computer. The sound didn't work anymore. Popped the sound card out and plugged it into my Linux desktop. Wouldn't you know, it worked fine. Reinstalled the driver. No go. Some people claim it's a problem with SoundBlaster sound card drivers on a machine that has a flash hard drive. But apparently it worked fine in Windows 7. I ended up having to use the built-in sound on that computer.

    None of this is to say that Linux is perfect and Windows is horrible. All in all, I've had more weird-ass hardware problems on Linux. But Windows is definitely not the panacea you make it out to be. I remember even as far back as upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows XP, the video card I had at the time didn't work at all on the new OS. There's a reason Microsoft publishes tools for checking if new versions of Windows will work with your hardware and software. It's because their shit stinks, too.

  18. Re:in other words on The Pirate Bay's 'Move' To Korea Was a Prank · · Score: 1

    Basic logic fail. Go look up the fallacy, "Denying the antecedent."

  19. Re:Did it say on The Pirate Bay's 'Move' To Korea Was a Prank · · Score: 1

    pendantically childish

    I don't know if that was intentional, but I choose to believe it was for the hilarity.

  20. Re:in other words on The Pirate Bay's 'Move' To Korea Was a Prank · · Score: 1

    It's an organization dedicated to subverting the law and what made you not trust them was an absurd prank about moving their servers to North Korea?

  21. Re:Good on Indiana Nurses Fired After Refusing Flu Shots On Religious Grounds · · Score: 0

    Aside from the plethora of religions with NO deity, Christianity (one of the biggest religions) see the problem as being oneself-- that is, the responsibility is being shifted nowhere but inward.

    You say he's the ignorant one? Tell me again who, in Christianity, forgives sins? The person who was the victim of whatever sin was committed? No?

    Who is it who "paid for all our sins"? That was me, I guess? My responsibility again?

    And by what means is it that I'm saved? Salvation is through the self, right? No?

    Where is this responsibility, again? Perhaps you might want to look into the difference between responsibility and submission. All Christianity teaches is that you can do nothing by yourself and you have to rely on Jesus for everything - forgiveness, salvation, knowledge. It is the opposite of taking responsibility. Perhaps if you weren't so steeped in your own bullshit, you'd understand that.

  22. Re:Here it comes... on Scientology On Trial In Belgium · · Score: 2

    Scientology is unlike accepted religions because its core practices seem intended not to stifle sociopathic behavior, but to exacerbate it.

    You seem to give an awful lot of credit to established religion. Almost like most of them don't encourage poor treatment of women, persecution of gays, owning of slaves, and so on. Intended to stifle sociopathic behavior, my ass.

  23. Re:0.001km = 0.01hm = 1m = 10dm = 100cm = 1000mm on USMA: Going the Extra Kilometer For Metrication · · Score: 1

    Yeah, except that when it comes to truly precise measurements in the imperial system, they typically end up using thousandths of an inch, so it still ends up being base 10.

    None of this seems like a particularly good argument to for a system of measurement. The occasional time when 32nds of an inch is useful are far outweighed by the ease of other conversions.

  24. Re:Guy was so smart it's scary. on Ramanujan's Deathbed Conjecture Finally Proven · · Score: 1

    Whether your conclusion is correct has nothing to do with whether you're a quack. It could very well be that acupuncture helps, but that doesn't make Qi a real thing. It could be that cold fusion is possible, but that doesn't mean that the guys who claimed to do it last time were right. Many things could be, and what makes one a quack is how you get to your answers, not whether you got to the right answer. Put another way, homeopaths aren't quacks just because it's possible to cure many of the diseases they treat. They're quacks because the methods they use to treat those diseases have no proven efficacy but they continue to believe in them.

  25. Re:Problems with science as a social enterprise on Researchers Investigating Self-Boosting Vaccines · · Score: 1

    I see you can copy and paste.

    "In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy."

    Who says science has to be understandable to an "untrained outsider?" Just because something requires specialized knowledge to do successfully doesn't make it wrong or biased.

    But for many scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups.

    I've heard this before from creationists when they claim that scientists who disagree with them are ostracized. This has generally been debunked in this particular case. They are fired for other reasons. Creationists scientists generally are incompetent biologists. Who woulda thought? Maybe that's not what's going on here, but claims of scientists being silenced for working outside the box are a common cry by those who really just want to promote their own pseudoscience. Also, the site you link to doesn't exist anymore, so it's hard to get more info. Perhaps it's time to update your copy and paste bin?

    In any case, it's also hard to believe this is true in general when nobel prizes are given to scientists who manage to come up with groundbreaking new ideas that are outside the norm. While some governments and corporations do try to suppress science (e.g. even Canada last year was guilty of this), I've not seen actual scientists doing it. And even it's not an indictment of the scientific method, but rather those who practice it.

    "Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."

    And that article goes on to say how the medical community has been very interested in what this Ioannidis has to say and he's quite well published. So what does that tell you about these scientists who want to suppress things?

    Now, all that said, you raise some valid points. When money and science go together hand in hand, it's easy to bias results, even with the most well meaning scientists. The pressure to publish can do so as well, and so can selective publication that we see today. Basically, what you can do as a layman is to trust the consensus of scientists and be wary of new drugs and procedures until medical scientists have had time to fully appreciate all the consequences of them.

    None of this contradicts anything I've said above, though. I realize you were just tacking this onto what the other guy who attacked some bizarre strawman of my argument said. Getting back to vaccines, the science for vaccines is well established, and we know they're safe and effective. So your points about politics and money skewing science, while interesting and generally worrisome, have little to do with the present discussion.