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User: Ian+Alexander

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Comments · 398

  1. Re:Does that include Women Porn? on No Porn From Public WiFi Hotspots In the UK Proposed · · Score: 3

    Is this even a thing? People jerking it in coffee shops? I've been using the Internet in public spaces all around the world for many years now and I've never ever seen it. If you don't have Internet access that's one thing but it would seem to me that if I was in that situation and I was that desperate I'd use a public access point to _download_ porn but not view it in the goddamn coffee shop. Obviously, the world is a large place and people do all sorts of strange things, but I'm hard-pressed to believe that this is actually common enough of a problem anywhere that there needs to be a response by ISP's or government or cafe owners or whatever to stop these dedicated cadres of cafe wankers from leaving unsanitary stains in coffeeshops across the country.

  2. Ironic NYT is Ironic on What If Manning Had Leaked To the New York Times? · · Score: 1

    It's funny to me that the NYT posted this at all, because they're engaging in a counterfactual about what could have happened if they had done their fucking jobs.

    Bradley Manning tried to get in touch with a number of traditional media outlets, the NYT included, before giving up on traditional outlets and just dumping the files to Wikileaks. He discussed this, and many other things, in a statement he read at his pre-trial hearing. The Times tries to blame their failure on Bradley, but the ball was in their court and they chose not to follow up on it.

  3. Re:Why he didn't submit to the NY Times on What If Manning Had Leaked To the New York Times? · · Score: 3, Informative

    The funny thing is, he actually tried to go to them first. He tried the traditional media outlets and when none of them could be bothered to give him the time of day, he dumped the files to Wikileaks. He called the NYT before he went to Wikileaks, but they never called him back.

    It's all in a statement he read out at his last pre-trial hearing: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/01/bradley-manning-wikileaks-statement-full-text

  4. Re:The 'talk' on How Close Is Iran, Really, To Nuclear Weapons · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This ignores the fact that Iran was a key U.S. ally under the Shah and when the Islamic Revolution happened the United States immediately did an about-face and has been extremely hostile to Iran ever since. We supported the Axis of Evil Dictator Saddam Hussein (oops, that was more than 20 years ago, I'm not supposed to mention it because it never ever happened) against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war because we wanted Khomeini out.

    Come on, has everybody already forgotten that we invaded Iraq because of "bulletproof evidence" that Saddam had an advanced WMD program? And then that justification for invading sort of just... fell off to the wayside when we occupied the country and picked apart the guts of his regime, and it turned out there weren't any WMD's, and the intelligence turned out to be fake?

    The United States wants regime change, they're just putting pressure on Iran. The Islamic Republic came into power on a wave of anti-Western (well, more like anti-Western-imperialism) sentiment and has distinguished itself to its people by not bowing to Western pressure, even under sanction. It is entirely plausible that they're committed to pursuing nuclear energy in the face of American pressure simply because they don't want to be seen to buckle to American demands.

  5. Re:Oh really? on We Aren't the World: Why Americans Make Bad Study Subjects · · Score: 1

    Yeah, there are a lot of experiments that psychologists and anthropologists and linguists would love to perform but can't, but they're still able to use empirical evidence to test hypotheses.

    They're called "natural experiments" but apparently economics is a special "science."

  6. Re:Mod summary off-topic. on We Aren't the World: Why Americans Make Bad Study Subjects · · Score: 1

    No, that's not saying that we (Americans) are inherently bad study subjects. It's saying that we are in many ways unique and not necessarily a good representative sample of the human population overall.

    We are a good sample if you want to study Americans though.

  7. Re:Frying pan or fire? on Who Should Manage the Nuclear Weapons Complex, Civilians Or Military? · · Score: 2

    Good, soldiers that follow orders make for good soldiers. What the rest of us are wondering is if we can trust the people giving you orders.

  8. Re:Dupe? on KDE Software Compilation 4.10 RC1 Released · · Score: 2

    That's not decimal numbering (where 4.10 would be a more precise expression of 4.1), it's literally 4 dot 10, where the ten represents the minor version number of KDE 4. Took me some time to get used to it, but other projects do this, too. The Linux kernel in particular does this.

  9. Re:The rich, the robots, the rest of us on Automation Is Making Unions Irrelevant · · Score: 1

    Robots are notoriously bad consumers. Either way, capitalism is on the way out for something else. The question is -- who is going to benefit from the new state of affairs?

  10. Re:Yeah, and? on Tor Network Used To Command Skynet Botnet · · Score: 1

    "Anything between the exit node and destination is sent in the clear and likely they've made some mistake that'll allow it to be blockable."

    If you'll Read The Fine Article, you'll notice that this particular botnet is using Tor hidden services to obscure the location of the command server; they're not routing botnet traffic through Tor to a command server on the clearnet; that would be silly, as you just pointed out.

  11. Re:Privacy has nothing to do with it on Facebook Says EU 'Right To Be Forgotten' Would Harm Privacy · · Score: 1

    Facebook is currently suspected of building shadow profiles of people who have never registered for Facebook... so it may be that you don't have to give them your information for them to get ahold of it.

  12. Re:nerd parlor game proposal on Multi-Server Microkernel OS Genode 12.11 Can Build Itself · · Score: 1

    Research has shown that people tend to just look at the beginning and end of a word and its approximate length to guess what the whole word actually is. In which case both Geode and Genocide are plausible misreads.

  13. Re:If you’re 27 or younger, you’ve nev on Report Says Climate Change Already Evident, Emissions Gap Growing · · Score: 1

    Therefore the statement is patently false, and absurd.

    I'm glad you latched on to the most important part of the meme (the GP was just parroting a meme which has been making the rounds lately), which was the problematic formulation, and not the message it was trying to convey.

  14. Re:Field Sobriety Test on With Pot Legal, Scientists Study Detection of Impaired Drivers · · Score: 1

    Of course, I'm sure the stoner brigade can produce a plethora of studies claiming that weed is a fucking miracle cure-all with no downsides whatsoever, written by the same kind of biased researchers that produce studies showing that burning shit-tons of coal is great for the environment.

    Yeah, because the same "stoner brigade" you just derided for being lazy fucks are also a well-heeled special interest lobby like the coal industry.

    while I never was a full-time stoner myself, I did smoke enough to know that I sure as shit wouldn't have felt comfortable driving on it (or doing anything else that required concentration).

    Of course, no stoner I've ever talked to claims that everyone can drive at any level of high-ness, but rather derides the idea that you can set a uniform standard like you can for BAC. Pot doesn't work the way alcohol does; it influences brain activity in much more subtle ways, and it effects everyone a little bit differently. Most importantly, it doesn't impair your ability to judge if you're capable of driving.

  15. Re:Field Sobriety Test on With Pot Legal, Scientists Study Detection of Impaired Drivers · · Score: 1

    In Washington, the legal limit for THC while driving under the new law is 5 ng/mL. That's in specifically blood concentration. So unless this test can tell blood concentration it isn't going to work here.

  16. Re:Easy on With Pot Legal, Scientists Study Detection of Impaired Drivers · · Score: 1

    For simple possession, unless you get busted by federal agents there is no way you're going to end up facing federal possession charges. Quit scaremongering.

  17. Re:If you’re 27 or younger, you’ve nev on Report Says Climate Change Already Evident, Emissions Gap Growing · · Score: 1

    This has been addressed elsewhere, but I'll bring it up, because that meme, while well-intentioned and does convey something important, is problematic in how it's been formulated.

    October was the 332nd consecutive month (27 years, 8 months IIRC) with an above-average global average temperature. Local extremes exist, of course, within each global average. So while it is true to say that those of us under 27 have never experienced a month with a global average temperature colder than average, it is not true to say that we personally have never experienced a month which was colder than average.

  18. And that will also mark on GNOME 3.8 To Scrap Fallback Mode · · Score: 4, Insightful

    my permanent move away from GNOME. I am learning to like XFCE!

  19. Re:Interesting Algorithm on Poll-Based System Predicts U.S. Election Results For President, Senate · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but Obama's no FDR, that's for damn sure.

  20. Re:Only Safari?? on Browser Wars Redux: This Time It's the Apps · · Score: 1

    RTFS, they're talking about getting it onto an iOS device.

  21. Read on Ask Slashdot: Using Code With an Expired Patent? · · Score: 1

    Read the first paragraph of the license. It's covered by three patents, two of which are still in effect because they were granted in 1992. You have until September 2012 before they expire, assuming no continuations have been granted, and there is still the matter of copyright.

  22. Re:Who says our legal system is broken? on Lawyer Is Big Winner In Webcamgate Settlement · · Score: 1

    despite the oversupply, universities are actually opening new law schools and increasing class sizes.

    Due to the oversupply; everybody wants in on law and somebody's gotta teach it!

  23. Re:Counterpoint on Firefighters Let House Burn Because Owner Didn't Pay Fee · · Score: 1

    If they hadn't?

  24. Re:Too quickly on Ubuntu 10.10 Release Candidate Launched · · Score: 1

    Shit, how about once every 9 months? That way when they decide to deploy an entirely new init system they might have some more time for integration and bugsquashing, and they could package PulseAudio properly for release like they initially didn't, or do a decent job packaging KDE4.

    Or at least they could shove that extra time between the Beta and RC and spend a lot more time squashing bugs. After about 8.10 or so the bugginess of each release has felt like kind of a constant, and it's higher than it should be.

  25. Re:Sounds reasonable on Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand the Brain · · Score: 1
    Kurzweil's argument was

    The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil. About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.

    Meyers' "tangent" about biochemistry is spot-on. In order to simulate a thing you must first understand it, which we are nowhere close to doing when it comes to the gene-brain relationship. Meyers talked about genes and brains only because Kurzweil said it first and made some silly extrapolations about the complexity of the human brain. Kurzweil talks about the genome like it's a long computer printout and you can just read it and understand how to build to a brain -- or at least, deduce the operating principles of the brain. That's not how the genome works at all and in ten years we're not going to be anywhere near close to understanding it.