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Comment Re:and... (Score 1) 196

In fairness Python 3 isn't really as widespread as it should be. I think people have found the 2.7 branch just works well for them.

With that said I do wish people WOULD move to python 3. 2.7's unicode handling is infinitely awful and fragile compared to 3.

Comment Battlestar Galactica (Score 2) 245

Reminds me a bit of one of the tropes from battlestar galactica. Adama knew from the previous war that the cylons where master hackers and could disable battlestars by breaking into networks via wireless and then using them to disable the whole ship, leaving them effectively dead in the water, so he simply ordered that none of his ship ever be networked and that the ship be driven using manual control. Later on they meet the other surviving battleship, the pegasus, and it turns out that only survived because its network was offline due to maintainance. Its not actually a novel idea in militaries. I remember in the 90s doing a small contract for a special forces group I can't name, and asked them about their computer network. He said they used "Sneaker-net", which is that any info that needed transfer was put on a floppy and walked to its destination, thus creating an air gap between battlefield systems.

I guess this isn't quite that, but it certainly seems to be a sort of variant of it.

Comment Re:Plausible deniability (Score 2) 151

Don't. Just forget the password. They can't prove you haven't. In fact its actually really common for people under duress to forget passwords for real, since memory can get quite impaired by anxiety (Its part of why torture doesnt work. The more people are freaked out, the more the brain reverts to a fight-or-flight baseline with faster reflexes and diminished cognitive skills)

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 2) 334

No its not. A naturalistic fallacy is where someone justifies a moral stance by a physical condition. It is essentially a round-about variation of the is/ought problem.

However, death has no real moral status, because we have no say over the matter. To say death is immoral presupposes that there is an alternative to death which IS moral, and for which we might chose.

But there isn't. Death isn't a moral choice, its simply something that exists, and we're all going to get knived by it some day.

Death *sucks*, but it isn't wrong. It just is.

Comment Re:Riiiight (Score 1) 498

Well the Americans in WW-II pretty much pulled off the whole thing, plus the whole "invent nuclear weapons" things in about that amount of time.

Being that the whole "invent nuclear weapons" bit is already done, and the Ukraine has the physicists to fill in the middle bits, yeah 4 years is probably a good bet.

Problem of course is that they have about 4 weeks, not 4 years to pull this off so....

Comment Re:How fine is this distinction? (Score 1) 62

Pavlov hasn't really been a thing in neurology or psychology since the 50s. Lets get that clear before we start spouting grossly outdated theories before we really screw up and start spouting freud.

Dogs do analyse our facial expressions and the like to guage our moods. But its also how humans do it as well. We know that because people who cant, namely people with autism, suffer from something called "mind blindness", the inability to guage the internal states of others.

The thing is, we can only guess at what animals can't understand, because they can't tell us otherwise. But we also need to acknowledge these animals for the large part have the same brain parts we do (with a few notable exceptions, like an inability to process grammar) and often display similar reason to us.

We know they tend not to be as smart as us. We've got whacking great big frontal and temporal lobes, but we need to be very careful in assuming they dont understand us, just because they are mute.

Comment Re:Ha ha (Score 1) 465

The US dollar is worth anywhere from 1/29th to 1/539th of what it originally was worth after the Revolutionary War, so your statement is inane.

Theres really nothing bad about this. Its called economic growth and its why our western countries don't look like the backward-arse third world countries who've failed to increase the value of their products.

Comment Schizophrenia (Score 5, Interesting) 160

When I was younger, early 20s back in the 1990s , once of my best friends started to slip into schizophrenia (it ran in his family). He constantly jotted drawings and writings on paper, which grew increasingly more bizare. Started with pictures of aliens and UFOs (Which he'd say where just him having fun) but over time turned into numerological type things (My first letter is T my second is C, I am top cat, my age adds up to 9 which upside down is a third of 666 etc etc etc) and increasingly more paranoid mystery theories. He'd draw charts explaining the relationships between things.

And since he was a biology student, he drew lots of plants. Particularly his favorite, marihuana.

Whats to say this isn't the mad scrawlings of a schizophrenic mad man, 500 years ago? It'd certainly fit the pattern.

Comment Re: Cloud formation albedo (Score 2) 378

Yes it has. But that don't mean we'll survive it. A 4c warming over a thousand years triggered the permafrost melt (for a total of 10c warming) which damn near sterilized the planet.

Regardless, those massive shifts are not contemporary and not compatible with our survival. In fact we're not even sure 4c is particularly compatible with our survival if history has any say in it.

Comment Real identities are dangerous (Score 2, Interesting) 140

Yeah sometimes its necessary. A friend of mine has been stalked by a Neo Nazi gang for some time after she spoke out somewhere about racism. Death threats, and so on (Neo nazis are one of the nastiest organized crime things I've ever seen!). She has *very good* reason to want to be anonymous and use a fake name on facebook only known to family and close friends.

Its *dangerous* to force real identities on people.

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"You don't go out and kick a mad dog. If you have a mad dog with rabies, you take a gun and shoot him." -- Pat Robertson, TV Evangelist, about Muammar Kadhafy

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