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Comment Re: Government vs terrorists (Score 1) 395

Terrorists are not a credible threat.

FIFY, at least in America.

41,000 Americans die each year in vehicle-related accidents (source: ntsb.gov)

785,000 Americans die each year due to heart disease (source: ahajournals.org)

580,000 Americans die each year due to cancer (source: cancer.org)

0 (as in Zero) Americans die each year due to Terrorism - it isn't a recurring event. This year, 3 people died in Boston, due to "Terrorism". In 2001, 3-5,000 people died; in 1996, 1 person died.

Even if we had a 9/11 every month, it wouldn't even come close to Cancer or Heart Disease as a threat.

...so you can toss your duct tape and plastic sheets. Or use them when you paint your garage.

Comment Fool me twice; can't get fooled again! (Score 1) 918

Don't worry. The wheels will eventually come off, as sustaining Pax Americana will utterly and completely drain the coffers down to where the whole thing just collapses, just as they did with every other two-bit empire in the past.

A good read on the subject is Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic.

To the bunkers!

Comment Re:One more reason that such systems make no sense (Score 1) 308

If you have to have an admissions exam for a university, ~.

Let me distill down a Quarter of College-level Econ for you:

  1. There are a limited number of spaces in the university;
  2. There are more applicants for those spaces than the number of available spaces; therefore
  3. Some method of discriminating* between applicants is necessary.

    Of course, one (i.e., you) could claim that the simple fix is to increase the number of spaces at the university, or perhaps build more universities. Then you run into the issue of scarcity of competent professors. Would you wish to staff your university with the first bumblefnck that was able to stumble through your doors, clutching a freshly-minted Masters or PhD?

    * Discrimination, in this case, means "a method of choosing". It could be the first 500 students in the door, those whose last name starts and ends with a vowel; or those who passed some godawful test.

    Scenes I'd like to see: implement national driver's license test standards so that 70% automatically fail their first try, and boost the penalty for driving without a license. Then we'd finally have a nation of good drivers, I mean good test takers. Wait...what?

Comment Re:A proposition... (Score 5, Insightful) 148

So why were you endangering national security?

Every time you use teh interwebs, you are endangering national security.

Every time you leave the house, you are endangering national security.

Every time you stay at home, you are endangering national security.

---

Consider that they are tracking everyone.

Which means everyone is a suspect.

And they wouldn't be suspects if they weren't guilty.

---

Q. What do you call an innocent civilian?
A. A criminal who hasn't broken the law yet.

Comment Simpsons is right (Score 1) 198

...because with all that radioactive water dumping into the Pacific, any fish from that ocean will start absorbing radioactive elements. Bart's three-eyed fish will seem tame in comparison, because at least you can see the problem.

Even better? Radiation is cumulative, so propensity for tissue damage rises with each exposure and the radioactive elements build up in the animal's body. There is no safe level of radiation exposure (source: Hellen Cadicott)

Still even better? Expect the higher-order fish (the ones that eat other fish) to end up will even more radiation exposure. Guess what's at the top of the food chain? That's right: those hairless chimps are flocked.

Try the fish!

Comment Re:xp still works (Score 1) 520

On the other hand SSH can't be compromised,

Do tell! So some malware/virus couldn't snatch the SSH keys from an infected box and then ssh into another? Or simply ssh into an improperly-secured box (say, with easy-to-guess passwords for easy-to-guess accounts)?

Please sign me up for your newsletter, The Dunning-Kruger Daily. I hope it has a good crossword puzzle!

Comment Re:Windows 8 woohoo! (Score 1) 210

So, it has come to this.

No, they're missing the boat, as usual. They need to port PHP to their craptaculous phone, then they'll have all the apps they could ever dream of.

The market will become flooded with Windows Phone "Developers" just as the Web space now is, then the inherent technical debt will increase past the point of breaking and millions, nay BILLIONS will be spent trying to maintain and extend all the in-house apps clueless businesses have written.

And that means more money for me when I come in and fix their problem with clean, maintainable (and noob-proof) code. *cackle*

Comment Re:He's right - Android is eating iOS's lunch (Score 0) 692

OK, I'll bite. Without using brand names, please tell me what you can do (e.g., use cases) with an iOS device that you can't do with an Android device of equal or lessor price?

I can give an iPod or iPhone to my kids and trust that they're not going to download any malware or spyware or SMS-overcharging trojans onto it.

All other things being equal, the inherent security of the iOS ecosystem is leaps and bounds better than anything Android is even capable of coming up with.

Comment Re:sick of windows at work (Score 2) 251

OSX isn't competing with Surface, per se, and OSX may be a POSIX compliant system, but why does Apple do things like make Safari non-compliant with regard to standards like the W3? One web site I worked on had the worst rendering with Safari. I mean, almost useless W3 non-comliance. We had to develop a plug-in to deal with some of our stuff. Firefox, IE? No issues. We could use the stock browser components.

What website would that be? I prefer to do my testing in WebKit browsers, personally.

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