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Comment Re:Or, we could just be playing a game (Score 1) 212

have you ever sat 16 hours in front of a computer with basically 95% of that time trying to type commands and move and click a mouse?

do you have any idea what that does to you?

i do, because i have been playing video games since i was 5.
i am 36 now.
most of the games i played didn't cause lasting harm and only one other game had me playing day and night, until i found warcraft 3, and it's expansion frozen throne.
but just one game was so addictive i'd have jitters trying to sit still and not play.
just one game left me not feeling hungry even if i hadn't ate in 14 hours.
just one game did i wrack my brain over what games i had failed my team at to the tune of sleeping 2 hours a night effectively.
just one game where i smashed the discs to because then i wouldn't play until a week later when i replaced the discs.
just one game had me physically destroy 7 keyboards and cause me to kick a computer case causing a short that powered it down, and i had to hammer at the case to get it to work and not short again.
yup frozen throne had me so hard i couldn't do anything else.
what 5% of gamers find this game? the one they can't play without. it nearly killed me. it is a game so fast paced i literally double my heart rate and double the blood pressure in my veins. i can see how gamers who haven't found the game they can't put down might not get how one game can change the course of ones life, but most gamers just play less addictive ones that are still fun but not 'addictive' enough to cause harm.
anyways games movies books etc. they all affect you but the level and extent of change varies.

Comment Re:Vertical Resolution (Score 1) 304

three hdmi 1080p monitors in 24" resolution for $130 per screen and a $120 gpu (ati 7770) and two display port mini to hdmi adaptors and a decent computer will do just fine for most people and be a fraction of the price because it's standard screen size. if the 7770 isn't fast enough for gaming then a r9 280x is only $300 and is 4 times faster than the 7770. i still play old games though, so there are many models for me to chose from. technically i don't do multi screen except to play back blurays to a 40" hdtv. but i don't have the room for them, and if i were to game with multiple screens i would likely use 3 40" tv sets ($300-400 on sale compared to $700 per screen for monitors) rather than pay for 'only' monitors. but 24" is plenty big. i use 1080p on my best laptop which has a 17.3" display but if i had room for 3 screens i would definitely go big, on a budget. and i am not sensitive to flicker, from crts, florescent lights and other flickery things have never ever bothered me so latency and refresh rates don't apply to me to be willing to spend more for something that doesn't bother me.

Comment Re:Raise the Price (Score 0) 462

"1) Spend little on R&D for an electric vehicle. Sell it just cheap enough (at a loss if you have to) to meet the minimum requirement. Whine about it.
2) Put some effort and investment in developing an electric car that people will actually want with a manufacturing cost that leads to a price people are willing to pay. Refine the design over time so that it becomes that profit center that saves your bacon when the bottom inevitably drops out of the IC car market as the cost of gas heads toward the stratosphere."

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-16/where-worlds-unsold-cars-go-die with 10 billion cars and lots where they simply store and refuse to sell 'normal' cars it is crazy. if the resources to build the cars wasn't used building them just to scrap 12 years later because selling them at a loss is unthinkable... and god forbid any auto plants get shutdown because too many car makers are making too many cars world wide. all that iron all that coal to make steel all those factories cranking out cars faster than ever with not one person on the 'sustainable' track of thinking, you know like shutting plants down, or having 4 day weeks and only 2 8 hour shifts instead of those factories. and now every car has a touchscreen tablet built in. and most of them will never be turned on.

Comment Re:Version 35 of the now venerable spying portal (Score 1) 73

what makes you think anyone still uses internet explorer. inflated botnet numbers from microsoft? oh wait windows 8 by default has about 20 automatically refreshing tabs with internet explorer. between win8 and botnets the traffic is skewed.

android is proof that open source and 'free software' are a far cry from each other, and it tracks a lot of data while i have yet to hear of free software containing adware.

Comment Re:Is the first one real? (Score 1) 17

soda stream uses chemically altered sugar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucralose

" It is manufactured by the selective chlorination of sucrose (table sugar), which substitutes three of the hydroxyl groups with chlorine."

supposedly the chlorine doesn't detach as the substance doesn't break down in the digestive system. but they also said aspartame was good for you and it wasn't and i recall saccharine was used for a while until it started giving rats cancer.

Comment Re:Prison == New Free Cinema? (Score 1) 186

instead of cherry picking just one state, why not cherry pick 30 states. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/rprts05p0510pr.cfm sure only 77% repeated within 5 years... but hell i was messed up for 20+ years and nothing worked until i was diagnosed and medicated. sure i didn't 'break' many laws and was only in police care until they could transport me to psychwards etc. and they were trying to help me. i would say they did good, because now i am stable and i'm a heavy streaming media user, rather than a heavy torrent user, now... though sometimes only torrents have things due to stupid unfair approaches to copyright... like licensing movies and tv content from separate parties and thus not having the movies available when the tv series is available... and i need to see the movie to understand how the storyline is from the tv series... (like movie 10 of the anime one piece) and keep in mind one piece has 600+ tv episodes with more to come and it doesn't make sense to just watch the anime without the movies because the movies make more sense (but except movie 10 are all non canaon of the manga or anime) if crunchyroll had the movies i would watch it there of course, but they don't and piracy is something many many people do, from radio mixtapes to vhs copying to dvd ripping most people have circumvented copyright if they had the resources to have a device but not the income to own content. so great i don't have to pirate movies because i can afford to stream them and i don't mind waiting for netflix or amazon or crunchyroll or don't mind hulu ads but when these sites only get partial content i have few options buying the movies off amazon is one possibility but at $20 a movie it then conflicts with my entertainment budget of $100 a month. anyways, i do have quite a backlog of movies to watch, and i easily spend $100 a month on entertainment so i probably sound pretty vain but i was taught that sharing is a good thing. that people are supposed to share the good parts of their life to others in hope they too lead an enjoyable life. copyright shouldn't be seen as a way to make the world a better place because it doesn't. it makes sharing a harder process and i don't always like the 'hyped' content for instance i spent $20 of my entertainment budget on the first 5 books of game of thrones(kindle edition) and have only gotten through the first chapter, so far. and if it doesn't get better it will be not very high on my list of things to do. if i had pirated the books i probably would have deleted them by now. as it is i feel obligated to keep the ebook until i finish the first book, because i know sometimes it takes authors a while to get a good storyline rolling.

Comment Re:Irony? (Score 1) 90

for live events there is this neat thing called 'multicast' where you beam the same stream in one broadcast signal to as many customers as needed. multicast is way underutilized but it does get used for the big live streams. live streams can only be paused if buffering on the client end allows it. streams from non live media use a lot more bandwith as each user needs to hold open a stream can pause it (though with flash the stream will time out) etc. but flash only has a 10 megabyte buffer and defaults to a single megabyte. anyways google seems to be able to do it, as do netflix hulu crunchyroll etc.

Comment Re:you've got male (Score 1, Insightful) 315

It is 2014. It is not 1974. The whole tabula rasa myth is a proven lie. The whole "politically correct protected class is a social construct and is oppressed due to evil white men" is a lie. We have vast genetic studies across the world that disprove all of this.

Women are not interested in technology, period. As with any natural law, there are exceptions. In this case, they are very few. The reason is simple: the intelligence and creative drive that lends itself to technology and art evolved in humans as male display of genetic fitness. Just as the peacock has feathers, and songbirds sing their songs, it is our raw intelligence that is the best predictor of deleterious genetic load. Yes, the evil geneticists can predict the deleterious genetic load of animals based upon their mating displays. Human females, like virtually all female animals, have evolved to judge genetic fitness based upon whatever is the characteristic of a particular species or subspecies. Technology is such a display that simply does not interest the vast majority of females.

This is old news now. The first book to delve into it, before the human genome was decoded, came out in 2001. Behavioral genetics and evolutionary pscyhology have become such important fields, the former editor of the Science section of the New York Times just released a whole book on the subject last week.

Strangely, slashdot type geeks appear to be the least amenable to evolutionary theory. Sure, they like Dawkins. They think people who believe in God are stupid. They believe apes evolved into humans, but THEN. evolution stopped. And, all people became equal. Especially nerdy white guys with aspergers.

In my experience, this is due to the very naive hope that belief in this strange geek religion of human equality will get said geeks laid. It doesn't. It never has. It never will.

Comment Re:He could hide with a better HOSTS file (Score 1) 3

so where does noscript fit into this?

where do iceweasel and seamonkey fit in?

oh hey and why the windows bias? i run a small but diverse network with certain devices with certain router ports etc to protect and divide my network from misbehaving software or hardware. and yes i realize google makes something like $500 per year per person with tracked information.

and what if you've pulled the plug on everything electric in your home (including the fridge) and they still have 'coincidence' events? also i never told anyone but had 2 movies on a mental queue and 2 on a written list, and just when you switch from one provider to another you see all 4 movies in 4 days after the install event?

i've been in the hospital for having paranoia.

i wont get into the details but half the time it seems like things are going my way, and the other half it feels like my mind is a quantum spaghetti of useless first world problems.

back to the movies, they are chosen between 30-60 days prior to transmission, so someone has a plan. my plan was to wing it and be honest. tbh i feel like i only do the things i like doing and get depressed and then feel dumb for being depressed when i know so many things are going 'right' for me.

one thing i hate about linux/slashdot is people assume you're a hacker. and i am not. my most impressive hack was taking a boot floppy to a p120 laptop get into an unencrypted drive open the shadow password file and take a user account's password and pasted it into roots hash. essentially giving me root again, sure i forgot the password to root which is why i did it, but it is only technically legal to hack your own computer which might be why bill gates called the computer menu 'my computer'

i wandered off topic ah well

Comment Re:So in other words, it will be just like Firewir (Score 1) 355

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB
in my timeline windows 98se was the first wide spread use of usb technology. a full 2 years before apple decided to add usb, based on your '5 year' timetable. personally i thought usb 1.1 too slow, and while i did eventually buy a 4 port powered hub, the main thing i used usb for was joysticks and mice, at the time you got 2 usb ports on a computer, and so when printers went usb i had to get one to have 3 usb ports. also digital cameras and scanners both went usb, and then i needed 5 ports... and then i quit using printers and scanners, but then external hdds were cheapest backup options, then flash memory came out and those eat usb ports for breakfast... connecting a whole lot of them is easy and sometimes it is nice to have several pluged in for various uses... luckily motherboards come with 6-12 ports for decent desktop computers, and some laptops have 4 usb ports which then means using a powered hub, because now bluray burners, cell phones, wifi/ethernet dongles, flash memory, mouse, hdds, etc etc etc. unplugging things is possible but not ideal.

Comment Re:As a Sr. Analytics Manager... (Score 1) 466

For many reasons including:

There aren't many places that do not have Office installed. People are very familiar with it and even if they aren't, they can usually make their way around it in with only a little coaching.

Most companies use Excel for basic analysis, charting, and data delivery to non-technical report recipients.

Deliver a raw dataset and allow the end-user to pivot, chart, etc. It takes the strain off the analytics team for basic tasks and gives the end user the power to do what they want with the data. Tableau seat licenses aren't realistic for most companies and building some sort of analytics platform from scratch in your language of choice isn't always something you can do in the short term and provide more functionality with less training required.

I could go on, but that gives you a general idea.

Comment Re:Dear Mark (Score -1, Flamebait) 335

I find it absolutely hilarious you link to the Dunning Kruger effect, and can't seem to understand how ridiculous your comment is.

1) Funding has in fact increased substantially since 1969. Your understanding of dates means you are deluded. The decline in the 1970s was due largely to school integration and white flight. Taxes were never "slashed".

2) The reason Newark public schools fail is because the vast majority of their students are black. Blacks are on average (I'm sure you know a smart black guy, ask him to explain the word "average" to you) significantly less intelligent than other races, hence much worse performance in all measures of education. This is true in any school system that is overwhelmingly black, whether Newark, St. Louis, Haiti, or anywhere on the entire continent of Africa.

3) The US used to be best in the world in everything prior to the Civil Rights Era. We went from putting a man on the moon and building the modern industrial economy, and the largest middle in history, to letting all our cities turn into African hellholes and spending trillion of dollars on attempting to change the biological nature of a particular breed of humans.

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