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Comment Re:Is this a big deal? Don't we want it? (Score 1) 111

I doubt that. Kids learn to escape their parents to go to a concert is that the concert is right there. Escaping their parents has an immediate, obviously visible, effect.

The type of surveillance described above is a lot more insidious, with respect to children. They're being surveilled for data mining. The kids aren't going to notice any obvious effects of the surveillance--it's not as if being surveilled means that the teacher will catch them saying naughty words and punish them. Any effect on them they either won't recognize (like buying more of some toy because marketing can target them better) or will be so far in the future and about such different things that they won't know about it (such as 20 years later someone deanonymizing the data and refusing to hire the guy because people who use lots of adjectives in childhood are statistically more likely to steal).

Comment Far far future (Score 1) 165

Let's just bypass all the Slashtards saying "heh heh, the US military doesn't have any ethics anyway" and ask a more fundamental question:

Have you ever seen a robot medic that can treat a wounded person at all without a human micromanaging its every move? Even in a hospital or another non-military situation? Have you ever seen a robot that can vacuum a floor *and* can put small objects aside, use an attachment to reach under narrow spaces, and follow instructions like "stay off my antique rug"? Have you ever seen a robot that can be placed in a kitchen, be told "cook a hamburger for me", and do it?

Of course not. Just being able to do everyday tasks that can be expressed in a couple of sentences to a human is still the stuff of science fiction, and will remain so for a long, long, time, even though there sure are an awful lot of them in movies.

Comment What? (Score 1) 111

Are they refusing to support the third party application itself, or are they refusing to support Red Hat Linux when it is used to run a third party application?

The article is badly written, but it sounds like #2, which is indeed bad. It's just the flip side of the manufacturer who won't fix a hardware fault because you ran Linux on your computer. Or with a car analogy, if you install a radio, the car manufacturer isn't responsible if the radio goes bad, but they are if the rest of the car does.

Comment Re:Cue typical Slashdot response (Score 1) 150

Where in the article does it say that Samsung caused the cancer?

So they apologized for it. Companies apologize for things that aren't their fault all the time. That's not a confession of guilt, that's a public relations ploy, and is solely based on whether people blame them for causing cancer, not whether they really caused any cancer.

Besides, if you read the apology carefully, it's not even worded as a confession. It doesn't say 'we apologize for giving people cancer'. They're just apologizing for making people upset--something they could do whether the cancer is caused by them or not. If a bully thinks you kicked sand in his face, and if you don't apologize he's going to beat you up/cost you millions in bad publicity, you apologize, regardless of whether you did it.

Comment Re:It's about power, not being a customer (Score 1) 417

They need to know when they get in one that it's going to be the best possible service.

Why do they need to know that it's going to be the best possible service? What if they prefer to not have the best possible service, in order to pay less?

Your reasoning makes as much sense as banning McDonalds so that restaurant customers get the best possible food.

Comment Americans? (Score 1) 272

I've often thought that a lot of the problem with "the government is killing American citizens" is actually a problem with citizenship, not with killing Americans. Generally these American citizens are the children of non-citizens who only spent a limited amount of time in the USA and much of their time they spent growing up was in a society radically different from the US.

Maybe the solution to "killing American citizens" is to not let these people become citizens in the first place? (The first thing that comes to mind is forcing them to choose a country at age 21 if they have dual citizenship, but I'm sure someone could poke holes in that idea.)

Comment Re:lol (Score 1) 499

That's because diets aren't supposed to be temporary.

How does that work? To lose weight from a diet, you need to consumne fewer calories than you use. To stay at the same weight once you've lost enough weight, you need to consume the same amount of calories that you use. These aren't the same thing.

An overweight person would need to make some change to his eating habits, but that change wouldn't consist of making the diet permanent--if he did, he'd just keep losing weight down to nothingness (or at least down to where his body just uses fewer calories because it's thin, which would not be the same as his target weight).

Comment Re:shenanigans (Score 2) 386

The US has inner cities with high crime rates that skew the average, Not only are these inner cities majority black, which makes these statistics very politically incorrect, they also have the strictest gun laws in the country.

If you don't live in one of those places (whatever your skin color), you don't really need to worry about the "high USA crime rate", And we don't have universal health care outside them any more than we do in them, either.

Comment Re:Sad, and not black and white either (Score 1) 351

It's funny how it sounds like a hipster to say "oh, and savage tribes don't even need iPhones" (or Xbox, or Star Trek, or other things like that). But rephrase it as "they don't have Plato, or Shakespeare, or Dickens" and suddenly it takes on a very different tinge, even though Shakespeare's plays were the lowbrow popular culture of their day.

Comment Yawn (Score 1, Informative) 90

This is just a mountain made out of a molehill by leftists who are fans of the government of Cuba and don't like when Western governments try to undermine it. I have news for them: doing things like this is the intelligence agencies' *job*. They're supposed to spy; that's why they're called spy agencies, and Cuba couldn't be a more deserving target.

If Cuba doesn't do such things itself, it's only because of lack of budget in these post-Soviet days, not lcak of scruples. (Remember when Cuba used to send "advisors" to Africa?)

(Would I like it if Cuba did that here? No, of course not. But I wouldn't like it if Cuba dropped bombs on us either, yet I'm not foolish enough to say that it's immoral to drop bombs on another country.)

Comment Re:Oh, it's on SyFy? (Score 1) 167

Perhaps nerds see Wil Wheaton as an example of someone acting in a socially awkward manner. Playing the role of a universally hated character is pretty much as socially awkward as you can possibly be when you're someone in the national media, after all.

Comment Re:Desensitizing the masses (Score 3, Insightful) 168

Reeasing things in dribs and drabs has benefits, though. It probably keeps the public's interest more than releasing the whole thing as a lump; even if public interest is down because of exhaustion, it's probably not as far down as it would be if nothing had been released in a year.

The other reason is that it makes it harder for the government to lie. If you release a document, the government can't lie and deny it because they don't know that maybe tomorrow you'll release a document that could expose the lie. If you release the whole thing in a lump, they could just carefully tailor the lie to match the existing releases.

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