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Comment Re:I call BS (Score 1) 229

Your heuristics idea would create too many false positives, where each false positive represents a paying customer who is now pissed at being treated like a bot. It also would likely allow many false negatives, requiring the spammers to merely tweak their system to fool the heuristic, meaning the problem would not be solved either. So now you have paying customers being treated as spambots while still being spammed by actual spambots. That's a bad combination right there.

Meanwhile, placing restrictions on accounts who have never bought even $5 worth of stuff will raise the barrier of entry above what most spammers can afford, and if it inconveniences a few legit people? Well, if they haven't bought anything, they can't really be called paying customers, so they're not the gamers Valve is interested in courting anyway.

Comment Well done, smart guy (Score 5, Insightful) 247

Congrats, you just took an axe and destroyed a multimillion dollar satellite. Clearly the backers of the GPS system will now see the light and shut the project down forever ... ... or maybe they'll just build another satellite and make the average taxpayer pay an extra dollar.
Seriously, jackass, you don't "bring the public's attention to the government's attempt to control the world through modern technology" through actions that make you look like a frothing-at-the-mouth luddite.

For all his talk of doing what's right instead of what's convenient, the actual right way to bring his concerns about the government and the military to the public's eye would have been to find like-minded people, form a group, start some grassroots activism and some protests to get exposure, and work towards getting his issues on a ballot. But, no, that would be too slow and inconvienient, so he decided to go the easy route of instant gratification by smashing some satellites.

Comment But... (Score 5, Interesting) 288

OK, these guys are probably far smarter than I'll ever be, but... the universe clearly isn't staying at a finite size, and playing the universe's expansion in reverse would imply that it started at a single point. How do they account for this? I even went as far as to read the article, but it wasn't mentioned.

Are they saying that the universe fluctuates between a not-quite-a-singularity tiny point of density and a not-quite-eternally-infinite empty void, or that it simply was a not-quite-a-singularity tiny point of density for an infinite time before it expanded?

Comment Re:Great, now let's talk filesystems (Score 1, Interesting) 313

Because it's absolutely ridiculous that I have to install a third-party driver to get a major OS to recognize a filesystem that has existed for ages? Microsoft has finally caved in and acknowledged that Linux exists. Why not support its filesystems, at least as ready-only?

Honestly, you'd think they'd want to make it easy to move data from Linux to Windows, but right now it's only easy going the opposite direction.

Comment Re:To What End? (Score 1) 429

Gasoline was originally a "worthless" byproduct of kerosene production.
Electricity was first useful for nothing more than cheap tricks (Ben Franklin trying to electrocute a turkey in front of an audience, etc).
Atomic research was first thought to be interesting, but of no practical value (we'd never be able to split or fuse them, etc).

Are you seeing a pattern yet?

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