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Comment Re:Sometimes not at all. (Score 1) 233

Yes, self deception is a common coping strategy.

Irrelevant, as the successful application of coping strategies is an essential component of happiness.

That's not to say that asking people how happy they are give you any kind of accurate answer. Then again, most established measures of objective happiness (an oxymoron) aren't likely to accurately describe the -- high stress, high personal sacrifice, yet rewarding and characterized by a feeling of purpose -- daily life of parents of young children.

Comment Re:First (Score 1) 176

Yah. I thought the summary might be bunk so i tried to RTFA, but I still didn't see anything that wouldn't have been possible under ipchains 10 years ago, or any evidence that this "Dynamic Firewall" is anything other than a convenient userspace layer over iptables.

Comment Re:The Game of Catchup (Score 1) 294

And therein lies the rub. One dialog pops up, and we expect people to immediately pull the power cord and go rinse off under a hot shower. Another, seemingly identical, dialog pops up, and users are expected to click OK instantly and without question, providing their admin password if needed.

It's important to realize that without a keen and well honed intuition to tell you what is real and what is scam, something that most computer users will never develop, there is no difference between these two events. What is instantly obvious to you is completely invisible to them because they have no clue about the subtle cues that enable you to accurately classify something as an attempt to trick you. Complicating the matter further is that in all likelihood neither do you. Typically seeing the difference is an entirely subconscious process, making teaching it very hard and understanding the need to teach it perhaps even harder. I mean, it's obvious, right?

Comment Re:Long term... (Score 1) 585

Funny, I seem to recall playing OoT on a stock PC keyboard with hardly any issues. Precision archery was somewhat difficult, (Damn you, Poes!) but overall it was just fine and didn't noticeably take away from my enjoyment of the game.

Comment Re:as said before here many times (Score 1) 456

Otherwise.... where are the MEXICAN (and Panamanian, and Colombian, and Nicaraguan, and etc.) hijackers and suicide bombers?

Killing your asses more effectively than the islamists could ever dream of using heroin, methamphetamine and crack cocaine, and getting filthy rich in the process?

Comment Re:Magic: The Gathering (Score 1) 858

If there was a zombiepocalypse tomorrow cash currency would become worthless next to things like shotguns or flamethrowers.

False. Cash dollars are an easily transferable scarce resource. Your shotgun guy would accept it as payment for a shotgun, trade it for gasoline with some guy who would trade it for tinned beans with some guy who would trade it for sexual services from your mom who would trade it for protection from you and your shotgun. Scarcity (and confidince in scarcity) is sufficient for tradeability, and tradeability is value.

Comment Re:Article Has a Very Strange Conflict (Score 1) 858

The scarcity is sufficient. Any scarce resource can be traded for monetary value. The actual value is determined by agents accepting the resource as payment for productive services, which again is determined by the impression that the resource can be traded. It's a circular thing.

The BitCoin project is built on a quite thorough understanding of how money actually works, which is not through component value or scarcity or magic or anything. It's through controlled scarcity and absolutely nothing else. BitCoins are money in the way that gold, oil, stock or Pokemon cards are money, with the added benefit of perfect divisibility and tightly defined scarcity.

Also, BitCoins are not in any way protected from inflation. Nothing could ever possibly be protected from inflation. It's just a thing that you can buy and sell if you want, and I'm curious as to how you would attempt to ban that.

Comment Re:not what I asked (Score 1) 354

Sorry, just being a little flippant :) No offense intended.

If you mean at the time of his demise, Abbottabad is located very close to Kashmir, where the state of national borders is muddled to say the least. It's definitely closer to Indian-administered Kashmir than to Afghanistan, though. The Wikipedia page has a pretty good map.

Now, If you mean where was he since the invasion, my impression is that the best available answer is that nobody really knows. It seems to be commonly accepted as fact that he was present (and nearly captured) during the battle of Tora Bora in late 2001. Since then, reports on his whereabouts are a mishmash of obituaries, wishful thinking and he's-definitely-anywhere-but-here-dear-god-stop-killing-us pleas. Here's a summary. MSNBC is running a story that indicates he might have been holed up in Abbottabad for a while, (Possibly since 2005) but I can't verify any of that.

Comment Re:Lame excuse - improving traffic safety (Score 1) 204

I could be missing something, but I don't think anyone has mentioned the data being provided as a real time feed. If I were to guess I would think that the 'delay' was much longer than a week, but probably covered a considerable duration of time.

The cops probably care less about where someone is speeding right now, and more about where and when the incidence of speed limit violations are the greatest.

Comment Re:No. (Score 1) 511

I didn't say there were, or even that he was wrong in saying Ubuntu would never succeed. I said that the arguments he presented were complete and utter boloney and that that indicated that he was, in fact, just pulling stuff out of his ass with no real justification.

As a side note, the notion that stock linux has a terrible user experience does not follow logically from the fact that it is not very successful/widely deployed. There are many reasons for the very limited success of desktop linux. Suggesting that it being too difficult to use (If you assume that this is the case, which I do not.) is the only - or even the most important - reason is just not very insightful.

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