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Comment I Suppose Next We'll Be Seeing Benghazi Stories... (Score -1, Flamebait) 465

I don't know who the miserable asshat is who keeps front-paging this blithering right-wing horseshit, but they need to be fired yesterday.

This is a non-story. It has always been a non-story. It has already been investigated, and what turned up was a gigantic pile of nothing. But then, that's all Daryl Issa's "investigations" have ever turned up.

Yes, the IRS investigated a bunch of applications for tax-exempt status for a number of "Tea Party" groups. They also performed the same investigations on so-called liberal groups. They're supposed to do that; otherwise any moron could claim tax-exempt status. Were there problems with the investigations? Yes, because the tax law that requires them is so vague that it's basically left entirely to the discretion of the investigator.

Were any applications denied? No, not really. Did the IRS investigate more "Tea Party" groups than liberal groups? It would appear so. It would also appear that there were a hell of a lot more "Tea Party" applications flooding in during the timeframe in question (which makes sense, given that the "Tea Party" is not grassroots, but entirely the construction of FreedomWorks).

As for how "terribly convenient" it is for multiple IRS personnel under investigation to have lost the data in question, well... Considering that the IRS is underfunded (sounds weird, but it's true); and considering that they have tens of thousands of personal computers, none of them brand new, and all of them in various states of disrepair and subjected to various forms of abuse; and considering that every one of those tens of thousands of computers are running FUCKING WINDOWS , then you are provably a drooling idiot if you think the probability for unrecoverable data loss is anything less than 1.0.

The only story here is that IRS regs concerning tax-exempt political advocacy organizations are hopelessly vague. Moreover, it's not a story that belongs on a tech-oriented site. If I wanted to read about fabricated right-wing ghost stories, I'd visit RedState. Get this shit off Slashdot.

Comment Re:One of the oldest semantic games played on /. (Score 2) 126

I see this old semantic game blooms anew on Slashdot. "It isn't stealing". Fine. It's fraud. Don't worry that your reputation is shot and/or somebody else is trading on your good name. It isn't stealing. Oh... the victim feels much better now.

I don't understand; what are you complaining about? You're correct. It isn't theft, it is fraud. So why call it theft when it's clearly something else?

If you call it by the correct name, you'll get community support, even among the "copying is not theft" crowd. OTOH, if you call it stealing, then you'll get mired in a gigantic semantic dogpile as hundreds of people re-litigate what constitutes "stealing."

We don't even need to raise the "Is it stealing?" question in this case. It's clearly fraud. So call it "fraud." Geez...

Government

Can the ObamaCare Enrollment Numbers Be Believed? 723

An anonymous reader writes "When the Obama administration announced on April 1 that an estimated 7.1 million had signed up for ObamaCare by the end of March, it seemed a nearly impossible achievement. To reach 7.1 million, sign-ups had to rocket up by 67% in just one month. That's astounding enough, but an IBD review of existing ObamaCare enrollment data shows that the mathematical challenge of reaching 7.1 million sign-ups was even tougher."

Comment Re:Drama queens... (Score 1) 465

Professionals do the job and get paid.

They did neither.

End of argument.

"Hey, kid. If you get down in that mine, dig out the coal, and bring it back to me, I'll pay you. ...What? You want a light? Why did you take the job if you don't have the tools to do it? Batteries cost money, kid. ...What? What's all this whining about dust and poisonous gases and how you can't carry more than two lumps because you're only six years old? I'm paying you; do your job. You don't want to be thought of as unprofessional, do you?"

What self-serving sophistry.

Comment Re:Drama queens... (Score 1) 465

"Hi. Welcome to this brightly-lit, strangely decorated cage. For the next four days, you'll be trying to design and write a video game while we surround you with cameras, force you through irrelevant tasks, and poke at you with sticks. Be sure to act professional throughout it all."

"Contracts" or not, the developers' reaction was the correct one.

Comment Re:Almost Famous? (Score 1) 164

Fable is by Lionhead Studios, home of longtime auteur game designer Peter Molyneux, who has a tendency to promise the Earth and be ultimately be crippled by his own ambition (see the big fat broken monkey-fest Black & White). During the development of Fable, for example, it was promised to have features like rival NPC characters, plants growing in real time, and a system wherein your every slightest choice and action changes your appearance and the world around you. What we ended up with was a buggy action RPG with a great big stiffy for itself.

-- Yahtzee Croshaw

Comment Re:Hmmm... (Score 3, Interesting) 983

I had only hard of LTO tapes quite recently, and I did a very tiny bit of poking around. The latest generation is LTO-6, whose tapes can hold 2.5TB each (uncompressed). The tapes themselves are quite modestly priced -- an LTO-4 tape cartridge (800GB uncompressed) costs about $30 each.

The drives, however, are not cheap. New drives appear to start at around $1200. Used drives are all over the place -- I've seen some on eBay with an opening bid as low as $350. Also, all LTO drives appear to have either an LVD SCSI or a SAS interface, which means you'll also need a controller card. There appears to be no such thing as a SATA LTO drive.

Plus you get to re-live all the joys of selecting tape vendors, and placing bets on whose tapes are going to last for 20 years.

Comment Re:Bullshit! (Score 1) 295

Mmmm, nope. I'm still seeing ludicrously sluggish behavior on some pages (some of Jira's pages, and on some of Freescale's discussion fora).

Browser: Chrome 33.0.1750.146
OS: Linux Mint 15 ("Olivia"), kernel 3.8.x
GPU: Intel i965
OpenGL Version: 3.0 Mesa 9.1.7

Mind you, if I only turn on HW acceleration in the advanced settings panel, GMail runs sluggishly. If I also then enable your software rendering override, then GMail appears to run normally, but in both cases I still get the sluggish Jira pages. I've no idea what Jira's doing that would run so slowly.

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