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Comment Re: Oh! So it's unacceptable is it? (Score 1) 95

it's interesting that you ask that today of all days - the way the news cycle works, today is the last day to drop a big story to affect the US midterm elections. Greenwald promised Snowden that he would publish to maximize political impact (to effect the most change) and an October surprise was strongly hinted at. There's nothing of great surprise on The Intercept today - some decent confirmatory stories but nothing politically destabilizing.

Many people have been of the mind "Greenwald's got this" but it seems now that they've gotten to him. Not to diminish the work he's done in any way but apparently he's passed the torch and forgot to tell anyone - well, I guess as of today he has through silence. If Greenwald (as Snowden's advocate) is done, that changes the political landscape for many currently observing the consuming power structure.

Comment Re:Why stop at Broadband? (Score 1) 262

Or are you suggesting that his post is racist because coloured folks tend to be poor more often than white folks? That makes you the racist, not him.

Be that as it may, it's also the standard currently used by US Courts to evaluate policies. In a sane world the Drug War would have been struck down for just this reason decades ago. Not like the CIA recruited the Bloods and Crips to sell crack to blacks or anything - it's all subtle discrimination. No, wait...

Comment Perplexing? (Score 2) 284

"There was no explanation for the change, and it is perplexing to researchers," reports Computerworld.

What kind of stupid researchers are these? Regulatory capture, corporate welfare, and political corruption are plenty sufficient to explain the changes.

Only a knave looking for social justice in every action by a bureaucrat should be surprised, but he should be working at a daycare facility, not as a university researcher.

Comment Re:Sadly there is a market (Score 1) 145

Some of them really are afraid clicking the wrong Slashdot story while taking a break at work could cost them.

This is a nice example of self-correction. The wild abuses they commit have put them in a position of being unable to effectively keep up in their field.

On the other hand, of course later we'll find out what sweetheart deal from the FCC Verizon got out of this, but it won't be covered on sillystring, so those same government workers will be protected from learning much about their own employer's corruption.

Comment Re:Only YEC denies it (Score 5, Insightful) 669

This has been mainline Christian thought, even among evangelicals, for decades. YEC's get the spot-light because they're zany, but this has already been accepted for a good while now.

You can read in Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", his popular science book from the 80's, his conversations with the Pope in the 70's during which the Pope "concedes" time after the Big Bang to science. Hawking gets a little happy about then explaining how time didn't exist until just an infinite moment after the Big Bang, but that's besides the point.

No, the theologically interesting part here is:

we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so.

The bit about magicians and magic wands are a throw away softening statement as nobody has ever imagined the Abrahamic God as requiring magic devices. More concisely then:

we run the risk of imagining God was ... able to do everything. But that is not so.

That may well be the most controversial thing a Pope has ever said. And has the potential to re-focus Christians on what Jesus was talking about - they've become lost in Old-Testament vengeance in the most recent millennium. Long gone are the days of Constantine not being able to fight wars of conquest because his army was full of Christian pacifists.

Comment Re: Not a chance (Score 4, Interesting) 631

You either leave enough float in your bank account to not have to worry about ever running out or you play the timing game constantly with your bank, who engineered the system for those delicious overdraft fees.

Right, and if you don't have money in your checking account, with a Visa debit account you will get a "transaction denied" message (switch to card B at the register) while with ACH you will get a $40 overdraft fee. If you are doing your errands, you might have five charges and owe $200 in fees. This bird won't fly.

Now watch as the blame-the-victim crowd tells me to constantly keep an eye on all of my balances instead of letting the computers handle that for me. Because progress.

Comment Re:What's the Business Plan? (Score 1) 153

... submit spaz.

I've seen the "by choosing to buy a feature now and then for a very small amount of money you support our work" claim, but I mean an actual business plan that doesn't depend on occasional contributions - have they ever seen a Facebook data center? The $5M VC money must have some basis, but the "occasional donations" claim does not appear to be it. FB makes money by selling a metric library-of-congress of ads but is largely funded by its public stock, which Ello does not have in play.

Maybe the $5M was somebody's play money, just in case something magical happened by accident?

Comment What's the Business Plan? (Score 3, Insightful) 153

Ad-free, no analytics for sale, free-as-in-beer proprietary centralized social network, eh?

Who is paying for hardware, software, rent, and electricity, investors? When do they get a return? Yeah, yeah, B-corp - where does the money come from?

Is this a serious venture or a spoof by Facebook to show people that thermodynamics cannot be ignored? Or the Tonika/Disapora* crowd trying to show the value of a distributed system?

I'm assuming this is addressed somewhere and just happened to be skipped by the press coverage I've seen.

Comment Re:Hard to find (Score 1) 71

B&N doesn't seem to want to carry it. Frustrating.

I had a mail subscription when it still took three minutes to download a large GIF from a BBS. That made lots of sense.

I don't get why anybody wants a print version of a blog in 2014, but if you do, why not get it by mail? It's not like B&N (I thought they went bankrupt?) doesn't feed its CCTV and register activity to the NSA anyway (wittingly or not).

Comment Re:Are you sure? (Score 1) 863

Was there a vote taken that I missed?

Apparently - most of the distros have leadership elections. The leaders form the committees which make these decisions. If you want "perfect" democracy try Gentoo - you can choose to "use" most any feature or not. I presume, but do not know, that the Gentoo team can pretty well tell from the mirror logs which features are in "use" or not, which may or may not guide (but probably ought to) guide default use tags.

On the other hand, you can have the best feature ever devised and nobody will use it if they don't know about it. Benevolent leadership making decisions for you is not a problem if you have a choice to choose other leaders (even if you don't like government you can choose to like governance) and/or the leaders you have will listen to claims of error.

Comment Re:This was no AP. (Score 5, Insightful) 339

What? I very much doubt this SSID was broadcast by a stand-alone AP

Brace yourself: defending @timothy for a moment. *

His point wasn't that you need a certain piece of gear, but that for a few dollars (or as others are pointing out "zero dollars", which a few dollars approaches asymptotic to zero) you can incite bureaucrats to attack the air traffic system.

Which I guess is the major strategy of Al Qa'e'da - asymmetrical attacks - so timothy can expect Hydra to be by momentarily for relocation and reeducation.

* someday Slashcode will catch up with the aughts and the at-tag will link this comment as rendered from the database

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