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Comment Re:Unbelievable! (Score 1) 191

he idea of moving the population to local cities where they can use public transportation especially in less dense areas like the United States, just won't happen. If you tell the population that they need to move from their houses which they have put a lot of money in, and live in an area the matches how they want to live and go to a crowed loud crime ridden city, will cause a lot of people to put a gun to your face, whether or not it is legal to have guns.

bah. Worked out well for Stalin, didn't it?

Comment Re:It's because it's by David Fahrenthold (Score 1) 200

but blame does not fall squarely on NASA ... Given that there is so much real waste, I don't understand the need to latch on to myths like this.

Your criticisms about precision are valid. There are multiple levels of meaning, though, and for some audiences "is NASA a good mechanism for humans to explore space?" is well answered by less-precise stories like this one.

This story illustrates one example - one Mississippi Senator uses NASA as his personal coke-n-whores vehicle. "Should we be funding public agencies to explore space?" is a valid question and this gives one anecdote about how such good intentions are perverted and abused. Elon Musk doesn't build $400M towers he's not going to use to get coke-n-whores (isn't a Model S good enough for that?)

Comment Re:Move to a gated community (Score 1) 611

People are still moving to the central valley and commuting to jobs on the coast

Why are there only jobs on the coast?

I think this is the real root of the problem. Everybody wants to cram into (for example) Silicon Valley - because it's where the best paying, most stable jobs are. Why can't these employers employ workers elsewhere. I've actually worked for a company that tried that tactic. Guess what? During hard times, (or mergers), they tend to shut remote sites down, and the workers are laid off or uprooted.

But yeah - a lot of problems would be resolved if employment were more distributed.

Comment Re:Brian Krebs received one & posted it... (Score 1) 250

The lawers' grasp of the rules of English capitalization does not inspire confidence:

“SPE does not consent to your possession, review, copying, dissemination, publication, uploading, downloading, or making any use of the Stolen information, and to request your cooperation in destroying the Stolen Information,”

It reads like a bad fantasy novel full of Portentous Capitalization.

Comment Re:Imagine that! (Score 1) 191

While there were extreme options available to Google, such as law suits and massive lobbying, Google took a rather mild approach

Well, they could have taken an even milder approach... kept Google News in Spain, but only shown news from sites published outside of Spain. Sure, no more local news, much less news about Spain, and most of what was available would be slanted in ways the government and/or people might not like, but c'est la vie...

Comment Remedies (Score 2) 173

1) What are the remedies for breach of the terms of the GPLv2?

This one is easy - if there's a breach then the license is void and Copyright is the effective law. Code was copied without permission, which becomes a copyright violation, and remedies are already established for that.

GPL is entirely based on the teeth of copyright - almost every OSI license is. If you hate imaginary property then you might question your use of licenses that depend on it.

Comment Re:Why not ask the authors of the GPL Ver.2? (Score 5, Interesting) 173

So asking the creators of the GPL in this instance will get you nowhere because their opinion on the matter lacks any weight, its what the actual wording says which determines what you are beholden to.

Most prose can be interpreted in multiple ways and not every interpretation occurs to every human at every time. Courts are well aware of this, which is why they will only ever offer an Opinion about what things mean - never claiming to offer the Truth. Even SCOTUS only offers opinions.

Now, those courts will also issue orders to men with a violent streak to enforce their opinions, so effectively they are Law. But never Truth, which is why subsequent cases can overturn previous ones. This also means that Law is never Truth, only the prevailing view of the status quo of a given time.

Comment Re:HAHA! (Score 1) 191

Just because someone lives in any particular area doesn't mean that stories about other areas aren't of interest. The bigger the news event, the broader the distribution.

Not to mention that the insights on foreign news sources on local events can be quite... interesting. Everyone has their own spin, and usually the real story is in the intersection of as many spins as possible.

What tends to aggravate me more about Google News is how reporting on major international events gets diluted with "$event Victim Has Ties To $city" types of headlines. I assume Google News has some sort of "uniqueness" score to filter out all the wire service duplication which causes these one-off local interest types of stories to bubble up the rankings, but I never find them remotely relevant.

Comment Re:Doubt it (Score 1) 299

I thought what made the original Blade Runner so powerful was the way it depicted subjective experience as both precious and ephemeral. When you reach the stage of your life when you begin to confront your mortality, you're painfully aware that the most precious things you've accumulated are memories, and how one instant those memories will be here, and the next they'll be gone forever.

I expect the sequel won't be as good as the original, simply because of regression to the mean. The original was something special, and it's simply not possible to manufacture that. In Hollywood they try, they hire the smartest, most talented, most attractive people, make them work like hell and hope for a miracle. But we all know that model doesn't produce greatness, it produces adequacy, on an operatic scale.

Still, while it's a reasonably safe bet the sequel will fall short of the original, you can't be completely sure. Lighting does sometimes strike the same place twice. I agree the plot outlined doesn't look so promising, but you never know.

Comment Re: What Native American is supposed to mean (Score 0) 307

Those "First Nations" killed off previous nations, so that's more revisionist bullshit.

It's really all lazy white people who don't feel like saying, "Apache", "Cherokee", "Iriquois", "Abanake", etc. - maybe because their ancestors' guilt is more apparrent with the specificity.

Any drive to collectivize those nations (not tribes) is an attempt to negate their value. Sure, they shared a common enemy but that's about it.

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