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Comment Re:So, in essence, Uber's app is malware (Score 4, Informative) 234

You can do this with the cyanogenmod privacy manager. Of course, then you have to root your phone. Adding that functionality ought to be a no-brainer, but Google owns Youtube and Youtube just HAS to have access to your phone's camera for some reason. I'm guessing so they can watch you while you're masturbating.

Comment Alton Brown's Recipe (Score 1) 189

Alton Brown's recipe has yielded a perfect roast turkey for me every year since he aired that episode. The guy basically taught me how to cook. My room mate complains whenever she goes home for Thanksgiving that she's missing out on my turkey and her family always makes a very dry one. Fortunately for her, every year when I do this I say to myself "Oh! Wow... that was easy!" and end up making two or three more turkeys over the winter. One year I made a turkey for Thanksgiving, had almost no left over turkey so I made another turkey the day after Thanksgiving, just so I could have left-overs.

One of these years I want to try a wild turkey, but have been told I'll be disappointed.

Comment Re:Burial customs? (Score 2, Insightful) 244

They'd be fools to do so merely on the word of a clearly hostile outsider, and even if they believe you, the perceived risk from Ebola might still be smaller than the perceived risk from social isolation.

Luckily, they (say, a village family in rural Ghana) are equipped with essentially the same meat computer your are. They are perfectly able to perceive the fact that the neighbor is dying with blood pouring out of her body, just like tens of thousands of other people just have. They are able to perceive that the ultimate social isolation is having everyone you care about die. It's nice to see you're not one of those people who thinks that a farmer in Liberia, who deals with life and death every day as he tends to livestock or hunts, isn't somehow too dim-witted to grasp cause and effect when he has the basic facts. This is about social behavior DESPITE knowing the facts.

Culture has value

Unless it's what's just killed off everyone you know. Or look at places like Ferguson, MO, where culture just decided to burn down local shops in a tantrum over reality disagreeing with an instantly concocted bogus media mythology. Culture, like the culture of castigating your neighbors for daring to go get an education or acquiring a broader vocabulary - as seen in swaths of urban culture or patches of, say, Appalachia - is often destructive, the opposite of valuable. Pious political correctness, which employees poisonous moral equivalence in the name of assuaging misplaced guilt over the fact that some cultures actually work better than others, preserves and actually perpetuates that destructiveness.

Comment Re:Burial customs? (Score 0) 244

Do you understand the average education levels in Africa? The average wage? The living conditions?

Yes, and the three countries in the worst shape (as it relates to the spread of Ebola) all have a miserable record of taking lots of external support that could be educating their people, bolstering their healthcare systems, and generally improving the lives of everyone in those countries. But because of cultural inertia and rampant corruption (you know, the people who feel entitled to skim the support cash/material personally and not do things like march out into the rougher parts of their own country to explain to the rural population that they're killing themselves with primitive rituals), those are places that can't shake off the problem.

Do you want to know who is a smug western douche? You are. "Africa" isn't a place you can talk about in sweeping terms like you just have. Your dim, uninformed vision of it as a single, monocultural place with a common level of education and sophistication is absurd (and incredibly condescending, Mr. Holier Than Thou). "The entire continent" isn't the same. Countries like Nigeria have seen cases in this outbreak, but have headed it off at the pass because the population, culture, and approach to things like this are very different there than they are in, say, Liberia.

I'll tell you what, you go to a Baptist church and tell them they need to give up a "ridiculous part of their culture". Or try it at a Mosque.

I have no trouble telling ANY group of superstitious people that what they think is ridiculous. Especially when they do things insist a capricious god is going to cure their kid's cancer, or kiss the bodies of Ebola victims, and then wander back to their own homes and, a couple of weeks later, wonder why their whole family is dying - despite a helpful aid worker risking her life to explain to them the basic facts of life and death. It's the 21st century. Billions and billions of dollars in aid flows into the countries most vulnerable to issues like this, and it gets squandered, diverted, or mis-applied because of toxic levels of corruption by comparatively educated people. They want to have a piece of that foreign aid action while also having the lazy inertia of backwards cultures that can't cope with this much human density. That sense of entitlement to both a primitive past and a piece of the largess of other countries that have moved on - it's unmistakable.

Comment Re:Burial customs? (Score 4, Insightful) 244

Quit being such an entitled white racist asshole with your critiques of their culture.

No, the entitled assholes are the ones who feel no reason to stop doing the very things that are spreading the disease. You're the one with the skin color obsession, everyone else is talking about what people actually do. Like laying hands on the corpse of someone who's just died of Ebola, while simultaneously asking the rest of the world to risk their lives and spend their money and time to come help ... even as they refuse to stop their idiotic, suicidal customs. That is a sense of entitlement, and a ridiculous part of a culture that simply has to stop if they want to quit spreading that disease around.

Comment Re:What BS. (Score 1) 454

Because that's what they're paying you to do? Well, that and I hate getting called on the weekend. Last project I put that much effort into, we'd take the weekends in shifts and the programmer on duty was guaranteed to get a frantic call that the system was down again. So I went in, added some data structures, redesigned how the program was launched so that if a data file crashed it, that file would be moved out of the way so processing could continue, and fixed about 150 memory overflows. We went from several hundred crashes a month to maybe one or two on a bad month. And that one or two turned out to be a corrupt index in a SQL database. After about 4 months, we stopped talking about the on call rotation. For the next three years after that, until the project ended, none of us ever got a call on a weekend again.

Comment Re:Sure (Score 1) 454

I'd say that depends on where you live and what you bring to the company. Can you afford it if that developer leaves? If he tells you he's going, would you make a counter offer? What would that counter offer be? Personally I'm not inclined to accept counter offers because it shows me the company is only interested in paying me the least amount it can get away with to continue to retain my employment, and not my actual technical merit. If I'm made a counter offer, I'll ask why I wasn't given that to begin with before I walk out the door. I'm one of those technical people there's a shortage of, and I don't like to work for dicks. That's why there's a shortage of me at any particular company.

Comment Beeecause... (Score 1) 516

We want things like roads and bridges and water and electricity, but we don't want to pay for them? The last major investment we made as a country was the Interstate Highway System, and we no longer understand the concept of investment or the idea of investing in infrastructure. The whole point of having a power network is that everyone doesn't need their own power generation capability, since that's expensive and a large electrical plant will be more efficient. But if you want a solid guarantee that your lights will be on at any given point, you're going to have to invest in your own generation capability. In the last three years I've had two outages that lasted more than 24 hours. The average outage where I live is between 1 and 3 hours.

While we're on the subject of investing in infrastructure, we've got a water crisis coming up very soon now. With undeniable climate change, a large part of the country is never going to have to enough water, while another large part of the country is always going to have way too much. I think we need an interstate highway system level project to move water around the country as needed. I think this will be vital for the well being of tens of millions of Americans over the next couple of decades, but no one is even thinking about such at thing right now.

Comment Re:Moderate BS (Score 1) 1128

So all of your fuss about having someone else do your work for you, challenging is just you looking for a meaningless fight?

I never said that there were no eyewitnesses

You just doubt that the grand jurors listened to eye witness testimony from the half dozen in question (out of the 60 witnesses they heard from) that actually told them what they needed to hear. Yes, they heard from LOTS of other witnesses who had anything from minor variations to outright debunked fabrications to share, but - as the prosecutor seeking charges against Wilson said - they heard from a consistent, corroborated core of media-averse African American witnesses who told the tale you don't want to hear.

Heck, one eyewitness says that the cop shot him execution style in the head at point blank range.

Why are you focusing on the known liars? What's the point? We all know that dozens of people reported pure BS in order to get attention or while grinding some I-hate-police axe or the like. I'm not mentioning those people because, just like the grand jury concluded, their testimony was anywhere from muddle-headed to outright fiction-for-malice's sake. You're the only one who cares what the liars had to say. But they're irrelevant. It's the physical evidence and the credible witnesses that it corroborates that count. And speaking of counting, you're still not finding it comfortable enough to count all fingers on one hand, and move on to the next hand? Really? Or should we just right back to your opening complaint, the implication of doubt and dismissal about their testimony because you hadn't bothered to read it?

Comment Re:Moderate BS (Score 2) 1128

That's incorrect: no judge ever had a hand in creating it.

A judge is the ONLY person who gets to decide how that information is made available. That means he goes over every bit of it for context, and the entire package is his product, with his reputation at stake for making mistakes in what's released and how it impacts the anonymity of the witnesses involved. There is no provider of that information except for the judge.

You're now claiming witnesses don't exist? After you started off claiming there were 7, six of whom were African-American? You can't even keep your own story straight.

I realize that English is not your native tongue, so I appreciate how much you're trying here. But we're talking about YOUR assertion that the documents in front of your eyes don't include the testimony of eye witnesses. Or have you finally got around to reading it, and you're changing your story, just like the debunked media-frenzy "witnesses" did?

And, ranting? You're the one who's been linked directly to the body of documents that completely satisfies your fake concern that the eye witnesses didn't really exist, and that their testimony doesn't say what the grand jury concluded that it said. So much energy you're putting into pretending it's not there for you to read! Why?

Comment Re:Moderate BS (Score 1) 1128

And you think you know this utter load of shit exactly how?

Because everything put in front of the grand jury is also available, online, right in front of you. Not that you'd want to see that or anything, because it would take all the fun out of that petulant little fit you're having.

Comment Re:Moderate BS (Score 1) 1128

Prosecutors control everything the grand jury sees. Grand juries are behind closed doors. So how do you know that the prosecutor doesn't lie to the grand jury?

Knowing there would be people with the hearts set on vilifying the cop and the investigation, the prosecutor made the rather unusual decision to let the grand jury take an unusual amount of time to make their own investigative queries, to see any and all testimony they wanted (including obviously spurious stuff from all over the internet, and already debunked nonsense from the street - like Brown's running buddy's description of Wilson shooting out his cruiser window, standing over Brown and shooting him in the back ... all stuff that didn't happen, per the evidence and multiple completely-consistent eye witnesses). And then, so you could relax a little bit, he asked the judge overseeing the panel to pre-emptively make arrangements to immediately publish a mountain of information so you could exactly what the grand jury had to work with. What the grand jury saw wasn't just what the prosecutor wanted to show them, it included the output of an army of investigators from the DoJ trying to turn the case into a federal civil rights violation case, and more.

Comment Re:Moderate BS (Score 1) 1128

I like how your correction to someone "deliberately spreading false information" is just a re-telling of the officer's account.

No, that's the account based on recordings of radio communications, and based on the testimony of multiple credible eye witnesses, corroborated by the physical evidence. And that's the account that the grand jury mulled over, along with a lot of obvious BS from all sort of other sources, that led the panel to realize there's no THERE there. Just like the DoJ investigation, in which Eric Holder was passionately, desperately hoping to find some sort of evidence of a civil rights violation, is coming up with a whole lot of nothing.

The people who keep trotting out the false narrative are just trying to wish away the 25 days of work done by the grand jury, and the untold thousands of man hours and millions of dollars tied up by Holder and the FBI, that are delivering exactly no police officer to string up.

Comment Re:Moderate BS (Score 1) 1128

Gee. I'd think a better way to avoid being punched is to not try to run the guy over, then slam a car door on him.

That might be something to consider, except of course that's pure fantasy on your part. Multiple credible eye witnesses (unlike you, and unlike the people who changed their stories or finally admitted they didn't actually see it happen after all) pointed out that the officer didn't either of the two things you're mentioning. So why bring them up? What's your agenda, in manufacturing a false narrative?

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