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Comment Re:That photo did rather weaken her argument (Score 1) 622

Huh. So if you ever appear in a photograph that some ignorant person on the internet considers "a sexy picture," even if you are fully clothed, then you are implicitly consenting to have every private picture of you that anybody can get their hands on illegally distributed for all to see. Failing to see the logic here, sorry.

Comment Re:Straw Man (Score 1) 622

Sending photos on the Internet over an encrypted, authenticated link to a service provider who claims they will keep your data secure is not in any way like sending them in a postcard. It's true that there are potential security vulnerabilities, but what's going on here is more like putting your valuables in a safe deposit box, but not realizing that the bank has a serious security flaw, and consequently having your valuables stolen because of that flaw.

While it's certainly true that some people are sufficiently expert in security to notice the security flaw and protect themselves against it, the notion that every layperson should be that knowledgable is absurd. There is a reason why we have specialists.

Comment Re:Math is hard? (Score 1) 283

There's no evidence to suggest that the FCC wouldn't have helped the other side if they'd had a strong groundswell of support. The problem is that there really were very few comments against net neutrality, and a huge number for it. So there was no other side that the FCC needed to work with.

Comment Re:Math is hard? (Score 1) 283

You are utterly missing the point. I agree with you that when there are two people arguing two sides of an issue, it is possible (indeed likely) that one is mostly wrong and the other mostly right. But what we are talking about here is a political technique that both sides use in exactly the same way. So if you think it's okay when one side uses it, and bad when the other side uses it, you are indeed blinded by partisanship. I say this as someone who has deep antipathy toward the position the Koch Brothers are pushing.

When we argue nonsense, we can't have discourse. It's like the caucus race in Alice in Wonderland.

Comment Math is hard? (Score 2, Interesting) 283

814,000 is just over a third of 2.4 million (2,400,000). That's a damned good return rate on a mass spamming. It's kind of pathetic that so many people would support the Koch brothers in their efforts to make sure that internet dissent finally stops screwing with their business model, but I don't see why this is interesting news. As for the petition being sent to the senators, again, how is this news? Every PAC does this. You get people to sign a petition, and you send a letter in each person's name to each of their representatives. Sometimes they send one to the POTUS as well. The summary seems to be implying that there's something dishonest about this; if true, it's dishonest whether it's the Koch brothers or Earth Defense Alliance. I'm personally rooting for Earth Defense Alliance, but let's not get carried away looking for malfeasance in common practice.

Comment Re:Brilliant. Got to prioritize... (Score 1) 50

You're seriously worried that a drone is going to somehow fly up to 30k feet and hit a jet? Do you know how hard it is to get a non-jet-powered airplane up that high? How hard it would be to get that airplane with a maximum speed of 100mph to collide with a jet moving at ~500mph? When did we Americans turn into such lily-livered cowards? You are jumping at shadows.

Comment Re:Welcome to government science (Score 1) 348

Free market capitalism gives us Viagra. Which is a dramatic way of saying that it encourages short-term thinking, because human beings have a well-documented cognitive bias toward near-term results, and tend to heavily discount the benefit of long-term results. And so we get cattle ranchers abusing antibiotics even though in the long run many people will die as a result of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria this practice breeds. And we get pharma companies developing Viagra analogues instead of antibiotics.

I say this not for your benefit, since you are not interested in being contradicted, but because it's possible that someone else reading your diatribe might believe you if nobody points out the problem with what you've said.

Comment Re:Welcome to government science (Score 4, Insightful) 348

No, actually the government was very dynamic at one time and got a lot of really impressive research done. Then people like you who think "government bad" started to complain about taxes and regulation, and over the course of the past 40 years or so, you've managed to suck a lot of life out of the government. It's the whole Gordon Gecko philosophy: greed is good. No, actually, it isn't. What's good is working together.

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