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Comment Re:Define "Threatened" and "Unwelcome" (Score 4, Interesting) 765

And you kept both completely shielded from any forms of media so that there was no way that they ever would associate cars with boys?

The female vervet monkey in this picture prefers to play with dolls. The male vervet monkey prefers cars. Do you think they were influenced by the media?

Comment Re:Skylines got right what Simcity got wrong (Score 1) 256

The original SimCity had weird aspects to transportation, too. At some point your city would get so large that the only way to ease traffic was to remove all the roads and replace them with public transit. Which made me wonder how anyone who needed a new stove or couch got them home on the bus or train.

Comment Re:Breaking news: Republicans against HTTPS (Score 1) 155

In the wake of the Obama Administration encouraging use of HTTPS, Ted Cruz was reported as saying that encryption was a government conspiracy to deprive godfearing Americans of their privacy.

I'm sure there will be exceptions made for presidential candidates who prefer to run their own web severs from their homes, Hillary style....

Comment A screenplay rule of thumb (Score 2) 104

A rule of thumb is that one page of a screenplay is about one minute of screen time. Interestingly, this works whether the page is dialog, description, action, or some combination. So if a 120 page screenplay means a movie of about two hours, most novels need to be drastically cut to be turned into practical screenplays.

Comment Federal Information Security Management Act (Score 1) 315

Thank you. And in addition, computer systems that store and process US government are (and were when she was SoS) required to be certified according to the requirements of the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002. My understanding is that complying with that is not a trivial undertaking. So who did that for her? Who were her server admins? I guess they'll be getting some Congressional subpoenas, once we know who they are.
Google

Craig Brittain (Revenge Porn King) Sues For Use of Image 122

retroworks writes "Washington Post reporter Caitlin Dewey leads with, "Revenge-porn impresario Craig Brittain is learning the hard way that karma is a real witch." The report states that the Federal Trade Commission has settled a complaint against Brittain, whose defunct site, "Is Anybody Down" was accused of unfair business practices. From the article: "The site paid its bills by soliciting women's nude photos on Craigslist and/or from their exes, publishing the photos without the women's permission (and often with their names and phone numbers attached), and then charging fees of $200 to $500 to take the photos down." Brittain agreed to destroy the image and never operate a revenge porn site again. However, On Feb. 9, "Brittain filed a takedown request to Google, demanding that the search engine stop linking to nearly two dozen URLs — including a number of news articles, and files on the case from the FTC — because they used photos of him and information about him without his permission." Ars Technica explains. "In this instance, fair use and general First Amendment principles are on Google's and the media's side."

Comment I'd love this to be true, but... (Score 1) 69

I'd love this to be true, but it seems unlikely from the point of view of the Gaia hypothesis. Life tends to transform its surroundings, hence the Earth's oxygen atmosphere that we depend on. This is why James Lovelock predicted, back in the '70s, that the Mars probes would not find life there: if Mars had life, we'd be able to see unambiguous evidence of it from here. The fluctuating methane levels on Mars are intriguing, but given the billions of years that Mars (and Titan) have been around, it seems like any life would have had plenty of time to evolve and make an unmistakable impact.

Comment Be Careful What You Wish For (Score -1, Troll) 631

I predict that all of you net neutrality supporters are in for a nasty surprise. Your hatred of Comcast and fear of what it might do has lead to the biggest restrictions on freedom since the Patriot Act, which at least had the excuse of 3,000 dead people.

But what’s the excuse here? Ooh, Comcast might charge Netflix more money? There might be “fast lanes” that cost more? Do you think George Soros spent $196 million on NN because he’s worried about Netflix? Of course not. You don’t need 300+ pages of regulations for just that. This whole thing is a Trojan Horse so that the government can get it’s fingers deeper into the internet. As soon as the regulations are available, search them for terms like “hate speech” and "disparate impact." This will be a mass of restrictions, requirements, taxes, subsidies, and pay-offs to favored groups. I'm sure trial lawyers will be happy, because there will no doubt be lots of new things they can sue about. I’m sure the FCC will administer this with all the fairness that the IRS has brought to regulating political advocacy non-profits.

And now that the regulations have changed, the NSA will have a freer hand with wiretaps.

Get ready for a shitstorm once Silicon Valley finds out what’s really in this.

Submission + - FCC votes along party lines to regulate entire Internet

jbdigriz writes: In a stunning power grab, the FCC has extended Title II, not just to the loosely and flexibly defined "broadband" market, but to the Internet as a whole, wired and wireless, including even interconnects, making ISPs common carriers of telecom services, with the possible exception of dial-up providers (dunno, haven't seen the order yet). The commission voted also to override state law in NC and TN to remove restrictions on community broadband. Ars Technica has more info here. Lawyers, start filing. I'm sure the upshot will not be enshrinement of incumbents, of course. Or "openness" as defined by Fairness Committees of "Stake Holders." Right, suckers.

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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