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Comment: Re:Call me a neigh sayer (Score 1) 416

by nmb3000 (#43722455) Attached to: The Bronies Get Their Own Charity

Bronies are people who like MLP so much that they identify it with their personal identity. That makes it an extreme position.

It's unlikely this will contribute much at this point (and depth in the thread), but I believe you are misunderstanding the "brony" label, and that this might be why so many people are disagreeing with you even though your base point about a life being disrupted by an obsession is valid.

By and large a brony is just "someone who watches My Little Pony and is not the targeted demographic". It's not just adults -- many teen boys accept the label. It's also not just males, many late-teen and older females also call themselves bronies. You don't see a lot of them going around telling coworkers and strangers and trying to "convert" them, but online or in discussion with friends they'll consider themselves part of that group. That is: "I'm a brony" means "I watch MLP".

The little animation Let's Go and Meet the Bronies from BronyDoc presents this as well (but in a much more colorful fashion).

So yes, while the real obsessive fanatics usually call themselves bronies, they only make up a small part of the brony group. Furries and the "crazy furries" are pretty much a perfect analog.

Comment: Re:It's a good thing... (Score 3, Informative) 288

by nmb3000 (#43341021) Attached to: Indian Supreme Court Denies Novartis Cancer Drug Patent

3. Pharma company goes on to spend $10M to show that the molecule will never work in people.

4. Pharma company spends about $100M on the molecule and it works out.

But in your hypothetical scenario you forgot the $2 billion they spent on advertising and marketing.

I'm not faulting you, but every time criticism of pharmaceuticals comes up everybody raves about high research costs while ignoring that these are not the main expenditure. Apologists also tend to forget about sheer mountain of money "Big Pharma" rakes in each year. There's a line somewhere between "making a profit" and "being a malevolent drain on society", and I think they've crossed well over it.

And this doesn't mention all the potential "negative future revenue" drugs that might have been squashed or hidden away, but that's another topic.

Comment: Re:Bad idea (Score 2) 337

by nmb3000 (#43175033) Attached to: Google Removing Ad-Blockers From Play

Almost all apps have a pay-for ad-free version

Absolutely not true. I've had many, many times that I've went to find an app for something and only found ad-supported ones with no paid version available. Contacting the developers about it usually results in "we're thinking about it" or "we prefer staying ad-supported only".

Developers need to realize that when you put out an ad-supported program, some of your users are not going to see those ads. It's part of the risk of using that (failed and parasitic, in my opinion) revenue model. Unfortunately everyone seems to think that every app in the store should be free and ignore the rest.

Blocking ads in advertising-funded apps is essentially the same as software piracy

Wow, when you go bullshit you go all the way. Does that mean when I disable cell/wifi network on my Android and run an ad-supported app (and therefore see no ads) I'm also being a "pirate"? At the absolute worst, blocking ads is a breaking of whatever bogus End User License Agreement the app thinks you've agreed to, while "software piracy" is simply copyright infringement. Anyone with half a brain (and not paid by the BSA) knows they aren't even close to similar.

Comment: Re:Almost... (Score 1) 693

by nmb3000 (#43099207) Attached to: Rand Paul Launches a Filibuster Against Drone Strikes On US Soil

He had a lot of people thinking about it, until he offered up dropping a Hellfire on Jane Fonda.

Funnily enough, he just (~3:53 PST) mentioned Jane Fonda as a good example of somebody who dissents and even supports the ideals of the enemy, yet doesn't deserve to be put on some secret drone strike list.

You can watch the filibuster live on C-SPAN's website. Big viewing numbers may show a little (if inconsequential) support for his effort.

Comment: Re:Online Advertising Response (Score 4, Interesting) 369

by nmb3000 (#42993211) Attached to: Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies

IMHO, the next step is to block referrer information to third party sites. E.g. if example.com loads a script from gstatic.com, then the HTTP_REFERER header is not sent to gstatic.com. There's almost zero collateral damage (one captcha service doesn't work), and companies like Facebook and Google no longer get to know every site that most internet users visit.

I agree whole-heartedly with this sentiment, but it might cause more grief that most would guess.

Over the last year or so I've played around with blocking the referer header from being sent at all, to any websites. 99% handle this just fine, but every now and then I'll come across sites that fail, and in various ways. Sometimes I get a useless error message from CloudFlare, and sometimes the page will simply render blank, like this one (in this case because TypeKit issues a 403 when requesting the CSS if the referer is missing).

I have no idea why some sites rely so heavily upon an HTTP header which is not required to be present at all. I'd love to see a browser start to do what you suggest and exclude the header in 3rd party requests because it would force sites to treat the header as it was intended (advisory only) and would also make it easier for those who want to block sending it entirely.

Comment: Re:Who cares if we are hungry... (Score 3, Insightful) 419

by nmb3000 (#42853645) Attached to: Corn Shortage Hampers US Ethanol Production

Actually ethanol burns worse than gasoline and (if you make it our way) takes more energy to make than you get from burning it, but that's ok because of, well, I have to really reach for this one -- JOB CREATION!

What I don't like is how ethanol is damaging for older vehicles. I know I have nothing to back it up, but ever since 10% ethanol started showing up at the pumps I'd swear I've had more trouble with my older car (difficulty starting, power, etc). Reading articles such as this one about the upcoming Ethanol-15 redouble my concerns.

It's the corn lobby and government subsidies that's driving adding ethanol into our gasoline, nothing else. I'm all for alternative-fueled cars designed to run on E85 (or E100 for that matter), but leave the stuff out of the "gas" pump.

Comment: Re:Separate the code and the data (Score 4, Funny) 125

by nmb3000 (#42841279) Attached to: Adobe Hopes Pop-up Warnings Will Stop Office-Borne Flash Attacks

This is why your data should not be executable.

I'm trying to figure out what possible reason to have Flash embeddable inside an Office document someone might have. Maybe you could argue that it's worth being able to embed in a PowerPoint slide, but even that is reaching.

A forthcoming version of Flash Player will detect when it's being launched from Office and will present users with a dialog box with vague warnings of a potential threat.

I think a better solution is to disable Flash entirely* when run from an Office document and instead display a message that says:

"Flash has been disabled. To enable Flash content, contact your system administrator and he will come back there and hit you on the head with a tack hammer 'cause you are a retard ."

* of course with the obligatory registry-key-bypass for corporate users

Comment: Re:No thanks (Score 5, Informative) 384

by nmb3000 (#42810903) Attached to: Experience the New Slashdot Mobile Site

It's also a blank page if you use AdBlock+ with EasyList. The rule ||googletagservices.com^$third-party breaks their requirement for Google Tag Services, and they weren't bright enough to handle this failure gracefully. Same with NoScript -- unless you've allowed googletagservices.com (and I've managed to browse the web fine for over a decade without it) then it's blank-screen for you.

Pretty sad.

Comment: Re:What can we do about this? (Score 1) 292

So instead of paying to be legal, you tell us to pay to use a service (newsgroups/vpn/seedbox) that can still allow you to be flagged criminal? I though the main goal of piracy was not to pay at all.

That's the problem with the widespread use of loaded terms like "piracy". The original word starts getting a vast number of additional meanings (primarily pejoratives pasted on by news and media conglomerates) with the intent to label others who apply the term correctly as malicious. See "hacker" for another good example.

A "pirate" in the electronic sense is someone who violates copyright law. This is somewhat unfortunate, as I think there should be more distinction between those violating copyright for commercial gain versus those only doing so for personal use.

As to your point about not paying for content, I think this is a widespread mistaken belief. I believe the vast majority of noncommercial copyright violators would be eagerly willing to pay for digital media content that can be used under their own terms and on all of their electronic devices. I certainly know I would be.

Paying for Usenet access and/or a seedbox can run you $20/month or more (depends on provider, block accounts, indexer community support, etc). This is in addition to what most people already pay for cable/satellite TV access (say $80/mo). Add those together and you've got at least $100/mo that people are already willing to spend. If I could get high quality DRM-free TV episodes I would probably be willing to spend even more. Toss in perks such as MKVs that include closed-captioned subtitles and 0% chance of audio/video sync issues and you've got something better than most of what's out there now.

Most "pirates" are willing to pay for content. The problem is that it isn't available by any "legal" means.

I currently don't pay because for now no service can be as good as a bittorrent download

That might change when you get a handful of copyright violation notices from your ISP. Suddenly the alternatives will look a lot better.

Comment: Re:Petty (Score 1) 175

by nmb3000 (#42717289) Attached to: Aaron Swartz Case: Deja Vu All Over Again For MIT

They both belonged in jail. Too bad they were both too privileged, pretty white boys to serve even a day.

The absurdity of this sentence is astounding.

LaMacchia "got off" because he didn't break the law. Do you understand what that means? He did not violate the established law... so why does he belong in jail? But don't worry -- his innocence resulted in the creation of additional tighter, more draconian laws which have been slowly removing from copyright any semblance of its original meaning. Oh, and at the same time bankrupting and making felons of your average American families (you know, your neighbors).

Swartz was facing multiple felony convictions, impossible fines, and potentially life imprisonment -- so he killed himself. His life was quite literally destroyed because he copied some electronic files and a corrupt whore of a prosecutor shooting for political gain wanted to "make an example" of him.

So you should be happy. Your kind got much more that just a little jail time for two people innocent of any meaningful crime. Freedom reduced, penalties absurdly unfitting of the "crime", and a young man dead. What a great day for the "defenders of copyright"!

Asshole.

Comment: Re:Warp vs Hyperspace (Score 2) 234

by nmb3000 (#42600483) Attached to: Students Calculate What Hyperspace Travel Would Actually Look Like

I liked the detailed information about the FTL jumps in Battlestar Galactica found in the show bible by RDM:

Faster Than Light (FTL)

The ability to travel faster than the speed of light is, of course, impossible so FTL is a bit of a misnomer even in Galactica's world. Technically speaking neither Galactica nor any other "FTL" capable ship actually goes faster than the speed of light. What happens during a "Jump" is that the fabric of space itself is folded and the ship travels from point A to point B directly.

Picture space as a piece of cloth lying on a table Place a coin on the left hand side In order to move it to the right side of the cloth, you could slide it across the cloth or pick it up and place it there, both of which involve traveling across the physical space and will take time However, if you pick up the right hand side of the cloth and fold it over so it touches the left hand side, the coin can be transferred from one point to another virtually instantaneously.

That is essentially what happens during a Jump. Galactica's FTL engine fold the fabric of space itself (through another dimension beyond the 3rd dimension) and the ship literally transfers itself between two distant points which are momentarily brought together.

As a result, Galactica is never "cruising" through the universe as does the Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon. Galactica, and all FTL ships simply go from one point to another, and once they've arrived, they can only move at normal speeds below the speed of light.

Galactica is an older ship relatively speaking and so her technology is significantly behind that of many of the other ships in the ragtag fleet, hence the need for long checklists to be completed by many hands before any Jump.

The process is much simpler and quicker aboard Sharon's Raptor, for instance, but even the Raptor must make precise calculations and execute specific settings before initiating a Jump. (The specific checklist used by Galactica during the FTL sequence in the miniseries was gleaned from one of many checklists from the Apollo 15 lunar mission. Goto: http://www.hq.nasagov/office/pao/History/ap15fj/ and look under "Apollo 15 Documents" for many checklists of this kind.)

The speed of tight also governs communications and sensor information. The farther away a ship is from Galactica, the longer it will take the signal to travel If Galactica and one of her fighters are "only" as far away as the distance between the Earth and Mars (say, 700 million kilometers), there will be an 11 minute lag in a radio conversation. The same goes for optical observations in that by the time we spot a Cylon basestar-- at that same distance, it's had 11 minutes to move closer to Galactica.

The Cylons are bound by the same rules of physics and they cannot travel faster than the speed of light - they have to Jump as well.

The Red Line

Practically speaking the further one attempts to Jump, the more difficult the calculations and the more variables are introduces into the equations. For example, consider the difficulties inherent in Jumping to a relatively nearby star system "only" five light years away: any information Galactica can gather by looking through a telescope is, by definition, five years old. The star and all the planets surrounding it have been in motion for five years since the light we can see left that system This means that Galactica must calculate the motion of all the celestial bodies in that system based on information that is five years old. The further away the Jump point, the greater the problem - try to jump 100 light years, and you have a century's worth of calculations to do.

Because of the limitations inherent in colonial technology, their ability to calculate all the variables involved in a Jump are also limited. Their margin of error increases exponentially the further out they go and as a result, there is a theoretical "Red Line" beyond which it is not considered safe to attempt to Jump. At the end of the pilot, Galactica has intentionally Jumped past the Red Line and is in uncharted and unknown space.

I like the bit about information still being limited to traveling at c (and using conventional "telescopes" to view distance locations), though it seems like if you can fold space at will you would be able to get around that without too much trouble. A jump-capable pneumatic tube system, of sorts.

BSG jumps are like Guild travel, except with computer calculations instead of drugs -- the tradeoffs being a shorter jump distance and a higher likelihood of jumping into a star :)

Comment: Re:Dashcams (Score 2) 253

by nmb3000 (#42427697) Attached to: Moscow Plane Crash Caught On Passerby's Dash Cam

And - it has regrettably to be said - in a culture full of batshit-insane drivers.

No joke. There are some pretty crazy Russian dashcam/streetcam compilations on Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFw1dpGw9uQ (0:55).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkvX9SVAlk0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTb4CGhp_eo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XB-B3Bqsm4 (2:52, 8:30)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiBLfLcUmZs (11:02)

It seems to be a combination of driving too fast for conditions (and/or bald tires) and assuming everyone else will jump the hell out of your way.

Comment: Re:Yelp should idemnify her (Score 5, Informative) 424

by nmb3000 (#42210969) Attached to: Virginia Woman Is Sued For $750,000 After Writing Scathing Yelp Review

Just found the actual comment she left via the Daily Mail:

This is the text of Perez's original review posted on Angie's List in August 2012.

Overall: F

Price: F

Quality: F

Responsiveness: F

Punctuality: F

Professionalism: F

Description Of Work: Dietz Development was to perform: painting, refinish floors, electrical, plumbing and handyman work. I was instead left with damage to my home and work that had to be reaccomplished for thousands more than originally estimated.

Member comments: My home was damaged' the "work" had to be re-accomplished; and Dietz tried to sue me for "monies due for his "work." I won in summary judgement (meaning that his case had no merit). Despite his claims, Dietz was/is not licensed to perform work in the state of VA. Further, he invoiced me for work not even performed and also sued me for work not even performed. Today (six months later) he just showed up at my door and '"wanted to talk to me." I said that I "didn't want to talk to him," closed the door , and called the police. (The police said his reason was that he had a "lien on my house"; however this "lien" was made null and void the day I won the case according to the court.) This is after filing my first ever police report when I found my jewelry missing and Dietz was the only one with a key. Bottom line do not put yourself through this nightmare of a contractor.

If that kind of review is worth $750,000 in damages then the Internet is boned. I thought the RIAA's damage calculations were bad -- There must be a trillion dollars worth of "harmful" reviews for places on Google Maps alone!

Science may someday discover what faith has always known.

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