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Comment: Re:Lame duck President (Score 5, Interesting) 316


My kingdom for mod points! Amen, preach on! As a centrist, I manage to piss off my friends on the right and left just about every day when I point out the fallacies in their partisan logic. My Facebook profile lists my political preference as "They are all lying weasels, every last one of them".

Our country's fondness for sports has made team affiliation creep into everything. Mac or Windows? Republican or Democrat? Plastic or paper? Die, heretic! We just aren't happy, apparently, if there isn't a "them" for "us" to oppose. And when there is a "them", we'll do and say anything, however outrageous, to bring "them" to utter destruction.

Comment: Re:BZZZZT! Article Suspect! (Score 3, Insightful) 377

by Deep Esophagus (#45640059) Attached to: Study: People Are Biased Against Creative Thinking

Jobs (and Apple generally) don't really do 'innovative', in the sense that nearly everything they produced had some sort of less-well-refined immediate antecedent elsewhere, or was purchased, or or the like.

When Woz drove the product development, that wasn't the case. The Apple of early Woz era years was wildly innovative. If TFA had said "Steve Wozniak" instead of "Steve Jobs" he could have made his point a lot better -- Despite the fact that his technical brilliance gave Jobs something to sell and grow the business, he didn't really fit in to corporate culture once Apple became the very thing they loathed.

Comment: Re:Cop was "in his car"? (Score 4, Interesting) 1010

I'll grant that a nickel's worth isn't enough to hang him over... but what we're up against here is the tragedy of the commons. One person doing it has little to no impact on the scheme of things, but once people decide it's OK for him to do it, why not me too? And my neighbor. And the 600 other people in the immediate vicinity. You can't let him get away with it and then run us off, that's discrimination!

This isn't about stopping that one guy from helping himself to a nickel's worth of electricity. It's about setting a precedent before it gets out of hand. I'm normally as anti-authority, anti-government as they come* but I can see the need to stop this early.

*And with that comment out in the open, I'd like to wish cheery holiday greetings to my fans at the NSA

Comment: Re:make my day... (Score 4, Insightful) 453

by Deep Esophagus (#45597139) Attached to: The Desktop Is Dead, Long Live the Desktop!



Comment: Re:Surprised people still use... (Score 4, Interesting) 192

by Deep Esophagus (#45562079) Attached to: AI Reality Check In Online Dating

I'm amused by your use of the word "traditional" to describe online dating services. From my point of view, that's still newfangled. Get off my lawn!

My wife and I were actually one of the first online romances. Back in the days of 300bps dialup, there was a service in Houston that had a bunch of phone lines running into multiple modems on a single computer, so a smallish group (probably 16; I don't remember) of people could chat together. One of the oldies radio stations advertised it, so I plugged the phone number into my Hayes terminal program and met a few people including a lady type person (yes, a GIRL who owned a computer... even though it was just a TRS-80). Within three days of chatting we had started to discuss how many children we would like in our hypothetical family, and we had already started seriously considering marriage before we ever met in person. We married five weeks after we met online.

That's what is missing from these algorithms. What about those who are attracted by some other factor than physical appearance? What attracted me and Mrs. Esophagus was our shared values and interests. Which is good, since I was rail-thin, covered in zits, and, like any good computer geek, only heard of personal hygiene as a long-forgotten myth from distant lands.

As for "how do we even know these profiles are real?" -- limit yourself to people you can meet in person, which may mean restricting your search to people within your own city or less than {x} miles away. Don't commit time, money, or yourself until you have both had a chance to do a little snooping by way of facebook pages, google searches, whatever. Hint: If the facebook page appeared only after you make contact, you are right to be suspicious.

Comment: Re:So you won't need to waste time on FB (Score 1) 163

by Deep Esophagus (#45555955) Attached to: Google Wants To Write Your Social Media Responses For You

Rather than "void of capital letters", the stuff I see that surprises me makes excessive use of capital letters. Not shouting, which I can almost understand, but capitalizing random Words in the Middle of sentences. It's mostly nouns with adjectives trailing a Close second place.

From the context I suppose you can infer that the author considers those specific words more important than others and therefore deserving of special attention. They are usually found in lengthy, paranoid rants or sentimental glurge and of course always accompanied by the instruction to pass it on / repost unless you hate puppies, God, and America.

Comment: Re:stupid coments, but.... (Score 5, Interesting) 312

This would seem to indicate that it's a personal bias, and not some kind of technical requirement.

We were defending pro se in a civil suit -- couldn't afford a lawyer -- and got the decision against us overturned because the judge made remarks like "Since you can't be bothered getting a real lawyer..." Even better, the judge was a golfing buddy with the plaintiff's attorney, and they made no attempt to disguise their familiarity and friendship during the pretrial hearing. No surprise he ruled against us on the spot with a summary judgement, never bothered to look at our defense brief.

Still had to go through it all again with a new judge, but at least the jerkass decision didn't stick.

Comment: Re:brace yourself (Score 1, Insightful) 453

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we don't get any kind of respect in management. Because that's what they see in us: The computerized equivalent of plumbers and bricklayers. The fact that they couldn't wrap their feeble minds around a tenth of what we have to understand intimately doesn't matter.

And conversely, they have no clue what obstacles we face or why we claim our jobs are difficult. "So, yeah, can you also have it map each email address to the sender's DNA and use the link to record their conversations at home and send them to me sorted by topic? I'll need that by Thursday, or if you can get to it earlier that would be even better. I realize this was just intended to generate order confirmation emails, but it could be so much more if you'd only be willing to put some thought into it!"

Comment: Re:There is no Magic Energy Fairy (Score 1) 327

by Deep Esophagus (#45247303) Attached to: 8 US States Pushing For 3.3 Million Electric Cars

Where do they think the power comes from? Those magic wall sockets most likely are connected to coal burning plants.

This. With apologies to Heinlein, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Zero-Emission Lunch. Your state can switch from coal to all-solar? Great! Good luck on finding zero-emission sources for the components, all of which I'm sure are made from renewable resources. Ditto for wind, and that's our LEAST problematic alternative energy source.

I would dearly love to get the planet, or at least the major consumers, off nonrenewable, polluting energy sources... but we don't have the magic bullet yet. Nothing even comes close to meeting the needs of a major city (by which I arbitrarily choose to mean > 1 million people), much less an entire state or country.
