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LDoBe

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  • Jan 21, 2014 @ 02:55am

    Re:

    heh, Osmium. Half a cubic meter weighs just shy of 12 and a half tons. Sign for that, bastard scammers.

  • Dec 12, 2013 @ 03:54am

    The hell's angels (or rather the hell's satans) have been known as trademark bullies ever since Simpsons episode "Take My Wife, Sleaze" Season 11 Episode 8. Yes, I'm that kind of Simpsons fan.

  • Oct 30, 2013 @ 04:23am

    In 1999 I was in 5th grade, and at school we played "Virtual Stock Market" for twelve weeks. I was the only kid who wanted to invest in commodities. All the other kids said I was a fool. I was made fun of. Worst of all was the rules said I could only invest in companies.
    The whole time I wanted to invest in gold. In 1999 gold was worth about $278 an ounce (averaged over the year). It made no large moves up or down. We were given two weeks to figure out where to invest and checked the numbers once a day in the newspaper. Every company I looked at fluctuated wildly compared to gold. But alas, I couldn't invest my virtual $20,000 in it.
    But then I saw reebok. It was nearly the cheapest stock in the whole NYSE. And it only went up or stayed the same! I invested everything in Reebok. By the end of the 12 weeks, I was richer than anyone else. Everyone bought Microsoft or Boeing, since that's where their parents worked, or wanted to work (I live in the Seattle area). During that 12 weeks, Microsoft fell (I can't remember why) and Boeing had a machinist Union strike. Needless to say Reebok only grew by about 1/20th of a percent, but that was a lot better than MS or Boeing.
    Ever since, I've wanted to buy gold anyway, and if I could have invested back then, I'd have a ton more money in gold than any of my idiot peers back then.

  • Mar 05, 2013 @ 12:21am

    Re: Re: Be silly that reseller rights are more than the creators.

    Fair use protects you, since your use is definitely parody. Also, I think you meant Starburst?, which is a "Juicy Contradiction."

    But yes, everything OOtB says is horseshit, and we might as well ignore him/her/it(most likely). Although the things it says does, form time to time, spur intelligent people to say interesting things and make a cogent argument we can use with people IRL. I suppose OOtB might even be a valuable resource in order to keep us sharp on the day-to-day drill of refuting idiotic ramblings of syphilitic, unthinking minds that have bought into copyright maximalism as a "Good Thing" hook line and sinker.

  • Mar 05, 2013 @ 12:05am

    Re: Re: Be silly that reseller rights are more than the creators.

    You just perfectly explained the broken window fallacy.

    Just because the cost of one good is incurred on a population doesn't mean it's a net economic gain.

  • Mar 05, 2013 @ 12:02am

    Re: Re:

    Well... The faucet example was manufactured in part in the Andromeda galaxy, which is 2.5 million light years away. Basically impossible to reach from either direction, unless some form of FTL travel is possible, or an alien civilization grew to maturity and sent a trading ship to us sometime earlier than 2.5 million years ago (from out POV at least. If they traveled fast enough, they would experience barely any time at all getting here.)

  • Mar 04, 2013 @ 11:55pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    Or perhaps he thinks a bad copyright law is one that extends protection only another 20 years after it's original expiration (applied retroactively of course)

    Or, he simply doesn't understand that if the SC bans resale of foreign manufactured goods, he won't be able to even sell a used BIC lighter, since it has the ? symbol on it (applied to the specific shade of red the plastic is dyed or other such nonsense.)

  • Feb 27, 2013 @ 08:49pm

    cats

    cats are extremely adaptable


    Bullmess! Every single cat I've had (5 over the years) goes hungry if I move her food dish by as little as a meter. The cats I've had simply won't eat if anything's out of place even slightly. If that's adaptable, then I have a horse that solves arithmetic problems to sell you.

  • Nov 14, 2012 @ 02:54pm

    Re: Forget giving us the money back

    They don't do nothing. They do lots of stuff. They just don't have to tell anyone what they're doing, as long as there's a good cover story. It is DHS after all. They're busy soothing the public with sweet lies of how they're working to preserve our freedoms, while simultaneously wiping their asses with the fourth amendment.

  • Sep 21, 2012 @ 09:31am

    Re: Re:

    The Slurm (it's highly addictive) sweepstakes? cuz that was just a winning bottle cap rattling around in a can.

    Perhaps the eyePhone? even though that was targeted advertising but didn't seem to involve location tracking. Just recording and analyzing everything the user does with the eyePhone.

    So, nope, I can't really think Futurama did anything like this. But it could be a cool episode!

  • Sep 20, 2012 @ 08:08pm

    Re: Messing with regular cell towers

    As far as I know, the Mobile protocols and standards attempt "graceful handoffs" where they connect to the new tower and verify network connectivity before handing off from the current tower. It works well if there are multiple towers to connect to, but wouldn't work if there's only two including the StingRay.

    Logic would dictate that the phone wouldn't drop the call, but still attempt to connect to the StingRay, won't be able to establish or verify network connectivity, and just keep pinging the StingRay while using the next strongest signal.

    I'm pretty sure that it won't be that situation though. I'm betting most phones would ping the StingRay. If the StingRay gives pretty much any response, the phones will start broadcasting to it, and drop the other tower's connection. There could also be the problem of the StingRay simply broadcasting on the same frequency as the nearest tower and act like a jammer, though I don't know if that would happen, since I'm not familiar with exactly how a SingRay works. If it broadcasts back to the phone it probably will cause huge problems with connection dropping. If it doesn't then the phones are going to run down their batteries shouting into the wind at a device that never answers.

    This is entirely speculative, but I did get an AAS in IT and Networking, and had to take several classes on POTS and Cell networks. So I'm not an expert or anything, just faintly more knowledgeable on this subject, than I would have been fresh out of high school.

  • Sep 20, 2012 @ 07:52pm

    Re: Re:

    If you don't want to be crushed to death by a car on the sidewalk, don't walk on the sidewalk.

    If you don't want your house to be set on fire by an arsonist, don't build a house.

    If you don't want to be attacked by a pack of wild dogs, don't smell delicious.

  • Sep 19, 2012 @ 03:17pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    That's called "Being a Crank" They move the goalposts in debates constantly in order to try to avoid the appearance of being wrong, while moving the goalposts is one of the things that make them wrong anyway.

    aj seems not to understand that one can lose a debate and still come out on top. It's a form of educated thinking. If you're willing to accept the undeniable facts that makes your initial argument wrong, and reexamine your own view point, you end up literally thinking better in some measure.

  • Sep 10, 2012 @ 04:42pm

    Re: Unconscionable?

    I like the idea that since all the labels do this kind of thing, that makes it unconscionable on the grounds of having no other choice.

    BUT, by that logic, Microsoft's EULA for Windows XP Pro would be unconscionable as well, since the only way to use XP legally is to agree to the EULA, and the EULA has an applicable law clause that specifies the jurisdiction as Washington State, or Ontario if in Canada.

  • Sep 07, 2012 @ 04:52pm

    Re: Please please please

    Here's an Amazon link to something like it. I'm not sure if it's the goophone I5, but it's definitely an iPhone knockoff from china....

    http://www.amazon.com/Unlocked-Android-Capacitive-T-mobile-networks/dp/B007TR4ON6

  • Sep 07, 2012 @ 04:44pm

    Re:

    Don't waste your money. I've been given a few of these types of knockoffs as promo swag before. They're not actually android OS, they look a bit like android, but the setting screens and impossible version ID numbers give away that the OS is developed in-house specifically to work with the cheapest hardware you can possibly imagine. Usually the whole graphical OS is a JVM skinned to look like the OS it's mimicing.

    I even got a tablet once. It had buttons beneath the LED screen, (under the lighting element), and of course claimed to be "touch-screen". More like "click on the grid of hidden buttons screen". They're really terrible, cheap and flimsy devices held together mostly with spit, and a loose fold here and there.

    I'd buy one if it was likely to be any good, the idea of an Android clone of the iPhone is pretty cool. But none of these devices are as good as the consumer grade crap that ships to American big-box stores. And none of the devices I've seen even have real Android versions running on them.

    They are called knockoffs for a reason.

  • Aug 31, 2012 @ 04:02pm

    Re:

    The court should say: The head of the TSA will hold these hearings from his jail cell in 18 hours, since he thinks he can treat the American people like fools.

  • Aug 29, 2012 @ 08:11pm

    Re:

    Maybe my brother and I (male too) got stuck in the Freudian penile phase, but all he and I ever made were the tallest towers we could (we were big on lego when we were around 7 or 8). We got some towers 3 or 4 meters tall before they fell over. We had a 3 story living room with indoor landing balconies looking out onto it from the stairs. (BTW, I'm not sure how I can explain the balconies other than it was kind of like an open atrium hotel where you could see ever floor from the ground.)

  • Aug 29, 2012 @ 04:15pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    might as well lash out at the guy who screwed us over.


    Then you probably should be lashing out at George W. Bush....
    During his presidency we got:
    -The "war on terror" (how do you win a shooting war on a concept?)
    -National Security Letters
    -The Patriot Act
    -Set up Guantanamo
    -Deregulated the financial industry, leading to the worst recession ever. A recession so bad that Obama can't do anything about it with the limited power of the presidency.

  • Aug 29, 2012 @ 04:06pm

    Re:

    Well, we can abort the AMA, as long as the servers are being "legitimately" raped.

    Sorry... I'm just not satisfied kicking the shit out of Todd Aiken yet

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