Posts by Jason Bassford

New study into lack of women in Tech: It's not the men's fault

Which says nothing...

The "study" shows almost nothing at all. Merely that women don't know enough math to take courses in university. All of the original questions still stand. Why don't they know math? Stopping at just the reasoning behind the course admission process is lazy. In fact, if women are culturally discriminated against in such a way that they're steered away from learning math - this study is just as bad as anything else. It ends up presenting something that's almost blindingly obvious and then washes its hands of all social responsibility.

Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight e-reader review

Re: Tied into Amazon's ecosystem?

"Obviously is over your head as Calibre will not allow drm breaking plugins to work with their software and go to great lengths to maintain this stance ;)"

I think you'll find that's not true - it only takes a little Google search to easily come up with plugins of this nature that work with Calibre. Now, Calibre may not support them - but that's something different than saying working plugins don't exist. Now, I'm not sure about Amazon's DRM specifically - but I believe you can find those too if you look around enough, and aren't too concerned with officers of the law knocking on your door.

Kernel crimps make Windows 8 a hacker hassle

Re: Unmitigated Jokes

A "presidented joke"? Enough said...

Microsoft trials Digits finger-sensing bracelet

Why is this a better idea than Leap Motion?

It seems clunkier, an annoyance (Do I really want to strap something on my arm when I want to work?), and I don't really see why it's more if an innovative product.

RIP Harry Harrison: Stainless Steel Rat scurries no more

No spoilers, but the ending to the film is fairly well-known.

I think that the subtitle of the article pretty much gave it away...

First tranche of Windows 8 released via MSDN and TechNet

Re: Technet site

I'm always amazed that they never plan the right infrastructure to support the concurrent access and their site always falls apart every time a major release comes out. Oh, wait. On second thought, maybe I'm not that amazed by their lack of planning...

Numbers don't lie: Apple's ascent eviscerates Microsoft

Re: Why Paris?

"Why Paris? Cos she is doomed to be superseded by slimmer smarter shinier eye candy too."

I'm not too sure you can get slimmer than Paris...

American search team fails to find women's G-spot

I'd never hire that research team.

It's like the flat-Earthers, or those who believed we were the center of the universe. "We've done extensive investigation, and all evidence up until now says the Earth is flat and the center of the universe." Idiots. Of *course* by sifting through previous studies that have been criticised you're going to find a preponderance of "evidence" for exactly what's gone before. It's obvious. Was that ever in dispute? How about a study that throws everything out the window, including preconceptions, and actually starts doing trials and collating new empirical data?

Domino's to serve pizzas on the Moon, apparently

Plural

The proper name is "Domino's Pizza". So, the plural possessive would be, "The Domino's Pizza's pizzas were eaten."

French bloke fined for failing to shag missus

Sex can't be a requirement....

What if, through physical handicap, sex in the traditional form is impossible? I don't think you'd say that it would be impossible for those two people to get married because of that. (Maybe they'd be able to use a special "exemption" form!)

The problem with this story is not that they got divorced (or even had their marriage annulled for some strange clause about non-performance) - all of which, to one degree or another, could be understandable. The problem is that the man got FINED. Really? Maybe in a divorce settlement some kind of consideration could be made in terms of recompense (she gets the car, some alimony, etc., and the lack of sex is a contributing factor) - but normally a fine means that you're violating a rule or law. In this case, the penalty should be ... not being married any more. I don't see how anybody can be actually fined for not having sex.

In fact, getting money for the hardship (Lack of it...?) of celibacy sounds more like the result of a straight lawsuit (mental / emotional anguish) than anything else. (Kind of like how I could sue somebody for banging pots and pans against my ears for years.) But for the judge to site a marriage clause - the only result of failing to meet it should result in divorce, not a fine - seems absurd. Unless there actually is a French marriage clause that says if you don't perform you get fined? I don't think so.

Secret list of celebrity .xxx domains removed from market

Re: He Who Shall Not Be...

You mean Lord Volde...? (Or maybe his brother.)

Anonymous, LulzSec go legit with PayPal boycott

I'm still getting a kick out of any news story involving this "group".

As the last news story made clear, there is no membership list - and even among those who "belong" there is no standard of shared believe. (One person can say / believe something the opposite of another.) So, to try to claim that "the group Anonymous" thinks something is worth less than the paper the report is printed on (or the screen it's displayed on). At best, some people claiming to belong to this group are making this claim. So, every time I see an article about this group now - with the slant that "this is what Anonymous believes / is doing", I just shake my head and laugh. Even if there WERE a "membership" list of some kind, and a group of people who all belonged and felt the same way - the fact that they *are* anonymous (the word, not the group) makes it impossible to give any credence to anything in the real world. Mainly because there's no way of knowing who it is saying something and, therefore, no way of responding to them in any way. From where I sit, none of this means anything.

ANONYMOUS: Behind the mask, inside the Hivemind

"I have had the opportunity to speak to Anonymous." ???

Really? And how did you manage that? When it's been made explicitly clear that there's no membership list and no agreement amongst "them" as to who qualifies to be one of these people and who doesn't?

Did you head down to the local pub and happen upon somebody in a Guy Fawkes mask, ask them if they belonged to this group, got an affirmative answer and then started asking questions hoping that things were on the level?

If there's no possible way of defining anything here - or going to a location or group where there's agreement - then how can it possibly be claimed that you managed to meet anybody who could objectively be said to be a part of this group?

Parmo v poutine: The ultimate post-pub nosh deathmatch

Proper poutine.

I'm Canadian, and while I like poutine in general, the "typical" recipe of just fries (okay, chips over there), cheese, and gravy does not normally make for a good meal. That's to good poutine what McDonald's is to a good burger.

From the restaurant of one of my favourite examples of poutine:

"Pulled Short Rib Poutine - Fresh cut fries topped with alfredo, Tankhouse Ale, braised Angus short ribs, green onions and Ontario cheese curds, smothered in gravy."

In this case, the Tankouse Ale is a home-brewed, nicely hopped, pale ale.

You need the general framework, but you also want to build on it so it's not just a glob of gravy and chips. It should actually be a very nice tasting meal. When I ate the above I did not simply feel like my arteries were hardening, as I have with typical poutine.

The freakonomics of smut: Does it actually cause rape?

Production does not equal distribution.

I fail to understand the specific argument that in order to decrease sexual abuse we should be increasing the *production* of pornography. Surely we don't need to *produce* any more at all - unless you want to consider all of those people who make a living out of that job. Purely in terms of those people "happily" viewing said material and thereby getting a "fix" with the side effect of preventing them from leaving their houses and doing something wrong in person, viewing of pornography in no way equates to the production of pornography. Load up all the pictures, movies, and other media already currently in existence and no single person could ever get through all of that without dying of old age well before exhausting the supply.

So, at best, if I'm going to buy into this whole argument (which is a big stretch, and I'm not saying that at all), it would not be one that would entail new production (unless there was some niche market for the same old things but in current social and technological contexts) but better availability, distribution, and acceptance of *already* produced material. Therefore, the immediate question / argument involving the harm of people in new production is specious.

"Internet Penetration"?

Why am I the first person to mention the oddly appropriate pun-like nature of this phrase? Not only in the article, but it's continued use in comments. Is it just too obvious? (That hasn't stopped others in the past though.) Would it induce too much groaning (uh oh) to rephrase - and explicitly point out the terminology confusion - by saying that the Internet penetration of Internet penetration has increased over the past few years?

Firefox UI man quits Mozilla for new health-conscious venture

"disruptively easier"?

I never realized that you could be disrupted by something being easy.

Stuxnet worm can reinfect PCs even after disinfection

Not really cleaned...

Just a minor point, but computers can't get reinfected by files remaining on a computer after they've been cleaned. If that's happening, then they weren't properly cleaned in the first place. The definition of proper cleaning is to remove everything so that there's no trace left behind.

The article might better have said that reinfection can occur when previous cleaning methods were used - those that were incomplete as they hadn't yet identified the new discovery.

Sony Reader PRS-600 Touch Edition

@Tony Barnes

"they are overpriced. This cannot be debated"

I've owned a 505 for almost a year now and consider it to be one of the best purchases I've ever made. If I lost it, I'd spend twice as much on another one if I had to. (Although, luckily, I wouldn't have to.) I don't consider it to be overpriced at all for what it does.

If you don't think it's worth the money, then don't buy it.

VMware Workstation plays lucky 7

Player 3 is free.

And it now lets you create and edit VMs. It lacks some of the bells and Whistles of Workstation, but the VMs you can use with it are just the same. So, comparing free to free - how does that change the comparison to Virtual Box?

Amazon may plug in-book advertising into Kindle

I'm glad I went with Sony.

The device is much more elegant looking (it doesn't have that truly awful keyboard that would prevent me from being proud of showing my Kindle to anyone - although that's just my personal opinion), and Sony isn't playing all of these Big Brother games like Amazon is.

Microsoft strikes back at Outlook 2010 rendering grumbles

Email should be text only anyway.

I hate looking at anything other than text in an email message. Email, properly, shouldn't have fonts, graphics, or video embedded. It should just be a message and nothing else. Something else, in the Outlook world, would be a Word document. That's not email. And don't even get me started on Outlook's horrendous bottom-quoting...

People just not that into Blu-ray

I guess I'm in the minority.

I'll add my voice to the "few" number of people in this thread who've posted that they actually like Blu-ray.

@The Avangelist: "Your eyes cannot tell the difference between a DVD and a Blu-Ray disc, anyone who says they can is lying to save face because they think they're stupid for not being able to tell the difference."

That is a deliberatively provocative statement, and quite false. I can quite easily tell the difference on my TV. From DVD to Blu-ray is as different as VHS to DVD. Especially if you have a Blu-ray movie that's actually been produced correctly - as opposed to many that are just whipped off in the format but without any particular attention to doing a good job with it. This is not me just being "stupid" but an objective and empirical statement. There are movies that I've watched in both DVD and Blu-ray. With the Blu-ray I've been able to read text on signs in the background that cannot be read on the DVD version.

I only buy Blu-ray at this point, and the movies I currently own on DVD that I consider to be the best I am slowly converting over. (Others I will just keep on DVD.)