Posts by Figgus

November election sends chill down Valley shareholders' necks

Re: There is no doubt about it

@James Micallef

Stock prices are higher and profits are higher, but only numerically. Adjust the numbers for the rampant inflation of the last 3.5 years, and you'll get a much more accurate (and much grimmer) picture.

And, FYI, part of the reason some stocks are so high is because Obama insists on picking winners and losers (more often losers) in the market, and the promise of free money from the government makes stock prices climb.

Also FYI, the rampant inflation is a direct result of Obama's (and Bernake's) policies. Quanitative Easing is a nice way of saying "printing money", and they did it so they could keep buying votes in our horribly damaged political electorate.

As a final FYI, the cornerstones of the collapse in the US were all Democratic initiatives from Democratic administrations gone by, namely Clinton and Carter. But hey, why let silly things like facts get in the way of your witchhunt against those evil and dastardly Republicans.

OK, I lied about the final FYI. This is really it. Obstructionism and gridlock was the best thing for the country. The only REAL economic uptick we've seen is because the market knows that Obama is effectively paralyzed since 2010. Those horrible Republicans stopping Obama from repeating his earlier failed attempts at stupid (but with bigger numbers this time) was the best thing that could have happened. Compare it to stopping an ignorant child from playing with a flamethrower after he just burned down the house playing with matches.

Acronis sucks up another Red Hatter

UI

Agreed, the latest version of Acronis is terrible. The usability went out the window, even creating Acronis bootable media is more of a chore now than it ever was before. Between the UI mess and the rampant bugs (won't recognize anything but local accounts on storage servers, Notes not displaying anywhere if you bother to type them in) Acronis has certainly managed to lose some ground to the competition.

Nintendo Wii U launch and pricing disclosed

Pointless

I really think Ninty is making a mistake with this one. I thought the Wii was a little silly, but bought one of the first DS despite the naysayers. But this thing, well, I think it's 3 steps past useless. It looks like Ninty is trying to get back into the handheld market by selling it as a console...

If the screen was smaller, it would be ok as a secondary monitor (inventory, hidden choices in multiplayer, etc) but this looks just wrong and clumsy.

The iPHONE 5 UNDERMINES western DEMOCRACY: 5 reasons why

Re: over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...

There is entirely too much cymbalism in this thread.

Republican manifesto calls for internet freedom but no net neutrality

Re: Trust the corporate sector to do you. Right?

It works fine if you do 2 things:

1) Don't force companies to do something they shouldn't (like subprime loans).

2) Don't bail them out if they screw up. Let them fail.

Tosh flashifies disk in demo hybrid drive

I want a hybrid drive that reads as 2 drives: a proper sized SSD for booting and a spinny drive for storage and programs, both crammed into one 2.5" package.

I want to decide what goes where, I don't trust the drive to do it.

Robot rover Curiosity sets out on first long Mars trip

I am still waiting for the news that the rover got stuck in a ditch, discovered proof of life, and nobody knows who got it there in the first place because of a massive equipment failure.

Mine's the one with the Master's from MIT in the pocket, but no Doctorate.

Court confirms $675,000 fine for sharing 30 songs

There is a good chance that after November 6, 2012, the US will fade into economic and political obscurity and the rest of the world will finally start to ignore the stupid tripe the US courts and lawmakers are puking out.

Actually, that's going to happen regardless of who wins because we have stopped preferring to hear the truth instead of pleasant platitudes. Politicians who try to tell us the truth simply don't get elected, it is far too bleak...

Citi rubbishes Nasdaq compensation offer for Facebook IPOcalypse

Re: Not compared of course

That was my thinking exactly. The losses from the glitches are miniscule compared to the losses from the overhyped stock itself.

Ohh, I think I see the difference: the glitches cost them their OWN money, not just the money of their clients. Batards.

Want a Windows 8 Start Button? Open source to the rescue!

Re: Appreciate the irony..

I wish they hadn't made this little band-aid, the last thing the open source crowd needs to do is help MS keep dominating the market long enough to kill open source (UEFI Bios, for example).

Seems rather like they scored an own goal.

We're raising generations of MUTANT KIDS, says Icelandic study

Re: "any dullard"?

... any dullard who can get through life well enough to attract a mate, you mean. Natural Selection is only one factor. In animals, Sexual Selection is pretty important too, and in most of our societies, sexual selection is the dominant evolutionary driver.

Great... so stupid ugly losers can hook up with other stupid ugly losers and make exceptionally stupid ugly loserish offspring that everyone else has to support in perpetuity. Awesome.

'Sex and the female brain are connected' - shock discovery

Re: Afterthought

For the love of all that is holy, they need to allow us to upvote this comment multiple times.

That's Mountain Dew on my keyboard, thanks.

Curiosity success 'paves way for Man on Mars by 2030s'

Re: Please could you run this past me again?

"No, I had a very "special" Seagate which I finally got my RMA for last week. It failed within a year of fairly light use."

Sounds like a "standard" Seagate to me, nothing special about it.

Scrunched Street View spymobile spied in India

Re: Not if you're posh?

With a word starting in "hol*" I would use an, so you don't say a-hole to someone.

Valve: Games run FASTER on Linux than Windows

Re: Maybe Valve should take a closer look at Cooperative Linux (http://colinux.org), for Windows?

Sure, but why bother? Just running it on Linux seems to be simpler and more effective anyway.

Hobbyist builds working assault rifle using 3D printer

Re: Damn

"Once replicators are truly perfected, everyone will be out of a job. But in a world where you can just replicate everything you need, there'll be no need for jobs. Or money. Or any of that related bullshit that makes our present civilisation so unbearable... speed the day!"

Except someone still has to DESIGN the item in the first place before you can replicate it, plus the costs of power and materials... Transportation. Refining. Ad nauseum...

I don't think replicators will be the turnkey solution to a communist panacea. By the way, our present civilisation is only unbearable to people who are too lazy to take care of themselves. The rest of us are getting along just fine.

Re: Bloody wonderful, dont idiots ever think first?

Yup. Chicago was a shithole before, and now it's managed to get even worse. I live 2 hours away from it, but will drive 4 hours the other direction to get to a "big city" instead of going to Chicago.

Then again, Chicago voters don't seem to grasp the relationship between cause and effect so I think they are getting the city they voted for.

Big biz 'struggling' to dump Windows XP

Re: I don't hear anyone...

...coming up with an actual reason for moving from XP to 7 (other than that MS would like everyone to do it). We have a mixed environt. Other than the somewhat tedious time wasted as users get used to a new UI, I haven't spotted any actual difference between the two OS's. Has anyone else?

Less than 4 gig of RAM? Check.

Spinny hard disk? Check.

DX9 is sufficient? Check.

Nope, no reason to go to 7 here. XP32 is fine.

Re: Dinosaurs companies

its pretty easy to tell the script kiddies/public sector workers around here vs the private sector companies.....

Hey, don't lump me in with the skiddies! We are still on XP because it will be a nightmare to get all the public safety apps working well on 7, and 7 offers NOTHING to justify the cost of migration. Not all public sector IT bods piss money out the window...

Google suspends 16GB Nexus 7 orders

Re: No SD slot?

Clearly, that is what I meant. The only lost sale was me, I am sure lots of people don't care one way or the other on the SD card.

I didn't mean to pluralize that second users in my post. It should have read "no user at all".

Re: No SD slot?

Sadly, this was the deal breaker for me too.

So now instead of 1 user accessing Google servers some of the time, they get no users at all.

Judge frees nude TSA protester, citing free speech rights

How about letting each airline set their own security policy? You want ironclad security, fly Body Cavity Airlines. You don't want to be hassled with a waste of time? Fly Open Airways.

Simples.

Mega spam-spewing Grum botnet finally KO'd

Holy CRAP I didn't know Dubya had a TARDIS...

... because he would need one to be the creator of that phrase.

Set the Wayback machine for the twelfth century, Sherman.

Gamer fails STAM roll, dies after 40-hour Diablo III stretch

Cause of Death?

Having played Diablo3, I'll wager the cause of death was extreme boredom.

Seriously, they might as well have named it Gauntlet 2012!

Smartphone-wielding Obamaniacs trounce Romney in poll

Also rans...

Actually, I am encouraged that the Libertarian party seems to be gaining ground. One of the biggest problems the US has is a two-party system where both parties like to waste borrowed money on stupid crap.

Republicans are certainly a bunch of blathering fuckwits on most social issues, but they are fiscal geniuses compared to Democrats.

I hope Romney wins because the only economic trick in Obama's bag is an utter abject failure.

Being a skinny is much more unhealthy than being fat – new study

Re: ???

Good thought, but no.

It is often harped on that poor people don't have access to healthy food, and that makes them overweight. My own ancedotal evidence backs this up (dieting and being successful in life are both hard, requiring willpower and effort). Therefore, poor people would be in the overweight category and have no insurance (supposedly).

Re: Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine

Interestingly, anything with European or Social names tend to have a left leaning agenda which is ALSO unlikely to have much in common with impartial health advice.

How about common sense and a rational middle ground? The BMI is not terribly useful in all reality, and it is still clearly unhealthy to be a tub of goo who never gets any exercise or good food.

The point I took away from the article is that BMI is shifted too far in one direction, perhaps going by body fat would make more sense? I'd like to see the same study, but reworking the results with bodyfat as well as BMI. I bet the ranges would be much more sensible with real life health.

Global warming: It's GOOD for the environment

"Uranus Probing Project"

*snicker*

Mexican election loser and Anonymous say vote was 'fraudulent'

Re: There's a difference ...

Paying the impoverished for their vote cards is tawdry;

Since you want to drag American politics into this, I'll point out that this is EXACTLY what the Democrats have been doing for ~50 years now, and with taxpayer dollars to boot!!!

You don't REALLY think they enacted all those handout programs because they actually give two shits about the poor, do you?

Viviane Reding says imitate US and form FEDERAL EUROPE

Re: No real panacea...

Yet this is the direction things have been going for nearly 100 years now. The 17th Amendment and all that.

States are having their autonomy stripped at an alarming rate and all central control is focused in one place that isn't even a state!

Re: interesting ...

It did until the 17th Amendment, after that it all went to hell in 50 handbaskets.

Re: Nights_are_Long

There is no reason whatsoever that a common market like the EU should be forced into a common bank UNLESS you are Germany and want to dominate all the members of the group. Being outside the Euro but in the Common Market gives us much more flexibility.

Flexibility to monetize your debt. Remind me not to hold any of your currency, ok?

Obama is best Pres 'to beat alien invasion'

Re: Yep

Actually, Americans want him there because they know what always happens to the President when "Mars Attacks".

Ultrabook makers take the Ivy Bridge path

Re: Touch screen on laptops?

Yes a phone no one wants.

Well, one can assume this laptop will be running Windows (just like that phone no one wants)...

Apple will only reinstate mute kids' app if makers win patent case

Re: Seems Apple have a hidden agenda.

If you're quite happy for a developer to go bust because some bully buy competitors throw mud (which may or may not stick) at them well bully for you.

Said developer opened the door to this sort of thing when they chose such a closed platform. I find a distinct lack of sympathy for them.

Apple slapped with 75 lawsuits by staff of titsup French computer biz

Yeah, because no big manufacturer has EVER leaned on a smaller reseller to eschew competitor's products.

Vendors have second stab at smart TV standard

TP Vision

Pass the bogroll...

'Kindness of America' snapper shot himself in 'act of self-promotion'

Re: Makes More Sense

Correct. And you also aren't allowed to have a firearm if you have been drinking in most states. (Both are stupid things to do.)

Re: Makes More Sense

I think this makes all the anti-gun nutters from the other thread look just a tad silly, especially the ones who tried to point out that the driver of the pickup truck was a legal gun owner in response to my comment about legal gun owners not being the problem....

Hilarious!

China goes Alt with root proposal

Re: The problem America has

I wish they would, it's apparently the only way the US will ever get its spending under control.

Korean telly factory power cut costs Samsung $30,000+ per second

Re: Believable

It cost the GOVERNMENT 1 billion. The private sector was only out 98 cents after taxes.

America's X-37B top-secret spaceplane returns to Earth

Re: Gay?

The Tea Party is about fiscal responsibility. Nice job buying into the media misinformation field, though. How did their kool-aid taste?

(I'm not affiliated with either party, but the rampant misinformation from both sides is annoying as hell and prevents any real discussion on the many problems at hand.)

Ethiopia to send Skype users to the slammer

Re: In that case...

I think the government is doing that now, just to protect their state owned internet.

Apple adds gay and lesbian icons to iOS 6 messaging

Re: That's it now

Even carrying an iPad, iPhone, iPod will mark you out as one of the Devils Disciples.

Amusingly, the running joke around the office between the Android and iThingie cults has been that owning an iThingie makes you gay. This is just more fodder for the war, I think.

That said, I have never understood the aversion. 2 guys being gay = 2 more women on the market for the rest of us!!! WE NEED MOAR GAYS!!!!

'Scientists' seek to set world social, economic, tech policy at Rio+20

@Kugutsu

I am not an expert in demographics, but I would wager that there is a very strong correlation between more children and less education.

I think the correlation is actually between "fewer children" and "parents who prize education and raise their kids in an appropriate environment". Education itself is just another byproduct of that environment.

Girl Geek Dinner lady: The IT Crowd is putting schoolgirls off tech

Re: Ayn Rand called, Figgus

I have never read anything of hers, but you don't need to read about it... It's plain as day and easy to see if you just LOOK. The schools in the US are failing, and everyone is frantically blaming teachers, unions, parents, the Federal DoE, and all along the problem with our schools is simply our welfare state.

Mom got free checks, grandma got free checks, great grandma got free checks... That's just how you live, so why study in school when you're just going to get free checks too? I see it every day.

Of course, like a lot of serious problems, it's better to deny it and blame the boogeyman than it is to criticize a failed charity program.

You can't entirely blame religion:

The problem in the West and the US in particular is, 50 percent of the population does not believe in evolution and some surveys put the number even higher. So there is no incentive to study something like science which cannot prove nor "disprove" the existence of the creation myth..

This causes wide swaths of the population for "religious reasons" not to pursue careers in the sciences. Since it clashes with their beliefs. Sad really after all this time to put myth in front of science....

The problem in the West and the US in particular is, 50 percent of the population does not believe in being self sufficient and some surveys put the number even higher. So there is no incentive to study something like science which cannot increase or decrease the size of their government checks...

This causes wide swaths of the population for obvious reasons not to pursue careers in the sciences. Since it is a huge waste of time better spent on xBox and creating illegitimate children. Sad really after all this time to be beholden to the government instead of an independent human being...