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mostlyskeptical

100 karma · joined April 19, 2017

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mostlyskeptical··on Kitty Marion: an actress who became a suffragette who planted bombs
"I'm right, they are wrong, and the ends justify the means".

For as horrible as I hear the right is, it seems to be only the left advocating explicitly for violence, while I'm told that the right simply arguing for something such as stronger borders is actually committing violence.

mostlyskeptical··on US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data
Mine go down fairly regularly. I have even been cut a check for adding cars to my insurance.
mostlyskeptical··on Completely Silent Computer
I won a silent computer 5+ years ago as a prize at a lan party. SSD drives, two of the best passively coolable gpu at the time (ATI I Believe?), passive CPU cooler, and the whole case was lined with musicians sound absorbing foam. I think it did have an optional 240mm fan but I never heard it even when I turned it on. It was so nice that I have built my newest computer in the same way (though I did put some big storage drives in it).
mostlyskeptical··on Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
At least some of their other stuff is a nightmare. I still haven't figured out how to use their oauth correctly, or use their iot stuff at all.
mostlyskeptical··on CloudEvents 0.1 – A common set of metadata to help process events
Sounds like ether or one of the many projects built on it (golem?).
mostlyskeptical··on Backpage.com Pleads Guilty to Human Trafficking in Texas
There's a non insignificant number of people who plead guilty to murder for that same reason (to avoid death penalty) but are later exonerated via DNA evidence.
mostlyskeptical··on Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham
Doesn't the house of Lords have some members appointed by the church, others by birth, women weren't allowed to be Lords spiritual until 2015, and women still aren't allowed to inherit some seats today?

Hard to take that seriously in any regard, much less as 'experts'.

mostlyskeptical··on Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts
Companies will always be shamed for not being diverse enough. Tis the call of outrage culture.
mostlyskeptical··on Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself
Thanks for this

A thread full of people talking about how bad working for yourself is had me questioning my upcoming decision to quit and try to do something for myself, and what you said is the biggest reason why I want to. I love hard work, but I don't love pointless work. I already do some low pay contracting on the side, but it's with a couple of small companies that trust me 100% so they never tell me "no". Don't get me wrong, they will question the hell out of my decisions and I've changed quite a few in response to the questions, but at the end of the day they trust me to do what's best for them.

I already have the house paid off, have no other debt, and have low 7 figures in reasonably liquid investments. Working for myself has been a dream of mine as long as I can remember. I don't need much money, just enough to get by.

Anyway sorry for the rambling. Just wanted to say thank you, you made me feel better about going into work today. Maybe I'll make today the last?

mostlyskeptical··on Amateur Radio on the International Space Station
You probably have multiple plug types in your house. Single phase, two phase, maybe three phase, groundless, etc. They might have similar requirements.
mostlyskeptical··on In California, Where Cancer Warnings Abound, Coffee Is Next in Line
As someone that lives outside of the state, it's almost a hobby of mine to collect prop 65 warnings.

I've seen it on everything from food to juices and hammers to cars.

The running joke about my friends is "I'm sure glad I don't live in California or all this stuff would give me cancer"

mostlyskeptical··on Evidence that the brain’s ability to control thinking relies on beta rhythms
The placebo effect is still an effect.
mostlyskeptical··on macOS High Sierra: Anyone can login as “root” with empty password
>neither of those issues are reasonable to expect no matter what your opinion of Apple's software is.

Neither is your password showing up in a password hint field (or anywhere for that matter... why is it even stored unhashed?).

Neither is logging in with a blank password enabling a disabled root user.

mostlyskeptical··on U.S. judge says Uber withheld evidence, delays Waymo trial
> That's to prevent leaks from driving the stock price up, and causing the buyout cost to increase. That's a little different than using it to hide the fact that they were knowingly breaking the law. Do you understand the difference?

You're making the assumption that they did it for that reason. It could be that covering up the crimes was just a side effect.

mostlyskeptical··on USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI confusion
As we say when teaching new riders to ride a motorcycle, a crash is often an intersection of factors. If you remove even one of those issues it likely would have prevented it.
mostlyskeptical··on Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
I can even see merit to the argument that cutting off new supply will force people to recycle old supply to repair and keep their sensors running as well. I know I've got a few that I'll have to keep working.
mostlyskeptical··on Pokémon Go Fest attendees to get refunds as technical issues break the event
Many of them use point to point microwave (if the provider has a good microwave network in the city).

Those are good for a couple of gbps each and can go anywhere in a city that's got line of sight.

mostlyskeptical··on Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator (2009)
That's how casino dice work right?
mostlyskeptical··on What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
A step beyond that: some can get fairly accurate with a single "tower". We had at minimum 3 BTS on every site, generally at 120 degree spacing but this could vary, but each BTS had multiple antennas and would do some rudimentary triangulation based on signal arrival times to each antenna. We could generally get within a couple of hundred fee.
mostlyskeptical··on California solar power output sometimes exceeds predictions
Exact. If California had a consistent excess of solar they wouldn't need so much from the Hoover dam.
mostlyskeptical··on An RF-powered cordless phone
Real cell towers may use more power than unlicensed is allowed to in some cases, but not significantly much and definitely not hundreds of times. I worked at Clearwire (Clear wimax) and even on the spectrum we owned we generally used less than 1W of power per sector. Very small ones would only use a couple of hundred mW and our longest range sites in rural Texas were either 2W or 5W (memory is fuzzy).

To be fair, we used more sites closer together instead of a few larger ones, but the point stands. Cell sites biggest advantage is elevation and line of site, not massive transmit power.

mostlyskeptical··on California to list glyphosate as cancer-causing
That was just one example of how everything is labeled a carcinogen there.
mostlyskeptical··on Show HN: Meatshields – An in-browser turn-based strategy game
Maybe have a pop up that asks if you want sound on or off?
mostlyskeptical··on Manualslib – Database of More Than 2.6M Manuals
Looks neat but you ask for a massive amount of permissions.
mostlyskeptical··on The Wonderful WiFi232: BBSing Has Never Been Easier
I'm pretty excited about starting up my ham radio BBS soon.
mostlyskeptical··on How a 64k intro is made
For wanting interested in this stuff, check out pouet.net (http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php). They have demos as small as 32b. Most of them have YouTube mirrors and usually they have the executables if you'd like to verify yourself.
mostlyskeptical··on How Craigslist Makes Money
In most places in the US you can live extremely comfortably, even with a couple of moderately expensive hobbies, on 50k. Get out of the big cities.
mostlyskeptical··on A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system
That's the one benefit of Trump getting elected: half of the US cares about civil liberties and privacy again.
mostlyskeptical··on Will Initial Coin Offerings Fund the Future?
Apples and oranges. You can't sieze the server or domain name and turn off cryptocurrency. That guarantees that the back end keeps running. Then your only way is to regulate the usage of it, but when that can be obfuscated with things like tor, VPN, public WiFi, etc it's going to be incredibly difficult to do any sort of meaningful enforcement. Add decentralized 'smart contracts' such as what ethereum has and it can be run beginning to end in a fully decentralized way.
mostlyskeptical··on Are We Having Too Much Fun?
Absolutely. How else can an activity like Riding dirt bikes, with a near 100% injury rate for even casual riders wearing full safety gear, be popular?

So many things in our society are overly sanitized to the point that we have an almost complete mental aversion to the idea that some things can be unavoidably dangerous and will still be beneficial (or at least that we should be allowed to do them because we want to, because we are free human beings).

Back on topic, after riding a dirt bike I just feel... Alive? For days afterwards I feel like a complete human. It makes the injuries worth it.

A good book on the subject is Foolproof: how safety can be dangerous and danger makes us safe -- Greg IP

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