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toss1941's comments

toss1941 | 8 years ago | on: 16 Years with IPv6

I think of IPv6 like driving a stick shift car that you skip a gear with. If you're lucky, the engine won't stall but even if it doesn't, you'll be accelerating very slowly until the RPMs catch back up to where they should be. In IPv6's case they skipped 3 gears because they knew the car couldn't possibly stall, but here we are, barely accelerating after all this time.

toss1941 | 8 years ago | on: Spinal Tap vs. Hollywood

One of my favorite movies, and favorite one of the genre by far. If anyone who loves this movie hasn't seen the commentary track on the DVD, get it immediately. The actors present on the commentary are all in character so it sort of feels like a second movie.

toss1941 | 8 years ago | on: Too many prisons make people worse

I largely agree but this whole issue needs to be looked at through eyes of compassion first and foremost. Jesus stood by a woman who was about to be stoned for adultery and told her would-be killers that he who was without sin should cast the first stone. Then he began to write in the sand, it doesn't say what he wrote, but it was probably some of the sins of the would be stoners and they fled quickly, realizing they were no better than she was. I think most americans who would applaud a 90 day sentence for a small quantity of drugs for personal use would feel guilty reading that story in the Bible in that context.

People forget that those who turn to hard drugs don't tend to do so because they're simply rebels spoiling for a fight with the justice system. They do so because they're people and people have problems, every single one of us. There needs to be a return to compassion but as long as drug users are vilified in every possible way on every possible television show, that won't change. Hollywood could lead the return to compassion if it wanted to by raising awareness of what is actually happening in people's lives, how drugs are seen as a (usually bad) solution or an escape and give concrete workable examples of how that can change. In the end, it's a problem of ignorance, i.e. people believe and act one way when they would be best off doing something entirely different were they armed with more information about their problems. Rather than 90 days in jail, it could be 9 weeks of counseling for one or two hours while the person remains a productive member of society.

So I just don't think attacking this as a problem with long sentences is going to do anything to help anyone. You might get sentences greatly reduced, but have you actually helped the root problem?

toss1941 | 8 years ago | on: Washington Post launches a Reddit public profile

It was interesting to see how much of the media was cheering the cruise missile strike in Syria. I think socially and economically WaPo is very liberal but for some reason most of the media loves almost anything to do with war.

toss1941 | 9 years ago | on: Are We Having Too Much Fun?

I imagined a Principle Skinner writing this article "Are we out of touch with the wants and needs of the American people? No, it's the children (voters) who are wrong..."

toss1941 | 9 years ago | on: Mexican Newspaper Shuts Down, Saying It Is Too Dangerous to Continue

The beauty of freedom of speech is that it disarms that fine china that begins to appear on every square foot of ground in society where free speech is under assault. Without it, people quickly become accustomed to tip-toeing around issues like the proverbial fine china, but just as quickly very dangerous ideas are left unopposed due to the climate of fear that is generated.

toss1941 | 9 years ago | on: Some Fake News About Me from Bloomberg

Thanks! And to add, how can one possibly become less confident instead of more confident in our media the older one gets? I think the media is just a tool, to be used by those with the strings of the reporters, or the reporters themselves, to drive a desired message. Truth is hard to find. Wait, I'm already a cynic. Oh well, I'll just go watch old shows on netflix like Star Trek TNG where I won't be inundated with carefully crafted dilemma's with equally carefully crafted solutions and virtue signaling. Wait a minute...

toss1941 | 9 years ago | on: AT&T, other U.S. advertisers quit Google, YouTube over extremist videos

I agree, give them all the control they need to keep their ads or content disassociated with the undesirable corners of the site but unless actual crimes are being committed we shouldn't have any videos being taken down for anything. Censorship of content on YouTube is the digital equivalent of burning books.

toss1941 | 9 years ago | on: Some Fake News About Me from Bloomberg

Just speaking about accuracy in all reporting of our time (not including specific trade publications), I think there has to be a clever moniker for the phenomenon that occurs when you read or hear a news report about a subject you are already intimately familiar with, where you spot multiple errors peppered throughout the article. Then, on subjects we know little about beforehand, we walk away confident that what we just consumed was wholesome and true. That has to have a name already right?

toss1941 | 9 years ago | on: Programming won’t be automated, or it already has been

I'm with the "or it already has been". Automation is always happening with programming. Fully automatic programming has no meaning, since you have to define parameters for some set of algorithms to act upon. Once you define parameters, you are already using automation because today we can already with a single line effectively "open file x for appending, and create it if it doesn't exist" and thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code will execute behind the scenes to make this happen.

toss1941 | 9 years ago | on: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

Quad cores are the absolute minimum I would want for a standard office machine, unless it's only for a handful of basic applications. My latest work laptop is a quad core with 32 GB of RAM for running multiple VM's, but they couldn't give me an SSD which ends up wasting at least a few hours of productivity a week.
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