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clamour

Re:Testimony of Ms. Soon Ok Lee (2002) on Thursday December 05, 2013 @03:58PM (#6857172)
You're right, the North Korean prison camps by all accounts seem worse, but the Wikipedia article actually contained a lot of information that was new to me. For example...

In 2004 Spc. Sean Baker, a soldier posing as a prisoner during training exercises at the camp, was beaten so severely that he suffered a brain injury and seizures.

How many deaths are swept under the rug at places like Gitmo or at CIA black sites? If they're beating people to the point of brain injury, I'm guessing it happens.

Re:Odds of Alien Life "Very High," House Panel Hears on Thursday December 05, 2013 @12:54PM (#6855867)
Sorry to be a jerk but does it annoy anyone how often conversations about the military/soldiers go through the perfunctory "I respect your service blah blah blah..."?

The term "military service" itself irks me to no end. It's not service, it's a government job. No one thanks DMV employees for their "service".

Re:I will not hack on your codebase for free in an interview on Wednesday December 04, 2013 @09:41AM (#6847120)
The less scrupulous English language schools do exactly this where I live. They'll post a job offering online and have you teach a "demo class" as part of your interview. In reality, that demo class is just a class that they didn't want to pay a substitute teacher for. Clever eh?
Re:Linux Mint 16 "Petra" MATE released on Saturday November 30, 2013 @10:58PM (#6826011)
I have a dual install of Mint on my machine precisely because of its seamless HDMI support. It was the one thing I could never get working properly on my primary OS, but Mint did the trick right out of the box.
Re:Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place? on Saturday November 30, 2013 @02:04PM (#6824121)
Green dragon is a drink.

"Water pipes" or "bongs" still involve smoking, but the smoke is passed through water. I don't know to what extent this reduces the ill-effects of inhaled smoke.

Re:Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place? on Saturday November 30, 2013 @01:26PM (#6823967)
You commit the same fallacy... his current state of intellect has no bearing on whether smoking marijuana causes a decrease in mental functioning.

Aside from smoking, vaporizing and eating edibles are popular and safe ways to ingest marijuana.

Re:It's practically impossible for regular people to buy Bitcoin on Thursday November 28, 2013 @03:02PM (#6816158)
It's the recommended method for obtaining Bitcoin (semi) anonymously, ever since exchangers started complying with AML regulations. That, or cash-in-mail sent with a fake return address.
Re:Cicada 3301 on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @10:48PM (#6812913)
That physical clues were distributed worldwide indicates there might be a little more to the story. Wikipedia lists the locations as

Annapolis, Maryland / Chino, California / Columbus, Georgia / Erskineville, Australia / Fayetteville, Arkansas / Granada, Spain / Greenville, Texas / Haleiwa, Hawaii / Little Rock, Arkansas / Miami, Florida / Moscow, Russia / New Orleans, Louisiana / Okinawa, Japan / Paris, France / Portland, Oregon / Seattle, Washington / Seoul, South Korea / Warsaw, Poland

I hadn't heard about this, does anybody have links to some of the original forum threads/puzzles?

Re:Darien Gap: The Most Dangerous (Absence of a) Road on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @04:16AM (#6807223)
That's weird, because searching "guerrillas" (an unambiguously nominal form of the word) in the Corpus of Contemporary English (COCA) gives me over two thousand hits!

http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

And the Oxford dictionary defines "guerrilla" as

a member of a small independent group taking part in irregular fighting, typically against larger regular forces

and gives the IPA pronunciation as /gəˈrIlə/ AKA "gorilla".

It's almost like language evolves, and borrowed words don't always retain their pronunciations... no, it couldn't be...