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User: laughingskeptic

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  1. The beatings will continue on Former Yahoo Employee Challenges the Legality of Yahoo's Ranking System (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    ... until morale has improved.

  2. Impossible? on Why James Hansen Is Wrong About Nuclear Power (thinkprogress.org) · · Score: 0

    Was it also impossible for the US to produce 124,000 warships during WWII? http://www.nationalww2museum.o...

  3. Cement was invented over 3000 years ago on How To Lead a Nation That's About To Be Swallowed By the Sea · · Score: 1

    Choose what to keep and build up. Their real problem is their inaccessibility and their failure to spin that as 'exclusivity'. They need a marketing guy and an invasion of rich people and pretenders in order to have the revenue needed to use their existing islands as the future foundations of some of the worlds most exclusive resorts.

  4. A clarification from the SAME authors: No net heating ... a localized atmospheric mixing effect

    scientist-debunks-misleading-coverage

  5. In Texas we have the opposite test. Only the most extremely irrational religious persons are allowed to hold public office.

  6. Snowden increased likelihood of Isis Paris attacks on Snowden Says It's Your Duty To Use an Ad Blocker (for Security) · · Score: -1, Troll

    Maybe if Snowden had not have destroyed the intelligence relationship between the US and the European governments, the Isis attack could have been prevented.

  7. Hospital networks vulnerable on It's Way Too Easy To Hack the Hospital (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    In my experience, the hospital networks are also extremely vulnerable. IT at hospitals is focused on making sure interactions with insurance go smoothly, the doctors are happy and the next remodel. They have added guest networks to appease their clientele without one thought to security. The result being you can see anything from anywhere, so not only are hospitals full of vulnerable equipment, they are full of vulnerable easily accessed equipment.

  8. Slanted PoV on Why New Antibiotics Never Come To Market (vice.com) · · Score: 2

    The article complains that "Despite their best attempts, they were unable to collect enough species (Diazona angulata) to obtain sufficient amounts of the precious chemical.". However this article omits a significant detail: a biologically active analog of diazonamide A was synthesized in 2003 AND he is listed as one of the authors. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu....

  9. $120B worth of jobs on Are Car Dealers a Business Worth Keeping? (vox.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Squeezing $120 billion of efficiency out of a $400 billion industry by largely eliminating the jobs of people who we find irritating might not be the best course of action and could put 1 million irritating people in jobs that bother us even more.

  10. Every Agency has special agents on The IRS Has Stingray Devices (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Special agents tap phones in the pursuit of legal cases. Its not that shocking that the IRS has stingrays. The FDA probably has them too. Back in the 80s I had a friend whose phone was tapped by the IRS because he was a manager for an idiot that absconded with the employee withholding and blew that money along with another million or so dollars at a strip club. It took the IRS a while to believe that the business owner really was that big of an idiot and they did a thorough investigation before deciding not to throw him in prison and just garnish his wages till the end of time.

  11. University patents funded by the public on Apple Loses Patent Suit To University of Wisconsin, Faces Huge Damages (reuters.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    These university patents are paid for by the tax-paying public, why does this no longer make them public domain?

  12. Taliban retreated to hospital on US Bombs Hit Doctors Without Borders Hospital · · Score: 1

    We attacked the Taliban at night. They retreated straight to the hospital (likely expecting a safe haven). The C-130 was tracking their movements from above and fired its computer aimed cannons on them as they retreated. Either the C-130's display was lacking the exclusion zone or in the heat of the firefight the 18 year old soldier feeding coordinates to the cannon via the infrared display (it is eerily similar to a video game) failed to notice the exclusion zone. The exclusion zone would have appeared as a transparent polygon overlay on the display. It is possible that the fight so quickly moved into the exclusion zone that the operator missed that the entire series of events was occurring inside the zone.

    Kunduz became the front line last week. The front line is not a good place for a hospital, why hadn't DWB evacuated?

  13. Duh ... parents on Houston's Gifted Education Program Biased Against Blacks and Latinos · · Score: 1

    Poor students have poor parents. Poor parents typically either do not have the interest or the time to be squeaky wheels and advocate for their children. Most children in GT are there because their parents demanded it, not because of some objective criteria.

  14. 'Choices' codeword for lack of solutions on Advance In Super/Ultra Capacitor Tech: High Voltage and High Capacity · · Score: 2

    If they had an electrolyte that worked in this application they wouldn't be talking about all the possible choices. They would tell us what worked.

    "For this solid electrolyte, we have plenty of choices. We can use gelled polymer electrolytes, made by swelling a polymer matrix with an electrolyte solution, or we can solidify ionic liquids by adding polymers or silica nanopowder. This nonleaking design, together with a virtually unlimited number of charge and discharge cycles, means that our supermicrocapacitors will likely outlast all other electronic devices on the chip. Such long life will be particularly useful whenever it is inconvenient or dangerous to open things up to replace a power source, as in pacemakers, defibrillators, and other medical implants."

    Electrical and magnet fields occur in 3 dimensions, not one. They can talk about the gap between the fingers of their layout, but their effective average gap in 3D is probably closer to PI*center_distance/2 which gives a lesser result for the expected capacitance. Their max voltage with a given electrolyte is limited to the closest edge, but that is not how a physicist would compute expected capacitance.

  15. Re:Negative pricing is huge incentive for batterie on How Wind and Politics Pushed the Price of Texas Electricity Below Zero · · Score: 1

    "Just"? Hydrogen is very inefficient to compress and not very useful uncompressed. If you react it to store it, then you have thermal losses going both directions and because hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1, anything you mix it with for storage purposes will have a relatively low energy density. Over time it turns even the hardest steels brittle and is a pain to handle. And then there is the fact that it is an explosion hazard. There is no "Just" when it comes to hydrogen.

  16. I asked Belkin about a similar issue on Bugs In Belkin Routers Allow DNS Spoofing, Credential Theft · · Score: 1

    I attempted to report a similar issue to Belkin last October via their forums and asked if they would be providing an update. They not only deleted my post, they deleted the account that I had to set up to make the post. I took that as an emphatic 'NO', there would not be an update.

  17. MF Cobol in VStudio not new on COBOL Comes To Visual Studio 2015 · · Score: 1

    Micro Focus Cobol has been available in Visual Studio since pretty much the beginning of .NET. This is just the 2015 version announcement.

  18. Egress filtering on Reflection DDoS Attacks Abusing RPC Portmapper · · Score: 2

    This attack requires spoofed IPs, yet I don't see Level3 committing to egress filtering or even mentioning egress filtering as a mitigation for this sort of attack. Why do ISPs allow bad packets to leave their network?

  19. IPs often assoc with multi-homed hosts on New IP Address Blacklist Based On Web Chatter · · Score: 1

    The problem with IPs found this way is that they are often associated with hundreds to thousands of web sites, and the bad actors shift between these backends rapidly. For instance I have seen cases where there are a few Wordpress generated sites out of thousands being used to host malware configs and updates at a single IP of a low-end hosting provider. I have seen many similar instances where the IP was associated with AWS. The most precise way to blacklist sites like this is by hostname and not by IP.

  20. Computers are just components to Navy on The US Navy's Warfare Systems Command Just Paid Millions To Stay On Windows XP · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Navy purchases computers as parts of much larger systems, often ships. These things get assembled and their expected lifetime is much longer that the technology cycles we enjoy outside of their domain. Refit schedules are not driven by the computers on board but rather by much larger, more expensive and longer lived components like diesel motors. The Navy is just in the last couple of years starting to move some of their onboard computer systems to what they refer to as "Carry On" components. There are probably ships in the fleet that have 25 year old electronics on them because these components weren't ever expected to be replaced.

  21. Appointed to Bar ethics comittee, not disbarred on Prenda Gets Hit Hard With Contempt Sanctions For Lying To Court · · Score: 1

    This says it all about lawyers, with all this shit hanging over his head, he is chosen to be the Ethic's Chair for his peers: http://www.rajhan.com/Firm-New... , http://www.mnbar.org/about-msb....

  22. Re:No thanks to you. on Writer: "Why I Defaulted On My Student Loans" · · Score: 1

    Loan defaults have nothing to do with the cost of college. It is almost the opposite, it is the availability of the loans in the first place that have raised the cost of a college education. The government has effectively made all of this money available without putting constraints on credit-hour costs or how the universities actually spend the money. Universities are money spending machines, you give them money and they will spend it. Using loans in an attempt to make college more democratically available completely backfired. This was a foreseeable economic disaster.

  23. Re:Why? on Writer: "Why I Defaulted On My Student Loans" · · Score: 4, Informative

    Until 1987 or so, the cost of college in Texas was extremely low. I was very frugal and my entire expenditures for tuition, room and board from Sept 1981 to Sept 1982 was $2500. At the time minimum wage was $3.35. A person could work a part time job (15 hours a week) and pay for this. I'll bet that most of the tuition collected by the University of Texas at the time was directly from the students or the student's parents with grants and scholarships coming next and student loans running a distant fourth. As the government made student loans more available in order to make college more available the government accomplished the opposite of the desired effect because the government ignored basic economics. Making more money available affects spending at the universities which affects costs. Universities are money spending machines. The University of Texas now has more than double improved square footage that it had in 1981. The buildings are nicer too. But the size of the student body has not increased proportionately. The university simply spends more on building and maintenance. Far more than it spends actually delivering an education. Under the current system your hard earned tax dollars are going to build monuments rather being effectively used to educate. We had a system that did the opposite quite effectively and we could have that again. Instead of being cheap with your tax dollars you should be angry with how they are being spent now.

  24. Staff notoriously underpaid on Carnegie Mellon Struggles After Uber Poaches Top Robotics Researchers · · Score: 1

    Many of these people were staff, not faculty at CMU. As a former director of a University research lab (otherwise known as a software sweatshop) I can attest that staff at universities tend to be grossly underpaid. Universities resist any staff making more money than their lower paid professors (think English, History, etc). It is all about politics and ego. A little help from LinkedIn shows some of Uber's employees former titles at CMU: Sr. Research Engineer, Graduate Student - Interaction Design, Commercialization Specialist , Senior Information Systems Specialist, Research Assistant, Senior Commercialization Specialist, Research Programmer, Graduate Research Assistant, Student, Research Assistant, Graduate Research Assistant, ...

  25. Lensing? on Four Quasars Found Clustered Together Defy Current Cosmological Expectations · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The original paper http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.0378... mentions the red-shift and spectral similarities of 3 of the observed quasars without mentioning the possibility that they may be the result of gravitational lensing by the fourth object and could possibly be millions of light years behind the 4th object.