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User: JoshHeitzman

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Comments · 152

  1. Re:Cut taxes until the federal government collapse on DHS to Begin Collecting DNA of Anyone Arrested · · Score: 1

    No, 2% of the population holding 99% of the wealth does not sound fair.

  2. Re: Err... on African Americans and the Video Game Industry · · Score: 1

    Err, there is more power and wealth to be had for the average programmer as a non-game programmer then as game programmer. The game industry is not a path to power or riches for most who work in it (sure that isn't to say there aren't some folks who do make it big, but they are the exception not the rule). From my own personal experience there simply are not a lot of folks of African decent in the software industry at large in the US and again from my own personal experience this goes back to college. If the percentage of degrees relevant to the game industry among degree holding Americans of African decent is lower then that of degree holding Americans of Europeans decent why does it even matter?

  3. Re:It's already the law in Iowa on New York to Implement an 'Amazon Tax' · · Score: 1

    "Quite frankly, don't be surprised if new taxes like these appear all over the place. The plummeting economy and rapid devaluation of the dollar means that even states have to collect money where they can." And don't be surprised when they are overturned in federal court, since states have already tried requiring retailers, with no presence in their state, to collect sales tax. These use taxes are a result of the federal courts not allowing them to do so.

  4. Re:Reading Slashdot from Microsoft on Microsoft's New Leaf On Interoperability · · Score: 1

    I'm hadn't personally met anyone who did it while I was, nor did I personally hear about anyone doing directly it through the internal grapevine, but considering there are over 70,000 folks working at MS it wasn't very likely that I would personally know any of these folks.

  5. Reading Slashdot from Microsoft on Microsoft's New Leaf On Interoperability · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As a former Microsoft employee (worked on dev tools the entire time), I speak from personal experience when I say I never encountered a problem accessing any internet site from inside Microsoft's Redmond campus. The most annoying thing MS's IT department did was push down various updates to your machine and automatically reboot your machine after displaying a box for abot 30 minutes, but since we (at least in product development) were all admins on our box it wasn't difficult to repeatedly kill all of their processes on start-up so you could safely run long series of tests without worrying about some UI popping up to interfere with the tests or the machine being rebooted in the middle of the run.

  6. Re:Consumers Hate Change on Why Linux Doesn't Spread - the Curse of Being Free · · Score: 1

    Thanks, it's been quite a while since I tried it. I'll keep that in mind and give it a try again when it looks like they've added a new feature worth the trouble.

  7. Re:Consumers Hate Change on Why Linux Doesn't Spread - the Curse of Being Free · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why should anyone invest the time to learn a new product that doesn't do more for them then the product they are currently using? Personally, I'm still using Office 2000. I've used both Office XP and Office 2003 extensively at my prior job, but I really didn't notice the difference between 2000, XP, and 2003. I've also given OpenOffice a try. The thing that really annoyed me to no end with OpenOffice was that I could not grab the edge of my current selection in it's Excel equivalent and drag it in order do the equivalent of a cut and paste of the selection (i.e. move the selection to a new location on the spreadsheet). Apparently I do this a lot, but hadn't really noticed how frequently until I tried OpenOffice and couldn't do it. I use FireFox and Thunderbird for web and mail there so no problem there.

  8. Re:Sweet! on EU Commissioner Proposes 95 year Copyright · · Score: 5, Insightful

    People have no right to get paid for a single work for the rest of their life. Most people do not get this government privilege and I see no reason why musicians other artists should either.

  9. Indian IT salaries increasing at 2x digit rates on Young IT Workers Disillusioned, Hard to Retain · · Score: 1

    Indian IT salaries have been increasing at double digit rates for several years now, while American IT salaries have been increasing at low single digit rates. This can only go on for so it is no longer cheaper to outsource then to insource. I seem to remember one article predicting this would occur at about 2010.

  10. Some manager don't need offices on Young IT Workers Disillusioned, Hard to Retain · · Score: 1

    Indeed, many managers at the company I previously worked at were rarely in their office, as they spent most of their time in meetings in conference rooms. Course that didn't stop them from taking the biggest offices for themselves while those with least seniority were double up in standard size offices interior offices (could have quite comfortably put three people in the oversized window offices).

  11. Re:Sorry, its wrong. on FTC Offput by Offsets · · Score: 1

    Whoopee! Now instead of using ~12 times as much power as a typical Nashville home his home now only uses just ~10 times as much. So if we follow his example we can all increase our power usage by 10x. Yeah!

  12. Delicate balance? on FTC Offput by Offsets · · Score: 1

    The balance doesn't seem to be all that delicate to me. Per the chart at this page http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html . It shows both temperature and CO2 levels on a geological time scale and includes links to the sources for both sets of data that were used to create the chart. CO2 levels have been in the thousands of ppm (peaking at ~7000 ppm) for hundreds of millions of years at a time vs the hundreds of ppm we are now.

  13. Re:underwhelming on Scientists Recycle CO2 with Sunlight to Make Fuel · · Score: 1

    You may find the chart at this page interesting http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html It shows both temperature and CO2 levels on a geological time scale and includes links to the sources for both sets of data that were used to create the chart. CO2 levels have been in the thousands of ppm (peaking at ~7000 ppm) for hundreds of millions of years at a time. I definitely agree regarding government marketing a crisis so that they (and their financial backers) can solve it (profit from it).

  14. Re:Renewable not! on Scientists Recycle CO2 with Sunlight to Make Fuel · · Score: 1

    You omitted a cycle that has been working for a very long time and that cycle would be the one where plants absorb light, consume CO2, and release O2 and them something else consumes the plants and O2 and releases CO2 extracting energy from the plant matter. For billions of years that something was animals and environmentally started fires. Humans just added in human started fires and internal combustion engines to the something.

  15. Re:Doesn't make sense on Scientists Recycle CO2 with Sunlight to Make Fuel · · Score: 1

    As long as the sun is there we can grow crops that can be turned into hydrocarbon fuels, so I don't see why it is necessarily bad to be dependent on hydrocarbons.

  16. Re:underwhelming on Scientists Recycle CO2 with Sunlight to Make Fuel · · Score: 1

    Until we start building solar collectors in space that send the energy back to Earth we do have a limited supply of solar energy that is limited by the surface of the Earth. Even solar collectors in space are limited by the Sun's actual output. Other posters have raised the issue of how much space these devices take up and it is necessary to know this as well as the lifetime cost of these devices to know whether it would be more profitable to use these devices to generate liquid fuel or to use the same space to generate electricity. Calling CO2 pollution seems like propaganda to me. Animals and the Earth both produce CO2 and plants consume it. CO2 is a natural and necessary part of our environment. Even regarding total CO2 levels there is the question of whether these devices are really more efficient at turning CO2 into fuel then biofuel feedstocks that could be grown at the same location.

  17. Re:sun renewable? on Molten Salt-Based Solar Power Plant · · Score: 1

    In the second sentence of my first post on this tangent I said "A renewable resource is one that we humans can currently cause to be renewed through our own actions" so your assertion that I didn't make it clear is without merit. Also here's a common definition of renewable for you "capable of being renewed; replaceable." that appears at both http://dictionary.die.net/renewable and http://www.wordreference.com/definition/renewable

  18. Re:sun renewable? on Molten Salt-Based Solar Power Plant · · Score: 1

    I'm saying they are resources (matter not energy) that are renewable. I didn't say fuel (resource) for fusion was renewable, in fact I said we'll eventually have to seek a source other then Earth's ocean (namely gas giants). Your talking about renewable energy and I'm talking about renewable (and non-renewable) resources, which is what this tangent is about. The energy put out by the sun isn't renewable, rather it's plentiful. So plentiful that we are unable to capture the total energy output of the sun. The same goes for the heat the Earth is shedding and the energy impart to the oceans in the form of tides by the gravity of the moon and the sun. However, non of these resources are renewable by out current capabilities (e.g. we don't know how to feed a star to keep it going longer then it would naturally). If we figure out a way to extract energy from these sources faster then they are currently releasing energy, we'll deplete them before they naturally would have been depleted, but in the future we may possess the technology to capture energy from else where in the universe and renew these (re)sources of energy.

  19. Re:sun renewable? on Molten Salt-Based Solar Power Plant · · Score: 1

    The energy for the plants comes from light of course, but it doesn't have to come from the sun. Any light source emitting the appropriate wavelength(s) will do. Resource have other uses then energy such as lumber, paper, thread, drugs, etc. If we ever figure out controlled sustainable fusion we'll no longer be dependent on the sun as our primary energy source. I also didn't say that renewable resources were infinite, I merely said that we currently have the ability to replace those that we use which is something we can do for coal and oil but not for the sun.

  20. Re:sun renewable? on Molten Salt-Based Solar Power Plant · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No she was not right. A renewable resource is one that we humans can currently cause to be renewed through our own actions. For example when we harvest plants we can plant new ones in their place. Wind, hydro, and solar power all come from the sun. Tidal power comes from the moon and a lesser extent the sun. Geo-thermal comes from the earth. We humans do not currently have the ability replace the sun or increase its life span. We also do not have the ability to prevent the earth and moon from becoming tide locked. Nor do we have the ability keep the Earth from eventually growing cold. Some day we may have that ability, but it seems likely that we will have developed fusion in order to supply the energy needed to implement those capabilities in which case we won't need energy from those sources any longer and we'll be pulling the matter we need to fuel the fusion reactors from the ocean and then quite probably gas giants. It's also interesting to note that we do have the capability of creating coal from wood (i.e. charcoal) so we could replace the coal we consume, there just isn't much of a point in doing so for most electricity generation as it would be better burn the wood directly (or use the same land to produce crop that yield more useable BTUs per acre). Similarly we can create crude oil from organic matter using thermal depolymerization. Never looked into the generation of natural gas or propane, so I'm not sure if that's feasible at the moment.

  21. One Platform to rule them all on What 2008 May Hold In Store for FOSS · · Score: 1

    It would make life simpler if OpenJava and Mono were merged into one platform that retained the APIs from both platforms so libraries could be written for the merged platform and accessed from any language using the One Platform.

  22. Re:So how does this work? on WTO Awards Caribbean Country Right to Ignore US Copyright · · Score: 2, Informative

    Because its isn't a guy its a state. It also isn't property its a right created by states via treaty just as the WTO is created by states via treaty.

  23. Re:x86 cores? on Single-Chip x86 Chipsets Around the Corner? · · Score: 1

    Because they get access to new phones about a year earlier then the US because the phones are just sold as devices at retail unbundled from the carrier. In the US you have to get your phone from the carrier, so you only get it if and when they choose to offer it.

  24. Re:A slogan on Toshiba Builds Ultra-Small Nuclear Reactor · · Score: 1

    What data do you have to support this claim?

  25. Re:Sony Nanowire Batteries on Nanowires Boost Laptop Battery Life to 20 Hours · · Score: 1

    A PDA/phone can only get so small and so thin. It can only get so small because we need to be able to see what is on the screen. It can only get so thin as needs be strong enough not break in under common usage stresses (unless they can figure out how to make all of the components flexible so they won't break). Now a pure phone could be shrunk down to be just be an ear piece so long as the voice recognition software was good enough and something that small would indeed need a very small battery. The PDA screen could eventually be shrunk down to a flip up eyepiece that would attach to glasses or a headset for non-glasses wearers and that would again need a very small battery for those who don't mind talking to their computer (personally I'd still want an input system that utilized the hands or someday a direct neural jack). Both of those are form factor changes though. Phones in their current phone factor can only get so small though.