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User: gnick

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  1. FU, make some good music and I might buy it.

    If you think that no piece of music available is "good" enough to buy, the problem may not be with the music.

  2. Re:So What on CDC: 1 In 10 Adult Deaths In US Caused By Excessive Drinking · · Score: 1

    "I do not care" directly translates to "I will not try to force".

    Really? I can honestly say that I don't care if you want to eat a fat-laden meal when you get home from work today instead of a healthy salad. I hope that goes both ways - 'Cuz I might want one too. And if I catch somebody smoking a cigarette, I probably won't be the guy with a squirt gun wetting it out.

    Did you proof-read your post? I won't force you to retract it, but really I don't much care. Try again.

    Otherwise, they are not fundamentally different. "I do not care" directly translates to "I will not try to force".

  3. Re:Weed still impairs you on CDC: 1 In 10 Adult Deaths In US Caused By Excessive Drinking · · Score: 1

    Both studies illustrate the same problem and it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see the solution.

    Ban trees.

  4. Re:So What on CDC: 1 In 10 Adult Deaths In US Caused By Excessive Drinking · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "I don't care if you live or die" is fundamentally different than "I won't try to force my perception of healthy living on you".

  5. Re:we're already close to that! on New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel · · Score: 4, Funny

    You have to stop? Gatorade bottles grant the full cycle of hydration (just don't mix up the fresh and used.)

  6. Re:waste of time on New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel · · Score: 2

    Do I really need to haul around a backup camera?

    Well, if you remove that plus the equipment it takes to integrate it into the existing display, you've just saved enough weight to bring a burrito with you on your trip. As long as it's not a big burrito. You could save more weight by driving barefoot. Or naked even. And run some laps first to shed water weight.

    I really think that if we're to the point where we're worrying about single grams, we've gone too far.

  7. Re:waste of time on New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel · · Score: 1

    Not zero over zero. A small amount of power will be used, even if it's just powering the radio or infinitesimal internal battery discharge or fuel evaporation/degradation. That energy will be made up using gas. If two identical cars are idling and one has just been jump-started with a dead battery while the other is fully charged, the jump-started car will burn very slightly more fuel.

    So, it's zero over an infinitesimal amount = Zero.

  8. Re:time or not on Is Time Moving Forward Or Backward? Computers Learn To Spot the Difference · · Score: 0

    It doesn't even have to do that. I just watched 180 YouTube videos and guessed that they were all moving forward. I blew that 80% number out of the water.

  9. Re: Your taxes at work on A Physicist Says He Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest With 1,000-Foot Walls · · Score: 1

    ...people too lazy to walk 1000km around it...

    I would walk 500 km, and I would walk 500 more, just to be the man who walked 1,000 km...

  10. Re:Thanks for pointing out the "briefly" part. on Half of Germany's Power Supplied By Solar, Briefly · · Score: 2

    Simply solved: Just ban people from turning on their lights when it's dark.

  11. Re:Wow on The Profoundly Weird, Gender-Specific Roots of the Turing Test · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have one wife, one ex-wife, one mother, one step-mother, one sister, one step-daughter, and more non-immediate female relationships/acquaintances than I care to enumerate. ANYONE could fake a woman in a chat with me, because from experience, I have no idea what to expect.

  12. Re:Twas Ever Thus on Cisco Spending Millions of Dollars Secretly Purchasing New Juniper Products · · Score: 1

    I'd also guess that the VAR resells Cisco as well as Juniper, and probably supplies Juniper with Cisco's kit as well.

    Which to me seems reasonable. It's not like one or the other is going to run to the patent office and declare that they'd like to patent a new implementation they've developed, but refuse to disclose what it is or how it works.

    When two companies are in similar lines, everybody generally comes out ahead when one knows what the other is up to.

  13. Re:Added benefit on NYC Considers Google Glass For Restaurant Inspections · · Score: 1

    I think it is silly to say that sanitation and health inspections are unnecessary.

    They are unnecessary. They're incredibly useful and prevent many illnesses some of which could be fatal, but if I was dying of dehydration, I'd drink water regardless of what it was tainted with - Similar for food. The WHO can give you stats on malnutrition/starvation around the world. This is NYC, where many people eat very well and many people eat what others throw away. If I go to a restaurant, I expect to be served sanitary food (usually - unless I intentionally walk into some dive where it could damned well be stray cat meat, but I at least know ahead of time what to expect.)

    This is really just presenting a method for maintaining some kind of level metric for those inspections. So whatever standard these restaurants are being held to is based on what they're actually doing rather than bribes/negligent inspectors/etc. So, when I go in, I know whether I'm getting properly prepared food-stuffs or something that may or may not send me to the ICU.

  14. Re:Added benefit on NYC Considers Google Glass For Restaurant Inspections · · Score: 1

    The funny thing is, living in Europe, and then living in Asia I can tell you most of the world does not have the same very very high standards of the US

    I'm not sure where you are (I'm in New Mexico, where you can find questionable food all over - Some of it delicious.) When in Vienna a little over 12 years ago, they'd just gotten their first McDonald's. It took YEARS to get approved to open and eventually reached an agreement - They could open, but had to post signs at the entrance in (at least 3 - I'm thinking German, English, French) several languages that said "The beef served in this establishment does not meet Austrian standards for human consumption." You'd think that would dissuade people who turn their noses up at bakeries who only bake once or twice a day, but the line was around the block.

    My Laotian relatives regularly ingest unprocessed cow blood (for special occasions) without consequences and, if the infomercials I saw as a kid are to be believed, Ethiopians will happily stab their siblings for a rotten lima bean. Everything's relative.

    People around here seem to love menudo, but I can't swallow that tripe.

  15. Re:Why water? on 3D Display Uses Misted Water · · Score: 1

    Yeah that's why they use it in so many asthma inhalers and electronic cigarette fluids and lots of other things intended to be ingested.

    So that implies that those are non-toxic? Ethyl alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, cough syrup, and countless others are meant to be ingested too - But that doesn't imply zero toxicity. Drink a couple of fifths of vodka with a bottle of percoset and tell me in the morning whether those ingestables had any toxicity.

  16. Re:People like this need to be put into the stocks on The Graffiti Drone · · Score: 1

    Depends on the target. Personally, I wouldn't so much mind these vandals white-washing road-side billboards. The casino light displays can be darned near blinding when driving at night or early in the morning. A fresh coat of paint would be an illegal public service.

  17. Re:For the Swarm! on The Graffiti Drone · · Score: 1

    Which would mean a dozen nozzles .. The recoil .. I'd be surprised if they can achieve any form of art unless there is some AI component involved.

    Building an "inverted pendulum" is a pretty common engineering school assignment. Not too sophisticated, but neat and far more complicated than simply compensating for propulsion from spray paint.

  18. Re:Sex discrimination. on Google: Teach Girls Coding, Get $2,500; Teach Boys, Get $0 · · Score: 1

    Random? Bummer... I'm going to get in serious trouble when I stick that $5 in an ugly little boy's diaper...

  19. Re:Sex discrimination. on Google: Teach Girls Coding, Get $2,500; Teach Boys, Get $0 · · Score: 2

    If I chose to go to a strip club, I would feel appropriate tipping the (female) dancers but not the (male) bouncers with my privately owned dollars.

    At the same time, I had to foot every dollar for college because I was neither a minority, female, the son of impoverished parents, nor Christian and thus ineligible for the private scholarships. And despite being at the very top of the class, I wasn't eligible for the government ones either.

    I'm not even sure which side I'm arguing for.

  20. Re:Glitterboyz on the way on Navy Debuts New Railgun That Launches Shells at Mach 7 · · Score: 2

    Yeah - Go pedantics! Big can be size, weight, importance, etc... Knee-jerking "big"=="size" is like saying that the "shortest" route home means plowing through walls, cars, etc, rather than going to my car and taking the "quickest" route home. Yes, "fast" is "speed", but when you're referencing F=ma, I think that "getting something big to move fast" implies changing the velocity of a given mass. How close to Kindergarten do we need to get?

    Well, I'm arguing with an AC on an article a day old that will probably never be read. Maybe a day of Kindergarten is what we all need.

  21. Re:Glitterboyz on the way on Navy Debuts New Railgun That Launches Shells at Mach 7 · · Score: 2

    F=MA. M = big, A = very fast, therefore F = big very fast!

    So, teaching in current mathematics has come to this?

    We're doomed.

    If somebody asks whether accelerating a 23-lb mass to Mach 7 would push the thing accelerating it backward, we may have to go back to F=ma. And defining m=big and a=very fast seems appropriate. So, yeah, F=big very fast. Not perfect grammar, but at least it paints a picture for our friend who has yet to hear of Newton.

  22. Re:It's a job, not private life on LA Police Officers Suspected of Tampering With Their Monitoring Systems · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's how I see it. If I'm at home, don't monitor me. If I'm accessing a vault full of cash, OK maybe. If I'm flying an armed fighter jet, I won't object too hard if they want to track me every time I go off course and engage my weapons.

  23. Re:here's how stupid this is on AMD Unveils the Liquid-Cooled, Dual-GPU Radeon R9 295X2 At $1,500 · · Score: 1

    Exactly - Pretty much everything is air-cooled. Even the frion in your fridge. It's just that it's easier to circulate some things than others.

  24. Re:I've worked with many Russians... on Evidence Aside, FBI Says Russians Out To Steal Ideas From US Tech Firms · · Score: 1

    The Chinese produce at least some very adequate imitations of foreign inventions, but the quality is inconsistent unless you're looking very closely at it. The French openly admit copying tech from the US (and presumably others). The Chinese may not openly admit to copying foreign designs, but it's readily apparent. I have no reason to believe that US companies don't have similar practices. And that counts double when it comes to military. As for a solution, I wish I had a friendly one, but practically the Chinese seem to be doing it right. Copying is cheap, manufacturing is cheap, inventing is expensive.

  25. A good number of people believing in something makes that thing valuable, not right. CDs reproduce sound more accurately than vinyl, but not necessarily the "same". I'm not an elite violinist and calling myself even an amateur cellist, guitarist, or pianist would be an insult to anyone who could adequately play. BUT, I've done "acoustic" analysis on measurements orders of magnitude beyond human hearing and can quantitatively determine the difference between produced "sounds". When you want a medium to produce exactly what you make it produce, that can almost certainly be matched by modern engineering. When you want to measure the "color" of sound or some other metric that can't be reproduced except by the perception of the recipient, it's entirely a matter of choice.

    Which is better - Blue Oyster Cult played near the pain threshold on vinyl on tube amps or Tchaikovsky sampled at 48 kHz played by a master orchestra on $300 noise-cancelling headphones? It's entirely up to the listener and if somebody wants to pay a premium for one over the other, that's exactly what it's worth. Personally, I like both.