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User: Gavagai80

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  1. Re:Why roll your own distro? on Munich Open Source Switch 'Completed Successfully' · · Score: 2

    Because creating a linux distro based on a popular distro is easy -- individuals do it in their spare time -- and a city is bound to want a different set of packages installed than any particular distro will have by default. It presumably saves them a lot of time [and thus money] not having to separately install programs on each computer, by including them in the distro.

  2. Re:That is what we need to terraform Mars! on Newly Discovered Greenhouse Gas Is 7,000 Times More Powerful Than CO2 · · Score: 1

    You can't terraform Mars, but terraforming a small domed area of Mars with greenhouse gasses so that it doesn't require mechanical heating might be feasible. Will still have to do something about the soil.

  3. Re:The issue has moved to the Internet on A Year After Ban On Loud TV Commercials: Has It Worked? · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't mind hulu much, except they show the exact same ad about 10 times in the same show. The repetition drives me crazy.

  4. Re:TV at negative extra charge on A Year After Ban On Loud TV Commercials: Has It Worked? · · Score: 1

    As a comcast cable internet subscriber, I can assure you that they would charge me a lot of money to get cable TV. They would of course phrase it as thought it were a savings, because their wonderful triple play values would reduce my internet cost to $33 a month... while making me pay for $66 a month of stuff I don't want.

  5. Re:No complaints here on A Year After Ban On Loud TV Commercials: Has It Worked? · · Score: 1

    The number of smug people continues to grow, but the degree of smugness for the small number of TVless people in 2000 was higher. It's getting too mainstream. I, for one, have felt my level of smugness about my lack of TV decline in recent years.

  6. Re:genesis of life on Mars Rover Curiosity Finds Ancient Lakebed · · Score: 1

    We don't know when life started on earth. It may well have started before the late heavy bombardment. There simply aren't any rocks surviving from that time to check.

  7. Re:Pumping more efficient than desalination? on Scientists Discover Huge Freshwater Reserves Beneath the Ocean · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Since all of this water is along the continental shelf and is fresh water only because it used to be above sea level, deep water rigs are obviously not involved.

  8. Re:They are scared on Diet Drugs Work: Why Won't Doctors Prescribe Them? · · Score: 1

    They're scared of the liability for the 218th side effect they didn't mention in the commercial. That's why they list the 217, to try to avoid liability for those.

  9. Re:Redundant and weird. on FTC Drops the Hammer On Maker of Location-Sharing Flashlight App · · Score: 1

    I'm assuming the ad networks only send IP location data (not very accurate, generally only gives the nearest big city and is often off by hundreds of miles) while the app sends GPS data.

  10. Re:What a great man on Nelson Mandela Dead At 95 · · Score: 1

    Mandela wasn't so much an anti-capitalist as an opportunistic ally of the communist opposition which was the best chance to fight apartheid. The communists had the local organization and the big international support and weapons smuggling from the USSR, so they were his obvious hope -- he never took a strong position on economic systems, ending apartheid was his priority before worrying about anything else.

  11. Re:What a great man on Nelson Mandela Dead At 95 · · Score: 1

    The Nazis were elected as the largest party (though only about a third of votes) a couple of times fairly, before they started rigging elections.

  12. Re:too short a time on NASA Will Send Seeds to the Moon In 2015 · · Score: 1

    Oops, self-correction after finally reading one of the linked articles: "Plants do most of their respiration at night, so keeping them in constant sunlight means they're unable to exhale." So unless they use arctic-specific plants they need a night. I'd think heating and cooling would be the biggest problem really on the moon.

  13. Re:too short a time on NASA Will Send Seeds to the Moon In 2015 · · Score: 1

    You don't want artificial nights, plants are quite happy with an arctic summer.

  14. Re:Why is the serpent always portrayed incorrectly on Google Is Building a Way To Launch Chrome Apps Without Installation · · Score: 3, Funny

    Since it's Genesis 3:14, representing pi, we can gather that the serpent's original shape was circular. What comes to mind when you think circular? The google chrome logo of course! The fall of humanity was caused by Adam being tempted by chrome to click the devil's ephemeral app link on his apple macbook. The proof is all there.

  15. Re:Gosh.... on New Windows XP Zero-Day Under Attack · · Score: 1

    Ramping up? There's been news about an XP exploit every week since XP was released in 2001.

  16. Re:Healthcare on Computer Model Reveals Escape Plan From Poverty's Vicious Circle · · Score: 3

    It is of course completely false both in implication and fact. The implication is that the poorest 47% don't pay income tax, which is blatantly false as even people below the federal poverty line pay federal income tax (I know, I was one last year, there was still a few hundred in federal tax and no I'm not confusing it with the separate social security tax). If 47% don't pay, it must be mostly wealthy people. But in fact, everyone pays sales tax and wealthy people pay property tax so there's nobody not paying any kind of tax into the system, from the homeless to Bill Gates.

  17. Re:I guess I'm just a bad consumer on Ask Slashdot: Top Black Friday Tech Picks? · · Score: 1

    I'm less monetarily lucky than about 70% of Americans and I don't see anything particularly worth buying either. I've got a computer, two LCDs, a smartphone and a tablet (all of which together probably summed $600). What would I do with another gadget? It's perplexing how people manage to spend so much for so little.

  18. Re:Validates what your home ec teacher said on Online Shopping: Hazardous To Junk Food's Health · · Score: 1

    Considering specials in the decision is important, people who shop from a list may spend more because they buy what's on their list instead of what's on sale.

  19. Re:Validates what your home ec teacher said on Online Shopping: Hazardous To Junk Food's Health · · Score: 2

    Takes all the fun out of grocery shopping. I've tried online grocery shopping and it's really boring, plus you can't check the expiration dates or visible freshness on what you're putting in your cart. I prefer to go to the store when I'm hungry without a list and decide what to get on impulse, which makes it fun. But I'm also sane, so I limit my impulses to the things that are cheap and only spend about $150/mo on groceries.

    I'd do almost any other sort of shopping online, but there's no substitute for actually seeing and smelling food. And it's a boring life if you just eat off a list without the ability to notice something new and interesting.

  20. Re:bad stats on 23% of IT Workers Spend Thanksgiving With Coworkers · · Score: 1

    As an atheist with a family of atheists and agnostics, I've always celebrated thanksgiving and never heard anyone suggest it was religious.

  21. Re:Learn JS and compete with $2/hr developers on If You Want To Code From Home, Learn JavaScript · · Score: 1

    You're doing your taxes horribly wrong if your net income comes out lower. Self-employment tax is a straight percentage of your income, it's impossible to make less net with more gross because of it.

  22. Considering he had no way of knowing if he'd make it to his destination when he got on the plane out of Hong Kong -- and in fact he didn't since he wasn't planning on his destination being Russia -- it makes no sense for him to have kept any more info under wraps. As a matter of personal safety (why hold on to something that gives the USA reason to assassinate you and Russia reason to torture it out of you?) as well as a matter of ensuring that info would be able to get out, he needed to transfer all info to others before leaving Hong Kong.

  23. Re:Somewhat Unnerving on Mozilla's 2012 Annual Report: 90% of Revenue Came From Google · · Score: 1

    It's disturbing that you haven't figured out how to change your default search engine.

  24. Re:An enviable position on Mozilla's 2012 Annual Report: 90% of Revenue Came From Google · · Score: 1

    Google is giving away the Android OS in the same way that Mozilla is giving away Firefox OS. Both OSes are free.

  25. Re:Missing the point on Mozilla's 2012 Annual Report: 90% of Revenue Came From Google · · Score: 1

    It wouldn't pay once everybody changed the search engine to google as their first action after installing the browser.