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User: internerdj

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  1. Re:And what is the cost of a failed mission? on NASA Sticking To Imperial Units For Shuttle Replacement · · Score: 1

    As much as everyone likes to complain about government waste, when you are sitting on the other side of the money it is a different world. The guys with the purse strings are always looking to cut corners. The engineers making your tax dollars work for you have to pick which battles they fight or they may end up with no money to work with at all. Getting the true cost of not making this change up the chain is very difficult.

  2. Re:Eh sonny? on Could We Beam Broadband Internet Into Iran? · · Score: 1

    I've met plenty of people who think that if you don't have enough "general knowledge" to do everything short of change your transmission in auto-repair then you are at best wasteful. Outside of your own field of specialty you have some preconceived notion of what is "general knowledge" of a particular subject, but that is really a function of your lifetime exposure and level of hatred/enjoyment of your learning the subject up to this point. Be very careful when you set a bar that every fully-functional adult should know about a subject, even if you never express where you set that bar.

  3. Re:Flawed interpretation of the study on Blu-ray Adoption Soft, More Still Own HD DVD · · Score: 1

    I guess I'm a bit of an oddball but I have a PS3 and have yet to watch a single blu-ray movie at home. I don't intend on purchasing any movies as blu-ray in the immediate or distant future.

  4. Next on the list... on First 'Anti-Stab' Knife To Go On Sale In Britain · · Score: 1

    Lightweight cast iron skillets. Far far too many people have access to this lethal bludgeoning instrument.

  5. Re:I am just waiting for on Fertility Clinic Bows To Pressure, Nixes Eye- and Hair-Color Screening · · Score: 1

    I disagree. While certainly it would be a minority, but it is recently a very vocal minority. Imagine now there is a tool to eliminate the "problem" from the gene-pool without doing anything morally reprehensible like killing those living with those "defects." I think the attitude you see in the US population would cause the outcry to be far greater than if the public were generally accepting of such things.

    What is curious to me is how do we decide if it is a genetic flaw or a genetic flavor and is it important to force that decision on the entire world?

  6. Re:Let's not put the cart before the horse on Introducing the Warpship · · Score: 4, Funny

    How am I supposed to secure the patent if I wait until after someone else has discovered the underlying science?

  7. Re:Gravel roads are cheap but need more maintenanc on Broke Counties Turn Failing Roads To Gravel · · Score: 4, Informative

    My state was introduced to a miracle material called asphalt several years ago. Recently they realized that they were repairing the roads constantly compared to the previous concrete; the worst case being a road that had to be repaved before it was open to the public. The normal crew of paving companies is up in arms because the state is bidding out new concrete-only bids to reduce maintenance costs and the work is going out of state because no one in the state uses concrete anymore for roadwork. The problem being that the state thinks that one type of material can build every type of road imaginable, and the officials can ride the resulting fame to godhood.

  8. Designer furniture? on Solar Machine Spins Sunlight-Shaped Furniture · · Score: 1

    I've seen pieces at big lots running higher than $500.

  9. Re:OMG! on Senator Applauds Pirate Bay Trial, Chides Canada · · Score: 1

    In Alabama politics, they call that a reimbursement of expense money: http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2009/06/securities_and_exchange_commis_1.html

  10. rock or a UAV on Wired for War · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do the ethics or morality of killing people change because of the tool?

  11. Re:I have a very bad feeling about this on Online Vigilantes, Or "Crowdsourced Justice" · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The examples in the article didn't even need that much. It could have been as few as a few hundred who tracked these people down and the results were the targets losing their reputations, jobs, etc. It is a scary scary thought indeed. Every reasonable human should always keep in their mind that if they wish to be treated above average as a majority, they must accept being treated equally below average when they are the minority. If you wouldn't want to lose the amount of life/liberty/pursuit of happiness you want to push on someone else, then you shouldn't try.

  12. Re:It's great! ...until... on Online Vigilantes, Or "Crowdsourced Justice" · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ooops. Sorry we killed an innocent man. We'll get it right next time. The reason we have (admittedly a very broken) justice system is the crowd is not at all capable of making reasonable and consistent judgments on the guilt and severity of a crime. The crowd doesn't demand punishment for the guilty; the crowd demands a scapegoat in retribution for a wrong whether the guilty party can be reached or not(Sorry Iraq).

  13. Re:I have a very bad feeling about this on Online Vigilantes, Or "Crowdsourced Justice" · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I also have a very bad feeling about this. If it is ok for kitten killers then it will be ok for whatever topic X society doesn't like as long as there is enough of society to make an impact in their personal lives.

  14. Re:On mecha, and exoskeletons on DIY 18-ft.-High Robotic Exoskeleton · · Score: 1

    I'm curious if a legged transport might provide more versatility than a wheelchair. It doesn't make sense to cruise to K-Mart in a legged vehicle but for dealing with more rugged terrain or say stairs legs make more sense. The problem I see is we want to make exoskeleton's in our own image. Fine it is a cool technical problem to get a biped to walk but four legs seems to be a fairly stable model in nature and has fewer balance issues. The issue would then be figuring out how to best conserve energy. Practically the energy expended should be lifting the much lighter legs and shifting pairs of legs between active and locked positions.

  15. naked eye? on One Fifth of World's Population Can't See Milky Way At Night · · Score: 1

    I can barely seen the moon with my naked eyes much less the stars. Now if I put my glasses on...oh wait the article is about light pollution isn't it?

  16. Re:But they're so much less easy to use on California To Move To Online Textbooks · · Score: 1

    I would guess since the state is sponsoring the books then it is K-12. We were never allowed to write in the K-12 texts because they would replace the texts with writing in them and it was expensive.

  17. Re:Selection unfairness. on 11-Year-Old Graduates With Degree In Astrophysics · · Score: 1

    Glad you live in one of the top states on the education totem poll. My state is incredibly inept at managing the power it has over education already with federal oversight, and even as a practicing Christian I would dread to see what they would be taught in "science" class.

  18. Re:Selection unfairness. on 11-Year-Old Graduates With Degree In Astrophysics · · Score: 1

    You mean grades 9-12 didn't last 5-6 years? It sure felt like it... Actually in the absence of a middle school, a "high school" may house students from 7-12th despite the 7th and 8th graders not actually being called high schoolers...

  19. Re:Selection unfairness. on 11-Year-Old Graduates With Degree In Astrophysics · · Score: 1

    I've got to say that in High School nothing pissed me off more than finding one of my peers had found a way to advance more rapidly than the rest of the class, and I didn't even know the opportunity existed until someone had won it. I took every academic opportunity that I had access to and there were a handful of people who got more because they had a special relationship with the administration. I probably could have done community college at 6th grade, most definitely by the time I hit high-school. I think there are a lot of people out there that could handle that; the problem is if the smart kids go off to magnet schools or college before high school then you screw up the whole test scores metric.

  20. Re:Yay! on First Look At Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 · · Score: 1

    I don't know I do pretty well sometimes with ctrl-c and ctrl-v and a couple of other keystrokes.

  21. Re:ATM != desktop computer on Cybercriminals Refine ATM Data-Sniffing Software · · Score: 1

    Either way there is a problem that someone is physically breaking open the ATM box or remotely accessing the box and it isn't throwing up any type of alarm or even logging the access. I have a big box of money and there isn't at the very least some way of knowing when it has been opened or remotely accessed? If someone is tampering with the box it needs to be taken down and serviced. It isn't that hard to clone the drive when you service the ATM and do a compare if tampering occurs. It isn't like they could hide code in with the customer data because the box is really going to have one section of data that is changing and it should have a pretty standard format. If I knew for sure my bank was pulling crap like that then I wouldn't bank there.

  22. Re:EMP Testing on Could a Meteor Have Brought Down Air France 447? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Car travel, by contrast, is largely mundane.
    I don't know about that. I'm often largely impressed while driving by how innately our ability to control objects moving far faster than we would ever be able to achieve in these squishy shells. It is quite amazing to me that we have evolved the ability to react to things moving far faster than any remote situation that we would ever run into in nature. With modern nutrition the best of the best barely brake 20 mph for short distances, and fast predators are not that much faster. Even heading towards each other we have little need to react at 200+ mph relative speeds but we do have that ability. Not only that we have the ability to control a vehicle as if it were just another leg with relatively little training.
    In rush hour it can definitely get mundane, but if you step back and think what wonderful things our brains are then it becomes very interesting indeed.

  23. Re:all-your-code-is-ours on One Approach To Open Source Code Contribution and Testing · · Score: 1

    I think I see the root of the problem here. I'm a salaried employee. As a salaried employee, my time is not bound to normal working hours. Theoretically that means I have to work till my tasks are done (sidenote: theoretically that should also mean that I should be able to leave work if my tasks are done despite not having worked a full traditional work week.) Companies have lately taken to this notion to mean salaried employees are essentially always on the clock. That means a company can hang you with a blackberry and require you to have it with you at all times, a company can ask you to sign an agreement saying any work you do during your employment period with the company is the company's work if they are interested in it, in some extreme cases companies have tried to regulate their employees activities outside of work either to save on health care or keep them from bad-mouthing the company online. All of these are overstepping what was the original intention of salaried employees, that is to save the company money by not having to pay overtime to guys who are solving really tough problems regularly.
    In short: Do be aware of such pushes into your actual life. Fight when you have the leverage to do so. Complain on /. when you don't. Have a nice day.

  24. Re:anonymous coward wants slice of first post mark on Publishers Want a Slice of Used Game Market · · Score: 1

    GM or Ford said that they want a cut of all used car sales?
    Actually the auto-industry got it right. They added value to the used car sales by doing a certified inspection. If I go and buy a used car from say the local Ford dealership, I know that they have run it through their shop to make sure all the pieces are there. If I go and buy through my local classifieds I have to pony up that cost, find a mechanic that I can trust, arrange for the seller to get the car to that mechanic (if the seller even agrees). The problem is that the publisher can't really add value to a used game without screwing their original purchasers...

  25. Re:all-your-code-is-ours on One Approach To Open Source Code Contribution and Testing · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Also on an interesting note, I had to sign an all-your-creative-work-are-belong-to-us agreement for my employer. When I went back for my Master's Degree my agreement to the student handbook essentially said all my submitted work was the school's property. Contractually I don't think I had the right to sign over those works to the school because I've already signed them over to my company. I wonder how that works for TurnItIn.com. Theoretically they now have materials in their database that I never had the rights to give them and my company could legally demand those materials be purged. Sure it won't happen and would put me in a legal bind I'm sure but it is interesting.