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User: nedlohs

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  1. Don't bother, they are clearly a moron on Ask Slashdot: How To Inform a Non-Techie About Proposed Copyright Laws · · Score: 1

    Seriously.

    Here we have an example of a Hong Kong based company with German and Dutch executives living in New Zealand. It was completely shutdown under the existing rules.

    And somehow that means they need new powers? Because the existing ones aren't enough?!?

  2. Re:Not a family man? on Maine Senator Wants Independent Study of TSA's Body Scanners · · Score: 3

    It's a zero sum game.

    Unless your wife flies multiple times a week or lives/works in a likely "use a passenger plane as a missile" target then it would be much better (in a purely selfish existance) to not spend it on the TSA. Instead spend it on medical research, or road safety, or funding medical checkups, or any of thousands of other things that are far more likely to save their life.

    Even if you do fly every day and spend all the time you aren't flying in a famous sky scraper you'd still be better off seeing the money spent on preventing the other things that are orders of magnitude more likely to shorten your life/reduce your quality of life.

    So no the premise isn't wrong. By spending the money on that you are deciding not to spend it on something else. And that something else is *far* more likely to "save your life".

  3. Re:No global warming in the past decade? WTF? on Don't Worry About Global Warming, Say 16 Scientists in the WSJ · · Score: 1

    Just how bad are the clocks you are using when recording temperature readings?

  4. Re:No global warming in the past decade? WTF? on Don't Worry About Global Warming, Say 16 Scientists in the WSJ · · Score: 1

    How about the fact that they are all in the past decade.

    You include both 1998 and 2010. Those are 12 years apart. What amazing definition of decade are you using?

  5. Re:Happens all the time. on Zynga Accused of Cloning Hit Indie iPhone Game Tiny Tower · · Score: 1

    That's a great source!

    Do you ask the CEO of Ford whether that Toyota car you are thinking about getting is any good?

  6. Re:Hmmm on Amateur UAV Pilot Exposes Texas River of Blood · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    this one.

  7. No way! on AT&T Caps Netflix Streaming Costs At $68K/Yr · · Score: 1

    If you are going to use lots of data then an unlimited plan is better than a metered plan. Who would have thunk?

    It's almost like if you plan on spending 24 hours a day at the gym a monthly membership would be cheaper than day passes.

  8. Re:Meh... on Huge Freshwater Bulge In Arctic Ocean · · Score: 1

    insignificant change and "will not change" are not the same thing.

  9. Re:Meh... on Huge Freshwater Bulge In Arctic Ocean · · Score: 1

    Because sea level is the only that matters in the world?

    And fresh water ice cubes floating in a glass of salt water will change the level of the water when they melt. By an insignificant amount, but still a tiny bit.

  10. And you thought episode 1 was bad... on Star Wars Uncut Project Complete · · Score: 1

    Turns out in relative terms not so much.

  11. Re:Not Surprise for MegaUpload on Megaupload Drops Lawsuit Against Universal Music · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There are lots of people under the jurisdiction of US law who aren't US citizens. So no you didn't fix it.

  12. Re:He deserves it on Indonesian Man Faces Five Years For Atheist Facebook Post · · Score: 1

    So what are the two or three countries you originally claimed then? And where did you pull the stats to get them from?

  13. Re:What's the advantage? on A Data Center That Looks Like a Mansion · · Score: 1

    But the goal isn't to reduce construction costs - and in fact they don't mind increasing them. The goal is to reduce the running costs.

  14. Re:He deserves it on Indonesian Man Faces Five Years For Atheist Facebook Post · · Score: 1

    http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_225_report_en.pdf

    If you take not picking "believe there is a God" in that then you have all of these with more than half:
    Estonia
    Czech Republic
    Sweden
    Denmark
    Norway
    Netherlands
    France
    Latvia
    Slovenia
    United Kingdom
    Iceland
    Bulgaria
    Finland
    Belgium
    Hungary
    Luxemburg
    Germany
    Switzerland
    Lithuania

  15. Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. on How the US Lost Out On iPhone Work · · Score: 1

    Except that importing without matching exports will drive your currency down in value relative to those you are importing from. Simple supply and demand, every import you do means (since they want to get their own curency to spend, etc) your currency is sold and their bought, every export you do does the reverse.

    Of course if you convince the rest of the world to just take your currency anyway and provide them with some mechanism to reverse that supply and demand issue you can mitigate that supply and demand. You could, for example, offer to borrow large amounts of it which means instead of converting it all to their currency they'll keep some in yours and hand it back to you.

    If you pull off that amazing swindle then you might be able to hold off the currency devaluation that would fix the problem - of course that would destroy your economy in the long term by putting it in the situation you describe I guess...

  16. Re:hmm on Chevy Volt Passes Safety Investigation · · Score: 1

    because battery technology hasn't changed at all in the last 100 years. Not at all!

    I take you use a horse pulled cart still? After all the very they were clearly superiour to the first automobiles, and since apparently technology never changes in your universe...

  17. Re:education is only useful for jobs on Study Analyzes Recent Grads' Unemployment By Major · · Score: 1

    But it's for a limited time period and has a reward at the end.

    If you are getting the education in order to get a job then you are trading off hard work now for either less hard work later or more money for a similar level of work later. If you are getting the education just for the sake of knowledge then going part time on it should be fine if you don't think the sacrifice if worth the benefit.

    It's similar to scrimping and saving to buy whatever the big ticket item you want is - you sacrifice things now (eating cheaper food, not going out to dinner/movies/etc, not buying that new video game, etc) so that you can then buy that thing later.

    Of course some people would rather pay more the item (via interest) by putting it on their credit card now - it's a simple cost/benefit the cost of the intererst is worth the benefit of having the item earlier to some people.

  18. Re:Lesson 1 on Man Charged With Stealing Code From Federal Reserve Bank · · Score: 1

    Woops...

    I do that all the time since I gre up with a lot more exposure to BHP as a name than BP - and fingers seem to add that H without my brain noticing...

  19. Re:I'd start by shooting the Captain.... on What To Do With a 1,000 Foot Wrecked Cruise Ship? · · Score: 1

    No we aren't.

    We are talking about a ship captain who abandoned ship for a life boat before all the passengers had been evacuated from his crashed ship. And comparing that with a plane captain who made sure there were no passengers left behind before he abandoned his crashed plane. Of course you can't personally check a cruise ship for people given the size of the thing.

    There was no mention or of nationality playing any role at all - well until you added the anti-american bigotry of course.

  20. Re:Ya know.. on Police Investigate Offensive Wi-Fi Network Name · · Score: 2

    So basically you've decided that that line is somewhere on this side of racism?

  21. Re:hrm... on Launch Your Own Nanosatellite Into Space · · Score: 1

    A lot more since that's very different from LEO.

    Significantly more if your chosen location isn't on the equator - changing the rotational axis of the Earth is going to take a great deal of effort, it might be cheaper to just change the laws of physics...

  22. Re:Lesson 1 on Man Charged With Stealing Code From Federal Reserve Bank · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So if the Federal Reserve doesn't "issue money" can you explain the word issue in:

    Federal reserve notes, to be issued at the discretion of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for the purpose of making advances to Federal reserve banks through the Federal reserve agents as hereinafter set forth and for no other purpose, are authorized.

    - US Code, Title 12 Chapter 3 Subchapter XII Section 411 - http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/12/411.html

    Or are you just sticking to a technically that the Board isn't the Fed, so the Microsoft Board of Directors doesn't count as Microsoft for example.

    Or that having the power to direct something to be done isn't the same as doing it - so that whole gulf oil thing a while back has isn't BHPs problem after all they just told their contractors and employees to do it.

  23. Re:Outside intervention? on Multicellular Life Evolves In Months, In a Lab · · Score: 1

    They don't give a time frame so how can you claim they proposed one.

    """
    Although known transitions to complex multicellularity, with clearly differentiated cell types, occurred over millions of years (9, 33), we have shown that the first crucial steps in the transition from unicellularity to multicellularity can evolve remarkably quickly under appropriate selective conditions.
    """

    Doesn't say it did occur in a short time frame, just that apparently it can. And "remarkably quickly" when you are talking about millions of years doesn't mean "short time frame". All they seem to be saying is that there doesn't need to be a big increase in genome complexity to get the shift and hence it doesn't need lots of time if you happen to have selective pressure for it.

  24. Re:Outside intervention? on Multicellular Life Evolves In Months, In a Lab · · Score: 1

    No shit, sherlock.

    They aren't claiming the multicellular life evolved in 2 months way back when. In fact you've have to be a drooling moron to think they would.

    We could also study the effects of compund X on mice, by observing mice in nature for a few hundred years and seeing what happens to the ones that just happen to eat some of compound X. Or we could put some mice in cadges and feed them compound X and speed up the process a tad.

    The whole idea of "natural selection" is that something is doing the "selecting". It could be a prey-predator arms race, it could the environment (average temperatures dropped, etc), and so on.

    So rather than observing yeast for a hundreds of years and hoping that some random occurance would see something that favours "clumps" of cells over individual cells they speed up the process.

  25. Re:How about... on PS4: What Sony Should and Shouldn't Do · · Score: 1

    They got over 3 years of a system with no mod chips and essentially no piracy. Once they killed otherOS is was just a few months and you could play "backup" games on a ps3 (just like you have been able to on an xbox 360 for years).

    That seems like a benefit too me.