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User: jafac

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  1. Re:Land of the free on Reaction To the Sony Hack Is 'Beyond the Realm of Stupid' · · Score: 1

    Exactly.

    And if NK wanted to REALLY threaten Sony; they'd just assassinate Seth Rogan. Seems like the easiest and most sensible thing to do. Seriously. The rest of this just makes no fucking sense at all.

  2. Re:Unbelievable! on Denmark Makes Claim To North Pole, Based On Undersea Geography · · Score: 1

    he idea of moving the population to local cities where they can use public transportation especially in less dense areas like the United States, just won't happen. If you tell the population that they need to move from their houses which they have put a lot of money in, and live in an area the matches how they want to live and go to a crowed loud crime ridden city, will cause a lot of people to put a gun to your face, whether or not it is legal to have guns.

    bah. Worked out well for Stalin, didn't it?

  3. Re:Move to a gated community on Waze Causing Anger Among LA Residents · · Score: 1

    People are still moving to the central valley and commuting to jobs on the coast

    Why are there only jobs on the coast?

    I think this is the real root of the problem. Everybody wants to cram into (for example) Silicon Valley - because it's where the best paying, most stable jobs are. Why can't these employers employ workers elsewhere. I've actually worked for a company that tried that tactic. Guess what? During hard times, (or mergers), they tend to shut remote sites down, and the workers are laid off or uprooted.

    But yeah - a lot of problems would be resolved if employment were more distributed.

  4. Re:Standard M.O. on How the NSA Is Spying On Everyone: More Revelations · · Score: 1

    This is because America is without responsible civilians. Or non-civilians, for that matter.

  5. Re:What a shock on Is Chernobyl Still Dangerous? Was 60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda? · · Score: 1

    The cleanup will consist of getting those bioconcentrating mushrooms to grow across the contaminated region, then harvesting and isolating them as nuclear waste.

    Well, that sounds cost-effective. I'm sure the shareholders will be pleased. Unless they're not on the hook for this cost, and we taxpayers are.

  6. Re:What a shock on Is Chernobyl Still Dangerous? Was 60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda? · · Score: 1

    Does not the fuel, inside the wreckage of the reactor building, continually produce new I-131, Cs-134, Cs-137, Sr-90, Radon, Xenon, and a host of others? The fuel is no longer critical, but fission of the enriched Uranium is ongoing. That's why the stuff is still physically and radiologically hot. Production of radionuclides will be ongoing for many thousands of years.

    It's true that the nuclides will be more or less contained inside the reactor building, but some of it will seep out, because it's not hermetically sealed like the reactor containment was. If you seal it (ie. make an airtight sarcophagus) - then heat from decay will build-up. It requires air circulation to cool, and that's the whole point of the sarcophagus. It will still allow some byproducts to get out, and will affect all of those who are nearby; and this will continue until the fuel cools enough for workers to get in there, physically remove it, and put it into sealed storage.

    It's the ongoing release and exposure of these materials that is the health-hazard. And it will remain so for thousands of years. This is precisely why safety systems for nuclear plants are so highly engineered. This was the scenario they never wanted to happen.

  7. according to the pro-nuclear lobby; on Is Chernobyl Still Dangerous? Was 60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda? · · Score: 1

    Chernobyl wasn't ever dangerous, since only a few dozen people were killed.

  8. Also; you can't call it "Engineering" if you don't have a process that is well-documented, tested, proven, and repeatable. Also: good luck with that.

  9. Just remember to get buy-in from ALL stakeholders, first!

    (good luck with that).

  10. Re:Argument on Top NSA Official Raised Alarm About Metadata Program In 2009 · · Score: 1

    Yes, but even leaking/whistleblowing didn't "work".

    A few of us are beside ourselves at the loss of our rights. A large number of armchair hacktivists are outraged that "The Man" is at it again. Most people are like **shrug** ". . . are we safe from terrorists yet?"

    There's been no backlash I'm aware of. And no real change in how spying is being done, or accountability, or oversight.

  11. Re:Community college bubble... on Coding Bootcamps Presented As "College Alternative" · · Score: 1

    In my school's C++ class, we were encouraged to download the free version of MS Visual Studio, and use that. I was on a Mac, so I used vim, and then Xcode. Teacher gave no fucks.

  12. . . . meanwhile: on Scientists Optimistic About Getting a Mammoth Genome Complete Enough To Clone · · Score: 1

    . . . the rest of humanity can't give two shits to protect other species from going extinct.

  13. but of course, on AT&T To "Pause" Gigabit Internet Rollout Until Net Neutrality Is Settled · · Score: 1

    sounds like there will be no "pause" in "investing" in lobbying and influencing policymakers.

  14. Re:Because cloud on Android 5.0 Makes SD Cards Great Again · · Score: 1

    yeah. Actually, I was hoping that they'd offload all processing to a mainframe somewhere, so I can pay a per-clock-cycle fee for my batch jobs. Also can't wait for the integrated punch-card reader support!

  15. Re:Robot factories on Colleges Face New 'Gainful Employment' Regulations For Student Loans · · Score: 1

    "financially worthless subjects" . . . because I sure think that the MBA's and spreadsheet jockeys of the world are best qualified to determine what is and is not good for all of human civilization.

  16. subjects in comments are dumb. on Imagining the Future History of Climate Change · · Score: 0

    It is my fondest wish and desire that 300 years from now, any and all history books will name specific names of people, who will be reviled for centuries, as being the main perpetrators and promotors of the denialist movement. Their relatives and descendants will be hunted down, and relentlessly persecuted. This is my only positive thought for the future of our civilization.

  17. Re:16 posts containing banal "jokes", 0 of any val on Largest Sunspot In a Quarter Century Spews Flares · · Score: 1

    I do not disagree with you.

  18. Re:Elon Musk Called it Two Years Ago on Antares Rocket Explodes On Launch · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is largely Orbital's *schtick*: they are basically in the business of repurposing old, obsolete hardware, and using them for launch vehicles. Antares is the follow-on to Taurus, and Pegasus and Minotaur are repurposed Peacekeeper stages. They're cheap. But they're really not in competition with SpaceX, because Orbital launches mainly smaller payloads.

  19. Re:2600 meetings on 2600 Profiled: "A Print Magazine For Hackers" · · Score: 1

    You help your landlady take out her garbage?

  20. Re:Fine, if on The Airplane of the Future May Not Have Windows · · Score: 1

    Last plane trip I took (United) had individual monitors which I could pay to watch a movie on. If I didn't pay extra, I was forced to watch a 10 minute advertising loop. (this is the future, for you driverless-car fans, by the way).

  21. Re:What is the significance here? on Building All the Major Open-Source Web Browsers · · Score: 1

    If there isn't a well-documented, repeatable build process, then it's not "engineering" AT ALL.

  22. Re:First taste of Mac OS X on OS X 10.10 Yosemite Review · · Score: 1

    You seem to have nailed on the head, pretty much all the "big problems" in OS X. Where I work, there was a huge migration from PC's to OS X, probably starting around 2003-2004-ish. The hardware (macbook pro) is actually among the best in the industry. Especially right now (omitting the 2011 models that had the NVidia defect, and Apple's appallingly bad handling of that). (Yeah - apple is really bad at acknowledging hardware defects, for a company that charges exceedingly "premium" price-points). Many of our developers switched, and they all pretty much have the same complaints.

    The biggest gripe for me is the window (and tab) switching. Holy crap, it's terrible - compared to any other OS out there. Another big one is that there's no "home" or "page up" "page down" keys, and you have to use the fn-arrow key combinations.

    A lot of the keybindings for terminal makes sense; but for some reason, you can't ctrl+a in minicom. That sucks, because you basically have to kill the program to exit. (and it's also useless, because you can't get into the config menu).

    Anyway: If you really hate Mac OS, then you can simply install Windows 7, or Ubuntu. (Fedora also works, but I haven't figured out how to get the drivers for fan and cpu scaling to work right, so. . . heat, fans, crappy battery-life). The hardware makes an excellent platform for either Windows 7 or Ubuntu. (I don't think that there's another laptop in the world right now, on which, you can get a 6+ hr battery life, with Windows or Ubuntu).

    I think the worst-case here, is someone who's a KDE nut, going to OS X. They are polar-opposites, in terms of customiseability.

    The only reason I continue to use OS X, is because I'm invested in VMWare Fusion. It's a pretty nice product, and I use it a lot in my work.

  23. Re:Prison population on As Prison Population Sinks, Jails Are a Steal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When a black-mark can remain on your record forever, there's huge consequences.

    I know a guy who was an engineer, FPGA specialist. Has 4 patents. Worked for 15 years, and his company imploded. I tried to get him a job where I work, but because he had a dishonorable discharge from the navy, no dice. (apparently, when he was 19, before he went to college, he failed to return from shore-leave for 24-hours, because he went on a bender, passed-out, and was basically kept incognito by a bunch of "bad people" with whom he had been drinking. Got in trouble for that, and it resulted in the dishonorable.) Bad judgement, for sure, but it was a small mistake. He went on to college, and go in at his first job through a professor. But now he's been unemployed basically since 2004.

  24. not really a radically new idea on White House Wants Ideas For "Bootstrapping a Solar System Civilization" · · Score: 1

    If you consider the concept floated (briefly) in the movie: Aliens, the company simply dropped a large atmospheric processing installation on the planet (LV 426, at that time) and began the terraforming process. That's not substantially different than "sending autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing"

  25. Re:That works fine if you manage to nip it in the on How Nigeria Stopped Ebola · · Score: 1

    If the hospital had admitted every uninsured foreigner who showed up with a fever, and then broke out the best protective equipment and procedures, well, then, that would be bad for the shareholders.