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User: pclminion

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  1. Vats of chicken fat on Factory To Make Biodiesel From Chicken Fat · · Score: 4, Informative

    I have a friend who produces biodiesel semi-professionally (sells to local farmers to run their tractors and other farm equipment, the rest is unofficially sold to friends) and for a while he was using rendered chicken fat. The raw material stinks like hell, but the resulting biodiesel doesn't really smell like much of anything. Remember that the manufacture of biodiesel is a chemical process that changes the oil into something else. The chicken fat no longer exists at the end of the process. Any odor is due to particulate or a fraction of oil that wasn't completely converted.

    Generally all biodiesel smells the same unless it's been manufactured improperly. I've managed to get some in my mouth before (a siphoning error). It doesn't have much of a taste but it coats your mouth with a terrible film that is very hard to get rid of.

    One time I was over at the plant with my dog. She managed to find an open container of chicken fat and stuck her head in there. I don't know how much of it she ate (drank? gulped?) but you can imagine, if you dare to, what sort of things were coming out of the other end of the dog for several days afterward. Oh god... Oh, oh god.

  2. Re:I'm sitting this one out on 'Cellphone Effect' Could Skew Polling Predictions · · Score: 1

    Why don't you write in your own name and be your own bitch?

  3. Re:NO! on Breakthrough Portends Cure For the Common Cold · · Score: 2, Informative

    The other thing that just gets me ticked is people NOT WASHING THEIR HANDS when they use the restroom.

    When's the last time you got cholera? Tapeworm? The sorts of infections which are transmitted via contact with fecal matter are a different set of things than what we're talking about here. The cold virus inhabits the upper respiratory tract, not your ass.

    In fact, when's the last time you caught ANYTHING and your immediate thought was "Dammit, I caught this damn thing from someone's ass!"

    I'm all for handwashing, but don't think there's anything unusually "unclean" about a restroom. Anything that anybody has touched with their hands could harbor potential nasties. Let's stick with worrying about things that are actually real.

  4. Re:I must be a threat to public safety then! on Supreme Court Hears Violent Video Game Case Tomorrow · · Score: 0, Troll

    You're saying that if it hadn't been for violent video games, you might have wound up a murderer? You needed to blow off some steam because you could have, quite literally, killed someone? It sounds like this has absolutely nothing to do with video games and everything to do with you being a latent psychopath.

  5. Re:Another day on iPhone Alarm Bug Leads To Mass European Sleep-in · · Score: 1

    Instead of constructing more and more complex systems to ensure that a machine beeps at you at a certain time, you could... Go to bed earlier.

  6. Re:Hows this bug work? on iPhone Alarm Bug Leads To Mass European Sleep-in · · Score: 1

    How does this bug work?

    delay = alarm_time - current_time;
    sleep(delay);
    buzzer();

    See the bug? You're thinking WAY too hard, man.

  7. Well, duh. on DOS Emulator In and Out of App Store · · Score: 4, Informative

    Duh. By emulating DOS, you allow the user to run any DOS program they want. In other words, you make the device programmable. That's a no-no on the App store.

  8. Re:Harry Angle? on Voting Machines Selecting Default Candidates · · Score: 1

    Ink-stained thumbs? Why should I have to turn over a fingerprint in order to vote?

  9. Re:Wikipedia can live and let live on Can Wikipedia Teach Us All How To Just Get Along? · · Score: 1

    Who determines what is valid?

    How about cold, hard logic? People may have differing opinions, but I'd venture to say that if your point of view isn't even internally consistent then it simply isn't valid. As in science, we cannot really prove that a particular view is correct, but we can certainly prove that it's not.

    As an example, consider moron prosecutors who prosecute teenagers as adults for sending underage naked pictures of themselves to other people. This is a person who is not holding a logically consistent world view: he is treating the teenager as an adult and a child at the same time. I don't care what your moral perspective is on teens "sexting" each other -- that point of view simply isn't valid. A computer could make that determination.

  10. Re:Wouldn't mining the moon be a bad idea? on NASA Strikes Gold and Water On the Moon · · Score: 1

    To get material from Moon to Earth you need a delta-v of about 1 km/sec. That corresponds to a change in energy of 500000 J per kilogram. To remove even 0.000001% of the Moon's mass and send it down to earth, it would take 3.7e20 J, roughly the equivalent of 87 gigatons of TNT.

  11. Re:Headline Is So Very Wrong on How Google Avoided Paying $60 Billion In Taxes · · Score: 1

    Why would I emulate an act that I hate?

    If you have some legal method to reduce the amount of tax you pay to the government and you do not take it, this makes you a fool, not a taker of the moral high ground. Let the government figure out how much money it needs. That is not your job -- it's why we have elected officials.

    "[...] the motive of the taxpayer thereby to escape payment of a tax will not alter the result or make unlawful what the statute allows [...] The legal right of an individual to decrease the amount of what would otherwise be his taxes or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted." -- United States Supreme Court, Gregory v. Helvering

  12. Well, that was dumb on Interop Returns 16 Million IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    Why didn't they wait until the supply/demand curves pushed the price of an IP into the dollar or more range? They could have turned their class A into tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars...

  13. Re:Still Playing Catch-UIp on Google Rolls Out Chrome 7 · · Score: 1

    I suppose I should add that we never concealed bugs from anyone. Had a user ever asked us how many bugs we'd fixed in release XYZ, we would have told them, no problem. But nobody ever asks that.

  14. Re:Still Playing Catch-UIp on Google Rolls Out Chrome 7 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No, but that doesn't mean you talk about it. At a previous job one of the lead developers was responsible for writing the release notes. At one version, he bragged in there about how "over 200 bugs" had been fixed in that release. Not long after letting it out the door, we started getting a barrage of emails from angry customers demanding to know "why your software has hundreds of bugs in it."

    The reality is that software has bugs. The reality is also that most users will never be impacted by all of them. Touting the number of bug fixes as if it's some kind of badge of honor just confuses people and makes them panic.

    He no longer got to write the release notes after that.

  15. Re:Evercookie is clever on Un-killable 'Evercookie' Killed ... Sometimes · · Score: 1

    Yes, installing a cookie on a user's system after informing them that you will be doing so, is equivalent to waterboarding enemy combatants in secret holding facilities. Get real.

  16. Re:Evercookie is clever on Un-killable 'Evercookie' Killed ... Sometimes · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Just put it in the ToS for the site that you use "advanced measures to track banned users." Presto, now you're not being underhanded about it, which is really the critical difference between malware and other forms of software.

  17. Re:At Last! on Adobe Reader X With Sandbox Due In November · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's "based on PostScript" in the same sense that Windows 7 is "based on DOS." The relationship is minor, incidental, and as a matter of fact, not even guaranteed going forward. PDF has a concept of a "ProcSet," a set of macros which are exported to a PostScript device prior to sending a page content stream. These ProcSets used to be mandatory. They are no longer required and are now considered deprecated. What it means is that natural PDF content streams are no longer directly usable by PostScript printers. This divergence will most likely continue.

    If you like, I can also present an experiential argument. I have spent a lot of time implementing code which manipulates PostScript, PDF, and several other page description languages. I can say from experience that the supposed similarity between PostScript and PDF is of absolutely no help in implementing either of them. They are completely different things.

    It's like saying that Java and C++ are based on each other because their syntax looks similar. It just isn't the case.

  18. Re:At Last! on Adobe Reader X With Sandbox Due In November · · Score: 3, Informative

    PDF is not an extension of PostScript. There is a superficial similarity between the PDF content stream format and PostScript, and although this was done deliberately to make printing PDFs to PostScript devices simpler, it is not a real derivative of PostScript. For instance, there is no operand stack, and there are no control flow or looping constructions.

    A PDF file is essentially an object-oriented database. Some of the contents of this database are graphics operator streams which are syntactically similar to PostScript. That is where the similarity begins and where it ends.

  19. Re:!rodents on Denver Airport Overrun by Car-Eating Rabbits · · Score: 1

    Q: How is a lagomorph different from a rodent?
    A: Because they have two sets of incisors while rodents have only one set.
    Q: Why do the incisors make the difference between rodent and lagomorph?
    A: Because I say it does.

    Actually, according to me, rabbits are members of the comidofuniculates (Latin for "those who chew on wires")

  20. Re:What? on Erasing Objects From Video In Real Time · · Score: 0, Troll

    Sorry, I started to call bullshit at the "increase the quality back up" sentence. No-one worth their salt in video processing would ever use such a phrase.

    What's your point? Was the news article written by one of the researchers, or a reporter, do you think?

    You seem to have a delusion that the researchers who make discoveries that get reported in the press actually have control over how their research is described to the public. Calling bullshit on something because a reporter fucked up some terminology is kind of... simple minded.

  21. Re:But I thought... on Survey Shows How Stupid People Are With Passwords · · Score: 1

    Potential keyspace isn't the same as actual keyspace. Not all combinations of 8 words are equally memorable. definitive underling into sidereal dojo marksman fruitfly. Yeah, try remembering that one.

    People really aren't very good at being random, even when they try to. Basically, unless a computer generated it from a truly random source, it isn't really random, is it?

  22. Re:Coming soon... on High-Tech Microphone Picks Voices From a Crowd · · Score: 1

    ... to a political rally near you. You probably don't need particularly accurate microphone placement and, in fact, if you had precise position and velocity coordinates of each of the mikes at any given time, they could even be moving.

    Provided you know that such a system is in operation, I'm sure there are some rather simple countermeasures that can be taken. The system's abilities seem frightening, but how well does it perform when it's being deliberately attacked? I'm going to hold off worrying about this for the time being.

  23. Re:Entrapment on Would-Be Akamai Spy Busted By Feds · · Score: 1

    It's not entrapment for law enforcement agencies to take people up on their offers to break the law.

    It is not entrapment but it is a bit paradoxical. Even if the original idea to commit a crime was the criminal's idea, the crime would not necessarily have been committed had the police not taken some sort of action. I think you could argue that preventing crime is more important than punishing crime, so facilitating the commission of a crime just to punish a person for that crime is a paradox. Why not take the course of action which leads to a universe where the crime does not get committed?

    It almost seems vindictive, and detrimental to society. Yes, it was the bad guy's idea to do it in the first place, but if you could have taken (or not taken) some specific action that resulted in no crime being committed I think that is a pretty obvious choice.

  24. Re:Moon Crashed into the Earth on Saturn's Rings Formed From Large Moon Destruction · · Score: 1

    No, it won't. I'm not sure that's ever energetically possible, let along possible from an angular momentum, standpoint.

    If an isolated system is in a bound state, it will always be in a bound state. Something external would have to impart enough energy to accelerate the moon to escape velocity for it to ever be ejected from orbit.

  25. Re:Seems strange they approved it at all on Apple Accepts, Then Rejects BitTorrent iPhone App · · Score: 1

    I can see why they don't want to get embroiled in any of the legal stuff associated with Torrents.

    It's not like the application is downloading torrents TO THE PHONE. It's just a coordination tool. If that's off limits, then they should really remove Safari from the phone, since a web browser can be used to search the Internet for infringing content.