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User: WolfWithoutAClause

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Comments · 2,844

  1. Re:Ask the US Postal Service on US Patent Office Seeking Consultant That Can Stamp Out Fraud By Patent Examiners · · Score: 1

    How about not quoting me out of context?

    "... and take away that money and then some if they're partially or completely overturned"

  2. Re:Ask the US Postal Service on US Patent Office Seeking Consultant That Can Stamp Out Fraud By Patent Examiners · · Score: 1

    It doesn't seem like a good idea, challenging patents in court is likely to be a lot more expensive than any patent clerk could ever be.

  3. Re:Ask the US Postal Service on US Patent Office Seeking Consultant That Can Stamp Out Fraud By Patent Examiners · · Score: 1

    > Again this would lead to corruption with patent pre-screening and favoured people getting patentable stuff and unfavoured people getting junk and working for free.

    No, I'm not saying that they would get paid only for passing patents. They would get paid for examining patents. It's just they would get paid more for being successful patent clerks; for passing patents that are enforceable and novel.

    And the patents could be assigned randomly from the pool of patent clerks that accept the patents.

  4. Re:Ask the US Postal Service on US Patent Office Seeking Consultant That Can Stamp Out Fraud By Patent Examiners · · Score: 1

    They should perhaps pay patent examiners some money annually for each patent that is passed, and take away that money and then some if they're partially or completely overturned. That way they've an incentive to work quickly, and a disincentive to do sloppy work.

  5. Re: 'unreliability' on An Accidental Wikipedia Hoax · · Score: 1

    You seriously think that other sources are free of errors? Newspapers for example??

    At least with Wikipedia when errors are found they can be removed.

    Also, in any GA/FA quality article there's lots of references; you can actually go to those sources and check stuff.

    Just because there's a lot of non GA/FA quality articles in there doesn't make Wikipedia useless, it just means it's still being written.

    I mean, Encyclopedia Britannica has been going for more than one century; Wikipedia is only just over a decade old, and is literally a hundred times bigger it covers much, much more; but it's about as reliable as EB.

  6. Re:As Flammable as Steel Wool? on Quiet Cooling With a Copper Foam Heatsink · · Score: 1

    or send an email to the fire department

  7. Re:500? on Quiet Cooling With a Copper Foam Heatsink · · Score: 1

    I agree, I smell bullshit/vaporware.

    Getting a large surface area is dead easy. It's getting the heat to spread out evenly over the surface that's hard, so it's all at a similar temperature.

    If you haven't done that, then the cooler parts of the surface are partly or mostly wasted.

    Normal fins have a specific shape, tapering, where the thick bit conducts the heat to the thinner bits. This sponge shape doesn't do that.

    So, it will have 500 times the surface area, but the effective surface area is going to be a tiny, tiny fraction of that.

  8. Re:very cool on Rocket Scientist Designs "Flare" Pot That Cooks Food 40% Faster · · Score: 1

    Actually, looks like quite thick walls on the pan; so the heat should conduct down to the liquid really quite well; having thick walls avoids that exact problem; and aluminium is a very, very good conductor of heat.

  9. Re:Stronger than steel made from wood! on Biodegradable Fibers As Strong As Steel Made From Wood Cellulose · · Score: 1

    I don't think you quite understand.

    Wood is an excellent engineering material, it's widely used in construction, and can and has been very successfully used for ships, aircraft etc. During WWII, even when aluminium alloys were available, British designers used wood, to make very highly successful, fast, and very robust aircraft like the de Havilland Mosquito.

    Yes, of course you have to consider multiple properties, but actually, wood is very good under lots of different properties, particularly compression, and wood in general and balsa structures in particular have *surreal* rigidity. See this table:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    so by weight, balsa is the most rigid material known, by a long, long way.

  10. Re:Stronger than steel made from wood! on Biodegradable Fibers As Strong As Steel Made From Wood Cellulose · · Score: 1

    Actually:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    Look down the list for stainless steel... then carry on down to 'balsa'.

    Yup. Wood has a better strength to weigh ratio than stainless steel. (Only along the grain though but plywood fixes that, and you can put the strength in the direction you need it.)

    Although they're not in the table, other woods are similar, but more dense.

  11. Re:Is this a Carbon Fiber competitor? on Biodegradable Fibers As Strong As Steel Made From Wood Cellulose · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Carbon fibers are five times stronger than steel and about a third the weight, so in a head to head competition, no way.

    Still, it could compete with (say) steel if it's easier to work, cheaper, and less polluting.

  12. Re:gullwing doors on Tesla Makes Improvements To Model S · · Score: 1

    Actually, the fastest dragster, albeit unofficial, ever was a rocket car powered by peroxide.

    Rocket dragsters were basically banned for being too fast/dangerous.

  13. Re:gullwing doors on Tesla Makes Improvements To Model S · · Score: 1

    Rocket engines very typically ARE internal combustion engines.

    The definition of 'internal combustion' is that the pressures from the combustion gases cause the motion. (In external combustion engines, such as steam engines, the heat from the combustion goes through a heat exchanger and the working fluid on the other side of that does the work.)

    In a rocket the exhaust gases push directly on the exhaust nozzle, and the interior of the combustion chamber and causes the motion, making it an internal combustion engine.

    Some rockets (such as nuclear-thermal or solar-thermal rockets) do have a heat exchanger, and are not internal combustion engines, but not the common ones.

  14. Re:Some things stick on Why You Shouldn't Use Spreadsheets For Important Work · · Score: 1

    A3 = A6 * B6 + C8

    versus:

    sum = numberOfItems * costOfItem + salesTax

    While you can *force* a spreadsheet to work like that, it's not the default, and the default makes it so very much easier to fuck up.

  15. Re:From many points of data on Belief In Evolution Doesn't Measure Science Literacy · · Score: 2

    Yes, isn't believing in the truth of something that has been rigorously proved part of scientific literacy?

    What would happen if the ones that don't believe humans evolved were forced to deal with some of the unequivocal data that backs it up, like genetics, would they still deny it and cause practical problems?

    Further it raises the question as to who is trying to change the test, and why ;)

  16. Re:Decapitation. on Botched Executions Put Lethal Injections Under New Scrutiny · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You don't understand, a lot of the people who are pro-executions don't want a painless peaceful death; not even when the statistics show that about 1 in 20 people are innocent.

  17. Re:Does not matter on The World's Worst Planes: Aircraft Designs That Failed · · Score: 1

    > only rocket-powered plane ever built

    Um... Opel RAK-1, and have you heard of the X-1? X-15?

    Rocket planes are a thing:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  18. Re:Knowledge on How the Internet Is Taking Away America's Religion · · Score: 1

    I think that there is a question as to whether the three witnesses are reliable or not. ;)

    I'm also pretty damn sure that Native Americans are not descended from Egyptians, and that the genetic information that shows they're not is widely available, and does stack up.

    If that was not the case, there would be some super-duper famous scientists right now that had managed to prove a key tenant of Mormonism; either Science or Nature would publish that like a shot. They LOVE overturning apple carts: if you have the hard evidence.

    In the real world... that hasn't happened, because they're not descended from there, all the evidence shows that Native Americans came from Asia, migrating across the Bering Strait. It's just 50 miles across the ocean there, it's many thousands of miles the other ways.

  19. Re:Knowledge on How the Internet Is Taking Away America's Religion · · Score: 5, Funny

    Let me give you the view of a non Mormon:

    Mormonism is bonkers!

    You're talking about a religion created by a convicted con man that involves him 'reading' invisible gold tablets that nobody else could see from within a hat, and mistranslating an Egyptian funerary parchment aka 'The Book of Abraham' that doesn't say what he said it says; and we know that because it was tracked down and translated for real.

  20. Re:Its silly on Paris Bans Half of All Cars On the Road · · Score: 1

    No, it's a serious problem, particularly in Paris because 60% of the cars there run on diesel.

    http://www.theatlanticcities.c...

    Although diesel is much more efficient, it creates serious local pollution, smog and minute particles that cause real harm.

  21. Re:Jet Fuel? on New England Burns Jet Fuel To Keep Lights On · · Score: 1

    No, wind and hydro are very good matches.

    When the wind blows, the hydro holds back its water; it saves the energy for later (at a storage efficiency of about 99%). When the wind drops it lets the water through faster to make up for the lack of wind.

    So the combined system has more average power; the wind is able to enhance the hydro generation and the hydro smooths out the wind.

  22. Re:Jet Fuel? on New England Burns Jet Fuel To Keep Lights On · · Score: 1

    That's a nice, clear explanation of how wind power means you use more fuel.

    Unfortunately it's absolute, total bollocks.

    The reason it's bollocks is because wind is used for about 20% or so of the total production, whereas the combustion turbines are only used as an emergency back-up.

    In nearly every case, when the wind drops (which they have several days advance warning for) all that happens is that the other sources (the more efficient sources) increase their output.

    Only if you have major failures elsewhere do the combustion turbines kick in.

  23. Re:Double bind on Man Shot To Death For Texting During Movie · · Score: 1

    No, in practice armed people don't actually have to be polite to unarmed people at all; because armed people don't have to worry about being shot by them. I mean, they may be, but they don't have to be.

    So far from taking away the ability to be rude fucks; it's arming the rude fucks, they will tend to want to be armed more than polite people; they're the ones that are more likely to need a gun, because they're the ones that tend to kick up problems.

  24. Re:Bitcoin is vulernable to government manipulatio on A Rebuttal To Charles Stross About Bitcoin · · Score: 1

    lol

  25. Re:Technically it is not a ship... on World's Largest Ship Floated For the First Time · · Score: 1

    I prefer the term 'titanburg'