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  1. Re:Make it more expensive ? on Why Apple Ditched Its Plan To Build a Television · · Score: 1
    The VW Touareg and the Porsche Cayenne.

    In former times, it was for instance the Porsche 914 and the VW-Porsche 914/4.

  2. Re:Facebook isn't free on European Internet Users Urged To Protect Themselves Against Facebook Tracking · · Score: 3, Informative

    To use a real world analogon: Burglary is still a crime, even if someone didn't lock his front door. Yes, you should lock the door. But it's still a crime to steal, even if you don't lock it. The Belgian Privacy Protection Commission now has listed some ways to lock your door - basicly they did already what you repeat now. Thus your remark could be rated "redundant".

  3. Re:And OP is retarded. on Stock Market Valuation Exceeds Its Components' Actual Value · · Score: 1

    Platinum occurrence in the Earth crust: 0,005 ppm. Gold occurrence in the Earth crust: 0,004 ppm. A difference of 20%, and platinum is slightly more prevalent.

  4. Re:And OP is retarded. on Stock Market Valuation Exceeds Its Components' Actual Value · · Score: 4, Informative
    The volatility of precious metals is known since the Ancient times. Precious metals have never been a good storage for monetary value, their main advantage was their ability to be measured easily (either by weighing them or by counting minted coins), and to be carried around easily - advantages you also have with paper money or with the numbers on a banking account.

    Compare for instance the prices for platinum and gold, two precious metals with very similar properties: Same frequency of occurrence in the Earth crust, same properties (density between 19-20 g per cubic centimeter, does not oxydate easily, can be cast and cold formed), same usages (mainly jewelry, some industrial usage, some coined or cast into bars to be stored as assets). Their prices have been so volatile recently, that platinum was about twice the price of gold, and vice versa within just a decade. Compared with that, the dollar/euro exchange rate is an example of long time stability.

  5. Re:Men's Rights morons on Men's Rights Activists Call For Boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road · · Score: 1

    Whites became powerful because they valued personal and economic freedom among their own people and others.

    This is plainout wrong, Whites became powerful when they still had Serfdom. And while England in fact abolished real Serfdom during the reign of Elizabeth I, it replaced it by the Copyhold tenancy, which only get abolished in 1925(!). Russia conquered most of Northern Asia in the 16th and 17th century, but abolished Serfdom in 1861. Nothing with personal and economic freedom among their own people.

  6. Re:Great. Let's sit here and wait for the next wav on Ice Loss In West Antarctica Is Speeding Up · · Score: 1
  7. Re:Great. Let's sit here and wait for the next wav on Ice Loss In West Antarctica Is Speeding Up · · Score: 1
    70 years?!

    Where do you live?

    Industrial fossil burning started in Europe around 1710, when Thomas Newcomen built his first steam engines (while Thomas Savery had it patented in 1698 already, Newcomen's construction was of practical usability and was widely used).

    In the mid-19th century, Western and Central Europe was fully industrialized, and coal was the main energy source. The retreat of the glaciers was noticeable around 1900, and has accelerated since then.

  8. Re:Great. Let's sit here and wait for the next wav on Ice Loss In West Antarctica Is Speeding Up · · Score: 2
    Additional, since more than 200 years, lots of sanatoriums to treat tuberculosis have been built in the Alps, and in parallel, tourism flourished here. Thus we have a huge collection of postcards and other pictures of the Alps including their glaciers reaching back that far (first colored drawings, since about 150 years also photographs), and thus we can easily document the glaciers' successive retreat for the last 200 years.

    Climate change to ever rising temperatures at least for Central Europe is thus well documented for centuries.

  9. Re:Great. Let's sit here and wait for the next wav on Ice Loss In West Antarctica Is Speeding Up · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Oh, the climate models are quite good for the region I live in. Austria collects weather and climate data since more than 250 years already, so we have a pretty good timeline of climate conditions since the 18th century. If I remember correctly, yearly weather reports started in 1736, very important for a society depending heavily on agriculture. And tell you what: Average yearly temperatures have risen two degrees Celsius since the start of the weather records. And that includes the Year Without a Summer 1816 (probably caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815).

    It's not as if the rising temperatures are something just recently discovered or somehow recalculated into the past. It's something that has been observed by several generation of scientists now.

  10. Re:Maybe not technically their fault... on Self-Driving Cars In California: 4 Out of 48 Have Accidents, None Their Fault · · Score: 1

    Actually, some of the accidents were when a human driver was in control. It's quite possible that the human driver could have avoided the accident, but alas, he didn't.

  11. Re:about time on Russian Company Unveils Homegrown PC Chips · · Score: 2
    Russia is also an Asian country, but the majority of its population lives in Europe. Thus it makes it an European country. (And the Russian fabs are in Europe too.)

    Geographically, the border between Europa and Asia is considered to be the Ural Mountains and the Caucasus Mountains.

  12. Re:They're right you bunch of freetards on FWD.us To Laid-Off Southern California Edison Workers: Boo-Hoo · · Score: 1

    Historically, small businesses create more jobs than any corporation does. Mom and pop businesses. Family businesses. Local cooperatives. Some individual who sticks his neck out - and entrepreneur. Young companies create jobs - older, more established businesses do not.

    A lot of it can be attributed to statistical effects. Lets say, we make the cut-off between a small or medium business and a big corporation at 500 employees. Companies will cross this line all the time. Some grow larger than 500 employees, others shrink until they are below 500 employees, or they go bust and fire more than 500 employees. In all those cases of crossing the 500-employees-line, it will always be a small or medium company adding jobs and a large corporation slashing jobs. That's built into the definition! So in your statistics, you will see small companies adding jobs and large companies slashing jobs - but that's because you define small and large companies in a way that this result is inevitable. It has nothing to do with the potential of an individual company to add or to slash jobs.

  13. Re:Cuz Minix Dude Was A Old Guy on Why Was Linux the Kernel That Succeeded? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The "more liberal" license might be the problem. While the license for the actual code you get is quite liberal, it doesn't propagate. The GPL ensures that there is always more GPLed code, once you start out from a GPL base. The BSD license is in some way an evolutionary dead end, because it is so liberal that it does not guarantee its own propagation. If I want to contribute to a project and want a guarantee that in turn, I have access to the contributions of people who are using my code, I can't rely on the BSD license. A BSD license means that the only development you are guaranteed to get is your own development. Anything else is just by chance. Your code might be useful for lots of other people, but you stand empty. There is no ROI for your development work if you publish something under BSD license. If you publish the same code under GPL, and even a single other developer shows some interest and adds something to your work, you are guaranteed to get rewarded by additional functionality.

  14. Re:Logical on As Hubble Breaks a Distance Record, We Learn Its True Limits · · Score: 5, Informative

    I guess you stumbled on a logical error (and you didn't read the article). 1. Very old light reaches us all the time, not just since the start of the Hubble. Thus light from very far away objects has hit Hubble from the beginning, but we weren't able yet to identify it. So there is a function of time, but it has more to do with our increasing ability to make sense of Hubble data. 2. The article talks mainly about the limits of Hubble. As it has a limited mirror area, the amount of light it can collect is limited. Objects farther away have to be brighter to be visible with Hubble. 3. Hubble works only with light that can be reflected by its mirror. The longest wavelength it can detect is 1 micron. As light that comes from far away is redshifted, its wavelength increases. Usually we use the Lyman series of absorbtion lines of Hydrogenium to measure the redshift. As soon as the shortest wavelength of the Lyman series is redshifted to a wavelength of more than 1 micron, we can't see it anymore in Hubble. Thus the farthest object of which we can estimate the distance with Hubble can't be farther away than the redshift of the Lyman series to 1 micron allows. Yes, also X ray can be redshifted to UV and to visible light, which then could be detected by Hubble, but we can't measure the redshift (yet), because we don't know how to identify the absorbtion lines that exists in X rays.

  15. Re:Depends how you evaluate the curve on The Programming Talent Myth · · Score: 2

    Actually, data available from the Künstlersozialkasse, a health insurance for musicians and other artists in Germany, suggests that that curve is a hyperbola, as expected from a phenomenom in a social context.

  16. Re:Depends how you evaluate the curve on The Programming Talent Myth · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, you don't have this U-curve with musicians. But many people just see the low end (the child of the neighbours screeching away on the violin when you want to take a nap), and the top end (the star violinist in the news). This creates the false impression of an U-curve. But there are hundreds and thousands of violinists you usually don't see, because they play in some university orchester in a small town you've never visited, or they play at marriages and 50th birthday parties, or they earn their money as bar violinists. And most of them are average.

  17. Re: Technically C++ on Singapore's Prime Minister Shares His C++ Sudoku Solver Code · · Score: 4, Informative

    I guess, Angela Merkel knows. At least she wrote a program to simulate electron movements for her PhD thesis.

  18. Re:Wedding Pictures on Microsoft's AI Judges Age From Snapshots, With Mixed Results · · Score: 1

    I used a pair of pictures of me as a child, which were taken when I was about 13. They look nearly similar (two shots out of a sequence done by a professional photographer). The AI estimated my age at 26 for the first and 42 for the second one.

  19. Re:Things that make you go hmmm on Inside the Military-Police Center That Spies On Baltimore's Rioters · · Score: 1

    No. There is no "both". There is that "innocent until proven guilty". And it's the task of a court, consisting of a jury and a judge, to determine his guilt. For the police, at the most he is a suspect. It's not the police's task to neither judge nor to execute their judgement.

  20. Re:Things that make you go hmmm on Inside the Military-Police Center That Spies On Baltimore's Rioters · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Was Mr. Gray really a victim or part of the greater problem? He was in fact a habitual criminal with past of selling drugs like heroin.

    He is the victim. He is a human being with the constitutional right not to have his spine broken by someone. He still has his constitutional rights even if you think he is a bad person. And there is that thing about human rights. You have them as a human, completely independent of you behaviour. I know that some people dream of stripping other people of their human rights because they dislike them. But that's a thinking we usually call totalitarian.

  21. The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"

    For instance, it would be feasible to use off site storage even for often used data. You could upload your movies to some file service and stream from there. No need for your own backup concept. You could even have your office file stuff on a remote filer and wouldn't notice much of a speed bump.

  22. Re:Bus Logic on New Study Suggests Flying Is Greener Than Driving · · Score: 1
    From the beginning of both the plane and the car.

    You can always look at the options. Is it feasible to fly to the local supermarket? If you have a helicopter, maybe it is. Does it make sense? Except for the ego boosting factor, probably not. Is it possible to drive from New York to Paris, France? If you get your car on a freight ship, it is. Does it make sense? In most cases, not, except you want that car to be in Paris for some reason.

    So yes, flying and driving by car are comparable. In many cases, there is a clear winner. But in a lot of other cases, there are several factors to consider until the best option can be determined.

  23. Re:Nuclear planes on New Study Suggests Flying Is Greener Than Driving · · Score: 2

    Probably no, as about 10 inches of water shield nearly all radiation that comes from the wreck of the plane.

  24. Interesting translation of Lagerstätte on Ancient Megadrought Entombed Dodos In Poisonous Fecal Cocktail · · Score: 2

    Yes, it is a geological term derived from a german word, but Lagerstätte doesn't mean storage space. That would be Lagerplatz. It is also not to be confused with Lagerstatt, which means bed. The correct translation is natural mineral deposit.

  25. Re:Less humane to keep them alive. on Oklahoma Says It Will Now Use Nitrogen Gas As Its Backup Method of Execution · · Score: 1

    The death penalty solely exists because people want a "just" excuse to kill people. And to tell themselves, that it is justified, they dehumanize the to-be-killed as much as possible.