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User: Sique

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  1. Re:DAB/DAB+ is obsolete already on Norway Will Switch Off FM Radio In 2017 · · Score: 2

    I actually never listen to music in my car at all, except the radioprogramming is sending some. But I don't listen to music stations. So MP3s are a non-option for me. (In some way, I am a-music at all, as I don't listen to music in general). My preferred radio stations for long drives are news/information broadcasters, but when I was in the U.S., they seem to be missing in general, at least in the regions I was driving around.

  2. Re:Read "Outliers" on Can High Intelligence Be a Burden Rather Than a Boon? · · Score: 1

    If you plot the personal wealth curve of people who "made it big", it does not differ from the personal wealth curve of people who won the lottery. For nearly all of them, there is a big jump somewhere during their life, and before and after that, it's no different than for anyone else in the same wealth range.

  3. Re:Backro-tastic on NASA's MESSENGER Mission To Crash Into Mercury In 2 Weeks · · Score: 2
    The Mercury probes were never called Voyager before, so why start now?

    The first space probe to pass Mercury was Mariner 10. Mariner 11 and Mariner 12 were supposed to fly to Jupiter and Saturn, but they were renamed to Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

  4. Re:uhh...warm oceans=wet land on Mystery "Warm Blob" In the Pacific Ocean Could Be Causing California's Drought · · Score: 2

    The Atacama Desert is definitely at least partly tropical, starting at 18 degrees south. So is the Sahara, whose southern boundary is around 15 degrees north. The Namib extends to the 18 th degree south, it is also at least partly tropical. The only desert that is not in the Tropcis is the Chihuahua desert, but it is at least close to a tropical sea, the Gulf of Mexico.

  5. Re: But not to Nestle. on California Looks To the Sea For a Drink of Water · · Score: 1

    Actually, yes. At least here the salt for deicing roads is mainly sodium chloride.

  6. Re:uhh...warm oceans=wet land on Mystery "Warm Blob" In the Pacific Ocean Could Be Causing California's Drought · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This probably explains, why some driest places on Earth are close to tropical oceans, right? The Atacama Desert, the Chihuahua Desert, the Namib Desert or the Sahara.

  7. Re:still ? on Did Natural Selection Make the Dutch the Tallest People On the Planet? · · Score: 1
    No, Darwin and Wallace called something else artificial selection: If you set a goal of what you expect from the offspring and then choose the parents accordingly, you are doing selective breeding.

    Natural selection is what happens if there is no special breeding goal.

  8. Re:Please.... on The Courage of Bystanders Who Press "Record" · · Score: 1
    Running away from a cop carries the death penalty?

    Please, please show me the law that says so.

  9. Re:The problem isn't DSL speeds, it's Big Telecom on Bell Labs Fighting To Get More Bandwidth Out of Copper · · Score: 4, Interesting
    We see the reverse in Europe. Here, POTS is a shared resource too, but competition started only when the sole access of the single provider was lifted, and each cable operator has to allow competitors at equal conditions on his cables.

    I live in a rural village of about 2,000 inhabitants, and I have 30/6 mbit/sec DSL at around 30 €/month. In fact I guess that most "cable companies" are running DSL to your home and then send the TV signals within the DSL. I know that most phone companies do. If you order a T1 or E1 with them, you get a DSL modem with a T1/E1 port.

  10. Re:Many Potential Answers on The Key To Interviewing At Google · · Score: 1

    Where I lived as a child you could tell from the shape of the cover what it was for. Access to electrical installations for instance was rectangular.

  11. Re:First, manhole covers are not always round on The Key To Interviewing At Google · · Score: 2

    If I knew that the hiring manager knew that the question applies only to round manhole covers, I would ask him, why he asks a question that contains its answer. There are rectangular and quadratic, there are triangulic and round manhole covers. And the round ones are round, because otherwise they wouldn't be round manhole covers.

  12. Re:But we know the Standard Model is incomplete on Years After Shutting Down, Tevatron Reveals Properties of Higgs Boson · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I would rather disagree. I remember an interview with one of the leading physicists of CERN before the LHC was started, and he said that in some way he hopes that the Standard Model would prove to be incomplete and the Hiiggs Boson either doesn't exists or has different properties than the Standard Model predicts, because it would open a lot of new research into alternative hypotheses around a potential Grand Unified Theory.

    So the results are disappointing in a way, as the most boring of all alternative explanations seems to be true.

  13. Re:Free gas and barely noticeable tremors on The Arrival of Man-Made Earthquakes · · Score: 1

    Don't mess up nuclear fusion (Hydrogenium into Helium) with nuclear fission (Uranium or Plutonium into smaller cores).

  14. Re:ugh....fluff on Focusing On Tech Alone, You Miss How Autonomous Driving Will Change Society · · Score: 1
    Human drivers have even more bugs, so you were saying?

    Yes, the autonomous cars will have bugs, and there will be situations where they just crash in a literal sense. But so do humans, and they do it fairly often. An autonomous car will not be drunk driving, and it will be not getting an heart attack at 65 mph, and it will not be distracted by that phone call or the children on the backseat getting into an infight.

  15. Re:What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article on Focusing On Tech Alone, You Miss How Autonomous Driving Will Change Society · · Score: 2
    You can still buy a car if you want to own one. Just most of the advantages disappear, while the disadvantages stay. And if your commute counts to your work time, then you leave your house at 9 and return at 5 instead of leaving 7:30 and returning at 6:30, because you could do that phone conference and your email stack in the car, and you write your reports on your way home.

    And yes, owning a car will become some hobby. It's not quaint not to have a car even now. A friend of mine made a point of not owning one because he always rented one if the need arised. Thus he always had a clean, well maintained car, better than most of us car owners. If autonomous cars become the norm, renting a car if you need one will be even more convenient, because you don't need to go to the rental car park anymore, you just wait until it arrives at your front door.

  16. Re:Contradiction in article summary on Why More 'Star Wars' Actors Don't Become Stars · · Score: 1

    He crtainly acted far better than the writing in some episodes, but nonetheless despite the writing he was still able to carry the role.

    I am not quite sure about that. There have been spoofs of ST:TNG, where the makers dubbed the episodes with new lines, and some of them actually changed the character of a role completely. In German, there is the "Sinnlos im Weltraum" (Meaningless/Clueless in Space) series of spoofs, where the same scenes in which Patrick Stewards appears as a sincere, deep thinker with the original lines becomes an aggressive alcoholic - just by changing the lines. (For reference: Schwarzer Kaffee, only suitable for people with a profound knowledge of the German language.)

  17. Re:This is going to go over well. on Why America's Obsession With STEM Education Is Dangerous · · Score: 2
    If you had any education in the humanities you would have known that there never was a "mathematics before engineering".

    Instead, Mathematics and Engineering were the same until about the end of the 18th century, and then began to split because of the huge body of knowledge which made specialisation a necessity. But the greatest mathematicians of the 18th century were engineers and mechanics at the same time. Most of the french mathematicians of the time were soldiers studying such topics like artillery trajectories and the construction of fortifications. Isaac Newton build most of his instruments himself, including the lenses for his optical experiments. And it was the observation of the polishing of lenses that got him to the theory of the corpuscular nature of Light.

  18. Re: So What on Poverty May Affect the Growth of Children's Brains · · Score: 2

    Grandpa probably could have been entitled to his own generation's money[...]

    Actually no. Money is only worth what you can buy for. The work, the good or the service Grandpa wants to pay for has to be done right now for today's prices. And while people working today also get today's payment, Grandpa has no negotation lever on today's pricing. He earned his money in former times at former prices, and now he is retired. If the older generation which doesn't work anymore has too much money, we the working generation will (free market to the win!) just increase prices until the purchasing power of the older generation fits again the amount of work we want to spend on them. If there is too much money on the market, we always can have an inflation until purchasing power and goods creation are in balance again. Working people can deal with it thanks to increasing wages in an inflation. Retired people can't. Their retirement funds compete against the retirement funds of all the other retired people, but the share of goods and services they compete on is defined by the people still working.

    Interests, payouts for 401k, house prices and all those money sources non-working people may have access to are only possible because people today are creating the surplus value which can be paid out as interests, as profits on shares or be spend on ever increasing house prices. Every retirement scheme where one stops working and still has access to goods and services is in a way a Ponzi scheme because someone else is creating the actual value the retired one is using up.

  19. Re:Leave then on Gen Con Threatens To Leave Indianapolis Over Religious Freedom Bill · · Score: 1
    The tradition in my country is that a marriage is whatever the public servant according to the current law performs as marriage.

    Churches and other religious affiliations are not allowed to perform marriages in general. They can perform a church wedding afterwards, but that's a private decision of the couple and has nothing to do with the legal marriage.

  20. Re:It works both ways on Gen Con Threatens To Leave Indianapolis Over Religious Freedom Bill · · Score: 4, Insightful
    If your business is "open to the public", then you have to serve the public. Period. It's a matter of contract. You as a business make an offer to the public to serve them, and if someone accepts that offer, the contract is finalised. You can't reopen the negotiations afterwards by claiming that you don't like the person for whatever reason. That would be culpa in contrahendo.

    If you don't want to serve some groups of people for whatever reasons, you aren't open to the public. And then you have to say that first, e.g. by calling you a club or a closed society.

  21. Re:$1,000 / visitor on Gen Con Threatens To Leave Indianapolis Over Religious Freedom Bill · · Score: 1
    Of course they have a phobia -- an irrational fear that that person will have some unwanted influence upon them.

    Otherwise why would they care about the sexual orientation of someone else? As long as they don't actively look for a mating partner, the sexual orientation of everyone else is none of their business, the same that it's none of their business what type of wallpaper that person has in his bedroom.

  22. Re:Buggy Whip on GNU Nano Gets New Stable Release · · Score: 2
    When your GUI doesn't come up correctly, what do you do? In Windows, it's reinstalling the whole OS, taking about one workday until most of the important patches are also installed, not withstanding reinstalling a lot of software. In UNIX, it's a few minutes of editing the config files, and then restarting the GUI. But how do you edit the config files? Be glad someone made a buggy whip!

    I know the buggy whip maker is some nice metaphor, but some people don't think it through.

  23. Re:goddamnit!!! on Hack Air-Gapped Computers Using Heat · · Score: 1
    Most security systems have several layers of defense. To assess how much a break of one line influences the other lines you have to know what new attack vectors are open.

    Lets say you have two systems A and B. System A has very important data, and it is important not only that the data is protected from access, it is also important that if it is accessed unauthorizedly, to know at least, if any data was sent to the outside. System B is less important and in a DMZ. If system B is compromised, you just power it off and reinstall it from a known good backup, but normally you don't do a thorough forensic analysis, you might not even have the right monitoring in place as there is no important data on system B (maybe it's just a web server serving static content like pictures for your corporate website, data that is known to the world anyway).

    With this attack you can tunnel data from System A to the outside without the attacked being aware. Even if the victim does a thorough analysis of system A and all paths from and to system A known to the victim, it will be not aware of the actual data leak.

  24. Re:goddamnit!!! on Hack Air-Gapped Computers Using Heat · · Score: 3, Informative

    They used heat as an attack vector by creating a covered channel. It is not an attack vector to gain access, it's an attack vector to siphon data.

  25. Re:So lemme get this right: on Cisco SPA300/500 IP Phones Vulnerable To Remote Eavesdropping · · Score: 1

    Yeah, luckily also the lock to your house doesn't have any vulnerabilities, thus we don't have to fear every local exploit automatically being a remote exploit, as the attacker could not break into your home first and then use the local exploit.