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User: skitchen8

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  1. Re: This is BAD on Australia Is On So Much Fire, You Can See It From Orbit · · Score: 1

    You do of course realize that is the logic that is used to deny global warming right? Weather is an incredibly complex thing; you cannot simply point at individual disasters and say global warming. You can't even really point to frequency either, the numbers vary so widely on number of occurrences throughout history that trends are hard to come by, other than cyclical Niña and Niño periods which are fairly well understood. Don't get me wrong, global warming is a huge threat to our ways of life, but saying it causes Sandy and causes wildfires gives the anti-science crowd fodder for the years those anomalies don't happen. Fear mongering never helps, what people need to point out are the easy to see trends in oceans rising and ice melting, things that are occurring at a definable pace and aren't subject to the seemingly random whims of the weather. Our best weather forecasting gives us about 50% certainty ten days out, we can model the oceans rising much more accurately over a much larger time period and posit the causes much more easily. People are dumb: if you tell them the world is warming up and it ends up colder at their house next year they're pretty convinced you were wrong. Look on the Facebook page of your local NWS office, or local meteorologist, and look at how often people accuse them of making things up when the computer models don't end up verifying; they don't think about how hard it is to forecast weather (my favorite thing is to show long term radar loops of hurricanes forming off the coast of Africa to demonstrate how hard it is to understand the weather between there and the Florida coast a few weeks later) they just assume nobody knows what they are doing.

  2. Could someone tell me on Researcher Says the Hawaiian Islands Are Dissolving · · Score: 1

    what kind of island Midway is? Its mountainous right?

  3. Re: 2038 on Asteroid 2011 AG5 Will Miss Earth In 2040 · · Score: 1

    I totally just heard about this the other day. Wonder if it'll blow by like nothing like y2k or actually have bad effects. From what I read the choices are watch everything die, convince closed source proprietary apps to restart development and switch to 64 bit, or force it to be unsigned and break many functions that add or subtract time. Is this right?

  4. Re: Asteroid 2011 AG5 Will Miss Earth In 2040??? on Asteroid 2011 AG5 Will Miss Earth In 2040 · · Score: 1

    I was thinking more along the lines of Heisenburg. As parent noted I know very little, but I was trying to make a funny about the so-called Observer Effect. I think I failed at both the funny and smart part though. :) I still think we should blow this sucker up, just to make sure we can if the time comes. To me "exploding into tiny hopefully harmless pieces" has less modes of failure than "attach rocket and try to nudge." Of course this may piss off the asteroid rights set, but they have questionable lobbying power. Are there other ideas out there I am missing out on? I've only really heard of either nudge it or Michael Bay it.

  5. Re: Asteroid 2011 AG5 Will Miss Earth In 2040??? on Asteroid 2011 AG5 Will Miss Earth In 2040 · · Score: 1

    So Opportunity and Curiosity need to be on alert then? On a more serious note: theoretical physics, as little as I understand, leads me to believe by looking for them we are actively inviting them to hit us. Shouldn't we figure out how to stop them and worry about seeing them later? If we can't stop it I would contend there is no use in knowing it'll happen.

  6. Maybe I understand it wrong on Israeli Bill Would Allow Secret Blacklists For Websites · · Score: 1

    But isn't copyright infringement a civil matter? The state can prosecute you for gambling, and child pornography, but doesn't an individual or company have to file a claim for copyright infringement? This seems like a ridiculous thing for a national level government to be concerning itself with.

  7. Re: Warm Air. on Mini-Tornadoes For Generating Electricity · · Score: 1

    Wrong. They never ran the Titanic into an iceberg to test, and never ran complex computer simulations to test. Concrete and steel regularly go through both tests.

  8. Re: Fuck Valve. on Steam For Linux Is Now an Open Beta · · Score: 1

    Pretty sure "our" in the Linux sense means "everyone's" so what exactly is your point?

  9. Re: Today's news at 5 on Researchers Create Ultrastretchable Wires Using Liquid Metal · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yeah, okay, someone mod me down :( I tried to be funny, can't fault a man for trying.

  10. Today's news at 5 on Researchers Create Ultrastretchable Wires Using Liquid Metal · · Score: 2, Funny

    A local contractor severed a wire today, killing 5 from heavy metal poisoning.

  11. Re: Applied 3D Printing on 3D Printer Round-Up: Cube 3D, Up! Mini, and Solidoodle · · Score: 1

    That was awesome, thank you for sharing.

  12. Re: kickstarter sucks too on 3D Printer Round-Up: Cube 3D, Up! Mini, and Solidoodle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Bit extreme, no? I've used Craigslist and eBay both as a buyer and seller and never once have I had a single problem. Sure fraud happens there, but fraud happens everywhere, it is not unique to either platform. All that is required is user intelligence, and kickstarter is not much different except for instead of buying a product that maybe someone will never send you you are buying a product that maybe will never exist. Besides that: Kickstarter, though it has its problems, has also had its deal of successes where people that don't have the ability to make things but have the money to buy them are paired up with people that have the ability to make things but not the money to sell them. The only people that could be mad at Kickstarter are people too dumb to read and understand what they are getting from investing in a campaign (read: good feelings for trying to help out what they perceive as a good idea). If you're backing a campaign because you want to buy a finished product you're doing it wrong.

  13. Re: Patents = Usury on The Mark Cuban Chair To Eliminate Stupid Patents · · Score: 1

    This is all about perspective then; you say innovation I say stagnation. Really how many *useful* features does your new DVD player have that your old one didn't? It plays DVDs, has been innovated enough to play CDs, MP3s, JPEGs, etc but you bought it to play the same shiny circle it did 10 years ago. Something becoming cheaper and gaining incremental features isn't innovation, it is stagnation. The thing is that to me, our patent laws are perfectly reasonable. Maybe the terms could be a bit shorter, but if someone invents something they should be able to own that invention for awhile. The problem is the patent office. The inspectors are simply overworked, if you take too long (which they already do) the system is broken. If you let bad patents through (which face it, given their insurmountable task, you would fuck up a lot too) the system is broken. If you hire a million new patent inspectors the country complains you are spending too much money, so the system gets broken. Then you ask how to change it and find it isn't fixable. If you do away with patents then many people see no reason to innovate. If you make the practice harder or more expensive you alienate the little guy. We can put a limit on how many patents an entity can file but besides being unenforceable it also screws the big guy, and the big guy doesn't deserve to be screwed either. I agree we live in an amazing world, I am typing this reply on the computer that resides in my pocket. It will, momentarily beam this message through the air, then fiber, then copper to a few hard drives somewhere so that everyone in the world can read it. This phone also connects to satellites in freaking space in order to find me when I get lost. Oh yeah, and the internet gives me Wikipedia, IMDB, various dictionaries, and all the naked women I can shake a stick at; you know, pretty much the whole of human knowledge (and perversions) sitting in my pocket. I cannot argue innovation still happens, but of this $600 computer (in my pocket, seriously, how cool is that?) how much pays for ridiculous patents on obvious ideas because sometimes buying a license is cheaper than lawyers and bad press? Of my $100 a month cell phone bill how much goes to the guy that determined if we take a receiver and put it up higher using a metal, plastic, wooden, or other solid substrate for the purposes of better reception while also, in it's design, using triangular geometry in order to maximize strength? We need to give credit, somehow, to the guy that invented the touchscreen, not the guy who's idea it was that if I spread my fingers apart I am signaling to make something bigger, and pulling them closer means make something smaller.

  14. Re: Guy is no dummy on The Mark Cuban Chair To Eliminate Stupid Patents · · Score: 1

    And the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks, says Shark Tank

  15. Re: Snowboards kill one at a time on Adam Lanza Destroyed His Computer Before Rampage · · Score: 1

    According to the interpretations that our current laws are based off of I have the right to own a gun. This interpretation has stood for longer than either of us have been alive, and though you may interpret it differently you are not the one that gets to make the laws. Also, have you ever gone bird hunting? I don't know many people that could shoot a flying bird out of the air with a 22, and I know a lot of people that shoot a lot of rounds. Anyways, I don't much like bird so the only birds I shoot at are made of clay, and they are plenty challenging enough for me to hit with birdshot.

  16. Re: Jack Thompson is already on the case on Adam Lanza Destroyed His Computer Before Rampage · · Score: 2

    Semi-automatic rifle, automatic weapons are already illegal to own. The rest of your comment doesn't get credibility when you don't know the difference between automatic and semi-automatic. Automatic weapons would probably be harder to kill people with, unless you have experience with them your aim lasts for exactly one round and then you are shooting at the ceiling/sky.

  17. Brings me back on Hacker Behind Leaked Nude Celebrity Photos Gets 10 Years · · Score: 1

    I would hardly call this hacking, more social engineering with the social part being the ability to use Google. I remember hacking an ex girlfriend's account when I was in middle school to send e-mails to every guy she knew asking for sexual favors. I guess I'm just a super 1337 hax0r. I also have to question how wise it is to carry nude pictures of you everywhere, do they often run into emergency "showing my tits" situations?

  18. Re: Jack Thompson is already on the case on Adam Lanza Destroyed His Computer Before Rampage · · Score: 1

    Okay, so let's say we live in your perfect world and suddenly someone who is already plans on committing a crime is thwarted by guns being illegal (come to think of it, since laws stop criminals from doing things we should just make murder illegal or something) and uses a knife. Now we already know that in China more children were stabbed, and it is very clear if the guy knew what he was doing he could have killed them all, but we'll ignore that because we're living in your fantasy land now, so he only kills 10 children. Imagine you're a first responder and you are tasked with notifying the families of the victims. Imagine how happy the parents will be when you tell them how successful you were in your campaign against guns and how happy you are that he only killed 10 children. I give it, in this situation, even odds that you get stabbed with a knife by a family member.

  19. Re: Snowboards kill one at a time on Adam Lanza Destroyed His Computer Before Rampage · · Score: 2

    Bird hunting would be awful hard with a .22. Maybe you're a better shot than I, but I would much prefer a 12 gauge with bird shot. The exact point here is that what is useful to you shouldn't affect what I can and cannot do, my wants and needs may differ. It seems a bit ironic to me that on a site where people are so worried that the government may see words they type in a search engine that they also are so okay with taking an actual constitutional right away.

  20. Re: Jack Thompson is already on the case on Adam Lanza Destroyed His Computer Before Rampage · · Score: 1

    I'm not against limiting high capacity magazines and assault rifles, there is no legitimate need for either. I am against the "ban guns" argument, as there are legitimate uses for guns. My apologies if there was a misunderstanding with the point I was trying to make and thank you for the chance to clear that up.

  21. Re: Jack Thompson is already on the case on Adam Lanza Destroyed His Computer Before Rampage · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As would reducing the number of cars on the road reduce drunk driving fatalities. Reducing the number of prescription narcotics would prevent accidental or purposeful overdoses. Cutting off everybody's electricity would reduce world pollution. Just because someone does something bad with something doesn't mean it doesn't have a legitimate use and should be taken away from the people that use it responsibly.

  22. Re: Jack Thompson is already on the case on Adam Lanza Destroyed His Computer Before Rampage · · Score: 1

    I am. Are we saying that we're okay with our children being stabbed? That's basically the argument being made when you say "but none of them died." I think maybe we should stop people from killing rather than make it so they kill less. If you're the parent of a child who has been stabbed to death I highly doubt your first thought will be how thankful you are they only killed your kid.