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User: laura20

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  1. Re:Saw this the other day on SN on How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business · · Score: 2

    40 year old restaurants don't tank because of a Google listing; they tank because they've gone to shit, and from the reviews, that's exactly what happened. If you look back at the TripAdvisor history, they were doing Groupon and the like, which is in the case of an established restaurant is a sign of a restaurant that was already on the downswing. And a lot of those reviews were the same thing: poor quality food and poor service. If you've been around for 40 years, you should have a steady clientele that won't be looking for reviews in Google. You start pushing coupons when you've burned that established clientele by decreasing quality of experience.

    I've been to restaurants like that; 40 years ago they were what was considered quality, but neither the menu nor the physical plant has been updated. The staff in the kitchen has gotten cheaper and cheaper, the skills are still 1970s level, etc. It's like eating in a ghost, and people don't come back.

  2. Re:Why? on Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto Outed By Newsweek · · Score: 1

    A reporter asking questions about a public, newsworthy paper you published under your own name is not a violation of your privacy.

  3. Re:genesis of life on Mars Rover Curiosity Finds Ancient Lakebed · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not really true, at least in terms of conditions for life being better than on Mars. The Late Heavy Bombardment probably ended about 3.8 Ma ago, and even the more conservative estimates have life leaving identifiable marks by 3.6 Ma, and there are arguments for rocks even earlier than that -- and we don't have many of those. Life seems to have appeared on Earth not long after the crust cooled enough for such to survive.

  4. Read the damn background on Feds Seek Prison For Man Who Taught How To Beat a Polygraph · · Score: 2, Insightful

    He's not going to jail for teaching people how to beat polygraph; he's going to jail for conspiring to defraud. There are any number of entirely legal actions you can take that become illegal when you use them to commit crimes. Want to do sleight of hand? Lovely. Want to use sleight of hand to defraud someone? A crime. And yes, teaching someone sleight of hand for the _specific purpose of defrauding people_ becomes conspiracy to commit fraud.

  5. Re:Sure... on Have eBooks Peaked? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yup. They are greedy; they want all that sweet extra crash - and despite the attempts of people to mau mau the numbers to convince the naive that ebooks cost as much for the producers as paper books, it's simply not true. The fact they don't have to factor in the risk cost of returns alone makes them vastly cheaper, even before considering materials costs and storage and transportation costs.

    I'm simply not going to pay hardback prices for an ebook, and I suspect there are plenty of others who feel the same way.

  6. Re:Not all providers have this capability. on John McCain Working On Legislation For 'a La Carte' TV Channel Packages · · Score: 1

    Yeah, the result is likely to be paying the same amount of money for smaller numbers of channels -- they already know that you'll pay $100 a month for 300 channels to get the 10 you really want, so they'd just charge $10 per each of those channels. Some number of people will end up better off, some (probably larger) worse off, but they'll extract the same amount of money in the end, except you won't have access to the penumbra of channels you watch things on occasionally.

    I'd probably be one of those better off, since I could care less about sports, so I'm not against it, but I wouldn't expect it to change much except perhaps killing off some more of the more generic filler channels.

  7. Re:Why all the problems *now*? on NIH Neuroscientists: Junior Seau Had Brain Disease Caused By Hits To the Head · · Score: 1

    Because the players are bigger and stronger. The average offensive lineman is 60, 70 pound bigger than even 30 years ago, much less 60. More mass, more impact.

    espn.go.com/espn/page2/story/_/id/6933214/tmq-mel-kiper-jr-size-increase-football-players

    There's probably also other factors -- I suspect training is also more intense, and all those training hits add up too. But the sheer size of your modern football player is a big one.

  8. Re:I'd start by shooting the Captain.... on What To Do With a 1,000 Foot Wrecked Cruise Ship? · · Score: 2
    It's an established part of the job of the captain of a ship to remain on the ship and coordinate evacuation efforts until passengers have been evacuated. That doesn't mean they are supposed to go down with the ship, or even that they are responsible for every last one getting off -- sometimes it is impossible -- but it definitely means that while passengers are queued up for boats or going down ladders, you are supposed to still be on the ship, doing what you can.

    Note that the deputy mayor of Giglio, the island they ran into, boarded the ship from a tender at 11pm, before it had even tilted, and found only a single junior officer left on board, and the evacuation in chaos. That's criminal irresponsibility, and the captain and probably some of his officers will go to jail for it. Though I agree with the other commenter who said that the truly criminal part will be the lying to the coast guard and telling passengers to go back to their cabins despite the fact that the ship was clearly hopeless. It's almost mystifying -- did he think that giant rock was going to somehow vanish?

  9. Re:National Archives of Australia have them anyway on Two Lost Doctor Who Episodes Found · · Score: 1

    The recovered episodes are broadcast versions from Australia, which had bits censored out of them. The Australian censorship board was very diligent about filing the sections they snipped out, however, so those segments still exist, we just didn't have the rest of the episodes until now. Now they can rejoin the edited version + copies of the censored sections and have two completed episodes.

  10. Re:Lets see if I understand this. on Theater Professor's Firefly Poster Declared Threatening · · Score: 1

    Nope. I've worked for the government; I assure you the first amendment did not mean I got to put whatever I wanted on my office door, or do whatever I wanted on government property.

  11. Re:Makes sense actually on The Cable Industry's a La Carte Bait and Switch · · Score: 1

    In summary, the consumers are paying pretty similar prices as before, but are getting far less channels. If a movie comes up on AMC that one of us wants to watch, none of us can.

    Yah, this is what I expect to happen. The cable channels know that you are willing to say, pay $50 a month for cable. If that's just because of four channels, then that's what those channels are worth and that's the price they will extract. With bonus extra profit because now they don't have to give you anything else. Some individuals will be better off, some worse, since cable won't be able to charge users individual rates, but overall customers will end up paying the same for fewer channels.

  12. Re:Why is a third party manufacturer needed? on How One Man Helps Keep Game Controllers Accessible · · Score: 1

    You're like (I used this example, because something similar really happened and is well-known):
    Hey, that dude went to the back of his motor home to make a coffee *while on the freaking highway*, crashed, and now can't walk.

    Nope. Long running urban legend, constantly morphing according whatever the current society or teller wants to bash (in your case, disabled people.)

  13. Re:Sounds familiar. on Mom Arrested After Son Makes Dry Ice "Bombs" · · Score: 1

    Also note that "Lectures in the Philosophy of Education" isn't written by Dewey -- it's from a student's notes during Dewey's lectures at the University of Chicago. So even if the quote exists and isn't taken out of context (i.e., "Some say that children who think for themselves..." being negated), it's still secondhand at best.

  14. Re:Sounds familiar. on Mom Arrested After Son Makes Dry Ice "Bombs" · · Score: 2, Informative

    Nah, you give too much credit to Coulter. She took it from "None Dare Call It Education" , written by crazy Bircher John Stormer. Who quotes it from Human Events, which is mostly right-wing propaganda.

    Well, half of it-- the other half that she claims Dewey said, "You can't make socialists out of individualists", is actually Rosalie Gordon from "What's Happened To Our Schools", which was a rant back in the 1950s about the eeeevil of progressive education.

    If the quote exists at all, it's in Dewey's "Lectures in the Philosophy of Education", but there's no electronic copy and I'm not trawling through the whole thing, given the dodgy reputations of the people claiming the quote. And given that one of Dewey's major focuses was getting a child involved in their own education instead of just sitting in a chair and being lectured at; that's part of why Christian conservatives hate him.

  15. Re:National Security Act on US Fears Loss of ICQ Honeypot · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is no British Constitution, in the sense of a piece of paper that William of Orange could have signed. It's uncodified, famously so. What you are speaking about, in a somewhat confused and uninformed way, is the British Bill of Rights, which is one of the things that make up the Constitution. And while it is an important document in the development of constitutional theory, in no way is "EVERY national constitution is based on the 1689 British Constitution".

  16. Re:Not very critical, actually. on Oil Arrives In Louisiana; Defense Booms Inadequate · · Score: 1

    Given that the monologue they are using is from a poster at the very liberal DailyKos, you might be kind of dumb.

  17. Re:In-home Reprimand on PA School Defends Web-Cam Spying As Security Measure, Denies Misuse · · Score: 4, Informative

    Cite? I've seen no claims that the student stole the laptop; there's a big difference between the school district claiming it was activated "upon a report of a suspected lost, stolen or missing laptop" and the student *actually* stole the laptop. Now maybe that's what happened -- he filed a false report or he stole someone else's -- but given that it would be a simple way to shut down the story the silence makes me doubt. "Student X reported his laptop missing, we activated the security system, he still had possession of the laptop, we disciplined him for the false report/fraud." Boom, story (mostly) dead. Instead we have them disciplining him for suspected drug use, and strangely vague and general denials.

  18. Re:Mines that old really still dangerous? on Robots To Clear the Baltic Seafloor of WW-II Mines · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hell, a couple of years ago, a guy was killed by a *(US) Civil War* shell. And that was one that not only had sat either in water or the Virginia mud for nearly 150 years, it had been flushed with water to try to make it inert.

  19. Re:This happens weekly on Police In Britain Arrest Man For Bomb-Threat Joke On Twitter · · Score: 1

    Dude, read the story. It wasn't at an airport; it was on Twitter.

  20. Re:Non-story? on Virginia Health Database Held For Ransom · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Of course, this information is already tracked by private companies, and their information is just as vulnerable. Or didn't you read the original article, which noted that Express Scripts has had the same problem?

  21. Re:roadkill on Judge Dismisses Google Street View Case · · Score: 1

    You are in fact required to post when a public road changes to a private one, if you want no-trespassing laws to be enforced. So yes, you do need to 'lock your door', in this case. (I don't know if this road was visibly posted or not, I'm just noting the general case.)

  22. Re:While it looks good and all.... on Mythic Launches Warhammer Online · · Score: 1

    This is why I'm so totally uninterested in it. I have no interest whatsoever in PVP, so a game where PVE is just to give you something in the downtime between PVP is right out. I find WoW's "Quest PVE is merely training for 25-man raids, which have all of the end game content" thing *quite* annoying enough as it is.

  23. Re:Moreno and Brown on IAU Names Fifth Dwarf Planet Haumea · · Score: 1

    That's Moreno's claim, that it was simply co-incidental that he went back though two year old data right after Brown released the abstract. However, Brown pretty much nails it: Moreno used the abstract and the logs for research but did not cite them. That's a big fucking no-no in science, and the only real reason to do that is to try to conceal the fact you were pirating someone else's research.

    So no cigar for him. Heh.

  24. Re:Animal Control Gone Wild... on Home Science Under Attack In Massachusetts · · Score: 1

    While pigs like to have access to mud to cool themselves, it is unhealthy for to live in it 24/7 - they should have a dry bedding area as well. So if the pigs' pen was nothing but mud, then they were indeed neglected and if the situation wasn't rectified upon notice, then yes, they damn well should have been put out of business.

  25. Re:When has the FBI EVER been competent? on FBI Seizes Library Computers Without Warrant · · Score: 1

    Um. Ruby Ridge: August 1992. Nothing whatsoever to do with Clinton. All Bush Sr.'s watch.