Slashdot Mirror


User: dasunt

dasunt's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
2,038
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 2,038

  1. Re:Which is why each state has separate car compan on HealthCare.gov Portal Suffers Data Breach Exposing 75,000 Customers (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 2

    We already have health insurance companies selling across state lines. I can start a health insurance company in Alaska, and sell health insurance in Florida.

    The only caveat is that I have to comply to Florida law for the insurance policies I sell in that state.

    What Republicans want to do is make it so I can set up shop in Alaska and sell insurance policies to Florida that comply with Alaskan law. And this is where we have already seen a race to the bottom in another field: Credit cards.

    Until a few decades ago, most states capped interest rates. Along came the Supreme Court and said that for credit cards, the state law where the company is based applies, not the state law where the credit card holder is. This turned Sioux Falls into a major base of operation for credit card companies, since South Dakota, unlike most states at the time, did not have a limit on interest rates.

    I see no reason why health insurance shouldn't expect to see a similar race to the bottom if they no longer have to follow the state law where the policy holders are based.

  2. We were told about this... on There Could Be Massive Shards of Ice Sticking Out of Jupiter's Moon Europa (sciencealert.com) · · Score: 2

    "All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings here."

  3. Re:I can buy a 65" TV for $400 on Half the World Is Now Middle Class Or Wealthier, Says Brookings Institution (brookings.edu) · · Score: 1

    That SUV is used and built on a truck platform. It may guzzle gas but it's cheaper design makes it much more reliable.

    IDK. Maybe we've been lucky, but I tend towards cheap cars and reliability has been high. YMMV (literally!)

    I see part of the poor's problem as being a lack of money. Not having money is expensive.

    Tomorrow, I could go out and spend $1,000 on repairs or $4,000 on a Craigslist find. I usually don't want to spend that money, but I could, if I have to. Even if I didn't have that money on hand, I have good credit due to not being poor. And obviously I can afford not having a working vehicle for awhile. Plus, I live closer to work, since we could afford a home nearer to the center of the metro area, so I put less miles on my vehicle. Oh, and I have a garage and a semi-decent collection of tools for repairs.

    Contrast with a poor person - who doesn't have that $4,000 or so. They are stuck going to whatever car lot they can get to, and getting dealer financing at horrible rates for whatever auto they qualify for on the lot. They have to try to buy something that's semi-reliable, They probably even have to put more miles on it than I do. They must always take it in for repairs.

    As a result, I can have a lower TCO than a poor person when it comes to vehicles.

  4. Then, here is me using top of the line smart phone sales numbers to show that a good portion of those supposedly living pay check to pay check are still possessed of a considerable amount of disposable income.

    Anecdotally, I know several people near or below the poverty line who have iPhones - often the latest ones.

    IDK, perhaps my environment is the exception, perhaps Apply's marketing is just that good, or perhaps the price of an iPhone is enough to make it the one affordable luxury item that people can have to fake wealth.

    (OTOH, I do know well-off people with iPhones, and I know several poor people who do not have any cell phones.)

  5. If girls are better at non-STEM subjects, and equals at STEM subjects, shouldn't the STEM fields skew towards boys?

    An average girl has less competition in a non-STEM field (due to boys under-performing), but more competition in a STEM field (do to boys and girls performing equally). So some girls will choose non-STEM over STEM.

    While the average boy is less likely to be able to compete in a non-STEM field (due to boys doing worse in non-STEM subjects). So by elimination, that means more boys will go into STEM fields.

    Or am I missing something?

  6. Re:It's in everything. on Roundup Weed Killer Could Be Linked To Widespread Bee Deaths, Study Finds (npr.org) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Glyphosate is in all the major weedkiller brands.

    Just plain wrong. I could find triclopyr-based products rather easy. There's also picloram-based products.

    After looking at them all though, I ended up going with glyphosate. For what I was doing, it seemed about as dangerous as the other herbicides.

    I still have a bottle of the concentrated stuff, which I use only as a stump killer. To be fair, I'd rather be exposed to people using herbicides like me - directly applied to the plant via brush, no spraying, no broad application - than like my neighbors, who spray it across their yards because front lawns are supposed to look like golf courses.

  7. I can tell you my forecast: Someone will figure out that since there are no strings attached, they can offer these people loans at high interest, paid for by the $1k per month. So they'll be just as poor as before, but perhaps have a car for a while, and someone else gets richer.

    Perhaps.

    Make bankruptcy easier to get, and then there's a real cost to expecting someone to pay $1000/mo on a loan. Sure the car can be repo'ed, but a used car isn't worth as much as a new car.

    Although most of the time, in my experience, the poor are about as financially savvy as most of the middle class. It's just that they have less of a buffer. Some idiots might take out $1000/mo car loans, but most probably will not.

  8. Any leaker should know better than to provide a first generation leaded document. Best to OCR it and provide that file on a generic thumb drive. (Or are there fingerprints of the creating computer on thumb drives to worry about besides your own wipeable fingerprints?)

    In theory, one could make a document that changes slightly each time it is accessed and then logs that access.

    Easy example would be to vary the crop of a picture just slightly. Probably would survive reproduction, and if a picture is, say, cropped 0-10 pixels on each side, it would narrow down the suspects.

    A way to fingerprint (text|written word) would be to change the (text|written word) (slightly|a bit) each time a document is (accessed|opened) (using|utilizing) word (substitutions|changes). This might be (conspicuous|noticeable).

    The above paragraph would have 7 possible changes, giving us 128 possible variations. Obviously with longer documents, there would be a better change to make less conspicuous changes.

  9. Re: There are several problems here on NASA Supports SpaceX Plan To Fuel Rockets With Astronauts On Board (engadget.com) · · Score: 2

    The momo-2 has such a thing built into the launch pad tower. It wraps around the section of the rocket with the fuel tanks and retracts just before launch. If you wanted to, instead of just insulation, it could be a refrigeration unit.

    Judging from Google search results, the Momo-2 seems most notable for exploding at launch.

  10. Re:You don't need a weather man... on World Is Finally Waking Up To Climate Change, Says 'Hothouse Earth' Author (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Didn't realize that literally all of the upper midwest has a more "brutal" climate than mountains.

    Average high in Minneapolis-St. Paul area is below 32F for the months of December, January, and February.

  11. Re: right to repair need to give 3rd party's the c on The Man Who Jailbreaks Teslas (fastcompany.com) · · Score: 1

    Sure it is possible to make bad ABS or ETC, but my experience doesn't match yours. I have driven cars with no ABS on snow - go slow or go off-road occationally. Ok for a race where you have to be first to win, racers have to take their chances. Not ok for a commuter in a country with 4 months of snowy roads.

    Had a GM with an overly enthusiastic ABS once. If I wasn't going about 5mph, it tended to slide out into intersections in the middle of winter. And I'm not a fast or aggressive driver - I'm not in a hurry when I drive, and I don't speed. The vehicle had good tires that were well-reviewed for snow, and that I've used on other vehicles. The ABS just sucked. But I'd have complete steering control while my vehicle slid through a stop sign. :) I've driven vehicles built in every decade from the 1970s to today, and that one was one of the very scariest vehicles I've drove in winter.

    Same vehicle that couldn't get up the hill to my old apartment in winter without turning off traction control.

    Finally got rid of it because GM apparently didn't test this model in places where for several months, the pavement is never visible on the side streets because of the packed layer of snow and ice on top of it.

  12. Re: right to repair need to give 3rd party's the c on The Man Who Jailbreaks Teslas (fastcompany.com) · · Score: 1

    ABS works amazingly well. Other than being on a track, why would you disable it?

    ABS works great as long as you aren't relying on locking the wheels to stop the car.

    In snow, ABS kinda sucks, especially when there's very little traction. The correct braking technique is actually not triggering ABS at all - or, if you have an old car, just let the wheels lock up until they lock up, pumping the brakes as needed to steer. If the wheels lock up, they'll make a wedge of snow in front of them, helping to stop the vehicle.

    ABS has been being shown to have a longer stopping distance in snow. I'm not talking just a little bit of snow that's already melting on the pavement, but on a few inches of snow on a road that already has packed snow because it's the middle of winter, ABS can really suck.

    Source: Lived in Minnesota for almost all of my life.

  13. Won't work in the US. on Return of the Bubble Car? (reuters.com) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've noticed that US auto buyers are quite good at justifying the car they want.

    I predict most buyers will consider this car to be too unsafe, or too small, or too under-powered.

    It doesn't matter if none of this is true for the driver's purpose. Cars are an extension of the self for Americans, and few people would feel secure enough to drive this.

  14. Re:A complicated way of committing murder on Hack Causes Pacemakers To Deliver Life-Threatening Shocks (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    But like they say in obligatory xkcd [xkcd.com], most people aren't murderers.

    Here's why this line of reasoning fails:

    All it takes is one individual who will threaten to kill pacemaker users unless they get ONE MILLION DOLLARS *raises pinky to mouth*

    Is the threat real? Who knows? Probably just some guy in Romania making idle threats. Can a major company risk it?

    What happens if the scammer realizes that people with pacemakers tend to die anyways, and publicizes a threat to kill one random person with the pacemaker within the next week? Note I'm not saying that the scammer has any capability to kill someone, but they are gambling on someone dying in the next week and the resulting outcry causing the company to pay up before they can fully investigate.

    Or what about this? Politicians tend to be of advanced age, which is the demographic that disproportionately use pacemakers as well as other medical devices. Sure, you may be able to fry the device various ways, but a lot of the time, a bricked device will likely still result in someone being alive, at least long enough to treat and replace the medical device. If you wish to kill someone, it's time to reprogram the device so it's active in a malicious way. We've seen complex assassination attempts, or attempted assassination attempts (Alexander Litvinenko, Viktor Yushchenko, Georgi Markov, etc). The resources needed to hack a pacemaker is within this realm of complexity.

  15. Re:The Washington, DC way of doing it on Cities' Offers For Amazon Base Are Secrets Even To Many City Leaders (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    Following that line of thought, if they can give solar panel companies a negative tax, and they can hand out a tax credit for new construction, they can of course write a tax credit for "solar panel companies who build new factories" (no actual production of solar panels required).

    The solar panel tax credit is likely flawed. It makes sense for the government to capture externalities via the tax code, which means for "green" energy, the best solution would be just to tax non-green energy sources (e.g. carbon tax, cap & trade). But raising taxes is politically problematic. The second best solution would be a green tax credit that's source-neutral - e.g. if you reduce the amount of carbon emitted by a certain amount, you get the same tax credit, be it through solar panels on a roof or better insulation.

    Incentives should be as broad as possible to allow different solutions to compete.

    When incentives are narrowly targeted, even though the intent may be good, it hinders the development of new ideas and the production of new technologies.

  16. Re:Protecting the Native Way of Life ... on Native American Tribe Can't Be a 'Sovereign' Shield During Patent Review, Says Court (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't think there was ever any original intent to make them sovereign peers of the states. I think that result is a combination of bad faith treaties (offers made that were never expected to be delivered or enforced) and modern-era litigation enforcement of those treaties.

    You are probably correct, but AFAIK (and I'm not a lawyer), judges don't buy into the idea that a treaty is invalid because the US had no intent of honoring it.

    Nor, I would argue, should the courts decide that the government gets an out because they intended to defraud the people they enter agreements with. That's a bad precedent.

  17. Re:Protecting the Native Way of Life ... on Native American Tribe Can't Be a 'Sovereign' Shield During Patent Review, Says Court (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 2

    Many states in the U.S have allowed the natives to skirt around various laws for god knows how many years as sort of repayment for what their ancestors did to them.

    Um, no. That's not how it works at all.

    The legal reasoning is that for a state like mine, during it's early history (frequently before statehood), the federal government obtained title to the land by entering into treaties with various existing nations. The treaties (to oversimplify) had the clauses that the nations would give up one section of land, and in exchange, the government would recognize the right to the remaining land they had. This has been interpreted as meaning the nations never gave up their right to internal-self rule, and thus, when there's a casino or cigarettes, it's not because they are flouting state law, but because state law doesn't apply. In effect, the various nations ended up as domestic dependent nations, where the federal government handles their external affairs, and the nations handle their own internal affairs.

  18. The moon could be inhabitable again on Moon Could Have Been Habitable Once, Scientists Speculate (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 1

    When terraforming is mentioned, it's usually Mars, or sometimes Venus, but the moon is rarely mentioned.

    It's a shame, since there's a lot the moon could offer. With enough targetted impacts, we could spin it up and give it an atmosphere. Due to the moon's smaller size, it would take far less of an effort than terraforming Mars or Venus (about 100 Halley-sized comets versus an estimated 10,000 comets for Mars). While the moon's low gravity means it'll eventually lose its atmosphere, it should hold to one for tens of thousands of years, which is long compared to human lifespans.

  19. It's a little odd that GMO advocates are so opposed to people knowing how their food was produced. I wonder if they feel that people are too stupid to decide what they want to eat?

    Why not a label on foods that were developed through exposing plants to dna-damaging radiation and chemicals?

    By some counts, thousands of strains were developed this way, including quite popular varieties (such as ruby red grapefruit).

    Or how about a label on organic foods informing consumers that pesticides are used on organic crops?

    Where do you stop?

  20. Re:Coconut juice is not milk and never was on Should the Word 'Milk' Be Used To Describe Nondairy Milk-Alternative Products? (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    It's not similar and just because something has been done a certain way doesn't make it accurate. If it comes from a plant it is by definition not milk. Milk is a substance secreted by mammals to feed their young. If it doesn't come from a mammal it isn't milk. If it comes from a plant it is juice. So the accurate term is coconut juice.

    "Milk" has literally been used to describe various fluids from path for so long that Slashdot's lack of unicode support does properly quote the soure.

    But it looks like (with some letter substitution): "With weartan genim thysse ylcan wyrte meolc & clufthungan wos, do to thaere weartan."

    If you can't read that, it's because it's Old English.

    IMO, if it's been a usage for a thousand years, I think we're fine continuing that usage.

  21. Re:That's what he says NOW... on Tesla Model 3 Teardown Reveals a 'Symphony of Engineering,' 30 Percent Profit Margin (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    You've inadvertently illustrated one of the problems with the Model 3. How many different revisions of this thing are there and how much more difficult does that make them to repair? What differentiates Rev A, Rev B, etc? That's going to make long-term maintenance, repair and restoration a nightmare.

    It isn't too unusual in autos and other motor vehicles to have different parts between cars of the same model year. They've been doing this forever - I have a forty year old motor vehicle where the carb can be one of two models.

  22. Re:Invading privacy? on Malls In California Are Sending License Plate Information To ICE (theweek.com) · · Score: 0

    Seems like that's a problem caused by greedy, unethical employers. A hike in the minimum wage coupled with real efforts to prosecute employers who break immigration law would be a much more effective solution.

    1. 1. Require all employers use e-Verify and keep a copy of the documents used for all employees. (Record).
    2. 2. Any employee turning in their employer for failure to use e-Verify will have their status automatically transitioned to legal immigrant. This will apply to all other employees and their families in the US. In addition, the employee turning in the employer will get a financial reward. (Incentivize).
    3. 3. Any employer found with undocumented employees will be massively fined. (Penalize).
  23. Re:Invading privacy? on Malls In California Are Sending License Plate Information To ICE (theweek.com) · · Score: 1

    Really? You have a State Issued ID that MUST be affixed to your car, and you are willfully driving it and PARKING IT in public view, on private property. And that is invading privacy?

    All of us, stereotypes aside, don't continually dwell in basements. We travel through public spaces, usually as part of our daily routine. And people travel through public spaces to meet with us.

    Yet most of us would not enjoy a record of our movements through public spaces each day. We wouldn't enjoy a record of where our vehicles can be found if they are parked in public view or private property that is readily and normally accessed by others. We would not want a record of who visited our home or whose homes we visit.

    Yes, all of our actions, for all of human history, could be easily viewed by others if we were in a public area. But collecting, storing and correlating that information is something new, and it's being done on a large scale. That's new, and we should ask ourselves if it's something we should be doing.

  24. Re:Incorrect on A New World's Extraordinary Orbit Points to Planet Nine (wired.com) · · Score: 1

    o.k., with time passing, we renamed them a little. Moonday turned into Monday, the latin Dies Martis into Tuesday, Mercury became replaced by his germanic equivalent Wodan, turning the day into Wodanesday or Wednesday, Jupiter, the Thundering God, named Thor in German, gave birth to Thursday, Venus turned into Freya and Venusday into Friday, Saturday just lost his n, and Sunday remained the way it always was.

    Tuesday is Tiu's Day, or Tiw's Day. Also known as Tyr. God of War and Justice among the Germanic people.

    Ironically, while the Interpretatio graeca considered Tyr to be a Germanic version of Mars, he probably evolved from the proto-Indoeuropean "Dyeus", which would make him the equivalent of Jupiter or Zeus.

    Also, Friday is technically Frigg, not Freya. Although both have evolved from the same proto-IndoEuropean deity.

  25. In Minnesota, moose populations are having difficulty with warmer winters leading to a higher parasite load (ticks). The warmer summers also stresses them.

    In addition, at least one study has forecasted that with the expected amount of global warming, Minnesota forests will turn to grasslands in about a hundred years. The prairie/forest border will move up to the area of Thunder Bay, Ontario.

    So at least where I'm at, moose may be locally extinct in a hundred years.