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User: BranMan

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  1. Re:revoke ALL their copyrights on CBS Refuses To Preserve Jack Benny Footage · · Score: 1
    I'm afraid I kind of agree with both of you. The studio owns the physical media, so it IS there's. No ifs, ands or buts.

    HOWEVER, being allowed to let something die of historical significance is not something we should, as a society, countenance without careful consideration.

    I'm sure there is president with, for example, historical buildings. The estate should file suit to have the state or federal government take the tapes, as eminent domain or as historical preservation, to be restored and released for the public. There is an avenue to take here, legally, even if it is untested waters. I think, if successful, that that would be a fantastic president to set.

    There. Problem solved (?)

  2. Re:Permanent damage at 100 meters too... on Sound Generator Lethal From 10 Meters · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I think that the idea here is for this to act as a barrier - an invisible fence if you will. As long as you start it up with no one near it, people will not want to GET near it. The nearer they get, the more it affects them.

    Seems like it would be workable. Plus, I bet there is a way to ramp up the effects over, say a minute? That would help to clear everyone out from the destructive zone before it hits full power.

    All in all, could be quite effective - though not subtle.

  3. Re:Stop with the drugs already on How Norway Fought Staph Infections · · Score: 1

    Say a patient has abdominal pain and calls to make an appointment for the next morning. Why can't they get an email with a link to a simple survey, say a dozen questions to rule out or in some simple things. After they take it maybe the survey says "I think you have appendicitis, go the the emergency room right away" or "I think you have indigestion, try these things before you appointment". When the doctor sees them the next day, she doesn't even need to ask these things, it's already there.

    Funny anecdote about just that - our daughter had a bad pain in her stomach, so much so that we brought her in to get checked out (happened on Saturday of course, and seemed bad enough and sudden enough that we didn't want to wait 2 days - in case there WAS something really wrong). It was looking like appendicitis (to us laymen). Doctor breezed in, poked around a moment or two, and had her get up off the exam bed and jump up and down. Said if you can do that and not collapse in agony, it's not appendicitis. Never did find a cause for her pain, and it went away pretty quickly.

  4. Re:Stop with the drugs already on How Norway Fought Staph Infections · · Score: 1

    I agree. Lately (or over the past year rather) on Slashdot we've seen a disappointing trend in one sentence comments making factually wrong sweeping generalizations of scientific topics being modded to +5 insightful.

    I don't write the comments when I'm moderating, of course, but I can tell you what I look for when moderating a comment. One thing I do NOT do is try to evaluate whether a specific comment is correct or not. Much of the time I can't say say one way or the other, but even when I can, that is not what I'm here for as moderator. I try to get rid of flamebait, of course, or trolls. AFAIK Moderators are to keep the conversation going - to keep the dialog interesting, and get all viewpoints heard. Suppressing something just because I think it's incorrect is not what I'm supposed to do.

  5. Re:Oh, look! on TSA Wants You To Keep Your Seat, and Your Hands In Sight · · Score: 1

    Actually, the security is working if they often catch weapons before they are carried on a plane. Not ALWAYS catch them, just catch them often. You see, to properly plan something like taking over a plane, you need to be certain. Even a better than 50% chance that ONE person can sneak ONE weapon onto a plane and not get caught is no good. Just doesn't work, not for anyone organized. They'd go after easier targets, which means the airport 'security' works, even when it's spotty.

  6. Re:I'd much rather... on "Loud Commercial" Legislation Proposed In US Congress · · Score: 1

    Funny you should mention Burn Notice. I really should send them a thank you letter too. There is so little good educational television that I really do need to let them know how much I appreciate it.

  7. Re:If women are so smart . . . on How Men and Women Badly Estimate Their Own Intelligence · · Score: 1

    Sorry it had to happen at all - it sounds like a very messed up situation. Better luck in the future.

  8. Re:If women are so smart . . . on How Men and Women Badly Estimate Their Own Intelligence · · Score: 1

    If I was in a similar situation, I'd fall back on my martial arts training.

    No - not slugging her back! I'm referring to blocking - with good training and being in fair shape one can block any casual blow thrown at you. Punches, kicks, etc - all can be blocked. And depending on how you do it, that can hurt your attacker (just like in the movies when someone ducks a punch and the attacker hits a beam or something with their hand), just a bit.

    No one should be thinking you an asshole for blocking a punch, and not hitting back. After a few occurrences, she'd probably stop trying. Of course, ditching her worked as well

  9. Re:If women are so smart . . . on How Men and Women Badly Estimate Their Own Intelligence · · Score: 1

    I trust, that if in response to her saying she did mergers and acquisitions for a large medical device company you had actually SAID "Wooooo Whooooo!" instead of just thinking it, she likely would have moved on and looked for someone a tad brighter at that point.

  10. Re:Star Destroyer Vs. Borg Cube? on Verizon Changes FiOS AUP, -1, Offtopic · · Score: 1

    It all depends - is a Star Destroyer actually meant to destroy something? Consider - the modern Destroyer class is actually a shortened version of the real name, from about WWI timeframe - Torpedo Boat Destroyer. Torpedo boats were the time's 'super weapon' that would render all larger ships obsolete (like battleships). What actually happened was they built a new class of fleet escorts to deal with them - fast enough that they couldn't be out-maneuvered by the torpedo boats, with enough firepower to blow them out of the water, and nimble enough to dodge the torpedos themselves. Problem solved.

    So, back to the question - is there a specific threat the Start Destroyer was meant to protect larger Imperial fleet units from?

  11. Re:Nothing to see here, move on on Copyright Time Bomb Set To Go Off · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't want to seem cold-hearted here, but why doesn't this artist just buy some life insurance like the rest of us?? I mean c'mon people - that's what it's for!

  12. Re:retrospective technological excuses on Why Computers Suck At Math · · Score: 1

    Actually, they did just fine - given the limitations. But, there were thousands of Scud missiles, hundreds of PATRIOT missiles - math was not on our side. BUT, destroy the launchers, and they'd have thousands of paperweights. That was the reasoning.

  13. Re:may not exactly be the programmers on Why Computers Suck At Math · · Score: 1

    I worked on it - PATRIOT was indeed Raytheon designed and built. The missiles were dual-sourced - Raytheon and Boing both made them. PATRIOT was indeed made to replace Hawk. Little anecdote about the two systems: Hawk was not reliable enough, so every component had to be doubled - so everything had a spare and you could keep the system up. PATRIOT passed the reliability test so that it didn't have to have everything doubled - but supposedly was designed to support that. Damned if I knew how they were going to do that - the Transmitter in particular was pretty darned packed. I shudder to think of working on it with twice the gear stuffed into it - and a megawatt of 208 3 phase power running through it.

  14. Re:Poor QA on Why Computers Suck At Math · · Score: 1

    Very good post. As someone who worked on PATRIOT at one time (Transmitter Maintenance Upgrade project - for about 3 1/2 years) - there were a lot of factors. Some of which escape everyone here.

    1) It was designed and built in the late 60s. Any idea of the state of the art for computers back then? After factoring in that the military does not use the latest - it must be proven and ruggedized - i.e. Mil spec.? The PATRIOT 'brain' if you will was a processor built across a whole cage full of circuit cards, programmed in assembler.

    2) It was mostly with the advent of our TMU project entering production that the PATRIOT was likely to operate for more than 100 hours at a time. They are finicky beasts - and repairing them before the TMU was a nightmare.

    3) It was extremely expensive to operate and fire. So much so that most crews that operate one get one or two live fires at White Sands, and that's it. They just weren't on 24/7 all the time - the transmitter tubes themselves have a limited life and were about 1/4 million dollars apiece - so this was not seen.

    4) They were meant to move around constantly - built for the cold war. If the enemy knew where your AA was located, it was dead. So again, it wasn't run constantly enough for people to see the flaw.

    5) The flaw was found in Israel, and a software patch was just a couple of days too late in the mail to prevent this disaster.

    6) The poor performance was simple economics, nothing more. There were more Scud missiles in existence than PATRIOT missiles. Pretty soon after the shooting started and everyone realized that, they were restricted to one PATRIOT for one Scud - period. The PATRIOT was 'tweaked' to 'miss' so that it disabled the warhead, but the PATRIOT missile is real small compared to a Scud. It could disable it, but nothing will prevent tons of Scud missile from continuing on a ballistic trajectory.

  15. Re:Not mutually exclusive on John Hodgman On the Coming Geek Culture · · Score: 1

    I can second that - exercise and athletic activity are great for improving everything about you. As a 'nerdathlete' I can recommend the ultimate combination, if you have the discipline for it - good traditional Karate alongside Track and Cross Country. Gives you everything - incredible endurance, muscle tone, confidence, coordination and flexibility, plus the skills to handle yourself in almost any confrontation.

    Then, to cap it all, if you have something physical coming up, and you run every day, just knock off and do nothing for 2 days prior. You'll have so much energy bursting out of every muscle after 2 days off you truly will think you are superman. Incredible feeling.

    So get out there and do something - you don't have to be coordinated, or good at it. Especially running - just do it. Karate takes a little more, but you can suck at it at first. At least it isn't acrobatic like Judo or Jujitsu - you keep your feet on the ground (almost always). Keep with it and you'd be amazed.

    Can't recommend it enough.

  16. Re: 25 years for three golf clubs on "Three Strikes" To Go Ahead In Britain · · Score: 1

    Does the phrase "Paid his debt to society" ring any bells? You can think of it as a 'time out' for adults - put in a place they really don't want (or should not want, at any rate) to be, for a time period proportional to the crime they committed.

    A smart person will learn from that and not do anything to get sent back. That's the theory anyway.

    Based on "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" (which was actually an argument against ESCALATION in retaliation for wrongs done to you - do the same back to them, no more, no less, and call it even. Otherwise you end up with blood feuds like the Hatfields and McCoys).

  17. Re:Oh, please - Oh, please yourself on Save the Planet, Eat Your Dog · · Score: 1

    Very nice points. Though I probably wasn't too clear with my own words - I believe the point I was trying to make was that we evolved as omnivores, to eat like omnivores. And while one can eat vegetarian, you have to consciously eat a wide variety to get the nutrients you need - with an omnivorous diet it comes a lot closer to 'just happens'. Vegan, while it can work, is to some extent 'unnatural' for the human animal.

    My comments on 'environmental cost' were just that cattle or herds can be herded, and fed on unimproved lands. Crops need to be cultivated. If we can leave the land alone - isn't that a lesser environmental cost?

  18. Re:What about privacy concerns? on The Best Medications For Your Genes · · Score: 1

    Insurance is NOT gambling. Insurance is a collective cushion against the acts of fate. If everyone in town puts $1000 into a fund so that if anyones house burns down they can use that money to rebuild it, it is NOT gambling. No one is betting they will have a fire, no one is betting they will not.

    That's what insurance is. What an Insurance Company provides, however, may be different than that - they are out to make a profit, not provide that cushion. With enough random people, statistics provide the rates insurance should cost. Period. However, Insurance Companies take those statistics and then try to make sure they do NOT have a random insured base, to reduce the outflow. (let's give policies to only non-smokers - they're cheaper!) Hence more profit. Weaseling out of paying claims is also done, to reduce the outflow. Again, more profit.

    If genetic information were used to set insurance rates, I wouldn't have much problem with it. Letting Insurance Companies use that info? Scares the crap out of me.

  19. Re:Oh, please - Oh, please yourself on Save the Planet, Eat Your Dog · · Score: 1

    IANAV/V-TIEMV (I am not a vegan/vegetarian - though I eat mostly vegetarians). While you CAN get all nutrients in sufficient quantity from a vegan diet except B12 (NOTE: This claim I am taking on faith), you really have to work at it. It doesn't just happen.

    Like it or not, we did evolve as omnivores, we are still omnivores, and denying that is just silly. You can live a vegan lifestyle if you like, but don't expect anyone to believe that we aren't omnivores. Actually, now that I think about it, just the fact that we have so many vitamin deficiency diseases supports our omnivore evolution. When you eat everything, you'll get a little bit of every nutrient, all the time. Why have your body manufacture it when you eat it?

    And I'm not sure I buy the 'environmental cost' theory either. To live vegan, you need cultivated fruits and vegetables - fertilizer, irrigation, pest control, harvesting, etc. Cattle can live on a free range - grasslands that - guess what - sustain themselves. With no cultivation or intervention by us. I doubt that is taken into account, as I would count that as zero environmental cost. Yes, you need more vegetation to produce a pound of meat than a pound of vegetables. But a lot of that vegetation will just grow by itself anyway. And, no - the worlds population is NOT so large we need to watch how we use every acre of land.

  20. Re:And how exactly... on Of Encrypted Hard Drives and "Evil Maids" · · Score: 1

    No, the whole point of all this was to be able to compromise your data WITHOUT ANYONE KNOWING IT. Beating a key out of you kind of defeats that purpose. Otherwise, why not just have a maid deliver towels (so they can verify you are on your laptop), then break in with guns and take it - long AFTER you've decrypted the volumes they want? I've worked on things classified Secret and Top Secret. Everyone knows they cannot truly protect such data - but they take great pains to KNOW when it may have been leaked or stolen. Once you know that, you can defuse most of the damage. The real trick is to steal it without anyone knowing.

  21. Re:BIOS password on Of Encrypted Hard Drives and "Evil Maids" · · Score: 1

    Hopefully you have intrusion detection too - then you'd see that the case had been opened when booting it up later, and again, not input your decryption password.

  22. Simple explanation - stress on Cosmic Radiation Makes Trees Grow Faster · · Score: 1

    IF there is a true connection, then it should not be so mystifying. Radiation has been shown, in studies, to make animals healthier in low doses (i.e more than background radiation, but less than what you'd want to monitor). The reasoning was that it 'stressed' the animals systems, making them stronger, and thus healthier overall. The same could apply to trees - Cosmic rays may 'stress' them, causing them to grow faster as a result (trying to compensate).

  23. Re:Until... on Ultracapacitor Bus Recharges At Each Stop · · Score: 1

    There's 2 more potential bad things that can happen with wheel motors that I can think of:

    1) Your chance of a failure has quadrupled - since you have 4 engines instead of 1, and if any one fails, your car is dead / undriveable until you have it repaired / replaced.

    2) If one of those 4 motors fails / seizes up - ever - at highway speeds, YOU'RE dead (and the car is too).

          The other problems with higher wheel weight - much higher, say it's 200 lb / wheel with a motor instead of 50 lb without - is not just that the ride is harsher. When that much weight hits a bump or a pothole, it's going to move up or down accordingly. That's a lot of weight moving in a direction you do not want it to go, and the only things that counter that are the suspension and the mass of the whole vehicle. The suspension moves the wheel back where it needs to go, and moves the car in the opposite direction. When the weight of a wheel becomes large relative to the car (say if the wheel is 200 lb and the car is 2000 lb), then the car can become airborne when you hit a bump at speed. And while that wheel, or wheels, are airborne you have zilch - no acceleration, no braking, no steering, no control. And bad things can happen.

          No wonder after talking it over with some real car guys they quietly dropped it.

  24. Re:Not as bad as it sounds! on Doubts Raised About Legal Soundness of GPL2 · · Score: 1

    Well, the lawyers never really get paid for telling someone they don't need them.

    I still don't see what the big deal is - the license was written by lawyers to not need lawyers to understand it, or use it. I guess you can't ever quite get there. A pity. Truely.

    As for the source code, just stick it in on a CD at the back of the manual. Along with a copy of the manual too, of course. I have tons of "drivers disks" with one program everyone installs and a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff you never look at. Will just be another example of that. C'mon - this should not be rocket science. And I should know (not that I'm a rocket scientist, but I have done testing systems for missile seeker heads back in my Raytheon days. So I'm a couple of steps removed from one - but close enough to know the difference. 8-)

  25. Re:Not as bad as it sounds! on Doubts Raised About Legal Soundness of GPL2 · · Score: 1

    Fair enough. Not agreeing is perfectly reasonable.

    I still don't get why you thought that, aside from me getting the details wrong from memory (I didn't recall a) specifically - good catch. I probably should have looked back at the license, but I posted in the heat of the moment), why you think that a company selling embedded Linux needs any sort of special procedures or treatment. It's all very straightforward - so simple anyone can follow it, without even needing a lawyer. How is it not?

      - Brannen