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User: Mike+Van+Pelt

Mike+Van+Pelt's activity in the archive.

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  1. Re:Things that didn't contribute to reduction in C on In Historic Turn, CO2 Emissions Flatline In 2014, Even As Global Economy Grows · · Score: 1

    The CO2 problem can not be solved by the denial of arithmetic.

  2. Things that didn't contribute to reduction in CO2 on In Historic Turn, CO2 Emissions Flatline In 2014, Even As Global Economy Grows · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But oh, no, it can't possibly be that China's fast-track of building new nuclear power plants had anything whatsoever to do with it, oh no, never never never never. (grumble grumble grumble)

    The CO2 problem will never be solved until the people who continue to loudly assert that they are so very very concerned about it get over their irrational dread of the only 24x7 source of energy that has the capacity to compete with coal.

  3. Oddity in homeopathic terminology on Homeopathy Turns Out To Be Useless For Treating Medical Conditions · · Score: 1

    OK, I think all of us (or, most of us, anyway) are clear on the "It's just distilled water, and doesn't do anything that distilled water doesn't do" thing, but one thing has always bugged me.

    How come the homeopathy people always discuss the components that aren't in their nostrums using Harry Potter Latin? They just stick a "um" or "ium" on the end of everything

    (Actually Rowling's Latin was better than this...

  4. Re:Politicians will be stupid but scientists/techn on New Solar Capacity Beats Coal and Wind, Again · · Score: 1

    Does it bother anybody else that nuclear isn't even mentioned in passing in the linked article?

    It massively ticks me off. If the people who are most visibly going on and on about global warming believed it themselves, they'd be front and center advocating replacing coal with nuclear. (Which we ought to have been doing for the past 40 years for more reasons than just CO2.) Instead, all we get from the vast majority is arithmetic denialism.

  5. Mod Parent Up on $7.4 Million Blurred Lines Verdict Likely To Alter Music Business · · Score: 1

    "Melancholy Elephants" is a very important perspective on this issue.

  6. Enforcement on Robocops Being Used As Traffic Police In Democratic Republic of Congo · · Score: 1

    CitizenYouAreIllegallyParkedYouHaveThirtySecondsToMoveYourCar

  7. Installed it... then uninstalled it. on uTorrent Quietly Installs Cryptocurrency Miner · · Score: 1

    Fortunately, that was a couple of weeks ago, when I wanted to download LibreOffice. I recalled from the last time that "utorrent is the thing". Back then, it didn't do ads. I would have left it installed to re-seed LibreOffice, but it didn't take much getting pelted with "Hottttt Roooskie wimmin are lusting after U" ads for me to remove it, with prejudice.

  8. Re:Compare the alternatives on French Nuclear Industry In Turmoil As Manufacturer Buckles · · Score: 1

    >Are people living in the Chernobyl area? No? THAT is my point.

    Actually, a few people are living in the Chernobyl area. Some of the old folks didn't evacuate, and some of them moved back.

    Interestingly, the people who moved back to Chernobyl and Pripyat are doing better, health and longevity wise, than the people who stayed away.

  9. The Goldfinger Gambit on One Year Later, We're No Closer To Finding MtGox's Missing Millions · · Score: 2

    I wonder if the point wasn't to steal the Mt. Gox Bitcoins, but just to delete them, forever removing them from the system, like the several million dollars worth on that hard drive buried in a landfill somewhere. By removing a bunch from the system, it reduces the supply and raises the price for those who are holding lots of them.

    (Fans of 1960s James Bond movies might recall that this was Auric Goldfinger's reason for setting off a nuke in Fort Knox.)

  10. Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation on 'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress' Coming To the Big Screen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "The Puppet Masters" was actually pretty decent, given their limitations. (They ran out of budget to do decent alien spaceships, and they're obviously not going to be able to take it as far as Schedule Suntan without getting a kiss-of-death NC-17 rating.) Donald Sutherland absolutely nailed the rold of The Old Man. And how did they get that chimp to act so *creepy* when hag-ridden? Much of the dialog was straight from the book, and a number of scenes were very close to the book, modulo moving the setting to the present day from a future where there are Venus colonies. It was made by people who read and loved the book.

  11. Freefall on Machine Intelligence and Religion · · Score: 1

    Heh... some of this reminds me of some of the goings-on in the "Freefall" online comic strip. Among all the slapstick humor is a good bit of serious discussion about what personhood really means, and when does an AI (either electromechanical, or biological) have it.

    One of the characters has been introducing the robots to religions... plural. All of them.

  12. Re:ARGH! They removed -remote!! on Firefox 36 Arrives With Full HTTP/2 Support, New Design For Android Tablets · · Score: 4, Informative

    Never mind... firefox -new-tab www.mozilla.org apparently works like firefox -remote "openURL(www.mozilla.org, new-tab)" used to. (At least, for my use case.)

  13. ARGH! They removed -remote!! on Firefox 36 Arrives With Full HTTP/2 Support, New Design For Android Tablets · · Score: 1
    Dang. I use this a lot.

    Crap. Crapity crapity crapity crap.

  14. Depends on whether the extensions I use get signed on Firefox To Mandate Extension Signing · · Score: 1

    I don't go nuts with extensions, but there are some I really need to use -- LastPass, Tree Style Tab, Certificate Patrol, NoScript. The "big ones", of course, will get signed, but some of these (like Tree Style Tab) seem to be an "individual working in his garage" type plugin. Will it get signed? If not... that's a problem.

  15. Re:Wait a second.. on Major Retailers Accused of Selling Fraudulent Herbal Supplements · · Score: 2

    I like Jerry Pournelle's approach -- You can sell snake oil pills, but if you advertise it as snake oil, it had better contain actual oil extracted from actual snakes.

  16. Re:Majority leaders home district on Safety Review Finds Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Site Was Technically Sound · · Score: 2

    The real risk of the waste site is increased expansion of human civilization which puts a lot of humans near the site.

    Well... go to Google Earth and take a look at what's already there in the general area of Yucca Mountain.

    Search for "Sedan Crater" and start scanning south. That moonscape of craters? Atom bomb test craters, every one, lined with completely uncontained fission products and whatever plutonium didn't get fissioned. (Which is a substantial fraction of each bomb's load.)

    I submit that what is already there is a much bigger hazard than anything that would ever be put in the Yucca Mountain repository.

  17. Re:Democrats have held Seattle since 1969 on New Google Fiber Cities Announced · · Score: 1

    Parent commits the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

  18. This is unlikely to end well on Valve's Economist Yanis Varoufakis Appointed Greece's Finance Minister · · Score: 1

    Germans, in general, are not willing to work 60 hour weeks to support Greeks working 20 hour weeks. All the necessary reforms are things that are anathema to the new Greek administration, who (by all accounts) intends to double-down on everything that has made the Greek economy what it is today. We'll see how that works out for them.

  19. How good is your insurance? on Google Thinks the Insurance Industry May Be Ripe For Disruption · · Score: 1

    With insurance, you don't really know for sure how good it is until the day you hope never comes happens, and you have to make a claim. Do they drag their feet or low-ball payment of the claim? Do they drop you? Do they hike up your rate?

    My car insurance is kind of on the middle-low end of cost. I get ads for other insurance that could have cheaper premiums. But... With my current insurer, I have had a few experiences with having minor and not-so-minor claims, and they have treated me well, and not dropped me, and not jacked my rates up.

    I don't think losing that kind of peace of mind is worth some marginal rate decrease.

  20. My suspicion on Why We Have To Kiss Off Big Carbon Now · · Score: 2

    Saudi Arabia is trying to bankrupt the oil shale producers to get rid of potential serious competition. (Remember the stories of more oil than Saudi Arabia being found in the Dakotas?)

  21. I want unbundling. on Unbundling Cable TV: Be Careful What You Wish For · · Score: 1
    From TFA:

    There are surely examples of people who would be better off in an era of cable unbundling, such as those who watch only a very small number of channels, none of them high-fee sports channels, with great regularity.

    That describes my viewing exactly. (Ditto Empty-V and its myriad tedious clones.)

  22. Re:Predestination is an incredibly unsatisfying mo on Heinlein's 'All You Zombies' Now a Sci-Fi Movie Head Trip · · Score: 1
    > The heart of the question about him is 'where did he come from and why does he exist?"

    "I know where I came from, but where did all you zombies come from?

  23. Re:It's what they want. on CIA on UFO Sightings: 'It Was Us' · · Score: 2

    Tin foil. TIN. Aluminum foil is worse than useless. There's a reason actual tin foil is hard to find. (And you won't find it at Costco.)

  24. Re:Hegel strikes again? on Skeptics Would Like Media To Stop Calling Science Deniers 'Skeptics' · · Score: 1

    When you say "Material must be handled over and over again because containers break down" it shows you have not bothered to even look at the actual proposals for how to deal with the waste; what was actually going to be put into the repository at Yucca Mountain. (Or, you're being deliberately disengeuous, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.)

  25. Re:Second hand view from a teacher on Ars: Final Hobbit Movie Is 'Soulless End' To 'Flawed' Trilogy · · Score: 1

    ... it was a missed opportunity to give the "best children's book ever written" a proper adaptation.

    It wouldn't work. And I'm not saying that to be cruel, but a major part of the viewing audience would have seen LotR first and quite frankly hate the Hobbit done according to the book.

    This. Tolkein's story "grew with the telling"; he'd done all this imaginary mythology background stuff, epic poetry, and tales. He wrote some of it up as a childrens' book, "The Hobbit".

    "The Lord of the Rings" came later. At the time he wrote "The Hobbit", he didn't realize that the ring Bilbo found was The One Ring. I'm not sure the whole "three for the elves, seven for the dwarf lords, nine for mortal men, and one ring to rule them" thing was developed in his mind at the time.

    Jackson chose to adapt "The Hobbit" as a prequel to "Lord of the Rings". That decision is ... controversial. But it was probably necessary, given that the "Lord of the Rings" movies existed.

    Yeah, it should have been one movie, maybe two. Sauron showing up Just Does Not Work in the continuity; in LOTR, they didn't know Sauron had returned at the beginning of the story. There are a lot of things I wish Jackson had done better, or differently.

    And too much Coyote Physics, way, way, *WAY* too much Coyote Physics, especially in the second movie. I enjoy Roadrunner cartoons as much as anyone, maybe more, but I don't want Coyote Physics in something more serious.

    Still, my biggest beef of all with Jackson was from the original "Lord of the Rings" movies; wrecking Faramir's character was a huge blunder.

    Oh, well, I still found them mostly enjoyable,