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  1. Re:Seriously - GTFO on Leonard Nimoy: Smoking Is Illogical · · Score: 1

    He does not, so far as we know, have cancer. Read the summary or the article. Nimoy has Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), one of the other bad things that can happen to you as a result of smoking.

    It's your choice to smoke, of course, but COPD is an unpleasant disease and quitting would halve your chances of developing COPD and delay the onset of crippling symptoms if you do develop it.

  2. Re:True on EA's Dungeon Keeper Ratings Below a 5 Go To Email Black Hole · · Score: 2

    Well, it *is* a game. What some people would call a sleazy marketing trick, others would call innovative gameplay.

  3. Of course they want one. on CERN Wants a New Particle Collider Three Times Larger Than the LHC · · Score: 4, Funny

    Even *I* want a collider 3x as powerful as the most powerful particle accelerator the world has yet seen, and I'm not even a physicist.

    I like to imagine the kilometers of stainless steel gleaming in the harsh mercury vapor illumination; the drifting swirls of escaped cryogenic vapors; the sound of my evil laughter echoing in the vast subterranean chamber. If those things don't inspire you, there must be something inhuman about you.

  4. Re:And that's exactly what I asked for. on Slashdot Tries Something New; Audience Responds! · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I vote for "I don't care how it looks as long as it has feature parity." Make it look any way you want but the comment system should be considered sacrosanct.

    Classic Slashdot is ugly, amateurish, and extremely dated looking. Beta is ugly, amateurish, slightly less dated looking. It would have looked up to date in 2000 or so. Maybe.

    Still, I understand the Dice wants to bring new users on board,and that some young 'uns may be put off with the frankly weird aesthetic of classic Slashdot. So I can live with the new look. But I can also live with Windows 8, and that puts me in a very small minority. If you want to expand your community by keeping the regulars and bringing in fresh customers, you have to bend over backwards to make the regulars feel valued.

    Anyhow, isn't it feasible these days to give people whatever styling they prefer? Changing a community site like Slashdot (or Digg, or fark, both of which have had instructively disastrous redesigns) is a bit like changing the neighborhood bar to attract a younger, hipper crowd. The very idea puts the regulars off. But *unlike* a bar, you can contrive things so the old-timers still feel like they're in the same old ugly but comfortable place.

  5. Re:Wait, Fracking uses Water? on Fracking Is Draining Water From Areas In US Suffering Major Shortages · · Score: 2

    We've been told this whole time that fracking uses some toxic unknown substance that causes water to burn and makes children possessed by the devil.

    Now it's water?

    It's water with a rather long list of additives including benzene, formaldehyde, ferric chloride, napthalene and toluene. But, yes, it's *primarily* water.

  6. Re:NYT for me, but paying somewhere is important on Ask Slashdot: What Online News Is Worth Paying For? · · Score: 1

    I pay $15/mon to subscribe to the Boston Globe on my Kindle. I don't particularly like the Globe, but there needs to be someone with shoe leather on the ground reporting local stories. Someone who isn't a total moron, or someone who spends all day on social media passing along stuff he's heard somewhere on the Internet.

    I view my subscription as like a tax payment; it supports a local institution that is important to the community where I live, even if its not nearly as good as it could be or ought to be.

  7. Well, what is the alternative? on HP To Charge For Service Packs and Firmware For Out-of-Warranty Customers · · Score: 1

    Do we expect vendors to provide free upgrades and updates to old hardware and software *forever*? At some point a vendor is going to say, "Sorry, you're SOL." Offering customers the option to *pay* for updates to extend the life of their investment doesn't seem so unreasonable, especially when you're talking about enterprise customers.

    Limiting free updates to the warranty period only seems unreasonably because the warranty periods tend to be rather short. Financially speaking, computer systems are customarily depreciated over a 5 year period; that is to say that spanking new computer your company buys will be valued at $0 on the books in five years. So it seems to me that expected lifetime of a computer in an enterprise is five years. That should be the baseline over which we determine what is a reasonable period for free updates. Free updates for *over* five years is expecting way too much of a vendor. Personally I'd be satisfied with three years of free updates with an option to buy updates for another three.

  8. Re:More snow = more pressure = faster calving! on Greenland's Fastest Glacier Sets New Speed Record · · Score: 1

    Its amazing watching people with no scientific ability trying to sound scientific. The glacier is thinning because its surging.

    Isn't it, though?

  9. Re:More snow = more pressure = faster calving! on Greenland's Fastest Glacier Sets New Speed Record · · Score: 2

    It doesn't matter what baseline you use for X and Y if you want to answer "how much greater is X than Y?" When I calculate "X - Y", the choice of baseline cancels out. It doesn't matter if I do the calculation in celsius or kelvin; or if I choose 1900-1999 as a baseline or 1950-1980. The answer to the question "how much hotter was 2005 than 1995?" is still going to be 0.2C.

    As for the choice of 1995 as a baseline, it was *your* idea to use a year that set a record for high temperature and ask, "has it got warmer since then?" and surprisingly, the answer turns out to be "yes". That's very different than taking ten or more years as your baseline, which cancels out the effect of unusually hot or unusually cool years impartially.

    As for the source of my data, here you go.

  10. Re:What will it cost? on Greenland's Fastest Glacier Sets New Speed Record · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's not so simple as "10 cm/decade doesn't seem like much".

    Imagine storm surges laid out on a bell curve, with height above mean high tide as the X axis. When you chose how close to build to the waterline, and the protections you put in, you probably wouldn't draw the line where you'd get one flood every thousand years. You might decide you can live with one flood every ten years. But shift the mean high tide by 20 cm over two decades, and that once a decade flood might happen eight or ten times a decade.

    There's often a sharp line between a near miss and a disaster. A one foot rise over thirty years (roughly correponds to 1m/century) means that a seawall or levee that would have held back the flood get overtopped. A one foot rise means a place that never got flooded before could be in harms way. Some of the levees that failed in Katrina were overtopped by only a matter of inches. Others were overtopped by ten feet, but that's a different issue.

    And in a lot of the world, the floodplain isn't chosen because it's a nice place to live. Bengladeshi subsistence farmers don't locate in low areas because of the beaches, but because that's the only land they can afford. These are people with very low levels of material consumption. They don't get much of the share of benefit from the carbon added to the atmosphere, but they bear a disproportionate share of the costs.

  11. Re:More snow = more pressure = faster calving! on Greenland's Fastest Glacier Sets New Speed Record · · Score: 5, Informative

    You realize 1995 set a record for hottest year ever on record? So you've cherry picked a particularly hot year as your baseline (or somebody dishonest picked it for you). That's Ok, because that record has been exceeded ten times since then, starting with 1998 which was *also* the hottest year on record.

    1995 was 0.4C hotter than the 20thC average. 2005 was 0.6C hotter than the baseline, and 2010 was just a smidgen hotter than 2005. So you could answer 0.2C to your question. But it's a lousy question, not just because it starts from a cherry-picked baseline, but because there's so much variation between years.

    A better question is "How much hotter were the 00's hotter than the 90's?" The 1990s where 0.313 C hotter than the 1950-1980 baseline. The 00s were 0.513 C hotter than the baseline. So again the answer to the question is 0.2C.

    Each of the past three decades set a record for the hottest on record.

  12. Re:More snow = more pressure = faster calving! on Greenland's Fastest Glacier Sets New Speed Record · · Score: 3, Informative

    What you're talking about is 1.2 meters of new ice on top of *two kilometers* of primordial ice. If we scaled the ice sheet to 2 meters tall, the extra accumulation would be roughly the thickness of a piece of paper.

    In any case, you're confusing the vast, 400,000 year-old interior ice sheet with a coastal glacier. It makes no difference that the interior ice sheet has thickened very slightly because measurements of the *glacier in question* show that *it* is thinning.

  13. Re:More snow = more pressure = faster calving! on Greenland's Fastest Glacier Sets New Speed Record · · Score: 5, Informative

    Fortunately, we don't have to deal in "suggestions". People have actually *gone* to the glacier and taken measurements. It is thinning dramatically since 1997 [1]. Nor do we have to deal in suggestions about the temperature of Greenland, because people have been measuring that too. It is warming, dramatically on the western coast, somewhat less so on the eastern. [2]

    The glacier in question, by the way, is considerably less than 100 km long (as you an readily see), so the interior doesn't enter into the question of what this glacier is doing at all. However if you're interested, ice core data shows that the interior has warmed over the past several decades. [3]

    I can certainly buy the argument that this event doesn't prove *global* warming, because it doesn't. But the argument that it proves *local cooling* doesn't hold water, because it we know *from measurements* that there hasn't been local cooling, especially in southwestern Greenland where this glacier is *entirely* located.

    --- Citations ---
    1: Liu, Lin, John Wahr, Ian Howat, Shfaqat Abbas Khan, Ian Joughin, and Masato Furuya. "Constraining ice mass loss from Jakobshavn Isbræ (Greenland) using InSARmeasured crustal uplift." Geophysical Journal International 188, no. 3 (2012): 994-1006.

    2: Hanna, Edward, Sebastian H. Mernild, John Cappelen, and Konrad Steffen. "Recent warming in Greenland in a long-term instrumental (1881–2012) climatic context: I. Evaluation of surface air temperature records." Environmental Research Letters 7, no. 4 (2012): 045404.

    3: Muto, Atsuhiro, Ted A. Scambos, Konrad Steffen, Andrew G. Slater, and Gary D. Clow. "Recent surface temperature trends in the interior of East Antarctica from borehole firn temperature measurements and geophysical inverse methods." Geophysical Research Letters 38, no. 15 (2011): L15502.

  14. Re:The Government Can't do Shit Correctly on Kansas Delays Municipal Broadband Ban · · Score: 1

    Well, I don't think municipal fiber is any harder to do than highways, which many states seem to do reasonably well, although not all do equally well.

    I've worked as an IT vendor wiith state and local governments across the country, and there's good people working in most of them, although some states government workers are so reviled that the proportion of strong workers is disastrously low. Some governments are better at getting things done than others. The think that government agencies don't do well at is agile response to novel situations. Fortunately, this is no longer cutting edge stuff.

  15. Re:More snow = more pressure = faster calving! on Greenland's Fastest Glacier Sets New Speed Record · · Score: 2

    It proves Greenland is warming. The *global* pattern proves that the globe is warming.

  16. Re:More snow = more pressure = faster calving! on Greenland's Fastest Glacier Sets New Speed Record · · Score: 2

    Seriously, you think pressure for *annual snowfall* makes a dramatic difference in the speed of the Jakobshavn glacier. this Jakobshavn glacier. The one that's two kilometers thick.

  17. Re:What will it cost? on Greenland's Fastest Glacier Sets New Speed Record · · Score: 2

    Wrong question. The question is how far sea level is going to rise over your lifetime due to a multitude of causes. Then when you know that, the question is how much you will have to pay (in taxes, prices, and risk) to deal with the consequences.

  18. Re:Is this the right thread for Beowulf clusters? on Many Lasers Become One In Lockheed Martin's 30 kW Laser Weapon · · Score: 1

    Could you even imagine a Beowulf cluster of those?

    I don't know. Let's ask Junis.

  19. Re:More info on Steam music here: on Steam Music Now Accepting Beta Signups · · Score: 1

    Better link here.

  20. Re:Prairie home companion. on NPR Labs is Working on Emergency Alerts for the Deaf (Video) · · Score: 1

    Speaking of which, I went to a concert by a Grammy award winning concert pianist playing works Beethoven, Schubert, Griffes and Chopin. The average age was, no exaggeration, well north of 70. I think I was the only person there under 60, except for one ten year-old boy there with his grandma.

    This suggests an explanation for why us old folks think Prairie Home Companion is a hoot, but *you* don't get it. We're smarter than you.

    Don't feel bad, though; think of growing sophistication as something you can look forward to.

  21. A solution in search of a problem... on Virtual Boss Keeps Workers On a Short Leash · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Years ago I worked on early mobile field work software on GPS enabled PDAs. Periodically I'd take an installation and training trip so I could hear the stakeholder concerns. One of the concerns I frequently heard from field workers in private was that the boss would be tracking their movements every moment of the day, and he'd use this to go after workers he didn't like. This was new stuff, and it had a bit of a creepiness factor for people who'd never used a computer in their life.

    My response was always this: What would *you* do if you wanted to show someone is goofing off instead of working? You'd go to the site where he claimed to have done the work and see if it actually got done. It's what you'd do, it's what I'd do, and it's what your boss does if he has any common sense. If he doesn't, *he's* the one who's goofing off. Field work is hard; traveling around and keying a few bogus entries is much easier, and would be sufficient to fool the system.

    With a few exceptions like security guards, you don't need technology to tell if a worker is doing his job. You need to manage your employees by measuring the things you expect them to accomplish.

    We are far from having a technological substitute for intelligent supervision. Anything that falls short of that is just pandering to management laziness.

  22. Re:Are we gonna compare every service pack to vist on Windows 8.1 Passes Windows Vista In Market Share · · Score: 1

    I have to agree. Windows 8 introduced a lot of questionable UI changes, but I can live with them because Win8 is stable and responsive, and those are the properties that matter the most to me. After all these years I'm used to vendors making stupid changes to their UIs; it's just an unfortunate fact of life and complaining about it pretty obviously doesn't stop vendors from doing it. So I have decided: a UI doesn't have to be *good*, as long as it is *predictable*.

    That said, if I had to *support users* on Windows 8, I'd hate it with a passion. Most users don't adapt readily to UI changes.

  23. Re:Well, Heck... No Wonder! on Environmental Report Raises Pressure On Obama To Approve Keystone Pipeline · · Score: 1

    You appear to be arguing that CO2 can't be a pollutant because it's a natural part of the atmosphere. But by the "natural substances can't possibly be pollutants" standard, a freshwater stream chocked with shit from a pig farm wouldn't be polluted, in that it contains nothing that a healthy stream ecosystem can't use -- albeit in lower concentrations.

    The reason oxygen isn't a pollutant isn't that it occurs naturally. Carbon *mon*oxide is a pollutant and it occurs naturally in the atmosphere at 0.1 ppm. The reason oxygen isn't a pollutant is that human activities don't affect its concentrations to any great amount. First, industrial processes that deal with large amounts of oxygen *consume* oxygen (by burning). Oxygen when it is released is released only in minute quantities. Second, the concentration of O2 in the atmosphere is 500x greater than CO2, so even if we *did* emit as much oxygen as carbon we wouldn't notice it.

    It amazes me that people are taken in by such simplistic arguments as "it occurs in nature, therefore it is always benign."

  24. Re:and the TSA exists because... on Confessions Of an Ex-TSA Agent: Secrets Of the I.O. Room · · Score: 1

    The Arrow Impossibility theorem only demonstrates that our notions of a "perfect" political system are broken. It does *not* mean its impossible to devise a system of government that is responsive to the desires of the majority.

  25. Re:well i'm reassured! on Confessions Of an Ex-TSA Agent: Secrets Of the I.O. Room · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sure the Federal government is *involved*, but *how* it is involved surely makes a difference. The Federal Government actually *runs* security at airports. It does not run non-military health care facilities. It doesn't even provide insurance except to its employees and their families and the poor. It's actual participation in health care and health care decisions is quite limited.

    The Federal government involvement in health care, broadly speaking, is limited to the following five areas:

    (1) Mandates individual coverage for US residents.
    (2) Sets minimal standards for what must be covered to meet the mandate.
    (3) Subsidizes low income insurance premiums
    (4) Provides free alternative insurance for households making less than 133% of the poverty line *in participating states*.
    (5) Provides a health care "exchange" on which consumers can shop for insurance *in states that decline to provide this service to their citizens*.

    That's it. Obamacare is a private sector based health care scheme -- essentially the same scheme, in fact, developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation for Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1996. There is no way to ensure the bulk of Americans have routine health care with *less* federal involvement than what is outlined above.