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User: spitzak

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  1. Re:Strawman argument from climate denialists on Researchers Claim Wind Turbine Energy Payback In Less Than a Year · · Score: 1

    That's why it says *ENERGY* investment, not "investment". Moron.

  2. Re:Stupid argument on Researchers Claim Wind Turbine Energy Payback In Less Than a Year · · Score: 1

    What graph are you looking at?

    I see a graph showing a range of 3300MW to 5400MW, about a 10:6 ratio, not your claimed 10:1. Chart is on the top/right of this page: http://content.caiso.com/green...

  3. Re:Free lottery weighted by karma? on San Francisco Bans Parking Spot Auctioning App · · Score: 1

    That's just silly. There right now is a much more efficient "lottery", which is "the one looking for a parking space that happens to be nearest the vactated space takes it". This obviously minimizes the driving and waste over any other scheme.

    Also pretty unclear what should happen in your scheme if the "winner" does not show up.

  4. Is this really "outsourcing"? on China Starts Outsourcing From ... the US · · Score: 2

    If the manufactured items stay in the USA (or are shipped to any place where it may be cheaper than shipping from China) then this is just putting the factory where the product is being used and is not really "outsourcing". The term "outsourcing" should be limited to when jobs move to follow cheap or available labor but otherwise defies any business logic.

    The article is not clear on where the factory output is going, or where the raw materials come from. There is one mention of a glass factory who's "site puts Fuyao within four hours' drive of auto plants in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana." All the others don't seem to say whether delivery to the USA is part of the reason for the relocation.

  5. Re:International comparison? on Interviews: Ask Lawrence Lessig About His Mayday PAC · · Score: 1

    Saudi Arabia is blank in that table for "World Bank GINI", which is otherwise the most populated. There is the "GPI Gini" but only a few countries have that, and there seems to be little correspondence to show where Saudi Arabia may be inserted.

    Sorting by "World Bank GINI", you are right that at the low end there are a number of former Soviet republics mixed in with the expected EU countries (Denmark, Sweeden, Norway, and Austria are lowest). I think the history of these countries may make them somewhat unusual. Much more relevant to your point is some unexpected ones, such as Egypt and Iraq, nearer the low end.

    The other end of the table is more interesting. It is pretty clear that lower income inequality is a requirement, though, as you state, not the only requirement, for democracy.

  6. Re:International comparison? on Interviews: Ask Lawrence Lessig About His Mayday PAC · · Score: 1

    I'm curious as to what you are referring to as non-democratic nations with "low income inequity". North Korea has a very high level of inequity when you include the government elite. It does not matter if there are huge hordes that are starving equally, since there is a non-zero number not belonging to that set.

  7. Re:Irony on Interviews: Ask Lawrence Lessig About His Mayday PAC · · Score: 1

    I think the fact that Cantor and his supporters felt he had to spend so much money, even though common belief was that he would win, indicates something. And perhaps he lost because he did not spend enough.

  8. Re:Irony on Interviews: Ask Lawrence Lessig About His Mayday PAC · · Score: 0

    I'm pretty certain that in cases where there was more than one democrat in the primary, one of them lost. Are you saying any number of democrats are allowed to win, but republicans are only limited to one? Quick, better notify Fox news!

  9. Re:Ecological problem? on Scientists Successfully Grow Full Head of Hair On Bald Man · · Score: 1

    I think that was a joke, right?

  10. Re:next it will be illegal on California Regulators Tell Ride-Shares No Airport Runs · · Score: 1

    I don't think you understood my comment.

    The first amendment cannot be read in the way you state.

    The fact that the second can, somewhat, is true. You can't make them equivalent.

    However I believe the reason the second amendment is so unclear is not because it was intended to say that alternate reading. It is because when it was written there were some who disagreed. Most likely gun opponents would have preferred to have no amendment, but could not get that so instead they managed to mangle the wording so it does not say anything clearly. It is also possible they managed to completely alter it to "only militia can have guns" but that wording was mangled back by the gun supporters. Perhaps it went back and forth several times, losing meaning each time. In any case the end result is a statement that is very unclear and pretty much means nothing. The best way to interpret it is that it is proof that there was enough writers who supported gun rights that something appeared in the document at all.

  11. Re:next it will be illegal on California Regulators Tell Ride-Shares No Airport Runs · · Score: 1

    Sorry, the 1st amendment reads:

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

    This is quite clearly a selection of things connected by 'or' statements. At best you could claim the 'and' at the end says that you are only free to assemble for redress of grivances.

    The true story with the 2nd amendment, which I think everybody really understands and agrees on, is that people were arguing about this back then as much as they do today, and they had to come up with some wording that all agreed on, and they came up with gibberish that says nothing.

  12. Re:Protecting the Weak from the Strong on Interviews: Bruce Perens Answers Your Questions · · Score: 1

    many of those military personnel with the neighborhood smoking weapons will support the revolution rather than fire on American Citizens.

    I agree, but what does that have to do with private gun ownership?

  13. Re:Protecting the Weak from the Strong on Interviews: Bruce Perens Answers Your Questions · · Score: 1

    go tell that to all those terrorist cells and the vietcong

    Yea they did great, they are now running the world and everybody loves them.

    Also the vietcong had a bit of outside help, you may have forgotten about it but the same country is in the news right now for doing something similar in a country further west.

  14. Re:Protecting the Weak from the Strong on Interviews: Bruce Perens Answers Your Questions · · Score: 1

    Studies done by the armed forces have already shown that some of those in the military will turn on their own government if it came down to revolution.

    Wow! You really shot yourself in the foot on that one. Yes you have shown how a popular revolution may defeat the military. However that solution does not require private ownership of firearms! In fact there are some indications it may work better if there are no private guns (the military defector is more likely if the people he is going to join are not shooting at him).

    Personally I don't see too much problem with guns, but I have to point out that you just made a really stupid statement if you are trying to argue for them.

  15. Re:Quietly Sweeping Windows Under a Rug on Linux Mint 17 'Qiana' Released · · Score: 1

    That is not the same.

    What I want is to be able to push a button in one application (or select text) and not have it raise above the other application. I also want to eventually raise that first application (perhaps by clicking the title bar). "layers" does not do this, and in fact "layers" are a very very bad idea.

    This is finally causing serious problems with drag & drop (as you cannot drag from a window without it raising) so they are finally starting to get a clue. Unfortunately I am seeing the "windows solution" rear it's ugly head: there are proposals that an app must communicate to the window manager the "drag start target regions" so that raise is prevented.

    The real solution is TRIVIAL: don't raise the window when there is a click, and allow the application to raise *if it wants to* in response to a click. Unfortunately slavish copying of Windows has made this actually be considered politically incorrect, including incredible bone-headed statements like "the user will be confused by not knowing if the action will raise the window" (use "standards" to fix that), or that "programs should not raise unexpectedly" (again, use "standards", or you can ignore raise requests if not attached to a click event).

  16. Re:Thankful for the FOSS drivers on older hardware on Testing 65 Different GPUs On Linux With Open Source Drivers · · Score: 1

    The GP *was* using the proprietary drivers. He was complaining that they were broken, and to his surprise the FOSS driver worked better.

    I agree that the open source versions are nowhere near the nVidia proprietary drivers, though.

  17. Re:This is so 1990s on Linux Mint 17 'Qiana' Released · · Score: 1

    Yes I would agree. Linux desktops have been broken like this forever.

    If I launch a program from the desktop and it exits with an error, can you PLEASE put up a window containing whatever was printed to stderr? It is NOT user-friendly to have nothing to happen. And no, a user is not going to figure this out by "reading the logs".

  18. Re:Quietly Sweeping Windows Under a Rug on Linux Mint 17 'Qiana' Released · · Score: 1

    To be honest, most of the problems with Windows Shell have been slavishly copied by the Linux window managers. Being able to click without raising windows disappeared years ago, and along with that any ability to actually use overlapping windows. Lots of other bad stuff also copied "because it is user friendly" but that is the big one.

  19. Re:Answer to Blender? on Pixar To Give Away 3D RenderMan Software · · Score: 1

    Arnold is the real threat

  20. Re:Wow... this is actually pretty big on Pixar To Give Away 3D RenderMan Software · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty certain RenderMan supports subdivision surfaces, same as Blender (although RenderMan may have more advanced ones).

    Nurbs are pretty much obsolete for non-engineering models.

  21. Re:Somebody post a SWIFT example PLEASE! on Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift · · Score: 1

    You are correct that it had to detect whether there was a value before the left square bracket. I worked on very early NeXT (when it ran on a Sun workstation as the hardware was not available yet), and I did try to fool it with gibberish. It appeared to depend on the last non-blank character: if it was any punctuation other than ')' or ']' then it was a method call. Comments could break it, "array/*comment*/[10]" would produce syntax errors.

    What was really annoying is that it did not detect typos until run-time, since it simply put the message name in quotes and looked it up in a hash table when the call was done. I guess this is familiar to people using python today, but then it was a pretty annoying concept. I believe this was fixed by Apple, but it was true of every version of NeXT I used.

  22. Re:Somebody post a SWIFT example PLEASE! on Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift · · Score: 2

    Oh come on. It is pretty obvious that you can add named parameters to a C-like syntax without having this weird square bracket stuff:

          someObject->setColor(red:0.4, green:0.3, blue:1.0, alpha:0.5);

    The square brackets are there because the original Objective-C compilier was very primitive. It basically looked for the square brackets, did some manipulation of the text, and passed everything to the C compiler. Pretty much it turned this:

        [someObject method:x]

    into this:

        callMethod(someObject, "method", x)

    Yes they were copied from smalltalk, but in smalltalk all functions used the same syntax. In this case the unnecessary differences in syntax were to make this compiler simple to implement.

  23. Re:Since when does Qt "work" with OS X? on Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift · · Score: 1

    Nuke and a lot of other software used for computer graphics.

  24. Re:Global warming is causing bad grades now on Temporary Classrooms Are Bad For the Environment, and Worse For Kids · · Score: 1

    I suspect the CO2 level in the room you are in is a bit too high if you are so mentally impaired to think this has something to do with global warming.

  25. Re:just because on Become a Linux Kernel Hacker and Write Your Own Module · · Score: 2

    You seem to have not italicized the important portion, even though you cut and pasted it into your post! Here I will do it for you:

    If you commercially distribute binaries not accompanied with source code, the GPL says you must provide a written offer to distribute the source code later. When users non-commercially redistribute the binaries they received from you, they must pass along a copy of this written offer. This means that people who did not get the binaries directly from you can still receive copies of the source code, along with the written offer.

    I think it is your turn to read the italicized portion until it sinks in.