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User: bill_mcgonigle

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  1. Hitler on Worcester Mass. City Council Votes To Keep Comcast From Entering the Area · · Score: 5, Funny

    friend of mine posted today:

    Instead of posting a long-winded screed about how I loathe Comcast, I'll just say this: If I had two bullets and found myself in a room with Comcast, Hitler, and Osama bin Laden - I would shoot Comcast. Twice.

  2. Re:Spider Goats on Companies Genetically Engineer Spider Silk · · Score: 1

    Cool, Giant eight legged spider goats, head butting little kids into the ravine.

    I don't care what they say, you're OK (no points today).

  3. Re:Charging amperage on Battery Breakthrough: Researchers Claim 70% Charge In 2 Minutes, 20-Year Life · · Score: 2

    Where you did come up with 12v ? Electric car batteries are typically in the range of 350-400v

    But how am I supposed to support the predetermined infeasibility of electric cars without a 150lb cable at 12V?

  4. Re:USA 1969 on Too Much Privacy: Finnish Police Want Big Euro Notes Taken Out of Circulation · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Only if you believe BLS numbers. Their latest "basket" offsets the inflationary impact of wheat doubling and heating fuel and beef quadrupling by counting in the rapid fall in prices of flat-screen TV's.

    That's not how inflation was measured in 1969, but it's better for the politicians this way.

  5. Re:Isn't this what Netflix OpenConnect is for? on Netflix Video Speed On FiOS Doubles After Netflix-Verizon Deal · · Score: 5, Informative

    Could someone explain why all of this is an issue, when Netflix seems to be giving away their OpenConnect CDN boxes for free, so that ISPs can cache most of the Netflix traffic inside their own network?

    Verizon has a competing (to some extent, anyway) video service. Their incentives have been aligned to make Netflix bad for customers.

  6. Re:That's easy! on Raspberry Pi Sales Approach 4 Million · · Score: 1

    Also: stable USB and stable GPU, sort of like the BBB.

    I'll try to remember to ask again on the 3.9-million units ("almost 4 million", take 2) story.

  7. Insurance vs. Wishy-Washy Platitudes on The Correct Response To Photo Hack Victim-Blamers · · Score: 1

    Lawrence should have used a service that allows her to pay e.g. $10/mo extra to insure against leakage. In aggregate, such funding can be used to improve security, and when the security eventually fails, provide restitution to the person who deserves damages under the terms of the policy.

    Does such a service exist yet? If not, it probably needs to be started in a jurisdiction where States don't stack insurance regulations up the wazoo.

    All this business about fault, implied contracts, what party A or B should have done or not done, upon whom society should unleash vengeance, etc. is just thumb-twiddling when we have existing social mechanisms to deal with these sorts of problems.

    Money doesn't solve everything, but where it does, it's most often a better solution than the others available, and such solutions net improved goods on the far side (in this case improved security for everybody due to the targeted funding and pressures of reinsurance). "Party A should do X and do it for free" is almost always a losing argument.

  8. Cities on Birth Control Pills Threaten Fish Stocks · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One of the problems with cities is that they concentrate pollution. One of the dirty secrets of cities is that their governments do the bare minimum required to get rid of their waste. I remember growing up on the Jersey Shore and some days the beaches would be littered with tampon tubes because NYC just dumped their sewage offshore. When you're five, you just don't understand what's happening - I'm surprised our parents let us spend the day in that water.

    The trouble is, these governments do everything they can to externalize the costs of living in the city onto the people (and apparently minnows) who don't. The wastewater treatment plants discussed here could absolutely destroy the estrogen before releasing it into the environment - but the sewage bills might have to double to make that happen. The city folks would undoubtedly scream about "unfairness" if their water was effectively treated before discharge.

  9. Re:Err... Wait a minute... on Samsung's Wi-Fi Upgrades Promise Speeds Up to 4.6Gbps · · Score: 1

    What could possibly go wrong?

    People could adopt this attitude, giving medical devices special consideration, the FCC could give medical devices a pass on accepting RF interference, and then respirators could start randomly failing when you walk an 802.11b device past them, while anything without the "medical exception" was already designed to reject the interference.

    BTDTGTTS (1998).

  10. Aerobots, Please on Linux Foundation Launches Open Source Dronecode Project · · Score: 2

    Drones kill brown babies. Aerobots deliver tacos.

  11. Re: Apple Newton on Microsoft Develops Analog Keyboard For Wearables, Solves Small Display Dilemma · · Score: 1

    ROM 2.0 was amazing. Two decades ago.

  12. Re:No where close on Z Machine Makes Progress Toward Nuclear Fusion · · Score: 1

    100 times as many as the team achieved a year agoâ"the group will need to produce 10,000 times as many to achieve breakeven."

    In other words they aren't even remotely close to a meaningful breakthrough. Nothing to see here, move along...

    The words are hard to parse to establish the baseline, but it either says that they need to make as much more progress as they made last year (100x), or they need two more years like last year (100x * 100x) to achieve breakeven.

    What's unclear is if they made methodical or breakthrough progress last year.

  13. Re: social security? wtf on Kmart Says Its Payment System Was Hacked · · Score: 1

    If you even go in to buy a candy bar they will ask you to apply for a credit card at the register. Even if you are eleven years old (happened to my daughter last week). Then they give you seven feet of receipt material with coupons, surveys, and a copy of the Magna Carta.

    They are so going out of business. I would be short on the stock.

  14. Re: Traffic Shaper? on BitHammer, the BitTorrent Banhammer · · Score: 2

    so go to a coffee shop where the wifi doesn't suck. Problem solved, coffee shops customer-regulated into competitively providing decent internet.

  15. Re: Because she had a big impact on peace on eart on 2014 Nobel Peace Prize Awarded To Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzay · · Score: 5, Insightful

    an educated population is one of the best defenses against mindless wars. That's why it's so important to the corrupt governments that want to wage those wars to have control of the education systems in their societies.

  16. Re: Awesome on Tesla Announces Dual Motors, 'Autopilot' For the Model S · · Score: 1

    we owned a Pontiac minivan for three years - over that time it cost us about $50,000 in acquisition cost, gasoline, and repairs, net out eight thousand for the trade in 'value' at the end of its miserable life. Who wants to claim that makes us 1 or 2 percenters? It was a real mistake to buy a GM product, but that doesn't mean that the target market was anything other than middle America.

  17. Re:Or crypto on Eric Schmidt: Anxiety Over US Spying Will "Break the Internet" · · Score: 2

    Eric is saying the crypto will break the internet

    He's right in that some of what we have now may become unworkable. But insulating the Internet from corrupt governments is progress, and we may well have to give up some of the utility that we could have had given the assumptions that there are non-corrupt governments. But that was an idealistic pipe-dream as such a thing has never existed in history.

    This moment is one of architectural correction. "Oh, what a pretty bridge we could have without winds and rust!" The faster it happens, the sooner we can get on with human progress.

  18. Re:Too much oxygen? on MIT Study Finds Fault With Mars One Colony Concept · · Score: 1

    but the study claims that they would be unable to vent ONLY the oxygen and would be forced to vent nitrogen as well

    It's too bad we don't have any experience with binding oxygen to other chemicals.
    There's a whole planet full of rusty soil to be had - I don't get why anybody is advocating for a sealed-ecosystem as if they're on a space station.

  19. Re: This shit is why managers think the cloud work on Vax, PDP/11, HP3000 and Others Live On In the Cloud · · Score: 1

    the consultants who drive Teslas understand RoI but, man, the guys in Range Rovers? - run away!

  20. Re: Diplomatically risky, though possibly legal on US Says It Can Hack Foreign Servers Without Warrants · · Score: 2

    this is nonsense. The US Constitution only grants the power explicitly delegated to the federal government - other powers fall to the States and the people. Any protections listed are based on natural rights which are inherent in the human being, not in a citizenship, and so apply equally to all humans.

  21. Re:Discovery? on Complain About Comcast, Get Fired From Your Job · · Score: 1

    If you can get what you want from a letter, why bother with the lawsuit.

    What could a letter get him at this stage?

  22. Discovery? on Complain About Comcast, Get Fired From Your Job · · Score: 1

    He has a lawyer but he hasn't filed a lawsuit and demanded the recordings as part of discovery?

    Is there some reason they wouldn't back up his version of events? It's not hard to imagine that many courts would award him significant damages if the story is true and many attorneys would take such a case on commission.

  23. Re:Military personnel have a different attitude... on Why Military Personnel Make the Best IT Pros · · Score: 1

    My experience as well. There are some organizations where "they said to do it, so I'm going to do it, I'm going to it as well as I can until the 5PM bell rings, because that's when they said I should leave" works really well.

    "But that request is insane."
    "Not my call."
    "It'll do the opposite of what's intended"
    "That's above my paygrade."

    are the kinds of conversations I've had.

    I've learned over time I'm not cut out for those places, but those places surely do exist.

  24. Re:90% ? on Past Measurements May Have Missed Massive Ocean Warming · · Score: 1

    Which is not a surprise because atmospheric models haven't been used for prediction for years

    One should hope not - there aren't even any models yet that can predict basic temperature trends on any sort of fine scale.

    Not that I'm complaining - aside from pushing for clean power, which will be cost effective anyway with the right technologies (sans government prohibitions) - other than protecting the real estate investments of the wealthy, the RoI on warming prevention is horrible, compared with other things to spend money on. Use the money to cure malaria first - it'll save far, far, more lives. I know, politicians don't like to hear the economics, but tough noogies to them.

    Accurate climate models ought to be a laudable field of academic pursuit, but there's really not much urgent need for them.

  25. Re:Possible sequence on Apple Sapphire Glass Supplier GT Advanced Files For Bankruptcy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    6) the governments socialize the losses of GTAT onto all of the companies that GTAT owes money to. Had GTAT and Apple succeeded, all of the profits would have been private, mostly recognized in Cork.

    Three cheers for corporate welfare!