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User: j1mmy

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Comments · 452

  1. save your money and get a normal tv on Linux-Friendly, Internet-Enabled HDTVs? · · Score: 1

    a good screen can last far longer than technology changes in delivering media to that screen.

  2. instead of asking slashdot, ask google on Can We Abandon Confidentiality For Google Apps? · · Score: 1

    there's a for-pay version of google apps which can be delivered over SSL. i don't know if the license terms are any different, or if the server-side storage is at all secure, but i'm willing to bet someone working for google could answer that question for you.

  3. Re:Copy and paste the article text you want to use on AP Will Sell You a "License" To Words It Doesn't Own · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What if Jefferson's quote had been used in the article?

  4. Questionable. on Rude Drivers Reduce Traffic Jams · · Score: 1

    There are many fine traffic modeling journals out there. Physical Review E is not one of them. More telling is the lack of any references to any transportation journal articles regarding traffic flow models. While cellular automata approaches to modeling traffic flow have become increasingly popular in the last two decades, nothing in the abstract or citations leads me to believe they used an established traffic flow model.

  5. Re:how could it save... on California's Revised Pay-As-You-Drive Insurance Draws Continued Objections · · Score: 1

    they're not exactly fudging numbers

    the FHWA puts out numbers valuing travel in terms of dollars. they do this for travel time and mileage, for both passenger vehicles and commercial trucks. how they get these numbers is questionable, but it's basically a combination of the money people earn from their jobs versus the length/duration of their commute. there are also breakdowns for different types of trips (work, shopping, leisure) and the length of the trip itself (a short trip has a different valuation per mile than a long one).

    what the insurance people have done is to take these values and work them against the cost per mile of the variable-priced insurance policies and the average cost per mile of the fixed-price insurance policies. given some data on average trip lengths and distribution of trip purposes, you can build a monetization of travel under the two schemes.

    the carbon savings comes from people driving less due to the higher cost of insurance relative to their valuation of their travel. if you're paying more for insurance because you drive to the liquor barn every other night to pick up a fifth of whiskey, you might think twice about obtaining such libation. saves money on liquor, too.

    frankly, if this does go through in california and elsewhere, it could start to shift the USA away from suburbia hell back towards walkable town centers.

  6. what about healthcare? on Hawking Says Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution · · Score: 2, Interesting

    the modern ability to manage and/or cure a number of life-threatening conditions is greatly impacting the evolution of our species as well. people who would never have made it to adulthood a century ago are now passing on their crappy genes to their kids.

  7. wrong tool for the job on HTML Tags For Academic Printing? · · Score: 1

    while you can mark up your HTML with CSS for print media, why bother? when i send documents around i almost always send PDF's since they'll look the same in just about every reader. if it's something somebody else needs to edit, then i usually go with an MS Word document, which is a very portable format these days.

  8. Re:Whatever the legal question on Of Catty Rants and Copyrights · · Score: 1, Informative

    The editorial page is a free-for-all -- journalistic ethics don't apply. The editors don't do any verification of the identity of people sending in letters because 99.9999% of people send in their own letters. The newspaper did nothing wrong here. The malicious action rests entirely with the principal.

  9. I've got a vision for ya on The Battle Between Google and Facebook · · Score: -1, Troll
  10. like it or not on Emigrating To a Freer Country? · · Score: 1

    you're probably more free as a citizen of your native UK than you would be as a foreign worker in some other country

  11. Re:LOL on Is Playing a DVD Harder Than Rocket Science? · · Score: 1

    think about it like being on a vacation. you can't fill every minute of every day with something unique and fun. the problem with being on a space station is that you're on a space station. there isn't much to do up there to begin with.

  12. Re:Power and brightness... on A Widescreen Laser Projector In Your Pocket · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The trade-off is performance vs size. You can take this thing anywhere and you don't need to plug it in to the wall.

  13. Re:Tax breaks for the rich? on Apple Plans $1 Billion iDataCenter · · Score: 1

    Have you heard of Ford? What about GM? They compete! Believe it or not, they make similar products targeted at particular markets. They use marketing and pricing in an attempt to gain a greater share of these markets from eachother and other companies in these same markets.

  14. Re:Tax breaks for the rich? on Apple Plans $1 Billion iDataCenter · · Score: 1

    Those rich people contribute a great amount to government coffers, but consume relatively little. As revenue declines, services suffer. If the top earners continue to leave a state, the revenue will continue to go down and poverty will get worse as the government has fewer funds available to pay for social services.

  15. Re:Tax breaks for the rich? on Apple Plans $1 Billion iDataCenter · · Score: 1

    A) I'd like to eliminate both! Businesses contribute a very small portion of tax revenues already. The potential for job creation and general economic growth that would result has the potential to bring in that lost revenue and then some through personal income taxes.

    B) Have you heard about this thing called competition? It's when businesses compete for greater shares of a market by lowering prices or increasing the quality of their product.

  16. Re:Tax breaks for the rich? on Apple Plans $1 Billion iDataCenter · · Score: 0

    You're right, you'll spend the money either way. Eliminating business taxes has numerous benefits, however. It will eliminate the need for offshore tax havens, bringing mountains of capital back to the states. It will eliminate the need for businesses to jump through hoops for tax planning purposes, vastly reduce compliance and accounting costs, etc. Businesses spend great deals of time and energy dealing with the tax system, distracting them from the actual work the business does. I'd say it would be a huge benefit. And what better way to attact more investment and domestic economic growth than to dump business taxes?

  17. Re:Tax breaks for the rich? on Apple Plans $1 Billion iDataCenter · · Score: 1

    Infrastructure is usually tied to gas and/or property taxes.

  18. Re:Tax breaks for the rich? on Apple Plans $1 Billion iDataCenter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Business taxes should be the first to go, because businesses don't pay taxes. Their customers do. The only thing governments accomplish when they tax businesses is they raise the cost of goods and services.

  19. Re:Tax breaks for the rich? on Apple Plans $1 Billion iDataCenter · · Score: 1

    The point is that tax revenue suffers. This has nothing to do with how much the rich pay relative to their income, it has to do with how much they contribute to the state relative to total tax receipts.

  20. the problem isn't the maps on Google Earth Raises Discrimination Issue In Japan · · Score: 1

    it's the prejudices of these japanese people

  21. Re:Low on MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX · · Score: 1

    Yes, even for professional, publication quality work. I've been working in and with engineering academia for years now and have yet to meet anyone that actually uses something other than Word. The equation editor is more than adequate for 90% of the math that goes on. Most journals (in my field, anyway) require documents to be submitted in word format.

  22. could be an epic prank on YouTube Video Sends Guatemala Into Crisis · · Score: 1

    maybe the guy knew someone else was gunning for him and decided to pin it on some politicians he didn't like just for the hell of it

  23. a couple ideas on Hosting a Highly Inflammatory Document? · · Score: 1

    anything you do with it online, do through tor or an anonymous proxy. don't leave any tracks if you don't need to.

    put it on wikileaks, as already advised.

    get hardcopies out there, too. buy a new ream of paper from your local office supply store. handle the paper with gloves from packaging to printer to envelope. i shouldn't have to suggest to handle the envelope with gloves, too. mail it with a bogus (actually bogus, not a real address for someone else) return address, dropped in to a mailbox nowhere near where you live or work. sent them to the local media, the internal affairs department of your local police agency, any local politicians you trust, etc.

    good luck!

  24. vaporware on Illusion Cloak Makes One Object Look Like Another · · Score: 4, Informative

    The summary is bad enough, talking about invisibility cloaks as if they actually exist. This and the prior work by the team are nothing more than computer models. I'm not discounting the importance of the research, just the way in which it's framed. We don't have such cloaks yet and likely won't for a long time.

  25. it won't be enforced on Social Networking Behavioral Agreements At Work? · · Score: 1

    corporations have policies to cover their corporate asses in legal situations. aside from that, nobody in the management chain gives a damn about this policy or most of the others you've agreed to.