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User: Mr.+Slippery

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  1. Re:depressing... on E. Coli Can Be Used To Clean Up Nuclear Waste · · Score: 1

    It isn't about solving some huge looming problem. It is about pacification of people's irrational fears so we can actually build nuclear power plants and stop spewing mercury and radioactive ash into the air.

    By all means, pacify irrational fears.

    However, being worried about the environmental impact of uranium mining (beyond NIMBYism), about the security and weapon proliferation issues involved in putting plutonium factories all over the place, and about the lack of a solution for waste disposal, is not irrational.

    Many people have irrational fears about nuclear power. Many, though, have an irrational attachment to it, some big-science romantic idea of Man Harnessing The Atom!, never mind the drawbacks.

  2. Re:Ok, but... the economics are backwards on Nissan Gives Electric Cars Blade Runner Audio Effect · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The thing is, simple economics dictates that it would make far more sense to equip the blind people with car proximity sensors of some kind, rather than make every car noisy.

    Which just goes to show you that "simple" economics doesn't apply to the real world.

    We have a cheap robust solution for putting noisemakers on cars. We don't have any effective solution for equipping the blind with movement detectors, and solution for giving them some sort of gizmos would be less robust -- those would be subject to being lost, whereas it would be amazingly rare for a noisemaker to fall off a car.

    Adding a noisemaker to cars would also benefit distracted pedestrians and young children, as well as preventing accidents with animals. If it helps prevent Distracted Dave or Little Bobby or Fido from getting run over, or keeps you from plowing into a deer, that's a benefit that woudn't accrue to giving motion detectors to the blind. (Many people already add "deer whistles" to their vehicles, though evidence for their effectiveness is spotty: see here and here. The study at the second link is interesting, but the test group using the whistles was self-selected and probably represented more cautious drivers.)

  3. Re:cursive vs print ? on Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill — Does It Matter? · · Score: 1

    You can write faster than you can think???? What sort of brain retarding drugs are you taking?

    It seems you have not learned the most important rule of writing -- not everything that's in your head should make it to the page. (Unless you're trying to emulate Kerouac's "first thought, best thought", which can be interesting for poetry and creative prose, but I would not recommend it for academic work.)

    People often write too damn much that says too damn little. Even typing this, I write a sentence, pause to consider, write another.

    I can think reasonably fast, thank you. But composing quality text takes a lot of thought.

  4. Re:cursive vs print ? on Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill — Does It Matter? · · Score: 1

    From the day I began writing essays I was bounded by my writing speed (and now, by my typing speed).

    Then may I suggest that you please think before writing?

    Anyway, if your cursive writing is slower than any other form, you're doing something wrong, because cursive involves the same movements as printing

    It most certainly does not. Printing uses many straight lines -- the shortest distance between two points -- whereas cursive (assuming we're talking about the thrice-dammed D'Nealian script) insists on curves. Furthermore, look at a cursive upper-case G or I or J, or gods forbid a lower case z and tell me how that involves the same movements as the printed letter.

    And tell me how I can distinguish a quickly (and therefore sloppily) written lower-case a, o, or s. Printed letterforms are much more unambiguous, making hastily-written text more legible.

    except with printing you also have to move the pen up and down as well as in the plane.

    With cursive, you still need to leave the page in between words and any time you write a lower case t, i, j, or x, or an upper case F, H, K, T, or X. And if you dot or cross those letters after writing a word so as not to leave the page during a word, then your hand has to move backwards!

    There may have been some sense to this when writing with a fountain pen. With a precision pencil, or with a modern ball-point or fine-line felt-tip, it's ridiculous.

  5. Re:cursive vs print ? on Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill — Does It Matter? · · Score: 1

    Printing is incredibly slow compared to cursive.

    Perhaps you never learned to print properly, then? Or maybe my cursive was some sort of outlier. That's entirely possible; I was sent to special phys-ed classes because my fine motor control was poor. I switched to printing because it was, for me, much faster.

    Or perhaps you dang foreigners learned a different system of cursive than the D'Nealian that tortured my youth.

    I see something written in print and I can't stop myself assuming that it has been written by a primary school child.

    So many kids in the U.S. break out of cursive as soon as it is allowed, that I have the opposite bias -- when I see something written in cursive, it often looks childish. Part of that is probably that cursive letterforms have to be larger to be legible, and larger letters imply childishness.

    In my mind, a neat draftsman-like printing (which mine is most definitely not!) carries the most sophisticated connotation.

    Er, anyone who has ever answered an essay question hoping for decent marks? You are never given enough time to fully convey a well conceived, well written and well argued essay within the time limit.

    I did well on essay tests, and was often done with my argument well before the time limit. Taking time to mentally edit before putting pencil to page results in a more concise and focused answer.

    I've found that most people tend to write too damn much, to stretch a point worth a single paragraph into a whole page. I suppose it's a habit that starts when as children we are told, "For homework, write a 100 word book report on Peter Rabbit", and pad our word count with tangents and repetition. This is really, truly, a very bad habit. One should use only the precise, minimal amount of words needed in order to convey the ideas that one has. To redundantly repeat ideas in order to extend the length of a prose essay can only end up degrading the quality of a piece and result in inferior writing. So always carefully consider the choice of the words that you are going to use and express yourself with the maximum amount of conciseness. That's how I think essays should be written.

  6. Re:Private Car Cameras on Trust an Insurance Company's "Drive-Cam?" · · Score: 1

    In a third of all fatal accidents where there are two or more people in the vehical and some are wearing seatbelts and some are not, the one that dies is the one WEARING the belt. The one ejected is the one that survives.

    Citation needed. Seriously, seriously needed. You're discouraging people from taking a life-and-death safety measure, you need to back it up.

    Might there, on rare occasions, be a case where someone who was unbelted would have survived where a belted driver of passenger is killed? Sure. Given enough accidents, all things are possible. But a third of accidents? I'm calling B.S.

    You'll notice that professional race drivers, probably the people most familiar with MVAs, wear not just seatbelts but five-point harnesses to ensure they don't get ejected. Here's a nice description of what happens when you don't wear your seatbelt:

    In a collision, you have three or four sub-collisions all taking place in sequence. First, the vehicle hits some object. The vehicle abruptly slows, but unrestrained objects inside it continue at the same speed, in the same direction. Then the unrestrained body hits the interior of the vehicle, and starts to slow. That's the second collision. That body's internal organs are still moving at speed until they hit the inside of the chest (or get cheese-sliced by their supporting ligaments--and that's where you get things like bisected livers or aortas). The fourth collision is when your buddy who was riding in the back seat lands on your head, because he wasn't wearing his seatbelt either and he kept moving at the same speed in the same direction. Newtonian physics: Learn it, live it, love it.

    There are two major routes that unrestrained persons take in a front-end MVA (Motor Vehicle Accident). Up-and-over or down-and-under (AKA "submarining"). With up-and-over, the upper body launches forward and up. The head strikes the windshield. (This produces the classic "windshield star") Your injuries here include concussion, scalp laceration, and various brain bleeds. You can suspect fractured cervical vertebrae (and if you have a fracture with compromise to the spinal cord at C-4 or higher, you've lost the nerves that control chest expansion and the diaphragm. "C-4, breathe no more," as the saying goes).

    Go a little farther through the windshield, and it isn't unexpected to leave some or all of your face behind stuck in the broken glass. You'd be surprised by how easily faces come off the facial bones.

    You can also expect fractured wrists, arms, and shoulders, from folks trying to brace themselves.

    A little farther through the windshield, all the way out of the vehicle (a situation we call "pre-extracted for your convenience"), and in addition to whatever damage you took on the way through, you get the damage from hitting the ground, trees, and metal poles at however-many-miles-an-hour.

    Sure, you hear people talking about wanting to be "thrown clear" in the event of an accident. If you want to simulate being "thrown clear," go to the fifth floor of a building and jump out the window.

    It's simple: if you won't wear your goddamn seatbelt, you're too mentally challenged to be permitted to operate a motor vehicle.

  7. Re:Private Car Cameras on Trust an Insurance Company's "Drive-Cam?" · · Score: 1

    If something happened which was your responsibility, and you know that you did wrong, and you accept that responsibility for your actions, why shouldn't you behave in an honest manner?

    Because your ideas of "doing wrong" and "accepting responsibility" may be at great variance with those of the legislature, police, and judges.

  8. Re:cursive vs print ? on Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill — Does It Matter? · · Score: 1

    Anyone reasonable writing the SAT essay portion...Same with AP history tests

    There wasn't an essay portion when I took the SATs back in the Reagan era, but I did take the English AP exam, and certain wrote in many blue books in college. Printing never seemed a handicap, and I never felt, "Wow, if only my hand could move faster I would have done better on that exam."

  9. Re:Illegible Cursive going away? Oh Noez! on Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill — Does It Matter? · · Score: 1

    Interesting. I taught myself to print (in school, I only learned block capitals before cursive was thrust upon me) and developed a similar hand to the italic they present. Except that my "a" and "y" look more like the Courier or Helvetica forms.

  10. Re:cursive vs print ? on Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill — Does It Matter? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Writing in print is writing each letter like the printer does, without linking them ? How can you write an essay like that ? It must take ages ?

    Why would it take ages? I abandoned cursive writing as soon as I could, in seventh or eighth grade, since printing was faster. If nothing else, with printing one can write smaller letterforms more legibly, and smaller forms require less hand travel, thus making for faster writing.

    And who composes an essay so fast that the limiting factor is the physical act of writing?

  11. No, it does not matter. on Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill — Does It Matter? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Cursive writing is no more a useful skill than illuminating manuscripts. Certainly, one should be able to write with a pen or pencil; but cursive letterforms are of dubious advantage with modern writing implements.

  12. bad summary on Austin Police Want Identities of Online Critics · · Score: 5, Informative

    From TFA:

    People who misrepresent themselves as officials in online comments could face civil, criminal penalties, Acevedo says.

    ...

    Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo says he and some of his officers have been harassed, lied about and had their identities falsely used

    ...

    In March, the social networking site Twitter shut down a fake account that pretended to issue official Austin police bulletins after the department and the Texas attorney general's office complained.

    ...

    State lawmakers this year passed a law that took effect Sept. 1 making it a third-degree felony to use another person's name to post messages on a social networking site without their permission and with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten.

    ...

    A police commander has had his name falsely used as the author of comments about the department.

    The main issue here doesn't seem to be people posting "cops suck!", which is of course protected speech, but rather low-grade identity theft.

  13. Re:Hey Big Auto on "Right To Repair" Bill Advances In Massachusetts · · Score: 1

    That's a nice bald assertion. Care to back it up with any evidence or rationale, or were you hoping I would take it on faith?

    When you make a contract with a corporation, you make it with the corporation, not with the employees or stockholders. That's a simple fact which requires no further evidence.

    So long as the corporation exists, it is made up of people with the same rights as any other people.

    A corporation is not merely an association of people. It is a legal entity created by the state. Acting as individuals, of course people maintain their rights; but in acting as a corporation, in return for being freed of individual responsibility for the corporation's actions, their individuals rights do not carry over into the corporation's actions.

    Until we get to lock stockholders up for a corporation's crimes, until stockholders are fully liable for the fines a corporation incurs, a corporation does not inherit the rights of its stockholders.

    If I sign a contract with a mom & pop store saying that I will pay them back in installments, is it invalid because "the store is not a person".

    No, and I have not asserted that. I have asserted that the store has a more limited right to enter into contracts; that this right is a solely artificial one, manufactured by the state as the corporation itself is; that like the existence of the corporation, its power to enter into contracts is, correctly, contingent on the public good.

    Breaking a contract for no reason other than threat or force is irrational and the initiation of force against the other individual.

    Of course it's rational (though perhaps not legal or ethical) to break a contract if one can profit by doing so.

    Failing to uphold a contract is in no way an initiation of force. I know that objectivists, "anarcho-capitalists", and other propertarians are fond of twisting language so that anything they don't like qualifies as an "initiation of force", but the force here comes from calling on the state to enforce the contract. You can tell that by the guns that the state's agents carry.

  14. Re:print? on Google Offering Print Versions of Online Books · · Score: 1

    The only legitimate excuse for a giant library is if you are an academic researcher or an author. A good writer is a good reader, as they say. I am not a writer so I have no such need to keep things on file like that.

    That may be part of it; though I'm a poet, my style is definitely informed by the prose I read. And certainly my book collection has swelled a bit the past few years as I've been doing research for the historical sections of my non-fiction book. Though for that I've also made extensive use of Google Books, the Sacred Texts archive, and Project Gutenberg, as well as some more specialized sites. Nothing like being able to find rare, long out-of-print original sources on-line.

    Also many of my books pertain to my "other jobs", references related to martial arts and acupressure and massage. (For the day job, software, I have a few dead trees, but most of them I acquired pre-Web, or at least back in the days of dial-up.)

    But I do enjoy just having books around. I prefer "collector" to "hoarder", thank you very much. :-)

  15. Re:Hey Big Auto on "Right To Repair" Bill Advances In Massachusetts · · Score: 1

    The people in them do. They have the same right as anyone to set the terms of their contracts and agreements.

    You do not make a contract or agreement with the people in a corporation, so those people's individual rights are irrelevant. You make it with the corporation -- a creature created by the state, and therefore having no natural rights. It is the state's responsibility to leash the immortal sociopath it creates when it issues a charter.

    Furthermore, there is no natural right to set the terms of a contract. If you want the state to take positive action to enforce your contract -- without which, it is meaningless -- you can't complain if the state sets parameters for what can or can't be in a contract. (I'm not saying that it's a good or useful thing to have the state obtrusively enter into each and every negotiation; but that's an argument based on practical outcomes, not on rights.)

  16. Re:print? on Google Offering Print Versions of Online Books · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm one of those people that greatly savors a paper book. I have a nice little library of books that I keep around on two bookcases

    Um, my friend...if your "library" fits on two bookcases, you are not one of those people that greatly savors a paper book. :-) Come back when vistors aren't sure if they've found your house, or a used book store.

  17. Re:print? on Google Offering Print Versions of Online Books · · Score: 1

    I don't have nor want descendants, so what the hell am I saving the environment for exactly?

    I don't have descendants, though having them in the future is not out of the question. Still, I like to think that 50 or 100 years after my death, someone might stumble across a poem or something that I've written.

    Ok, so that's artist's hubris, and pretty unlikely. I'd still like to see memes and works I like survive, even if they didn't hatch in my brain. I'd like someone to read Tennyson's "Ulysses" 50 or 100 years after my death, and have the feeling, the experience, that it evokes in me.

  18. Re:No thanks. on Google Offering Print Versions of Online Books · · Score: 2, Informative

    On other news, good bye trees!

    Books sequester carbon. So long as the ultimate source of the wood is a tree farm rather than a forest, not a big deal. (Of course paper from hemp, sisal, or other fibers would be even better.)

  19. Re:Idiots on Garlic Farmer Wards Off High-Speed Internet · · Score: 5, Informative

    If anything vegatables and milk should be intentionally irradated as is commonly done in Europe to:

    ...reduce their vitamin content, add toxic radiolytic products like 2-ACBs, and attempt to compensate for unsafe food handling practice that shouldn't have been allowed in the first place? Not to mention increasing the availability of radioisotopes that are perfect for a "dirty bomb"?

    Yes, there are ignorant folks out there who think that irradiation makes food radioactive, which is plainly wrong. That does not mean that irradiation does not have deleterious effects.

  20. Re:Just confused? on Lawyer Demands Jury Stops Googling · · Score: 1

    That is also why jurors are not supposed to reach decisions on matters of law, only matters of fact.

    In the United States, it is the right of the juror to decide matters of both law and fact. This is explicitly listed in the Maryland state constitution: Art. 23. In the trial of all criminal cases, the Jury shall be the Judges of Law, as well as of fact, except that the Court may pass upon the sufficiency of the evidence to sustain a conviction.

    If you are ever a juror in a prosecution based on unconscionable laws, it is your legal right and your ethical duty to vote to acquit.

  21. Re:Hey Big Auto on "Right To Repair" Bill Advances In Massachusetts · · Score: 1

    They're both rights violations.

    No. Corporations have no rights.

    Corporations should be permitted to exist only so long as they serve the public good. Withholding information about their products in the interest of maintaining a service monopoly is not in the public good.

    So, fsck 'em.

  22. Re:That's becaues it's more mythology than reality on Fungivarius Beats $2 Million Stradivarius Violin · · Score: 2, Funny

    You see this in other high end audio all the time. Cables would be the best example.

    My favorite example: Denon's AK-DL1: "Ultra Premium", a $499 5-foot Ethernet cable. It's so premium that "signal directional markings are provided for optimum signal transfer" -- presumably the electrons read the markings to figure out which way to go, because moving under a voltage is just so out of style.

  23. Re:Science =! Public Policy on How To Make Science Popular Again? · · Score: 1

    Er, "Food Not Bombs", not "Foot Not Bombs". D'oh.

  24. Re:Science =! Public Policy on How To Make Science Popular Again? · · Score: 1

    I consider capitalists, even the "less correct ones" like, say Bill Gates and his monopoly, infinitely more moral (even if perhaps not 100% intentional) than even what you'd call "center" socialists.

    I don't know who or what I'd call "center" socialists, I don't think I've ever used the term.

    I find it pretty remarkable -- nonsensical, even, bordering on insane -- to claim that Bill Gates is infinitely more moral than socialists like Peter Kropotkin, Eugene Debs, Carl Sandburg, Noam Chomsky, Kurt Vonnegut, or George Orwell, or the anarchists at your local "Foot Not Bombs" chapter.

  25. Re:Science =! Public Policy on How To Make Science Popular Again? · · Score: 1

    I'm don't want this discussion. After all, there's nothing that can convince you.

    Well, at least nothing that emerges from your misunderstanding of the fundamental natures of capitalism and socialism, no.

    2) capitalism : people who work AND create value decide what happens in society

    Here's the root of the problem: your definitions are screwy. If you believe that people who create value by work should control a society's economic resources, you accept the fundamental tenet of socialism, the worker's control of the means of production.

    Capitalism, on the other hand, says that capitalists -- the aristocracy of landlords, stockholders, copyright and patent holders, and others anointed by the state -- should decide what happens in society.

    Socialism, even moderate amounts, really means the replacement of money by direct (and therefore constant) military force.

    Libertarian socialists don't even believe in a military.

    Capitalists, though, find it essential. What do you think money is, except force? Money is that which I can trade for ownership; ownership is the relation with an object whereby I can call on government guns to enforce my control of it. Property is force -- "first use" of force, even.