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User: Latent+Heat

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  1. What do you call a man with breasts? on Analysis Reveals Almost No Real Women On Ashley Madison · · Score: 1

    . . . old! . . . (bah-doom boom!)

  2. Asking the FAA check pilot for his weight on Airline Begins Weighing Passengers For 'Safety' · · Score: 1
    I was preparing for my first flight as a student pilot with the senior instructor at flight school in his role as FAA examiner. Even though this early in my training, and the purpose of this flight check was to see if my regular instructor was doing his job, I wanted to make a good impression by following all of the rules -- kinda like not wanting to make rolling "stops" past traffic signs on your driving road test.

    Even though in lessons with my regular instructor we never went through weight-and-balance calculations, this was on the basis that a trainer was in proper trim with 2 people and a full tank of gas and we never took any luggage, I knew the Piper PA-38 Tomahawk 2-seat trainer had a stringent gross weight limit. Even though each person, pilot or passenger, was deemed to weight 160 lbs "by the book" for weight-and-balance, the PA-38 only allowed for full gas tanks if the "payload" was at or below 320 lbs -- at least my regular instructor had cautioned me that if go over, you need to offload fuel.

    I knew that I weighed 160 lbs "back in college", and whereas the FAA guy wasn't unusually tall, he had the look of the few pounds that comes as we age.

    Faced with a diplomatic dilemma, I got up the courage to ask, "If I am to calculate weight-and-balance the right way, I am going to have to know how much you weigh . . " The Examiner barks back at me, "You are to count each person in the aircraft as weighing 160 lbs!"

    OK, OK, alright already!

  3. A reasonable expectation of . . .Kentucky on Kentucky Man Arrested After Shooting Down Drone · · Score: 1
    You would think that law enforcement people in the Commonwealth summoned for some guy buzzing another guy's yard with a drone, and guy-with-yard reaching for his varmint gun . . .

    Doesn't the law make any allowance for "community standards" anymore?

    I mean, what would Sheriff Andy Taylor do? (OK, OK, a different state, but you get the idea.) Sure, Barney would reach for the cuffs, but Andy would try to mediate this dispute, no?

  4. Release . . . the Kraaken! on Microsoft Officially Releases Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 · · Score: 1

    Release . . . the Windows Phone!

  5. Iowa Immigration Requirements on Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads · · Score: 1
    No special requirements

    You just have to be used to the Central Valley, without mountains within day-trip range, with incredible humidity in summer and cold, snowy winters.

  6. The NSF National Robotics Initiative on Volkswagen Factory Worker Killed By a Robot · · Score: 1
    The NSF has a solicitation for research proposals on human-robot cooperation. The Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society magazine The Bent has an article on this topic, showcasing a product offering by a Norwegian company called Universal Robotics offering a "depowered" robot said to be safe to operate close to humans.

    Some of these solicitations come from "on high", and a contract monitor at NSF was doing some eye rolling about the notion that you could truly make an industrial robot safe to work with humans in its working element, or at least was giving speech inflections over the telephone suggestive of rolling one's eyes. A research group in Canada offered a critical take on the claims for the safety of the Universal Robotics offering from the standpoint of other university people taking these claims on face value and putting graduate students into the robot "cage."

    A safer robot may need strategies such as "depowering" the robot or offering (as UR does) a depowered "teaching mode" along with control systems to obtain the required accuracy with less power. Beyond that, there is interest in vision and sensors to avoid hitting people with the robot.

    But the question is, a chimp (Pan Troglodyte) can tear a person apart, but a chimp has sensors, and a chimp can be trained to be around people. Would you trust that training, would you rely on that training. A robot that has enough power to do the required factory tasks has the power to crush a person, but you can depower the robot depending on the operating mode and you can add sensors. Would you trust the algorithm design and software programming and mechanical safety systems behind such an arrangement to enter the robot cage?

    Would you trust a self-driving car as a car has the power to crush someone? I guess with enough sensors and algorithms and testing, but even there, you are not guiding a self-driving car by standing right in front of it as suggested by NSF's co-robots . . . are you?

  7. It's "not just the about the money!" on When Will Your Hard Drive Fail? · · Score: 1
    C'mon people, unless you are recording movies, backing up your data (onto multiple thumb drives) is trivial.

    The real hassle is backing up your operating systems along with all the software installations and installs.

    Sure, we all have the activation keys for every piece of software we installed in a safe place somewhere?

    That is also the royal hassle that Microsoft created when they started "authenticating Windows" against hardware configurations. You used to be able to just clone hard disks and take them to another computer when one failed. I know there are people who also build computers from parts, but Microsoft going to that model made building a machine from parts more trouble than its worth. And having a hard disk fail is probably the software industry's model for getting people to buy all the software -- OS, office suite, everything -- from scratch.

  8. They came for on Why Is It a Crime For Dennis Hastert To Evade Government Scrutiny? · · Score: 2
    the Republican House Leadership, but I was not a Republican serving in the House of Representatives.

    They came for lobbyists making a gadzillion dollars representing Turkish interests, but I was not a lobbyist representing Turkish interests.

    They came for persons making "structured" bank withdrawals totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I was not making bank widthdrawals in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  9. Khhhhhaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnn!

  10. Exotic Moon on Prospects and Limits For the LHC's Capabilities To Test String Theory · · Score: 1

    You can see one of those a couple miles out on the highway out of town, but there is a 2-drink minimum . . .

  11. What about the quality of the remaining stars? on Galaxies Die By Slow "Strangulation" · · Score: 1
    I object to this pure numbers-based galaxy ranking.

    What if the galaxy with many fewer stars has higher quality stars? Should we give so much credit to galaxies that are prolific star creators when they have poached the material from other galaxies?

  12. Where has the absence of C13 gone? on Global Carbon Dioxide Levels Reach New Monthly Record · · Score: 1
    Take a look at the comparison of C13/C12 ratio with total atmospheric CO2.

    http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/o...

    The carbon in plants and in fossil fuels is depleted in the C13 isotope by about 1.8 percent (18 mils). The annual wiggles in the C13 ratio are accounted for by the complementary wiggles in the total CO2 being the update and reemission of CO2 depleted in C13 at that level.

    The multi-decade slope of the C13 curve is much more shallow in comparison to the annual wiggles in relation to the same comparison for total CO2. Any number of debunk-the-skeptics Web sites points out that as we emit CO2 depleted in C13, the C13 ratio declines. But not one of these sites offers even a rough quantitative analysis, which would show that CO2 depleted at the fossil level can account for no more than a third of the increase in atmospheric CO2 that is the source of much anxiety.

    Is anyone else noticing this?

  13. Work for EPIC and save lives! on Kludgey Electronic Health Records Are Becoming Fodder For Malpractice Suits · · Score: 1
    Was on a poster of an on-campus recruiter at the U last year.

    I shut up and didn't make any remarks about that poor Thomas Eric Duncan dude . . .

  14. Um, there are folks speaking Aramaic on Ask Slashdot: Best Medium For Storing Data To Survive a Fire (or Other Disaster) · · Score: 1

    Isn't Copt or Syriac as spoken by Middle Eastern Christians tracing their geneologies to the First Century pretty much the same thing?

  15. Recovered IDE drive from a fire on Ask Slashdot: Best Medium For Storing Data To Survive a Fire (or Other Disaster) · · Score: 2
    My father lost his workshop to fire in 1999. I have in my hands a Western Digital "Caviar" 2540 IDE drive that still reeks of smoke 16 years later. The computer was wrecked, but I hooked that drive up to an IDE cable and copied all of his files from it.

    People think a fire turns everything to molton slag. There was much that survived even when the 2 cars in the garage were reduced to burnt hulks.

    Don't have any experience with such a thing with modern multi-100 Gig drives, but traditionally drives were built like tanks.

  16. Your real crime . . . on Florida Teen Charged With Felony Hacking For Changing Desktop Wallpaper · · Score: 1
    . . . was that the computers worked better when the sys admin was away on vacation?

    Maybe it was a job security thang?

  17. Trusting the passengers on Modern Cockpits: Harder To Invade But Easier To Lock Up · · Score: 1
    Actually, we are trusting the passengers, in the words of Jerry Pournelle, we are trusting the passengers to riot rather than submit to a hijacker.

    The Shoe Bomber Richard Reid got stomped by the other passengers, and the Underwear Bomber Abdul-Mutalub was fought and stopped by a fellow passenger.

    On the other hand, if someone really wants to crash the plane, can the other pilot or the pilot with volunteer passenger "muscle" stop this. The passenger on that one plane in 9-11 broke open the cockpit door -- they were able to thwart a fourth attack on a building, but they were unable to prevent a crash. It seems they knew there chances of living were slim and they gave their lives to prevent loss-of-life on the ground.

  18. The Jet Blue incident on Modern Cockpits: Harder To Invade But Easier To Lock Up · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I believe it was mentioned that it was a Good Thing when a co-pilot locked out a captain who was freaking out, allowing the co-pilot to make and emergency landing and save the passengers.

  19. Pilot range extender on Modern Cockpits: Harder To Invade But Easier To Lock Up · · Score: 1
    They sell them as a "pilot range extender" at the FBO (fixed-base operator) plane rental counter for private pilots.

    But what do women pilots use? What if the call is for Bodily Function #2? Even with an all-male crew, do you really want to expose yourself this way to your colleague? There is this protocol with the urinals in the Men's Room of not looking over at other dudes -- at the controls of the plane, should the other pilot have to limit their gaze of the instruments and controls?

  20. And your point being . . . on New Solar Capacity Beats Coal and Wind, Again · · Score: 1
    Someone asks why there is "pushback" against mandating/subsidizing renewables, an explanation is offered on the beliefs/reasoning/prejudices of those offering the pushback, and then this explanation is deemed "irrelevant wandering"?

    It seems people can get very huffy about something deemed irrelevant?

    It seems someone can get quite imperious about an enterprise that garners pushback for being heavyhanded?

    It seems the word "conversation" really mean "shut up and hang your head in shame while I explain to you what you should think?"

  21. Mr. President! on Giant Lava Tubes Possible On the Moon · · Score: 1

    We must not allow a lunar lava-tube gap!

  22. Ridiculous non sequitur on New Solar Capacity Beats Coal and Wind, Again · · Score: 1
    This perspective (jamming something down throats until blood is vomited, metaphorically of course) is not being advocated, by I am quoting from your prior post where you just advocated it (metaphorically speaking, of course). Only you didn't write that?

    I believe Charles Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll) wrote of such a thing . .

  23. This is about freedom . . . on New Solar Capacity Beats Coal and Wind, Again · · Score: 1

    "Renewables need to be jammed down the throats of every American until they vomit blood because we've ceded leadership in what will be the world's biggest industry to China. " With Manichean language like that, this explains where the push-back is coming from.

  24. Ms. Rosie Scenario on New Solar Capacity Beats Coal and Wind, Again · · Score: 2
    Both the Right and Left are guilty of this.

    But when there is an ideological agenda, there can be a lot of confirmation bias.

    Start with the title, "New Solar Capacity Beats Coal and Wind, Again." Is this an objective, nerd-centric assessment of scientific fact? Or is it a victory-lap "Eat stuff all of you doubters and deniers"?

    The concern is that Renewable is not quite ready for Prime Time and being jammed down our throats.

  25. Glenn Reynolds' spin . . . on Clinton Regrets, But Defends, Use of Family Email Server · · Score: 1

    At least the General's crime of sharing stuff with a woman he was sleeping with doesn't apply here . . . we think . . .