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User: onkelonkel

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  1. Re:Laws of Physics have become Heresy? on Teaching Creationism As Science Now Banned In Britain's Schools · · Score: 3, Informative

    You are correct. Life on earth can't get more complex over time, because that would require energy and the sun doesn't exist.

  2. Re:What about flat cards? on Clueless About Card Data Hack, PF Chang's Reverts To Imprinting Devices · · Score: 1

    Cool, you could go get real Chinese food instead of this RedOliveLobsterGarden corporate pale imitation. (Try the Xiao Long Bao)

  3. Re:"disruptive" = scam on Uber Demonstrations Snarl Traffic In London, Madrid, Berlin · · Score: 1

    "Scam" Do you know what that word means? A scam is a confidence trick or fraud. How exactly is uber tricking people out of their money?

  4. Re:#notallgeekyguys on Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds · · Score: 1

    I have seen a woman at an MTG tournament. Really. It was awesome. She was, from what I could see of her play, a decently skilled mid to upper level player. (Not a total random scrub like me). She was also young and very pretty, with long blond hair and a sweetly voluptuous figure. She wore a push-up bra and a super low cut top. All the nerd boys were drooling and ogling her cleavage so hard she kicked their buts right up to the semi-finals. At the semis she lost in 2 to the guy who ended up winning the tournament. He was smart enough to see through her female version of the "Jedi mind trick" and wouldn't have noticed if she had two heads.

  5. Re:It's a numbers game - Art History anyone? on Fixing the Humanities Ph.D. · · Score: 3, Informative

    You are exactly right.

    There was a sad story on the radio the other day. A nice lady with a PHD in Art History was living in her car because she was broke and unemployed.

    What struck me was how very _betrayed_ she felt. Here she had studied hard, gotten good grades, and had achieved the highest academic degree possible and yet the job she expected wasn't forthcoming. All her life she was told "you need a degree to get a good job" and she somehow interpreted that to mean that if she got a degree she would get a job. Her whole attitude was that she was all but promised a job, and that it was the university's fault that this job wasn't there, and that she should have been told by the university that there were no jobs in her chosen field "before they took her money".

    She wanted to work as a museum curator, cataloging and managing the museums art collection. When asked how many such jobs existed, she was taken aback, as if she had never thought about it and then said maybe 10 or 20 in the entire province.

  6. Point Roberts on AT&T Charges $750 For One Minute of International Data Roaming · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There is a tiny "Island" of America called Point Roberts at the extreme NW corner of Washington State. The Canadians who live right along that border are forever fighting with their cell providers to take off roaming charges because the phone will often pick up the AT&T cell tower on the US side instead of the Telus (or whatever) tower on the Canadian side. The carriers seem quite helpless to fix the problem; some people I know there have to get roaming charges taken off every month.

  7. Read about it Here - Big Planet on Strange New World Discovered: The "Mega Earth" · · Score: 2
  8. Re:Depends if the "Idiot" is a Volunteer or Paid on A Measure of Your Team's Health: How You Treat Your "Idiot" · · Score: 1

    "both have other official "significant others"

    Blackmail is such an ugly word. But it could work in this situation.

  9. Re:Registration != ownership on Zazzle.com Thinks Depictions of Pi Are Protected Intellectual Property · · Score: 1

    Around here we call it the Swooshstika.

  10. Re:Misinformation? - Shingles on Mutant Registration vs. Vaccine Registration · · Score: 1

    I got very lucky, I went to my doctor within a few hours of the pox appearing, and he had me on antivirals about 5 minutes later. Stopped it in its tracks.

  11. Re:About time. on SpaceX To Present Manned Dragon Capsule · · Score: 1
  12. Re:Misinformation? - Shingles on Mutant Registration vs. Vaccine Registration · · Score: 4, Informative

    The same virus that cause chicken pox in kids will lurk in your body for decades and can come back and give you Shingles. For seniors it can cause nerve damage and crippling pain, even blindness if you are very unlucky. Chicken Pox may not seem like a big deal, but trust me you do not want Shingles.

  13. Re:The bigger story on The Internet Is Now Part of the Crime Scene · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is what narcissistic psychopaths do; they blame other people for their own problems. Girls don't want to go out with me. It's clearly their problem, nothing to do with me, so I will kill them all.

  14. Re:Why so much insurance? on California Opens Driverless Car Competition With Testing Regulations · · Score: 1

    Just to be clear, we are talking about a $5 million limit to a liability insurance policy. It doesn't cost $5 million. I pay about $250 a year to raise my minimum $200k liability to $3 mil. Apparently I'm a bit above the local average, most people here have about $2mil coverage. If I had more personal assets, and I lived in a more litigious place I would probably go for the max $5 mil .

  15. Re:Cant be cheap!!! on Swiss Space Systems Announces Plan To Offer World's Cheapest Zero-G Flights · · Score: 1

    Algol W!

  16. Noob on IT Pro Gets Prison Time For Sabotaging Ex-Employer's System · · Score: 1

    He went in and did as much damage as he could, in a sort of drive your semi through the front door kind of way, failed to cover his tracks, got caught, confessed, and is doing 4 years hard time. Better that he walked away with his head held high and never looked back.

    He should have followed best practices:

    1. Be patient. Wait. Wait at least a year. In that time they will have let any number of people go, and you won't be the go-to suspect.

    2. Plan ahead. Make sure there are a few well concealed back doors into their systems. A few ex-employees who didn't have their accounts deleted, maybe a vendor login. Write down the details, don't email them to yourself.

    3. When you are officially fired, step away from your computer. Insist that someone disable all your accounts and access privileges. Have witnesses.

    4. When it's time to strike, don't use your home computer and don't use your laptop at the closest starbucks. Bounce everything through TOR and a couple of VPNs. Don't short the stock first. Excessive paranoia is the key.

    5. Lay your groundwork carefully. Make sure ALL the backups are corrupted first. Plan your logic bomb so it deletes all traces of itself. Your attack payload should ideally wipe every server and every workstation like you hit them with DBAN.

    6. Trigger your logic bomb, log out, and never ever ever log back in again.

  17. Re:It's so damned inefficient at present. on Why Mobile Wallets Are Doomed · · Score: 1

    You are the only person on earth who comes to a till with the correct change. I have had to stand in line behind any number of cash using undiagnosed Alzheimer's sufferers as they try to count out $3.97 in nickels dimes and quarters and take 5 minutes to complete their purchase.

    Chip and pin with RFID ftw. The total comes up on the PIN pad. I tap my card on the pad. It spits out a receipt and I move on. Total time 15 seconds. Worst case, I actually have to slide my card into the reader, hit ok a few times and enter the PIN. Total time 30 seconds.

  18. Re:pyrethin/permethrin kitty danger on Harvard Study Links Neonicotinoid Pesticide To Colony Collapse Disorder · · Score: 1

    So, how much permethrin would I need to not use to avoid accidentally killing my neighbours cat?

  19. Re:The DOT is the problem... on Feds Issue Emergency Order On Crude Oil Trains · · Score: 1

    Transport Canada has given the Canadian Railroads 3 years to replace the old dot 111 cars. About 65,000 of them according to FP. Of course we just blew up a small town (Lac Megantic) and killed about 50 people with a trainload of Bakken crude, so maybe TC was motivated.

    As you say, a failure of leadership in the US. It's not like the US government hasn't saddled railroads with multi-billion dollar unfunded mandates before. PTC for example.

  20. Re:Rail line routes on Feds Issue Emergency Order On Crude Oil Trains · · Score: 2

    Around here the railroads have been doing diversions around towns where it makes sense. The city trades land with the railroad. The city gets the relatively more valuable downtown railway lands (right of way plus railyards), gets to close a whole lot of at grade road/rail crossings (better traffic flow, much safer), plus no more noisy stinky trains downtown, and in return the railroad gets a corridor around the town plus a bunch of extra land on the outskirts of town to build a new (bigger) yard. A lot of times the city and railway get together to build a big-ass industrial park (with railway service) near the new yard, and usually if you do it right the new industrial park has convenient highway access for intermodal (containers) traffic. The only downside for the railway is a slightly longer route, otherwise it's a win, win, win for everybody.

  21. Re:"Smoking" gun on US Climate Report Says Global Warming Impact Already Severe · · Score: 1

    No offense, genuinely curious. I have read (ok skimmed) the actual report. From what I understand, the SG formed a committee, they reviewed a large swath of the existing studies available at that time and their main conclusion was that smoking caused cancer and emphysema and was strongly linked to heart disease. People who smoked had a 10 times increase in rates of death from cancer compared to non-smokers. These were (I think?) conclusions based on existing statistics, and not original research.

    Not being an epidemiologist, I can't really tell where the science is lacking.

  22. Re:"Smoking" gun on US Climate Report Says Global Warming Impact Already Severe · · Score: 1

    "On January 11, 1964, Luther L. Terry, M.D., Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service, released the first report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. On the basis of more than 7,000 articles relating to smoking and disease already available at that time in the biomedical literature, the Advisory Committee concluded that cigarette smoking is—

    A cause of lung cancer and laryngeal cancer in men

    A probable cause of lung cancer in women

    The most important cause of chronic bronchitis"

    Which of these conclusions do you consider "Outright Lies"?

  23. "Smoking" gun on US Climate Report Says Global Warming Impact Already Severe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health came out in 1964. It clearly and undeniably showed the evidence that smoking was harmful. Now, 50 years later, only about 1/2 of the states have actually banned smoking in enclosed public spaces.

    Why does anyone expect America to respond to AGW any quicker or more effectively?

  24. Where can I get a jammer? on FCC Proposes $48,000 Fine To Man Jamming Cellphones On Florida Interstate · · Score: 1

    Where can I get a jammer? I promise I would use it with the same discretion and concern for others shown by the morons who shout into their cel phones for an hour on the train.

  25. Re:The idiocracy is coming on Women Increasingly Freezing Their Eggs To Pursue Their Careers · · Score: 1

    "My brother is at Harvard"

    "Then why are you begging in the streets? Good God can't he support you?

    "No. He's in a jar of formaldehyde. He was born with two heads."