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User: CrimsonAvenger

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Comments · 9,858

  1. Re:"Obama pledged to end the controversial program on NSA Spying Wins Another Rubber Stamp · · Score: 1

    Wasn't that Senator Obama?!?!?!

    Not in JAN 2014 it wasn't. Or did you think he was elected President late last year?

  2. Re:Should come with its own football team on Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook Press WA For $40M For New UW CS Building · · Score: 1

    If they paid more taxes I would pay less

    No, if they paid more taxes, the government would increase its spending to match the increased revenues.

  3. Re:Climate change phobia on We Stopped At Two Nuclear Bombs; We Can Stop At Two Degrees. · · Score: 1

    So there's coastal cities and there's "flat as a pancake cities that are 1 meter above sea level"

    And then there's New Orleans. Average height above Sea Level is MINUS 0.5 meters. Range is 6m above to 2m below.

  4. Re:fees on Verizon Posts Message In Morse Code To Mock FCC's Net Neutrality Ruling · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I want Gigabit symmetrical with 1 TB of transfer for $50/mo.. This is absolutely 100% possible with current technology.

    Then why don't you start a company that offers that service?

    If you can do it profitably, you'll have investors falling all over themselves to give you money, since pretty much everyone will want your service....

  5. Re:You get used to it. on Adjusting To a Martian Day More Difficult Than Expected · · Score: 3, Informative

    No you don't. Your watch rotates on an 18 hour cycle, but the boats 'day' (and overall schedule) remains on the standard 24 hour cycle. On top of that, you make the swap from Lima (local time) to Zulu (GMT) once when you leave port and again when you enter port (days, weeks, or months apart)

    Irrelevant. You roll out of your rack, go to your watchstation for six hours. Then you do PMS/training/whatever for six hours. Then you sleep for six hours. Repeat till you get back in port.

    In other words, you live on an 18-hour day for the period of your patrol.

    As I recall, it took two to five days to adjust at each end of the patrol.

  6. Re:Who pays costs now? on Patent Trolls On the Run But Not Vanquished Yet · · Score: 1

    It means the other guy's legal costs, not their own.

  7. Re:wtf on Fighting Scams Targeting the Elderly With Old-School Tech · · Score: 1

    Aha! My thanks! I never would have suspected that that's where the "Post" button was.

  8. Re:State Your Name on Fighting Scams Targeting the Elderly With Old-School Tech · · Score: 1

    Just curous - how did you do your first post? I don't have a "post" button, and can only "reply to this".

    Though I suppose that could be intentional. Maybe you have to meet certain preconditions to be allowed to get "post" privileges.

  9. Re:He's being polite. on Schneier: Everyone Wants You To Have Security, But Not From Them · · Score: 2

    What he means to say is what most of have known in our darkest heart of hearts since the first help ticket: The vast majority of users are technically illiterate idiots, and you can't fix stupid.

    Note that there is a difference between "stupid" and "ignorant".

    Note that being "technically illiterate" puts you into the "ignorant" category, but that claiming that "technically illiterate" is the same as "idiot" puts you well into the "stupid" category.

    Now, arguably you can claim that the vast majority of users really don't care very much about the subject at hand, which might very well move them into the "stupid" group. But being technically illiterate, in and of itself, is not a sign of "stupid"....

  10. Interesing... on Lawmakers Seek Information On Funding For Climate Change Critics · · Score: 3, Insightful

    SO, they're only investigating the funding sources of people who disagree with their position.

    Well, that couldn't be biased at all, now could it?

  11. Long Range Foundation on The Believers: Behind the Rise of Neural Nets · · Score: 2

    This sounds like the LRF from Heinlein's Time for the Stars.

    They were required to spend their money researching things whose payback was so far in the future that no-one else would touch it.

    And they kept making embarrassing amounts of money as a result of the products of their research. wonder if this lot will do the same?

  12. Re:Nothing important. on What Happens When Betelgeuse Explodes? · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Says the anonymous coward while an Ebola pandemic ravages Africa.

    Pandemic???

    Africa has 1.1 billion people. With an average life expectancy of 71 years. Which means about 15 million deaths per year.

    Ebola has killed about 8000 people in the last 15 months.

    Which means that ebola has accounted for ~0.04% of African deaths since the end of 2013.

    Sorry, 0.04% of your deathrate does not a pandemic make....

    Note, by the by, that there were more traffic deaths in each of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, and the United Republic of Tanzania then there were ebola deaths in all of Africa over the last 15 months.

  13. Re:600 light years from us on What Happens When Betelgeuse Explodes? · · Score: 4, Informative

    So, if Betelgeuse is going to explode in about 100,000 years, won't its distance to Sol have changed by then?

    Yes.

    But not by much. It's nearly 200 parsecs away now, and it's moving at about 30 parsecs per million years. So it'll be less than 2% farther away when it booms. Much less, since its relative motion is such that most of those three parsecs will be lateral motion instead of motion away from us.

  14. Re:Actually, ADM Rogers doesn't "want" that at all on NSA Director Wants Legal Right To Snoop On Encrypted Data · · Score: 1

    nope. The constitution doesn't apply to citizens of other countries.

    This is incorrect. More properly, the Constitution doesn't apply to people IN other countries.

    That is to say, if a German comes to the USA, the Constitutional protections apply to him while he is here. But they don't apply while he's in Germany.

  15. Re:but I'll defend to the death your right to say on Google Knocks Explicit Adult Content On Blogger From Public View · · Score: 1

    The full quote is Voltaire's, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

    Hmm, that sounds familiar....

  16. Re:More of this ridiculous on Pakistanis Must Provide Fingerprints Or Give Up Cellphone · · Score: 1

    The counter to that is to steal registered cards. The counter to that is to report the cards as stolen. Counter: kill the card-owners, so they can't report the cards. Counter: police de-registers cards belonging to dead people. Counter: kidnap/disappear the card-owners. Only works until the authorities catch on in each individual case. Mitigation: keep kill/stealing. That's what terrorists do anyway, so no problem there. Problem: you're now switching numbers often. Gonna be difficult to keep your address book up-to-date.

    Nah, you (the terrorist) get a perfectly normal cellphone for most business (chatting up girls, planning things, that sort).

    Then, when you're ready to do an operation, you (as you point out above) kill a few people & take their phones. Then you IMMEDIATELY use them on your op. And toss them into a dumpster as you leave the op (assuming, of course, that this op is of the subset of terrorist ops that is "survivable") and go back home and get your regular phone....

  17. Re:About right on In Florida, Secrecy Around Stingray Leads To Plea Bargain For a Robber · · Score: 1, Informative

    You mean the standards set by the politicians who are paid by the private prison lobby? That's the situation we have today.

    You'd think that privately run prisons are so pervasive in this country as to dominate the criminal justice (punishment) system.

    Alas, fewer than 10% of the convicts in the USA are held in "private prisons"....

  18. Re:on starting with smaller-scale albedo modificat on What If We Lost the Sky? · · Score: 2

    People especially Americans, do not like the government telling them what they can and can't do to their own property. Also the small local governments have limited funds, such actions will mean that the local government will need to make a serious sacrifice.

    Local governments can change local building codes to require all new construction to fit the guidelines for albedo modification. Done.

    Yeah, it won't affect existing infrastructure, but in the long term (and with AGW we're talking long term, or should be), it'll have the desired effect.

    Assuming, of course, that the albedo-modification theories are correct in the first place.

    Yes, I know that modifying the albedo will do what we want. What I wonder about is whether we can effectively modify the albedo in a controlled fashion.

  19. Re:The US gets back what it seeded on Al-Shabaab Video Threat Means Heightened Security at Mall of America · · Score: 1

    You forgot Iraq and Afghanistan for Obama.

    Or did you think we'd stopped bombing them back in 2009?

  20. Hmm, sounds like a variation of Smoot-Hawley in that it makes imports more expensive to the benefit of local companies.

    And we all know how well Smoot-Hawley worked, right?

    It should also be pointed out that Weimar Germany went that route once too. And that worked almost as well as Smoot-Hawley....

  21. Re:Why do the tax payers have to pay for all this? on ISS Crew Install Cables For 2017 Arrival of Commercial Capsules · · Score: 1

    That transcontinental railroad was built entirely by private industry.

    No government money involved, in case you were unaware. Well, except for the money paid TO governnment for the railroad right of ways, of course.

  22. Re:Russian steep price on ISS Crew Install Cables For 2017 Arrival of Commercial Capsules · · Score: 1

    SpaceX is going to be capable of sending seven astronauts for under $100 million. That's about $15 million per seat or 20% of what the Russians are charging.

    Last numbers I saw, the Commercial Crew program was expecting to cost the government ~$58M per astronaut (plus assorted cargo), with a payload of five astronauts plus cargo per launch.

  23. Re:One of these days Mother Nature is going to dec on Drug-Resistant Malaria May Pose Major Threat · · Score: 2

    The WWI-1918 "Spanish Flu" was perhaps the last major pandemic, infecting 1 out of 3 people in the world and killing 10% of the world's population in about 18 months.

    3% to 5% of the world's population. It killed fewer than 100 million people, possibly as low as 50 million....

  24. Re:Selling Chicago one chunk at a time... on Chicago's Red Light Cameras Now a Point of Contention for Mayoral Candidates · · Score: 1

    Chicago's, motto translated from Latin, means "We make Louisiana's government look honest", or something like that.

    Well, then, they suck at that too. NOONE makes Louisiana's government look honest.

    And I say that in the nicest possible way, being a longtime resident of N'Awlins....

  25. Re: Electric not the answer on The Best, and Worst, Places To Drive Your Electric Car · · Score: 2

    Meanwhile, my wife often has barely enough gas in her car in the morning to be able to get to the gas station.

    I take it that either

    a) the nearest gas station is ~100 miles away, or

    b) your wife is an idiot?

    Face it, it's not that hard to stop at a gas station on the way home from work rather than drive till there's teacup of gas left in the tank.

    For that matter (anecdotal evidence from where I live) there are half a dozen gas station within five miles of where I live - it takes even the worst performing of our cars less than a quart of gas to go five miles.

    Either way, having "barely enough gas in her car in the morning to get to the gas station" is a situation that shouldn't happen "often"....