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  1. Re:Mod parent to infinity on Climate Scientist Pioneer Talks About the Furture of Geoengineering · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Individual effort is precisely the wrong way to approach the problem. No individual has a measurable impact on the overall environment. The only thing that would work is manipulating the natural economic incentives that are pushing us towards disaster.

  2. Re:Mod parent to infinity on Climate Scientist Pioneer Talks About the Furture of Geoengineering · · Score: 4, Insightful

    the effects on the environment are a side-effect, and comparatively small. If we decide to intentionally target the global environment, the effects could be much bigger.

    We can only hope, but I find that extremely unlikely. How many dollars have been spent on dredging up carbon and dispersing it into the atmosphere in the last 200 years? The US spends a trillion dollars per year on gasoline alone, and the US is about 1/4 of world oil consumption (less by now). Global coal consumption is over 7 billion tons per year. That is a ton of coal for every man, woman, and child on earth, per year, every year, for decades on end.

    What this means is even if we find some means of restoration that is 100 times as potent at cooling the planet as CO2 is in warming it, the task is incomprehensibly huge.

  3. Re:Flight controls instead? on California DMV Told Google Cars Still Need Steering Wheels · · Score: 1
    Here you go. (Jump to 3:36 if it doesn't do it for you).

    Check out the sweet GPS Nav unit at 4:08 also.

  4. Re:Mandatory panic! on South Carolina Student Arrested For "Killing Pet Dinosaur" · · Score: 1

    He wasn't arrested for writing about shooting the neighbors' dinosaur. He was questioned about it, and then he escalated things from there. The story even says this. Even so, this type of anecdotal story is utterly worthless without knowing the backstory and what else was going on. Maybe it's just as ridiculous as it sounds, more likely not, but you really can't tell anything either way from these little tabloid "Can You Believe It!?" writeups.

  5. Toner Cartriges on Ask Slashdot: Where Can I Find Good Replacement Batteries? · · Score: 1

    Your comment makes me realize that tactic might work for toner, too... it has the exact same problem in my experience.

  6. Re:Why is this treated differently on Calif. Court Rules Businesses Must Reimburse Cell Phone Bills · · Score: 1

    Hmmm. Perhaps employers will find that they can pay somewhat less for telecommuter positions, since it would enable employees to avoid commuting expenses, or even live far away wherever housing is cheap. (Overseas outsourcing being the extreme example of this.) It would be ironic for the Internet to kill Silicon Valley by easing the pressure for co-location.

  7. Re:Why is this treated differently on Calif. Court Rules Businesses Must Reimburse Cell Phone Bills · · Score: 1
    No, the key is avoiding variable costs where one party pays, while another party benefits and controls the variable cost. This promotes waste. A hammer is not a variable cost.

    For example, if employers had to pay for your commute, but you still got to choose where to live, you would have no incentive to minimize commuting costs. Thus the employee pays for the commute.

    On the other hand, if a boss could make employees use personal cars on the job and not reimburse mileage, then the boss has no incentive to minimize work travel costs. Thus the employer pays for mileage imposed by work.

    For me the existence of "Unlimited" plans really muddles the cellphone issue though. If the employer stated up front that you must have an unlimited plan as a condition of employment, that should be OK, since there is no variable cost involved.

  8. Re:It depends on Calif. Court Rules Businesses Must Reimburse Cell Phone Bills · · Score: 1
    Just as the ruling stated: ""We hold that when employees must use their personal cell phones for work-related calls..."

    This clearly leaves your employer the option of requiring you to carry a cellphone they own as a condition of employment. Or leaving you alone at home.

  9. Re:McDonallds should sue ... on Comcast Training Materials Leaked · · Score: 2
    You just described the problem in more words.

    Yes, there are reasons for things. Even stupid, annoying things.

  10. Re:Who's wondering this? on Operating Systems Still Matter In a Containerized World · · Score: 2

    I question it. When you're running a database implemented in Java on a filesystem in an OS inside a VM on a filesystem inside another OS on virtual memory/paging hardware, that's 8 levels of largely redundant access control / containerization / indirection. It's a supreme mess and imposes a big burden of runtime cost and more importantly the burden of configuring all those layers of access control.

  11. A) It needs to only be applied to Drones with Cameras

    The ability to fly out of visual range is what a drone is. Otherwise it's just an RC helicopter or plane.

    (I guess a drone without a camera could navigate solely by GPS, but it's hard to imagine the usefulness of that; without a camera it couldn't even deliver a payload with decent accuracy.)

  12. Re:Surprise? on Munich Reverses Course, May Ditch Linux For Microsoft · · Score: 1

    Yea, MS money made the users hate the experience.

    Oh, come now. All users complain at least sometimes. If a complaining user were really enough to change the course of the enterprise, how many Windows desktops would be left? Or Oracle? I use an Mac Pro at work myself, and it certainly is not perfect.

    Maybe system in Munich really is bad, but you simply cannot determine that in any substantial manner just by sticking your finger into the air. It all comes down to subjective decisions by whomever is in authority.

  13. Re:The Average Cat on Software Combines Thousands of Online Images Into One That Represents Them All · · Score: 1

    How does it compare to eigenfaces?

  14. Sitting on the floor? on Xiaomi's Next OS Looks Strikingly Similar To iOS · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Darn those people from the east, always copying western practices.

  15. Re:Flash vulnerability? on Watch a Cat Video, Get Hacked: the Death of Clear-Text · · Score: 4, Informative
    No, I don't think it's a Flash vulnerability. It is awfully obscured in the article by general hand-waving, but I think the idea here is to trick people into installing an executable that isn't really Flash by causing an executable that presents itself as a Flash update to request installation. Since this happens while they are visiting youtube (with a man-in-the-middle doing the injection), the user may assume it is a legit update and install the malware.

    In other words, Flash and Java are "exploited" only in the sense that people are so used to being pushed security updates, that they may accept a fake update delivered on an insecure connection. Accepting a so-called Flash update from any untrusted site would accomplish the same thing. It really just boils down to the fact that every site is an untrusted site if you're not using https, since you don't know who all is in the middle.

  16. Re:As a private pilot... on Where are the Flying Cars? (Video; Part Two of Two) · · Score: 1

    you could cruise the highway 5 feet behind the car in front of you.

    The main benefit of flying transportation is to bypass the congestion on the surface of the earth. (You could achieve most of the same practical benefits by digging tunnels everywhere, but nobody knows how to do it cheaply and the scenery is no good.)

  17. Re:As a private pilot... on Where are the Flying Cars? (Video; Part Two of Two) · · Score: 1

    How do you figure? There's no reason, for example, an aircraft couldn't say, "our destination is over the ocean, but we don't have enough fuel for that, so I'm stopping for gas now..." It would be like riding a horse, if you ask it to walk into a wall, it just looks at you funny.

  18. Re:As a private pilot... on Where are the Flying Cars? (Video; Part Two of Two) · · Score: 2, Informative

    Surely a big part of the Flying Car Dream is making them safe enough for everybody to operate - which is to say, highly automated.

  19. Hey, for all we know, one of the 6000 jobs eliminated in this objective, impartial assessment of Cisco's evolving business needs might be his own, and he will be kicked to the curb. That could happen, right? I mean, he did say "we" need to have courage to lead change. If he were actually exempt, he would have had to say something else, like, "a bunch of you people are about to get buggered."

  20. Re:Libraries are one thing Amazon is not on Why the Public Library Beats Amazon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Libraries are also a haven from commercialism. Any privatized variation on the library, run by e.g. Amazon, will unavoidably slide into becoming a flea market and / or Cable TV, just as surely as the Internet did. There are deep inherent conflicts between the goals of spreading knowledge vs turning a buck.

  21. BOOO on California May Waive Environmental Rules For Tesla · · Score: 1

    Waivers for individual companies (or tailored so that they only apply to one company in practice) really suck. How is this the rule of law? It's a popularity contest. Worse, it favors only big companies with enough sway to browbeat the government. If anything, we should be working towards better global standards to clamp down on regulation-shopping. At least, goods should be produced under similar regulations to those where they will be consumed, otherwise local industry is unfairly undermined and externalities are rampant.

  22. Re:Libraries are one thing Amazon is not on Why the Public Library Beats Amazon · · Score: 3, Insightful
    But libraries already have floating e-book licenses you can check out for downloadable content (including off hours) in addition to everything else they offer.

    My daughter volunteered at the local library this summer teaching younger kids to read. In theory some semblance of this "could" be done over the Internet, but I just don't see it actually happening, and it wouldn't be the same.

  23. Re:Moderation? on Writer: Internet Comments Belong On Personal Blogs, Not News Sites · · Score: 1

    That is just a general limitation of crowdsourcing (or democracy for that matter). There is a not-super-high ceiling of quality you will hit. But anything much better will, inevitably, come to resemble a scientific journal, and that's not what most of us want most of the time.

  24. Re:Performance on Solid State Drives Break the 50 Cents Per GiB Barrier, OCZ ARC 100 Launched · · Score: 1

    I think SSDs are not unlike power supplies in that some poor quality options are available so you can't just shop price. So far I've stuck with Intel and Samsung SSDs, passing up cheaper options, with good results. As the technology matures I suppose that budget brands will become a safer bet. But getting back to this article, I would not be first in line to buy a new model OCZ.

  25. Re:Performance on Solid State Drives Break the 50 Cents Per GiB Barrier, OCZ ARC 100 Launched · · Score: 2

    No desktop should be HDD-only. The are too slow. Conventional wisdom used to be that maxxing out RAM was the first thing to do, but after even 8GB (which isn't all that much in a desktop any more) I would get an SSD for it before anything else.