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User: tompaulco

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  1. Re:turn SOME drivers on Cellphone Drivers Drive Like Drunks · · Score: 1

    >EVERYBODY is impaired in some way almost all the time
    Spot on! Just this last week, I was on business in Florida, and had a miserable cold. My wife kept insisting that I go out and get some medicine, but I really didn't feel up to it. Finally, I gave in, and guess what? I nearly had an accident. My head was all swimmy, it was raining, I was driving up a curving highway entrance ramp with those nice 4 foot high concrete rails, and once around the corner, I find myself at merging speed with the highway, about 80 feet behind someone who was attempting the old tried and true method of stopping in the merge lane and then trying to go from 0 to 60 in 30 feet as soon as an opening appeared.
    In my mushy state of consciousness, I slammed on the brakes, not thinking to pump them. Apparently newer model Buick Centuries don't have that new fangled ABS technology. Luckily I managed to stop short of the idiot. It would have been my first at fault accident ever, and only my second accident in 15 years.
    I hate driving when I am sick, but unfortunately, it is often necessary, even if just to go get some orange juice.

  2. Re:turn SOME drivers on Cellphone Drivers Drive Like Drunks · · Score: 1

    The difference being that using a cell phone doesn't inhibit your ability to tell whether you can use a phone and drive at the same time. You may be wrong about your ability to do so, but at least you'll be consistent.
    Being drunk actually changes your perceptions. When you're sober, you know you can't drive when you're drunk, but when you're drunk, you think you can.
    When you are slightly tipsy, you probably will realize that you not going to be as capable as you normal, and may take a taxi home, but have a few drinks more, and suddenly you may think you are capable of driving.

  3. Re:After almost getting hit this morning... on Cellphone Drivers Drive Like Drunks · · Score: 1

    Not too long ago, I heard a story on the news saying that men were not statistically worse drivers than women.
    From an insurance point of view, it is possible men may be more likely to file a claim, since they (generally) feel more of an emotional attachment to a car, whereas women (generally) see a car as an object necessary to get them from here to there and who cares if it's got a ding in it.
    There's also the possiblity of the sympathy angle: meaning that police officers of either sex are more likely to believe a woman's side than a man's side in an accident. I've got a good counterexample of that, though. A lady smacked into me after she failed to yield on green while attempting to make a left turn. She wouldn't even get out of her car, and insisted on being taken away in an ambulance, even though I had come to a complete stop by the time she hit me, and her only momentum was from accelerating across a single lane of traffic. She swore she had an arrow, but I pointed at the light in front of me, which was still green. She stuck to her story, but eventually her insurance agent called me and said that in his opinion it was her fault, and they paid the entire cost of the repair.

  4. Re:After almost getting hit this morning... on Cellphone Drivers Drive Like Drunks · · Score: 1

    >What the hell does a credit rating have to do with how safely you drive?????
    Same thing. Statistically, people with bad credit ratings tend to cost insurance companies more money. Therefore, the insurance companies charge them a higher rate.

  5. Re:Old People on Cellphone Drivers Drive Like Drunks · · Score: 1

    Except that when I am having a conversation with someone and something starts happening on the road, my focus shifts to the road and I stop talking or listening until it is safe to do so. If a drunk person can stop being drunk when something on the road demands his attention, then we can legalize drunk driving.

  6. Re:Global Cooling VS Impossible to prove on BBC on Global Dimming · · Score: 1

    >How do we know we are not in a warming cycle
    Actually, we ARE in a warming cycle coming out of the most recent Ice Age.

  7. Re:Pollution Versus Global Warming on BBC on Global Dimming · · Score: 1

    I seem to remember that not long after that report, other scientists were dismissing it as circumstantial. But the other scientists probably hadn't realized that only evidence AGAINST global warming can be dismissed as circumstantial.

  8. Re:Bring on the heat!!!! on BBC on Global Dimming · · Score: 1

    Humidity is not a function of temperature.

  9. Re:safest place on earth? on BBC on Global Dimming · · Score: 1

    Better stay up north. The doomsday scientists say that Yellowstone national park was once a supervolcano and that it is going to erupt again, probably decimating most of the U.S. midwest.

  10. Re:So Hybrid cars will increase global warming? on BBC on Global Dimming · · Score: 1

    >Our vehicles are maintaining the "delicate balance" of the cooling and warming cycles.
    No, more like our vehicles are failing to upset the not-so-delicate balance of cooling and warming cycles, thanks to the complex system of checks and balances built into our planet.
    But should we sin all the more so that grace might increase?

  11. Re:Any long-term statistics? on NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth · · Score: 1

    The Earth's rotation slows EVERY YEAR by a larger amount than this earthquake sped it up. Earthquakes are more likely to compact the earth and thus increase the rotational speed. Continents running together are more likely to throw up big mountains, slowing the rotation speed. However, big mountains are formed slowly over time, whereas earthquakes tend to be very quick.

  12. Re:Sensationalism on NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth · · Score: 1

    That's nothing. I'm still hearing that certain weather affects today are caused by el Nino, and the el Nino weather pattern was like ten years ago.

  13. Re:Lost time, lost weight on NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth · · Score: 1

    If you are lighter, you have lost weight. But I wonder which is larger, the decrease in weight due to increase in centripetal force, or the increase in weight due to the decrease in average radius of the earth?

  14. Re:Lost time, gained life on NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth · · Score: 1

    We can't change how fast our time appears to go for us by simply by choosing a different reference point. All that does is change how time passing at that reference point appears to us, and how our time passing appears to them. It doesn't ACTUALLY change the speed of passage of time for either the reference point or us.
    By the way, the whole relativity thing is probably just caused by the CPU of the universe not being able to handle the refresh rates in real time on an infinite universe.

  15. Re:So How Long Is A Day, Anyway? on NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth · · Score: 1

    No, trees are lighter than water, as are ducks, therefore the southern hemisphere is heavier, and she must be a witch.

  16. Re:Long term effects? on NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth · · Score: 1

    That is true, however, the attraction due to gravity has probably increased very insignificantly due to the compaction of the Earth causing a miniscule movement in center of gravity of the Earth as well as a miniscule decrease in the average radius of the Earth.

  17. Re:Earth-rearranging earthquakes commonplace on NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth · · Score: 1

    >When creationists are not simply asserting the ultimate authority of scripture, they're insisting that living things are simply too complex to have been created by a series of random events. That argument only makes sense if you fail to consider just how huge the history of this planet is.
    I, on the other hand, as a creationist, believe that the Earth is billions of years old, but I can't for the life of me figure out how something so incredibly complex as a human being could have evolved in such a short time span.
    The oldest Homo Erectus fossils are estimated to be 1.5 million years old. Homo Erectus had a nose, eyes, 10 fingers, 10 toes, dangly bits, and everything. If so little has changed in 1.5 million years, how could I really believe that in a period only 1000 times larger that we went from an amoeba to a human being? Are human beings so close to perfect that evolution didn't have to do much in the past 1.5 million years?

  18. Re:GPS on NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth · · Score: 1

    No. GPS is recalibrated according to ground stations fairly often anyway, and their time clocks are based on SI seconds and don't give a flip about the length of the actual rotational period of the Earth.

  19. Re:So that's why my watch is running slow. on NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth · · Score: 1

    No, this means that some day there will also be a "dark side" (more accurately referred to as the non-visible side) on Earth, as viewed from the moon.

  20. Re:DMCA and patents will hold US back on Has The "Technology Bounceback" Begun? · · Score: 1

    >You do realize there is difference between "could do" and "could do well", don't you?
    Not that it matters, since granting of H1Bs is based on a set of criteria which a company allegedly looked for in the U.S. first. If doing the job well is a criteria, then the market value simply goes up, but you could almost certainly find someone to do the job if you offered enough money to entice someone (i.e. market value, the wage someone is willing to take to do the job).
    I know someone who recently got a H1B DBA position here in Oklahoma City. I have been unable to find a DBA position here in Oklahoma City. Of course, I wouldn't have qualified for the criteria posted, because one of the criteria was that the applicant must speak Korean. Of course, no decent DBA in the U.S. would work for the wage they are paying her, either. That seems like a good dodge to me. If you want someone from India in order to pay a lower salary, just say you have a requirement that the applicant speak Hindi or one of the other languages spoken in India.

  21. Re:No on Has The "Technology Bounceback" Begun? · · Score: 1

    I think the 15 year veterans probably don't much want to compete with someone who is relatively new and is willing to work 60 hours a week for just enough to pay the rent either.

  22. Re:Forget the option just give us the stock on The Coming Expensing of Employee Stock Options · · Score: 1

    Writing options does not create new shares. The company still has to acquire those shares, unless by shareholder vote, the grant more. An option is a promise to sell you stock at a certain price. It has nothing to do with creation of new shares or dilution of any existing shares.

  23. Re:Just work a 40-hour week on The Coming Expensing of Employee Stock Options · · Score: 1

    You'd better be twice as good as the guy willing to work 80 hours a week. That's pretty darn good.
    On a side note, my company pays a quarterly bonus which works out to about 20% of my pay. If I don't work overtime, I probably won't get that bonus. 20% is a pretty serious pay cut to me.

  24. Re:Huh? on The Coming Expensing of Employee Stock Options · · Score: 1

    >The article seems to imply that all companies that use stock options do so to basically lie to thier investors, and once they must account for them in a more obvious way, geeks will be paid less.
    I don't know that they are lying necessarily. As you say, it could be more obvious, but the money for the options is still coming from somewhere, and the money to buy the stock and sell it to the employees if the options are exercised also clearly comes from somewhere. The biggest factor is probably time, as you could issue an option that is deep in the omney and is almost certain to be exercised at a huge loss to the company, but may be several years out before it expires.

  25. Re:Here you go: on The Coming Expensing of Employee Stock Options · · Score: 1

    >When an employee exercises stock options (sells them on the market), the number of shares
    Not without the shareholders voting to increase the number of shares. All exercising the option does is force the issuer to sell (or buy, but in this instance, we're only talking about Calls) you X shares at Y price. They have to either already own the stock, or buy it on the open market. They can't just pull it out of their butt unless the shareholders agree to issue new shares to cover the exercise.