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  1. Re:Prescription Correlates + to # of Prescribers on Doctors Are Creating Too Many Patients · · Score: 1

    That's a really long way to go for a car analogy.

    Not true; I'm sure we've all heard stories from family members about taking their car to a mechanic and being told it needs half a dozen repairs that it really didn't. Medicine is the same, expect most people have insurance so they don't even have to think about whether the extra 'repairs' are needed because they're not paying for it.

  2. Re:Lets all hope for Skylon on How Far and Fast Can the Commercial Space World Grow? · · Score: 1

    Really, that could be it. I discovered that project about month ago, and its seems promising.

    Skylon's problem is that it's too expensive to develop and not cheap enough in operation. There's no known or predicted market large enough at its predicted cost per kilo to justify the $10,000,000,000+ development cost.

    It flies too fast at staging and has no wings, thus it bound to hit earth fast. I understand that parachutes will slow it down but not
    much to keep the delicate tanks from cracking or even bending.

    Generally speaking, tanks are cheap, the engines are the expensive part. Being able to reuse the whole thing would be nice, but if you can only reuse the engines that's still a substantial win.

    And NASA looked seriously at reusing Saturn rocket stages in the past. It hasn't really been tested yet, but no-one seems to think it's impossible.

  3. Re:But why? on How Far and Fast Can the Commercial Space World Grow? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Tourism is a huge demand. You get it down to $10k and I will take a ticket right now. Lots of other folks would be buying at $100k.

    One of the space tourism guys was saying recently that there's a surprising amount of demand for spaceflight in the million-dollar range, where people who could afford to fly on Soyuz can't afford the time required for the training (AFAIR Soyuz passengers have to train as crew, whereas a true tourist flight would only take a small amount of training).

  4. Re:Venus Project on Simulating Societies At the Global Scale · · Score: 0

    Well, if and when we have automated AI at that level, it would be a true form of Communism in the way Carl Marx would approve of. It would, in the history of mankind be the first successful implementation of it once the human element is removed from the vacuum of power.

    Communism can never be 'successfully implemented' without killing off all the productive people who refuse to be enslaved... and then it collapses because there's no-one to do any useful work. So it's a pointless exercise.

  5. Re:Hard to even submit MS bugs. on Does Microsoft Need Bug Bounties? · · Score: 2

    It's like they would rather pay you to NOT submit bugs.

    That's a lot cheaper than fixing them.

  6. Re:They'd be gone in a week on Does Microsoft Need Bug Bounties? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And a lot of bugs can't be fixed because old applications rely on them and people only buy Windows for backwards compatibility.

    When I was writing Windows video drivers years ago we had to deliberately put bugs into our drivers to match the bugs in the stanadrd Windows drivers because various popular applications would fall over without them.

  7. Re:It's the same old shit, really on CNET Sued Over LimeWire Client Downloads · · Score: 1

    It's so easy to understand that I'm clueless as to why no attorney has been able to use the above reasoning to persuade even the most stupid judge in the US.

    I suspect that the Second Amendment might just have something to do with it.

  8. Re:how bout on Draft Proposal Would Create Agency To Tax Cars By the Mile · · Score: 1

    Of course, you realize that thinking like that effectively hits the poor the hardest.

    Yes, but that's the point. The left hate the poor and want to keep them reliant on government services so they keep voting for left-wing candidates.

    It's a great scam so long as the poor don't wise up.

  9. Re:Fuel Tax Works Fine on Draft Proposal Would Create Agency To Tax Cars By the Mile · · Score: 1

    What is the difference between this and the already-in-place fuel tax?

    They get to track you everywhere you go and hire a bazillion more burrowcrats to enforce the system. It's a win all around as far as the government is concerned.

  10. Re:Weird Benchmarks: chrysis at 800x600 resolution on AMD Launches Fastest Phenom Yet, Phenom II X4 980 · · Score: 1

    That's the point. Find the thing people actually do which is CPU-bound, don't just fudge a GPU-limited thing until you get different numbers for different CPUs.

    Nothing that the average person does is CPU-bound if they have a fast CPU; most of the time it will be idling. The closest they'll get is gaming when not GPU-bound, which they may not do today, but they will when they replace their GPU in two years.

    Ultimately if you want the fastest CPU then you want to run things that are CPU-bound. If you just play crappy console game ports and run them so they're GPU-bound then you'll do fine with a dual-core in most cases.

  11. Re:Weird Benchmarks: chrysis at 800x600 resolution on AMD Launches Fastest Phenom Yet, Phenom II X4 980 · · Score: 1

    That seems like a stupid way to benchmark.

    Why would you use a GPU-limited benchmark when comparing performance of different CPUs? That would be retarded.

  12. Re:so how many people will have to die before safe on FAA Wants Your Opinion On Commercial Space Rules · · Score: 4, Insightful

    so how many people will have to die before for some safety rules are in place?

    3007.

    Back in the real world, pushing rules that expect 99.99999% safety would simply kill the industry in America and hand space travel over to the Chinese or some other country which is happy for people to make their own decision about whether they think a flight is safe. All that's really required is some basic standard that companies have to meet to avoid punitive lawsuits when someone does die.

  13. Re:This only addresses one aspect of altruism... on Robots 'Evolve' Altruism · · Score: 2

    That's my point. No evolutionary advantage.

    But there is an evolutionary advantage, because your genes are more likely to reproduce if you are 'altrustic' towards people who are related to you. Dying to save three brothers and sisters is likely to spread more copies of your genes than letting them die.

    In fact, you could argue that sending free food to Nowhereistan is an evolutionary advantage, because after you bankrupt the Nowhereistanian farmers they'll all die off and you'll have less competition.

  14. Re:This only addresses one aspect of altruism... on Robots 'Evolve' Altruism · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Compassion and caring is not bounded by family boundaries, so it seems to me that the evolutionary advantage behind altruism is still questionable.

    The vast majority of people care more about themselves than their relatives and much more about their relatives than some starving child in Nowhereistan. Which is precisely what you'd expect from genetic explanations of 'altruism'.

    The real 'altruists' who sacrifice everything to feed starving Nowhereistans are badly programmed (and the end result of such behaviour is probably to cause more starvation as they put Nowhereistanian farmers out of business).

  15. Re:Robots Randroids? on Robots 'Evolve' Altruism · · Score: 1

    Are you really being 'atruistic' if you're helping others solely because it increases the chances of your own characteristics being passed on to future generations?

  16. Re:Switch to KDE on Ubuntu Unity: The Great Divider · · Score: 0

    Putting the buttons at varying places way out to the right is actually kind of cumbersome.

    Until you cick on close when you really wanted to open a menu. Keeping the close button away from the things you use often is A Really Good Idea(tm).

  17. Re:Switch to KDE on Ubuntu Unity: The Great Divider · · Score: 1

    How could a Win7-like search feature be a bad thing?

    Because when I start an application I don't want to have to take my hand of the mouse to type, and then guess what name will actualy give me the application I want?

    Having to type the application name is much slower than just selecting it from the menu, or clicking the icon on the desktop. Particularly when said icon or menu option also passes whatever command-line options you need so it's already configured to do whatever you want it to do.

    That doesn't mean that search as an extra option is bad, but the solution to the sucky taskbar in Unity is apparently always to 'just type the application name' as though that's not taking us back twenty years in user interface design.

  18. Re:Absurd on Ubuntu Unity: The Great Divider · · Score: 1

    Nobody is maintaining Gnome 2.

    What maintenance does it actually need? I'm not aware of any great falings it has as a user interface.

    And since Redhat will be including it for years in RHEL because it's a much better interface for people who use their computers for real work instead of Facebook, I'm guessing they'll be doing what's necessary.

  19. Re:HTPC interface? on Ubuntu Unity: The Great Divider · · Score: 1

    Has anybody used unity as a HTPC interface?

    Why would you do that? Mine just boots straight into XBMC.

  20. Re:Absurd on Ubuntu Unity: The Great Divider · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is an entirely configurable option. Users who like it will keep it, users who don't will switch it. Anyone complaining is just doing it to hear his own voice.

    Gnome 2 goes away in the next release of Ubuntu. Then it's a choice between Unity and Gnome 3, which both appear to be following similar 'you will do things the way we want you to because we know best' philosophies, or KDE which is OK but just feels blah whenever I try a new release.

  21. Not bad for a netbook, not good elsewhere on Ubuntu Unity: The Great Divider · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've been running Unity on my netbook for six months and it's not bad there as it's a bit more space-efficient on the screen and all I do is web browsing and type the odd document in Office; hence the half dozen launcher icons are all I need.

    But I only lasted about 30 minutes with it on my laptop until I switched back to Gnome, because having 30 launcher icons scrolling up and down the screen and having to move the mouse to random parts of the screen to make them appear and scroll through the list to find the windows that are actually open is just awful.

    IMHO the big problem is the idea of a 'one size fits all' GUI for everything when people have very different requirements on different systems. Unity is an improvement on small screen devices where you don't need to open six out of thirty different applications at a time, but not good when you do.

  22. Re:Not relevant. on Sony Online Entertainment Services Follow PSN Down · · Score: 4, Funny

    I don't understand how this relates to US Navy Seals killing Osama bin Laden.

    A lot of them will be pissed off if the servers are still down when he respawns next week.

  23. NSA on NSA Advises Upgrade To Windows 7 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The NSA have an excellent guide for securing Linux systems (particularly Redhat, but much is applicable to all distros), so they're hardly Windows-centric.

  24. Re:gps? on the ocean floor? on AF 447 Flight Recorder Found In the Atlantic · · Score: 1

    How about a balloon that will eject from the inside and inflate automatically with compressed air?

    That would probably work, but you'd have to ensure that it separated from the wreckage, and then that you found it before the balloon deflated. If it goes to the seabed with the wreckage, then you can find it by finding the rest of the plane, which is relatively easy to spot because of its size. If the flight recorder floats at sea for a month and then sinks to the seabed you'll never find it because it's small and could be thousands of miles from the crash site.

  25. Re:I don't get this on AF 447 Flight Recorder Found In the Atlantic · · Score: 1

    In my mind the best solution would be to have all data+voice streamed real-time from the airplane to an external source by satellite for the entire flight, so you don't have to depend on locating the black box at all to determine what happened... But from what I've read, the problem there is pilot unions objecting to being recorded and 'monitored' all day long.

    No, the problem is that you'd have to spend about $10,000,000,000 to set up such a system and hunting for a recorder on the bottom of the Atlantic every few years is much cheaper.