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User: cduffy

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  1. Re:Hybrids on How 4H Is Helping Big Ag Take Over Africa · · Score: 1

    Thinking that farmers from Ghana will not be able to make a rational decision between buying industrial seed every year or saving whatever strain they have already from year to year is a not so subtle form of racism.

    Or maybe what is or isn't rational varies based on local conditions. Capital availability is a concern. Distribution infrastructure (and differences in cost based on same) is a concern.

    Ghana is one of the best-governed countries in its region, but even so, there's still an infrastructure gap -- a decade ago (which is as recent as I had knowledge) you had daily rolling blackouts even in the capitol as a matter of course; electrical generation capacity wasn't growing with demand.

    Accusing those who disagree with you of assuming anything other than rational behavior in light of full knowledge of local conditions strikes me as starkly unreasonable.

  2. Re:Or just practicing for an actual job on Duke: No Mercy For CS 201 Cheaters Who Don't Turn Selves In By Wednesday · · Score: 2

    Sorry kids, Library use is copying. Copying is not a bad thing, you save a lot of time by doing it.

    Shared libraries or static libraries?

    Static library use involves copying at the link phase. Shared library use doesn't. Depending on your license, the distinction can be legally significant.

    And, well, that's the thing. Those of us who are professionals think about liability... which is why we can actually find a large company willing to buy our startups without doing an absolute freakout (or requesting a huge discount for cost of reimplementations) analyzing the codebase during due diligence.

  3. Re: Yes, what are YOU going to do? on Secret Policy Allows GCHQ Bulk Access To NSA Data · · Score: 1

    "However, I do like other people paying for things I can use. You know, good roads, schools, a health service, mass transportation and so on."

    Well, uhh, yeah. The whole point is that that kind of thing is so expensive that no one person can pay for it alone.

    Is this supposed to be controversial?

  4. Re:Great in the winter .. on Germans Can Get Free Heating From the Cloud · · Score: 2

    Your company doesn't have a gym? And what do cycle commuters do?

    When I didn't live a few blocks' walk from work, I wouldn't even start to consider an employer that didn't have showers at work.

  5. Re:Bread-and-butter brainwashed on Mayday PAC Goes 2 For 8 · · Score: 2

    Unless it's upwards of $5.3M in value, the estate doesn't even need to file.

    I think he'll be okay.

  6. Re:what's the point? on A Smart Electric Bike: Taking the Copenhagen Wheel Out For a Spin · · Score: 1

    I owned a little Piaggio MP3 at the time -- that was my drive vehicle if for some reason I couldn't bike -- and yup, it's a great option... but, well, there's something to be said for arriving at work having just finished a nice workout as opposed to having just spent time breathing fumes on I-35. Did wonders for my stress level, and no better way to get exercise than to have it be over the course of accomplishing something you were going to do (and spend time and money on) anyhow.

  7. Re:what's the point? on A Smart Electric Bike: Taking the Copenhagen Wheel Out For a Spin · · Score: 1

    Did you actually read my post at all? You're not getting any exercise on a Vespa.

    On an Opti, you get where you're going, and you're maintaining an 80-100rpm cadence getting there.

  8. Re:what's the point? on A Smart Electric Bike: Taking the Copenhagen Wheel Out For a Spin · · Score: 1

    Most users don't want to go that far on a bike.

    Really? Where I'm from, "range anxiety" is a thing -- people buying an electric vehicle don't want to run out of power off in the middle of nowhere.

    I was an Optibike owner back in the day, and active on their mailing list -- one of the questions we got most often from folks deciding on whether or not to buy was how realistic the range numbers were (something like 47 miles in economy mode on the internal battery alone, and 105 with the external touring battery). It's a very real concern to folks who haven't yet bought in and realized how little of that range they'll habitually use. :)

  9. Re:what's the point? on A Smart Electric Bike: Taking the Copenhagen Wheel Out For a Spin · · Score: 1

    Electric bikes tend to be lousy bikes.

    The cheap ones, yes. If you're not going for cheap, then you get in-frame batteries and bottom-bracket motors -- and your stock components are made by named, high-end manufacturers.

    Still a markup, sure, but that markup paid for Optibike to fly one of their engineers in to Austin to train a local bike shop on replacing their electrical components when mine broke, so I'm not much complaining. ;)

  10. Re:what's the point? on A Smart Electric Bike: Taking the Copenhagen Wheel Out For a Spin · · Score: 1

    and sort of ignores the fact that there are you know derailleur gears to cope with hills

    ...which works, but can be incompatible with getting where you're going in a reasonable amount of time, if there's significant distance between points A and B.

    Switching from a car to an electric bike did my health a huge amount of good commuting from Austin to Round Rock -- a 30-minute drive was a 50 minute assisted bike ride (acceptable), or a 90 minute unassisted bike ride each way (not always acceptable). Getting that 100 minutes of pedaling in each day (both directions) improved my health enough that in six months I was able to do the same commute on an unassisted bike on those days when I had three hours to spare. I don't see how that's anything but win.

    As an aside -- my strongly preferred variety of e-bike is mid-drive, with the motor's power going through the chain, so you're still shifting. A really well-designed system such as that from Optibike is tuned such that the motor is only in its optimal efficiency band if you're pedalling alongside it -- one gets more assistance from an Opti if maintaining a constant 80-100rpm cadence, which is a good place to be in from a cardio perspective regardless.

  11. Re:too expensive on A Smart Electric Bike: Taking the Copenhagen Wheel Out For a Spin · · Score: 1

    The United States market doesn't fall into that "most places on Earth" -- laws are state-by-state, but most follow CSPC guidelines, which puts the limit at 1hp (750W), or 20mph, and has no pedal-assist requirement.

  12. Re:Redistribution on Statisticians Study Who Was Helped Most By Obamacare · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because if you banned pre-existing condition exclusions without forcing folks to be insured, people wouldn't get insured until after they were sick.

  13. Re:How about the "bio-fuels" ? on Irish Girls Win Google Science Fair With Astonishing Crop Yield Breakthrough · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Corn ethanol is ridiculously inefficient. Sugar-based biofuels, by contrast, can have a quite good return and are actively used by developing countries in South America that don't have money to waste on things that don't make economic sense (but aren't used in the US because we have relatively little land able to grow sugarcane).

    In short, it's more complex than either "all bio-fuels are good" or "all bio-fuels are evil". This shouldn't be a surprise -- few things are so simple.

  14. Not blood, semen found on the bloody shawl. on New DNA Analysis On Old Blood Pegs Aaron Kosminski As Jack the Ripper · · Score: 2

    It's not the bloody that's allegedly the perpetrator's, but semen found on the shawl. I'm surprised nobody else replying to you seems to have done their homework either.

  15. Re:Somehow on RAYA: Real-time Audio Engine Simulation In Quake · · Score: 1

    The USPTO isn't funded by campaign contributions, it's funded by patent application fees. Much easier to follow the money than assume ulterior motive being applied in a more roundabout way.

  16. Re:Federal vs. local decision (Re:I like...) on U.S. Senator: All Cops Should Wear Cameras · · Score: 1

    ...and Texas also has silly blue laws, so liquor stores are all closed on Sunday, and armed TABC agents rough up customers at locations accused of violations.

    I rather prefer the liquor laws in Chicago -- if ever there was a city that learned its lessons from Prohibition...

  17. Re:Paying by the MB on Net Neutrality Is 'Marxist,' According To a Koch-Backed Astroturf Group · · Score: 1

    We've been paying for roads by the mile for decades, via gas taxes -- an effective way of making people who drive more, pay more.

    That might be true if gas taxes were more than double what they are now.

    Funds from gas taxes go to a fund accessible to the federal highway administration -- which is to say that they don't pay for city streets at all, which are covered purely by property taxes. Even then, the FHWA only covers about 49% of highway costs, meaning that the majority of the costs of highways remain borne by the states, and are paid out of different taxes.

    (This is a sore point because so many folks wrongly consider cyclists freeloaders on account of not paying gas taxes -- when the amount of wear put on roads is proportional to cubed vehicle weight, making the road wear caused by cyclists negligible, whereas the property taxes and state sales taxes paid are not).

  18. Re:What do you mean, "repatriated"? on For Microsoft, $93B Abroad Means Avoiding $30B Tax Hit · · Score: 1

    "Earned" offshore, when 99% of the work is not the sales but the engineering -- which is very much onshore effort.

    This is a place where Europe's VAT approach has it right.

  19. Re:Please stop linking paywalled papers. on Turing's Theory of Chemical Morphogenesis Validated 60 Years After His Death · · Score: 5, Informative

    publishers pay the people who fronted money for the study

    If only they did.

    Funds paid to scientific publishers pay for editing, not for the original studies. Moreover, peer review -- the most important part of the process -- is almost universally done for free by other scientists in the field; the publishers are just mediators in that process, adding minimal value.

  20. Re:Please stop linking paywalled papers. on Turing's Theory of Chemical Morphogenesis Validated 60 Years After His Death · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Someone's got to pay to fund the research.

    ...but that someone isn't generally the publishers running the paywalls, so how is that relevant?

  21. Re:so they got an anti-abortion judge on BPAS Appeals £200,000 Fine Over Hacked Website · · Score: 1

    I may be wrong on this, but in the US, HIPAA would rule the day on such a case, no? That would mean that 200k Pounds Sterling would be a wee drop in the bucket compared to the fine such an organization would face here should it face a data leak of that magnitude.

    You're making substantial assumptions about what kind of teeth HIPAA has. When I worked at a medical software company -- wherein I was directly responsible for systems handling patient data, went through HIPAA training, and worked directly with our HIPAA compliance officer to determine technical measures -- it was damned near toothless; what we spent hiring said officer and taking said measures was much more than we would have been fined for a single breach. (We wouldn't have been able to sell the system or satisfy investors unless we could pass an audit, so it was the right business decision to make, but much of what our compliance officer told us was how much work we didn't have to do; the actual compliance requirements often fell far short of what I considered best practices).

  22. Re:I don't get it. -- so what happened? on Google Funds San Francisco Bus Rides For Poor · · Score: 1

    which viewpoint prevailed (if any)?

    Nobody won -- the developer is holding the property, which remains zoned industrial, until market conditions (financing availability) and political considerations give them more leeway in its use.

  23. Re:I don't get it. on Google Funds San Francisco Bus Rides For Poor · · Score: 1

    I understand the plain meaning of the words. I objected to their subtext. This, too, should be fairly straightforward English language comprehension.

  24. Re:I don't get it. on Google Funds San Francisco Bus Rides For Poor · · Score: 1

    Gentrification typically displaces people who are previously reasonably happy living in a neighborhood "unfit for human habitation".

    If the prior residents considered it fit for themselves (or, at least, the best fit available given their means)... well, you tell me what conclusion I should draw.

  25. Re:I don't get it. on Google Funds San Francisco Bus Rides For Poor · · Score: 1

    Uh, no - it means people who make significantly less money than me tend to live in unsafe places.

    ...and when those places are "gentrified", the people in question are forced to move by rising rents, typically into another "unsafe" location but now with more transportation time/costs.