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User: NelsChristian

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Comments · 85

  1. Re:One word - Parimutuel on Sportsbooks Start Refusing More Bets From 'Wise Guys' Trying To Win (espn.com) · · Score: 1

    Sports betting is already parimutuel. This is only about increasing the house take.

  2. Not having internal SLAs means you are wise to avoid internal services. You either buy outside, or roll your own. Such smokestack applications are quite duplicative & costly, but it beats getting screwed because some other department decides that your project doesn't get what was promised.

  3. That firehouse light is also direct current, so no fluctuating magnetic fields in the filament causing vibration causing eventual failure.

    For a while, you could buy rectifier inserts for standard light bulb sockets. But there was no repeat business, so the original product went away. But there is now a similar product sold as PowerDisc.

    The rectified power might not be totally smooth, but is smooth enough to extend life of the bulb by 100x, according to product claims.

  4. Re:Tech isn't there yet on A Look at Smart Gun Technology · · Score: 1
    You don't own enough tin foil.

    The bigger question is whether or not there will be a kill switch in the RFID software. That makes the gun reliably safe for the guy with the kill switch, but not so safe for the owner.

    Really, if there are laws pending for kill switches on smartphones, how soon before someone demands a kill switch for a smartgun?

  5. Re:Um yeah on Texas Family Awarded $2.9 Million In Fracking Lawsuit · · Score: 1

    I love cars, but I still expect to get paid if some fool drives his car into my house.

  6. Re:Not good on Spark Advances From Apache Incubator To Top-Level Project · · Score: 1

    Governor? How about adjusting the contact points which you'd find in the distributor?

  7. Re:An ode to wankery on Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High · · Score: 1
    Nope, we do not need to respect everyone's opinion equally, but certainly Richard Lindzen's opinion way more than most.

    Science isn't a matter of democracy.

  8. same as it always was and will be. ... on 53% More Book Banning Incidents In US Schools This Year · · Score: 1

    Folks have always been careful what kids are taught and always will be. This is just a tussle between schools and parents over what is important, and what will be taught. I'm rooting for the parents. Nobody is preventing you from making your kid read the books.

  9. Re:The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while on FCC Rural Phone Subsidies Reach As High As $3,000 Per Line · · Score: 1

    Highways? How fresh do you want your tomatoes? How long are you willing to wait for that UPS or FedEx delivery to get to your door? Just because the highway goes through a lot of countryside between Chicago and New York doesn't mean that the road is there just for the purpose of the rural countryside it goes thorugh.

    Housing tax deduction? I wasn't aware that this was only allowed for rural housing?

    In any case, what authority are you quoting about what is and is not part of a successful society?

    Ok, I do agree that phone subsidies for Ted Turner's ranch and the old small airport are silly. And some year, it might be fixed. But remember that Congress just got around to removing a luxury tax on phones that was created during the Spanish-American war. So don't hold your breath.

  10. Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies. on Air Force Foresaw Fatal F-22 Problems; Rejected $100,000 Fix As Too Expensive · · Score: 1
    Because the piston fighters can't stop your jet powered ground attack craft.

    That sort of depends on what rockets and radar they carry. Certainly, the slow but numerous drones aren't going to get into a cannon fire dog fight, but if they can detect the manned fighters, a flood of missles might difficult for the fighter pilot to evade. I wonder how much our opponents are spending on swarm intelligence for such a plan.

    Quantity has a quality all it's own.

  11. Re:Probably on Ask Slashdot: What Are the Implications of Finding the Higgs Boson? · · Score: 1
    fully functioning health care system

    for some definition of 'fully functioning'. I don't consider any variation on the UK NHS to be 'fully functioning'.

  12. Re:Without power? on After Recent US Storms, Why Are Millions Still Without Power? · · Score: 1
    Solar Powered roofs
    Wind power
    NEED I SAY MORE

    Yup, A lot more. When those high winds blow down your windmills by the thousands, how long will it take to fix? When those high winds break up your solar panels with tree limbs and bricks from the neighbors now busted chimney, how long will it take to replace half the solar panels in the neighborhood?

    Maybe you'll be the lucky one and your power will be OK, but there will still be millions without power for weeks if they all rely on solar and wind. Now maybe if they all had a natural gas or propane driven generator, they'd all be OK too.

  13. Re:Search (as most people use it) not CLI on Has the Command Line Outstayed Its Welcome? · · Score: 1

    Typing in a few keywords is close enough to CLI for the purpose of this argument. And that fact that most folks don't use the more complex stuff merely means that the CLI for google search is well matched to the task at hand. It's a really poor CLI that requires the use of the complex bits of syntax for simple requests.

  14. Re:not necessarily the easiest way on Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Destroy Hard Drives? · · Score: 1

    You can recover data from metal dust? A few seconds with a grinder on the disk faces should work quite well. Disassembly and physical destruction doesn't seem the easiest way, but it would work.

  15. Re:Impact on jobs? on AT&T Responds To DoJ Lawsuit · · Score: 1
    Why do republicans always side with large corporations?

    The same reason the Democrats do - fund raising. It's not like the Dem's don't have their own corporate favorites, like GE, who wangled waivers from ObamaCare. They now even have their own version of crooked corporate friends in Solyndra.

  16. Re:Affirmative Action on American Grant Writing: Race Matters · · Score: 1

    Obama is a politician, anything good becomes public quickly, whatever is hidden isn't so good. If he had earned straight As, it would have been a NYTimes headline for a month before the 2008 election, just to prove how much smarter than Bush he was.

  17. Re:Inefficient on Use Your Car To Power Your House · · Score: 1
    Since power plants aren't things that you can just switch on and off on a whim,

    Time to turn in your nerd license while you take a refresher EE/power course. Peaking plants, often natural gas burning turbines, are designed to be turned on and off as needed.

    There may be idle machinery, but no wasted electrical potential. What do you think all those thousands of power EEs do with their time if not make sure the grid is reasonably efficient?

  18. Re:Duh. on The End of the Gas Guzzler · · Score: 1
  19. Re:Before we start the flame wars on The Encroachment of Fact-Free Science · · Score: 1

    The question isn't one of models, but of facts. Professor Richard Lindzen has a recent paper out that shows that 16 different climate models predict a positive feedback effect in the upper atmosphere, while the satellite record shows a negative feedback.

  20. Re:Before we start the flame wars on The Encroachment of Fact-Free Science · · Score: 1

    Hmmm. So agreeing with Richard Lindzen (MIT Professor of Meteorology) that the facts don't all agree with AGW makes you a Republican and an anti-science type? Seems to me to be an ignorant position on your part.

  21. Re:Doesn't matter what country you are in... on Wikileaks Receiving Gestapo Treatment? · · Score: 1

    What you suggest might happen in the emergency room is charity. And since when did any offer of charity return a right of control over the charity recipient? That doesn't happen under any set of ethics or morals I know of. Nor is forcing the hospital to give free service a charitable act.

    Only a slave owner has the right to demand products or services be given to him or her as a right. There is no right to health care in a free society.

  22. Re:This is new?! on Multicore Requires OS Rework, Windows Expert Says · · Score: 1
    It's the reason for Henry Petroski's famous remark that "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."

    Hmm.. Just maybe that extra cycle time might now be spent doing something constructive that we did not do when cycle time was dear? Sending and receiving email used to be quite cheap. But add in cryptographic signatures (rfc 4871) and the cycle time spent on one piece of mail goes up an order of magnitude.

    The software industry would be derelict if it didn't try to find something useful and profitable to do with the extra cycles granted it. Well, I suppose there are exceptions. I find youtube.com to be useful, even if Google doesn't find it profitable.

  23. This has been tried before .... on 50% Efficiency Boost From New Fuel Injection System · · Score: 1

    Do a search on "smokey yunic adiabatic". He was working on this 10-20 years ago.

  24. Re:Does your company lose 10% to IT failure? on One Expert Pegs Yearly Cost of IT Failure At $6.2 Trillion · · Score: 1

    I agree, but for a different reason. The problem is that IT does improve productivity, it's just that it isn't as much productivity as it maybe could be. This is not $6T that we ever had, it's $6T that we might get if we could perfect IT. But since IT involves people, it's never going to be perfect. Since we never had the $6T to begin with, it's not a loss.

  25. Re:What happened to you, UK? You used to be cool on UK Government Seeks New Web Censorship Powers · · Score: 1
    You mean except for the fact that humans had a hand in the Little Ice Age as well?

    Got a link for that? Somebody worried about all the whale oil being burnt? Not enough warm blooded animals swimming in the deep so the ocean cooled?