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User: Sowelu

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  1. Re:Ad blocking? on Microsoft Edge Performance Evaluated · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wouldn't that be more intrusive, though? If every page was paywalled or subscription-based...like, every page...then you're going to be on-file as paying a whole bunch of people. Even if micropayments actually become a thing again, you're going to have a service with a list of every site that you not only patronize, but that you like enough to pay for.

    God, imagine the damage it would do if someone hacked and published a record of _that_.

    Seems pretty dangerous to people in repressive regimes, too, since subscribing to any kind of opposition news is basically funding a political enemy, more directly than just loading ads on a page.

  2. Re:Too late? on Microsoft Edge Performance Evaluated · · Score: 2

    Maybe we don't want to go back, but we sure don't want to stay here either. Google used to be a knight in shining armor, not so much these days. Their market share is big enough that they can get away with almost anything they want--so, put them up against competition again, and see if 'being the good guys' turns back into a desirable market strategy.

    Yeah I'm not getting my hopes up either.

  3. Re:Too late? on Microsoft Edge Performance Evaluated · · Score: 0

    Too late for?..

    I mean, anything that gives us an out from the Google ecosystem, without Firefox bloat, has got to be great.

  4. Re:Is Edge going to be portable to non Windows? on Microsoft Edge Performance Evaluated · · Score: 1

    Last I heard it's not even going to be portable to Windows 7 or 8.

  5. Re:Ad blocking? on Microsoft Edge Performance Evaluated · · Score: 1

    Enjoy your paywalls!

  6. Re:Plan B? on Comet Lander Falls Silent; Scientists Fear It Has Moved · · Score: 1

    Yeah, don't be silly. They're military hardware, not eggs!

  7. This could be a horror movie on Comet Lander Falls Silent; Scientists Fear It Has Moved · · Score: 4, Funny

    We land a spacecraft on a comet for the first time. It loses power, but when it comes back online...it's different. It's moving. And we don't know what it's up to.

  8. Re:Oh look on Why Certifications Are Necessary (Even If Aggravating To Earn) · · Score: 1

    What the hell browser are you using that doesn't have a scroll bar?

  9. Re:Sapphire on Bringing Back the Magic In Metamaterials · · Score: 5, Funny

    Crikey, we've discovered a rare Bing user in the wild! What a marvel!

  10. Re:Something is fishy on Elon Musk: Faulty Strut May Have Led To Falcon 9 Launch Failure · · Score: 1

    Man, every time I hear people talking about LOX like that, I think they must have one hell of a lot of bagels on the ISS.

  11. Re:Transparency on Elon Musk: Faulty Strut May Have Led To Falcon 9 Launch Failure · · Score: 1

    I'm very much not an expert with this stuff, but it seems to me that if a particular strut is going to fail at 10,001lbs and you test it to 10,000lbs, it might pass the test but you still don't want to reuse it. There has to be some cutoff point where you're causing long term damage, but it's still functioning to requirements, right?

  12. Re:Transparency on Elon Musk: Faulty Strut May Have Led To Falcon 9 Launch Failure · · Score: 1

    You can test random struts, but you can't test ALL struts or you're left with no struts. Sounds like they didn't test the right ones is all.

  13. When in doubt, add more struts on Elon Musk: Faulty Strut May Have Led To Falcon 9 Launch Failure · · Score: 5, Funny

    They should have added a lot more of them, clearly. It's not like struts have any mass.

  14. Re:Have they fixed the performance problems? on Microsoft Officially Releases Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 · · Score: 1

    Ah! It's nice to know who to blame! :)

  15. Re:Make security mandatory on How Developers Can Rebuild Trust On the Internet · · Score: 1

    I can't tell if this is parody or not.

  16. Re:Have they fixed the performance problems? on Microsoft Officially Releases Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 · · Score: 1

    I don't think emacs belongs in your list. emacs would be a great IDE if only it had a decent text editor.

  17. Re:Can someone answer me this? on Reddit Will 'Hide' Vile Content After Policy Change · · Score: 1, Insightful

    If you have to manually block people, then you're going to get a lot of fly-by abuse from new accounts that people make to dodge the block lists.

    If the system allows users to say "auto-hide all people from my screen who have a 50% troll rating or higher", you're going to get a lot of people abusing the system. It's REALLY, REALLY common on political discussion sites for users to dogpile on people whose opinions they don't like and flag them as trolls, and often they use bots to do it more efficiently.

  18. Re:This legislation brought to you by.. on US House Committee Approves Anti-GMO Labeling Law · · Score: 1

    Example of higher-level government bodies overriding lower-level ones... This came up in Washington a while back, and could come up again. Gun possession, or pot possession, whichever you're more fond of. If it's legal in your state, but a small town makes it illegal, then what happens if you have $item in your car and you stop through that town to fuel up? Suddenly you've just broken an unreasonable law for no good reason.

    Similarly, if that small town makes it illegal to sell GMOs that aren't labeled with a very specific frowny-face logo...you're going to have a lot of inadvertent lawbreakers. Especially if they say something dumb like "you need to label whether it was grown in a field that has ever grown GMOs", something that might never cross your mind. You can be sure there's a lot of creative lawmakers out there, and you never know what magical categories your product will wind up in!

  19. Re:Meanwhilie is Russia, GMOs are banned - Serious on US House Committee Approves Anti-GMO Labeling Law · · Score: 1

    See though, 1) and 2) are actually really damn likely is the problem. Remember how much lower infant mortality rates are in Cuba? It sure as hell isn't because less babies are dying.

    That said I'd really love to see an honest study on a national level like that. Just...probably not from Russia.

  20. Re:This legislation brought to you by.. on US House Committee Approves Anti-GMO Labeling Law · · Score: 1

    You say tomato, I say tomatooooh god why does it have teeth

  21. Re:This legislation brought to you by.. on US House Committee Approves Anti-GMO Labeling Law · · Score: 1

    It pains me to say these words that right-wingers say, but patchwork labeling requirements really are bad for small business. If California, Oregon and Washington all have different labeling requirements, then someone who sells to all three needs a fancier supply chain in place to make the packaging. If a small packaged-food company is small enough that it can't secure decades-long contracts with ingredient suppliers (and dictate terms to them), then whether they even have GMOs might change from month to month. Again that screws up the supply chain.

    If you want your products to comply with labeling laws, you need to spend a lot of hours (and blow a lot of previously unnecessary labor expenses) to track what the laws are. You have to be more careful what you buy--not because it's healthy, but just because of your labels. You need to redesign labels, maybe frequently as the laws change, and if you're a small company without an in-house designer, that's just more expense.

    You're sapping hundreds or thousands of dollars from every single company that sells food, even before people start making decisions about what ingredients to use in the first place. A lot of these margins are LOW. God help them if they get a label slightly wrong and get fined or sued.

  22. Re:This legislation brought to you by.. on US House Committee Approves Anti-GMO Labeling Law · · Score: 1

    Frobozz Electric! We bring things to life.

  23. Re:Ironic on Mini Ice Age: Nothing To Worry About · · Score: 1, Troll

    I guess, if "ironic" means "contrived by desperate anthropogenic climate change deniers".

  24. Flame retardant payloads? on Macon-Bibb County Government Wants $5.7 Million Drone Fleet For Emergencies · · Score: 1

    Anyone know how much flame retardant you'd need in order to have an effect? Not every kind is useful on every fire, but if you could feasibly actually start fighting a fire before humans arrive on the scene...well, score. I have no idea if you could realistically put enough to be useful on a drone of this size though.

    Hell, even if you aren't directly fighting an industrial fire or something, it'd be nice to dust nearby buildings' roofs with something to keep it from spreading as fast.

  25. Re:Opening themselves up to liability? on Macon-Bibb County Government Wants $5.7 Million Drone Fleet For Emergencies · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, it could still help with triaging emergency calls. And presumably you still dispatch the firefighters, you just get more power to recall them early if it's obviously a false alarm, or (maybe even better yet) you give them eye-in-the-sky information about what the fire looks like. I could see a view like that improving outcomes in some proportion of calls: either they fight things more effectively, or they save fifteen seconds trying to locate that basement fire on foot and get the water on it faster.

    I'm pretty willing to believe what they say about heat signatures. Hot air has a way of escaping. A couple minutes after an alarm goes off, there's got to be heat showing SOMEwhere, even if there's not necessarily a lot of smoke yet. If the experts say you can affirm where there's a fire or not the vast majority of the time, I'm inclined to take their word for it, especially if (going back to triage) there's more fires than manpower at the moment and the opportunity cost of making sure is measured in lives lost at another call.