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User: cusco

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  1. Re:Cheap cooling on Detroit: America's Next Tech Boomtown · · Score: 1

    People will go where the work is, whether they like it or not.

    And if it's Detroit there will be a lot of "not". I take it the executives of these companies will be living somewhere the weather is livable and the food is decent.

  2. Re:So ... on Samsung's Position On Tizen May Hurt Developer Recruitment · · Score: 1

    Water sports and winter activities are what come to mind, where you don't have pockets or pockets may be buried under other layers of clothing. And maybe visits to the naturist resort . . .

  3. Re:Bet On Vikings on 'Accidental' Siberian Mummies Part of Mysterious Ancient Arctic Civilization · · Score: 1

    Probably not Vikings, more likely the same red haired people who lived between Persia and the western gates of the Great Wall. There are many mummies with similar features from the Tarim Basin, preserved by high salinity soils rather than copper and permafrost. They appear to have been of eastern European origin, and their textiles and genetics indicate that they are of the same people who also moved westward and became the Celts. These mummies are much later than the Tarim mummies, who did not make such proliferate use of copper.

  4. Re:Yahoo does make money. on Investors Value Yahoo's Core Business At Less Than $0 · · Score: 2

    There are an awful lot of inactive Yahoo accounts that can be attacked without anyone really paying attention. I log into mine probably twice a year just in case someone that I used to know still has that address and has dropped me a line. My wife hasn't looked at hers in a couple of years, and I don't think my nieces even remember that theirs exists.

  5. Re:only one version of the truth on Mathematicians Devise Typefaces Based On Problems of Computational Geometry · · Score: 5, Funny

    Considering your username, I think probably even handier than for most people . . .

  6. Re:Great, now all we need to do... on Kepler-186f: Most 'Earth-Like' Alien World Discovered · · Score: 1

    we don't have the technology, so the ship won't have it available.

    **WE** don't have the technology **today**. This is one of many reasons to colonize space, to learn how to do things like pull out the couple dozen titanium atoms in a dust grain. Laser sintering 3D printers already can make alloys that were thought to be impossible and physicists are learning how to make crystals an atom at a time, it seems exceedingly unlikely to me that "stockpiling a lot of spare parts" would be necessary as long as ship crew have complete plans of everything.

    While having the source code for all software would be a very good thing, the ability to edit, update and maintain the code is a very specialized collection of talents that would probably not be available for the relatively small population of a starship, even a generation ship. If they don't have an onboard AI to do it for them it would be much more appropriate to have most of that work done in the population centers of the gravity well. The only time they would need to do that work themselves is if the population of the solar system reverted to barbarism and they lost contact.

  7. Re:Great, now all we need to do... on Kepler-186f: Most 'Earth-Like' Alien World Discovered · · Score: 1

    Why does almost everyone seem to assume that once the ship is launched the inhabitants won't be maintaining, repairing and improving it along the way? I've never understood that.

  8. Re:Aren't those guys rocket scientists? on The Dismal State of SATCOM Security · · Score: 1

    No, but just because it won't bankrupt him doesn't mean that he wants the annoyance of buying, setting up and learning a new (and more expensive) system that may well not be as reliable as the old one. My dad bought one of the first consumer-level Lowrance fish finders on the market. He used it until he couldn't fish any more, even though there were "better" models on the market. Why buy a new one when that one did exactly what he wanted exactly the way he was used to it?

  9. Re:Cut this out. on Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What? · · Score: 1

    You don't support end users, do you?

  10. Re:What now? 1 billion! on Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What? · · Score: 1

    OpenOffice/LibreOffice may have only 80 percent of the features of MS office, but since neither I nor anyone that I have worked with over the last decade use more than perhaps 15 percent of those features that's not really much of an issue to me. To be truthful, MS Office 4.3 was overkill for probably 90 percent of end users. I can't foresee ever creating a spreadsheet doing anything more complex than pull numbers out of a SQL database and make a pivot table with them, and the free versions do that just fine. Sure, there will be edge-case users who do stupidly complex things with it (which generally would be much more appropriately done with some other tool), and for them buy a full MS Office license. For the rest of your enterprise, why bother?

  11. Re:Aren't those guys rocket scientists? on The Dismal State of SATCOM Security · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The problem is that reliability has always been considered as paramount in these devices, for very good reasons, and inserting a security layer in the stack increase the likelihood of problems and increases their complexity. There are satellite phones out there which have been in almost continuous use for 15 years, good luck flashing that firmware to handle encryption or to obfuscate that hard-coded password. For most satellite communications users I don't foresee the situation changing any time soon. They guy running a gold dredge in the upper Amazon isn't going to want to cough up for a new phone when his current one has been working fine for the last decade, nor is the tribal chief in New Guinea or the crab boat captain in the the Bering Straight. What they have works, and they don't give a shit whether the phone can be hacked as long as it works when they really need it. The commodities speculator in his Lear jet might be concerned, let him pay for the system upgrades, but leave the rest of the system backwards compatible for those people who need reliability overall.

  12. Re:Holy shit on Survey: 56 Percent of US Developers Expect To Become Millionaires · · Score: 1

    A better measure is to pick a few specific items that you personally consume on a regular basis and track those. When we lived in Peru we watched the price of rice, tea, a specific brand of tennis shoes that Rosa liked, bus fare, and a quarter of 'pollo a la brasa' (roast chicken) to track the actual value of the Inti over time.

  13. Re:Not so fast, Thermodynamic laws are pesky thing on 'Thermoelectrics' Could One Day Power Cars · · Score: 1

    Then I misunderstood your previous post, which I took to mean that there wasn't enough to bother with. It would be interesting to me to see an estimate of how much it would cost to make an exhaust manifold of thermocouple material, and what the estimated output would be. With hybrid vehicles like the Prius, which just uses the IC engine to charge the batteries that actually propel it, it might well be worth it.

  14. Re:Not so fast, Thermodynamic laws are pesky thing on 'Thermoelectrics' Could One Day Power Cars · · Score: 1

    There's a lot of energy available from an IC engine. If you doubt me let your car run for anything more than two minutes and then touch the exhaust manifold. Bumped one with my arm when I was in high school and it took twelve years for the scar to fade.

  15. Re:BS on San Francisco's Housing Crisis Explained · · Score: 1

    Actually I'm in Seattle rather than California, grew up in redneckland in northern Michigan. Those things you call 'Palmetto bugs'? Those are a species of tropical cockroach. I remember stomping on one, grinding my shoe to make sure it was dead, picking up my foot, and watching it run away. Vile things.

  16. Re:BS on San Francisco's Housing Crisis Explained · · Score: 1

    Lived in the sweltering armpit that is Florida for a decade one year. Never again will I step out of the airport at Miami. Haven't been to Texas in two decades, but nothing that I hear from anyone living in the area makes me think that it has gotten any cooler, any less humid, or that mountains have suddenly appeared in the state. And I really don't care if there is some tiny corner of either of the Carolinas that has managed to acquire a population with an average IQ higher than the ambient room temperature, you're still in a state only slightly less backward than Louisiana or Pakistan.

  17. Re:Iapetus on Astronomers Solve Puzzle of the Mountains That Fell From Space · · Score: 2

    New year's eve 2004 was the first time that Cassini imaged Iapetus. At least that was how I read the sentence.

  18. Re:BS on San Francisco's Housing Crisis Explained · · Score: 1

    Texas/Florida - You have rednecks and six inch long cockroaches that fly. Hot and humid and depressingly flat. No.

    North Carolina - Hot/humid alternates with cold/humid, in an area overrun with rednecks and completely lacking in decent food (except barbeque). No.

    Montana - Constant wind, two meters of snow, more rednecks, jello is considered a salad. No.

    Detroit - All of the above disadvantages (except the roaches don't fly), plus you're in Detroit. No fucking way in hell No.

  19. Re:Get this over with on Mt. Gox Ordered Into Liquidation · · Score: 1

    Many of his suckers, I mean customers, are US citizens/residents and the transactions were initiated from their US-located computers. AC left out Fraud.

  20. Re:Rewarding the bullies... on Student Records Kids Who Bully Him, Then Gets Threatened With Wiretapping Charge · · Score: 2

    My mother was a legal secretary for 13 years, I've worked with cops in several jobs over the years, several of my in-laws are/were teachers. IOW, no hard data but plenty of personal experience.

  21. Why not? I certainly wished death and dismemberment on them then, when I was the victim. Its fuckheads like them that join the Marines and commit atrocities, then get out and become abusive cops and abusive spouses/parents.

  22. Re:Rewarding the bullies... on Student Records Kids Who Bully Him, Then Gets Threatened With Wiretapping Charge · · Score: 2

    Nah, 1970s when you could still carry a pocket knife without being automatically expelled. Which I did, but then so did they, and bullies always travel in packs.

  23. Re:Rewarding the bullies... on Student Records Kids Who Bully Him, Then Gets Threatened With Wiretapping Charge · · Score: 4

    When Columbine happened the first thing that came to my mind was, "If it had gone a little further when I was in school . . ." A friend who was also bullied in school said that she had the exact same thought.

  24. Re:Rewarding the bullies... on Student Records Kids Who Bully Him, Then Gets Threatened With Wiretapping Charge · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As children most cops and most judges were the bullies. For that matter, so were a lot of school administrators. They don't understand the problem, or that there even is a problem. I was suspended for finally hitting back in junior high school, and almost expelled when I did it a second time.

  25. Re:No, this is not what the developing world needs on Paper Microscope Magnifies Objects 2100 Times and Costs Less Than $1 · · Score: 1

    Training does not make one a doctor, either. There are tens of thousands of incompetent quacks in the Third World with medical certificates whose diagnoses are less trustworthy than the old lady who sells herbs in the market, and the quack charges prices that the poor can't afford. If the old lady's granddaughter can use this tool and a printed page with sketches of different microorganisms then the poor have a better chance of getting the help they need.

    BTW, the training does not have to be expensive. Cuba and Venezuela both sponsor medical professional training (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, etc.) for free, as long as the student is willing to spend their first x-many years after graduation (5 years, I think) working in under-served areas of their countries.