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User: Ecuador

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  1. Re:The person who made the ppt was immediately fir on The 69 Words GM Employees Can Never Say · · Score: 2

    What about the people who made this nice GM ad seen in John Oliver's show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ;)

  2. Re:I DON'T CARE! on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Experts Unable To Replicate Inmarsat Analysis · · Score: 1

    Apart from the fact that finding what caused a hull loss helps preventing future accidents, I would certainly give a buck to find out what happened just out of curiosity and I bet at least 60 million other people would as well. That is on top of the 30 bucks I give every month to help combat hunger, and various other charities. It is not one or the other. If you want to find wasted money, look at the military. USD 60M is what the military would throw on a toilet cover.

  3. Re:Reasonable, no smoking gun. on Norwegian Infectious Disease Specialists Have New Theory On HIV In Africa · · Score: 2

    Or, unexpectedly, copulating with a virgin does cure HIV (also Cancer, Herpes and the common cold), and it is the reason only 40% of the AIDS victims are men. In that case it would be worth exploring whether we could cure female HIV using virgin boys...

  4. Re:Too much work, here is why on Physics Students Devise Concept For Star Wars-Style Deflector Shields · · Score: 1

    I'd go with increasing the hull integrity field...

  5. We've probably seen this technology used before. on Sony Tape Storage Breakthrough Could Bring Us 185 TB Cartridges · · Score: 1

    I know it is no longer sold - read the reviews to get the idea, but a pre-pre-release of this technology from Sony, could explain why this particular tape was selling for 39.2 million pounds each, while masquerading as a simple DV tape.

  6. Not the best article for Isaac Roberts... on The Greatest 'Amateur' Astronomer You've Probably Never Heard Of · · Score: 4, Informative

    Maybe it is just me, but why does the article look like it is written for 8-year olds? From the layout to the writing and includes errors that show the writer is not really an amateur astronomer. For example they used an image to show "piggyback" mount. Well, they took an image from a webpage that is titled Questar telescope piggyback mount, only from that article they took the image WITHOUT the piggyback mount! There are better articles about Isaac Roberts, the ones I had read were better. But of course it wouldn't be /. tradition if the summary linked the best ones!

  7. Re:Warning... grammar police! on Group Wants To Recover 36-Year-Old Historic Spacecraft From Deep Space · · Score: 1

    His point is that there is no infiniter infinitest, but there ARE degrees of infinity. If you read it again in relation to the post it responds to you will get it.

  8. Pretty blatant. on Scammers Lower Comcast Bills, Get Jail Time · · Score: 2

    Customers were not charged retroactively for the discounted amounts, but their bills were "corrected on a moving-forward basis."

    Well, of course, otherwise they will lose this great excuse for a price hike.

    Also, unless their billing system is completely ridiculous, an employee account would only be able to switch users to a lower existing plan (e.g. some sort of concession), and I doubt that even their most discounted plans lose money. In the end, they claim to have lost 2.4 million (not clear if it is in less than a year) out of 16 billion annual revenue - so, what is it, a 0.015% price increase? But anyway this is Comcast...

  9. You just have to wait a bit. on NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin of Life · · Score: 1

    I mean, the earth had a lab in the scale of hundreds of millions of square kilometers, performing concurrent "experiments" over millions of years in order to produce life. Do you think a random creation experiment can give results in a human lab in just a few years?

  10. Exactly, this "Kill Switch" is idiotic on Industry-Wide Smartphone "Kill Switch" Closer To Reality · · Score: 2

    And dangerous. Just make IMEI be on read-only memory so that it is not over-written, and then, instead of rejecting stolen phones you can even pinpoint them and send a cop to pick them up along with the thief... All the technology is already there, the only problem is that there are no rules that make carriers tell you (or even the police) where your stolen phone is and who has it (in many countries SIM cards are not anonymous by law).

  11. Re:Simple solution on FWD.us Wants More H-1B Visas, But 50% Go To Offshore Firms · · Score: 1

    Oh, and since a TA/RA is work, the cost to the US is not the missed tuition, but the opportunity cost. Someone who gets a place and is trained in a US University then gets to use that training abroad.

  12. Re:Simple solution on FWD.us Wants More H-1B Visas, But 50% Go To Offshore Firms · · Score: 1

    In the US top students do not pay for graduate school, it is the other way around - tuition is waived and you even get a stipend depending what sort of TA/RA-ship etc you get (I am not referring to special cases of expensive studies like Law school, MBAs, medical school...). In fact, since many of the top schools are public their tuition is already low, but when I said about letting top talent go, I was referring to the students that would anyway not have paid for their Masters or PhD.

  13. Simple solution on FWD.us Wants More H-1B Visas, But 50% Go To Offshore Firms · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Instead of increasing H1b's which are abused by offshore firms, make a new category for foreigners who hold a graduate degree from a top US school. The US has by far the best Universities in most areas, but the best foreign students often leave the US because of the very restrictive H1b Visa system (employment-tied, application only on April for October start, dependents not eligible for work etc). Why provide world-leading education and then let the best talent go?

  14. Doomsday Book on Researchers: Rats Didn't Spread Black Death, Humans Did · · Score: 1

    Not only were such facts known to researchers, but most SF fans had a pretty good idea by reading the Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. It might be fiction, but it does get quite a few facts right, and overall is a great read.

  15. Good change on SpaceX Resupply Mission To Launch March 30 · · Score: 2

    It is a good change to hear "hey we will delay the launch because our camera might be affected", from the old "- ehh, we should delay launch after that freezing weather, the O-rings might fail - shut up, we are already late, from what I see in this powerpoint it should be ok"

  16. Re:As an Australian on Amazon Hikes Prime Membership Fee · · Score: 2

    Hahaha, after years with Amazon Prime (from 2006) going back to a European country with no Prime was indeed quite annoying and I found it hard to explain to people what they were missing. Right now I am in the UK where there is prime, so I am again a subscriber although it is pricier and worse (way less stuff, higher prices, earlier cutoff for next day delivery) than the US.

    Now, for me though, it was even more amazing than your description. It seems that it depends on where you live, but I was in NYC and I almost always got my stuff next day using free prime shipping. In fact, my wife ordered once a silver necklace at 2am before going to sleep, and at 9am, a mere 7 hours later a knock on the door woke us up. Sure enough, the necklace had arrived!

    And that is not the only cool thing about it. I moved into a new house, went into amazon, the next day I had a projector, a projection screen (very heavy 120" with tripod), an home theater right at my doorstep. Free shipping. And a couple of months later my home theater amplifier had a problem and the manufacturer told me I had to ship it to their service (heavy amp, my own shipping cost), I wrote to Amazon asking whether they could help even if it was beyond the 1-month return window. They said they'd be happy to help and sent me a pre-paid return label, I sent it and got a full refund! Obviously, after that I bought all the big ticket items from Amazon. In fact, for computer parts I used to buy from NewEgg, but while their RMA was fast, you had to pay your own shipping back (also there was re-stocking fee IIRC on some items). But after having repeatedly excellent service from Amazon, I valued the fact that the item would arrive faster and would be shipped back free with a printable label if there was a problem for a full refund, so bought from Amazon even in cases where the price was somewhat higher.

    Streaming is just an added bonus. The Prime experience was worth it before streaming and it was a real bargain at that price. Oh, some people complaining about bad experiences with Amazon, confuse Amazon with Amazon Marketplace - which is like ebay basically.

  17. Re:The MP3 files are just fine on Neil Young's "Righteous" Pono Music Startup Raises $1 Million With Kickstarter · · Score: 1

    I am 35. The installers ranged from 25-45, they couldn't hear it. One said he might be hearing something, but he couldn't really tell because of the sound of the fan. My wife couldn't hear it. Neither has anyone else since then (they replaced it, it is no longer loud, but I can still hear it). Trust me, it is not the 50th percentile, it has happened to me way too often to hear things like laptop chargers at annoying volumes when no-one else can hear a thing, or have to stick their ear on it. It is not only whether you can perceive a 16 or 17kHz sound or not, it is how sensitive you are at that frequency and that is what is abnormal with me, I am way too sensitive for some very high frequencies to the point of e.g. some chargers or TVs being really annoying for me to be in the same room with. I know that in the army when they gave us an audible spectrum test only about 10% passed the entire range (I don't know how high they tested), so at 31 I was at least at that percentile, but as I said from experience I haven't actually found anyone as sensitive. For that test they did not release results, the reason I know it is another funny story. Supposedly if you did not pass the minimum range set you had ear damage and you were disqualified from the fire range. The trainees who processed the results mixed the minimum range with the maximum range and only qualified those who passed the latter, announcing that over 100 of the 120 people tested were quite deaf according to the tests. At least the higher ups figured out relatively quickly that something had gone wrong and everybody got to go to the fire range a day later... on foot... through a muddy "road".. 15 km away... boots, helmets, G3 battle rifles, flasks and all... most guys thought back to the good days when they were deaf and did not have to go shooting...

  18. Re:The MP3 files are just fine on Neil Young's "Righteous" Pono Music Startup Raises $1 Million With Kickstarter · · Score: 1

    Hehe, I am close to the 1/10000% you say in some aspects. Well, at least in one aspect. Interesting story: I had an inverter installed for a solar panel array and when they switched it on, I stepped back "whoa, what is that loud whistling noise?" the installers were looking at me like I was crazy. Well, I told them, granted, it is very high pitch, a bit higher than, say, the whistling noise a CRT usually makes, I'd say over 15kHz, but it is really really loud, don't you feel anything - I can't even get close to the thing! The response was "what whistling noise the CRT makes???". I had to pull out my phone and download a spectrum analyzer. Sure enough, even the phone mic picked up a huge spike at 16.1kHz... But, I certainly can't tell compressed audio if it is over say 192kbps. I probably can't afford the playback equipment that can actually demonstrate the difference before even getting into the debate of whether it is perceivable by humans or not...

  19. Re:But He Isn't on Should Newsweek Have Outed Satoshi Nakamoto's Personal Details? · · Score: 1

    I have a foreign name that is not common, perhaps there is another one or two in the US? So when a friend of mine happened to pass by Long Island city many years ago, he was pretty certain he found my phone number when he got a local hit when calling 411. Fortunately I don't share much with this other "ecuador" fellow that lived less than a mile away, because my friend called and asked for me and a lady told him I was in church. Knowing me, he responded "Ecuador? In church? That can't be right! What the hell is he doing there?" The answer was "He is giving a sermon...".

  20. Holy Crap! on The Ephemerality and Reality of the Jetpack · · Score: 1

    I saw that when I was a kid in the 80's on some TV program and as I grew up I was pretty sure that I had either watched something fictional, or I was too young and misunderstood. I mean, if they had that working in the 70s, they would have something even better in the 90s, 00s etc, instead of, ehm, pretty much nothing. Thanks for that! You verified my childhood memory and solved what was a "mystery" to me!!

  21. Yeah, but.. on The Mammoth Cometh: Revive & Restore Tackles De-Extinction · · Score: 1

    does she run Linux?

  22. Re:Dick? Maybe, but not your classical patent trol on Inventor Has Waited 43 Years For Patent Approval · · Score: 1

    In case you are not joking, he means "Supreme Court Of The State Of". Americans love their acronyms for whatever reason even if it makes communication much harder. This specific example was modeled after the common acronym SCOTUS (Supreme Court Of The United States), so people who know that could understand (screw the rest). In fact, SCOTUS is one of the more "appropriate" acronyms, as it actually means "Darkness" in Greek, which is where the current SCOTUS is taking us...

  23. Re:why do people use WhatsApp? on How Jan Koum Steered WhatsApp Into $16B Facebook Deal · · Score: 1

    I have unlimited texting in the UK, but most of my friends are in various countries. I don't like IMs, but when a friend suggested that there is an IM that requires no signup and shows you directly which of your phone contacts are on, I tried it out. So, it works well and you can post pictures and sound into the conversation, hence much better than SMS.

  24. Re:Wow on NVIDIA Launches GTX 750 Ti With New Maxwell Architecture · · Score: 1

    I'm no nVidiot, but 5-10% improvement at a substantial power savings in the same price bracket is indeed an impressive feat.

    Substantial power savings, but certainly not the same price bracket. It is a $149 card so most reviews don't pit it against the much cheaper $119 R7 260X. In fact newegg right now sells an XFX OC edition of 260X for $119 and a Sapphire for $114 after rebate. Let's not mention that the Maxwell card gets trounced even by the cheaper 260X at many OpenCL tests - and reduced FP64 to 1/32 (vs the previous gen 1/24), so compute is also out. You have to pay dearly for the efficiency, nVidia as usual demands a price premium. Basically thank god for AMD being able to keep up, otherwise nVidia would be selling their cards 2X and 3X the price!

  25. Re:Why do people do this?!? on White House Responds To Net Neutrality Petition · · Score: 4, Funny

    We don't really know that petitions don't get attention from the WH, but it is an interesting question. I suggest we start a petition for the WH tell us whether they take petitions under serious consideration or not.