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User: ImprovOmega

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Comments · 1,183

  1. Re:He was much more than that on Actor Christopher Lee Has Died at 93 · · Score: 2

    There's a wonderful bio here that kind of expands on a lot of those points.

  2. Re:I'm Baffled... on Ask Toolbar Now Considered Malware By Microsoft · · Score: 1

    With the advent of multimedia webpages it's hard to lock down what exactly is meant by "browsing the web". For most modern sites to work correctly you need to be able to process and display: HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, HTML, JPEG,GIF, BMP, PNG, h.264, .wav, .mp3, .avi, Flash, SilverLight, Java, and so on. So many protocols/formats that may pop up and you have to handle them all. Is it any wonder browsers got so bloated over the years?

  3. Re:That'll annoy Oracle on Ask Toolbar Now Considered Malware By Microsoft · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you just run a silent install of the offline installer it doesn't install ASK either. Granted getting to the offline installer is not exactly obviously presented on their download page, but it is available. And corporations have been using that for years.

  4. Re:Good on Ask Toolbar Now Considered Malware By Microsoft · · Score: 1

    It really hasn't been necessary to have a browser toolbar since search was integrated into the main UI for basically all modern browsers. I briefly had a Google toolbar intentionally installed 5+ years ago, but now I just have my search provider set to Google and I never even thought about a toolbar since. I've removed a lot of them from friends and family PC's though.

  5. Re:Ahhh... Toolbars! on Ask Toolbar Now Considered Malware By Microsoft · · Score: 1

    Oh my god, MyWebSearch...I had almost forgotten about those douchebags. There was a time about 3-4 years ago where I was removing it from some secretary's computer every week. "But I like the smilies!" "Not on a corporate machine you don't. Stop it."

  6. Re:Hmm on Ask Toolbar Now Considered Malware By Microsoft · · Score: 1

    Doesn't matter. Most of those toolbars can install in a purely user context. Otherwise how would they infect...I mean...assist corporate users.

  7. Re:Deniers on the Left? on Diphtheria Returns To Spain For Lack of Vaccination · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Now you're just being a pedantic assclown.

  8. Re:Sure, defend the asshole on Worker Fired For Disabling GPS App That Tracked Her 24 Hours a Day · · Score: 1

    It's pretty obvious to me that her boss was a sociopath. They're hard to nail down because they can be rather charming. If you can't get away from them your best bet is to convince them that they have power and make a show of it in their presence. Their only real weakness is their ego. That won't stop the random humiliations from them (which also strokes their ego), but it can make them marginally more tolerable to work with.

    You, with a conscience, can't win a straight up fight with a sociopath, they will lie convincingly about everything to cover their backsides and if they're even modestly intelligent that can be amplified into a lot of problems for you. Even when they are obviously in the wrong your most likely best outcome is that you don't get hit with whatever they intended to harm you. They won't face consequences, but you may just make it out minimally scathed.

  9. Re:No, they don't - you're misleading people on William Shatner Proposes $30 Billion Water Pipeline To California · · Score: 1

    I'm sorry, but even reverse osmosis plants use chemicals to prep and clean the water and to protect their equipment. Sea water is astoundingly corrosive, so if you don't want to be replacing all the core parts of your plant every year you have to treat it to prevent that damage. Those chemicals are not typically filtered out before being dumped back into the ocean.

    But let's just assume they filtered out all those chemicals and only dumped saltier concentrated sea water back into the ocean. The area around the dump site would still be a death pit for any and all marine life very close by. Now you can get away with a few of these plants, sure. But if you start trying to provide enough water for, say, the entire state of California, through desalination alone, you're going to absolutely murder the coastal ecology.

    Again, I'm not an eco-freak. I think we should have maybe a dozen or so such plants (maybe a few more) to help offset the drought and tough beans for some of the sea life involved. But if you scale it out too much you will wreck the coast.

  10. Re:Why not? on William Shatner Proposes $30 Billion Water Pipeline To California · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately this is very much not cost efficient nor scalable. To give you an idea, there's a desalination plant recently built in Carlsbad, CA that is designed to produce 50,000 acre-feet of potable water a year. This is enough to supply roughly 200,000 homes with water. This means that plant is pushing out 44.6 *million* gallons of water each day to keep up.

    If you personally had a reasonably sized beachfront house you could probably produce enough organic desalinated water for your family, but on a large scale it's not feasible as a municipal water source.

  11. Re:Why not? on William Shatner Proposes $30 Billion Water Pipeline To California · · Score: 1

    There are ways to do it chemical-free, though concentrating the salt and whatever else in the water before dumping it out into the ocean again will still be of some minor environmental impact. A lot of desalination plants still do use chemicals, and there's a breakdown of some of the impacts here

  12. Re:It's finally time on Feds Say It's Time To Cut Back On Fluoride In Drinking Water · · Score: 1

    It's hit or miss. Some dentists in Mexico are very capable and reasonably priced. But some of them are hacks with a pretty looking office. My relatives have had it go both ways.

  13. Re:What am I missing? on A Cheap, Ubiquitous Earthquake Warning System · · Score: 1

    Exactly. Weren't we trying to build a monorail that was going to cost something stupid like $9 billion+? Seems you could run this for a lot of years before you even got close to that budget...

  14. Re:Why not? on William Shatner Proposes $30 Billion Water Pipeline To California · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Desalination plants are NOT clean. The pollute the heck out of the ocean around them. It's not like you just produce pure salt and water out of those things. You produce clean water and as a byproduct you get a slurry of super salty brine mixed with all kinds of chemicals that speed up the desalination process and then you dump that slurry back out into the ocean because that's the most economical way to do it.

  15. Re:The gold standard for fast, painless executions on Oklahoma Says It Will Now Use Nitrogen Gas As Its Backup Method of Execution · · Score: 1

    Ack, did NOT pass out. Stupid no edit button.

  16. Re:The gold standard for fast, painless executions on Oklahoma Says It Will Now Use Nitrogen Gas As Its Backup Method of Execution · · Score: 2

    I had partial nitrogen exposure due to a leak that had happened in an industrial nitrogen tank I was transporting. I did pass out, but I can tell you there was zero pain involved. It actually felt completely euphoric. I wasn't gasping for air or anything like that (though I did realize what had happened and I got the hell out as quick as possible, so I never went under), but even realizing what had happened didn't give me a sense of panic, and afterwards there were no lingering effects. I really think this should be the preferred method of execution. It's simple and demonstrably painless. If I had to die suddenly, I would prefer that to practically any other method.

  17. Re:If it were me... on Oklahoma Says It Will Now Use Nitrogen Gas As Its Backup Method of Execution · · Score: 1

    Pure nitrogen inhalation is quick and painless. I've been in a situation where nitrogen was displacing normal air and the feeling right before you would pass out is one of euphoria. There's no pain at all and unconsciousness comes *very* quickly.

    Added bonus, nitrogen gas is super cheap.

  18. Re:Ten seconds? on Oklahoma Says It Will Now Use Nitrogen Gas As Its Backup Method of Execution · · Score: 1

    I used to work around welding and cutting torches, transporting tanks of acetylene and nitrogen around. One day a fresh nitrogen tank sprung a leak in the back of my truck. When I dropped the tailgate I felt a whoosh of cold and I got extremely light-headed in the few seconds in took to get clear of the invisible cloud. And that was in a well-ventilated open air area. Any kind of enclosed space and I would have passed out in seconds for sure. It wasn't even remotely painful though, almost purely euphoric.

    As far as ways to die go, you could do much worse. The only group of people who would be distressed by it would probably be fighter pilots since they're trained to recognize and work around low oxygen situations.

  19. Re:need super precision numbers? on Mandelbrot Zooms Now Surpass the Scale of the Observable Universe · · Score: 1

    There are many options for arbitrary precision floating point computations. You can easily go to 1024-bit precision (or more) with some easy to find classes for C++ or Java (or write your own). For performance purposes, it's slightly better to go with fixed point arithmetic (especially when your data has known boundaries), but you can get quite reasonable performance from floating point too.

  20. Re:Kill them all. on Islamic State Doxes US Soldiers, Airmen, Calls On Supporters To Kill Them · · Score: 1

    The only way to make it work is with an inhuman amount of brutality. It is within our power to eradicate their entire territory with nuclear weapons, and I promise you, nothing will rise up there to take its place (not for a few hundred years until the radiation dies down anyway). The rest of the world may then turn against the United States, but the ISIS problem would be 100% solved.

    In other words, no, it never really works. That level of violence is self-defeating. ISIS is finding that much out themselves though, because all their Muslim neighbors (and *especially* Jordan) hate them with a passion. I agree that the U.S. needs to help put a stop to them, but cancers like ISIS do tend to get killed off pretty handily by the rest of the world.

  21. Re:wtf on On the Dangers and Potential Abuses of DNA Familial Searching · · Score: 1

    I don't think that would be considered battery since the action is against the car - vandalism or destruction of property I could easily see though. Poisoning is because you are taking action against their person (also poisoning of almost any kind if a felony in most jurisdictions).

  22. Re:Which computer? on Listen To a Microsoft Support Scam As It Happened · · Score: 1

    That's just lazy conmanship. You die with the lie son - tech support doesn't get angry, tech support patiently explains again and again what they want you to do. Needs to be a practiced fake cheerful voice right up to the point they hang up on you.

  23. Re:Alternate Bank of Canada Press Release on Star Trek Fans Told To Stop "Spocking" Canadian $5 Bill · · Score: 1

    Most people won't risk jail time to cover their employer's ass. Perjury is actually a fairly serious offense. Why would you risk lying to the court for a minimum wage job?

  24. Re:could not keep watching it on A Critical Look At CSI: Cyber · · Score: 1

    the NSA can use coffee cups to playback conversations from half an hour ago because of reverberating echoes still trapped inside the cup.

    (I just made that up, CSI writing team: give me attribution please.)

    On last week's episode of CSI Las Vegas they had a no-audio web cam quality recording of two guys chatting in a green house and they used (I shit you not) vibrations from the leaves to rebuild an audio of what the two were saying. I face-palmed so hard.

  25. Re:It's all crap. on A Critical Look At CSI: Cyber · · Score: 1

    I love the episode in one of the later seasons where Horatio is stranded in South America (part of the Mala Noche story arc) and he's given a gun with like 8 bullets in it then proceeds to face off against 10 guys armed with automatic weapons, already drawn and trained on him, and he *still wins* and makes it back to the United States. It was ridiculousness cubed, but it was all part of the fun of that show.