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User: amber_of_luxor

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  1. Re:The Elephant in the room, no one is talking abo on California Looks To the Sea For a Drink of Water · · Score: 1

    Even if the earth was in the middle of an ice age, the Western Antarctic Ice Shelf would be collapsing, and melting away.

    Using that as proof of global warming, is akin to using Westboro Baptist Church as proof that God is enamoured of out-of-wedlock same-sex intimate sexual relationships, and that everybody must participate in one, at least once a week.

    Amber

  2. Re:What a wonderful unit! on California Looks To the Sea For a Drink of Water · · Score: 1

    >If Americans adopt metric

    I hope you realize that the United States was one of the first, if not very first country to both endorse the metric system, and make it a legal unit of measurement.

    What Congress forgot to do, was mandate that all government agencies use the metric system.

    Probably the major reasons for the failure of metrification in the seventies and eighties are:
    A} Speed limits. Instead of changing 5 mph to 10 kph, it was changed to 8 kph. Nobody's speedometer has checks at 8 km/h, 16 km/h and similar multiples of 8.
    B} Instead of moving the sign that says "exit 1/2 mile ahead" to "exit 1 km ahead", they changed it to read "exit 804.3 meters" ahead.
    C} Instead of using cm to measure the height of a person, they used meters.
    D) Instead of measuring bust size in cm, they used meters.
    (One meter sounds small. 100 cm sounds big. Furthermore, nobody wants to be called a 1. 100, yes. 1, no.)

    amber

  3. Re:I see what you did there on California Looks To the Sea For a Drink of Water · · Score: 1

    We are sorry, but the term " assclown " has been restricted to refer only to the individual who are/were part of Prenda Law, Inc.
    Please do not use it for other purposes, or Prenda Law will be forced to file another frivolous lawsuit against you, for infringing upon their intellectual property rights.

  4. Re: Impact on Ocean tiny in comparison on California Looks To the Sea For a Drink of Water · · Score: 1

    In the short term, nuclear energy is cheap.

    In the long term, nuclear energy is the most expensive option that is available.
    Hint: After factoring in all of the costs, it currently cost one trillion dollars to produce one watt of electricity from nuclear power. That figure climbs at around two percent per month, and will continue to do so, for then dozen millennia.

  5. Re:But not to Nestle. on California Looks To the Sea For a Drink of Water · · Score: 1

    I take it that you are not aware of the desalination plants that are solar powered, and distill the water.

  6. Re:But not to Nestle. on California Looks To the Sea For a Drink of Water · · Score: 1

    Southern California can either use the Salton Sea as a dumping ground for the brine, or build a canal from the Salton Sea to the Pacific Ocean, reflood the Salton Sea, and build desalination plants on the Salton Sea, dumping the brine right back into the Salton Sea.

    Counter-intuitively, dumping brine into the Salton Sea will reduce the amount of salt in it.

    Building a canal from the Salton Sea to the Pacific Ocean, could be enough to trigger a jump in real production of goods in California. (Part of it is from demolishing existing structures, including the flood plain, and part of it is from building replacement structures.) Worst case scenario is that it promotes local jobs, in a fashion that few other government programs are capable of doing.

  7. Re: Must example set of him on Florida Teen Charged With Felony Hacking For Changing Desktop Wallpaper · · Score: 1

    I really wish I remember the legal citation for the case where the perp read the password on a Post-It note on the monitor.
    Perp went to jail for breaking and entering.
    Was not guily of unauthorized access to the computer system.

    There are several other court cases where the rule is that if the password is known, then the access is authorized, regardless of how the perp came to know the password.

  8. Re:Systemic and widespread? on The Courage of Bystanders Who Press "Record" · · Score: 1

    >Many drug dealers don't give a shit about being arrested and doing a little time

    I've known drug dealers deliberately get a little time in county lockup, to retain their street cred.

  9. Re:Systemic and widespread? on The Courage of Bystanders Who Press "Record" · · Score: 1

    >You're going to automatically side against the LEO because the camera was disabled?

    Yes.

    If the LEO was properly trained, they could walk into the rest room naked, and if there was an incident, walk out, with the other person under arrest, and neither party being injured.

  10. Re:Systemic and widespread? on The Courage of Bystanders Who Press "Record" · · Score: 1

    >." Do you have to worry about getting shot at your job? Probably not

    Law Enforcement does not even rank in the top ten list of occupations where being killed on the job is an occupational hazard. Nor do they come in the top ten, where getting injured by a gun is an occupational hazard.

  11. It would be even cheaper to get a competitor to go with them. Roy Brizo Hot Rods LLC, for example.

  12. Re:People CHOOSE to work for Amazon on Amazon Requires Non-Compete Agreements.. For Warehouse Workers · · Score: 1

    >How about when the potential employer makes a few phone calls to their previous work history?

    a) Once upon a time, Amazon outsourced that to another company. I don't know if they still do that;

    b) Most employment verification is computer to computer. Whilst Amazon may have records that firm # 1 contacted them to verify employment, they won't necessarilly know why employment verification was needed;

  13. Re:I just don't care on FTC: Google Altered Search Results For Profit · · Score: 1

    There is no such thing as unbaised, in the world of search. What happens is that there are results that are more likely, and less likely to be what the person doing the search wanted. But even that is iffy.

    The major, if not only virtue Google currently has over other search engines, is that it has indexed more content. However, that doesn't mean that the user seeking that indexed content will find it on Google.

    A company willing to commit around US$100,000 up front for hardware, and then around US$10,000 a quarter for hardware, can have their own in-house search engine. A search engine that keeps track of the parts of the Internet that the organization is most focused upon.

  14. Re:Source? on German Vice Chancellor: the US Threatened Us Over Snowden · · Score: 1

    Money buys technology and food.
    People buys time.

    When push comes to shove, only two things matter:
    * How well the hardware works;
    * How well trained the operator is, in using the hardware;

    An army that use 3D printed guns won't last as long as an army that uses guns machined from metal blocks.

    Twenty people with guns, but don't know how to pull the trigger on the guns, will die, when somebody who knows how to use a sword, puts it to work on them.

  15. Re:speech recognition on Ask Slashdot: Mouse/Pointer For a Person With Poor Motor Control · · Score: 1

    Nuance leads the pack, becuase their business model is to buy out the competition, or eliminate them through excessively high royalites for the non-patents that the USPTo grants to organizations that engage in ongoing racketering and extortion.

  16. Re:filtration is key on Scientific Study Finds There Are Too Many Scientific Studies · · Score: 1

    >Eliminate biased studies and the rest can see the light of day.

    If it wasn't for some researchers fudging data, breaking every rule in the book, about research design, there never would have been any pilots from Tuskegee, during WW2.

    In this case, the bias of the researchers, and the funders, was a goodness.

  17. Re:Publication cycle on Scientific Study Finds There Are Too Many Scientific Studies · · Score: 1

    >until a study gets obsoleted by newer, superior studies thus gets shorter

    In my field, most of the research from the last two decades is pure unmitigated crap. Basic errors in research protocol are so common, that the few people who read, and review everything, remark when there are no research protocol errors.

    (It is pathetic to see a study by an author of a university textbook or research protocol, do a study that fails to adhere to what is in the book on research protocol that has their name on it.)

  18. Re:Too many studies to keep track of? on Scientific Study Finds There Are Too Many Scientific Studies · · Score: 1

    >the technology is here, the problem is paywalls.

    Whilst both indexing and accurate bibliographic citation in those paywalls has improved, for fields of study that are way off the mainstream, the only way to ensure that all relevant articles from a journal are correctly indexed, for that non-mainstream field of study, is to go through each article, in each volume of the journal, doing the appropriate indexing it yourself.

    > Probably No scientific institution in the world has access to all the journals that cover the relevant fields of the institution.

    Even by using Inter-library loan, accessing the articles is an issue. Especially since libraries started dumping their hard copy journals.

  19. Re:When applied correctly homeopathy is GREAT! on Use Astrology To Save Britain's Health System, Says MP · · Score: 1

    You do realize that 100% of the published peer-reviewed research, where the patients were diagnosed according to the standard protocols of homeopathy, resulted in a 100% cure, don't you.

    And you do further realize that 70% of the published peer-reviewed research on homeopathy does not diagnose the patient according to the standard protocols of homeopathy, don't you.

  20. Re:eReaders are functionally bad on The Case Against E-readers -- Why Digital Natives Prefer Reading On Paper · · Score: 1

    What you are forgetting is that most publishers neither know, nor care about correctly formatting an eBook, whether it be in PDF, ePub, Mobi, LIT, or other file format.

  21. Re:The abacus is on? on Ask Slashdot: Parental Content Control For Free OSs? · · Score: 0

    >A fucking 360 didn't have a 45 minute boot time.

    I had a Dell laptop running Win7 that took about an hour to boot up. I took two videos:
    * The first one was from when I clicked on the mouse, to restart the system, until the login screen after rebooting was displayed;
    * The second one was from I clicked on the mouse, to shut the system down. Then pressed the start key, and watch the entire boot process, until the login screen is presented;

    When I uploaded them to YouTube, they were rejected, due to their length. To this day, I have no idea why Win7 took so long to boot up.

    I also had a BSD box that took about ten hours to boot up. That was because it ran a disk integrity checker, then tripwire, and then something else. Roughly three terrabytes of data files to check, every time it booted up.

  22. Re:Duck Duck Go on Google Sees Biggest Search Traffic Drop Since 2009 As Yahoo Gains Ground · · Score: 1

    For most sites, the two most critical things to track you are:
    * Originating IP Address;
    * User-Agent String;

    However, I've noticed an increasing number of sites that are not functional, when there is no referring header, or when adblock, or one of its variants is installed.

  23. Re:This tired old saw again. on Science Cannot Prove the Existence of God · · Score: 1

    Proving the existence of anybody who was born more than roughly 500 years ago, is, at best, problematic.

    Finding any evidence of a person who was a nobody from the backwoods of an insignificant country, when they lived two thousand years ago is pretty much guaranteed to be "not going to happen".

    A country bumpkin, without political authority, spiritual authority, or money is usually going to be a nobody. 2000 years ago, it would have been a nobody. That is what Jesus was.

    That we have biographies about Jesus, is something to ponder. The way you prove that there was no Jesus, is by categorically rejecting any evidence that might support the thesis that there was a Jesus.

  24. Re:Atheists *are* believers ... on Science Cannot Prove the Existence of God · · Score: 1

    Athiest: There is no god.
    Theist: There is a god.
    Polytheist: There are many gods.

    Gnostic: I know.
    Agnostic: I do not know.

    Claiming a theist is an athiest, becuase said theist appears to doubt the existence of one diety, whilst accepting the existence of another diety, is as illogical as it is irrational, as it is delusional.

  25. Re:The idea or concept of god... on Science Cannot Prove the Existence of God · · Score: 1

    The so-called state-of-the-art about the existence of God, starts with the axiom that there is no God, but refuses to acknowledge that as an axiom.