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User: Belial6

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Comments · 9,672

  1. Re:But knives still are. on Safety Commission To Rule On Safety of Rulers In Science Kits · · Score: 1

    On a recent trip through Nevada, I had the that kind of opportunity to have with my son. We stopped at one of the Indian reservations to buy and light off fireworks. On the way in, I made a point to buy a pack of hot dogs. Before he let off any fireworks himself, I took a couple of M80s and put them in the pack of hot dogs. (hot dogs being enough like fingers for the 'experiment'). We then let off the M80s and my son got a very good demonstration of what happens to fingers if you hang on to fireworks when you let them off.

    He then had a great time setting off his fireworks using the proper safety precautions that they needed. A little demonstration, and what could have been a seriously dangerous activity became a fun night that he will remember for years to come.

  2. Re:Deadline on Obama Highlights IPv6 Issue · · Score: 1
    From your link:

    In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us a citizens or the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.

    You think it is fare to liken a man who wrote that as being anything like Hitler? Yes, he was an expansionist, as everyone at the time was, but your link points out that he did NOT want to commit genocide, and in fact wanted to bring the Indians into his society. He was clearly stating that they either could stay and be one of 'us', or leave.

    I know it is trendy to hate the early US 'white man', but as conquering nations go, the US was pretty tame.

  3. Re:OH COME ON on Methane Survey Reveals Mars Is Far From 'Dead' · · Score: 1

    Truly lifeless planets are common. Planets other than earth with life are not. Even planets that have life but did not originate life locally are pretty rare as far as we can tell.

  4. Re:As someone whose income depends on the PS3... on PS3 Jailbreaks Galore Released · · Score: 1

    The existence of a video game market, and the fact that no one has found an unbreakable DRM proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that your analysis is wrong.

  5. Re:As someone whose income depends on the PS3... on PS3 Jailbreaks Galore Released · · Score: 1

    I was noticing the stacks of legit games I have for the various systems. They seem to correspond directly with how easy it is to run the games without the original media. XBox, DS and Wii have the most, followed PS2. I have zero games for the PS3 or 360 (although the biggest obstacle seems to have been removed which was the fact that you have to send it back to MS for repairs on a regular basis)

    To be fair, I do have more Atari 2600 games than any of the others, but those were all garage sale purchases during the PS1 time frame.

  6. Re:Oversaturated degree market on You Are Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School · · Score: 1

    For the vast majority of people, getting a degree is purchasing a club card. A very expensive club card. So, much like joining that country club at $10k a year for the opportunity to talk to people that you might do business with, getting a degree is an investment. The question with degrees, is much like the question for most of the risks we take in life... "Is it worth it?" It takes a very long time to earn back a $100k education when you are only getting $5k more a year from it.

    The opportunity cost that you point out is the piece that no one ever wants to talk about. If you took your $100k education, went to work instead, and invested the $100k in a moderate investment, many would likely make more money in your life.

  7. Re:Not buying on Review: Civilization V · · Score: 1

    That is a fantasy. All it would take is a new console coming out that removed most of the new revenue for 6 months. They would shut down the servers, and all of your games would be gone. Being big is in no way a guarantee of continued existence.

  8. Re:How do you get offenders to stop? on Is the Web Heading Toward Redirect Hell? · · Score: 1

    Well, you know what they say... "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

    Of course, that is what the malicious people want you to think. ;)

  9. Re:I was going to complain... on In Case of Emergency, Please Remove Your Bra · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yes! Finally, my crazy survivalist rantings will make women want to take their bra's off for me! I knew that all those years living alone in a shack in the woods would eventually pay off!

  10. Re:How do you get offenders to stop? on Is the Web Heading Toward Redirect Hell? · · Score: 1

    You are not reading what I am writing. First it is the envelope being delivered in the same state that takes a week or more. So, even if you take one day sitting in my local post office. It put on a truck and driven to San Francisco for day 2. It goes on a truck to Los Angeles for day 3. It goes to a local L.A. office for day 4, and gets delivered on day 5, there is no excuse for it to take 7 days or more.

    The other part that you are not reading is that GAMEFLY claims the one single envelope arrived on two different days. It isn't a conflict between the USPS and Gamefly. Gamefly will say that the envelope arrived on Tuesday, and then claim that the same envelope arrived on Thursday.

  11. Re:Knew it on China Embargos Rare Earth Exports To Japan · · Score: 1

    The fact that Japan is not self sufficient in the food area makes negative comments about their declining population seem pretty silly.

  12. Re:what about hard drives? on China Embargos Rare Earth Exports To Japan · · Score: 1
  13. Re:How do you get offenders to stop? on Is the Web Heading Toward Redirect Hell? · · Score: 1

    That might be believable if it was 2 days vs. 3 days. It isn't though, it is 2 days vs. 7 days, and they claim the same envelope arrives on different days.

  14. Re:Summary and Article Misleading... on China Embargos Rare Earth Exports To Japan · · Score: 1

    This is exactly why anytime I hear people talk about "peak oil", I know that they have no clue. The amount of a resource that is pulled out of the ground tells you almost nothing about how much is in the ground. The only thing that it tells you is that there USED to be AT LEAST that much in the ground.

  15. Re:what about hard drives? on China Embargos Rare Earth Exports To Japan · · Score: 1

    No kidding. Gold is so cheap that people walk around with it dangling from their bodies. Heck, sometimes people put it on their food and eat it just because they think it looks cool.

  16. Re:No worries on China Embargos Rare Earth Exports To Japan · · Score: 0, Troll

    Whether you agree with the parent or not, if you don't understand what he is saying, you likely never will. Right or wrong, he was clear on what he wrote.

  17. Re:cache difference on AMD One-Ups Intel With Cheap Desktop Chips · · Score: 1

    AMD will likely never be done until X86 is. AMD keeps Intel out of monopoly position while never really giving it a run for it's money. If AMD starts to fall too far behind, Intel will just raise their prices until AMD catches up a bit, or they will stockpile improvements until they need them. Then if AMD starts to get too close to being real competition, Intel will use those resources to pull back ahead.

    Intel doesn't set the pace of x86 improvements, AMD does. In the end, that relationship works out for everyone. Intel keeps making insane amounts of money without too much in the way of anti-trust issues. AMD gets to exist. Consumers get improvements from both AMD and Intel at whatever pace, AMD can roll their improvements out.

  18. Re:How do you get offenders to stop? on Is the Web Heading Toward Redirect Hell? · · Score: 1

    I'm more confused as to why I can send a letter from California to New York, and it will reliably get their in 1 to two days, but when I send a Gamefly disk from Northern California to southern California, it frequently takes up to a week. Even more confusing is how two disks mailed in the same envelope can arrive in Southern California days apart from each other. Well, OK, I'm not really confused by that, but since the mail system was brought up, I couldn't help but take a crack a Gamefly's obvious fraud.

  19. Re:Response to rampant speculation on DX11 Coming To Linux (But Not XP) · · Score: 1

    I didn't say that they are 'entitled' to anything else. We are talking about how well MS supports their OS after the sale. It is perfectly valid to say that MS does not support some of their software after the sale without saying that you are 'entitled' to it. It is also valid to use the after the sale support to gauge the quality of a product in comparison to it's competition.

  20. Re:Response to rampant speculation on DX11 Coming To Linux (But Not XP) · · Score: 1

    And XP is still being sold on desktop computers. Not most of them, but as long as it is still being licesensed for general sale by MS, not supporting it is bad support.

  21. PicoCell on AT&T Introduces Satellite-Enabled Smart Phone · · Score: 1

    They should be selling a PicoCell that relays to the satellite with priority going to land based cell towers. Then don't charge for access. This way, it would be a lot harder to NOT rationalize putting one in your car. What is $600 added to the price of your car to know that you will always have coverage. With the current plan, there is no way I would ever user their service. I simply could not rationalize the price. If I already had the service, and only had to worry about minute charges, I just might use it if I was out in the middle of nowhere.

  22. Re:not just japan on Mega Man Designer Explains Japan's Waning Video Game Influence · · Score: 1

    I always felt that Wolfenstein 3D was their last good game. That was the point that there games stopped feeling like games and started feeling like tech demos for selling a game engine.

  23. Re:Ugh.. on The A-Team of IT — and How To Assemble One · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Bingo! That's exactly what I was thinking. IT is full of 'Munchausen by proxy'.

  24. Re:I wonder... on Airbus Planning Transparent Planes · · Score: 1

    I notice you didn't use the invisible sink to wash your hands....

  25. Re:Boy oh boy... on New HRP-4 Humanoid Robots From Japan To Go On Sale · · Score: 1

    I think you're going to have to explain that a bit better. What technology is going to stop the declining numbers? Why not just have sex like the rest of us?

    You are looking at the statement backwards. I wasn't saying that their numbers are not declining. I'm saying that other groups have gone through the same thing. The Japanese are not the first group of humans in history to have their population reduced due to cultural factors.

    My point is that genetic purity is a silly notion. The more diverse the genes the better the individual traits. If the Japanese were less worried about preserving some romantic notion of blood purity and more serious about being members of a larger world community their numbers wouldn't be declining.

    Belief that total diversity is inherently better than total purity is a silly notion. If everyone on the planet were interbreeding, as is the trend, then you end up losing your genetic diversity, as genetic drift gets reigned in pretty quickly. The way you get genetic diversity is by having groups separated long enough either by geography or socially, that genetic drift can happen.