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User: dondelelcaro

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Comments · 336

  1. Re:Left foot braking, not heel and toe on Is the Tesla Model S Pedal Placement A Safety Hazard? · · Score: 1

    It's pointless in non-turbocharged cars

    While there's not as much point in non-turbocharged cars, F1 race car drivers often left foot brake. Part of this is because of their karting roots, and the other half is that left foot breaking can help you floor the gas pedal that much faster. [That, and an F1's clutch is on the steering wheel anyway.]

  2. Consider git-annex on Does Anyone Make a Photo De-Duplicator For Linux? Something That Reads EXIF? · · Score: 1

    In addition to the other methods (ZFS, fdupes, etc), I personally use git-annex.

    Git annex can even run on android, so I keep at least two copies of my photos spread throughout all of my computers and removable devices.

  3. Re: 'no definitive conclusions can be reached' on Study Linking GM Maize To Rat Tumors Is Retracted · · Score: 1

    Of course we're on someone's payroll. We have to eat, after all. The question is whose payroll we are on. All reputable journals require scientists to indicate who supported their research and any conflicts of interest they might have.

  4. Another new tool to prevent resale! on Apple's War Against Jailbreaking Now Makes Perfect Sense · · Score: 1

    While detering theft is useful for the consumer, how long until this tool is used to lock a device to a specific consumer, eliminating any resale value that the phone may have?

  5. Re:When talking to a prosecutor in the US. on The Accidental Betrayal of Aaron Swartz · · Score: 4, Informative

    And because it's considered civil contempt, you get no trial, no appeal.

    They're only jailed for as long as the grand jury is sitting. Secondly, you can contest coercive contempt charges, it's just that your grounds for contesting them are more limited.

  6. Re:Quarantine works on Indiana Nurses Fired After Refusing Flu Shots On Religious Grounds · · Score: 1

    The other method to reduce transmission is prevent caregivers from working in the hospital if they show signs of being sick with any significantly harmful highly contagious disease.

    While this would reduce transmission, it wouldn't be enough. For influenza, you can be an asymptomatic carrier capable of passing on the disease for a period of at least a day before showing symptoms.

  7. Re:compete instead of complain on Outrage At Microsoft Offshoring Tax In the UK, Google Caught Avoiding US Taxes · · Score: 1

    What if I don't want to eat in the store?

    If you don't want to eat in the store, then don't eat in the store. No one is forcing these companies to take advantage of the externalities that the US provides.

  8. Re:compete instead of complain on Outrage At Microsoft Offshoring Tax In the UK, Google Caught Avoiding US Taxes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    More like, Store A is charging $20 for a loaf of bread, I'll go to store B where I can get it for $5.

    Lets at least get the metaphors slightly more accurate.

    Store A is charging $20 for a loaf of bread, but provides an awesome atmosphere, chairs, clean eating space, nice employees, free coffee, and massages while you eat your loaf of bread. Store B sells the same bread for $5, but you can't eat your bread there. So you buy your bread from Store B, and then expect Store A to let you stay in Store A to eat your bread.

    Companies pay taxes to pay for the externalities that they take advantage of while doing business in a country.

  9. Re:Did I seriously miss something? on Comparing R, Octave, and Python for Data Analysis · · Score: 2

    there are ways around that through smart planning, variable use, and multiple data files for different variables so not all are in memory at once

    There are also packages like ff and others which handle absolutely gigantic files by offloading parts of them to storage and only allocating memory for them (and storage) when required. R certainly has some problems with dealing with huge amounts of data, but they aren't insurmountable for datasets less than 1T.

  10. Re:The world's tiniest violin plays for UCLA on California Considers DNA Privacy Law · · Score: 1

    this research can NEVER be wholly or partially copyrighted/patented. or that the university will not directly or indirectly profit from this research and all data will be made public...

    First off, facts cannot be copyrighted. Secondly, in a university setting, research results are generally made publicly available in journal articles, and you can often request the data if you have a legitimate reason to get access to it. Raw data will almost never be made public (although it is often made available to other researchers) as it would be a privacy violation to do so.

    Genetic research should always involve informed consent with a description of what the results will be uesd for; I don't personally have a problem with laws that properly legeslate that. However, they should not be so burdensome to make compliance infeasible.

  11. Re:The world's tiniest violin plays for UCLA on California Considers DNA Privacy Law · · Score: 1

    The fact that those doctors are making *MONEY* off it, and her and her family aren't? If it was non-profit and shared with all who needed it, maybe, but as a big money business the HL cell cultures are an insult to 'supposed' medical ethics everywhere.

    You're mistaken. HeLa cells are banked by ATCC, which is a non-profit organization which provides the cells to other cell banks which provide them to researchers at cost. The cells themselves are typically not sold for profit. [They are expensive, but that's because media, refrigerant, and people needed to propogate them aren't free.]

  12. Re:The world's tiniest violin plays for UCLA on California Considers DNA Privacy Law · · Score: 1

    We're not talking about the field of medicine, we're talking about the profit center of medicine, the drug companies.

    While this does affect big pharma a little bit, the vast majority of genetic testing for association currently occurs in academic settings. This bill has the potential for significantly increasing the difficulty of determining which genetic variants cause important diseases, reducing the ability of researchers in California to participate in research in this field.

  13. Re:nonsense on FBI Seizes Server Providing Anonymous Remailer Service · · Score: 1

    If you're a professional, you'd switch the server to single user mode, dump the drive contents to a portable drive, reboot the server, and be on your merry way.

    And if you were really a professional, you'd get a search warrant for a complete wiretap on the server, and track all packets coming in and out. You might also compromise the machine so you could obtain all of the unecrypted traffic entering and exiting the machine. But the FBI apparently isn't that smart.

  14. Re:Talk or else! on US Judge Rules Defendant Can Be Forced To Decrypt Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    You can be forced to divulge the combination of a safe, but you can be required to open it yourself.

    I don't know any jurisdiction which would bother spending the money trying to compel someone to provide the safe combination. They just seize the safe, ask nicely once, and if they were rebuffed, call a lock smith to open it.

    The highest UL safe rating is only for 30 minutes of work time, after all.

  15. Re:That's not a bug, it's a feature on Study Hints That Wi-Fi Near Testes Could Decrease Male Fertility · · Score: 1

    RTFA. Hell, read the fscking summary: "... compared to healthy sperms stored for the same time in the same temperature away from the computer."

    Except that they method they used to maintain temperature didn't involve a laptop in the control area; they attempted to cool the sample kept near the laptop by an air conditioning system. This would introduce significant vibration, a temperature gradient, and potentially alter CO2 and O2 concentrations near the sperm.

    It's not like running this control would be difficult, so one can only guess why they didn't bother to do it.

  16. Re:expensive cupcakes on Baker Has to Make 102,000 Cupcakes For Grouponers · · Score: 1

    a factory sized bakery is FAR more stringently controlled

    Factory sized bakeries are more stringently controlled, both by governmental regulation and for QA purposes. However, because of the magnifying effects of the economies of scale, cheaper ingredients are used wherever possible. Additionally, due to the need to maximize shelf-life, automate production lines, and reduce waste, components that would not normally be added to baked goods by smaller bakers are added in an industrial setting. Finally, while many so-called organic products are not free of contaminants, products produced using normal methods also contain many of these contaminants.

  17. Re:expensive cupcakes on Baker Has to Make 102,000 Cupcakes For Grouponers · · Score: 1

    [I]t's just a label change without a quality change.

    Paying more for a label is silly, but at least some of the higher end cupcake places I've visited were superior to the standard supermarket cupcakes, both in taste and decoration. Probably not $4 superior, but enough that I would consider paying more for the once or twice a year I buy a cupcake. But then again, I tend to consider cupcakes like this gourmet, so my taste might be suspect.

  18. Re:expensive cupcakes on Baker Has to Make 102,000 Cupcakes For Grouponers · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A "gourmet" cupcake is made in exactly the same oven with exactly the same ingredients as a regular cupcake...

    Just like a computer contains the same silicon and rare elements as any other computer, the devil is in how they're assembled and put together, and the skill with which someone makes them. A "working" program is made in exactly the same compiler with exactly the same syntactical constraints as a segfaulting program

  19. Re:How about Fedora? on Linux Mint: the New Ubuntu? · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have always preferred RH's system-V-like way of doing things.

    While there are slight differences, Debian has been using SysV as a default for a very long time. [Probably even since the beginning.] We also have file-rc and various other init systems available as options; while they may be the default at some point in the future, they're not the default now.

  20. Re:Should be pretty obvious by now on Study Finds No Link Between Mobile Phones and Cancer (Again) · · Score: 1

    but homeostasis is not perfect.

    No, but it's fairly good when we're talking about internal body temperatures... and when it does fail and your temperature goes much beyond 42C, you die.

    Put a one cm2 sample in sunlight in the summer and check the heat gain vs exposing the same size sample to a milliwatt em source of your choosing.

    This would be a measurement of average heat gain, which isn't what I'm talking about. Obviously there's not enough energy in a typical cell phone transmitter to produce an appreciable average heat gain in a volume of water the size of a human. However, with an increase in localized intensity via focusing you may be able to increase the incidence and severity of inflammation.

    I personally don't think that the radiated power of most common devices is going to be high enough to introduce a high enough relative risk to offset the advantages of cell phones (or probably even to have a study with enough statistical power to be detectable), but that doesn't mean that scientists shouldn't go out and do the tests to verify that this is in fact the case.

  21. Re:Should be pretty obvious by now on Study Finds No Link Between Mobile Phones and Cancer (Again) · · Score: 1

    Is there more cancer in warm areas then in cold ones? I would guess that then few milliwatts of RF would produce less heat than say living in the south or west?

    External temperatures don't influence internal temperatures much, so long as humans can maintain homeostasis. That said, I would expect (after controlling for skin pigmentation) to find more skin cancers in warmer areas... but that's not what you're asking about.

    It's not the power itself that is the issue, but the intensity. A few mW over a few um^2 is more likely to be problematic than a few W over a few meters^2.

  22. Re:Should be pretty obvious by now on Study Finds No Link Between Mobile Phones and Cancer (Again) · · Score: 1

    does it not make sense that electromagnetic radiation below visible light should also not cause cancer

    Non-ionizing radiation shouldn't directly cause cancer by the inducement of DNA damage. However, non-ionizing radiation could conceivably cause inflammation due to localized increase in heat. Increased inflammation can increase the risk of cancer. [That's basically why asbestos causes cancer, even though asbestos itself is spectacularly inert.]

    It's certainly unlikely that cell phones produce enough energy to cause enough inflammation to cause an appreciable increase in risk of cancer, but the possibility is large enough that it's reasonable to study.

  23. Re:Corporations... Right on Ron Paul Suggests Axing 5 U.S. Federal Departments (and Budgets) · · Score: 1

    I can easily use city streets and the (private) railways to supply my needs.

    Except for the fact that almost all of the highways and railways have had federal subsidies. Good luck disentangling them.

  24. Re:"competing freeware program" on RealNetworks Sues Dutch Webmaster Over Hyperlink To Freeware · · Score: 1

    Sure, suing for linking to it is pretty stupid, but US government seems to be closing sites that link to TV series too.

    Lets at least get real here. Real Alternative is trivially googleable. If you were actually looking for it and couldn't find it, something's wrong with you.

  25. Re:The FSF is indeed generating FUD on FSF Uses Android FUD To Push GPLv3 · · Score: 1

    I think the valid interpretation (which is why people merely seek coming into compliance with the terms...) for the GPL/LGPLv2 for reinstatement is to re-obtain a new copy and fully comply with the terms.

    Coming into compliance really works because the copyright holders grant a new license to the violator after compliance is obtained; the copyright holder is not limited to the terms of the GPL in granting new licenses. That said, it is possible that a violator would attempt to claim that they re-obtained a new license from another sublicensor, but that would add evidence that they knowingly were in violation of the license; that's one reason why we've not seen anyone with an action brought against them try to reinstate it by themselves, even if they disagree with my (IANAL) interpretation of what GPLv2 section 4 means.