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User: lxw56

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Comments · 128

  1. Re:"Well, of COURSE they'd like that." on Amazon To Experiment With Part-Time Tech Teams (usatoday.com) · · Score: 1

    >A 37.5% cut in take-home pay If you're in the 25% tax bracket plus 4% state tax, you're probably going from, ballpark, 81k to 54k takehome - a 33% reduction. 21k per year ish.

  2. Re:Problem? on How the World's Agricultural Boom Has Changed CO2 Cycles · · Score: 1

    Nope. (posting to remove accidental mod)

  3. Enough already on Chemists Grow Soil Fungus On Cheerios, Discover New Antifungal Compounds · · Score: 1

    Slashvertising was bad before, but now we're shilling for General Mills? That's it, I'm out.

  4. Re:He thought she had maliaria, not Ebola on Texas Ebola Patient Dies · · Score: 2

    Aerosol from a sneeze could travel up to eight feet, according to reports on a recent study.

  5. Re:Hogwash. on Stanford Promises Not To Use Google Money For Privacy Research · · Score: 0

    Mod parent up. According to CIS, they did not use Google's unrestricted money for privacy research because their privacy research was already funded.

  6. Re:Sue the bastards on In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment For a Novelist · · Score: 1

    Update is here

  7. Re:Sue the bastards on In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment For a Novelist · · Score: 2

    LA Times Books has an update that provides more insight to this story.

    TL;DR:
    McLaw wrote a 4-page letter to "local officials" prompting these concerns.
    His lawyer gave a statement saying he is in a medical facility receiving treatment. Lawyer is not alleging that his rights were violated.

  8. Finally! on Red Hat CEO: Open Source Goes Mainstream In 2014 · · Score: 4, Funny

    The year of Linux on the desktop has arrived!

  9. Re:Stopped reading at... on Ask Slashdot: How To Feed Africa? · · Score: 1

    Soil organic matter is essential to the soil holding water. The problem with modern fertilizers is the carbon-nitrogen balance. Nitrogen fertilizer also fertilizes soil life, which consumes soil organic matter and eliminates it as CO2. Sustainable farming practices increase soil organic matter, increasing the soil's water-carrying capacity.

  10. Re:Of course, prior to mid 1800s on UK Plans Private Police Force · · Score: 1

    Witch hunts were also common back then. Real ones, where they'd take women who'd committed no crime and burn them at the stake.

    That was so much worse than today, when all they do is break into men's houses unannounced, shoot their dogs, and search for hallucinogens, which they consider a reason to steal the house and throw the resident into prison for decades.

  11. Re:Still no mention of military spending on Ron Paul Suggests Axing 5 U.S. Federal Departments (and Budgets) · · Score: 1

    The Department of Energy manages the nation's power supplies,

    The power companies are quite capable of that.

    Department of Commerce collects taxes,

    I thought this was the responsibility of the Treasury Department.

    the Interior governs our damn national parks and the immense stretches of government-owned land along with all our environmental efforts

    It's worth noting that the federal government owns 30% of all US territory. Should it?

    The Department of Education mandates school curriculum and is perhaps the only way social mobility even exists, let alone educated poor (free lunches etc.),

    The DoE oversees a few school services that should be provided by states or other organizations. It also regulates, often detrimentally, state education as if the states or school districts are unable to do so themselves.

    weather forecasting would be impossible without NOAA, and neither would our current understanding of climate change, without NIST our clocks wouldn't run on time and our industry would not have any baseline standards, and without the USGS, well, we'd have no idea what our natural resources look like--or our flood risk, earthquake data, and so on.

    Private companies and other organizations do many similar things - satellite imagery, weather forecasting, standardization, risk assessment. Why not also do these?

    Without government spending a great many things that people take for granted would disappear and the world would become a much more unpleasant place.

    How do we get bread baked and distributed to stores? What federal agency oversees the care of abandoned pets? Services we consider unthinkable without the government are services that have been provided elsewhere, separate from a massive institution that claims authority to rule us under threat of violence.

  12. Re:For such a vital system. on Galileo To Be Europe's Answer To US GPS · · Score: 1

    Why not charge the EU $750mil/year? It's surely worth far more to drivers, farmers, engineers, and governments.

  13. Re:For such a vital system. on Galileo To Be Europe's Answer To US GPS · · Score: 1

    The US government operations alone surely get the value out of the US, not to mention the tens of billions in benefit to the US economy.

  14. Re:For such a vital system. on Galileo To Be Europe's Answer To US GPS · · Score: 1

    SA is officially dead via presidential order. It's not even available in the most recent version of bird (at least officially).

    To anyone who believes that (and believes the government can't trivially re-add it if they did remove it), I'd like your help collecting some lottery winnings.

  15. Re:Exercise on Ask Slashdot: Ergonomic Office Environment? · · Score: 1

    Support-specific exercises are especially helpful. A developer friend of mine has been free from chronic pain since a few months after my mom gave him Pain Free. It has been helpful to me and others as well.

  16. Their gadgets do take the cake on CIA Shows Off (Formerly) Super-Secret Spy Goodies · · Score: 1

    Which would explain why I didn't get the cake I was promised.

  17. I think I'm safe on Confidential Data Not Safe On Solid State Disks · · Score: 5, Funny

    I challenge anyone to find my MicroSD card. I've conducted extensive security audits to verify that no attacker, even one with inside information, can gain electronic or physical access to the disc.

  18. Re:donating 10 million CPU-hours a year on Google Earth Engine To Provide Climate Change Data · · Score: 1

    yeah, about an hour per CPU.

  19. Where Hydrogen and Carbon fall in on "Home Batteries" Power Houses For a Week · · Score: 1

    Hydrogen is #10 at .12% of crust mass.
    Carbon is #15 at .03%, but passes all other elements in industrial production at 8.6 gigatons/year, not counting agriculture. Iron is next for production at 1.2 gigatons.
    Nitrogen is #31 at .005%, right below lanthanum and yttrium! And Lithium is #33.

    You can find the full list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust. I love Wikipedia. That is all.

  20. Re:In Santa Fe NM you pay extra for a gravel road on Broke Counties Turn Failing Roads To Gravel · · Score: 1

    I don't see why local interest groups shouldn't be allowed to do their own thing. Do you just dislike them because they're not like you? The solution is allowing more groups or individuals exemption from regulation, thus taking away the idea that these few groups are "special".

  21. Re:Shortens bulb's life on Laser Blast Makes Regular Light Bulbs Super-Efficient · · Score: 1

    The cost of replacing an incandescent bulb is insignificant compared to the cost of energy used in illumination.

  22. Re:Hack-a-thons? No. on The Dangers of Being Really, Really Tired · · Score: 1

    By the way, since the all-out attack on unions started, real income of American middle and lower-class workers has declined at a steady rate.

    Cited by Thomas Sowell in Economic Facts and Fallacies, average real income per household has only risen 6% per household, but has risen 51% per individual, between '69 and '96. Wages have increased significantly, the problem is smaller households. Furthermore, households with higher incomes usually have two or more wage-earners, lower-income households have one or none, making household income a terrible substitute for individual wages in this discussion. Unions have been an important check on the power of big business, but all-out attack or no, they aren't in a regulatory disadvantaged position today. Rather, they're in decline because what they offer either isn't valued by many workers (for lower-wage walmart-type jobs often taken by people who either don't fight for their rights or don't care much about the job anyway/short-term workers) or isn't especially needed (for higher-wage jobs that you have to not suck at to keep).

    If it hadn't been the ready availability of easy credit, our standard of living would have plummeted.

    Of course, easy credit only returns to bite borrowers in the ass, to the benefit of the banking system.

  23. Re:That pretty bad on CFLs Causing Utility Woes · · Score: 1

    I probably shouldn't have included oil in that list considering recent prices. In the midwest where I live practically no one heats with electricity because of the expense compared to propane or natural gas furnaces.

  24. Re:That pretty bad on CFLs Causing Utility Woes · · Score: 1

    Yes, but (1) if electricity were an ideal heat source, we wouldn't be heating with gas, propane, and oil. And in my house in Virginia, we used the lights and A/C simultaneously quite a bit thanks to warm nights and semi-nocturnalism. A/C is much more expensive per BTU than heat. I'll grant you that as an easy-to-make, easy-to-power low-tech light source, incandescents can't be beat. But with today's electricity prices, I'm switching to CFLs.

  25. Re:Can we still blame pollution for this? on Hot Water, Hot Earth · · Score: 1

    Thanks a ton for the link. My brain just exploded.