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User: Ioldanach

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  1. Re:Doing their part to reduce traffic! on Rude Drivers Reduce Traffic Jams · · Score: 2, Informative

    In which case yes, they've made the practice as safe as it is likely to get. Unfortunately, drivers in most areas are still not used to motorcycles engaging in lane splitting because it just doesn't happen all that often, and are unlikely to be specifically watching for it.

  2. Re:Doing their part to reduce traffic! on Rude Drivers Reduce Traffic Jams · · Score: 1
    Its not lane splitting that I have a problem with, it is lane splitting followed by being upset when the potential consequences, which can be caused by drivers being unaware of this unexpected (and rare, where I am) occurrence, are manifest. Every example of the consequences becoming manifest that I've heard from a biker has outright blamed the driver for trying to stop the bike because they were upset the bike was lane splitting, yet I don't know anyone who would inflict injury on another plus thousands of dollars of damage on their own vehicle over a feeling of indignance. I'm sure it happens, as a variant of road rage, but I can't help but think that the problem of drivers actively attempting to injure a biker is overblown.

    The fact that someone is driving a vehicle that can't handle the traffic conditions they encounter along their route without engaging in a questionably safe practice doesn't change the safety factor of the practice.

  3. Re:Doing their part to reduce traffic! on Rude Drivers Reduce Traffic Jams · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In some places, lane splitting is legal.

    That doesn't mean its wise or safe. Don't go lane splitting on your motorcycle and then get pissed that someone who couldn't see you because you're moving at twice the speed of traffic tried to change lanes and you wrecked. You were engaging in an unsafe, if legal, maneuver.

  4. Re:DEFINE: Subjectivity on Are Women Getting More Beautiful? · · Score: 1

    I see Jessica Simpson as a freakishly stretched elf - on the verge of starvation.

  5. Re:Dangers of blocking on US Agency Blocked Cellphone / Driving Safety Study · · Score: 1

    an accident has just happened but there's no safe place for you to stop?

    I've had that one on several occasions, typically where I observe an accident on the highway in the other direction and there's no realistic way for me to even get to the accident in a safe manner, nor would I be of any use or assistance if there were. In particular this happens with snowstorms, where someone runs off the road in a non-life-threatening way and it is very unsafe for a civilian vehicle to pull off the road to attempt to render aid.

  6. Re:Dangers of blocking on US Agency Blocked Cellphone / Driving Safety Study · · Score: 1

    Another difference is that the ATC knows when to shut the hell up and let the pilot do his job if something goes wrong, just like someone in the passenger seat would. But someone on the other end of the phone may not even know he is talking to a driver.

    It is the job of the driver to make the other end of the line aware that he's driving, and may need to completely divert his attention unexpectedly for indeterminate periods of time. When I'm driving and have a reason to talk on the phone (usually to get directions, or to make a quick call to check if we need something at the grocery store on my way home) I inform the other person that I'm driving, and if something comes up I just say 'hold on' and ignore them completely until the relevant danger has passed. I've never had anyone even annoyed at this, and don't really understand why anyone has any difficulty with this. Part of learning to drive is learning that the road and the conditions around you, including other drivers, are your number one focus. Anything else, radio, passengers, phone, be damned. If conditions on the road require more attention than usual, the rest can all wait.

  7. Re:voices on Futurama Voices Could Be Recast · · Score: 1

    Anyway, although it does seem that his involvement, while not lowering quality imho, does seem to doom some shows. Why is that?

    Because he seems to work for Fox a lot, and they seem to like to kill shows off whenever the execs shuffle offices.

  8. Re:Legally, how? on Amazon Pulls Purchased E-Book Copies of 1984 and Animal Farm · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not a contradiction at all, it is deemed licensed to you as opposed to somebody else. That part means the license is non-transferrable. Looks to me like they violated their own license.

  9. Re:I doubt it... on Cure For Radiation Sickness Found? · · Score: 1

    Like the GP said, the methods of radiation damage are diverse, it is impossible for there to exist a single pill that treats it from all these aspects.

    The pill doesn't fix the cell, it prevents the cell from committing suicide when exposed to radiation that might or might not have critically damaged it. When a cell is exposed to radiation, it shuts itself down, often unnecessarily. This pill prevents that, allowing a potentially damaged cell to survive. There's a chance the potentially damaged cell could eventually turn cancerous, but the immediate problem of death is averted, at least temporarily.

  10. Re:News at 11 on Strong Passwords Not As Good As You Think · · Score: 1

    On the flip side, it's actually not too hard to have the computer deny users from using passwords that contain words from the dictionary. So you don't need to say "there must be a digit and an uppercase letter and a non-character symbol..." You can just say "no words" and have the computer check the password for strings that match dictionary words.

    Just as long as it allows dictionary words of three characters or less. I can't tell you how many times I've had my chosen password denied on certain systems because it contained three adjacent characters that happened to form a three letter word.

  11. Re:Yup on Judge Rules IP Addresses Not "Personally Identifiable" · · Score: 1

    Yes, and that doesn't change the point. The IP address is one part of the evidence, which is then used as a stepping stone in building a case against someone.

  12. Re:Good. on Pickens Calls Off Massive Wind Farm In Texas · · Score: 1

    With nuclear the problem isn't just the environment, it also requires a ton of people manning it. A wind farm can basically generate electricity with just a bit of maintenance.

    You think you can maintain the 50,000 windmills required to match a typical nuclear power plant and the necessary power grid between them with fewer people than are required to staff a nuclear power plant?

  13. Re:Good. on Pickens Calls Off Massive Wind Farm In Texas · · Score: 1

    But in reality, nuclear power plants take 20+ years to build, so they are hardly a realistic solution to today's power problems.

    Define "years to build". A modern turnkey nuclear reactor can be constructed in around four years. Getting past people's fears and going through licensing hoops are what make the process take a decade or more.

  14. Re:Yup on Judge Rules IP Addresses Not "Personally Identifiable" · · Score: 1

    I agree about this, and that's why I think the methodology RIAA is using *should* not really hold in court. They should really provide them with name and date ranges, forget about the IP addresses, it's just an Internet Protocol technicality and should be treated as such.

    In the only case that's gone to a verdict, as far as I know, the IP address was one point of several. The IP address is useful as a tool to limit the range of people you're likely to be talking about. Combine that with other information, such as the userid used on the network, which matched a userid used by the individual in multiple other places, and you can start talking about identifying a person with some modest degree of certainty.

    So, alone, the IP address can't prove someone did something. However, when aggregated together with other data, it helps to paint the picture.

  15. Re:Doctors orders on FDA Considers Banning Acetaminophen-Based Pain Killers · · Score: 1

    and as an antipyretic you should take what exactly? The WHO recommends children take paracetamol for fevers above 38.5C.

    why not Ibuprofen?

  16. Re:Doctors orders on FDA Considers Banning Acetaminophen-Based Pain Killers · · Score: 1

    That doesn't mean you should give them asprin instead of tylenol. I don't know of any dangerous side effects of advil in children, which is what I'd use.

  17. Re:Doctors orders on FDA Considers Banning Acetaminophen-Based Pain Killers · · Score: 1, Informative

    Aspirin is a risk factor for Reye's Syndrome and shouldn't be given to a child under 16. Ibuprofen, on the other hand, is fine as far as I know.

  18. Re:False dichotomy on Pirate Bay Retrial Denied, Judge Declared Unbiased · · Score: 1

    I would amend this by also requiring that distributed works protected by their own device are not covered by copyright, only the device. As they cannot be read without an external key of some sort, they are circumventing the reasonable terms limit and are therefore failing to uphold that part of the social contract of a copyright. The works should be protected only by the trade secret and contract law protecting the key itself, and if the key is broken legitimately the works would see no copyright protection.

    Want to try and restrict user's rights by distributing with macrovision or CSS? Go ahead, but that distribution goes out without the protection of copyright, just the protection of the technology itself.

  19. Re:In Space on Beamed Space Solar Power Plant To Open In 2016? · · Score: 1

    LOL. Every time I've used bluetooth device, an AM/FM radio, or a cell phone.

    Are you really comparing exposure to milliwatts of increased background RF to a concentrated 200MW beam?

  20. Re:Most people won't care, but at Orlando... on Verified Identity Pass Shuts Down "Clear" Operations · · Score: 3, Funny

    Could the TSA's own advances in screening have killed off the company's business model?

    Clearly, the gubmint should step in and stop the TSA from getting efficient, frail business models need to be protected, right?

  21. Re:No one here's buying it. on German Member of Parliament Joins Pirate Party · · Score: 1

    it was something like 2 images in a sizable pr0n-pile of otherwise vanilla erotica

    And remember, next time you hear a case about someone being charged with having 1000 CP images on their computer, that probably means that they found a single 40 second video clip of CP. Apparently they consider every video frame to be its own "image" and the charges and penalties are based on the number of images.

  22. Some math... on In Round 2, Jammie Thomas Jury Awards RIAA $1,920,000 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Lets presume each of the 24 songs in question (of the 1702 songs being shared by that IP) is available on itunes with a price of 99 cents. Lets also presume that statutory damages were actually limited to the revenue lost by the company (which they apparently aren't). And finally that the 24 songs were each 5MB and the cable modem had an upload speed of 256kbps.

    For the 24 songs in question to incur $80,000 in damages each, therefore, they would have had to be downloaded a total of 1939394 times, for 9696970MB of downloads. This would, at 256kbps, take 3507 days (about 9 and a half years). Kazaa had only existed for about three years at the point of infringement. Also, for that matter, that ignores the remaining 1678 songs.

    Going the other direction, if all 1702 songs were saturating the upload speed of the modem for the history of Kazaa (call it 3 years even to make things easier) you'd have been able to upload 1009152MB, or about 201830 songs, divided evenly over all 1702 songs that's about 118 times each. At 99 cents each that's $2803.68 in statutory damages.

  23. Re:focus on the actual issue on Thomas' Testimony and the RIAA's Near-Fatal Error · · Score: 1

    I disagree. The purpose of the law and the statement in the constitution are to protect the rightful owners of the copyright. The way the particular laws are written hinges on presumptions of an earlier time, that violations of copyright of the scale we're seeing today would not be something individuals exchanging copyrighted materials would be able to achieve. Therefore, the implementation of the laws is intended to stifle mass copyright infringement. They haven't caught up to the way individuals are infringing today.

  24. Re:focus on the actual issue on Thomas' Testimony and the RIAA's Near-Fatal Error · · Score: 1

    The punishment is meant not to recover just lost revenue but to be punitive. According to http://www.researchcopyright.com/article-penalties-for-copyright-infringement.php the copyright holder can request triple damages.

    Still, the punitive punishment should make sense. Charge the retail value of the song for damages plus treble that to be punitive, and now you're all the way up to $4 per song downloaded from your system.

    The law is written so that people printing and distributing media for a profit lose their shirts. As in, for outfits counterfeiting tens of thousands of books or CDs at a time. Sharing 24 songs that each get downloaded around a hundred times is a far smaller offense, and shouldn't be fined the same way.

    Then again, I also believe that any media distributed with DRM should be treated as not copyrighted, because the manufacturer has chosen to protect their product via a method other than copyright. If the product has DRM it cannot be expected to become free of that at an arbitrary point in the future, and since the "limited times" clause is not met the protection clause should not apply at all. Which means that any DVD protected by CSS or any music file distributed with DRM should be protected only by trade secret and contract law that govern distribution of the copy protection.

  25. Re:Hopefully It'll Just Go Away on Administration Wants To Scale Back Real ID Law · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But what if I had been a terrorist, fully aware of the knife?

    You're buying into the security theater paradigm. Before 9/11, hijackings were kidnapping and ransom situations in the US. If you wanted to survive, you kept a low profile and didn't rock the boat, and odds were everything would be fine. Out of 200 people they might kill one or two, so your odds of being that one were low enough that resistance was not a good idea. 9/11 changed all that. Now the possibility that everyone might be killed is very very real, so terrorists are likely to see an overwhelming resistance if all they could get on board were knives or possibly even a couple small firearms.

    I honestly think that a modest knife, say 3" or less, presents no substantial hijack threat.