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User: Smauler

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Comments · 1,915

  1. Re:What hapens to the BBC if Scotland votes yes? on BBC: ISPs Should Assume VPN Users Are Pirates · · Score: 1

    I assume the total from Scotland is substantial

    Scotland is about 10% of the UK, by population. As a reference, London has more people, as does Yorkshire.

  2. Re:ORLY? on BBC: ISPs Should Assume VPN Users Are Pirates · · Score: 1

    I assume you're also irked by Boston, Southampton, Clacton and even Downton?

    -ton is a very common town suffix derived from old English, does not mean town, and is not pronounced town.

  3. Re:Nice timing on 3 Decades Later, Finnair Pilots Report Dramatic Close Encounter With a Missile · · Score: 1

    Indeed. Finland is one of those peacenik non-aligned countries that has never had to concern itself with Russian imperialism

    I hope this is sarcastic. Finland has more than enough experience of Russian aggression.

  4. Re: Broken light bulbs. on Surprise! More Than Twice As Much Mercury In Environment As Thought · · Score: 1

    You don't have batteries at home?

    Keeping a few charged aaa batteries in the house is useful not just for digital thermometers. They are also used for other things which you may need too.

  5. Re:in the meantime : on Dell Demos 5K Display · · Score: 1

    TVs are often awful for gaming, having very high input lag. Some can have over 50ms, equivalent to a decent internet connection. Yup, that's right - there's more lag between the computer and the screen than there is between the computer and a server hundreds of miles away.

    Note I'm not talking about response time or refresh rate here.

  6. Re:Somewhat on topic. on Mysterious, Phony Cell Towers Found Throughout US · · Score: 1

    Click the second link, and you might understand the problem.

  7. Re:Hijacking and theft on Hidden Obstacles For Delivery Drones · · Score: 1

    I used to deliver tyres. One particular drop we had often weren't there, and one time I was just told to unload all the tyres, and leave them in front of the garage. It was about £20,000 worth (about 200 high end tyres), and I did have to unload them all myself.

    ps. unloading tyres is an example of a job that is about 5 times as fast with two people compared to one person.

  8. Re:Parallel "Nothing Wrong" case in VA on Deputy Who Fatally Struck Cyclist While Answering Email Will Face No Charges · · Score: 1

    Hello, Id like to report a home invasion. You got a dead body you need to come out here and clean up.

    You seem remarkably calm for someone who's just shot their daughter.

  9. Re:No-Fly List, TSA, nudeo scanners. it's all thea on US Government Fights To Not Explain No-Fly List Selection Process · · Score: 1

    I wasn't going to go all grammar nazi.... but since it was repeated.

    It's not "the single, most damaging, thing", it's "the single most damaging thing".

  10. Re:Expert?? on Is Storage Necessary For Renewable Energy? · · Score: 2

    If you have enough turbines the wind is always blowing somewhere, and the overall output of the entire fleet never drops below some predictable level.

    You can have enough more than enough electricity generated in the east for the east, and more than enough in the west for the west. The problem comes when we have to move electricity. It's not lossless.

    Wholesale, we had _negative_ energy prices for about a month last year in the EU because of lots of wind and a warm autumn. It was cheaper to pay people to take electricity than to shut down the turbines providing it. If it were possible to move energy about easily, this obviously would not have happened.

  11. Re:I don't get it. on Geneticists Decry Book On Race and Evolution · · Score: 0

    You really should publish the work you've done identifying IQ as a physical aspect of the brain

    Really? Ok.... the first person has a brain, the second has no brain. Which do you think will have a higher IQ?

    If you said the first person, you're identifying IQ as a physical aspect of the brain.

  12. Re:Are You Kidding? on Geneticists Decry Book On Race and Evolution · · Score: 1

    Race is a social term used to generalize the ancestry of a person. It's to vague to make a prediction about the genes, and their expression, in a particular person.

    No it's not. If you are black, you're more likely to have sickle cell anemia than if you're white, by a large margin. If you smoke, you're more likely to get lung cancer, by a large margin. Both of these facts are useful for deciding upon health policy and treatment.

  13. Re:Are You Kidding? on Geneticists Decry Book On Race and Evolution · · Score: 1

    I'm willing to bet that the light skin adaption was acquired from Neanderthals, not evolved by Homo Sapian.

    You'd lose that bet. The map at the bottom of this page shows a good correlation between skin colour and distance from the equator, both amongst those groups with Neanderthal genes _and_ those without.

  14. Re:Why? on John McAfee Airs His Beefs About Privacy In Def Con Surprise Talk · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Come on.... which arguments?

    This man has claimed shit loads of things that have been pure crap. Do you really need references?

    Of course privacy is important, everyone knows it's important, we don't need some washed up crapware peddler to tell us that.

  15. Re:Reality not sufficient, on Enthusiast Opts For $2200 Laser Eye Surgery To Enhance Oculus Rift Experience · · Score: 0

    If laser eye surgery is out of the question for you, despite having a ton of reasons why glasses and contacts are bad, I'd have to ask why? It's not _that_ expensive.

    Off topic : Bad eyesight seems to be the only disability that it's ok to make fun out of. At least they do some good adverts, though.

  16. Re:Similar in the UK... on NFL Fights To Save TV Blackout Rule Despite $9 Billion Revenue · · Score: 1

    This is not to protect Premier League teams, this is to protect smaller league teams. Most Premier League teams operate at a profit, especially the smaller ones, due to the huge TV revenues.

    For Americans who don't know, there are over 100 full time professional football (soccer) teams in the England alone, and they're relatively well supported. Here's the attendances for today's games in League 2, averaging about 4,000. League 2 is the 4th division in the UK, the worst fully professional division (Premiership > Championship > League 1 > League 2.... it used to be just division 1, 2, 3 & 4, but marketing). Sheffield Utd, in League 1, got 20,000 today.

    I think one of the big differences between US sport and just about everywhere else is that there's promotion and relegation just about everywhere else. Teams in the US can be completely shit, and it can be an advantage because they get good draft picks the next season. If you're shit in England, you get booted down a league, whoever you are.

    p.s. I'm a Colchester Utd fan (League 1).

  17. Re:Self-awareness on Can We Call Pluto and Charon a 'Binary Planet' Yet? · · Score: 1

    if the barycenter is not in the middle of earth, then the earth wobbles as the moon goes around.

    The barycenter for any two objects is never the middle of either. It's always somewhere on a line directly between the two centres of mass. Every individual satellite that humanity has launched makes the earth wobble a little bit (albeit a miniscule amount).

  18. Re:Self-awareness on Can We Call Pluto and Charon a 'Binary Planet' Yet? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Interestingly, Jupiter is the only planet which has it's barycenter with the sun outside of the sun.

    The definition of whether something orbits something else, or whether it is a binary system is pretty arbitrary. It would be nice and neat if we could say that if the barycenter is inside the larger body, the smaller body is orbiting the larger, but that would mean that Jupiter would not be orbiting the sun.

  19. Re:harddrive speed on AMD Prepares To Ship Gaming SSDs · · Score: 1

    I've certainly seen games where a SSD made a BIG difference to loading times (roller coaster tycoon 3 springs to mind)

    RCT3 takes about 10 seconds to start up on mine, and about 10 seconds to load a level. After that, it does everything on the fly. You'll load a level once every few hours or so (10000 seconds), so an SSD would result in a performance increase of about 0.1% on my system.

    I run a couple of cheap stock 7200rpm hard drives striped, so a bit faster than most.

  20. Re:Nerd Blackface on Big Bang Actors To Earn $1M Per Episode · · Score: 1

    My view is that suicide is a result of a mental illness.

    It saddens me that self determination is considered mental illness by you. I have the absolute right to kill myself, and probably will do some day. It's not because my life is dreary or soul destroying, it's because I'll be able to choose how I die.

    My view is that people hanging on to life desperately is a result of a mental illness.

  21. Re:That kinda sucks on Sony Tosses the Sony Reader On the Scrap Heap · · Score: 1

    It was a great replacement for cassettes (even if Sony and retailers initially made the mistake of pushing it as a competitor to the CD).

    They were a great replacement for CDs for audiobooks. The CD is diabolical for audiobooks... Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series is 144 hours long, on audiobook, which makes CDs a little impractical.

  22. Re:Who didn't see this coming? on How Google Handles 'Right To Be Forgotten' Requests · · Score: 1

    Hate speech is not illegal in the United States. That's a European policy not an American one.

    Whilst there are fewer hate speech laws in the US, I'd guess there are more laws restricting speech against the government, ie sedition. "Seditious Conspiracy" is planning on bringing down the US government. No violence is necessary.

    The hate speech laws in the UK are rarely used. I absolutely agree with you that they should not have been passed. What's interesting is that they were passed in order to protect minorities (in theory), and a disproportionate number of people prosecuted with them have been minorities.

  23. Re:No they are in contempt on How Google Handles 'Right To Be Forgotten' Requests · · Score: 1

    Well, Scientology is a cult, and a moneymaking enterprise. Everyone knows that.

    I wouldn't be for taking kids away from parents just because they're Scientologists, though... and that's never happened, either.

  24. Re:Who didn't see this coming? on How Google Handles 'Right To Be Forgotten' Requests · · Score: 1

    No, Google collects data about people. That's how they can get a relevant search when you search for someone's name. It's not metadata, it's just data about individual people.

    That being said, I don't think it should be the responsibility of google to filter their data based on individual requests. It's really difficult to do, and the only reason they're complying is because the EU is a huge market.

  25. Re:Legitimate concerns on UK Government Report Recommends Ending Online Anonymity · · Score: 1

    When people attack synagogues.... that's against the law, already. When people actually encourage people to kill Jews, that's already against the law. I'm not sure how them being anonymous or not online would affect the attack on the synagogue.

    Very, very few people are actually anonymous online now. It's pretty easy to track most people down.