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User: nharmon

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Comments · 722

  1. Re:Zeno on The Doomsday Clock Is Moved Closer To Midnight · · Score: 1

    ...says the person with a signature claiming that Jesus was a liberal.

  2. ACLU's guidance on Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Way To Deal With Roving TSA Teams? · · Score: 5, Informative
  3. Re:Go troll somewhere else. on Belarus Bans Use of Foreign Websites · · Score: 1

    The Constitution is a framework to define and limit power of the Federal government AND ABSOLUTELY NOTHING MORE.

    That has not been true since 1868, when the Constitution was made to limit the power of the States as well.

  4. Re:Invisible hand of the free market on Prospects Darken For Solar Energy Companies · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Only if we allow it to. Right now it can not, because the prices are being manipulated by government subsidy. Not just the solar energy prices, but those of coal, nuclear, and wind as well.

    It is a lesson we continually fail to learn: Industries built on government subsidy suffer when those subsidies begin to go away, even if the product itself is sound.

  5. Re:Confusing positions on Congress's Techno-Ignorance No Longer Funny · · Score: 0

    I've noticed this also. As well as the backlash against usage-based billing as a consequence of network neutrality.

  6. Re:Why would they? on Will NASA Ever Recover Apollo 13's Plutonium From the Ocean · · Score: 1

    I believe the offer was to inhale an equal amount of plutonium as any anti-nuclear critic would ingest of caffeine.

  7. Re:Canon or Nikon on Ask Slashdot: Best Camera For Getting Into Photography? · · Score: 4, Informative

    SLRs are very forgiving to people who are inexperienced with taking pictures. So yes.

  8. Cheap Digital SLR on Ask Slashdot: Best Camera For Getting Into Photography? · · Score: 2

    Buy a cheap digital SLR, cheapest you can find, and then invest your money in lenses as you progress.

  9. Re:Woot! on OpenSUSE 12.1 Released · · Score: 1

    2 again. I switched to Apple.

  10. Re:Al Franken on Slashdot Asks: Whom Do You Want To Ask About 2012's U.S. Elections? · · Score: 0

    Ahh yes, Senator Franken's brilliant editorial on why allowing mobile carriers the ability to block certain types of network traffic will cause Comcast to block Netflix from its subscribers.

  11. Re:Screenshots... on Linux Mint 12 to Blend GNOMEs 2 & 3 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Goatse. Don't click

  12. Re:Has anyone attempted to figure out... on Pancake Flipping Is Hard — NP Hard · · Score: 1

    Correct. And in the case of catching a ball, we know that if the direction of a moving object remains the same relative to us, we are on a collision course. No need to do calculus in our heads.

  13. Re:Hmm... I'm waiting for the stories on OLPC Project To Air-Drop Laptops · · Score: 1

    When the laptops sit unused, the people patting themselves on the back for sending them will wash their hands of ever helping poor Africans again. You just watch.

  14. The black market for OLPCs... on OLPC Project To Air-Drop Laptops · · Score: 2

    is about to get an influx of supply.

  15. Re:USA against the World? on US Defunds UNESCO After Palestine Vote · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't you think this is exactly the purpose they had in mind when they passed this law? To make it as costly as possible to do something the United States does not want them to do?

    And since this is blocking future funding and not current funding, this is less like picking up your marbles and going home and more like simply refusing to come to any more marble games.

  16. Re:Without patents... on Oracle-Google Trial Won't Start Until Next Year · · Score: 1

    If only it were that simple... it is often more like:

    LAWYER 1: We wrote a significant portion of the software, your honor. Half of our product was licensed to XYZ Corp. with a specific non-compete clause. A quarter of it was licensed to ZZ Corp. without a non-compete clause. Since ZZ Corp was later acquired by XYZ Corp., we do not feel the license we granted to ZZ Corp. overrides the conditions under the license we granted XYZ. And even if it does, it does not cover all of the software we licensed to XYZ.

    JUDGE: *puzzled look* Uh, did _your_ client write this software?

    LAWYER 2: Yes, your honor.

  17. Good tool for expected sky conditions on Orionid Meteor Shower Peaks Early Tomorrow Morning · · Score: 2

    This might be helpful in determining if you want to stay up or wake up early for this:

    http://cleardarksky.com/csk/

  18. Re:Or not on "World's Most Relaxing Music" Composed · · Score: 2

    I too find music with words distracting when doing work that requires a lot of concentration (school work, coding, etc). I tend to listen to electronic music in those situations. My favs:

    Boards of Canada
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrBZeWjGjl8

    Tycho
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCOEg-iUK1U

    Ulrich Schnauss
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s50jAWtCdQ

  19. Re:Note to self... on Severe Arctic Ozone Loss · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How much are you willing to bet that this will be used to try to debunk global warming because there is an area that has colder then average weather.

    As much as I would be willing to bet that this will be used to try to prove global warming because there is an area that has colder than average weather.

  20. Re:Not on everything on Should Science Be King In Politics? · · Score: 1

    Productive is hard to quantify.

    And the difficulty of quantifying it is due not just the multitude of factors but the vagueness of the underlying concept as well. Which ultimately makes the question "How much welfare should we provide in society?" one that science can not answer. Science can only provide the facts upon which society can apply its values against.

  21. Not on everything on Should Science Be King In Politics? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    While I can see many will knee-jerk themselves into an emphatic "YES" to scientific superiority in government, there should still be a place for philosophy and morality in politics as well. And in some cases, philosophy should trump science.

    When you might ask? How about in terms of macroeconomics? It makes little scientific sense to provide welfare to people who will never be productive citizens ever again. Yet it goes against our values to not take care of our most vulnerable who are unable to care for themselves.

    It also makes little scientific sense to protect individual rights to the extent that we do. My friends over in Europe and Asia often point out that the banning of hate speech has a demonstrable effect on reducing bigotry. Yet our non-scientific culture values free speech.

    So, science should play a big role in determining the fundamental facts of a political discussion, but after that it is all about values and philosophy.

  22. Re:Rent-a-cop oversteps his bounds in shock horror on Theater Professor's Firefly Poster Declared Threatening · · Score: 1

    Exactly. So I was left to wonder what this pacifist professor saw in the quote that made it "show the reality of violence", rather than glorify and romanticize it.

  23. Re:"Re-Opens"? on Japan Re-Opens Some Towns Near Fukushima · · Score: 1

    I too must have missed the "complete deregulation of [the] financial sector" as well. When did that happen?

    Or maybe you don't understand what "complete deregulation" means.

  24. Re:The problem with the "I'm an asshole" boss on Judge Rules Boss's "Firing Contest" Created a Hostile Work Environment · · Score: 1

    Part of the idea is to get you used to following the orders and directions of someone you just plainly do not like.

  25. Re:How to write one of these articles on The Nine Circles of IT Hell · · Score: 1

    Seriously. The most awful part of this article were the solutions. For example, the solution to the problem of different vendors blaming each other (aka: limbo?) is...

    "When you're digging a hole in hell, the first thing to do is stop digging and climb your way out," says Roth. That means making sure you have the tech expertise in house to solve your own problems, going with open source to avoid vendor lock-in, and taking the time to refactor your code so you can be more efficient the next time around.

    ...to not have the problem in the first place? How utterly useless is it to advise someone that the solution to a problem is to not have the problem in the first place. Gee, thanks brother, I never thought of that.

    Instead, the real solution to this is to get out of the middle of the two vendors and insist they work together to fix the problem. Even if that means you have pay them extra for their help (though you can usually hint to this being kept in mind when the contact comes up for renewal, and they will back off on the charging extra). Does this always work? Not always. Sometimes you need to get the big guns involved (read: lawyers). But 99 times out of a 100 you will get to a solution before needing that.