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Comment Re:Misnomer (Score 1) 392

The deal is I would have drained it myself. However, with this new information from you, I will not likely worry about it as much on the very unlikely chance that it happens to me. The nozzles are different so it seems like it should be obvious to everyone that they are not the same fuels but, well, not everyone is so savvy. My first RV was diesel and my current one is gasoline so I suppose I could be high and screw it up but it is unlikely that I would be high (at least that high) and driving. It is a near certainty that I will be completely sober when driving something that large. What is scary is that I do not need a special license to drive it nor do I need a special license to drive with a snowplow. Having seen how people pilot/point (not really driving) the two it seems like we may want to look into that.

Comment Re:Android to iDevice (Score 1) 344

Often it's not even the cheap hardware, but just really shitty drivers (frequently pre-installed by OEMs). Do a clean install of Windows and be careful about the source of your drivers, and you can go years without a crash on Windows (on a heavily used gaming box, no less). I know, I've done it.

I honestly didn't understand why most people hated Vista so much (I mean, it had bugs, but they weren't *that* bad; it used a lot of RAM, but I was running it on 1280 MB and it was all right) until I tried an OEM image of it. Took 3x as long to boot to a usable state (despite having about the same specs), was noticeably laggier, had less free memory, and crashed in under an hour of use (I'd been running the RC2 build - not even release - for months without a crash). That kind of problem with shitty OEM builds is, unfortunately, a problem in the PC world. Apple takes care to avoid it (though their own Windows drivers also tend to be shit.)

Bringing this back to phones, the same problem applies there. An awful lot of Android OEMs take a fairly good OS - the stock Android platform - and then run it on hardware with bad firmware (which, sadly, is usually not user-fixable), bad drivers, and (often buggy) bloatware. The result is... not pretty. The OEMs don't really have anybody to blame but themselves, but the users keep buying it so as far as the OEMs are concerned, they're doing the right thing.

Comment Re:Threatens security (Score 1) 102

Again total crock of shit. Australian Uranium export laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.... Not only is mining totally and strictly regulated (no matter who the hell owns the mine, they can not even stick a shovel into the ground until approval is gained from local, state and federal government), it can only be sold to countries the Australian government has specific agreements with and is restricted to energy use only http://www.world-nuclear.org/i....

100% irrelevant to the topic I was discussing, which was ownership of U.S. uranium interests by Russia. Not only is Australia a completely different continent, its politics are also completely different. Similar in some ways, but definitely not the same.

It is the US government that is seeking to directly control the mining and export of 'AUSTRALIAN' Uranium because 31% of worlds resource and Australia already exports Uranium to China and the US. There are a whole bunch of Uranium resources yet to be touched.

Again, completely irrelevant to the topic under discussion. If I lived in Australia, I'd object to sales to China OR the U.S.... but especially China.

Comment Re:Android to iDevice (Score 1) 344

My take on it is, that iPhone users only THINK they use their phone a lot, while Android users use their phones more than they think they do.

Sadly, it's arguably the other way around. The problem isn't that Android users use their phones a lot, it's that the phones (or rather, the OS) is terrible at not using the battery when the user isn't using it. A skilled and conscientious user can regulate their Android phone's battery use pretty well, and get excellent battery life (without compromising functionality much), and there are apps to automate some of that, but... by default, Android is *terrible* about leaving stuff running in the background. This makes it more functional than the competing OSes in some ways, since those tend to have pretty strict restrictions on background processing, but sometimes the stuff it does (like continually tracking your location if you open Maps and then don't tell it to kill the location service when not needed*) is just stupid.

Yes, when you're running something that will really pound on the battery (like gaming) then Android devices might outlast their competition. They do have larger batteries, in most cases, and their processors are no less efficient. The reason for those larger batteries, though, is because in order to get anything close to the same average battery life in normal usage Android needs more battery capacity. Expand the time scale from a few hours of intense usage to a day or normal usage, and Android will usually burn through a lot more Watt-hours for the same level of user usage.

* Caveat: This was something I noticed on my father's Android 4.0 device; they might have fixed it since. It was fucking stupid though; he'd used Maps for a few minutes in the morning (with location, but not navigating to anything), then gone back to the home screen without force-killing the app or turning off GPS, left the phone in his pocket the whole rest of the day, and found its battery nearly dead in the afternoon. Over 90% of the battery had, over half a day, gone into tracking him as he wandered around a boatyard with the app neither running in the foreground nor under orders to do anything in the background!

Comment Re:suckers (Score 1) 141

Nuclear is not the only solution, nor is it particularly attractive when solar can achieve the same goals, without the side effects.

How do you claim absence of side effects?

Solar farms are already observed to fry birds and blind pilots. Not to mention the huge amount of landscape they consume. And in high latitudes, not only to they take up even more (and more ecologically sensitive) area, they aren't even usable a good part of the year. In my area, they don't even come close to competing with other sources for cost.

Comment Re:Java is done (Score 1) 223

The only way to come to your conclusion is to ignore facts. You can go read the original decision and evidence which accompanied the decision. No, you don't need to be an attorney to figure this out.

But wasn't the whole thing about some private APIs that Google (or whatever was that company it hired) made use and actually copied verbatim?

No, again you can go read the decision and evidence (which includes the charges from Oracle against Google). It was one of the most open Civil cases I have ever seen.

Oracle DBs and Apps make substantial use of Java. Had Sun been allowed to falter, or worse yet be bough by a (then) competitor like IBM, it would have been disastrous for Oracle.

At best a straw man, at worst complete horse shit. IBM does not run around suing people over bullshit like this, and _IF_ they had bought Sun they _Might_ have done something fools nobody but you. Fighting pretty hard to hold that delusion that Oracle is right aren't ya? Well, you did say you worked there so...

An opinion which completely ignores facts is worth very little. An opinion that counters facts and relies on events that never happened... absolutely useless.

Comment Re:suckers (Score 1) 141

This has been studied and the result was that there is a localized heating effect in a small area immediately downwind of the wind turbine which is rapidly lost in the noise of the already-chaotic system in precisely the same way that the butterfly effect is bullshit â" if an entertaining thought exercise.

This causes me to think you haven't understood what the Butterfly Effect actually is. It says that slight differences in the initial conditions of some nonlinear systems can have a profound effect on later outcome. It doesn't apply to all chaotic systems by any means, nor does it necessarily mean a persistent change... just a big one. Nor, just off-hand, would it seem to apply to your windmill example at all.

You might be interested to know that the Butterfly Effect has made a profound contribution to weather and climate modeling. Without it, we would not know even the relatively small amount that we do know.

The name "Butterfly Effect" was intended as an analogy to how it works... it isn't to be taken literally. But it does work, and is observed in the real world. If you doubt that, I strongly suggest you avoid flying in a modern jet.

Comment Re:females operate on emotion, not logic (Score 1) 446

Which was not under contention. The chasing of an irrational goal is rational, whether or not the goal is irrational. Which was what that was about.

I disagree: if your goal is irrational then no matter how rationally you go about pursuing it you are still acting irrationally.

Which is exactly what I meant by 'ignoring my points'.

I think we're talking at cross purposes. Would you mind telling me precisely which point you feel I haven't addressed and I'll attempt to address it.

Comment Re:Leaders (Score 1) 110

If they don't know what they are doing, then why are they the leaders?

I disagree with others here. If they say they don't know if their organization has the talent to succeed, then indeed they don't know what they're doing.

Especially those who think their IT dept. is incompetent. What that means is (A) they are wrong, or (B) they are right... which in turn says they made bad hiring decisions and should clean house.

Comment Re:Pist frost (Score 1) 76

Pretty much my thoughts exactly. This means a potential of more distracted drivers on the road. I bought a used Viper, one of the originals, and not only is there no radio, there is no OEM slot to put a radio in. There is, also, a State law that makes distracted driving illegal. Use of this type of technology while driving may provide probable cause for a traffic stop so caution is paramount. The overreach of such laws is absurd though the intent is good (I believe). Recently a driver was stopped for eating a sandwich whilst driving, I think that was unnecessary and using the law for purposes which it was not designed for.

Comment Re:A crap effort full or artifacts (Score 1) 100

Quality is not a requirement for it to be defined as a panorama and quality is not a metric used when determining the size. However crappy it still qualifies as the largest panorama (it seems - Google does not indicate that there are larger with commercially available products) even though it doesn't meet your standards. It does not meet my standards either but we do not count and the definition is not affected by standards. Additionally, it is "a lot" and not "alot." 'Alot' is not a word in English.

Comment Re:StreetView? (Score 1) 100

No. Well, not according to my app that is called TheSage which has very good definitions. I looked because I have seen a picture of an item that was circumnavigated being called a panorama. I figured I would get a more authoritative source and went to the MW source:

http://www.merriam-webster.com...

Colloquially I would agree with you BUT reality says otherwise. I personally only use it to describe what you think is the definition. However it is not as strict as I use it and you believe it actually is. To offer you some support, Oxford Dictionary has the very first definition as being what you describe and what I use it for. You can see that here:

http://www.oxforddictionaries....

However, even Oxford goes on to list additional definitions that negate the strictness of it having to be the area surrounding the viewer/camera/photographer.

Comment Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song? (Score 1) 158

I remember that song. Bands with long songs got little radio so were not as popular, it was a self-feeding cycle. The Doors were so popular that people wanted to hear their music on the radio. They lead the way for bands like the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. I admire the Doors for many things, this is one of them though the information could be incorrect I suppose. I grew up with the Doors so, well, they have stuck as have all the bands listed above.

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One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor... is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics. -- N. Wiener

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