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Comment I know why they hid the extensions (Score 1) 564

I used to support an office of several hundred clerks starting from the Windows 3 days.
When the extensions are exposed, some people would change the extensions for some reason known only to the non-verbal half of their brain or perhaps just typing clumsiness.
Now they can't open the spreadsheet by just clicking on it, and worse yet, they seem to most often do that in the shared departmental folders.

One typical thing that happened was when gradualy transitioning the office newer versions of MS Word, so some people could open .docx documents and some could not.
The solution? Just rename .docx to .doc. Yay! that should work.

Anyway, a long time ago it became obvious that making it difficult for users to change file extensions would reduce support calls, and so here we are now.
As many other posters above me pointed out, the real problem is that the extension is used to determine the file-type association.

Comment Re:Politics aside for a moment. (Score 1) 538

It's not about politics, it's about her boyfriend.

The State Departments server can only deliver mail through Earth's Internet.
It's well known that she keeps in touch with P'Lod, her alien lover.
So she needs access to InterGalactic email, which P'Lod got her an account on.
She's not lazy by any means, but keeping track of multiple email accounts is a pain in the neck, so she uses the P'lod one for everything.

If you want some more "facts",
Just search google for: Hillary Clinton P'lod

https://books.google.com/books...

Comment Re: More ageist stupidity (Score 1) 196

Although what you said was basically true, there is a problem with your position.
The problem is that there is no way to write a law with the intent of preventing abuse of people are too young to be able to form themselves to make reasoned decisions about sex or reproduction other than arbitrarily assigning a numerical age as the borderline.

Consider that there are laws and/or policies against adults of any age having sex with people whom they supervise in a business setting. This is because there is no way of separating choice made through duress frm free choice in those situations.

Comment Re: Irrelevant posts about driving ability. (Score 1) 328

Judgement is also a driving skill

I wish that I had said that.

If only we could find a way to test for that skill before the crash happens. I suppose the tickets and points system is an after the fact method of finding those people who totally lack judgement skills.

As far as the study of impaired driving goes, I think we could separate out judgement problems by looking at the kinds of crashes.
For example, crashes like rear-enders in rush hour, or in bad weather could be ascribed to momentary lapses.
Crashes while driving twice the speed limit are bad judgement.
Or, Running a red light while passing a line cars stopped for the light.

So then we take those kinds of crashes, see what percent are done by people doing what kind of chemical, or not doing, and compare the numbers to the number of people who are driving stoned at any time.

So, if there are 10,000 crashes we label as judgement problems, and 5% are done by people with marijuana residue in their system, and there are 12% driving while stoned at the time of the crash, then we could suppose marijuana promotes safe driving. Why this is so, that is, what is causal, would be for another study.
  Who knows, we may even discover driving while doing meth is a has idea. Maybe arrests for driving 10mph on the interstate will show an association with driving on LSD.

Comment Irrelevant posts about driving ability. (Score 1) 328

Ok, well not entirely irrelevant.
Many of these posts talk about how driving ability, that is, the ability to navigate a course while drunk or stoned, is not imparied by M.J. except at large doses (unlike alcohol which can make it hard to even go on all-fours in a straight line; I know that for a fact).

So what. Sure, alcohol significantly impairs motor skills and reaction times, but the real problem with alcohol is how it impairs judgement.
While a youngster I did drive wasted. I made an conscious effort to drive as carefully as possible so as to get home, and much more carefully than is my natural inclination.

My experience was that most people I knew lost all common sense when drunk. When they were sober, they would not do the things that I did while I was sober (some would not even ride with me to go get a burger, at least not in my race car), but while drunk they would try anything and even in the rain.

I just don't see that judgement problem with stoned people. I cannot speak from personal experience; I never did toke.
People I knew seem to pretty much drive stoned the same way they did while straight.
Those that drove like my mom when they were straight drove like my mom when they were stoned.
Those that drove like they were trying to get home to beat a diarhea attack when straight drove like that when stoned.
My crazy redneck friends didn't get mellow when they started smoking. They just turned into stoned assholes.

Anyway, I think the whole thing of doing tests on motor-skills while driving is nearly pointless.
Crashes occuring due to insufficient skills are rare compared to numb-skullery.

The real problem with people is that they get into crashes due to their poor judgement. Not watching the road ahead, fooling with the radio, reading the newspaper, fooling with their lunch, trying to one-hand text while driving where children are playing and so on.

In my observations, I don't believe that marijuana affects judgement in the way that alcohol does; it's not even close. If we are going to let people self-medicate, then I believe marijuana is a superior choice.

However, in my experience as a school teacher , something must be done to keep it (any recreational drug) out of the hands of teenagers and children. It is very obvious that many of them lack the ability to control their usage, and they seem to often become damaged in their mental abilities in a way that does not seem to happen to the adults that I knew that started later in life.

I would really really want the children problem solved. I also think that with M.J. legalized, we can do a better job of keeping it away from kids.
We used to do a much better job of keeping alcohol away from teenagers, but I think people have gven up.

Comment Re:Italian Court Rules MMR Vaccine Caused Autism (Score 4, Informative) 580

US Media Blackout Of Italian Vaccine Ruling

Poor dumbed down Americans will never know the truth.

Rimini: 2012 – Italian Court Rules MMR Vaccine Caused Autism [zengardner.com]

On September 23, 2014, an Italian court in Milan award compensation to a boy for vaccine-induced autism. (See the Italian document here.) A childhood vaccine against six childhood diseases caused the boy’s permanent autism and brain damage.

While the Italian press has devoted considerable attention to this decision and its public health implications, the U.S. press has been silent.
Italy’s National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

Well. yes we've already heard of this in the USA. It's old news.
You may be surprised to learn that the media in the USA is not compelled to print every piece of bullshit that comes up. If you had been awake during the last few decades you would have known that news commentators that get caught telling stories that are later proven to be false are fired without a second chance.

From 2013, here's an article from Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/em...
And another from 2013:
http://www.skepticalraptor.com...

It appears that the courts depended upon the testimony of a single doctor who has never published in a journal, but yet who claims to have a cure for autism.

Comment Re:We should have already noted something ... (Score 1) 212

... if that was true. Several experiments to determine the neutron flux falling with the inverse square law (for a point source) have been done so far. To my knowledge none of them suggested the neutron particles were "leaking" into other dimensions. String theorists, go look elsewhere.

That's the second thing I thought, but what is different in this experiment is that the neutron detector will be heavily shielded from the reactor's neutrons so that the expected flux would be zero at any distance.
If the "brane-leakage" flux is small, then it may have fallen within the error of measurement of a reactor's typical flux.

By expected flux, I mean the flux one would expect if there are no other branes nor cross brane leakage. That is, only neutrons from natural background decays and cosmic rays.

Comment Re:ATM machine ..? (Score 1) 425

It's a common enough idiom.

There are many common idioms that are used incorrectly in conversation or casual writing. But that doesn't mean they should be used in formal writing, such as an encyclopedia.

Well met, friend, for thou speakst great sooth! Many people have I encountered who are such dullards as to employ incorrectly the English tongue. 'Tis tragedy of the vtmost that the youth of our times know not how the language should properly speak itself. A gay fellow would I be were my fellow man to renew his acquaintance with the King's English.

Alas! but I must forsake thy gentle companie, for mine friends await me in a local hostelrie, and so must I away! Parting is such sweet sorry. Anon, good sir, anon!

Thou'st thou me, thou ill-bred clown?

Comment Be a contractor/sysadmin (Score 1) 251

Get a job as a contracter/sysadmin, and store encrypted copies of all your stuff on the servers in your client's offices around the country.
I would also suggest their desktop computers. The executives desktop computers always have extra space, but they get upgrades too often. I suggest low-level management's and receptionist's desktops. They never get anything new.

Comment If you though about it, you would answer yes (Score 1) 351

The actual survey question is:
  “Do you support or oppose the following government policies?”
  with several cases, one of which is:
"Mandatory labels on foods containing DNA"

The first thing you should notice is that the word "warning" does not appear. Kudos to the reporters and slashdot poster who either did not read the survey or did not understand what they read.

Almost all foods already have labels, and for most foods (presently) anything more processed than a raw banana must have a label.
So, the question is, should all foods (containing DNA) be required to have a label?
For example, "This is a banana" would meet the definition of the question.
or, "You're looking at a steak"

I can support that, especially for processed foods, and we already have that law, so, yeah, I support mandated labels.

especially for those weird roots that appear in the bin at the grocery store.
WTF is that I ask? I dunno, there's no label.

Comment Re:Flocks of starlings (Score 4, Funny) 81

Look in the sky, see the flock of starlings?
The dark clump of birds that you can see will dart around, sometimes here, sometimes there. It can fly west and yet clump east, time-travel! Must be negative time! Sometimes simultaneously appearing in two places. Faster than light travel! Sometimes no clump can be seen. Where'd they go? Poof, out of existence.

You want a quantum simulator? Starlings, go watch a flock of starlings and apply your quantum equations to their motion.

You may think I'm kidding, but the same problem exists. Just as you can't see the individual bird, only the flock, likewise you've built a bunch of equations for a flock of smaller particles. You can only detect the flock and not the particles.

Keeping with your analogy ... In order to exactly determine the location of each single starling, you need a shotgun(s). Then it no longer is part of the flock now that it has been observed.

As an aside, I am aware that you can shoot at a flock of starlings all day and not hit a one.

Comment It only works when it isn't (Score 2) 163

This thing only duplicates items that were originally made by a 3D printer that uses that same material.
That is to say, I don't want a teleported camshaft that is printed with a 3D printer that uses chocolate for the printing material.
Well actually I do want that, but I would not put it in an engine.

Nor do I see how something made of materials that aren't available as 3D printer matrix materials could be teleported.

Comment Re:ICU doctor here.... (Score 1) 136

This really intrigues me because it never struck me that this could be a mechanism for antibiotic resistance. It is even more interesting to me knowing the first CRE (Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae)

clearly arose in India [source]

but the reasons weren't clear to me and I just naively assumed it was a random mutation. India, also according to to that same paper has quite a problem with antibiotic resistance which one wouldn't expect as there isn't so much of a problem with antibiotic overuse as there seems to be in the West. So, maybe not so random and maybe we have honed in on a legit reason for growing resistance.

The other problem in India and similar places is that the dosage wasn't what the label said. The doctor may have prescribed 500 mg of amoxicillin, and the patient bought capsules in a bottle labeled 500mg amoxicillin, but what was in those capsules was a fraction of the prescribed dosage.

Case in point is Ranbaxy who sold millions of doses of what they knew was non-performing anti-retroviral drugs.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/...
And more like this:
http://fortune.com/2013/05/15/...
http://fortune.com/2013/01/10/...

The bad part is Ranbaxy only got caught because one of their executives was an American who ratted them out.
Ranbaxy only got into trouble because they tried to sell their crap in the USA, otherwise nothing would have happened to them.
There are numerous other drug companies with the same ethics, but they don't try to sell in the USA or Europe, so they'll never get caught.

Another thing I did not know is that the FDA almost never test drugs for efficacy.
What happens is the drug company does the tests and the FDA looks at the drug companies documentation and procedures and signs off on that. This is why cheaters don't get caught - they are grading their own papers, so to speak.

BTW, Ranbaxy was bought by Sun Pharma, so Who Knows where their drugs are going now.

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