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Comment Can't hardly find a dumb phone anymore (Score 1) 313

My mom is unfortunately on my phone plan because she can't manage her own finances well enough to pay for a phone herself.

Last November she lost her closest-thing-to-a-dumb-phone-I-could-get-her. It would still do web stuff, but... in a very dumb way, like "smart" phones before the modern (iPhone/Android/etc) smart phone era did. I simply could not get her a phone that only make phone calls, but that was close enough for those purposes.

And then she lost it, and I had to replace it. I wanted the cheapest goddamn dumbest simplest most basic phone possible. All she wants or needs to do is make phone calls. She doesn't give a flying fuck about texting or internet or anything! (Or she didn't at the time, and I wish it had stayed that way). All. She. Needs. Is. A Phone. But to get her a "dumb" (not even, like before) phone would have actually cost me more than their cheapest generation-or-two-old smart phone, a Galaxy Mini S3. Now she's fucking addicted to it and sucking up all the data (that I barely even use) on my plan.

What the fucking fuck has happened where it is simply impossible to get just basic phone service without paying more for it!?!?

Comment Re:toxic microbeads? (Score 1) 247

It turns out that when you take materials that are usually not a problem, and change their surface chemistry, they can become problems. Take carbon, for example. Pencil "lead" is graphite. Not a problem. OTOH, take a look at a bottle of graphite lock lube. It's the same element, in a fine powder form. There are all kinds of warnings on it because it can get into your lungs.

IANAChemist but I think a real chemist would agree that surface chemistry is an exciting new field, and we don't know enough about it. Sometimes you can get exposed to things in weird ways because they're small.

To take an oddball analogy here... jumping up and down on a mile high peak is not a problem. People do it all the time. Now shrink the mountain down to six feet and try jumping up and down on the peak. Ouch.

Comment Re:Military service can be mandatory, can cause ha (Score 1) 545

I'd love to hold society to the standard that no child should have to risk death due to parental stupidity. That's just not California. If you really want to uphold this ideal, you'll have to crusade for myriad causes, including gun control, obesity-fighting measures, tighter distribution of driver's licenses, promotion of breastfeeding, etc, etc. On the list of annual deaths in California caused by parental stupidity, lack of vaccination is near the bottom of the list.

All of this is true. However, lack of vaccination will rapidly climb the lists if America's current anti-science, anti-education and anti-logic trends are allowed to continue.

Comment Re:Yes & the sheer amount of existing code/fra (Score 3, Interesting) 414

I've never used any of the three languages in discussion here, and would barely count myself as a programmer at all, and upon initial reading of each of these routines this was my interpretation:

Java (I assume yours is): For every integer (call it "i") in the set "items", if "i" is less than ten, do whatever the 'add' function of the 'results' object does to it. (No idea what that function is, but my first guess would be to do the math of "results" + "i". Upon reflection after seeing the other languages' versions of this routine, I get now that it means "put 'i' as a member into the set 'results', or more loosely, "add 'i' to the set 'results'".)

Haskell: The set "items" contains members 1, 15, 27, 3, and 54. The set "results" contains every member of that set ("items") that passes the filter of being less than 10. (This is the clearest to me, and the one that shed light on the purpose of the other two).

Python: The set "items" contains members 1, 15, 27, 3, and 54. The set "results"... uhh.... assuming this does the same thing as the Haskell function, I'd guess it means that "results" contains every "item", where "item" is any item in the set of items, but only if "item" is less than ten; a roundabout way of saying, in a more Java-like fashion, "for every item (call it 'item') in the set 'items', if 'item' is less than ten [then that is part of what the set 'results' equals]".

Submission + - Gravitational anomalies beneath mountains point to isostasy of Earth's crust

StartsWithABang writes: Imagine you wanted to know what your acceleration was anywhere on Earth; imagine that simply saying “9.81 m/s^2" wasn’t good enough. What would you need to account for? Sure, there are the obvious things: the Earth’s rotation and its various altitudes and different points. Surely, the farther away you are from Earth’s center, the less your acceleration’s going to be. But what might come as a surprise is that if you went up to the peak of the highest mountains, not only would the acceleration due to gravity be its lowest, but there’d also be less mass beneath your feet than at any other location.

Comment Re:Since there's no downside, why not go all out? (Score 1) 1094

I don't think there's a downside to a minimum wage, or at least, not a compelling one.

As to specific implementation details. I really don't know. Not my field. My lay opinion would be that, well, it needs to be tied to the local cost of living and what not, but it would be a bitch to administrate. But no, having the minimum wage in Buttfuck Arkansas and Los Angeles be the same is probably sub-optimal.

I intended more to point out that while a small increase is basically a cost-of-living raise, a large increase will, indeed, likely do more harm than good.

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