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Comment Re:They might guarantee it... (Score 3, Informative) 488

The problem is he wants a fair trial, AS DEFINED BY EDWARD SNOWDEN. We can't make up law according to the defendant. If you don't like the law we have now, elect someone else and have it changed.

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, he posted bail and went on news programs. These days, you get thrown into solitary confinement for years before the government decides maybe it'll give you a secret military trial.

Comment Not Really a Textualist (Score 5, Insightful) 1105

"Textualist" is how Scalia portrayed himself, but if you look at Shelby County vs Holder, where the Supreme Court struck down most of the Voting Rights Act, Scalia's arguments basically came down to the idea that he was a mind-reader about what Congress really wanted to do, but was not politically able to do, never mind the text. Other times, he disregarded the clear intent of the lawmakers in favor of the strict textual reading. But he was hardly consistent. He was a textualist when the text favored him, he ignored it when it didn't. And maybe that's not unique to him - I'm not saying he was unique in that respect, but let's not pretend he was intellectually consistent.

In the end, he was a Republican justice. Nothing more, nothing less.

Comment Re: The science is not settled (Score 4, Insightful) 568

We evolved from apes. The science is settled. The Earth goes around the Sun. The science is settled. Anthropogenic Warming is happening. The science is settled.

The scientific method means any theory can be overturned in principle. But in practice we know some won't be. Anyone telling you the science isn't settled on Evolution because nothing is ever settled in science is being just as disingenuous as you are.

Comment Aerospace is National Security (Score 5, Insightful) 135

Not that the Russian government isn't incredibly corrupt and wasteful, but this is actually probably what you'd want to do. If your economy is tanking, you'd want to continue to put *some* money into aerospace for as long as you could to retain talent and prevent you from having to rebuild it from the ground up later. Maybe not enough to do big ambitious projects, but you'd want aerospace on "idle" for when (hopefully) the economy improves.

I mean, NASA stopped building big rockets that went to the moon and "just" went into low earth orbit for a few decades, and they're *still* basically back at square one when it comes to building Saturn V-sized engines. Imagine if aerospace had been completely shut down.

Comment Antennas (Score 5, Insightful) 215

It's not really a mystery. Phones used to have external antennas, and now they're not only internal but the phones themselves have mostly metal cases (because it feels so much more "premium") with a tiny plastic window for the antenna because that metal blocks the radio waves. This is textbook "form over function" design.

Comment Dear Editors (Score 5, Interesting) 462

Why can I never figure out where a link is going? Read back over that. There are two hyperlinks in the summary. One is "an article by two early Apple designers" the other is "lost its marbles when it comes to user interface design."

So which one of those goes to the article that the summary is about? It's the second! That's so counter-intuitive! Seriously! Why do I have to click through your links to figure out what you're linking to?

Comment Re:And what if we were just colder 160 years ago (Score 1) 735

The paper you cite raises the idea that while West Antarctica is losing ice fast, East Antarctica is gaining mass. However, a couple caveats.

1. That result hasn't been reproduced, and there is some healthy skepticism that they're measuring right since they used satellites to estimate snowfall and then estimate how much of that turned to ice (a surprisingly complicated process). Plus, it used old data (8 years old, and we know that ice loss has increased dramatically since then). So, the short version is, the paper you linked may end up being right, but the consensus view among scientists is still that Antarctica is losing ice.

2. Even if it turns out to be true, the authors of the very paper you cite say that Antarctic ice loss is accelerating as the snowfall remains pretty confident, and their opinion is that within a few years, ice will loss will outpace gain.

Comment Re:Thermometer accuracy (Score 2) 735

It doesn't matter, on average. Let's say we know thermometers are off +/- 1 degrees. Maybe because the thermometer, maybe because of human error eyeballing the mercury, whatever. However, assuming it's as likely to be over as under (and there's been extensive research on that as well), the bad readings will more or less cancel each other out.

If you only had one reading, for instance, you could really only say what the temperature was +/- 1 degrees. If you have a million, you could say you know almost for certain (just like the more times you flip a coin, the closer your distribution is likely to be 50/50). The reality is somewhere in between, so there are error bars, but they're known quantities. And as a previous poster mentioned, the thermometers of the time were surprisingly accurate anyway.

Comment Re:Complete Bullshit - funded by Koch-funded CATO (Score 2) 417

Economics 101 is that when faced with fierce competition in the job market, wages will rise. They haven't been rising for software developers. Ergo, while the job market is certainly better for us than many other professions, the "job shortage" is a fiction.

What businesses *do* see is we're not as desperate for a job. They're so used to having a hundred people apply for one job mopping floors that they think that's normal, and the way things should be.

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