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Comment Re: 2% is nothing (Score 1) 121

by cold fjord (#48571223) Attached to: NASA Gets 2% Boost To Science Budget

Wrong timing for it, though. While our nation is under attack by Isis and Syria, this increase would be better spent on improving our dwindling military capabilities..

Dwindling? CITATION NEEDED.

CITATION PROVIDED

Budget cuts to slash U.S. Army to smallest since before World War Two
A New Army Drawdown: This Time Is Far Worse
General: With cuts, Marine Corps will 'cut into bone'
AIR FORCE PREPARES TO SEPARATE 25,000 IN SERVICE'S LARGEST DRAWDOWN

"Over the next five years, about 550 aircraft and about 25,000 Airmen will be gone from the Air Force.

Mind the elephant, sir, it has been known to bite people in the ass.

Comment Anti-science Democrats (Score 2) 121

by cold fjord (#48570167) Attached to: NASA Gets 2% Boost To Science Budget

Clinton Makes Mistake In Cutting Nasa's Budget

Nothing better captures the decay of the Clinton presidency from the change-friendly, innovative liberalism promised in 1992 to the reactionary liberalism of today, determined to defend the welfare state at all cost, than Clinton's newest "reinventing government" initiative. Unveiled late last month, it promises to "reinvent" NASA with huge budget cuts.

In 1992, Clinton-Gore campaigned as the Atari Democrats. Unlike the hidebound Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis locked in to the Democratic past, they posed as futurists dedicated to global competition, high-tech/high-wage jobs, and cutting edge science. So where do these two change-is-our-friend Democrats go for budget cutting? Farm subsidies? Welfare? Inflated government construction costs, a legacy of the egregious 1931 Davis-Bacon Act (that the administration has just promised to retain)?

They go to space, the one area where the United States has the greatest technological advantage-an advantage that can be quickly lost without serious sustained effort. Under the euphemism of "reinvention," the administration is cutting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to pieces.

Isn't Hillary planning to run in 2016? What an indictment of the US political system, that she could possibly be competitive.

Comment Re:How much is that in F-35s? (Score 1) 121

by cold fjord (#48570107) Attached to: NASA Gets 2% Boost To Science Budget

I wonder if Europe has malcontent little punklets demanding everything be priced in Eurofighters.

A fair number of people that post on Slashdot fit that description already, but they are generally willing to accept F35 units and do the conversion.

There are bonus participants for many other parts of the world as well.

Comment Re:2% is nothing (Score 1) 121

by cold fjord (#48570087) Attached to: NASA Gets 2% Boost To Science Budget

Or just drop the F-35 program entirely, use drones and cruise missiles for most of what the F-35 would do, and keep the A-10's for close in air support.

You can do that as long as you're willing to start replacing all of your C++ compilers for application development with NTFS filesystems and X-Windows.

Those weapons platforms don't really overlap that much in their capabilities. Maybe by 2115 instead of 2015 .....

Comment If you like your privacy ... (Score 1, Insightful) 209

If you like your insurance you can keep your insurance.
If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.
If you like your privacy you can keep your privacy.
If you like your freedom ...

Thank You, Jonathan Gruber

Obamistas believe they had to lie to pass Obamacare because Americans are stupid.

Submission + - NOAA: Climate Change Did Not Cause Calif. Drought (discovery.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NOAA: Climate Change Did Not Cause Calif. Drought

Climate change is usually discussed in extremes: Epic heat in Australia. A deadly heat wave in Europe. Hurricane Sandy grinding New York to a halt.

The extreme California drought? Maybe not so much.

A new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study released Monday shows that the three-year California drought may have been caused by natural variability and not necessarily human-caused climate change.

The study follows a series of studies released in September that were inconclusive about the role of climate change in the California drought, and another published last week showing that the drought is the worst the state has seen in 1,200 years.

Submission + - Feds Plan For 35 Agencies To Collect, Share, Use Health Records Of Americans (weeklystandard.com) 1

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: The Weekly Standard reports, "... the Affordable Care Act aims to make the use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) universal. This plan actually began with the 2009 stimulus ... Doctors and other health providers have been offered incentives to convert patient information and health histories to a compatible and transferable electronic format, and as of June 2014, 75 percent of eligible doctors and 92 percent of eligible hospitals had received payments under the program. This week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the release of the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020, which details the efforts of some 35 departments and agencies of the federal government and their roles in the plan to "advance the collection, sharing, and use of electronic health information to improve health care, individual and community health, and research." ... Now that HHS has publicly released the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, the agency is seeking the input from the public before implementation. The plan is subject to two-month period of public comment before finalization. The comment period runs through February 6, 2015." — Among the many agencies that will be sharing records besides Health and Human Services (HHS) are: Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Justice and Bureau of Prison, Department of Labor, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Office of Personnel Management, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Submission + - American Intelligence Agencies Building New Superconducting Supercomputer (upi.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: UPI reports, "The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, a branch of the U.S. intelligence community, said in a press release that the agency has embarked on a multi-year research effort called the Cryogenic Computer Complexity program, or C3. Current supercomputing utilizes technology that relies on tens of megawatts and requires large amounts of physical space to house the infrastructure and power and cool the components. C3 hopes to use recent breakthroughs in supercomputing technologies ... to construct a superconducting supercomputer with "a simplified cooling infrastructure and a greatly reduced footprint." "The power, space, and cooling requirements for current supercomputers ... are becoming unmanageable," said Marc Manheimer, C3 program manager at IARPA. ... The international intelligence community has been competing to outpace each other and build the first computer to break the exaFLOP barrier for some time, but scaling out contemporary CMOS technologies to construct computers capable of exaFLOP calculations would require hundreds of megawatts to power, necessitating an energy source with an output equal to that of a single small nuclear reactor. ... Currently the record for single computer speed is China's Tianhe-2, ranked the world's fastest with a record of 33.86 petaFLOPS in June of 2013 ... In his 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, best-selling author and journalist James Bamford reported that the NSA told the Pentagon it would need an exaFLOP computer by 2018 ..." — More at Defense Systems.

Comment Re:exactly (Score 0) 171

by cold fjord (#48545595) Attached to: Preferred Type of Game?

Bluffing in poker is generally acceptable, cheating at cards isn't, nor is making a general practice of lying which seems to be an ever present temptation for you.

By the way, you don't have some affiliation with "climate science" by any chance, do you?

Comment Re: Who cares... (Score 1) 346

Fleecing conservatives of their money is in fact a market. Those guys will open up their wallets if you say all the right sweet things. Even better they'll go around repeating it. There is an entire eco-system in right wing political systems doing this. Since a lot of these people trend to being older, they are both susceptible to fear and they have money. The young, can also be susceptible, but they don't have money so there is no market.

They need to create an index for conservatives.

Fleecing liberals and progressives of their money is in fact a market. Those guys will open up their wallets if you say all the right sweet or scary things. Even better, they'll go around repeating and reposting it. There is an entire eco-system in left wing political systems doing this. Since of a lot of these people tend to be older, they are both susceptible to fear and they have money. Some will even direct corporate donations to help the cause. The young can also be susceptible, but the poor results of their own policies has left many of them without jobs and dependent on the government and their parents. They believe the cure for bad outcomes form government programs is even more government programs. The noose grows ever tighter.

They need to create an index for progressives and liberals.

Submission + - A Web Site That Will Live In Infamy (acecomments.mu.nu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A commenter at Ace of Spades writes, "During the 3-1/2 years of World War 2 that started with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and ended with the Surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945,
"We the People of the U.S.A." produced the following:
22 aircraft carriers,
8 battleships,
48 cruisers,
349 destroyers,
420 destroyer escorts,
203 submarines,
34 million tons of merchant ships,
100,000 fighter aircraft,
98,000 bombers,
24,000 transport aircraft,
58,000 training aircraft,
93,000 tanks,
257,000 artillery pieces,
105,000 mortars,
3,000,000 machine guns, and
2,500,000 military trucks.

We put 16.1 million men in uniform in the various armed services, invaded Africa, invaded Sicily and Italy, won the battle for the Atlantic, planned and executed D-Day, marched across the Pacific and Europe, developed the atomic bomb, and ultimately conquered Japan and Germany.

It's worth noting, that during the almost exact amount of time, the Obama Administration couldn't even build a web site that worked."

Comment Re:Initially, I worried (Score 1) 84

by cold fjord (#48542127) Attached to: US Treasury Dept: Banks Should Block Tor Nodes

I'm pretty sure the bank can identify "valuable customers" based on their existing accounts, don't you think? Why would that worry you, and how do you think an IP address would play into it? I'm pretty sure there is more value to the bank in preventing an incidence of fraud than the incredibly minute value of an IP address on the market, and who would legitimately buy it? For what purpose? That seems like nonense. Why does the NSL bother you? Up to no good?

The issue here is shady dealings, not sheep.

Comment Re:What in the hell was he thinking? (Score 1) 388

by cold fjord (#48542095) Attached to: Man Caught Trying To Sell Plans For New Aircraft Carrier

Not at all. He had an obligation to report that contact to his security office to report that and turn down the offer. He didn't do that. He was offered an opportunity, and he took it. The crime was what he did in taking the opportunity. He actively stole plans, freely volunteered the suggestions on the best way to attack the carrier, and made suggestions on now he could avoid being caught and on stealing even more information. It's all on him.

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