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Comment 'Refill with water every 200 mi' (Score 1) 247

So the battery supposedly has a 1,000 mile range, but you have to stop every 100 to 200 miles to refill it with water? ... So it only has a 100-200 mile range. And on top of that, it's a disposable (recyclable) battery, not a rechargable one ... pros and cons to that, but it does require an infrastructure of replacement battery stations. Certainly better in my opinion than a charging station, but at least charging stations exist.

Comment Re:Knows and Presumes are not the same thing (Score 2) 473

This actually raises interesting questions about stereotypes and whether or not they are true, which I think would be a bane in the opinion of most minority groups. Stereotypes, after all, are just statistical observations. This study would seem to provide significant evidence to support stereotypes, and I think that's even more impactful on society than any privacy concerns you may have about how your public actions (in this case, 'Liking' on Facebook) portray your personal beliefs.

Comment Re:Barbara Streisand Effect? (Score 1) 700

You may not have heard about it, but plenty of other people did when Tesla's stock price plummeted 2.5% moments after the review was uploaded to New York Times's website. The damage was immediate. In other words, Tesla lost $100 Million in capital in a matter of minutes because of the New York Times's review. That could be a devastating libel claim, but in the mean time, Tesla has to deal with $100 million fewer dollars.

Comment Re:Problem? (Score 4, Funny) 644

Not that I would intuitively think Germany actually gets more sunlight than the U.S., but when a scientist (such as myself) says I used a model to extrapolate something, or normalized to conditions, it basically means I performed transformative maths to make the data look good enough to get grant money so I can get tenure because my stats program shot out more asterisks at me, all while being as obtusely transparent about it as I need to be to feel a sufficient amount of moral ambiguity.

Comment Aside from hype, Apple's real policy... (Score 3, Informative) 601

... is merely to ban apps that contain checkpoint information that is not publicly available. A Checkpoint app that uses data from public police information is still acceptable, and nearly every police department in the nation not only publishes their checkpoint dates and locations, but ADVERTISES THEM on TV and the local news.

Everybody wants so much drama where there actually isn't any. It's annoying.

Comment Re:Tell the person (Score 1) 619

I also have received a few mistyped emails, where my email address contains no period between my names, someone else's is the same but does contain a period. I have not received important information, just friends of this other person typing in the wrong address. I've simply responded letting them know and I have not gotten them in a long time, but if you're getting important stuff like bank data, then email the person they are supposed to be going to to let them know. I RECOMMEND NOT FORWARDING THE EMAILS, i.e. the emails with bank account information, because that will probably upset someone possibly into suing you for hacking or something dumb like that. People are paranoid these days.

In addition, I have filled out my online profiles to include state of residence and a photo picture just in case anyone is searching for a person they know they can verify very quickly that I am not that person. It helps.

Comment Expectation of Privacy on Public Roads (Score 0) 586

The GPS device was attached to his vehicle, which is driven on public, state and federally owned road infrastructure. There is no legally defensible expectation of privacy in public places. His car is registered to him, with a license plate that ties him to the vehicle. Tracking him visually by having agents follow him, or tracking him by GPS signal, is nominally different both effectively and physically. There was no breach of privacy, there was no attempt to prosecute this man for anything. The FBI has the constitutional right to track him in public places. The individual also has the constitutional right to avoid being tracked, as this individual did by removing the GPS tracker.

Now, if they wiretapped his telephones and recorded all of his conversations without a warrant, that might be a little different ... but that's what the Patriot Act specifically allows.

Comment Re:Great plan there (Score 1) 515

I missed 40 days of school in 8th grade (a personal high point), and I didn't get much better about it during highschool. Now I'm working on a Ph.D. in Neurobiology at a translation research and teaching hospital. I credit my not-being-at-my-public-school for the level of success I've achieved.

As a parent, it's my business where my kid is. I'll smash that damn device and hand it back to the truant officer on my kid's behalf. Schools have become the Juvenile Executive branch of the government, and it's not their responsibility. "We'll educate you with the information we want you to know, whether you like it or not!"

Comment Re:MythTV + Freeview DVB-T Tuners (Score 1) 286

If you can see/hear it, you can copy it. Heck, isn't that what the education system is all about?

How many people held up a recorder to an old mono-boombox back in the day? It wasn't too long ago that everyone recorded TV shows on their VCRs and watched them whenever simply by hooking up an inline video feed with a recording timer. As signals become higher and higher quality, the same recording equipment become available to the consumer at lower and lower cost ... why even bother recording? Hook a vinyl recorder up to the speaker leads and have a 99.9999% perfect copy made for you.

I don't understand what the fascination is. It's just because everyone and their nephew has a computer at home ... but only one person has to make a recording and post it on the internet to produce the same amount of 'damage' as there being no copy-protection on media at all.

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