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Comment Re:Real world already knows this (Score 1) 172

The city I moved from last year upgraded all their meters to electronic ones. When you arrive you punch the spot number into a machine that takes coins or credit. You can also add money from your phone, so you don't need to return to fill up the meter. Enforcement is by a Google Streets-style car that drives around and records license plate numbers. There's no discretion. If your car is there when they go past and you haven't paid, you get a ticket.

I've never heard of a meter maid covering up a parking signs. I'm not American though. Perhaps you have more corruption than we do.

Comment Re:Server technology? (Score 1) 271

what is the return on investment? these days we have IP KVM's and integrated light out from HP that give you access to a server from a cell phone if need be. how much is this gizmo going to cost compared to existing solutions and how is it going to save our employers money?

To answer your first question, it seems good for Intel to make the CPU the bottleneck again, that way we finally feel the need to buy new CPUs. As for home use, my MiL's current, C2D 3.06GHz, iMac does not seem appreciably faster than my C2D (Merom) 2.33GHz Macbook Pro which I have had since October of 2006. My informal Handbrake benchmark (crunching video is my only real use for fast computer gear these days) is out of whack due to a recent switch to 64bit Handbrake and 64-bit nightly build of VLC, but they seem to be in the same league, definitely not worlds apart as a 3.5 year difference in tech should have yielded.

Comment Re:Attendence in college? (Score 1) 554

All because 1st semester calc never, ever transfers.

I had a similar problem when I transferred from a state school to a private school. They didn't want to credit any of my classes and despite me already having 3 years, didn't even get me to sophomore by credits.

I didn't want to take the classes again, so I figured I would just spend 15 minutes per day at the Registrar's Office arguing. I figure I had the whole year to go there every day but they had a lot of work to do in their 8 hours that they wouldn't get done.

They finally got so tired of me wasting all their time that they just asked me for a full list of what I thought was fair and then just approved it.

Comment Re:Speaking as a teacher... (Score 1) 554

If your lectures are so bad you have to force students to attend, then maybe you should spend more time honing your teaching skills and less time on the Draconian tracking systems

I find it quite rare that every student is interested in the topic, regardless of the professors teaching skills. The next time you teach a class ask your students "Where would you rather be than here" and see if anyone says "nowhere". The difference is some people choose to act on that, even if you are an incredibly interesting and engaging teacher.

Comment Anthropogenic global warming (Score 1) 617

In my opinion "Global Warming" is a simplification of a topic too complex for the general public. Whether it was a poor choice in naming, simplifying the subject for public debate, or an attempt to make it sound scary really doesn't matter at this point. It has both helped and hurt the discussion.

It also doesn't matter whether the planet has climate cycles. AGW doesn't threaten the planet, it will be here long after we are gone. If what we are doing is causing severe changes we should be looking to see how we can change what we are doing. It's not inconceivable that what we are doing is affecting the climate, we've done it before. We had to change farming techniques rather than sit back and say "droughts are normal".

But no, instead it's all electric cars and inefficient solar and wind power instead of proven nuclear, etc etc...

Your stance is just as narrow minded as many of the renewable energy proponents. We don't have any technologies that are a single solution to fossil fuels. We could address a lot of our usage through simple efficiency requirements. Push CAFE requirements higher. Change building codes to require minimum environmental efficiency. Require remodeling to bring the affected areas up to current codes. I would even require new buildings to install 1kw solar for each 1000 sq/ft of enclosed space. Not as a solution, but as an incremental step. Builders won't do it themselves, they'll skip a 50 cent part on a $300k house if they can get away with it.

While I support building more nuclear plants, it's just part of the solution. Even if we granted permits for 100 new nuclear plants this year, it would be a decade before any of them came online. Focusing solely on nuclear is almost as bad as the big ethanol push a few years ago. We chose ethanol over biodiesel even though it meant specially designed 'flex fuel' engines, necessitating new cars. Bio OTOH was suitable for use in existing diesel engines. Trains, trucks, heavy equipment, etc. (BTW, since the new ULSD engines that is no longer the case. So we've actually made things worse in that respect) We chose to try and change millions of cars rather than focus on a less visible high usage market. Why not bio for the home heating market? Nuclear is another half attempt unless we get the political will to do something about spent fuel. And just like ethanol, it comes at the expense of another technology that could be retrofitted to existing installed technology. The US will likely never stop using coal. We have too much of it. So why aren't we cleaning up the coal plant emissions? I have a theory that it's our 'I don't want to pay for that' culture. Short term people get outraged "our taxes are paying so xxxx utility can get free stuff", regardless of the fact that if we regulated cleaner emissions xxxx utility would just pass the cost to rate payers anyway, after fighting for years in court.

Comment Re:Analog Computers (Score 1) 359

and sure, there are lots of tolerances in a car engine that are much less than 1 mm, but it is about 1 meter across, not 1/3 of a km)
Now lets assume there is a car engine on that aircraft carrier. Lets further assume that someone copies the "car engine" model into the "aircraft carrier" model and then later copies and pastes out the car engine and the machine it drives out of the aircraft carrier model to simulate it.

If the system is using global floating point coordinates and the engine wasn't pasted near coordinate zero then the model of the car engine copied out will be much less accurate than the model of the car engine copied in!

Comment Re:The jokes just write themselves, don't they? (Score -1) 286

Might cut down on the pervert problem too. I'm just sayin'.

They don't have a problem with perverts. Ratzo the Nazi kid fucker has declared it official Catholic Church policy to aid and abet in the raping of children as a matter of course.
They have a problem with moral and ethical people complaining about it. There does not exist one Catholic who isn't an avid supporter of child rape though. There couldn't be since if they had any morals or ethics they would have left the church long ago because it is the official declared policy of the Catholic Church to aid and abet child rapists.

There is no excuse for being a Catholic. If you see one, beat them to a pulp or kill them on sight because by remaining a Catholic they have already declared their avid support for raping children.

Comment Re:I'm not surprised (Score 1) 840

Contrary to your statement, the Vatican did withhold names of the accused and refused to prosecute priests involved in child abuse cases.

You're losing sight of the argument, which was that Ratzinger (head of the CDF, later named Pope Benedict XVI) set a rule mandating excommunication for those who turned over names to civil authorities, under the name of the "pontifical secret", and that has hidden the accused from civil prosecution. That's clearly wrong:

  • Authority in these cases was given to the CDF in 2001.
  • The CDF requested the sealing of case records under the pontifical secret for all cases it was to prosecute

Are you saying that there were cases prosecuted by the CDF since 2001 that (a) hadn't yet been visible to civil authorities, and (b) the identities of those accused have been hidden from civil authorities? Now that would be news! Instead, all we have are these impotent claims that pontifical secret means shielding the identities of the accused.

It only makes sense to seal a case to protect the victim or the innocent accused if you have complete confidence in the judicial process

in a civil case, yes. in a canonical case, where the notion of sin is tied up in the determination of guilt or innocence, that's not the case; sealing works both for the victim and the accused.

And since the Vatican's judicial process is biased in favour of the priests (being, of course, presided by priests behind closed doors)

that's a complete conjecture. do you have anything approaching proof? if it were biased in favor of priests, then there'd be no "convictions" (laicizations), right?

On a related note, I find it ridiculous that the Vatican publishes material in Latin hundreds of years after the language died, and then people like you complain about improper translations.

French is the official language of France, German is the official language of Germany, Latin is the official language of the Vatican. Each uses it in its official proceedings. Hence, not a dead language. There's no excuse for shoddy translations of official documents, regardless of language. Are you really telling me that there are no Latin language experts out there, even among academics, who have to use it in their research all the time? No -- it isn't ridiculous, and using a poor translation is always an approach to be ridiculed.

It's bullshit like this that brought forth the protestant reform, more than 400 years ago.

Yes... it's clearly bullshit to allow an institution or government to make up its own rules and then follow them. Puh-leeze!

Comment Re:Committing crimes (Score 1) 237

citation for this? In the US, there is a high high bar to criminalize incitement. See Brandenburg v. Ohio

The repercussions of that case are that the government cannot prosecute abstract speech. However I would not want to be the authors of a book where defendants of an actual crime all were saying ".. The book said it was OK to do this."

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