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Comment Re:The real crime here (Score 1) 465

Government: "Offender's employer: We're garnishing offender's wages. Give us the next $1000 you were going to pay offender, even if that means he doesn't see a penny for a paycheck for the next two months."

Offender's Employer: "Okay, here's your money, and BTW thanks for letting us know our employee's a thief. We’ll be looking to replace them ASAP.”

Bender the Offender: Hmm, there's no point in working if they take all my earnings, I think I'll just go on the dole.

Taxes will end up paying for the crime no matter if it is jail or fines.

Comment Re:Fire (Score 1) 143

So does Sodium. But do you notice how table salt doesn't burn in water?

There's no lithium metal in lithium /ion/ cells. The whole lithium catching on fire thing is to do with them having a rather volatile solvent as part of the electrolyte (something similar to ether).

That's not necessarily true. When lithium batteries are charged at a low temperature, lithium metal plates the anode. This could certainly be a problem for electric cars, as they may not be in a warm garage as they are charging.

Comment Re: It's a TRAP! (Score 1) 175

Of course an ADK requires that you trust the entity that holds the ADK. In the GP post, he lamented that when people left the company they took their keys with them. If it is company mail produced on company time I don't see the problem with the company holding a key to decrypt it. With PGP, you can also split the ADK into multiple parts so that you would need several people at the company agree to decrypt anything. That way a single employee cannot arbitrarily use the ADK. Of course, if they are using Symantec's key server they can just configure it to keep copies of a user's key or handle all the encryption/decryption on the server itself.

Comment Re:Money pit (Score 2) 322

The new canal won't compete with the Panama one, because it's wider. The larger ships will have to take the new one (at full fare) while the smaller ships can choose. Given that it's cheaper to use larger ships that means the Panama canal will see a massive drop in use.

Which is why they are building a new canal in Panama that will handle the large container ships and supertankers. This project has been underway for some time.

Comment Re:Small-scale, real-time. (Score 1) 502

The Daily Fail readers will be annoyed with anything that the paper tells them is annoying. If they claim that aliens are lurking in alleyways and eating cats, that is what that demographic will be annoyed with. Their readership is so gullible and stupid that they will believe anything as long as the article has as many pictures as it has words.

Comment Re:String theory is voodoo physics (Score 4, Informative) 259

The theory of relativity wasn't testable when it was first proposed. Part of the reason Einstein never got a nobel for it was that it wasn't until the 1970's that there was real firm experimental evidence for it.

There's a distinction between something that can never be tested and something that can't be tested now due to technological limitations.

You mean the observations Eddington took in 1919 confirming light bending in accordance with predictions by general relativity didn't take place? From the Wikipedia entry:

"Eddington's observations published the next year[5] confirmed Einstein's theory, and were hailed at the time as a conclusive proof of general relativity over the Newtonian model."

Also, relativity made a number of testable predictions. From the wiki page on the theory of relativity:

"The predictions of special relativity have been confirmed in numerous tests since Einstein published his paper in 1905, but three experiments conducted between 1881 and 1938 were critical to its validation. These are the Michelson–Morley experiment, the Kennedy–Thorndike experiment, and the Ives–Stilwell experiment. Einstein derived the Lorentz transformations from first principles in 1905, but these three experiments allow the transformations to be induced from experimental evidence."

Obviously the testing of the theory still continues as we gather more data from around the universe, but to say there wasn't firm experimental evidence until the 1970s isn't correct.

Until string theory makes some testable predictions it's just mathematical and philosophical wanking.

Comment Re: Coincidence (Score 2) 387

There is some logic behind

A Russian scientist turned wild foxes into cute puppies in about 10 generations by breeding for lower adrenaline levels

Not necessarily adrenaline levels, but that may have been the way it worked out. All they bred for was aggression, the more aggressive foxes were not allowed to breed. This resulted in a tamer fox, but also a lot of other traits that we associate with dogs (juvenilization, coloration patterns, vocalization, etc). Just selecting for one thing can have a profound effect on the species.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Comment Re:Perfectly fair (Score 1) 25

'Major sponsors include Ford, General Motors, IMRA, Michigan Engineering, NYK, Qatar Airways and Siemens PLM Software.'

Why is that unfair? Other teams are permitted to get sponsors. It's their problem if they can't recruit good sponsors. Plus most of those companies hire Michigan engineering graduates so why wouldn't they sponsor the students they are likely to hire?

Sure, I think they should be able to get as much money as they want from sponsors. However, the article made it sound like they were getting engineering help from their sponsors. This is supposed to be a student competition, not a professional contest. In this case, the team that won didn't even build their car, they just drove a car built by previous students and sponsors. I guess they drove it competently, but in an engineering competition I would like to see more engineering on the part of the participants.

Comment Re:Figures it would not be the US (Score 2) 190

Except for the fact that it was the vehicle trials which occurred in the US (california, nevada), trials that demonstrated the safety of these vehicles and which have caused the UK to fully allow them on the roads in Jan 2014, rather than their initial plans for trials to occur by the end of 2013. While the article does not explicitly state this to be the reason for the change, I believe it to be a fair presumption that the 300,000 miles google's cars have driven in Califonia were taken into consideration.

Trials are different than allowing manufacturers to sell driverless cars or allowing the general public to drive them. Even the Nevada law just instructs the DOT to set safety standards for driverless cars, which they have not yet completed. That also doesn't address insurance, which all cars in the US are required to have to drive on public roads. If the insurance companies won't insure the cars because of the litigation-happy Americans, the only way to drive such a car would be to underwrite the insurance yourself (which generally involves posting a large bond).

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