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Comment Maybe good, maybe bad. (Score 1) 168

While it certainly saves the average traveler from having to guess the queue length and service rate for themselves so they can estimate the wait via Little's Law ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... )
It is hard to see how it manages to not be confused by people standing around the entrance and then walking away rather than in, or separate those speeding through the Priority or Pre-Check lines from the regular lines.

It would seem a simple electric eye counter or just giving the guy who sorts you into lines a clicker might do just as good a job. So while I don't like hopping into the tin foil hat explanations too quickly it is hard not to suspect that maybe this is just a cover story for the fact that they are indeed using it for surveillance purposes.

But then they already know everything I am doing in the airport tracking my phone doesn't personally make me any more under their eye than I already am. Not that I like them gathering all this data and lying about what they keep, I'm just not sure this actually adds to the degree I have already had my privacy compromised by the government.

Comment Re:The end somehow is always 30 years away (Score 1) 652

Except the article said we run out in 30 years

Earth’s carbon budget—the remaining amount of fossil fuels that scientists calculate can be burned without destroying the climate—will last only about 30 years at the rate we’re going.

The 2035 date had to do with bringing everyone to the US standard of living.

Comment The end somehow is always 30 years away (Score 5, Interesting) 652

Close enough that we have to DO SOMETHING NOW!, but far enough that no one will ever be called to account for being wrong, but not so far away that it's not in our life time and can be ignored. Having lost track of the number of such deadlines for the point of no return that have already passed in my life time let me just say I am a little skeptical.

And you know the Indians, the Chinese, and many others could care less and are going right on growing their populations and carbon production and there is no chance they will do anything but grow for the next 30 years. So if the author is right and we have only that long before we have irrevocably ruined our environment, then the choice for those of us in the industrial world is clear.

Enjoy all the vacations and recreational activities you can now. No seriously, if they are right then we are doomed, so you might as well enjoy it while you can, and they are wrong then you will have the last laugh while they sit around entertaining themselves doing the crossword puzzles, while they suffer without air conditioning.

Comment Exactly why the Honor Harrington series is great (Score 1) 470

It is both modeled on Napoleonic Navel Fiction while at the same time being physically accurate withing the constraints of its sci-fi universe. Accelerate at full speed for an hour in one direction, well then it will take you an hour to come to a stop. Long trips at high fractions of the speed of light have shorted subjective shipboard times. The light speed time lag in sensors and communication plays significant tactical and strategic roles in almost all the battles.

If you love space opera or Aubrey/Hornblower and you like accurate physics then you definitely want to read the Harrington series by David Weber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Comment Search for me but not for thee (Score 5, Insightful) 207

Oh sure they have a wonderful system for searching what they want to search and can't be troubled to search what they should be able to but don't want to..

http://www.judicialwatch.org/p...
"Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe. The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search. "

The saying "Laws are for the little people" used to be funny, now, not so much.

Comment There is an upside to this (Score 1) 38

Getting lots of people running Tor even if they don't need to, even if the implementation may not be the "best" possible, for various definitions of best, is that it dilutes the number of users using Tor for "bad" things.

I don't know what the percent of users of Tor are using it for the standard list of things the government needs to save us from, but you know that eventually the argument will get made, which owing to the nature of Tor will be almost impossible to disprove, that basically everyone using it is doing something illegal and thus running a node makes you an accomplice, and using Tor is probable cause for the government to come and search your stuff.

If that argument has not already been made in court you know it is only a matter of time before it is.

Comment Not an apology (Score 5, Insightful) 59

They make no mention of having been clearly non-responsive to the FOI request. The FOI asked for "Acquisition documents" that they hadn't got one yet doesn't get them out from having been trying to get one. And the excuse of "well we didn't know what the other department was doing" fails, the whole point of a FOI request is for them to find out of someone has the documents in any of their departments. The real problem is that these FOI laws lack meaningful penalties for failure to properly respond so no one ever does.

Comment Re:How did this get modded up (Score 1) 187

You can't prove a negative

It's called proof by contradiction.

No you have it backwards, proof by contradiction is a method of showing something is true by showing that if it were false it would be a contradiction with something known to be true. An example in this case would be to say,

"assume there are purple unicorns, that would imply through a chain of logic that there can not be pink spotted elephants, since we know that pink spotted elephants do exist then purple unicorns can not exist, QED"

since you are likely to have difficulty finding a contradiction that results by assuming that purple unicorns do exist this method of proof it unlikely to helpful in this case.

Comment Re:Warranty (Score 2) 187

What the fuck?

The illegibility that you find so shocking would seem to come from the terminal the poster is using (based on their previous comments) the content would seem to come from the fact that all they appear to want to do is assert that various political view points are bad along with those who hold them regardless of how relevant it might be to the discussion at hand.

Or their views on the world may just be the result of living in Seattle and not having sex for 20 years, can't tell which is the cause and which is the effect.

Comment They only had no idea because they didn't look (Score 1) 653

If you go to the USPTO trademark search and put in "multimeter and yellow" the FIRST result is a Fluke yellow multimeter.

If you are in the business of making multimeters and claim you have never heard of Fluke or seen one you are clearly full of it.

Company caught clearly knocking off other company's product tries to play the "trademark laws is bad, boo hoo" card.

Not impressed

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