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Comment Re: But is it reaslistic? (Score 4, Insightful) 369

Yea and it's not the middle ages either and there are no strains of plague that are anti-biotic resistant. The only Bacteria that are scary are anti-biotic resistant ones, all the rest can be cured with a dose of anti-biotic. That's why people with the real knowledge don't research bio-weapons from bacteria, they use viruses that have no effective treatment option.

This sounds like some rank amateur typing up a letter that says "we could do X" where X is some fanciful attack. What I see here is groups like the CIA playing this up as a fund raising drive even if the "plan" is stupidly simple and not even viable. This in fact sounds a lot like the yellow cake uranium crap they pushed into the media.

People need to stop falling for this BS.

Comment I doubt it even makes it to the atmosphere (Score 3, Insightful) 273

That methane dissolves into the water long before it reaches the surface and re-emerges, I would be surprised if even a small percentage of it make it to the atmosphere because bacteria would consume the dissolved methane before it can reach the surface. Even in the atmosphere where there is very little life the methane only lasts a couple decades, but in the ocean where it's teaming with life I doubt very little of it makes it to the surface.

Comment Re:Everything old is new again. (Score 2) 193

I'm willing to bet tape has a MUCH longer life span too. CD-R's start dieing in less than 10 years, I doubt blu-ray lasts any longer. Even the archival grade disks where they claim to last longer than 0 years I'm not sure I believe them. The nice thing about magnetic tape is that they tend to last forever and only go bad from wear or exposure to magnetic fields.

Comment Re:Stupid metric system (Score 0) 140

Any measurement system that requires you to use decimals for reasonable accuracy in common situations is the wrong increment and if this is common when using the measurement it's just a bad system for that reason.

For example, measuring the height of a human being requires the use of feet and Inches in Imperial measurements but generally uses nice clean numbers in centimeters for the same accuracy. This occurs frequently for certain measurement cases where cm/mm are better, but there are just as many situations where foot makes a cleaner measurement than meters. Outside small measurements and between large ones the foot is a cleaner measurement in my opinion.

For temperature, centigrade is too large of a measurement, at least for temperatures humans encounter on a routine basis. Decimals in centigrade are needed to provide enough accuracy. This isn't true of Fahrenheit, daily measurements, food, etc where F is a cleaner measurement in whole numbers. Centigrade is a scientific temperature scale, it's great for that, it's lousy in daily use.

It's unfortunate that SI was based on the old French meter, it's just too big in general use, something smaller close to a foot would have been better then we wouldn't have ended up with a worthless deci/deca meter. Centigrade is the same, in looking for a cleaner measurement they used boiling water as the high end which made the unit too large for common use but great for scientific measurements.

Comment Re:Call anything 3D printing (Score 2) 108

Tilt up wall construction is one of the most common construction methods in the US. The concrete walls are poured on the ground in forms adjacent to their final location, once cured they are tilted up and connected, once the walls are in place the roof is added. Almost every warehouse or industrial building built these days is built with tilt up wall construction.

It's fast, it's cheap and its low labor. Don't speak of what you dont' know.

Comment Re:Big Data (Score 5, Informative) 181

The lie you have bought into is that destination traffic is the same as transit traffic.

The whole point of peering agreements is to stop one provider from piggybacking on another transit providers network to reduce their costs. The agreements are structured so that to reach various end points they transit the traffic as closely as possible to the destination then hand it off to the hosting network rather than hand it off at the first available point and allow it transit the other networks system.

This whole arrangement falls flat on it's face when one of those transit providers is also the major destination route for millions of customers. ISPs that provide residential service always have unbalanced traffic arrangement because the customer almost always requests more data then they send. As long as L3 and Cogent are handing this destination traffic off to Verizon at the closest possible peering point for their subscribers then Verizon shouldn't be able to request the the traffic be balanced.

The problem is that unregulated market forces have allowed monopoly providers in local markets to combine with the very limited number of Tier 1 network operators resulting in the almost immediate abuse of monopoly by the Tier 1 portion of the network leveraging the monopoly side of the residential ISP business. There is rather simple solution to this problem. Bar any ISP that offers services directly to residential customers from owning or operating long haul national networks. If Verizon was forced to separate their Tier 1 transit business from their Residential ISP business (as in either divesting the assets or separating the company into two distinct companies) the problem would be solved almost immediately.

Businesses with monopolies will abuse them, that's the whole point of regulating free markets, because without that regulation you will end almost immediately with companies abusing market position and breaking the free market. Free markets don't stay free without regulation, particularly businesses with massive capital start up costs such as residential ISPs. Without regulation you end up with Verizon's Tier 1 network business leveraging the monopoly residential ISP traffic to extract rent from competing providers. This is a rent the market would not support without the monopoly or with regulation to prevent it's abuse.

Comment Re:The Discovery channel? (Score 1) 103

The reality TV executives showed up and everyone went "wow look at how cheap that content is". Although they failed to really grasp that whole cheap thing in the proper context.

TV is 99% junk (repeats, realityTV, etc) now because it was more profitable. All the specialty channels are now just repeating junk rather than trying to be channels serving that actual niche. Hell the weather channel didn't show weather, SciFi shows wrestling, etc. Those channels long ago lost their real audiences.

Comment Re:probably BS (Score 1) 226

Derivative in what way? Did he take a video of a video or did he take a video of the actual game? I fail to see how anyone could claim video you shot yourself of live action belongs to them in the form of copyright because you are the one that took the video, they don't have a copyright on the live action and it's absurd to claim they do.

Now as someone else said, there may have been contract language on the ticket that you agreed to by attending the game that gave them copyright on all your recordings of the game. I would suggest not attending such games in the future. This could in fact not even be tied to copyright law, this could be some special exception in UK law that gives soccer clubs rights to all video shot of their club. It would be absurd but that's never stopped the UK before.

Comment Re:Everything hits poor people harder (Score 4, Insightful) 207

Communism is a great idea as long as every actor is altruistic and interested in the welfare of the society above themselves. Because of that base assumption about human behavior it's a terrible system.

Libertarianism is a great idea as long as every actor is altruistic and interested in the welfare of the society above themselves.

Laissez-fair capitalism is a great idea as long as every actor is altruistic and interested in the welfare of the society above themselves.

Etc...

All these "improvements" on the system we have only work if you assume people aren't self-interested greedy pricks that will screw over their own mothers for $5. As soon as you insert the real world into these system it collapses from the sociopaths gaming the system for themselves. As you said you need checks and balances, capitalism with regulation to prevent the abuse of the system that is common appears to be the most functional system, that is as long as you don't get people that are so stupid they think the regulation is the problem.

Comment Re:Impact assesment (Score 5, Insightful) 327

It doesn't mean it's irrelevant, it means impacts won't be prevented (which isn't the purpose of an impact study anyway) but they can still be mitigated later. You might not understand this difference but it's significant. We have a serious problem with environmental groups abusing the process not to prevent environmental damage, but to prevent development at all. Even when developers or state agencies go out of their way to protect sensitive sites/species groups like Greenpeace will still sue, not to get additional protections or to protect anything but simply to raise the costs in the hope the agency/company will abandon the project because in Greenpeace's view all new development is bad. They aren't alone, there are dozens of groups who are abusing the courts and our environmental laws as some campaign to end all new development.

This is not the purpose these environmental rules were created to satisfy. The laws are being heavily abused and if it's not reigned in it's going to get so bad people will support abolishing the protections all together, which is a far worse outcome.

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