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Comment Re:471 million? You may want to think about that. (Score 2) 247

471 million potatos is a lot of potatos.
471 million .2mm bits of plastic is enough to cover in plastic all of the living rooms in California.
Wait - no - one living room. Or about a dinner-plates worth a day.

Every day. That's the difference.

Even assuming that it's a dinner plate sized amount of pollution, over two decades, you are looking at 7300 dinner plates. Only, broken into little chunks, easily consumed by aquatic life and smothering plants, clogging pipes etc.

Comment Re:Force his hand..."Sue me! Sooner than later..." (Score 5, Informative) 379

they couldn't possibly hope to recover the $100k+ in legal fees.

$100,000? That's just a tiny bit inflated. My legal fees for two felonies were slightly more than $5,000. It's not going to cost six digits to get judicial relief in a circumstance like this. It probably doesn't even get the lawsuit stage, a demand letter sent to the school district and reviewed by their attorney would probably suffice. "Yeah, we're going to lose this one. Wipe the student's record clean, tell him you're sorry, and move on."

There's plenty of stupidity in the American legal system to make fun of without making stuff up.

Comment Re:But...batteries? (Score 1) 85

If my phone could mine enough Bitcoin overnight, when plugged in anyway, to cover micropayments for some paywalled articles for me to read the next day, it might seem worth it - even if I was paying more for the electricity than the mined Bitcoin was actually worth.

Won't work. Cell phones and most tablets lack any sort of active cooling system; the CPU is not designed to run at 100% for any significant amount of time and will throttle itself soon it reaches a certain temperature. Heat also degrades li-ion batteries; running the phone "hot" overnight will slaughter the longevity of your battery just as effectively as leaving it in a car on a hot summer day.

Comment Re: Well that was an incoherent metaphor (Score 1) 270

I was actually referring to the entire geopolitical situation, not just Iraq. Russia is slicing off parts of neighboring countries, we decapitated Libya (after the guy gave up his WMDs, incidentally, great message to send there....), threw Mubarak under the bus, did nothing while the Iranians crushed a reform movement, the list goes on and on.

The only good thing BHO did with foreign policy was to begin to normalize relations with Cuba. That was long overdue and he deserves some credit for that. The rest has been an unmitigated disaster. The World now looks a lot like it did before WW1, except instead of mustard gas we'll now get to contend with nuclear weapons when the shit hits the fan.

Comment Re:The goal hasn't changed. (Score 2) 185

The USN's anti-aircraft weaponry was extremely effective by the standards of the era. It turned the Japanese "victories" at Santa Cruz and Eastern Solomons into pyrrhic disasters that cost them dozens of their best pilots and whatever slim chance they had of winning of the war. That was in 1942. It only got better as time went on. We also had proximity fuses and other technology that the Axis never developed.

Personal anecdote: A friend of mine was a gunner on the 5"/38 mounts aboard USS Antietam. During gunnery practice they wouldn't aim at the target sleeve being towed through their gunnery range, rather they would aim at the cable connecting it to the aircraft doing the towing. More often than not they could hit it.

Comment Re: Well that was an incoherent metaphor (Score 1) 270

I don't think anybody seriously believes that BHO was willing to spend time, resources, or political capital on securing a status of forces agreement with Maliki's Government. He viewed himself as elected to "end" wars and conducted his foreign policy accordingly, at least until the rise of IS. I'm skeptical that it's BHO's "fault" per se, but I'm also skeptical of those that give him a complete pass on this issue.

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