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Comment Re:Show me the math on the Tesla. (Score 1) 280

and don't forget that most wealth is generated by engaging in activities with energy requirements.

That Tesla 80D Insane Edition that I want takes $115K worth of economic profit to acquire, which in most industries requires 5-20x as much revenue. So over a million dollars worth of economic activity on average to just get that Tesla before you can drive it. Is that greener than a Fiesta?

Comment Re: Maybe they will move to court instead? (Score 1) 137

Just so you know, Microsoft did a lot of shitty deals back then and screwed over a lot of people.

Why wasn't the contact enforced when Vista or 7 came out? One party is a nuclear-armed sovereign - don't tell me Microsoft refused... the courts would surely order cooperation if that were the case.

Comment Re: gosh (Score 1) 164

lemme guess, American public school student?

It's rich since the government in the region of Iran hasn't attacked another country since the 1820's but jingoistic Americans insist that they need to be attacked before they strike again. The irony is laid on thicker than the blood of the millions of victims of American imperialism. Or the women in Iran who have been repressed and murdered since the US overthrew the Shah there and installed theocratic thugs 40 years ago.

Even the CIA admits that all the imperialists are doing is creating more terrorists. We need to take down these morons - for our own safety.

Comment Re:Very tricky issue indeed. (Score 3, Insightful) 374

the state steps in and forces support for the benefit of the child

Humans respond to incentives. What the State actually accomplishes is encouraging mothers to get rid of the father because she'll get his money anyway (in the vast majority of the cases) without having to deal with him. While this outcome is predictable, empirical evidence has borne it out too. Broken households don't benefit the child, in the vast majority of cases (the empirical evidence bears this out too).

Besides, parents are the holders-in-trust of the child's rights, not the State. The State is a legal fiction and as such cannot hold any natural rights, so it's a non-sequitor. Yeah, they can send the boys in blue to enforce any arbitrary rule, but that's not sound moral reasoning.

Comment Re:The Earth has been warming since the Ice Age en (Score 2) 703

On the other hand, even if global warming were not caused by humans, shouldn't we be trying to mitigate its effects anyway? Should we be planning for the effects of rising sea waters, instead of (as the skeptics want) just do nothing and let the waters rise?

Is that their claim? The seas have risen by something like 200m in the past 13000 years.

I thought their claim was that human-produced CO2 is a minor contributor and that the vapor feedback cycle is limiting, so humans should focus on adaptation to change rather than trying to prevent it since they can't.

Is this a misrepresentation of the claims?

Comment Re:The author forgot one other option. (Score 3, Informative) 105

I just read the entire article and the author forgot one other solution: the British solution Instead of putting the burden on app developers to include backdoors, or on Google to block apps that don't, put the burden on end users to turn over their keys to police when asked. I'm not saying I like this solution, but it is a solution the author of the article didn't consider. If you make the sentence for non-cooperation long enough, it doesn't really matter if the police find what they're looking for: they can just lock you up for not handing over the keys.

In the USA, this would likely require a constitutional amendment, it is widely held that the Fifth Amendment "Right Against Self-Incrimination" protects the right not to divulge an encryption key.

Comment Re:Its about time (Score 1) 314

In scandinavia, kids are also given fluorine pills

With their school lunches? Baloney.

Xylitol has very little - if any - effect on dental health. It's just a sweetener that is not sugar (does not cause karies).

Nope - plaque uptake the xylitol and try to process it as a sugar and fail, exhausting their metabolites and ultimately starving off. Here's the most cited link on PubMed but you're welcome to search all the others, including more recent ones.

The schools aren't investing in the program because somebody's brother owns a chicklet factory - they've demonstrated success with it.

Source: I read peer reviewed real scientific reports.

Except the ones on the topic that are easily to find?

Comment Re:Its about time (Score 1) 314

I tried to point out the difference between sodium fluoride and silicofluorides but you just heard 'fluoride'. Of course studies will use sodium fluorides - because that's the safer one. Silicofluorides interact across calcium channels and dissociated fluoride ions don't. Meanwhile about 80% of municipal water supplies use silicofluorides.

Comment Re:Its about time (Score 2, Insightful) 314

Europe banned Fluoride in drinking water since at least the 1980's.

And all their teeth fell out! ;) Just kidding, they got refrigeration too.

The biggest risk is that fluoride is not fluoride. Sodium fluoride dissociates well, but most water supplies use silicofluorides that don't, and they cause heavy metals to cross the blood-brain barrier because the silicofluoride compounds interact biologically.

The dominant fluoridation chemical is actually toxic waste from fertilizer plant smokestack scrubbers that would have a real disposal problem if there weren't municipal water supplies to dump it in.

And those problems don't even touch on osteoporosis, the economic problems with watering one's lawn with fluoridated water, or the moral issue of involuntary medication.

I've got cavity-free kids on well water. Toothpaste with xylitol (birch/watermelon sugar alcohol) is the simple answer. In Scandinavia they give the kids a couple pieces of xylitol gum with their school lunch - far more economical than the US system and with fewer risks. But in the US, government programs are a secular religion that may only ever be tweaked, not found to be foolhardy.

Comment Re:My summary on systemd (Score 0) 442

So far you've been wrong about just about everything. I know you think that prefacing nonsense with insults makes it an argument but it isn't.

Mainframes do precisely what you claim cannot be done and have done since long before Unix. So your categorical assertions of what can and can't be done are simply and obviously provably false. The fact that rather than admit this and engage you continue to be rude proves that you lack character as well as knowledge.

Comment Re:My summary on systemd (Score 0) 442

How can a service handle a situation when it is down? The services have to register in advance how to handle things. Moreover other services might still have issues.

  B depends on C and C needs to reinitiate with B, but D is also talking to C. How does the new B signal C?

As for it being contrived that's one of the key issues in process management how to handle chains and stacks of processes. That doesn't happen much in the sysv world because sysv handles it so badly that everything ended up having to write its own process manager.

Comment Re:Still Acesulfame K (yuk!) (Score 2) 630

yeah, and it's probably carcinogenic.

I've got a nasty Diet Cola habit, but switched from Pepsi to Sam's after Pepsi started adding ace-K. It's not hard to calculate a dose of aspartame that your liver enyzmes can handle but there's no safe-ish dose of ace-K.

Oh, and the whole "aspartame makes you fat" meme is bullshit - I've dropped 45 lbs in the past year by getting rid of nearly all the carbs in my diet, all while drinking the stuff. An over-abundance of carbs is what horks your insulin system.

A sweetener that is proven to be incredibly dangerous, though: sugar, especially HFCS. It causes the largest health crisis the country has ever seen and innumerable downstream morbidities. Most articles about artificial sweeteners tend to "gloss over" that part.

A huge number of Americans self-medicate on caffeine (the drug they should be on is probably illegal or guarded behind the nearly impenetrable veil of the AMA's psychiatric guild). But encouraging them to drink their caffeine with sugar is the worst possible idea. Ace-K is probably carcinogenic, but once you've got some cancer cells, to really make them happy, fill them with fructose - Pepsi's got what cancer craves!

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