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Comment LSA is a problem (Score 1) 473

The Light Sport Aircraft category was supposed to help with the cost by creating a new category of plane that is a bit smaller and hypothetically cheaper. What I've noticed is a very large number of manufacturers in the market which seems good, but none can get enough sales volume to reduce cost.

The cheapest route of course is to build your own, put an engine on that can run car gas, and be your own mechanic. This is not appealing to everyone, and not everyone whom it would appeal to even knows it's an option.

Comment Especially (Score 3, Interesting) 534

Especially when a couple month ago we heard that they overestimated because the temperature increase has stalled over the last 10 years. Perhaps this accounts for the missing temperature rise? But then....

While infilling works well over the oceans, the hybrid model works particularly well at restoring temperatures in the vicinity of the unobserved regions

The method used works well over the oceans - is that where they omitted data and the used the prediction method? But it works "particularly well" where we have no actual data to validate it...

Comment Really Bill? (Score 1) 445

I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest. This system is responsible for many of the great advances that have improved the lives of billions—from airplanes to air-conditioning to computers.

Airplanes got invented by individuals - the french were gliding down hillsides and the Wrights read about that and said "fuckin' cool lets do that" and then did it better than anyone else. Only after did they try to commercialize it and capitalism caused some ugly things along the way. Air conditioning I'm not sure about. And Computers were invented for war, not capitalism. Of course business will take anything and try to market it to everyone in order to make a buck, so business does bring advances to the people. That doesn't mean it's the only way, but it was proven effective. In general it doesn't cause innovation. Shit, DOS was a personal project that Bill Gates bought from his friend (without disclosing who he was selling it to and hence got it relatively cheap) - point is that these things often come about due to interests other than capitalism.

Comment Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score 1) 258

Oh, I didn't mean the USPS shouldn't be subsidized. I view it as a government provided service that we pay to use. The government part means it's available everywhere to everyone, while paying to use it makes it more fair. I don't expect it to make money - at best it should brake even, so government subsidy at times is fine. What I have a problem with is first class mail subsidizing junk mail. Without junk mail you'd still need a carrier to visit every day for pickup, but the stop will still be faster without a pile of crap to put in there. Or they could make the service run every other day, but that increases worst case delivery by 2 days. There are lots of ways to make adjustments, but having bulk pay well under 10 cents is really a bad joke since it still uses all the infrastructure that first class has put in place.

If they want to run it like a business and not a government provided service then they at least have to charge enough to pay their bills, and that includes ALL mail.

Comment Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score 1) 258

Whatever their cost, they should charge appropriately. First class mail should not be losing money. Bulk mail should cost more but instead they neglect the delivery cost, claiming the mail person will be making the stop anyway. If USPS is losing money it's because it's used to subsidize marketing for business. If the low cost mail wasn't there I think I'd only get actual first class about 2-3 days a week, so those other 3-4 stops are really for mail that they charge next to nothing for.

Comment No such thing (Score 2) 178

Where are the hosting providers that make end-to-end encrypted email/web/VOIP/XMPP easy and automatic for all my clients?

It is up to the user and the mail client to do the encryption. If your hosting provider plays any part in that they will need the keys and can therefore hand them over to others - or do decryption for others and keep the keys. Any way you look at it, end-to-end encryption requires that it be done AT THE END which means on your own machine.

Comment Re:Why should not the loser always pay? (Score 1) 162

I'm not sure about the loser paying when the loser is the defendant. That means you can pay arbitrarily high fees to a lawyer to sue someone as long as you think you'll win. Violate a patent - be bankrupted by someones lawyer fees. OTOH this means individual inventors might be able to defend their patents against large companies easier. It really seems like a windfall for patent lawyers though. Not sure if it's good or bad.

Comment What about Experian? (Score 5, Insightful) 390

Hieu Minh Ngo, the website owner, was recently been indicted for 15-counts filed under seal in November 2012, charging him with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, substantive wire fraud, conspiracy to commit identity fraud, substantive identity fraud, aggravated identity theft, conspiracy to commit access device fraud, and substantive access device fraud.

Why does someone at one level of the crime get charged but not the one at the top. Remember:

Experian — one of the three national U.S. credit bureaus — reportedly sold SSNs through its subsidiary, Court Ventures, to the operators of SuperGet.info

Why are they not being charged? Using SSNs for certain things is illegal, and selling them probably is too - otherwise what did the other guy do wrong?

Comment Stability of amino acids (Score 1) 141

It seems to me that the redundancy in the code allows some triplets to be more stable than others. A random change from one letter to another shouldn't be a problem as long as the new triplet codes the same amino acid. In this light I would expect very important pieces of DNA to be coded in a way that allows more variability without changing function. How or if evolution deals with this would be interesting to study.

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