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Comment Re:What complete and utter bullshit. (Score 1) 220

What complete and utter bullshit.

95% of 250 coders. That means that out of a million programmers they will misidentify 200000.

You know it's not a contest to come up with the worst bullshit. If you're left with one person 95% of the time when you have 249 possible wrong answers, it's like being left with 4000 people when you have 999999 wrong answers. If all those are too close to tell apart you'll misidentify >99.9%.

Imagine for example that you wanted to find people by height and weight, as measured to nearest cm and kilo. It might work decently on a small group, but if you scale it up to a million people there'll be a lot of duplicates and then you're just guessing, double the population and you halve the chance of being right.

Comment Re:Uh, okay? (Score 2) 375

It doesn't bode well for Linux that it is also not the year of the Windows Desktop or Apple Desktop. It is the year of the smart phone. The year of the desktop may never return. Desktops are better suited for developers and smart phones are better suited to consumers.

Developers and a ton of other professionals. If Linux/FLOSS could replace Windows, Office, Outlook/Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server that's probably 15 of Microsoft's $26 billion dollar revenue. Open source has not managed to commodify basic business and collaboration tasks, despite so many years of trying. It's not all about smartphones and tablets.

Comment Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men? (Score 1) 468

That's not the case here, and it's irrelevant. When I noticed the discrepancy between my camera's reported speed and my speedometer, I then compared it with a GPS-based speedometer app in my iPhone. The iPhone and car speedometer were in perfect sync. The camera-indicated speed was indeed extremely low, and so low that I have to think it was made deliberately wrong in order to provide misleading information in court, to fight in jurisdictions where such things are overlooked.

Let's say I was in court for some kind of accident, and I was going 70 MPH in a 60 MPH zone. The video recording of the crash shows the camera says 60 MPH, so it never comes up that I'm partially at fault because I was speeding. The other party in the crash is screwed by faulty evidence.

Comment Re:Disappointed in Portland (Score 1) 147

If a $300 one-time fee (that you can plan for many months in advance) is a show-stopper for you, then you have a severe personal finance problem.

(And saying "I'm too poor not to live paycheck-to-paycheck" is not an excuse; plenty of people on the forums at sites like earlyretirementextreme.com and mrmoneymustache.com have figured out how to live well on $7,000 - $30,000 per year).

Well, yes, I live very well with on an income of $10,000/yr, barring a catastrophic health issue. I do so by being very careful about avoiding frivilous expenses. A one-time expense of $300 on top of a continued monthly expense that is only a few bucks less than what I am now paying doesn't work for me. But spending $300 now to avoid years of monthly payments would be a good deal.

I don't really need any faster access or greater bandwidth than what I now have. Yeah, I'd like those, but I'd also like a trip to Hawaii, a larger appartment, room for an infinite number of bookcases... Not going to happen.

Comment Re:How it makes them feel (Score 1) 228

It's not the viewing of the picture which is offensive, but the making of the picture. Distributing it is rubbing salt in the wounds, and makes the difference between a secret, private image of Muhammad (which were quite common in Islam), and a public spectacle. The secret, private images were tolerated because the owners would know that the image was not being worshipped or being used to degrade Muhammad. When it's public and all over the place, that security is lost.

It's just a respect thing - when a religion has been pushed into the corner by the meddling of other countries, often with no regard to their sensibilities, they will fight tooth and nail to secure that which is the most important thing to them. We've seen this with other religions and cultures, too, so it's not just an Islam thing.

If someone respects the hell out of something I'll not go out of my way to show how free I am to disrespect it, or show how much I dislike people being offended by disrespect, by disrespecting it - "told you so" is not productive. That's just me, though.

Comment Re: Not really. (Score 2) 237

The Skylon project is aiming to reduce the price to ~$1000 per kilo (to begin with), and then further reduce that through the life of the project. They've made some amazing progress, and they don't need to use nuclear fuel (just hydrogen), which means there's less for anyone to complain about. Couple that with being entirely reusable (and possibly capable of flying a second mission within 2 days), and it looks simply genius.

Comment Re:Finaly. (Score 0) 225

You really don't understand how the web works, do you? You are saying that everyone needs to write and maintain an app for each and every OS out there, instead of having an interface which they can support, which in turn is supported by each and every OS. You are calling for the web to return to the incredibly-limited mid-90s. "How it should be" for you is not how the rest of the world wants it.

Comment Re:Adobe (Score 1) 225

With a proper SLA and a good backup solution it is no more risky than putting your data in any other system. For example, there are thousands of companies who use hosted CRMs for their entire sales workflow, generating billions of dollars in the process. I guess they're all dumb?

Comment Re:18B on 75B (Score 1) 534

That is 24%. That means your device could be 20% cheaper and they would STILL make more money then anybody else in percentage per product in the electronics world. So instead of 500USD for the Ipad2, you could be paying 400USD and they would still make money. And some people don't think Apple is overpriced.

Don't worry, you can buy a $500 phone from my non-profit, $400 will be my for salary and $100 for a junk Android phone. Profit is an indication that you're delivering more value relative to cost than the competition, after all sales price is just a number you decide. They're not competing against some imaginary non-profit, the day Google, Microsoft etc. deliver a competing product forcing them to lower prices they will. Until then, keep blaming the one delivering what people want and not the ones who don't.

Comment Electrically-coupled counterweight (Score 1) 248

Many posts suggest doing away with the cable by putting the motor on the elevator car; but this overlooks the fact that the elevator needs to be connected to a counterweight for efficiency reasons.

However, here's a thought: you put motors on the elevator *and* the counterweight. As the elevator goes up, the counterweight goes down and uses its motors as generators to partly power the elevator's motors. And vice versa.

Sure, you're not going to break even due to electrical losses; but it'll be a damn sight better than no counterweight.

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