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Comment Re:Possible? (Score 1) 225

Depends on where you live. California circuit law holds that obscene works do not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, so cannot be protected by copyright as defined in the constitution.

Who decides what's obscene? According to millions of Americans, Janet Jackson was obscene when she had her Superbowl "wardrobe malfunction". Most of the rest of the world didn't really care.

Comment Re:Reverse discrimination is still discrimination (Score 5, Insightful) 280

Profiles for pets, WTF? Can teddy bears have profiles too? Are the pets allowed to have political opinions?

Why are facebook apologising to all LGBTs and not just Drag Queens? Why do drag queens get to have an alias and not straight people who wear straight peoples clothes. If women wear trousers do they get to call themselves cross-dressers and get an alias? If the pet cross-dresses can it have an alias?

This is all fucking insane.

Well what about writers with pen names? Musicians and actors with stage names?

Sting has a facebook page. His real name is not Sting, so why should he have special privileges?

Comment Re:Start menu usage dropped in lieu of what? (Score 2) 269

Prior to Windows 8, what exactly where people using to start applications if they were not using the start menu? Or did they just notice the start menu was being used less often because people were keeping applications open?

90% of the people I see using windows have the desktop covered with icons to launch everything.

Comment Re:Time for a new date (Score 1) 201

Peak oil WAS in 2008. It's a technical term for the maximum bump on the consumption graph. People like to pretend it's something else or that coal, shale oil, gas, biodiesel, whatever should be included but that's something else. Whether we get another peak with a sharp dropoff or a slow slide down as consumption drops due to replacement with other energy sources is something that's still being guessed at.

That's not a definition I've ever heard for peak oil. From the wiki: "Peak oil, an event based on M. King Hubbert's theory, is the point in time when the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum is reached, after which the rate of production is expected to enter terminal decline."

The problem is, is that the amount of known reserves is constantly changing, so peak oil will always be a moving target. Production, of course, has been reduced despite known reserves, to maintain prices.

Comment Re:Until we have independent testing... (Score 3, Interesting) 421

I'll assume option '3' for the moment:

Out of a sample size of ten million people, chances are very good that some of them will do very stupid things (and then claim they didn't).

Mind you, I'm perfectly willing to accept that the phone has a defect in design or construction, but I've had enough experience in troubleshooting and repair to lose all trust in humanity.

It's going to be a big problem for them. These phones have only been out for a day or two, so what will the average Joe's phone look like after a month?

Comment Re:strongly doubting it (Score 4, Informative) 112

...and the DC-10 can deliver as much water as five of the largest water scoopers.

Also bear in mind that a water scooper has to "land and refill" too...it just does that on a body of water instead of an airport. That could be closer than the nearest airport, or it could be farther.

I looked them up: the scooper scoops 6,137 litres of water during a 12-second 410 metres (1,350 ft) long run on the water at 70 knots. 12 seconds to refill sounds pretty amazing, but apparently the DC-10 can be filled (45000 L) in 15-20 minutes, which is not too bad.

Comment Re:You mean... (Score 1) 243

You mean just like we can do now assuming our ISP treats all traffic equally? Isn't QoS supported by most home type routers, even without having to flash it with dd-wrt or tomato or whatever?

But isn't QoS pretty much limited to upload. Here's a quote from http://vonage.nmhoy.net/qos.html: QoS as found on any consumer router running on a standard Internet Service Provider will ONLY work on upstream/outbound data (data going from you to your ISP). You cannot realistically control the priority of data coming TO you FROM your ISP, since you can only control the data on your side of the modem.

Comment Re:Kickstarter's Problem (Score 1) 215

That's why I reached out to them for clarification and they responded with "Thanks for writing in. Unfortunately I'm unable to comment further on our terms, as it is a standalone documentation of our policies." It's pretty clear they want you the backer to think that refund means full monetary refund when you glance over the TOS but when push comes to shove ehhhhh we'll just let that be whatever the creator wants it to be.

Maybe I'm thinking about this the wrong way, but I don't think it's realistic to expect a full refund. Presumably they go through KS to get money to use in the development of the product, so it should be expected that some of that money is used. If the company has to sit on those funds in case the project is abandoned, then funding this way is no use whatsoever.

Comment Re:This ignores the big problem of hydrogen, leaka (Score 2) 113

This ignores the big problem of hydrogen, leakage. Currently about 10% to 20% of all hydrogen produced is lost to leakage. This has serious environmental ramifications. Hydrogen leakage will cause bigger and longer lasting holes in the ozone layer. By making hydrogen production cheaper and easier it just makes the leakage problem worse. http://www.nature.com/news/200...

Your own article says "Although its environmental benefits would still far outweigh any drawbacks.", so maybe you're overreacting a bit.

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