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Comment Title is wrong (Score 1) 2

Title says tap water... article says rain water. The synopsis is also wrong. The synopsis says that "3 Liters of rainwater collected contained 134 Becquerels of Iodine for an average of 20.1 Becquerel per liter", but this isn't the case (and in any case the average given those numbers would be 44.67 (134 / 3 = 44.67)). That data shows that 20.1 Bq/L of Iodine 131 were found (in three liters, meaning a total of 60.3 becquerel) and the parenthetical number (134) is "the number of liters of water that one would need to consume to equal the radiation exposure of a single round trip flight from San Francisco to Washington D.C. (0.05 mSv)."

Comment Re:solution: (Score 1) 557

You learn to turn emotion off when you have no control over the outcome beyond what you've been able to do. I do this quite well as a paramedic. I see horrific things, encounter situations that would leave others crying in the fetal position for days... but I get through it through a sense of personal accomplishment and team camaraderie. Am I stoic? To a degree. But I also know when to ask for help, and there's a communication style among my peers that allows for expression through humor, anger, etc. that's not frowned upon. Some of the best therapy I've ever had was sitting on the bumper of the ambulance at the hospital after a particularly bad call, scene, patient, etc. I don't *like* what I see, but I like being able to affect it. And being trusted to affect it. That doesn't make me a sociopath... just someone who WOULD be a sociopath if you locked me up in a windowless office for eight hours a day with Excel and actuarial tables.

Comment Re:Apple owns a patent for screen rotation? (Score 1) 434

Fancy words like 'hire,' and grammatical structures like "Which would have been thrown out." expressed as a sentence rather than a question?

I'm not defending patents for broad swaths of technology - not in the least. At the same time, requiring very specific patent applications requires the use of very detailed, technical language as part of the description. The patent suit problem is that patent approvals hinge on interpretation of descriptive language. It's the classic elephant problem - you and I describing the same thing but in completely different vocabularies.

The Internet

The Internet Is 'Built Wrong' 452

An anonymous reader writes "API Lead at Twitter, Alex Payne, writes today that the Internet was 'built wrong,' and continues to be accepted as an inferior system, due to a software engineering philosophy called Worse Is Better. 'We now know, for example, that IPv4 won't scale to the projected size of the future Internet. We know too that near-universal deployment of technologies with inadequate security and trust models, like SMTP, can mean millions if not billions lost to electronic crime, defensive measures, and reduced productivity,' says Payne, who calls for a 'content-centric approach to networking.' Payne doesn't mention, however, that his own system, Twitter, was built wrong and is consistently down."

Places Rated, Skeptically 125

Readers left more than 500 comments on yesterday's post suggesting that, after accounting for local price differences, the best-paid tech jobs aren't in Silicon Valley or other areas well known for computer jobs, but rather in smaller cities around the country. Quality of life is overall more important than salary, though, and it isn't an easy thing to measure. Several readers pointed to reasons why the most expensive places to live get to be so expensive, and why (for those who can afford to live there in the first place) locations like Silicon Valley are often worth their premiums. Read on for some of the most interesting comments from the discussion in today's Backslash summary.

Dvorak Admits To Trolling Mac Users 354

jalefkowit writes "Tech pundit John Dvorak has long been known for his inflammatory opinions. Many have suspected that these opinions are just a way to drive up traffic to his column. Now, we have it straight from the horse's mouth: Dave Winer has Dvorak on video describing his methodology for trolling the Mac community to pump up his stats." I have to admit I'm also guilty of posting the occasional inflammatory story, but I find it's usually best to suffix the title with a question mark, and let our ever-knowledgeable readers hash out the issue and decide for themselves.

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