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Comment Re:Urban Fetch (Score 1) 139

Yeah I feel like Uber drivers benefit differently than a dedicated delivery person. If your choice is to idle in a parking lot waiting for an Uber request or making $5 in 10 minutes then you can pad what was an expense with a small amount of income. $30 an hour for a delivery van is probably on the low end of breaking even. $15 an hour filler + $50 an hour driving is better than $0/hr filler + $50 an hour driving.

Comment Re:Where is the misuse of military equipment charg (Score 1) 286

The excessive surveillance was so shocking to the conscience that they will even allow child pornographers to go free. Bad guys on all sides, and nobody wins.

This is not "excessive surveillance". The person possessing child pornography put it on a file sharing service. Set its permissions to public and seemingly deliberately placed the files into a publicly searchable database.

This isn't even a case of a search engine finding things on a server that wasn't supposed to be exposed to the internet, Gnutella's entire purpose is to share files with other people. The fact that a government agent bothered searching this man's index of public files he intends to share with others is not an overbreach of his privacy. It would be like me putting my couch on Craiglist "Free couch at this address" And then a NCIS officer finding cocaine inside. It's not like the NCIS broke into every single person's house in Washington state.

The only reason this was overturned was not due to shocking surveilance, but because the officer who performed the search was in the military. The FBI should and can continue to perform these types of searches.

Comment Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score 1) 770

It's a perfectly valid argument because it's a question of sample size.

"We have performed 97 experiments. 97 of them reached this conclusion. 3 reached a different conclusion. The data from our study therefore points towards the 97 experiments."

It's not a perfect argument but scientists as a proxy for hard research isn't a bad way to gauge a scientific concept. If you measure something 100 times and come up with one result 97 times, it doesn't mean those 97 measurements are correct but being able to reproduce your results 97 times with only 3 failures would certainly increase your confidence. In this case it's 0.97 * thousands of researchers * dozens of scientific papers. It's effectively a distributed survey not of authority but of hard data. When a scientist says "I accept Global Warming as Fact" they aren't saying that presumably as an opinion what they're saying is "I have reviewed as much literature and research on the subject and the vast majority concludes that Global Warming is Fact." The scientists are just proxies for the hundreds of papers each has read and the studies they themselves have performed.

Comment Re:Ask them (Score 1) 130

Or, just use the ProRes or DNxHD.

VHS is 4:1:1 and incredibly soft. ProRes and DNxHD are both so lightly compressed and 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 that you'll never notice the difference.

It doesn't need to be Uncompressed. You might want it to be 10bit but even that would be pushing it.

The only time you really need uncompressed footage is when you're dealing with noisy footage which is difficult to compress. VHS footage is so soft that there is very little entropy to compress so the 4:1 or 6:1 compression of DNxHD for instance would be effectively lossless.

Comment Re:Adequate legroom is not a premium feature (Score 1) 819

Adequate leg room isn't a premium feature. It's simple human decency to allow taller than average passengers the ability to sit with reasonable comfort without forcing them to pay more for the "privilege". There is nothing wrong with airlines waiving premium seating fees for unusually tall passengers to get them a adequate leg room.

If you're tall you're also probably making a few thousand more per year than your shorter co-passengers. You're also probably male, which means you make a little more money. All told being tall generally gives you enough benefits in life that you can pay $20 more for more legroom. I wish a better seat at a concert be able to see over your freakishly tall head was only $20.

A 2004 study by psychologist Timothy A. Judge, Ph.D., of the University of Florida, and researcher Daniel M. Cable, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina, found that every inch of height amounts to a salary increase of about $789 per year (the study controlled for gender, weight and age).

Comment Re:Anthropometrics (Score 1) 819

but when even consumers that care about it have trouble finding out exactly which aircraft serves a route for their date of travel and what the seat configuration is, it's hard to blame consumers for not taking it into account.

Go to SeatGuru.com enter in the flight number and date. Tada! But even that is a misrepresentation of how hard it is. Almost every single seat on every single flight is the same. A normal economy seat is about 30" and a normal premium economy is about 34 or 35". Almost nobody buys premium economy even though it usually costs about $20 - $100 more. The airlines try very hard to advertise these seats but people just aren't willing to pay. Clearly people have decided that they prefer cramped seats to spacious economy seats even though the whine and moan. "Oh man economy is so terrible these days!" "Are you willing to spend $20 on an economy plus?" "No!"

Comment Re:Cheapest Ticket (Score 1) 819

Tall people can afford premium economy.

A 2004 study by psychologist Timothy A. Judge, Ph.D., of the University of Florida, and researcher Daniel M. Cable, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina, found that every inch of height amounts to a salary increase of about $789 per year (the study controlled for gender, weight and age).

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/Car...

Comment Re:Anthropometrics (Score 2) 819

I'm 5'11" and there is plenty of room in Economy plus. If you're a frequent flyer you can get Economy Plus for free when you book a ticket on United, I assume Delta is the same for their frequent flyers.

Over the last 5 years United Airlines has had an average profit of 0.2% Delta : 7.3%. Southwest: 3.2% American: -5.3% (loss). JetBlue 2.9%. Those are very low profit margins. I'm one of the first people to call for government intervention when warranted but the airlines don't need to be bailed out or subsidized just because people aren't willing to pay the cost of an airline's seat. If people want lots of leg room or they're slightly taller they can pay for the extra space they want. If they want a super cheap, basement discount seat in exchange for a little less comfort then I don't see a problem with that either. Should we outlaw small cars too because they don't have large trunks?

Either one of two statements is true:
1) Access to air travel is essential to people of all economic means.
2) Air travel is a luxury.

If #1 is true then we shouldn't be forcing airlines to increase their prices. We shouldn't force airlines to increase their seat spacing since it would price many people out an already expensive product.

If #2 is true then we shouldn't do force airlines to increase their seat spacing because it's simply a luxury good and if people want a slightly nicer luxury they can pay for additional expense if it's truly valuable to them. And if someone really wants to know exactly what kind of seat they're in for when booking... they can enter it into SeatGuru and check.

Comment Re:bailing water at this point, ms. (Score 1) 126

Ummm, Bing is not Yahoo. Yahoo is Bing.

3% isn't great. But Apple only has 10%. So it's not *that* far behind what most people consider the leader.

IE is dead second. Well behind Chrome but way ahead of Firefox etc.

Bing is also the default search engine for the iPhone. So I guess that means Apple is in on this conspiracy to cram Bing down everyone's throats.

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