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Comment Re:Good idea, but terrible implementation (Score -1) 110

by Arker (#47404379) Attached to: YouTube Issuing "Report Cards" On Carriers' Streaming Speeds
"First, what gives with the goofy webpages that try to scroll like pages of a book?"

It's not really a webpage. 'Designers' have never liked the web and love to break it - this is the result. 884 lines of idiocy, full of 'favicons' and malicious attempts to direct my browser to Facebook! of all things, but no actual webpage, not even a fallback apology when viewed with a sane browser, nothing but a title and a blank page.

But to answer your question, what gives? Cranial rectosis. It's an epidemic, and obviously it's hitting google pretty hard right now too.

Comment Re:Got To Be A Ritual (Score 1) 63

by Arker (#47403463) Attached to: IBM Tries To Forecast and Control Beijing's Air Pollution
"Oxygen isn't a pollutant either, unless you breath too much of it. Similarly for nitrogen."

How much you breath has absolutely nothing to do with it. Oxygen, Nitrogen, and CO2 are the natural components of the atmosphere, not pollutants.

"Here's a clue, have a sense of proportion. Pump enough CO2 into the atmosphere, big surprise, the atmosphere heats up. Don't want to believe it is problem? Please, don't. However, you cannot ignore the CO2 acidifying the oceans and taking out coral reefs and shell fish. Don't think that's a problem? The ocean is the base of the food chain. Surely, you care about that, eh? Nah? Okay, please go back to sleep."

This does not appear to be relevant to anything I posted, indeed, you appear to behaving quite the conversation with an imaginary friend there.

Comment Re:Got To Be A Ritual (Score 2) 63

by Arker (#47402641) Attached to: IBM Tries To Forecast and Control Beijing's Air Pollution
Carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant.

It's a natural component of the atmosphere, produced every time an animal breaths or respirates in any manner (fish do it too.)

Now, focus on the real pollution for a moment and realize that there are still very real and enormous costs to your proposed policy of 'If it pollutes simply end it.'

So what are you going to use for power, Solar? Do you have any idea how much pollution you have to create BEFORE you get a PV cell ready to START producing a miniscule trickle of electricity? Hydro-electric damages the riverine ecology and there is still plenty of pollution attributable to its construction and maintenance on top of it. The latter goes for wind as well. *You cannot even construct* your "clean" power plant without polluting to do it, so electricity is out the window, welcome to the new dark ages.

Unless that is really what you want, you will have to adjust your expectations. Some level of pollution being unavoidable, the question becomes how to keep it within safe bounds.

Comment Re:TSA = the USA's Gestapo (Score 2) 702

by Arker (#47399559) Attached to: TSA Prohibits Taking Discharged Electronic Devices Onto Planes
"Hahahaha, Nazis? Unless you're taking a direct flight to a concentration camp, gtfo."

The iconic image of the Nazis I was raised on was the Gestapo agent demanding papers. The US is supposed to be better than that. No internal passports, a free man (or woman) has the right to go about their business in peace, does anyone still remember those days?

Comment Re:What's worse? (Score 1) 201

You misunderstand the function of law enforcement.

It is not, directly, to help the victim. In many cases the victim is, after all, beyond help.

Rather, it is to prevent future victims. First by putting the victimizer out of business - and if that doesnt help the existing victim, in fact even if hurts the victim, it still has to be done, for the sake of the potential future victims. This is why we ask rape victims to testify even though they may find that as traumatic as the original crime. Not to fix the damage that's been done (that's the function of civil law, not criminal law) but to prevent future damage.

Comment Memory? (Score 2) 415

by Arker (#47397403) Attached to: Police Using Dogs To Sniff Out Computer Memory
I am not surprised that the reporter is a technical illiterate who cant tell memory from storage, but surely the submitter or the editor one could show half a brain cell working and correct it?

All the devices mentioned are storage, not "memory".

Anyway, police dogs are a scam. Like Clever Hans, they are more attuned to their trainers emotions than s/he is, and can baffle and impress the unwary with seemingly impossible tricks as a result. Granting a warrant based on a dog alerting is effectively the same thing as granting it because a cop has a hunch.

Comment Re:Not surprising. (Score 0) 725

by Arker (#47393427) Attached to: When Beliefs and Facts Collide
Human activity has an affect on the environment, and has been having an effect on the environment for *at least* 10,000 years. That's not in dispute.

But how big an affect, in what direction at what time, and how that all works in context of the much larger and more powerful forces that also effect climate change? That's something that bears investigating.

Carbon is not a pollutant, it's a normal and necessary component of the atmosphere. The concentration varied widely over time long before humans evolved. There are several feedback mechanisms involved - both positive and negative.

An example of positive feedback - higher CO2 raises the temperature slightly which causes the oceans to release yet more Co2, raising the temperature further in a vicious cycle... but wait!

An example of negative feedback - higher CO2 increases plant growth. Plants harvest CO2 from the atmosphere and exhale O2 - reducing CO2 and thus bringing the temperature back down!

The biggest difference, on a scientific level, between the AGW crowd and their detractors seems to boil down to differing estimates of the net affect of all those feedback loops. The AGW folks insist it is positive, and thus that increasing the C02 concentration can be counted on to trigger runaway warming and catastrophe. The skeptics think it's a net negative, in which case any disturbances caused by CO2 emissions will correct themselves given a little time.

That's a factual dispute and one that should be relatively easy to settle, were politics not involved.

Comment Re:interesting times... (Score 0) 221

by Arker (#47388381) Attached to: IeSF Wants International Game Tournaments Segregated By Sex [Updated]
No, I'm forgetting none of this (although some is not exactly true,) despite so many replies from people that did not grasp the thread. This was the GP I was defending;

"This is simply not true. Margeret Murdock [wikipedia.org] won a silver medal at the 1976 Olympics (she lost the battle for gold under very controversial circumstances) and set four individual world records. In the eighties, most shooting sports became gender-segregated, the only exceptions being skeet and trap, which became gender-segregated right after a woman (Zhang Shan [wikipedia.org]) had won the gold medal in the skeet competition in 1992. There are other examples as well.

So, if today's women are no longer competitive with men, then that's certainly a consequence of gender segregation and not an argument for it."

To recap, in previous times, while women may have faced some discouragement from competing, they DID compete in open competition right along with the men, and in many cases performed very well. This did not sit right with some men and so we got segregated events where women have, if we believe another poster, not produced the same sorts of scores their predecessors did shooting against men.

I am not swearing that last part is true - I dont now - but accepting it for the sake of argument, the lesson would appear to be that humans perform better when they are allowed to compete at their level as determined by skill, not gender.

Comment Re:interesting times... (Score -1) 221

by Arker (#47377241) Attached to: IeSF Wants International Game Tournaments Segregated By Sex [Updated]
If we were talking about a sport where male physiology grants some sort of advantage, you might well have a point.

We are not. Male physiology is no advantage whatsoever in shooting sports. I know fewer women that shoot regularly than men, but the ones that do are not in any way inferior - in fact I would say the opposite based on my experience.

Given the facts, the most likely hypothesis is that yes, females do indeed do more poorly when segregated into a less-competitive ghetto than when allowed to compete on equal terms with their peers.

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