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Comment: Re:While they're at it... (Score 1) 587

by DaMattster (#43347937) Attached to: Samoa Air Rolling Out "Pay As You Weigh" Fares

Maybe they should also increase the fee for health insurance more significantly if you're enormous. That would have to be more of a BMI thing but seriously, I should not be paying this much for insurance. I think the average increase for tobacco users is like 40% and it's even less for fat people. Well guess what! It should be 10x for tobacco users and 10x for fat people and then they can easily drop mine 4x. Talk about a motivator to lose weight and stop smoking! Flood insurance is calculated precisely by risk of actually flooding. Why not health insurance? In fact one trampoline or pool alone can double your homeowner's insurance because that's the mathematical increase in probability of having a claim. If you're 400 pounds or smoke a pack a day, I'd say your odds of needing healthcare actually exceed my own by 1000x. So yeah, plane tickets, health insurance, buffets, hit them everywhere that it's realistic so they can get an idea of the actual impact on society and business costs because they're so damn fat.

Man are you an unhappy person. Until you are perfect, perhaps you should tone down some of the judgement.

Comment: Microsoft Thinking (Score 0) 95

by DaMattster (#43317797) Attached to: Microsoft Makes Millions Renting Campus Space to Vendors
In the Microsoft-mind, a vendor should feel honored and privileged to be able to have a client with such world recognition that they should be willing to rent office space from the Redmond complex. It's arrogance plain and simple and Microsoft is slowly and steadily becoming less relevant in computing today. We'll see how longer MS can capitalize on its own name to charge for office space in its own complex. I wonder how many vendors eventually just say "fuck it!" and walk away
Power

Laser Fusion's Brightest Hope 115

Posted by samzenpus
from the coming-together dept.
First time accepted submitter szotz writes "The National Ignition Facility has one foot in national defense and another in the future of commercial energy generation. That makes understanding the basic justification for the facility, which boasts the world's most powerful laser system, more than a little tricky. This article in IEEE Spectrum looks at NIF's recent missed deadline, what scientists think it will take for the facility to live up to its middle name, and all of the controversy and uncertainty that comes from a project that aspires to jumpstart commercial fusion energy but that also does a lot of classified work. NIF's national defense work is often glossed over in the press. This article pulls in some more detail and, in some cases, some very serious criticism. Physicist Richard Garwin, one of the designers of the hydrogen bomb, doesn't mince words. When it comes to nuclear weapons, he says in the article, '[NIF] has no relevance at all to primaries. It doesn't do a good job of mimicking secondaries...it validates the codes in regions that are not relevant to nuclear weapons.'"
Google

Google Releases Street View Images From Fukushima Ghost Town 63

Posted by samzenpus
from the new-fallout-map dept.
mdsolar writes in with news that Goolge has released Street View pictures from inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima disaster. "Google Inc. (GOOG) today released images taken by its Street View service from the town of Namie, Japan, inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011. Google, operator of the world's biggest Web search engine, entered Namie this month at the invitation of the town's mayor, Tamotsu Baba, and produced the 360-degree imagery for the Google Maps and Google Earth services, it said in an e-mailed statement. All of Namie's 21,000 residents were forced to flee after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the town, causing the world's worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl. Baba asked Mountain View, California-based Google to map the town to create a permanent record of its state two years after the evacuation, he said in a Google blog post."
Technology

Gartner Says 3D Printers Will Cost Less Than $2,000 By 2016 170

Posted by samzenpus
from the get-you-one dept.
colinneagle writes "Widespread adoption of 3D printing technology may not be that far away, according to a Gartner report predicting that enterprise-class 3D printers will be available for less than $2,000 by 2016. 3D printers are already in use among many businesses, from manufacturing to pharmaceuticals to consumers goods, and have generated a diverse set of use cases. As a result, the capabilities of the technology have evolved to meet customer needs, and will continue to develop to target those in additional markets, Gartner says."
The Internet

Ship Anchor, Not Sabotaging Divers, Possibly Responsible For Outage 43

Posted by samzenpus
from the who's-to-blame dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "This week, Egypt caught three men in the process of severing an undersea fiber-optic cable. But Telecom Egypt executive manager Mohammed el-Nawawi told the private TV network CBC that the reason for the region's slowdowns was not the alleged saboteurs — it was damage previously caused by a ship. On March 22, cable provider Seacom reported a cut in its Mediterranean cable connecting Southern and Eastern Africa, the Middle East and Asia to Europe; it later suggested that the most likely cause of the incident was a ship anchor, and that traffic was being routed around the cut, through other providers. But repairs to the cable took longer than expected, with the Seacom CEO announcing March 23 that the physical capability to connect additional capacity to services in Europe was "neither adequate nor stable enough," and that it was competing with other providers. The repairs continued through March 27, after faults were found on the restoration system; that same day, Seacom denied that the outage could have been the work of the Egyptian divers, but said that the true cause won't be known for weeks. 'We think it is unlikely that the damage to our system was caused by sabotage,' the CEO wrote in a statement. 'The reasons for this are the specific location, distance from shore, much greater depth, the presence of a large anchored vessel on the fault site which appears to be the cause of the damage and other characteristics of the event.'"
The Military

United States Begins Flying Stealth Bombers Over South Korea 567

Posted by samzenpus
from the nice-day-for-a-flight dept.
skade88 writes "The New York Times is reporting that the United States has started flying B-2 stealth bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the U.S. Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The U.S. military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The U.S. also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting its allies in the region. The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' mainland."

Comment: Forget the big guys! (Score 1) 198

by DaMattster (#43284867) Attached to: Another Way Carriers Screw Customers: Premium SMS 'Errors'
I've been using Page Plus Cellular since January of 2009 and I will never go back to T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon. With Page Plus, I am in control as there are no automated premium SMS features to sign up for and there are few gotchas. I like paying 55.00 per month for service levels that would be a lot more expensive at the big boy's doorstep and I've been contract free for four years now. I bought a brand new iPhone 4S and activated it on PP without an issue and I have an iPhone at a fraction of the service cost! 3G is good enough for all but the most demanding of video streaming.

Thufir's a Harkonnen now.

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