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Comment: Re:$3500 for that? (Score 2) 49

by Leuf (#39649805) Attached to: Fully Functional Nintendo Controller Coffee Table

How about we don't have woodworkers price IT projects and don't have IT workers price woodworking projects? You are apparently expecting the wood to cut and assemble itself into a finished product, not consume any electricity in the process or require any rent to be paid on the facility it's building itself in. All of the tools required also purchased themselves and did not wear at all during the process. No other consumables like glue and sandpaper were needed. Further Etsy didn't take 3.5% and Paypal 2.5% off the top. No time was spent photographing, marketing, or answering questions from potential customers either.

All that not withstanding, that maple is highly figured curly maple (which doesn't really show in the article pictures but does in the Etsy ones) so you aren't even close on the lumber costs.

Comment: Re:I wonder how many people bought a pickup truck (Score 1) 998

by Leuf (#39625783) Attached to: Hybrid Car Owners Not Likely To Buy Another Hybrid

I bought a used pickup at the end of last year, but you wouldn't catch me buying a new one anytime soon. If you live in an area where it doesn't snow you might have a different view, but I've had enough experience with 2wd pickups in the snow to never want to do it again. So 4wd is a must for me and that adds between $4-6k which takes the price up into the $25k area. I'd sooner buy a small car that gets much better mileage for less money and just rent a truck when I actually need one. And yet if you look around the dealerships around here trucks are pretty much all you see. I guess we didn't get the memo about gas prices here.

What bugs me is that while pretty much every little hatchback lets you fold down the rear seats, very few let you also fold down the front seat to fit the long stuff you'd want the pickup for (okay you aren't going to get a full sheet of plywood in there, but that's what the truck rentals are for). The Honda Fit was pretty much the only one that I saw that would do it, and the Fit really ought to get better mileage for what it is. It could also stand to not be so freaking ugly.

Comment: Re:Sensitive information? (Score 2) 121

by Leuf (#39612729) Attached to: U.S. Government Hires Company To Hack Into Video Game Consoles
It would give them an excuse to start prying into the lives of anyone they associated with through gaming. Actually finding anyone who is a real threat is a secondary concern to having more people to have to look into and more ways to look into them so they can get more money and influence.

Comment: Re:Final Fantasy 7 (Score 1) 350

by Leuf (#39328569) Attached to: Computer Games That Defined RPGs In the 1980s

I'm playing through it right now on win7x64. First you install the game with the option to put as much on the hdd as possible. Then you install patch 1.02. The game will work at this point, but the movies won't because you don't have the right codecs for it. Then you install a mod that converts the game to opengl and allows it to run at higher resolution and compensate for widescreen monitors. There is a whole modding community for the game that among other things replaces the in game models for the characters with better versions, so Cloud doesn't look like a lego man outside of battles.

I've had some crashes, once in a great while when entering battles, and often it hangs up when exiting the program.

It will also work pretty much out of the box with an xbox 360 controller, except the dpad and L2 and R2 don't work. It's playable as is though, it thinks the left analog is a joystick and you don't really need L2 and R2.

Comment: Not my experience (Score 2) 187

by Leuf (#39121851) Attached to: How Google Is Remapping Public Transportation
It took about 4 years to get our new development on the map. I never had any joy getting the other companies to add it. Then I think Google added a different tool for reporting errors and when I reported it to them again I actually got a response back essentially saying you're right and we're going to fix it. Within a month or so it was on the map.

Comment: Re:"lost" water? (Score 1) 303

by Leuf (#39047287) Attached to: In Hot Water: The Effects of Even Modern Nuke Plants On Water

In the same way as if you were diverting the water for irrigation or drinking water, the water doesn't disappear it re-enters the system somewhere else. The people (and ecosystem, but no one really gives a damn) downstream have less of it.

Now if you had a plant that was fed by a river that came down from mountains just to the west of the plant, and the prevailing winds were east to west, then some of the condensate would tend to end up right back into the river.

Comment: Re:Do you ever wonder... (Score 2) 158

by Leuf (#38972335) Attached to: BigDog Robot Gets Much Bigger
Why would you ever not want to be at war for a whole month? What's needed is a genetically engineered horse or mule that is patented and requires genetically engineered food that is also patented (You wouldn't want the enemy to be able to just steal your $100k horse and be able to feed it with grass, would you?). Then the military will buy millions of them.

Comment: Easier solution (Score 5, Funny) 668

by Leuf (#38710394) Attached to: New Cable Designed To Deter Copper Thieves
Pirates use the copper in the lines to steal trillions of dollars worth of copyrighted materials. By stealing the copper, you are stealing the copyrighted materials that were transferring across them. Since we can't determine exactly how much copyrighted material was in the copper at the time, we need to assume it's at least 10 million dollars worth per foot. Since we'll never be able to recover this money from thieves desperate enough to steal copper, we simply need to authorize the RIAA and MPAA to shoot anyone suspected of stealing copper on sight.

Comment: Re:The little guy is screwed. (Score 4, Insightful) 413

by Leuf (#38660444) Attached to: Amazon To Collect Indiana Sales Tax In 2014

A zip code isn't enough to calculate a tax rate. There are county level taxes and country boundaries are not necessarily zip code boundaries. So you have to know what county the address is located in.

Furthermore, certain items are tax exempt or taxed at different rates, and not every jurisdiction has the same exemptions and rates. So you may not only need a database of rates at every level of government, but also a database of what is taxable for every level of government of every jurisdiction in the country.

Furthermore, certain jurisdictions have tax holidays so you somehow need to find these out for every jurisdiction in the country every day, while you check to see if anyone has changed their tax rate(s).

So what makes more sense, having every individual find their own solution to this problem, or have the entity responsible for the problem and receiving the money come up with a single solution and indemnify the businesses that use it against any inaccuracies present in the database?

Comment: Peer Criticism (Score 1) 505

by Leuf (#38644254) Attached to: JRR Tolkien Denied Nobel Due To Low Quality Prose

It's funny when you pull back the veil to see these guys being petty snobs. Oh, Robert Frost is an old fart, no award for him.

Recently I've seen George RR Martin ("The American Tolkien") completely dismiss all the critical reader reviews on Amazon of his last 2 books as being from trolls, saying he only cares about the opinion of his peers. There's nothing like the internet for giving you the non-sugarcoated truth of what people think, because they'll say things they would never say to your face.

Comment: Mythbusters to the rescue (Score 1) 891

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8E5dUnLmh4/

The problem is when one car is bigger than the other, this is much worse for the smaller car than the smaller car hitting a wall. This is the problem with SUVs, even the people who don't necessarily want to drive a larger vehicle may buy a larger vehicle to protect their family in the event of an SUV hitting them. A sub-compact with a 5 star front impact rating can still get munched in a head on collision with an SUV.

Comment: Re:Not a great example of a data dump (Score 3, Insightful) 643

by Leuf (#38612000) Attached to: What a Black Box Data Dump Looks Like
So, you read the data and tried to interpret it, but didn't RTFA or look at the picture of the mangled car? Here's a hint, a 2g crash does not result in the right front tire being separated from what used to be a car. It was severe enough to bend the A pillars, but that probably happened while the car was flipping over twice. Yeah, it was probably just the stereo though.

The heart is not a logical organ. -- Dr. Janet Wallace, "The Deadly Years", stardate 3479.4

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