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Comment: Responsibility and Punishment (Score -1, Troll) 280

by kurthr (#43258787) Attached to: IRS Spent $60,000 Producing <em>Star Trek</em> Parody

This was pretty obviously a waste of money and unjustifiable...
Probably someone (junior) will be fired, hopefully someone senior will be prosecuted...
None of them have the political backing to really be protected.

Our banking overlords OTOH are only raping us for 10,000x more than this so it's hard to be too upset.

Comment: Re:Cap and Trade solves everything! (Score 1) 623

by kurthr (#42057141) Attached to: Report Says Climate Change Already Evident, Emissions Gap Growing

No, hasn't.
It was signed into law by Schwarzenegger, but it doesn't take effect until 2013...
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming_Solutions_Act_of_2006#section_5
I don't like cap and trade, but you're just trolling... the rest of the comments on this thread are no better.

Comment: Re:Remember the gorilla arm syndrome (Score 1) 85

by kurthr (#40602285) Attached to: Microsoft Buys Multi-Touch Pioneer Perceptive Pixel

Hmmm, but you don't work at the whiteboard/chalkboard to be individually productive. You do it in order to be seen from a distance without technological assistance.
Would you choose to do the rest of your work on a vertical 200" workspace? I doubt it.

Oh, and I am amazed that you have purchased non-tactile chalk... does it exude an anesthetic?
Touchscreens are tactile... you touch them.

Comment: ZOMG M$ might be like Apple :O (Score 2) 242

by kurthr (#40385605) Attached to: Locked-Down Tablets Endanger FLOSS For End Users

Speculation and fear mongering... Google could be more like FB. Slashdot could be more like reddit.

In particular, M$ is touting their enormous number of programs that run on Win8 (even if not in the Metro tiles).

There are enough bad things that might happen with some actual substance, why not worry about those.

Comment: Re:Fact check (Score 1) 568

by kurthr (#39563139) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why Aren't Schools Connected?

Next time before spewing "facts", please check where they come from!
When I try to google Mercatus, the first auto complete is Koch brothers...
The idea that we spend on average ~$90k/yr/child is hilarious. We only spend that much money on prison inmates.
The real number is ~$10k including the school lunch program, buses, and janitors.
That's comparable to the overhead cost of a class A building for a relatively low paid employee... Ok seems about right.
Oh you want to educate them too? Then throw in an "overpaid" teacher who makes 40-60k/year (gets summer off but grades at night/weekends).

Simple check. There are 12 years between 18-6 ages. The average life expectation is 72 years. So very roughly 1/6th of the population is of public school age.
There are over $300m us citizens and so there are ~50m school age students. If we were spending $100k/student/year on it would be $5T/year or half the GDP. FAIL!
Oh wait, you mean they ballooned the number by adding up 10 years together and it's actually less than $10k/yr?
You mean they only use 10 years so that they can make countries that stop education at 15 look better?

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
Ok 5% of GDP I'll accept that, but it's still well below what many other countries spend so no big surprise.

How much do other countries actually spend?
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.PRIM.PC.ZS

So we are ahead of Bhutan and Cameroon, but well behind Columbia. Congratulations!
Hmm... actual data that hasn't been so twisted by insane ideology that it at least passes a smell test.
Please learn to use the Internet.

Comment: Re:Define, please? (Score 4, Informative) 129

by kurthr (#38708406) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Changing Career From OLTP To OLAP Dev

OLTP - Online Transaction Processing. An application/database designed for larger, equal, or nearly equal volumes of database inserts, updates, and deletes, as there are reads. The database is generally more (and often highly) normalized, meaning that there is less data duplication across tables and/or within tables.
OLAP - Online Analytical Processing. Essentially a data warehouse designed for larger volumes of reads than there will be inserts, updates, or deletes (often relatively very, very few deletes). Less normalized meaning that there may be duplicated data across and/or within tables in order to increase query speed at the cost of possible consistency issues due to the data duplication.

Mark this informative comment the hell up!
And smash my Karma if you want to, but the (four letter) acronyms really didn't help the article much.

Comment: Re:Bad call by a union, nothing more (Score 5, Interesting) 394

by kurthr (#38635430) Attached to: World's Largest Passenger Plane May Be Unsafe, Some Say

You are correct in the case of airplanes and other macro structures...

But, interestingly the little mirrors in your TI based DMD/DLP movie projector use aluminum hinges.
They bend ~1% strain @540Hz for ~20khr before failing and that's >10^10 cycles!

Why? because the hinges are thinner than a grain size and so dislocations don't propagate.
Cool :)

Comment: Lightning is a DC not an AC Electric arc? (Score 5, Insightful) 199

by kurthr (#38184532) Attached to: Huge Tesla Coils Will Recreate Natural Lightning

Greg is a great guy, giant tesla coils are cool, and I'd love to know more about lightning, but it seems like lots of properties of air (especially when it has water or other polarizable droplets/particles) are frequency dependent. So I'm not sure how that this is really going to act like the natural lightning that we're used to... Science? Ok, but not Natural Lightning Science.

Ask not what's inside your head, but what your head's inside of. -- J.J. Gibson

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