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Comment Re:Someone is going to pay one way or another. (Score 4, Insightful) 644

There's a difference between donating some genetic material to a couple who can't conceive on their own, and being a father.

This man, at the request of the couple he was donating the material to, signed away any rights/claims to being a father. This is completely and utterly wrongheaded on behalf of the state, and I hope the man is able to take it to appeals.

And I say that as a lesbian who has been in a similar situation to the women in this case. (we ended up not having kids, but were looking at the possibility).

Submission + - New supernova seen in nearby galaxy M82

The Bad Astronomer writes: A new and potentially bright supernova was just discovered in the nearby galaxy M82. This is a Type Ia supernova, the catastrophic explosion of a white dwarf. It appears to be on the rise, and may have been caught as much as two weeks before peak brightness. It's currently already brighter than magnitude 12, and may get to mag 8, easy to see in small telescopes. The galaxy is less than 12 million light years away, so this may become one of the best-studied supernovae in recent times. Type Ia supernovae are used to measure dark energy, so seeing one nearby is a huge boon to astronomy.

Comment Re:Lesson from this story...don't be a glass hole! (Score 0) 1034

Apologists.

There, now that we have that out of the way, and are safe from unnecessary ad hominem attacks (that, by the way, is the reason I chose this user name: it's a pretty good asshole detector. People who pass the test are the ones who don't comment on it as part of their justification for why they think they're right and I'm wrong), we can simply say that I don't really care whether he'd been doing it for months or years. He still wore a wearable video camera into a movie theatre. It's clear he didn't think about the repercussions for his actions, and rather than whine about how he got hassled by the FBI on the Internet (where such claims are essentially unverifiable), perhaps he should be taking a good long look at himself and why he didn't realize that it'd be a bad idea in the first place.

Comment Re:meanwhile.... (Score 2) 513

Except for RAM, the vast majority of PC users will never fully max out their machine. They won't even get close to what the CPU can do. Even 10 years ago when someone asked me what kind of PC they should buy, I would tell them to buy the oldest machine they can find with twice as much memory as they think they need -- because in my experience, lots of RAM contributes more to the longevity of a machine than loads of CPU.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but I figured I'd lend a me-too to support what you're saying --

I have a gaming system. It's 2 years old. Core i5 2500k, overclocked at 4.8GHz, with 16GB of RAM. I bought it for $1000, 2 years ago, and haven't needed to upgrade anything. Not even the video card. It's currently connected to the TV via HDMI, with an xbox controller connected to it, and I play Steam games on the big screen with it. It'll be a while before it needs any kind of upgrade, in part because I've gone to Linux on the gaming machine (was originally Windows 7), and in part because since buying a Playstation, I don't see much point in playing the rat race on the desktop.

I'm currently typing this on a 3-year old Dell Vostro v130n, which came with Ubuntu 10.04, 2GB of RAM, and a dual core 1.2GHz Sandy Bridge celeron. The version of Linux that's on it has changed to something much more modern, but other than that, it does *everything* I want on a laptop. I literally cannot see any reason to ever replace this laptop before it dies a horrible death. That could happen as soon as I click submit to this comment, but it could also be years before that happens. My next laptop will probably be a chromebook... wiped for my preferred flavour of Linux, but the majority of computer users wouldn't even need to do that, because ChromeOS does everything they want with their computers for a fraction of the cost of buying a Windows machine, let alone something like a Macbook Pro or Air.

Comment Re:New MS business plan (Score 3, Interesting) 513

Vista didn't actually suck all that much if you used it for enough time... the real problem with Vista* was that it took a while for the prefetch service to learn which applications you used most frequently. Once it got a handle on what you liked to do with the system, it was actually fairly zippy. During the first couple of weeks with Vista, however, it was horrible. SP1 improved this, but it was still an unpleasant experience for its first few weeks.

* -- that's aside from the obvious bits about driver incompatibility and the fact that they dropped an OS with a 1GB minimum RAM requirement (2GB for 64-bit) in an era when it was normal to see systems with 512MB.

Comment Re:Lesson from this story...don't be a glass hole! (Score 3, Insightful) 1034

Or, you know, he just didn't think it bothered anyone and no one said anything to him until the FBI dragged him out of a theater. Maybe he didn't see any reason for carrying two pairs of glasses around for doing different things. I only need glasses for reading. I don't wear them all the time and I don't carry them with me because it's a pain to carry a fragile pair of glasses around unless your actually wearing them. Glasses are too fragile to just stick in your pant pocket and cases for them are too bulky.

He still wore a wearable video camera into a movie theatre. What the hell did he think would happen?

It boggles the mind that people are being apologists for what he did. I agree that it probably didn't need involvement of the FBI, but how anybody could be so incredibly naive as to think that wearing a video camera into a movie theatre would be a good idea is just incredible.

Comment Re:Lesson from this story...don't be a glass hole! (Score 1, Funny) 1034

Perhaps if he was able to scrape together $1500 for Google Glass (presumably more since he's got prescription lenses in it), he could have found $50 for a pair of cheap prescription glasses to use in places where Glass either isn't feasible or allowed....

http://www.zennioptical.com/lo...

If it's his only pair of prescription lenses, then he's an idiot. If he owns other prescription lenses but decided to bring the wearable video camera to a movie theater anyway, then he's at best a troll and at worse, still an idiot.

Comment Re:Murica Fuck yea! (Score 1) 635

Yes, some people do that. Other people have better things to do with their life than to spend 30 minutes every day in a store. I buy food maybe once in two weeks. Some of it is in cans, other is dry (pasta, rice, flour) and other is frozen, so it can be stored nearly forever. I load the car pretty well on those trips. The store is in about 40 minutes of driving from my home. (There are stores closer than that; the closest is about 15 minutes away, but I dislike it.) I usually stop by the better store when I am in the area for other reasons; and when you are free to pick the day, it's not difficult to find time.

See there's the issue. The closest store to you is a 15 minute drive away. The closest store to me is a 2 minute walk. Sure, stock up on staples that don't expire (just bought a 20lb bag of rice today, for example, which is several months' supply), but when you live that close to a store with a good deli/meat section and good produce, why wouldn't you walk there to get fresh ingredients daily? They're much better for you than frozen when it's in season, and meat that hasn't been frozen tastes way better.

Comment Much less (Score 2) 635

I drive significantly less than I did 10 years ago. I moved into the city, and am now able to take public transit to work, which was, previously, the lion's share of my driving.

As for the why... the price of fuel is a pretty big factor. Between that, and the fact that I'm now living in an area where public transit is a viable option, I don't really see the point in driving the car for anything other than shopping trips, and I can do most of those on the weekend. The very few things I may need during the week can be had at the grocery store, deli, or drug store across the street from my apartment building.

I still own a car, and I can't see myself ever giving it up, but I don't *need* to drive everywhere like I did when I lived in the country.

Comment Re:Autoupdate (Score 1) 194

Gentoo isn't actually that bad, though it does require a little more understanding of how the system works than something like Ubuntu. It does have a fairly decent package management system though, and because most of what you're using is compiled it tends to be a fairly fast system to use.

Each to their own. For me, computers have gotten fast enough that I don't really care about a few milliseconds here or there, and am currently using a Ubuntu derivative now for ease of package management (and because this particular one has a DE that I can't find elsewhere yet, as it's too new). But I did use Slackware for nearly 15 years before I decided I wanted something that was less involved for the package management. That's the beauty of the system -- you can do what you want with it, and there's many many different paths to accomplishing the same goal.

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