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Comment Re:Choices (Score 1) 702

And with Net Neutrality, if you don't get good government-regulated service... what?

Or are you pretty confident that the FCC will handle regulating the Internet as well as they do, say, terrestrial radio and broadcast TV?

Comment Re:Dutch Auction (Score 2, Interesting) 574

I doubt that most of the "scalped" tickets are actually sold by scalpers. Most are probably sold by friends and employees of the event and/or venue.

Think about it--before tickets go on sale, roadies and janitors get a chance to buy premium seats at face value, maybe even with an employee discount. The performers don't care, the venue doesn't have to pay employment taxes on this unofficial employee benefit, and the employee gets some extra cash.

Comment Re:Look at whose backing this (Score 1) 215

Having a way for people with simple needs to get quick medical attention and out of the waiting rooms so that people who do NOT have simple needs is a good idea.

It doesn't matter if the good idea comes from a source you think is compromised. The good idea stands on its own merits.

This is like the self-checkout line at grocery stores. I say they should go for it.

Comment Re:like trying to offer proof to a Birther (Score 0) 1093

1) People skeptical of the solidity of the science in AGW are not 9/11 conspiracy theorists. You're comparing one to the other because it makes your argument simpler. It's a meaningless and dishonest comparison. The questions don't go away simply because you call the questioner a Nazi.

2) It's not just the emails, though they are somewhat damning. People are looking at the code, and they're looking at the provenance of the information as well. It's not encouraging. It's certainly not "settled science". It looks more like "settled results".

3) Any rebuttal that begins with "you have to have a Ph.D. to understand why this number should be a 3 instead of a 4" smells funny. I don't have to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics to understand the basics of absorption line spectrums, because the explanation is straightforward and well understood. Hiding behind credentials is not a substitute for understanding thoroughly enough that you can explain the hows and whys and defend them.

I'm actually of the opinion that carbon emissions are not good, and we should do something about them. Carbon emissions make a fairly good metric for efficiency, and encouraging efficiency is a good thing. I object to grand, sweeping changes negotiated in the political sphere because once you introduce politics you can't disentangle it. Especially inside the global political sphere. Carbon emissions become a club to wield against political enemies and defend political interests, and it becomes decoupled from the environmental good.

So I'm in favor of continuing study of climatology, and to continue to work on the climate models. This is good science that we need to know. I'm in favor of establishing some kind of baseline to measure carbon emissions so we can make something like informed decisions. I object to climatologists needing to come up with doomsday scenarios to justify their funding, and I object to emissions legislation whose primary purpose seems to be redistribution of wealth. I don' think this makes me a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, nor a birther. Yet I think the current state of climatology is full of holes concealed by a lot of hand-waving.

Comment Re:From Mark: (Score 1) 219

Do they put something in the water cooler at Facebook HQ?

BTW, the "News Feed/Live Feed" thing is a piece of shit and whoever came up with it should be wrapped in barbed wire and shot into the sun.

Facebook used to be pretty nifty. Now it's made of AIDS. Fuck it.

Comment Re:Of course it is. (Score 1) 769

Using 'man' is fine, except it's a pain to use. How do you search? How do you scroll up a full screen? Down a full screen? Of course, I know how to move around inside the man-page, but I've been doing it since installing Linux meant downloading 18 Slackware floppy disk images. But it's slow. HTML with links is faster, and easier to read. Often more convenient, too, since you're likely to have a browser open in modern distros, but maybe not a terminal.

(Then of course there are the iconoclasts who insist on using 'info' instead of 'man'.)

All of this made sense when Unix was largely command-line only, but times have changed. The needs of the users have changed. The programs have changed, too. For the better, IMO. They're a lot more helpful than they were, when terse was an over-valued virtue.

If you're going to stick with 'man', emulate OpenBSD. Their manpages were among the best of the open-source world.

Comment Re:Hockey guy? (Score 2, Insightful) 874

Study on the matter and come to a conclusion yourself.

Unless you actually have a degree in this stuff, you aren't going to be a great judge of arguments.

This is nonsense, because we do this all the time. And those with degrees do not always judge correctly either.

It's a thinking person's responsibility to look into all of these important issues and come to their own conclusions. You're perfectly welcome to punt and let somebody else make the decision for you, but you shouldn't feel good about it.

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