Comment Re: Delta Airlines seemed quite offended... (Score 1) 237
No, the names normally work the other way in China. Xi is his family name, his father was Xi Zhongxun.
Comment Re:Why not just turn it off instead? (Score 1) 294
Same, evening daylight is useless to me because, realistically, I'm not getting out of work before 6:30 or 7 PM at the earliest. Morning daylight gives me the time to if nothing else go for a jog before work without running in the dark, which I hate, and which I would be stuck doing either way.
Also sun overhead at noon is just what noon means.
Comment Re:Not happening in democracies, this is why: (Score 1) 197
You burned 50% not 2%. It is 4% - 6% enriched, from that part you burn half, the ret is unusable uranium.
All Uranium is usable if you subject it to enough neutron flux. Yes the current nuclear industry throws away about 95% of its energy in unspent fuel. It is due to the way anti-proliferation is done. Which is done in a way so its less anti-proliferation and more anti-civilian nuclear power. PS AC because I'm mod'ing
Yeah, that was my understanding too AC. The technologies that allow for efficient reprocessing of once used nuclear fuel into a second round of fuel are closely related to the technologies used to turn nuclear fuel into nuclear bombs, is my recollection. So the US makes a big show of not doing it and telling other countries not to do it (it being build efficient multi-cycle nuclear reactors) as part of our anti-proliferation efforts. Other countries don't have the same hangups and so don't really have the same sort of nuclear waste storage issues, since they have so much less waste and it's so much less potent.
It's been about a million years since I looked into the issue though so I may be off in the details.
Comment Re:How do they make money? (Score 2) 37
Banks get paid 1.55% on deposits at their local Federal Reserve bank. So, they take your money, offer you 0.05% interest, deposit it at 1.55%, and make the spread of 1.5%, for example.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reqresbalances.htm
Comment Re:yes it is facist (Score 1) 457
"Democracy severely restricted? " that is the facist part, citizenship only open to those having gone thru military (federal service). You haven't gone through the service ? Then you are not a citizen with degraded rights. Saying it is open to everyone does not make it more democratic.
Would that make 17th century England fascist, since the franchise was rather restricted? Does fascism = limited franchise?
Comment Re:Will Starship Troopers Follow Heinlein's Book? (Score 1) 457
From Wikipedia - Heinlein made a similar claim, over two decades after Starship Troopers's publication, in his Expanded Universe and further claimed that 95% of "veterans" were not military personnel but members of the civil service and that only retired veterans could vote or hold office.[48]
And, the important point of federal service was that it was elective, not mandatory - it was something people chose rather than something they were forced to do.
Comment Possible workaround: Complain (Score 3, Informative) 180
My cube-mate called up and politely said "WFT!?", and after some sighing, Verizon agreed to send him a new box for free. So that's something.
Journal Journal: I didn't know I had a journal
What is the purpose of this site feature, I wonder? Let's test.
Comment Re:Why need money? (Score 3, Insightful) 51
I think part of the problem is, I wouldn't trust a company that said it's product was based on GnuPG, but wouldn't let me look at the source code for the encryption bits. How would you know they hadn't given the NSA a backdoor of some sort?
Terrorists Bomb Moscow Airport 640
jayme0227 writes "Terrorists detonated a bomb at Moscow's busiest airport on Monday, killing 35 people and wounding another 152, Russian authorities said. President Dmitry Medvedev, who called the bombing a terrorist attack, ordered additional security at Moscow's other airports and transportation hubs, and Moscow police went on high alert in case of additional bombs."
According to the NY Times, "The airport remained open on Monday evening, and passengers continued to flow through the hall where the bomb had exploded."
Meta-Research Debunks Medical Study Findings 261
jenningsthecat writes "From The Atlantic comes the story of John Ioannidis and his team of meta-researchers, who have studied the overall state of medical research and found it dangerously and widely lacking in trustworthiness. Even after filtering out the journalistic frippery and hyperbole, the story is pretty disturbing. Some points made in the article: even the most respected, widely accepted, peer-reviewed medical studies are all-too-often deeply flawed or outright wrong; when an error is brought to light and the conclusions publicly refuted, the erroneous conclusions often persist and are cited as valid for years, or even decades; scientists and researchers themselves regard peer review as providing 'only a minimal assurance of quality'; and these shortcomings apply to medical research across the board, not just to blatantly self-serving pharmaceutical industry studies. The article concludes by saying, 'Science is a noble endeavor, but it's also a low-yield endeavor ... I'm not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life.' I've always been somewhat suspicious of research findings, but before this article I had no idea just how prevalent untrustworthy results were."
Open Source Complaint Against IBM Gets Support 250
FlorianMueller writes "ZDNet blogger Dana Blankenhorn reports that '[t]he efforts by open source TurboHercules to break IBM's mainframe monopoly through the European Commission got some proprietary support this week when NEON Enterprise Software LLC of Austin, Texas, filed an EU complaint alongside a US antitrust lawsuit.' NEON's founder co-founded BMC, so the company is well-funded for this fight. In comments given to the IDG News Service, IBM claims that NEON's product, which saves mainframe customers money by optimizing the use of coprocessors, 'offers no innovation,' and accuses the 'copycat' of violating IBM's intellectual property. That's basically what IBM also said about the Hercules emulator. The European Commission is expected to take a decision on an investigation in a matter of months. Since IBM lobbies the EC over the Open Document Format, it's now accused of double standards."
The Apple Two 643
theodp writes "Over at Slate, Tim Wu argues that the iPad is Steve Jobs' final victory over Steve Wozniak. Apple's origins were pure Woz, but the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad are the products of the company's other Steve. Jobs' ideas have always been in tension with Woz's brand of idealism and openness. Crazy as it seems, Apple Inc. — the creator of the personal computer — is leading the effort to exterminate it. And somewhere, deep inside, Woz must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists."
OpenTTD 1.0.0 Released 107
Gmer writes "Eming.com reports that OpenTTD, the open source clone of the Microprose game Transport Tycoon Deluxe, has reached a milestone. OpenTTD 1.0.0 has been released 6 years after work started on the first version, with the help of hundreds of contributors and thousands of testers/players. Over 30 language translations are considered complete, and OpenTTD is available for *BSD, Linux, Solaris and Windows. OpenTTD is a business simulation game in which the player is in control of a transport company and can compete against rival companies to make as much profit as possible by transporting passengers and various goods by road, rail, sea or air."
Submission + - How 136 people became "7m illegal file-sharers (pcpro.co.uk) 5
Barence writes: "The British Government's official figures on the level of illegal file sharing in the UK come from questionable research commissioned by the music industry. The Radio 4 show More or Less examined the Government's claim that 7m people in Britain are engaged in illegal file sharing. The 7m figure actually came from a report written about music industry losses for Forrester subsidiary Jupiter Research — that report was privately commissioned by none other than the music trade body, the BPI. The 7m figure had been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m, gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software — in other words, only 136 people. That 11.6% was adjusted upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it." The 6.7m figure was then calculated based on an estimated number of internet users that disagreed with the Government's own estimate. The wholly unsubstantiated 7m figure was then released as an official statistic."
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