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Comment Lifetime need? (Score 1) 117

When I was in high school people were looking at the most recent personal computer, which had 64k of ram, and exclaiming "when would you ever need that much ram?" The whole lab shared a 6 MB hard drive, and floppy disks held 360k. In college the computer I bought came with a 256 MB read/write optical drive and eventually a 40 MB hard drive. Everyone still thought those were huge.

Even a small OS like linux is a 180 MB download, and the USB sticks we use like we used to use floppies are now measured in GB. Assuming you won't need larger storage is a sure way to get yourself in trouble in a little while.

Comment Re:Summary missing information (Score 1) 120

Venus has a higher average temperature than any other planet - the clouds do a good job at distributing the heat fairly evenly about the planet regardless of the latitude, season, or whether it is day or night.

Mercury has a lower average because there's nothing holding heat in on the night side. It does, however, hold the record for the greatest temperature difference in the solar system, between the day and night halves.

Comment Re:Are we supposed to be more concerned? (Score 1) 83

On what basis are you calling it inefficient? Do you really think they should devote classes at Quantico to cover crimes that only involve things sent through the postal service? Would getting the postal service employees cooperation be easier if they saw the enforcement coming from outside their agency? Are you also against arson investigators being part of the Fire Department?

Just because you can call two different things "investigation" doesn't mean the process for each is going to work the same, or that an EPA investigator would be equally good at detecting smugglers crossing the border. Letting specialized agencies train people in the specifics of their specialty certainly appears to be more efficient when you look beyond the superficial.

Comment Re:The IRS Has Stingray Devices (Score 1) 83

Perhaps because there is no consensus that those drugs induce an "abortion", outside of catholic circles and the folks that insist that it is a person once sperm collides with egg? You're referring to Plan B, are you not? Or did you mean the birth control pill, since some also consider those to be a form of abortion?

The reason that people villainize hobby lobby is that they take the insulting stance of not trusting their own employees to do what is right and moral according to their own morals, and they want to enforce their own religious views upon the private lives of those employees. They don't know that any of their employees are doing any such thing, but they made a big deal about it being even possible, and want to create an option where they can take the power to make those decisions out of the hands of their employees.

Paying for health insurance that also covers abortion and birth control is no more guilt-inducing in the employer than paying your taxes makes the taxpayer guilty of murders committed by the bad apples in our military overseas.

Comment Re:About as far as you can throw a strawman (Score 1) 620

You're assuming that the guy flying the drone was actually interested in his neighbor's daughter, which hasn't been shown. That's just what the idiot with the gun was afraid of.

So, if your neighbor was on a ladder pruning the tree in his back yard, and decided he needed to take a picture of his handiwork so he could fit a birdhouse there, you'd feel that you have the right to shoot him because your scantily-clad child is in the background?

Where are you obtaining this legal right to shoot someone else that's not on your property, but is either on their own property or on public property? What is there to stop said neighbor from shooting you when you're taking a video of your daughter playing in your back yard, if the shot background includes his son in his back yard?

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