Posts by ShrNfr

Remember that $5,000 you spent on Tesla's Autopilot and then sued when it didn't deliver? We have good news...

However, the present autopilot has been shown that it has the follow the non-existent line into the wall followed by a crash and burn feature enabled.

NRA gives FCC boss Ajit Pai a gun as reward for killing net neutrality. Yeah, an actual gun

Re: We have the clueless leading the blind...

50% of the 40,000 deaths on the roads of America are due to drugs and alcohol. In my book, that is not a "very few" number of people. In addition, almost all crime involves the use of a private automobile at some point. Obviously, these will not be eliminated, but you're more than a bit myopic in your statistics. I do not think the NRA should be involved in "Net Neutrality", that is not their charter. However, when 3 times as many people are killed with baseball bats, hammers, etc. as are killed with long guns, and a similar number are killed with people's bare hands, your hatred of the NRA is a bit over the top.

NASA taps ESA satellite Swarm for salty ocean temperature tales

Re: Hmmm....

Nothing, nada, zilch is ever proved in science. The only thing you can do is to reject a null hypothesis with a given degree of significance. Neither is science a democracy, it is a raw dictatorship of reality. When I see a study that says that the null hypothesis of "The observed warming in the 20th century was due to natural causes" with a 95% or better significance, I will take "Global Money Grubbing" of the Escathological Cargo Cult of the CAGW more seriously. Till then it is simply another exercise in Lysenkoism.

Earth days are getting longer – by 1.8 milliseconds per century

I blame global warming and CO2

Before somebody else does.

Three certainties in life: Death, taxes and the speed of light – wait no, maybe not that last one

Re: Age of the universe

In the ultimate, it is very hard to distinguish distance from time. You can say that distance is something that is defined by "how far" something goes in a given time or time is a measure of "how long" something takes to go a given distance. Even things like atomic clocks fall victim to this since they rely on counting the number of oscillations of something that is produced by a transition of the wave function of an electron through a distance. But how long is the distance? Well it is one that produces a given number of waves in a given time. And there you are back to ground zero. About the only potentially independent definition of length is the Plank length, but even there, it is defined in terms of time.

I would continue at length, but I do not have the time.

If you care to put your waders on, the paper is available here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.03312v2.pdf

Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals

Big deal. All these and more are available on Amazon.

NYSE halts trading in Violin Memory shares

Yup. There are the gray sheets, the pink sheets and the oh sheets. I have seen totally worthless stock of companies who have declared bankruptcy and have had their shares cancelled trade on these venues. All you need is a greater fool and you can sell this stuff.

$329 for a MacBook? Well, really a 'HacBook' built on an old HP

They do not have any available for shipment. This is just putting a site (that appears not to work) to collect interest and perhaps advance orders. If they get enough orders they will buy a bunch of these HP laptops from wherever and do the hackintosh trip on them.

Viscous liquid oozing down the walls? You must have hives

No fair, no Noomi Rapache.

Linus Torvalds in sweary rant about punctuation in kernel comments

/*********************************/

/* This is what we used */

/* in PL/I */

/********************************/

/* tough if you don't like it */

IoT puts assembly language back on the charts

BR 14

END

FBI won't jail future US president over private email server

Re: Interesting downplaying there

Are you aware that it was explicitly stated today that the stuff was classified prior to it being sent? Some later stuff was "up-classified", but it is the responsibility of a person with a clearance to know what should be classified, even if it is not currently so. Further, there are "need to know" requirements. It would have been interesting to see who the recipients of the classified information were.

BAM! Astroboffins now have a second way of picking up black holes' collision super kicks

"The shift between short and long wavelengths will show if the gravitational waves from super kicks are being directed towards or away from Earth."

Think about this sentence for a tad. The answer is obviously yes.

Too Naked for the Nazis streaks to literary glory

Well, the author of "behind" is: Jonathan A. Allan is Canada Research Chair in Queer Theory and Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Brandon University.

Why am I not surprised?

I've seen Kaspersky slap his staff with a walrus penis – and even I doubt the false-positive claims

Hey gang, everyone should own an oosik. http://briankulik.com/ode.html

eBay bans CD sales of metal band Burzum, citing offensive material

Re: I don't get the complaints about Mien Kampf

Actually, I bought my first edition, first issue copy of that book from a antiquarian seller that I had known for years off of eBay. Frankly, I stole it from him given what I paid for it.

eBay is terminally stupid at times. They ban valid religious items such as Buddhist kapalas, etc. that are made of human bone, but then allow the sale of human bones that don't have a religious connotation. We all know how evil, violent and satanic those Buddhist rituals are, don't we? In other news, Mein Kampf is the highest selling book on the iTunes store. Go figure.

Users folder vanished after OS X 10.9.3 update? Here's a fix

A tad better file system than 10.9.2 though

On the other hand, 10.9.3 fixed some of the horror show that happened to the file system performance in 10.9.2 for some folks. It was also cute to have lots of apps crashing every time they accessed the file system.

Hunt's paperless future: NHS watches £60m vanish down plughole

And everyone thought Idiocracy was a satire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy From "plot": Joe is arrested for not having a bar code tattoo to pay for his doctor's appointment, only just realizing the current year and society's state.

Sexbomb pop minstrel Taylor Swift PORN FIB used to lure fanbois

This is why they invented the NoScript add on. Also useful for blocking other things too.

Yahoo! to 'share something special' in New York on Monday

WSJ reports that Yahoo has approved a 1.1 bn buck cash offer for Tumblr. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324787004578493130789235150.html

Climate scientists agree: Humans cause global warming

This survey impressed me as one of the most useless surveys that has ever been done. It is not a question of "Does human activity modify regional climate?" (it does) or "Does CO2 make the atmosphere warmer?" (it does). The Aral sea is evidence of the first, and basic physics and radiative transfer will demonstrate the second. It is a question of "Does human activity modify climate and make the atmosphere warmer enough to matter?" The answer to that question is the one that matters. Asked either of the first, I would have the intellectual honesty to answer "yes". Asked the second, I would have the intellectual honesty to answer "It appears not." Oh, and the background here is a PhD in how you measure the vertical temperatures of the earth's atmosphere from a satellite.

People will pound their chests about this survey to claim that somehow folks can 1) Vote on how the universe works (they can't) and 2) How this proves we should all throw money down green ratholes (it doesn't). It is akin to asking if rain gets water on the ground. The answer is, of course, "yes". The real question that you have to ask before you build that levee down by the river is "Will enough water get on the ground via rain so that we have to worry about the river overflowing."

Ill formed questions always are followed by ill formed conclusions.