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Comment: Re:Replaced by what? (Score 1) 621

I assume that this is really the core of the idea - that the move would raise coal prices enough to stimulate more investment in renewables. I'm not saying it's a good idea, or even a better idea than investing this $50B directly into renewables, but I imagine that this is what they must have been thinking.

Comment: Re:Makers and takers (Score 1) 646

by wytcld (#46466683) Attached to: 70% of U.S. Government Spending Is Writing Checks To Individuals

When the federal reserve increases the supply of money, inflation is the net result.

That's an ignorant claim, based on an way over-simplified conception of how the money supply works. The Fed has greatly increased the money supply in the last few years. Yet inflation has been at around 2% or less per year. Just because you have a theory that "increased money supply > inflation," and can draw a simplistic model to illustrate it, doesn't mean that the model or the theory corresponds with the complexities of economic reality. In clear fact, your theory fails to predict the results over the last few years. Simple, "common sense" theories of a great many things don't really work when subjected to rigorous collection of evidence.

By definition, every country with currency inflation has minted enough currency for it to inflate. But there's a large number of countries which have printed large amounts of currency with no more inflation than other countries which have printed only small amounts. So overall, the correlation you're claiming doesn't hold. The picture is far more complex. A theory complex enough to comprehend it will not claim that increasing the money supply necessarily results in inflation, since that necessity is specifically disproved by abundant historical evidence.

Comment: Re:Makers and takers (Score 1) 646

by wytcld (#46466579) Attached to: 70% of U.S. Government Spending Is Writing Checks To Individuals

The price of beef is affected by the price of raising cattle, which has gone up substantially because of prolonged severe drought in the American West. Buying feed is far more expensive than letting them graze.

This is not "inflation." This is the sort of cost increases we face when the weather is unfavorable. It's part of why climate change will be so expensive for our economy if we don't head it off, even if the current drought is arguably a return to the norm for the West after a century of unusually wet weather there.

Comment: Re:Please stop linking paywalled papers. (Score 1) 73

The publishers aren't paying for research. If anything, they're taking money away from research by charging too much for journals and, in many cases, additional fees to authors to get their work published. Most of the money paying for research comes from government grants, and thus ultimately from the public, and then the journal publishers try to lock it up and make everyone pay a second time to see the work they've already paid for.

Comment: Bandwidth is easy, latency is hard (Score 1) 93

by Dr. Spork (#46456793) Attached to: Intel Rolling Out 800Gbps Cables This Year
When we hear these impressive bandwidth numbers, usually a prophecy that "the future is on the cloud" is not far behind. Once our connection to the server is faster, we will get everything we could want without doing any of the computing on site. But people forget that a very low latency is also very important to the cloud experience, and there is very little that we can do about latency. At some point, we just run into fundamental laws of nature. I have a feeling that in my lifetime, consumers will basically stop caring about the width of their pipe (for most, it will be wide enough), and prefer the ISPs that give them the best ping. People who are thinking a few tech generations in the future would do well to keep this in mind, I think.

Comment: OMG, another season of Trailer Park Boys? (Score 3, Informative) 136

by Dr. Spork (#46452827) Attached to: Drones Used To Smuggle Drugs Into Prison
They already sold a trailer of weed to Canadian prison guards and smuggled weed into the US using a "drone" model train. This is exactly the sort of thing they would do! Bubbles buys a quadrocopter to play with, Julian figures out how to use it for selling drugs, Ricky crashes it, Trevor and Corey take the blame.

Comment: The "false positives" thing really does matter (Score 2) 85

by Dr. Spork (#46441817) Attached to: New Blood Test Offers Early Warning for Alzheimer's Onset
If the test is 90% accurate and then has 10% false positives, then one out of ten people who fail the test is actually free of Alzheimer's. But if only 5% of the general population actually develop Alzheimer's, then even if you fail the test, you are still most probably (67%) in the clear. Granted, it's a reason for concern, because your odds of being in the clear dropped from 95% to 67%, but it's certainly not as big an update of your odds as you might have expected from a 90% accurate test that you just failed. (Right? Or did I screw up the math?)

Comment: V-V-V-Virtual Box! (Score 2) 856

by Bonker (#46408175) Attached to: Microsoft's Attempt To Convert Users From Windows XP Backfires

So 'Desktop Linux' is just not cutting it for me yet. Almost, but not quite. (Seriously, get USB keyboards working with yer full disk encryption, Debian.)

That said, I'm not going to Windows 8 or even 8.1. Evar. In the rare event that I need to run something that only runs on Win 8, I've got a company supplied Virtual box VM image with a legit corporate licensed copy. (I've booted up to run the latest version of MS Dev Studio less times than I can count on one hand.)

In the slightly more common event that I need to run something that ran fine on WinXP, but won't run on Win7, I have a WinXP Virtual Box image. This has saved my older, but perfectly working USB scanner.

In the much more frequent event that I want to run in a Linux desktop environment for, say, development work, working with iptables, or the like, I've got a couple different Mint Linux Virtual Box images.

About the only thing I don't have an image for is a Hackintosh... but I've got a company-supplied Macbook which also has an array of Virtual Box images hanging around.

Mint is about || yay close to being usable as my main desktop OS, but has a few standout problems. I DO use it as my laptop OS.

Win 8 will NEVER be an issue for me.

Comment: Re:Bitcoin is a virtual commodity, not a currency (Score 1) 698

by wytcld (#46397619) Attached to: Bitcoin Exchange Flexcoin Wiped Out By Theft

If you want to haul away tons of gold you have to back a truck up to the vault, and physically crack it.

If you want to haul away "tons" of bitcoin you have to ... yup, it's just like stealing gold! Not really. Gold is safer because it's bulky and physical. Those are the same advantages it has in some circumstances over paper money. So bitcoin is not like a commodity.

Comment: Yes, fine, geez. There was once water on Mars! (Score 4, Informative) 41

by Dr. Spork (#46376667) Attached to: NASA Scientists Find Evidence of Water In Martian Meteorite

How many times do we get to "discover" that bears actually do shit in the woods?

(This is years after we've seen clear pictures of Martian flood plains, with obvious river channels. This is years after we've detected signals for hydrogen under the Martian surface. This is years after models of solar system history basically make the conclusion inescapable that early on, Mars would have had to have liquid water. And I could go on.)

Comment: Re:And the Stockholders Don't Want the Policy Chan (Score 1) 348

Maybe I'm just more cynical, but isn't this an incredibly convenient and free advertisement about the morality, kindness and social responsibility of a giant corporation? I'm not saying that the "ideologues" were told to manufacture a controversy for the sake of publicity. But if they did it spontaneously, it's pretty clear that Apple was eager to shut them down loudly enough to make the news. There isn't a better image-building exercise than one which pits the altruistic benevolence of a company against the money-grubbing greed of some shareholding scrooges. We love to see them being told off, and feel like this makes Apple our ally. Well, however this episode ultimately came about, I must clap and declare it "well played" on Apple's part.

Comment: Re:Troll (Score 2) 792

by Dr. Spork (#46371339) Attached to: Whole Foods: America's Temple of Pseudoscience
You're right, but recall that the article had a much longer list of pseudoscientific bullshit that sells at Whole Foods. Homeopathy is just one really obvious instance. Credulity in that stuff is at the core of their business model. The thing is, they also have lots of stuff that I like to buy, but I don't appreciate the deeply cynical nature of their marketing strategy. When you absolutely know that your products do not do what they claim to do, and you sell them anyway because you count on your customers being too dumb to figure it out, that is just really disrespectful.

Comment: Re:Obvious missing option -- ELECTIVES! (Score 4, Insightful) 313

by rgmoore (#46370627) Attached to: Should programming be a required curriculum in public schools?

I would argue that food prep should be a required class. When I was in school, everyone was required to take cooking, sewing, and wood and metal shop. Cooking is, or ought to be, a daily activity for most people; they certainly shouldn't count on a lifestyle that has somebody else preparing all their meals. A cooking class with a good emphasis on nutrition could do a lot to reduce widespread obesity.
