Disqus - Latest Comments for nathan

Re: GE Ships US's First Smart Appliance, But Is It Pointless?

nathan — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:12:28 -0000

The 62% energy reduction is not from being "smart", it is for using heat pump technology instead of resistive heating. The pump heats the water and cools the air.

It doesn't say which air, but if it is indoor air then it is a nice bonus for people running air conditioning and a bit of a slap in the face for people running heating. Or maybe there is an external heat exchanger like domestic, central air conditioning units.

The cost to add "smart" to an electrical appliance is negligible. The appliance is already controlled by a microcontroller, all that needs to be added is the interface to the data network. The press release omits this completely, but the added unit cost of this circuitry is certainly under $20.

Re: How Much My San Diego Vacation Might Have Cost

nathan — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:29:18 -0000

Wait, what? Did you just say you let your mom pay for your vacation? Seriously?

Re: Vilsen Liten Robot

nathan — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 04:59:24 -0000

VEKLIGEN jätteintressant att du skriver om ditt kaffe. Jag är övertygad om att det här är information som ingen kan leva utan. Tacka vet jag alla härliga navelskådande bloggare.

Re: Vilsen Liten Robot

nathan — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:13:27 -0000

Lycka Till

Re: A Ron Paul Primer

nathan — Tue, 08 May 2007 03:34:49 -0000

Good list! I'd like to see links of the important legislation he's introduced. I've been meaning to look it up myself, but it'd be a good thing to put here.

I'd kind of be curious on his views on net neutrality at the state level as well. Obviously he's for less government regulation, but the only network players in a vast majority of areas are state-endorsed monopolies. (The Ma Bell monopoly was broken up years ago only to reform like the T1000)

I'd love to see a Ron Paul/Barak Obama ticket (in that order). hehe

Re: So I Handed The Black Woman My Blackberry: Inspired by XKCD

nathan — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:55:34 -0000

... and she ran away

(now the question: is that an odd or even power of irony?)

Re: 5 Ron Paul Quotes That Scare Me

nathan — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:10:27 -0000

100% of TJ Colatrella's can't form coherent thoughts.

Re: The Difference Between Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0

nathan — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 04:09:07 -0000

and web 3.0 will hopefully include crypto as an underlying design element lest we still end up with this stupid trust all your personal data to the company running facebook situation

Re: The Nice Guy Paradox [Solved]

nathan — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 12:46:27 -0000

> Don’t fight the rules; to do so is as pointless as picketing gravity or boycotting inertia.

ehh, theoretically it should be easier to overcome this. while gravity and inertia are both physical laws, this phenomenon is the result of self-organizing behavior, and such would be slightly easier to change (but still not easy at all :p)

Re: Ron Paul is Seriously Flawed as a Candidate; We’re Just So in Love With Him That We’re Not Paying Attention

nathan — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 08:51:04 -0000

College loans increase the demand for college slightly, and do increase the amount of people who can go, but push the price up college up ridiculously. Much like the housing bubble, people tie a large debt ball and chain around themselves because it's the expected thing to do. I went to college on scholarship (so you can take these comments with a grain of salt if you want), but everybody I know that has student loans has had massive bills for them every month, and they're pretty much living paycheck to paycheck. Debt is basically selling yourself into wage slavery.

Why should the federal government be funding education? Does Ron Paul say that if he were a governor, he would eliminate state run education? The federal government should not be in the business of taking most of your taxes, and then divvying them up to the states. It's not a matter of -defunding- education, it's a matter of downsizing the federal government, states raising taxes, and then public schools being more locally accountable.

National healthcare is a terrible idea. Why can't the states individually have their own healthcare programs? Try 50 different things, and see what works the best. National healthcare will end up being a few crony companies supplying the health plans, and the same red tape crap. This country is simply too big to amass power in the federal government. Unfortunately, people don't want to follow this idea, and want to affect as many people as they can.

The FDA isn't solely a consumer protection group. Leave the area that researches information and prevents fraud (say, selling a drug as one thing when it's really another). Get rid of the part that makes medical devices go through asinine regulations. Get rid of the part that prevents patients from getting drugs before they've been fully approved.

I would like to see Ron Paul on a ticket with Dennis Kucinich. I don't know which way, but I think it would balance it out a bit. Perhaps Ron Paul could work on demolishing these federal agencies that suck money from the states and then redistribute it, and Dennis Kucinich could work on transitioning the states to doing the right thing. Or something. Unfortunately, I think then the media would finally have something to rip Ron Paul apart over.

Re: Rickroll Database: #240, http://www.nsict.org/~clive/misc/goofy.jpg

nathan — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:46:39 -0000

ridiculous

Re: Japanese Zero Emissions Home Unveiled for G8 Summit

nathan — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:20:50 -0000

What about all the emissions and pollution from manufacturing all of that stuff?

Re: Computer Science Was A Dead End For Me

nathan — Sat, 17 May 2008 04:57:02 -0000

> Math is one of the most limiting subjects I’ve ever had to take. It gives me a migraine and personally, I don’t think it should be so damn serious. It’s just numbers for crying out loud! Regardless, I need more room for thinking, analyzing, and concluding. Math doesn’t allow that type of flexibility.

epic fail.

Re: Monovation: Assembly Injection into Live Processes - Miguel de Icaza

nathan — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 03:31:43 -0000

gdb --pid is a gaping security hole?

if you're relying on an attackers laziness to keep them from modifying a process, you've already lost.

Re: i am neurotic. - unjinxing the deck

nathan — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:43:17 -0000

Everyone knows the right order is Spades-Hearts-Diamonds-Clubs

Re: 249292000

nathan — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:15:39 -0000

She's not a home wrecker if his wife doesn't know anything now is she?

Re: 8079016

nathan — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:23:24 -0000

Please tell your Dad you love him, despite anything you think might happen.

If you can't save him, you can at least do that. You do not deserve to live with the regret of not telling him.

I say this as someone whose dad recently died of alcoholism related conditions. I wish you all the best.

Re: What's The Safest Seat On An Airplane?

nathan — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:35:54 -0000

does it matter? you're much more likely to be assaulted while going through security theater.

Re: Java: Exception in thread main java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError | Java programming | Tech-Recipes

nathan — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:35:29 -0000

I'm sorry it did not work.

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » Air Powered Cars Are Too Good To Be True

nathan — Wed, 30 May 2007 14:48:16 -0000

You are totally missing the point of these types of cars. Whether you use air, hydrogen, batteries, you are still better off. Each fossil fuel car is like it's own little power plant inefficiently converting liquid to mechanical power and heat. Yes, when you store energy it has to come from somewhere. However, one big power plant can generate energy a lot more efficiently than millions of individual "power plants". The power plant doesn't have to be coal, power can be generated with wind, light, nuclear reactions, tidal changes, and water flow.

In short, no, these cars are not a crap idea. We are better off centralizing where we produce our energy. At that point, we have our options open to any number of methods to produce that energy.

Re: Ahmadinejad

nathan — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 10:04:24 -0000

Po, eu li no reader e jurava que era do Biscoito. Soh quando vi seu twitter que eu percebi que voce quem escreveu.

Re: SORE THUMBS * Mon-Wed-Fri * Insane Political Gaming Manga-Type Comics by Owen Gieni and Chris Crosby

nathan — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 03:48:40 -0000

It's funny because it's true.

Re: SORE THUMBS * Mon-Wed-Fri * Insane Political Gaming Manga-Type Comics by Owen Gieni and Chris Crosby

nathan — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:09:40 -0000

Without a TuberOfTruth, he was already dead anyway.

Re: SORE THUMBS * Mon-Wed-Fri * Insane Political Gaming Manga-Type Comics by Owen Gieni and Chris Crosby

nathan — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:36:15 -0000

I want a brush-shaped gun.

Re: SORE THUMBS * Mon-Wed-Fri * Insane Political Gaming Manga-Type Comics by Owen Gieni and Chris Crosby

nathan — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:18:17 -0000

I'm just telling myself that if I pleasure myself enough times before the next strip, Harmony will still be alive. Oh, Harmony... HARMONYYYY!!

Re: SORE THUMBS * Mon-Wed-Fri * Insane Political Gaming Manga-Type Comics by Owen Gieni and Chris Crosby

nathan — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:15:07 -0000

Your point being?

Re: Alan Shimel Should Stop Talking About Snort’s Licensing.

nathan — Fri, 11 May 2007 17:00:48 -0000

Actually, point of clarification. Sourcefire owns a decent portion of Snort's sourcecode. Not all of it is ownd outright by Sourcefire. As such, if portions of Snort that were not completely owned by Sourcefire in RNA, then RNA would be GPLed by virus licensing.

Re: Reversing a “ZLib-Obfuscated?” Network Protocol

nathan — Tue, 22 May 2007 01:06:03 -0000

Instead of the focus being to obfuscate the traffic, perhaps it was just compressed to be ... um ... compressed.

Compression = less data = less network traffic = less impact on deployed networks.

I *WISH* people would use compression by default in custom protocols.

Re: Vote on the Next reddit T-Shirt

nathan — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:41:52 -0000

Many of us can only see 9, with none on the 2nd page:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/91g...

Re: 2007/07/20/myspace-blocks-the-letter-i/

nathan — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 22:07:15 -0000

fuck people who are sensitive to swearing. waaaaaaah!

Re: 2007/08/31/opera-skins/

nathan — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 06:55:59 -0000

you forgot breeze! - http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/i...

Re: THE TEN: People Who Deserve To Be Kicked Off LookBook.nu

nathan — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 08:15:38 -0000

you sound super dumb & like a hater

Re: Square peg, round hole

nathan — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:33:19 -0000

This is nothing new. They've been doing this a long time, and they're very expensive.

Re: Artisan System - A PHP5 Object Oriented Framework

nathan — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:17:19 -0000

When you're turing complete you're turing complete... : )

Re: How to Not Be A Douche Bag: Part 2

nathan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:39:42 -0000

Are pants optional?

Re: Don’t Be a Douche Bag Part 6: Stop Self Congratulating

nathan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:58:11 -0000

The embedded video's down right now. I found it on Youtube, but just thought you should know.

Re: Don’t Be a Douche Bag Part 6: Stop Self Congratulating

nathan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:23:28 -0000

That's weird. It's working now. 7-10 weren't working either, but they probably are now. Maybe it's just me.

Re: Do You Have Any Useless Skills?

nathan — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:55:58 -0000

I can make fart noises with my eye. Beat that. I dare you.

Re: Saving the Economy by Saving the Planet

nathan — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:37:44 -0000

Save the environment by increasing the supply of money? Are you out of your mind?

The whole reason we're destroying the planet at record pace is because the economy is running too hot with an abundance of artificially cheap money. Ever-present inflation creates an unnatural demand for production, because money (and capital) that sits still loses value. In essence, low interest rates indicate society's preference for consuming today over saving for tomorrow.

Re: The real surprise of the App Store isn’t number of downloads or revenue

nathan — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:42:23 -0000

Does it particularly matter _which_ vendor users are locked into?

Re: Start Hacking in OCaml in 5 Steps

nathan — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 16:39:56 -0000

what a completely useless post.

steps 1 and 2 are outdated, and ocaml is probably already installed due to having said at one time 'i should learn ocaml, so apt-get install ocaml'

step 3 is just a political statement. most likely if someone is a programmer, they already _have_ an editor they prefer working in.

step 4 is kind of the real step here. but your post could have simply been a link to the tutorial, then.

step 5 is going to help you stay in touch with the language, not actually do simple things to learn it, so in the absence of any other usefulness to this list, it doesn't stand on it's own

Re: Start Hacking in OCaml in 5 Steps

nathan — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 13:56:15 -0000

i don't particularly care about steps 1-3. that's not my point. my point is that this "tutorial" might as well read:

HOW TO LEARN OCAML:
1. learn ocaml
2. ....
3. PROFIT!!!

it's the equivalent of a linkjacked blog post.

Re: Cool Stuff: Lenticular 3D Star Wars Poster

nathan — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:07:14 -0000

Why is Death Star rotating? This ruins the whole effect.. They should do their homework in geometry

Re: A Ron Paul Primer

nathan — Tue, 08 May 2007 03:34:49 -0000

Re: So I Handed The Black Woman My Blackberry: Inspired by XKCD

nathan — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:55:34 -0000

... and she ran away

(now the question: is that an odd or even power of irony?)

Re: 5 Ron Paul Quotes That Scare Me

nathan — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:10:27 -0000

100% of TJ Colatrella's can't form coherent thoughts.

Re: The Difference Between Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0

nathan — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 04:09:07 -0000

and web 3.0 will hopefully include crypto as an underlying design element lest we still end up with this stupid trust all your personal data to the company running facebook situation

Re: The Nice Guy Paradox [Solved]

nathan — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 12:46:27 -0000

Re: Ron Paul is Seriously Flawed as a Candidate; We’re Just So in Love With Him That We’re Not Paying Attention

nathan — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 08:51:04 -0000

Re: LugRadio live

nathan — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 14:06:03 -0000

Sorry you didn't like LugRadio Live and Unleashed. We felt it was more important to do things that spoke to the LugRadio community than to talk about the wider world of Linux, which we do in every episode and which we will continue to do from next Monday's episode. We've hashed over, many times, why we choose to be "laddish", and if being "inclusive" means not speaking as we normally do then we'd rather not include that segment of the community who are offended, and we have no problem with them voting with their feet and listening to other shows. If you feel we're unreasonably dismissive of technologies then you're welcome to bring up those topics on the LR forums or to send us an email outlining why you think that's the case, and we've been known to admit that we were wrong when challenged. If, however, you're just complaining that we're picking on your pet technologies but don't have any reasons why we're wrong then you'll just have to live with that, or possibly consider some alternatives.

Re: Unobtrusive Sortable Tables

nathan — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 22:14:57 -0000

Jus a quick note: it's Stuart Langridge, and kryogenix.org. I'm glad you liked sorttable. :)

Re: http://disqus.com/preview/

nathan — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:16:32 -0000

test

Re: http://disqus.com/preview/

nathan — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:17:01 -0000

blockquote

Regular comment.

Re: Modified Hybrids Get 250 Mpg

nathan — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 16:09:53 -0000

Google does unit conversions wonderfully. The spam filter here doesn't want me to post a link, but typing '250 mpg in liters/100km' in the search field gets the correct result without stress

Re: Lester Brown: Ban the Bulb

nathan — Tue, 29 May 2007 02:54:33 -0000

agh jeeze.

1. compact fluorescents don't dim

2. cfls and leds do not like hot environments, like ovens

3. the spectrum of cfls sucks for long term viewing

4. fluorescents flash at 120hz which is also annoying in the long term

5. if you're heating your house, it doesn't really quite matter how efficient the light bulbs are (otoh it matters doubly if you're air conditioning)

6. cfls look bad in open-bulb fixtures that use the shape of the bulb as part of their design (like chandeliers)?

7. cfls are bad in a place like a cold garage where they are really dim, and only on for short times and never get to full brightness.

outright banning something? i can't decide that something in my house would be better served by a traditional incandescent bulb? what a horrible totalitarian idea! if the problem is the people who go to the store and go 'uh derr i buy the bulbs i always buy', then what is needed is education on the long-term cost savings of the slightly more expensive bulbs. yes non-thinking is a huge problem, but it certainly shouldn't be solved by taking a product completely off the shelves.

emissions from generating electricity should be attacked at the source. reduce the emissions of preexisting power plants, and change the types that are built. (if reducing emissions drives up the price of electricity, then that will certainly decrease electricity usage also, right?) solar should be coming down enough in price over the next few years to make it viable for large portions of the grid (in the day). visiting hydroelectric dams and seeing the power they put out makes you wonder why we don't see more of those, too.

how long has nuclear power been around? oh that's right, we gave up on those and went back to burning oil, because of hysterical fear of zomgmeltdownz!!! although apparently i've heard about new pebble-bed reactors that have built-in negative feedback to avoid that sort of thing, so hopefully that'll help too. there's really only one place we get our energy from, nuclear reactions. we either have to harvest what the sun puts out (short or long term), or create our own.

outright banning something as simple as a lightbulb is just ridiculous. let's ban heaters, air conditioners, computers, and stereos while we're at it, because of all the energy they use. in fact, let's just ban any light bulb over 20W (for use in nightlights). people can just sleep when it's dark, and do things when it's light. riiiight....

Re: Man Caught Stealing Bike Wheels, Set to Music

nathan — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:28:06 -0000

i know it's not a panacea, but you can certainly lock up your frame and your wheels (a little more obvious to those who have quick-release wheels, but a wrench isn't exactly hard to come by)

Re: Halifax to Vancouver in a Smart Car

nathan — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:34:30 -0000

i can count on my 2001 civic getting about 42mpg crossing the country at about 60mph (i stayed off the interstates)

coming down from the rockies i hit about 52mpg, without a corresponding huge drop going up. i attribute this to the engine being complete cut or idling (coasting) most of the time on the way down, whereas on the way up, i was probably going to a bit slower

(diesel contains 15% more energy per gallon than gasoline. meaning my civic would compare at 48mpg. (yes i know diesel has other advantages))

Re: Hybrid-Electric Cars: How They Work, Battery Technology and More

nathan — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 21:42:52 -0000

the idea that somebody would be interested in hybrids, but not know this very basic rudimentary information is disgusting. the only way to to have a true environmentally friendly society is if people possess _at least_ a basic understanding of technology. to not know the basic principles behind hybrids and still consider yourself having an environmentalist opinion is just a travesty. if you don't know how something works, are you buying anything but marketing?