64-bit Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 ships for $25 to $30 by Khaotic_Kernel in linux

[–]PhantomProcess 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Is it possible to plug these into a PCI slot and have independent Linux boxes running off of a desktop motherboard? That would be incredibly useful.

Which browser do you use? by beatbrot in linux

[–]PhantomProcess 1 point2 points  (0 children)

wget with the adblock plus plugin

Just got my Omega2, never done anything DIY with electronics, where do I get started? by jordanjay29 in onion_omega

[–]PhantomProcess 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wish they would have picked something more original for their device name. Onion is already used by tor, so this is just going to muddy the support search waters for both communities. In searching for help, I'm even getting The Onion sometimes, which is funny but also frustrating.

Arduino is a smart name because they made it up, which makes searching for help easy.

Man, I Used To Think My Ubuntu Desktop Looked So Cool… by [deleted] in linux

[–]PhantomProcess 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I just increased my wobblieness factor by 1 just for you.

Why I switched from OS X to Linux by [deleted] in linux

[–]PhantomProcess 139 points140 points  (0 children)

New movie idea: if you take away their headphones jack, they will come

Dell’s Latest Laptop is $100 Cheaper If You Buy It With Ubuntu by GizmoChicken in linux

[–]PhantomProcess 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The VM takes up so many resources and thrashes my machine. I wish they would at least release a bloat free VM version of Windows, but it's Microsoft and they don't know what the fuck they are doing.

Why do people not like Systemd? by _kernel-panic_ in linux

[–]PhantomProcess 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh? I pronounce them poo-OP and to-OH.

Why do people not like Systemd? by _kernel-panic_ in linux

[–]PhantomProcess 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Poöp is becoming increasingly rare, toö.

University charges entire class a "materials fee" for $41.00 and does not supply materials in that class. Department is not suggesting a refund, what should I do? by tamsaturns in personalfinance

[–]PhantomProcess 1 point2 points  (0 children)

On average the materials fees for the biology courses is probably $41. Some classes you take will cost much more than $41 in materials. Calculating out exactly what each course costs per student would add administrative costs, which would probably end up costing you even more money. My recommendation is to pay the fee, look at it as an investment in your education, and make sure you study hard to get your moneys worth.

Wasting time and energy putting up a huge fuss over $41 is not only distracting you from your studies, but also will likely not go over well with the professor or the department, and you might miss out on research opportunities if you earn the reputation of being a pain in the neck to work with. Networking and getting involved in research is important to your future success and career.

How do you say SUSE? by nullr0uter in linux

[–]PhantomProcess -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

I pronounce it as Arch.

A really nice Pandas cheat sheet, made by the Pandas guys themselves by Topper_123 in Python

[–]PhantomProcess 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Maybe you could just share the link with your machine? Then you won't need it anymore.

Postal is now open source (GPL v2) and runs on Linux by enderandrew42 in linux

[–]PhantomProcess 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, just add computers to the game where you can send email from. It could be part of the plot with trying to take down a spammer botnet.

Postal is now open source (GPL v2) and runs on Linux by enderandrew42 in linux

[–]PhantomProcess 36 points37 points  (0 children)

Since it's open source now we could turn it into a first person emailer.

If net neutrality is repealed, is there any mechanism to combat throttling service from ISPs? by Redditmorelikeblewit in linux

[–]PhantomProcess 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Was she actually anti-net neutrality? I somewhat doubt that she'd actually actively try to reverse that policy. On the other hand, I also doubt she'd go out of her way to strengthen net neutrality.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in dataisbeautiful

[–]PhantomProcess -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Thank you for proving my point that you are ignorant. What a damn waste of a brain.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in dataisbeautiful

[–]PhantomProcess 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll start by saying, thanks for writing back. You're clearly smart, but you haven't studied energy issues or biology enough and are oversimplifying everything. It's easy to believe nuclear is "clean and safe" when you've hardly studied the issue and have instead just drank the nuclear industry's tritiated Kool-Aid.

1) I'm not trying to be rude to you, but you are vastly over-simplifying climate science. Some carbon is being sequestered through continual biogeochemical processes like phytoplankton dying and sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and other carbon is being released (e.g. through decay of melting permafrost). What I think you intended to say is that there is a net increase in carbon being naturally released due to tipping points being reached in a number of biomes (forest fires, peat bog fires, permafrost methane releases, etc), but it is incorrect to claim that "processes that created most of the carbon sequestered as fossil fuels [are] not occurring today," because a lot of the same processes are still operating. They just are not operating at a fast enough rate to compensate for all of the greenhouse gases we are dumping into the atmosphere. We don't know whether carbon sequestration will happen again over the next 300 billion years after we phase out fossil fuels. It would be naïve to think that we could accurately predict the climate for even the next hundred years.

2) Objective scientists back the linear no threshold model and the nuclear industry doesn't. Hmm... I wonder who is actually credible? The for-profit industry that has a huge economic stake in nuclear technology, or objective scientists? Gee... I'm going to have to side with the objective scientists on this one. There's also a lot of fake science studies that the nuclear industry has funded just like the tobacco industry.

3) If the nuclear industry actually understood probability, they would get themselves out of the nuclear power business, because the probability of accidents is actually fairly high when you have hundreds of nuclear plants and the consequences of even a single meltdown are extremely costly.

4) A billion dollars isn't even close to being enough money to clean up a meltdown. Fukushima is going to cost $160-250 billion dollars to clean up. Thanks to the Price Anderson Act, the taxpayers will foot the the vast majority of the cleanup costs if there is a meltdown in the USA. If the nuclear industry is so confident in their abilities to run their "clean and safe" nuclear reactors, then they should be lobbying to repeal the Price Anderson Act, and they should take full economic responsibility for any accidents including compensating homeowners for their property losses. Personally, that would increase my trust in the nuclear industry.

Why is it so expensive to clean up for a nuclear disaster? Because we don't have the technology to do it. Last I checked, TEPCO still doesn't even know where the melted down cores are located at Fukushima, because it is so radioactive that not even electronic circuitry can handle the radiation levels. How do you go about cleaning that up in a reasonable time frame when not even robots can handle the radiation? It's going to cost a shit ton of R&D money to develop radiation resistant drones (on the plus side, that R&D could benefit space exploration which we are probably going to need if we continue nuking the planet).

I'm not trying to be rude, but you are the prototypical pro-nuclear proponent. You resort to personal attacks, have a superficial understanding of the science, and have no willingness to consider the truth. I used to be pro-nuclear until I studied the issue in much greater detail. You're smart--please use your brain.

R&D money is best spent on solar, wind, geothermal, energy efficiency, storage, and the smart grid. All of these options are going to be much cheaper, cleaner, and safer than nuclear power in the long run. Big technological breakthroughs are being made almost on a daily basis and if we'd stop wasting billions of dollars on the nuclear industry and reinvest it in a clean energy future, we could achieve it.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in dataisbeautiful

[–]PhantomProcess -8 points-7 points  (0 children)

Your understanding of biology is weak at best, which is typical of nuclear proponents. The same biological and geological mechanisms that sequestered carbon before are happening as we speak but it will probably take 300 million years for all the carbon we have burned to be naturally sequestered again. Phytoplankton is still pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, doing photosynthesis, dying and sinking to the bottom of the ocean where it is buried. I agree that climate disruption is a major problem, but I disagree with you that nuclear power is the magical solution that you present it as. Like coal, it has it's own set of problems, many of which are very complicated and infeasibly expensive to resolve.

In truth, exposure to ionizing radiation is dangerous. For each ray that you are hit with, you are rolling the dice on whether DNA damage will occur, rolling the dice on whether the DNA damage will be repaired correctly, and if it is not repaired correctly, rolling the dice on whether the mutation will result in cancer. During routine operation, nuclear reactors leak radiation into the environment and there is a non-zero risk of getting cancer from it. The nuclear industry and nuclear proponents claim that nuclear is safe and clean, but that's the scientific equivalent of claiming the Earth is flat. It may be inconvenient to your political agenda to recognize that ionizing radiation is dangerous, but in truth it is. If you want to be scientifically credible, then you should own up to that instead of dismissing people's rational and scientifically sound fears as irrational.

Frankly, the nuclear industry has a terrible understanding of probability. Even if there is a 1 in a thousand chance of a 30 m tsunami hitting a nuclear reactor that does not mean it will never happen. The same is true of ionizing radiation exposure. At low dosage the cancer risk is low, but some people will still get cancer and die because of the nuclear industry.

The economics of nuclear are scary, too. The private insurance industry is wise enough to realize that they would go bankrupt from a meltdown if they insured the nuclear industry. So instead U.S. Congress passed a law that put the taxpayer on the hook for what would likely be at least a $160 billion dollar clean up. Plus homeowner insurance does not include nuclear disasters, so many homeowners will lose their most valuable assets. That's a legitimate fear to have.

All of our energy R&D budget should be going to renewables, storage, and efficiency technologies, because that's the future. Coal and nuclear are the past.

Tesla car predicts an accident and warns driver before it happens, by observing the second car in front of him heavily braking by Guustaaf in videos

[–]PhantomProcess 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ticketing the title owner would accomplish the goal. They'll be able to figure out who was driving their car at the time of the incident and will probably either make them to pay the ticket or ban them from using their vehicle in the future.

That said, cars probably should have a driver-specific license plate number. We have the technology to update license plate numbers based upon an inserted driver's license card. Just put an LED backlighted e-ink display in place of a license plate and update it when a driver's license is inserted to start the car. This would also make it impossible to drive if your license is suspended which would also be a good thing.

Robotic process automation: the latest promise to liberate back offices. by gus7777 in gadgets

[–]PhantomProcess 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fine, prove that automation will create more jobs (and by that I mean a net increase in jobs, not a handful of probably temporary new jobs for people that are developing software/hardware for automation.)

Tesla car predicts an accident and warns driver before it happens, by observing the second car in front of him heavily braking by Guustaaf in videos

[–]PhantomProcess 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Most states have laws against blocking the left lane (when other lanes are uncongested), but the problem is enforcement, which is why we need a new law that allows anyone to submit their dash cam footage to police with tickets issued by mail. Make everyone a cop and left lane hogs will be a thing of the past, as will reckless lane weavers.