61

Science & Alternative Science / Water from cars - check my math

« on: March 04, 2016, 10:05:25 PM »

So an idea I've had for a while is wondering if the increase in the oceans are helped along by the water vapor released by cars.

So I did some math.

Well ok, not alot.
I used this figure:http://blueskymodel.org/gallon-gas
(Scroll to the bottom) of 8.3 lbs/gallon of gas.

Then this: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=23&t=10
136 Billion gallons of gas used in the USA in 2014

Multiply 1,128.8 bilion lbs of water.
Density of water as a liquid:
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/water-density-specific-weight-d_595.html
8.3 lbs/gallon
(Convenient)
Which basically gives 136 billion gallons of water produced per year in the US by car exhaust. 

Thats a lot of water.  Not exactly lake amount but for the US only that seems like alot yearly.

62

Philosophy, Religion & Society / A victory for Satanism is a victory for America

« on: February 05, 2016, 10:30:34 PM »

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/02/05/3746252/the-hilarious-story-of-how-satanists-trolled-a-major-city-into-submission/

Basically the Temple of Satan forced a city council to suspend praying before meetings because the alternative was allowing a Satanist to say a prayer at least once.

63

Arts & Entertainment / David Bowie is dead

« on: January 11, 2016, 07:22:06 AM »

Killed by cancer at 69.
www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/david-bowie-dead-legendary-artist-854364

64

Technology & Information / Is TOR no longer anonymous?

« on: November 12, 2015, 12:37:19 PM »

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/tor-director-fbi-paid-carnegie-mellon-1m-to-break-tor-hand-over-ips/


Long story short: FBI allegedly hires university to research how to unanonymize TOR users.  They may or may not have succeeded, but probably did.

65

Philosophy, Religion & Society / The Red Cup of War

« on: November 11, 2015, 05:01:09 AM »

So, I've been seeing talk about the red Starbucks cup on my Facebook feed and have finally looked into what the actual argument is.


www.vox.com/2015/11/10/9707034/starbucks-red-cup-controversy




That article seems to explain it well.  Has anyone else seen this hate over a cup?  Anyone care?

66

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Living in Norway

« on: July 23, 2015, 10:03:52 AM »

Screw this, I'm getting the hell out of here.  Y'all can have fun with this mess.

67

Technology & Information / cloud computing Barbie

« on: March 13, 2015, 10:33:13 AM »

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/hello-barbie-goodbye-privacy-why-some-are-calling-new-doll-creepy/ar-AA9EYaC

So Barbie has gone into the Same realm as Samsung TV and micrsoft's Xbox one.
By sending voice data over the internet to a cloud server, they can do heavy voice processing without having to put in expensive hardware in the consumer devices.  Too bad it all get's recorded for analysis by the company who would want that information the most.

68

Philosophy, Religion & Society / US election results

« on: November 05, 2014, 08:52:30 AM »

Looks like the GOP got their wish.  I fully expect all the problems to be solved in a year.  By the time Obama leaves gas should be $2.00/gallon, unemployment should be 5% (with most jobs being full time $50,000/yr), and our budget is balanced.

69

Philosophy, Religion & Society / One more Gun... Just give me one more gun...

« on: October 24, 2014, 09:07:46 PM »

Yet another school shooting.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/10/24/358588109/shooting-reported-in-washington-school-police-say-suspect-is-dead

70

Technology & Information / need some Mac Server advice

« on: October 04, 2014, 04:32:25 PM »

Figured I'd see what the minds here know.

So my district has about 150 iPads.  To manage them, I have an old macbook with 2gb of ram with os mavericks and is os server.

Now it runs fine with one exception: VPP(volume purchase program) tokens.  I hate these things.  To explain: apple allows you to assign an app to a user and push that app.  The VPP allows you to do that.  It also links to a special iTunes account that let's you buy the apps. 
We have roughly 7 of these tokens.  Why?  Because you don't want to mix money from the various departments.  Special Ed, for example, has their own budget and thus their own VPP account.

Now the server can only handle 1 token at a time.  So if I want to push out apps for specialed, I load the token and push the apps.  If I want to push out apps for the HS, I swap the tokens and push.  However, swapping tokens also stops all pushes and prevents any future pushing or authorization until I put it back.

To this end, I want to virtualize the servers so I can have 7 servers on one box.  We already have a windows server VM farm so it fits in our overall technology plan.  However, apple are dicks and refuses to allow virtualization on any non-apple hardware.  So... I'm debating what to buy.  I can get a Mac mini with 16GB of ram and hope that'll work (2gb for each server which is minimum) at $1,500 or the Mac pro with 32 gb of ram (upgradable to 64) for $3,500.  I'd like to go cheap as most of the servers won't be doing much most of the time but each server requires a minimum of 2gb and the Mac mini maxes out at 16.

Also: Mac pro is a god damn canister.  Mounting it is not really an option.  But the mini is a box.

Thoughts?  The pro is definitely the server choice as its hardware is the upgrade for the old apple xserver.  But the mini may do what I need for many years.  I just don't have enough Mac hardware experience to know which is the best option.

71

Philosophy, Religion & Society / America votes to arm Syrian Rebels. (and fund the government)

« on: September 18, 2014, 11:17:34 PM »

Anyone else feel like we're just doing the same stupid things over and over again?

72

Suggestions & Concerns / Not letting me post something ...

« on: September 01, 2014, 03:45:17 PM »

My last post here:
forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=1183.msg41217

Was not easy to do.

It kept resetting my connection every time I tried to post it.  I took out this sentence and it suddenly worked.

For example, after abandonment in Jewish law and abandonment in common law, the finder of lost property can properly exercise dominion over the object, thereby vesting title and absolute ownership in himself.

But now even if I try modifying it, it resets the connection.

It is currently 11:46 AM EST.  I've been trying since about 11:35am EST.

Any thoughts?

73

Philosophy, Religion & Society / God is training some spies

« on: August 06, 2014, 09:47:19 PM »

I saw this posted up at a grocery store bulletin board and thought I'd share.


Sorry for the size.  Can't remember how to resize an image on the forum.

74

Technology & Information / Xbox and Valve finally have their baby

« on: July 12, 2014, 12:46:45 PM »

www.alienware.com/landings/alpha/

I honestly didn't see this coming.  I thought PC games would die off as console games became the dominate market.  Now it seems like PC gaming and console gaming will merge into one.

There may come a day when buying a disk doesn't happen anymore and shelves of game stores are full of license keys instead of actual games.

And once the steambox comes out then we'll have two steam based consoles. 

75

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Shooting in Texas leaves 6 dead.

« on: July 10, 2014, 02:09:45 AM »

My wife was reading her Norwegian news site when she came across an article that happened today.

This is the story.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/multiple-fatalities-houston-area-shooting-24497032

So yeah, a Norwegian news paper picked up on this shooting and put it on the front page. 

Also this raises an interesting question:
Where was the good guy with a gun? 

76

Philosophy, Religion & Society / House speaker seeks to sue president

« on: June 26, 2014, 09:14:17 AM »

www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/06/25/boehner-suing-obama/11355639/

I thought lawsuits were personal.  Like when no crime has technically been committed but one party feels they need some kind of justice.  Does this mean that Boehner is just being pissy?

77

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Georgia wants a new amendment. (old news)

« on: June 15, 2014, 03:51:22 PM »

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/georgia-senate-calls-for-constitutional-convention/ndCbs/

Yeah I know, it's from March but shush, I just found out about it today.

Thoughts?  I can't imagine this actually working.  What are they gonna do, limit terms to democrats to 2 years but Republicans to 6?  Force a balanced federal budget by amendment?  Oh yeah that'll go over REALLY well with the powers that be.

78

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Another mass shooting

« on: May 25, 2014, 01:09:42 AM »

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/05/24/315425094/shooting-near-uc-santa-barbara-leaves-3-dead

Yep.  7 dead. 

This is turning into a very normal thing.  I suspect that nothing we do is going to alter this.

I also am beginning to suspect that this is not random.  Something about all this just strikes me as very odd.  Only a few of these shooters have survived (not for a lack of trying) and yet we've heard nothing of them.  What did the psych reports say?  Did they feel guilty after?  Do they act normal?  Did they have a motive?

If I were a man who believed in such things, I'd think that this was some kind of experiment to get a drug or brainwashing method or something to cause a rational, unsuspecting, normal person to go on a killing spree of his peers.  Why you ask?  What else: war.  Just imagine if you could capture anyone and turn them into a suicide gunner?  Capture private johnny and let him walk into that military base and shoot the place up. 

And with the gunshot to the head, no evidence and no witnesses to speak of why they did it.

79

Technology & Information / Avoiding Viruses with Linux as my web browser

« on: May 14, 2014, 10:57:05 PM »

Ok so as we all know, viruses mostly come through nasty websites and especially the ads on said websites.  Those pesky java scripts and such.

With my scare from Ransomeware, I've decided that for my daily web browsing, I'll use a linux distro and for my gaming, I'll use windows.

The first solution would seem to be dual boot but that's a pain, forcing me to completely shut down one OS to jump tasks and I'm not going that route.
The second is just linux with wine and ect... but that is unstable or doesn't offer the same quality FPS (especially with my card).

So what I've settled on (unless someone has a better idea) is linux in a virtual machine.  Without a direct connection to any windows files, any nasty java script should fail in the linux box and even IF it succeeded in doing something, it wouldn't be able to access my windows OS.


So, does anyone have any suggestions for a nice, light weight OS I can run in a virtual machine and allow for all the flash and java I could want?  And with recent browsers?  I don't want to use firefox 3.0.

80

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Texas family begging for food... in New York!

« on: April 26, 2014, 11:34:54 PM »

I came across a rather odd family today.
I went to the grocery store here in New York (not the city) and outside was a man and his family (two children I think) with a sign that says "lost my job.  We need food.  God bless"
Ok, I figured, just a begger.  But why not get unemployment?  Why not get food stamps?
I walked past quickly as the store manager asked them politely to leave, which they did.

As I approached my car, I could hear them behind me speaking in Spanish.  The children specifically.  Then I saw the car they went into: A van with Texas plates.

Is this a new epidemic?  Is Texas so bad that losing your job requires you to drive all the way to New York just to beg for food?  Or is Texas simply dumping their poor on us New Yorkers and claiming it as "solving the poor problem"?