Slashdot Mirror

What's unhealthy about tomatoes, cheese, and bread?

Cheese.

Alcohol is in fact the only drug that I know of that has withdrawal symptoms that include death. If you are a severe alcoholic, you should not go cold turkey. From about.com:

However, within six to 48 hours after not drinking, hallucinations may develop. These usually are visual hallucinations but they can also involve sounds and smells. They can last for a few hours up to weeks at a time.
Also within this time frame after quitting, convulsions or seizures can occur, which is the point at which alcohol withdrawal can become dangerous, if not medically treated. The symptoms may progress to delirium tremens (DT's) after three to five days without alcohol. The symptoms of DT's include profound confusion, disorientation, hallucinations, hyperactivity, and extreme cardiovascular disturbances.
Once DT's begin, there is no known medical treatment to stop them. Grand mal seizures, heart attacks and stroke can occur during the DT's, all of which can be fatal.

Now that the WSJ is a Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece, it is a tabloid

No, it isn't. It's a broadsheet.

That'd be interesting but not that all helpful when the #1 killer of smokers is heart disease, not long cancer. In other words, most smokers won't live long enough to get lung cancer.

Or you're in the military and you obey an order that is contrary to military law (in which case, unless you frag the person who gave the order, you're up shit creek either way - either you disobeyed an order, or you obeyed an illegal order.

Nope - you are duty bound to disobey an order which is against military law. If you don't, you can be tried and found guilty of a crime. See U.S. v. Keenan.

See this for info on Nuremberg and the "just following orders" defense:

http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/militarylaw1/a/obeyingorders.htm

even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question

You mean Fannie Mae, the largest and hardest hit of all the subprime lenders who has about 40% market share and is subsidized by the government?

Here is a citation on the size of Fannie Mae: citation 1
Distribution of Bailout funds, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are second only to AIG: citation 2

So no they aren't just pulling that shit out of thin air. You could also look at government policies for the last 80 years in which the government is trying to get every American to own a home.

The grammar in the OP's quote was correct, it is in the present-perfect tense. Read it again without [sic] in the middle and it will sound fine:

How has the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration addressed the repeated reposting of this security manual to other websites, and what legal action, if any, can be taken to compel its removal?

Link for reference: http://grammar.about.com/od/basicsentencegrammar/a/prperfectense.htm

If you've ever seen a tramp stamp on a "larger" lady, you'll know where they got the obfuscation ideas for test CAPTCHAs from.

Let's be more clear. There's high functioning Autism and there's low functioning Autism, and the difference between the two has to do with whether they can hold their own in intellectual settings, and whether they can live independantly. High Functioning Autism and Aspies have at least average intelligence, and can frequently be geniuses or experts in their fields.

well, they already did that.

since people started selling "pennies" for scap metal (worth a lot more than a penny), the USA has replaced the copper pennies with copper-plated Zink pennies in 1982.

http://coins.about.com/od/uscoins/f/copper_to_zinc.htm

Use a modern editor that can store the strings of all previously used variables

Allow me to rephrase: How do I tell the editor how to find "the strings of all previously used variables" in code written in the assembly language for a given microcontroller, specifically one with a 6502-compatible CPU core? Two ACs recommended that I look into Emacs with an appropriate major mode, but it appears asm-mode supports only indentation, not autocompletion.

Bullshit. There ARE no such e-readers, unless the only print you've ever seen is darkish grey text on lightish grey paper. E-reader displays are NOWHERE NEAR 'printlike' yet. Ugh.

There are LCD screen book readers that are better than most non-artsy printed books, where the battery life is merely a week or so. Certainly higher contrast than an old yellowed paperback.

Then there are e-Ink or e-Paper or whatever screen book readers, that have no redeeming characteristic at all, other than a battery life measured in page turns, which for a slow reader is possibly measured in months.

The problem is the assumption that given that its technologically hard to make a high contrast display, thus expensive, therefore a high contrast display must inherently be better because its expensive thus more profitable for the manufacturer, err uh umm, I mean marketing says the more expensive one causes less eyestrain. However, there is plenty of evidence that LOWER contrast reduces eyestrain...

http://ergonomics.about.com/od/eyestrain/a/reduce_contrast.htm

Meanwhile most people here in SE Australia (educated or otherwise) know all two well that a "slight change" in weather patterns can really screw up a civilization. Grain harvest have been cut in half for 8 out the last ten years, billions of dollars of hydro infrastucture built in Tasmaninia in the 90's sits idle for lack of water, the high tech bass-link cable that was to be used to export that power to the mainland is now used to import power. Firestorms convert forrest into grassland, and grassland into desert, the dust from which can be seen on most mornings simply by looking at your car. Lakes that have survived for tens of thousands of years become toxic and whole forrests of 600yo red gums wither and die. Every state capital in the country has been forced to ration water while thier governments spend billions building some of the world's largests desal plants. Had this happened over geological time scales nobody except geologists would have noticed.

Now I have never been to WI but I hear from reliable sources it is also experiencing drought conditions. Tell me, do they teach history in WI?

Actually the first modem was 300 baud. http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blmodem.htm/url

Well, yes, if you didn't do the paperwork for it. But the requirements are fairly simple [noonsite.com]

Those are the Federal requirement. The State of MA also requires all persons possessing a firearm to obtain a license from their local police department or State Police (for nonresidents). Failure to do so is criminal and (quoting directly from MGL CH269(10)(6)

shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two and one-half years nor more than five years, or for not less than 18 months nor more than two and one-half years in a jail or house of correction. The sentence imposed on such person shall not be reduced to less than 18 months, nor suspended, nor shall any person convicted under this subsection be eligible for probation, parole, work release, or furlough or receive any deduction from his sentence for good conduct until he shall have served 18 months of such sentence

http://crime.about.com/od/gunlawsbystate/a/gunlaws_ma.htm
http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=eopssubtopic&L=3&L0=Home&L1=Firearms+Registration+%26+Laws&L2=Gun+Laws&sid=Eeops
http://www.mass.gov/legis/laws/mgl/269-10.htm

177,000 feet [flash] (about 54 km). However, this NASA site says 50 km (about 164,000 feet), while this source says 24 nautical miles (about 146,000 feet, or 44 km). My guess is that the differences are due to variations in mass and trajectory of the shuttle for various missions, and in improvements in the design (less weight, more thrust) over the years.

Apogee of the SRBs is at approximately 220,000 feet (about 67 km).

ever hear of a switch or hub?

As a plasma, the gas conducts electricity, which pretty much precludes it from being an arc of electricity

Really? Whether the medium is a plasma or some other form of gas, its still an electric arc. You can't have an electric arc in a pure vacuum - the ions gotta come from somewhere. Carbon arc lamps just vaporize the carbon to produce the plasma rather than relying on gas sealed in the bulb.

But if that's not good enough, here's some cites:

All arc lamps use current running through different kinds of gas plasma. A.E. Becquerel of France theorized about the fluorescent lamp in 1857. Low pressure arc lights use a big tube of low pressure gas plasma and include: fluorescent lights and neon signs.

Once the air is ionized it becomes conductive and allows the built-up charges to equalize in a spectacular display of plasma that we call lightning.

Indoors, both day and night, most of the light we work by comes from fluorescent lamps and high intensity arc lamps. In all these sources - every one of them - light is produced by plasma.

I deliberately chose not to cite wikipedia, but I think it is worth pointing out that there are at least 5 difference articles that confirm in one way or another that the fluorescents are arc lamps.

I'm just saying there is a difference between comparing a white public figure to a monkey, and comparing a black public figure to a monkey.

So, what would be an appropriate way to portray a black politician as a buffoon? (Other than the obvious fact that you called them a politician?)

Well, if the press is in love with her, there are few options. Wait a couple of years, and with luck they'll have gotten over it. The strategies used to parody Condoleezza Rice would probably be attacked by today's media as being unfair on "sexist" grounds, if used on Michelle Obama. For example:
http://www.mygtv.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/condoleezza_rice_bikini_show.jpg
http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/8/5/condi_secret.jpg

And no doubt, with our ludicrous newly-found "sensitivity" on religious grounds[*], the one showing Rice with little horns while deploying her tongue on her boss might be judged unacceptable if it featured the Obamas instead:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_2k22z8vH128/SDoVJbCMmOI/AAAAAAAACxM/ysfuq40YhEg/s320/Condoleezza-Rice-George-W-Bush--23188.jpg

[*] If ever there was a characteristic crying out to be parodied, this is it.

Trust me, I hack both systems.

The 360 and PS3 are practically identical. Both use IBM Power-PC based main cores and a bunch of side processing units. the 360's total performance capability is HALF that of the PS3 (360 does 1TFLOP PS3 can do 2TFLOP) the PS3 also has a superior graphics hardware set. Comparing GTAIV on the 360 vs the PS3, the 360 looks like it's running in 16-bit color depth, shadows are absolutely horrible, and the draw distance isn't even on par with the PS3.

Sorry, speaking from an 'inside' point of view, you're dead wrong. For one, the 360 only has 10MB of dedicated VRAM. the PS3 has 256MB of GDDR3 for their GPU, and the 256MB of XDR DESTROYS the 512MB of GDDR3 that the 360 uses for system memory (For one GDDR3 isn't meant to be used as main system memory, XDR is.)

http://www.wikixbox360.com/page/Detailed+Xbox+360+System+Specs
http://playstation.about.com/od/ps3/a/PS3SpecsDetails_3.htm

PS3 stomps the 360. The 360 is by far inferior, it's locked down, and it burns itself out more often than not.

Oh, and I do run Linux on my PS3.

The first chart is nice, but it tells only a litte, because we don't have an absolute scale. It shows an increase, but I'd rather like to see it unnormalized - on the *Kelvin* scale, I might add.

When you find complex Earth life living at temperatures significantly below the freezing point of water, I'll take your suggestion seriously (note that the body temperature of polar bears, penguins, and whales is significantly higher than 0C). Until then or until downloading into electronic processors actually is possible and makes low temperatures on the Kelvin scale desirable, personally I'll find a graph normalized on the freezing point of water more than satisfactory. In addition, that freezing point and the boiling point of water are actually pretty useful as a calibration points. The heat necessary for the phase change from ice to liquid is a significant discontinuity in enthalpy making a Kelvin-based scale nonsense for the purpose you ascribe to it.

Distill water for purity and then perform your freeze/boil calibration at sea level. I think we did that experiment in grade 10 science and it was well within the capabilities of the early 19th Century, whereas the Kelvin scale wasn't proposed until 1848. As long as you have the calibration apparatus and can reproduce the procedures, you can adjust for any systematic changes in measurements that have happened between now and then. Those low error bars in those early measurements don't seem that much of a stretch to me and your argument seems like a deliberately misleading straw man.

Fact: That means we have, on average, a temperature increase of 1K per 100 years, or an increase of 0,39 percent over ONE HUNDRED years.

Until the majority human race can sustain itself in a world that's got an average temperature significantly below 0C, I'm going to argue that the fact that the temperature range can go from 0C to 0K is meaningless. Really the question is: what is the variation in average world temperature which can still support human population in sufficient numbers to maintain our modern civilization? (Although certainly not all the people we have now would be required, it would probably still require around 1/2 billion). Anyways that number is certainly a lot less than 100C, and (since the last few ice ages with large ice sheets involved average temperature drops of less than 10C) the livable range may be less than 20C. If so, that 1C change may be as much as 5% of the change that can be supported before the irreversible collapse of modern civilization. That makes your relevance estimate off by an order of magnitude.

As for the last part, you seem to be confusing the effect of systematic errors with those of random errors. The thing is that if the reading errors are random, they will tend to balance each other out, with some high and some low readings. So statistically, the error will be less pronounced over the long term, so trends will still show up on regression analysis. Systematic errors are more of a problem, such as replacing one grad student who tends to record high with another who records low. However systematic errors would not show up over the short term and could be more readily identified and accounted for over the longer term. That said, your count of 200 measuring stations seems low since the US weather service established measuring stations in each county in PA in the 1830s. While other states were slower to adopt similar measures, since John Dalton started making observations as far back as 1787, it's reasonable to believe that the number of measurements available in NA and Western Europe in total would have been significantly higher than 200, even as far back as the 1870s when the US National Service was created.

The trouble is that the population doesn't grow at a linear rate. It grows at a much faster rate. Currently the population growth rate is at roughly 1.3%, which doesn't sound bad, but that works out to a "doubling time" of only 54 years.
So in 2064, we'll have met or exceeded the theoretical max you cited. I'd say that's cause for alarm.

I'm mostly just being the Devil's advocate here. I'm no statistician, just a guy with the internet and a /. account.

^^Citation needed... by me. Netscape Only HTML Tags

I think you were thinking of NORAD?

1. Ok, lets compare to cartoons from the 60's
2. I know, that's what I said
3. Yeah, because modern TV does not have stupid stereotypes...

In closing, you sir, are either entirely delusional or a complete twit. If you would let me know which of those categories you fall into, I would appreciate it. Thank you.

the technology is just beginning start getting available for realistic electric cars, and so some time in the moderate future, there may be enough electric cars on the roads that electrical power may actually make some significant inroads against oil as a transportation fuel-- but not in 1985, and the oil companies are (and were) perfectly aware of that.

I'm pretty sure there are those in the petroleum industry who know very well electric cars were made before internal combustion engine cars were released. In the 1830s "Robert Anderson of Scotland invented the first crude electric carriage." However I don't necessarily blame or think the reason electric cars didn't take over the roads was because of the petroleum industry, electric companies were pretty powerful too. And the power of coal companies wasn't something to sneeze at either.

Falcon

Iraq was a US mignon during the cold war

Awww lookit widdle Iraq ain't it so cute!

So, this guy gets paid at least $174,000 per year plus all those awesome perks and retirement plans that none of us peons could ever get, and he can't do his own homework?!

What does this guy do all day?

Work for a win in the next congressional election.

In an interview, Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said: “I regret that the language was the same. I did not know it was.” He said he got his statement from his staff and “did not know where they got the information from.”

So, this guy gets paid at least $174,000 per year plus all those awesome perks and retirement plans that none of us peons could ever get, and he can't do his own homework?!

What does this guy do all day?

DOS was better than CP/M.

Microsoft bought DOS.

Another great statistic I just found was that an average of 171,000 Christians are "martyred" for their faith every year. That's pretty wild! I'd make a joke about some well-fed Roman lions, but that would be in very poor taste.

It's true; Christians taste bad. It's from their eating all those communion wafers that taste like cardboard. You are what you eat.

People are leaving that organization in droves.

I would beg to differ. Several top Google hits suggest that they are growing, but at a rate less than the world population. Thus, as a percentage of world population, Catholocism is shrinking, but it's still growing in numbers. People are not, as you suggest, leaving it in droves.

Another great statistic I just found was that an average of 171,000 Christians are "martyred" for their faith every year. That's pretty wild! I'd make a joke about some well-fed Roman lions, but that would be in very poor taste.

People are leaving that organization in droves.

I would beg to differ. Several top Google hits suggest that they are growing, but at a rate less than the world population. Thus, as a percentage of world population, Catholocism is shrinking, but it's still growing in numbers. People are not, as you suggest, leaving it in droves.

Another great statistic I just found was that an average of 171,000 Christians are "martyred" for their faith every year. That's pretty wild! I'd make a joke about some well-fed Roman lions, but that would be in very poor taste.

Have you tried stripping the binary?

... if they would just install a heated driveway. Like on http://landscaping.about.com/cs/winterlandscaping/f/upfront_cost.htm

http://mobileoffice.about.com/od/usingyourphone/f/tethering.htm

Question: What Does Tethering Mean?
Answer: In relation to cell phone use, tethering has two definitions and both can apply to mobile professionals' use of their cell phone.

1. The first definition of tethering refers to using a cell phone as a modem for your laptop or PDA. Creating a connection either with cables or wirelessly "tethers" your cell phone to your other mobile device.

When reading User Agreements for cell phone service providers make sure to pay attention if the Agreement prohibits the use of "tethering your cell phone" or using your cell phone in a "tethered capacity".

If you do not have a cell phone service package that allows you to use your cell phone as a modem you could be in violation of your User Agreement and lose your service. You may also find that you have incredibly high bills for your connection time.

Tether the tether by tethering the tethered tether to another tether. sheesh

Part of the problem here is that U.S. public policy since Reagan is dominated by the mantra, "The marketplace can handle the problem." And very often, that's true. But not always, as this problem shows.

The marketplace hasn't been allowed to handle the problem. Because of price and wage control laws in World War 2 employers were not allowed to pay employees more. Because this interference damaged employers' ability to hire workers the government started allowing employers to offer to employees benefits such as health insurance. When an employer did they got a tax deduction. That is why today most people in the US get health insurance through their employer. However a person who buys their own insurance does not get that tax deduction.

Here's more on the History of Health Insurance Benefits.

Falcon

I'll reply to you since at least you seem the most polite person to reply, I never expected all these responses or the troll mod. Wow, just wow. And this Tomhudson person, whoah, it's a miracle they let him run free.

anyhoo, check this out
http://landscaping.about.com/od/pestcontrol/a/cat_repellents.htm

Personally I would go for the plant options and maybe talk to the owner of the cat to finance it?

...especially in this day and age where shareware is thrown about every which way

GREAT SCOTT!
Marty! What year is it?

Doc? Is that you? What are you doing here... and now?

Yes Marty, it's me! I must've overshot the date. Now what YEAR is it?!

Doc! Calm down. It's 1991.

Oh, well, then I guess I've got some bad news. On the plus side, I should be able to stock up on floppies.

I don't agree is better. Is different, but is not better. A lot of people hide behind the screen/mobile device and talk whatever smack they want, free of guilt because there are no consequences to what they say. Of course this only applies to interactions between two strangers. But you will never replace an actual face-to-face talk with another human, because 93% of the conversation is transmitted via nonverbal communication (http://humanresources.about.com/od/interpersonalcommunicatio1/a/nonverbal_com.htm). Just think about the tones we use when talking. They can really change the meaning of what someone's saying. You can't transmit that on a text.

There was a reduction of the national debt during the 90s-era Republican Congress (1997, 98 and 99 to be specific).

And who controlled congress during the Bush spending spree before the Democrats took over congress? Who controlled congress during the reductions in deficit in the 50s-80s? It's right here. The Democrats controlled both branches of congress right up until Reagan took the presidency and the Republicans took the senate. You can't have it both ways: you can't blame the president when it was Bush in the white house and then blame the Republicans in congress when it was Clinton who was president.

But, since you trotted out the same argument you always hear, here is the data that shows that on average, the deficit is reduced under democratic control of congress as well as under democratic presidents. The correlation just isn't as strong. The bottom line is that, statistically, Democratic party governments do a better job at reducing the deficit!

The election resulted in a sweeping victory for the Democratic Party which captured the House of Representatives, the Senate, and a majority of governorships and state legislatures from the Republican Party.

12 years of the "permanent Republican majority" was enough for people to finally vote the bums out, that election showed about the same dissatisfaction with incumbents as in 1994. Why is it that conservatives are the only ones in this country who can have a revolution? We certainly didn't see any less corruption, government waste, and general largess under conservatives as progressives. In fact, the last republican president to preside over a reduction in the gross national debt as percent of GDP was Gerald Ford.

If you read the books
about Bill Gates and Microsoft, there is little evidence that he was much
interested in technology. Remember, he initially didn't think the internet
would be important. Hard
Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is interesting,
for example. .

Bullshit. I pulled "Hard Drive" off the shelf and the first several chapters are about Gates' obsession with computer programming.

Admittedly the "The Road Ahead" was some worthless crap for MBA fanboys.

The early Microsoft Basic was buggy and poorly documented. It ran under the CP/M operating system.

"... the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots."

The problem with managers who have little knowledge or interest in technology is that they are mostly blind to technology. The mentally blind cannot lead.

If you read the books about Bill Gates and Microsoft, there is little evidence that he was much interested in technology. Remember, he initially didn't think the internet would be important. Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is interesting, for example. So is Barbarians Led by Bill Gates.

Read The Road Ahead by Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. There was little in the initial edition, at least, to suggest that Gates knew much about technology. The book was full of platitudes that any buzzword collector would know.

Have I ever heard of rhetorical questions?!

Try here Link

On the occasions when I need to find something via BitTorrent that I'm not certain I can find anywhere else, I will check this bookmark:
http://netforbeginners.about.com/od/peersharing/f/torrentsearch.htm

I can't keep up with which torrent sites are up, down, removed or what. This page usually gives me a fighting chance of finding a functional torrent-related site with the *cough* information I need.

None of those states allow fullblood first cousin marriages that would produce off-spring.

I know first cousins who have married and have had kids. I know they did some genetic counseling and/or testing beforehand, but I do not know that if that was a requirement of the state that they were married in.

In any case, if you do not like the citation I gave you, a google search: http://www.google.fr/search?q=restriction+on+marriage+cousins turns up a bunch of others, none of which support your position that no state allows first cousins to marry - most of them seem to say that 19 states allow first cousin marriages without restriction:

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/LAW/04/columns/fl.grossman.incest.04.09/
http://marriage.about.com/cs/marriagelicenses/a/cousin.htm

PulseAudio is architecturally flawed

It's structured the same way the audio systems on Windows and OS X are.

networked audio daemon and a lower level kernel API

There should be no such distinction. Any "lower level" API should be an implementation detail of the application-level audio system, just as the PCI configuration space is an implementation detail as far as X clients are concerned. As for the traditional distinction between the audio deamon interface and the "lower level" one: it's an accident of history that we lived with that split so long. PA is a better world.

PA is userspace, trying to do things that require kernel level control of timing

You should read up on POSIX realtime scheduling. There's nothing PA does that required kernel-level support. In fact, you should be happy PA runs in userspace: the less code in the kernel, the less can go wrong in the kernel. Besides: being in the kernel means that you're non-portable, that you can't use floating-point, and that you have various other coding constraints. Userspace is far better.

As for switching users on a desktop machine, I don't know anyone who does this

Pauline Kael, on Nixon: "How can he have won? Nobody I know voted for him."