Slashdot Mirror

A high quality gaming machine that could compete with the PS4 will set you back well over $1000.

I think you mean it will cost you $500 or so. It was even cheaper a few years ago before the change to DDR4, and prior to the gigantic clusterfuck with mining that drove video card prices through the roof. And the prices are coming down rather quickly, on top of that you're already setup for the next-gen titles and if you have a dislike of windows, you can take your pick of any 'nix variety. Especially since nearly all upcoming titles support vulkan out of the box.

And you don't get the PSVR which is relatively cheap and a perfectly decent intro to modern VR gaming.

Considering VR is such a tiny minority of gaming ranking on par with 3D TV, I don't think that's an issue for most people.

And if they want to censor it, it wins over parents. There's a reason Nintendo is doing so well.

That's not the reason they're censoring. And nintendo has been selling adult themed games for quite a while. Give you a single reason why Sony is censoring: They moved the HQ from Japan, to San Francisco and the old CEO that supported everything under the sun quit.

Nothing is stopping independent developers from making whatever games they want and releasing them however they want for the PC.

Mostly true. Until you discover the legions of western feminists, numale allies, and various review sites that are so prudish they make the 1910's look progressive. And if you don't think so, then just look at the reviews that the 'mainstream' sites push, crying over things like cleavage, bellybuttons, and the absolute moaning over the 'golden ratio' for thigh high to skirt length, and how much they echo the bullshit coming off of regressive sites like resetera.

Assange's "Deadman Switch" clicked last night (and you have to love the file dates. . .)

And the "insurance torrents" are all back up:

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_D...

I remember the 90s, and the 200bn that got wasted because the telecoms wanted a handout on government dimes.

Never forget this anytime you see big telecos complaining about infrastructure costs, or smothering co-ops and municipal ventures which need to make use of utility poles and easements.

The Book of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal (or a summary from the author) should be required reading for any lawmakers involved with the USF or FCC.

What makes Starlink different from other satellite solutions? Current satellite solutions have limited bandwidth with higher ping times. Satellites in Geostationary orbit are 35,786 km (22,236 mi) away. That distance creates real world ping times on the order of about 600 to 1200ms. Since there will be over 4000 Starlink satellites they can be in lower orbits reducing the distance between the end user and the satellite. Shorter distance makes for better ping times and Starlink is projected to operate around 25 to 50ms.

Skip the costs of other sites. Just stay within the sat network:
Ground station to satellite, stay in space bouncing through a few satellites, then down to ground station.
Avoiding the numerous hops in terrestrial infrastructure (including going through NSA) is why they have multi-layered constellations.

I would say that Windy overestimated it a bit, but Windy/Starlink/1-web/Amazon appear closer than you are.

Actually, you have been lied to, son.
What makes Starlink different from other satellite solutions? Current satellite solutions have limited bandwidth with higher ping times. Satellites in Geostationary orbit are 35,786 km (22,236 mi) away. That distance creates real world ping times on the order of about 600 to 1200ms. Since there will be over 4000 Starlink satellites they can be in lower orbits reducing the distance between the end user and the satellite. Shorter distance makes for better ping times and Starlink is projected to operate around 25 to 50ms

Not sure how the news of YT raising price for YTTV fits into this discussion, but sure are a lot of heated comments here, https://old.reddit.com/r/news/...

What is bias? Does "bias" mean "not a white male?"

Here is one. Google is filtering the term "Radical Islam" which is used primarily by liberals to describe Islamic terrorist organizations. If this is a real leak and not a forgery, the company is so far gone that the best solution is to send in the army, drag people out in handcuffs, and shoot them in the parking lot. For what it's worth, here is a three-year-old thread warning about Google hiring Al Qaeda supporters to write its filters. So it could be real.

Then there was the Apple chief of diversity who was fired by the board for saying that the company was willing to hire white people. So they got rid of the black woman who said that. They made clear that it is official Apple policy that they do not want to employ anybody of European descent. So there is an example of bias that permeates the corporate culture all the way to the top.

A couple of years ago I read about an exciting new approach to treating cancer: DNA nanobots. These are very simple machines made from DNA.

How simple are they? They are hollow capsules with a hinge and a latch. The one function of the nanobot is to pop the latch open under the correct circumstances.

(Note: I'm a software developer, not any kind of doctor or scientist, and I'm describing this in my own words based on my own understanding. Apologies if I get anything wrong. Links at the end so you can go to better sources.)

The latch can be configured to open only when it bumps into a specific protein. For example, a protein only found on the cancer to be treated.

The idea is that a nano-dose of strong medicine is inserted into the "nanobot" capsules. Each does of medicine is tiny but there are literally trillions of capsules. (That's why they are made out of DNA... no person and no machine can make these, they are self-assembling.) Then the capsules are introduced into the body of the patient. They travel along through the body, bumping into things, and the medicine doesn't do anything because it's contained inside the capsule. Then, when the capsule happens to bump into a cancer cell, the latch opens, the medicine is released, and a nanodose of the medicine is administered directly to the cancer cell.

What I found exciting about this is that it decouples the problems of being both safe and effective. We have plenty of effective anti-cancer drugs, but many of them are useless because they aren't safe. They aren't selective enough; they will kill healthy tissue as much as they kill cancer cells. But if we can program the latch to open only when near the cancer cells, potentially these same drugs would now become safe to use. The nanobot makes the effective drugs safe.

The research from the news story identifies many targets. If the latch can be programmed using this new data, potentially the nanobots can be tailored to attack any kind of cancer and not hurt any healthy tissue.

From time to time I check the news to see if there is anything new about DNA nanobots. The original research I read about has gone silent... I read somewhere that a major drug company had bought the research so maybe it's quietly being developed (and the staggering piles of paperwork quietly started at the FDA).

Here is the research I originally read about:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2014/12/ido-bachelet-announces-2015-human-trial.html

I didn't find any follow-up about the human trial. I'm wondering whether the treatment worked and the patient was saved.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5nck89/what_happened_ido_bachelet_and_leukemia_nanobot/

Here's what appears to be another research team pursuing the same idea.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212112000.htm

Yeah, because Linux NEVER has any error messages to show people.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/l...
https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08...
https://ubuntuforums.org/showt...
https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/...
https://bufferoverflow.io/gpu-...
http://vfio.blogspot.com/2015/...
https://www.se7ensins.com/foru...

There is literally 100 guides to this, whoever told you you need more than a $100 GPU and a cpu that supports VFIO lied to you and you should never trust another word they say.

Bzzt. NEXT provides a co-ordinate system on planet surfaces (20.0222 S 109.0222 E, etc.)

But even before that, you could use primitive mapping techniques with only the simple compass HUD--
https://reddit.com/r/NoMansSky...

Telling someone three years before you release a game that you are going to put the ability to land on asteroids and make windows on starships transparent is not a "promise". People blasted Sean Murray for doing exactly what he said which was

"And when we ship the game not everything will be possible. But this is a game we will be making for quite a while, even after it comes out."

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMan...

"As for what it isn't? According to Murray, it might not be the game all the various trailers released for the PS4 and PC exclusive made it out to be."

'That means this maybe isn't the game you imagined from those trailers,' he writes. 'If you hoped for things like PvP multiplayer or city building, piloting freighters, or building civilizations ... that isn't what NMS is. Over time it might become some of those things through updates.'

http://www.gamenguide.com/arti...

"It’s not really a multiplayer game, that’s not really the way to think about it. There are infinitesimal chances, very, very small chances of you even coming across a place that another player has been to . . . The most likely thing that is going to happen is you are going to come across a planet and some other players has been there and they’ve named that planet and the creatures, and I’m sure they’ve given it a good name."

https://gamerant.com/no-mans-s...

"To be super clear - No Man's Sky is not a multiplayer game. Please don't go in looking for that experience."

https://twitter.com/nomanssky/...

They tried it a decade ago, and probably a decade before that. This has nothing to do with gullible millennials : it's almost certainly one of those perennial ideas that is a consequence of a broken education system.

The Zuckerberg Files.

I believe these are all the archives somebody on /r/DataHoarder snagged before Facebook accidentally hit delete 10,000 times and then accidentally dropped the backup drives in a volcano.

https://www.reddit.com/r/law/c... for a great rundown.

It starts with 15%. Then it goes to 20%. Then 25%. Then 50%. ...sooner or later you get your education paid for, but the cost is ~100% servitude

A company can define what's in the best interest of itself, and thus their shareholders, and it does not have to be "maximize profits." Of course many companies decide that maximizing profit is the best path, but the idea that it is a legal requirement is a myth.

Source 1

Source 2

Source 3

Uhh, plenty of people fall asleep in MRI machines all the time. It's loud, but you wear headphones (that optionally play music) and the loud noises are periodic. And, because you're laying down and stuck immovable for sometimes over an hour, it's natural to start falling asleep.

I've had at least 5 MRIs and lab techs from two different buildings have told me they have people fall asleep all the time.

https://www.quora.com/Have-you...

https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/...

http://1goodfoot.blogspot.com/...

https://multiplesclerosis.net/...

[thousands of etc examples]

Ok Google now please stop advertising those scams!

Your response is interesting to me, because when I made this comment on reddit, they assumed I was pro-Trump and downvoted accordingly.

As somebody who isn't particularly fond of the president, but also not fond of the condescending attitudes from the Democrats, I may stand in an unusual position here--destined to be taken the wrong way by the vast majority who appear to be more polarized.

But surely, SURELY you must be rooting hard for one team or the other? No, and stop calling me Shirley.

He never reported the bug because he's apparently unaware of the in-vehicle bug reporting system, yet seems surprised that it's never been fixed.

Neural net vision systems train to their dataset. If your edge case is not in the dataset, it's not going to be learned. Self-driving vehicles without a driver at the wheel (Level 5) are not going to be viable for years because there's such a vast multitute of edge cases, and the only way to learn them is to collect an edge-case dataset. Until then, you're not getting beyond Level 3/4.

That's not to say that manually filing a bug report is the only way to trigger one. When there's a driver disengagement, that generates a sort of "mini-report". But a filed bug report contains a lot more information.

One of the things that I think a lot of people forget is that you're dealing with a data flood. Picture how much space and bandwidth it would take to record billions of miles of realtime, high framerate data from multiple cameras per vehicle, plus radar and ultrasonic sensors. Totally impractical - even just to transmit the full dataset for every edge case. As a result, there's some clever "data minimization" techniques used to keep the flood under control, where all "processed" data is transmitted (what it believes is where), but the raw data used to generate it is only transmitted at key moments (recognition ambiguity, changes in what's recognized, driver triggers, etc), and only for the objects of interest.

Also, as for this driver's particular case, I don't think it's hard to see what's going on. The car is correctly recognizing that the left lane is blocked, and correctly recognizing that the right lane is clear, but not realizing that you're not supposed to take the right lane, because of the arrow-sign in the left lane. So instead it's seeing the path that the other cars are taking as an exit, and trying to "remain on the same road" via the "clear" lane.

If I remember right, construction sign tagging was first spotted in shadow mode last fall. I'm not sure how much of that has since transitioned from shadow mode to live.

They're actually fairly common, with about 20-40 air bursts occurring each year. They're pretty evenly distributed. Russia just seems to get a disproportionate number because it has the most land area of any country by almost a factor of 2. It's also got a large population spread throughout that very large land area. The country covers pretty much the same latitude as Canada (second-largest country), but Canada is mostly deserted at higher latitutdes. So that increases the chances of a meteor being seen/recorded over Russia.

It's also worth noting that the ancient Egyptians also witnessed large meteor events and used the material to create jewelry for royalty and ceremonial weapons.

They're actually fairly common, with about 20-40 air bursts occurring each year. They're pretty evenly distributed. Russia just seems to get a disproportionate number because it has the most land area of any country by almost a factor of 2. It's also got a large population spread throughout that very large land area. The country covers pretty much the same latitude as Canada (second-largest country), but Canada is mostly deserted at higher latitutdes. So that increases the chances of a meteor being seen/recorded over Russia.

It's also worth noting that the ancient Egyptians also witnessed large meteor events and used the material to create jewelry for royalty and ceremonial weapons.

I'm sure telecom carriers would welcome local competetion and build out their infrastructure for everyone:

http://www.startribune.com/tel...

https://www.fiercetelecom.com/...

https://www.bizjournals.com/de...

https://arstechnica.com/uncate...

https://www.reddit.com/r/cordc...

Here's the BBC misquoting a Reddit user. Here's the user spotting it and calling it out.

The BBC admits Aleppo Boy was propaganda.

BBC lied about women coding.

If the market could punish, the BBC would be begging for donations much like The Guardian. But with taxpayer support, this will never happen.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Enoug...
Musk fanboys are a strange breed.

mostly that they're pushing them too hard to hit competitive numbers. You end up with a card that's unstable out of the box.

Complete rubbish, nobody is complaining about unstable out of the box. Rather, there are complaints about buggy tweaking tools. Enthusiasts quickly found that the Radeon VII can be aggressively undervolted at default clock, and in fact can be overclocked while undervolted.

An aspect that this report hasn't mentioned, perhaps as it's an unfortunate and unfair issue in some games, is sadly there can also be code issues at play as well. Many modern games have still suffered from damage dealt or game physics not being frame rate independent which can directly equate to player advantages, Quake 3 for example was well known for having the fastest movement and most useful jumping speed and height on 125 FPS, the issue was fixed many years ago in some mods and subsequently Quake Live by removing the physics system's dependency on frame rate.

A quick search on damage tied to fps brings up quite a few recent results, and I couldn't quickly find evidence that they had all been resolved -

Quake Champions : https://www.reddit.com/r/Quake... (Damage and movement FPS dependencies were fixed early in Early Access)
PUBG : https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/fra... (Quick search found no info on fixes)
Fortnite : https://www.eurogamer.net/arti... (Epic acknowledge the issue and state that they’re working toward a fix.)
Destiny 2 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (Quick search found no info on fixes)
Warframe: https://forums.warframe.com/to... (Staff posted at the time a fix was being looked into)

Even including such bugs high FPS is not the be all and end all in a multiplayer shooting game as positioning, better weapons, collecting more health and armour are all strategic elements that usually claim the victory beyond simple aim and damage output. Higher frame rates certainly can aid locating your opponents position quickly and accurately in a high speed fire fight though and are certainly a much more pleasant visual experience, https://www.testufo.com/ can give you a quick example of that without having to leave your browser.

Or even the OP linked video ? The first post in the addiction video is from kurzgesagt saying they will remove the video , and delete it (hey you can even google it https://www.reddit.com/r/video...). In the second the one I linked, they themselves say those 2 video did not match standard they set themselves, cited only one source etc.... Well whatever.

IMO, all life born on Spaceship Earth is precious and important. Food for thought, fellow passengers. :)

I can't argue with you on any of those points. Whole Foods used to have a great selection, and now it does NOT.
 
See the two star review average.
 
Take a look at this thread..
 
  Another debate
 
  Business Insider gripes about it.
 
You see, you have an angry mob of people now because Bezos bought a healthy business and then drained it of all its blood like a swarm of giant Alaskan mosquitoes attacking a large cow. He destroyed the brand that everyone trusted and now wants US to come crawling back to him? No thank you.

I can't argue with you on any of those points. Whole Foods used to have a great selection, and now it does NOT.
 
See the two star review average.
 
Take a look at this thread..
 
  Another debate
 
  Business Insider gripes about it.
 
You see, you have an angry mob of people now because Bezos bought a healthy business and then drained it of all its blood like a swarm of giant Alaskan mosquitoes attacking a large cow. He destroyed the brand that everyone trusted and now wants US to come crawling back to him? No thank you.

Yup, if there's one thing you can count on from them, it's compromise.

see: https://www.reddit.com/r/tippr...

Reddit doesn't control it or get a cut. Works well.

lgw selectively quoted pseudofrog thusly:

reactions that based on some reactionary ideology that's far from uncommon online (The Force Awakens sucks because a lady with latent Force powers beat up a couple of guys with a space stick).

He then responded to that assertion by opining:

You know, I'm not sure anyone actually believed that. I think it's entirely a contrived excuse, or so oversimplified as to be wrong.

No. No, it's really not.

While The Last Jedi was still in theaters, some unemployed basement-dweller spent considerable effort to create a de-feminized fanedit of the movie.

If you're still determined to defend your thesis, you might first want to visit the Reddit discussion page about what has come to be known as the Chauvinist Cut. Or you could "treat" yourself to mundanemike's fawning SJWs lose their mind over THE LAST JEDI: THE DE-FEMINIZED FANEDIT review of the CC (the Youtube version is the same video he posted to the Daily Caller website, btw). Be sure to at least read the commments that other incels have posted praising his review's "takedown" of SJWs.

I could cite a Godzillion examples of similar foaming, reactionary rants about the original movie, the Chauvinist Cut, and the campaign to downvote it on Rotten Tomatoes, but all you really need as evidence is Bleedingcool's 2017 story about the Facebook troll who claimed to have written a bot he used to massively downvote The Last Jedi on RT to understand that your skepticism is baseless.

Not to mention naive ...

Oddly enough, Twitter is a place where you get banned for telling people to "learn to code"...

Thank you for the data point. I ran across this post that has a solution to at least one person's sleep issues (haven't tried it because I don't own a unit just yet): https://www.reddit.com/r/GPDPo...

Damn the bad luck!

Regardless of whatever merits this space force may or may not have, isn't it a bit late for this president to be trying to change the subject and introduce ideas or policy?

Let's finish resolving the criminal cases before we listen to Trump as though he were a politician. The evidence against him is overwhelming, and in the unlikely event that he really didn't know what his family and everyone working for him was doing, he can clear it all up quickly by talking to the prosecutors under oath about his conversations with the other conspirators, publishing his income tax returns and other proof that he really divested all his hotels to avoid violating the emoluments clause, explaining where the inauguration's laundered money went and what favors he owes for which foreign bribes, explaining why he does everything Putin asks, etc.

Until that happens, there isn't anything else to talk about with Trump, and nothing else that any of us want to hear from him. The investigations are everything. What are there, now six run by the feds (not counting the states starting to get involved with the tax evasion)?

You wanna talk about space force? No. If you were chasing a shoplifter and he suddenly shouted behind him, "I have an idea for a perpetual motion machine," would you listen to his idea, or would ignore it and proceed with tackling him, cuffing him and booking him? If Trump has anything to say to us, it needs to be about his role as a criminal suspect, not as a wanna-be president. Either confess so we can get it all over with, or start explaining how all the evidence might be incorrect.

If he's innocent, it shouldn't be too hard to explain a few things, leaving Mueller to slap his forehead and say, "ooh, I never thought of that! Maybe you really are innocent!" Who knows, whatever the misunderstanding is, it might also clear Cohen's and Manafort's names too. Doesn't anyone care that they're about to start doing serious time?

RESOLVE THE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS BEFORE TALKING POLITICS OR VISION.

Unicode

  'HORSE' (U+1F40E)

  'BATTERY' (U+1F50B)
sorry nothing for 'staple'

  'WARNING SIGN' (U+26A0)

This post has a "staple"character https://www.reddit.com/r/unico..._latin_letter_staple_with_combining_staple_above/

A random re-coding website said it is %u02AD

Of course /. strips it out!

I didn't do the tape playback myself, but only because someone else had already done it seemingly hours after the thing was released - it wasn't a modem noise, but the sound from saving ZX Spectrum program data to tape (though in fairness, pretty similar to a modem since it's transforming digital into analog audible signals, but I think they had more range for tape storage than unreliable phone lines).

I did enjoy the ZX Spectrum game in an emulator though, I thought it was pretty awesome they actually hired a guy to write some real (If simple) game for the show actually on a ZX Spectrum.

California have it in their grasp to be able to put in a TRUE high-speed with hyperloop.

No, they don't. Hyperloop doesn't exist, it's a theoretical project with some extremely limited proofs of concept built that, currently, don't even prove it can run faster than HSR. If it's viable at all it'll be 20 years or so before we can see it, and in the mean time it suffers ABSOLUTELY EVERY SINGLE PROBLEM THAT HSR DOES.

Yes, I said it. Remember how Musk pretended it was "cheaper" than HSR? He did that by connecting two points that were 50-100 miles away from LA and SF, and by only "connecting" (if you call building stations 50-100 miles away "connecting") those two cities. He also handwaved about the costs, and ignored the fact that many of the things he proposed such as some way of building cheaper viaducts would also improve the costs for HSR if they were actually practical and cost that little.

Add to that the reality that it's probably a horrible way to travel even if it works, and ultimately it's not easy to understand why so many people are for it, beyond misunderstanding it and/or having the classic American prejudice against HSR because it's what those damned furry-ners do.

Musk was never proposing Hyperloop because it was a good idea, he was proposing it because he's a fucking car manufacturer.

Roughly a month ago, somebody "glued" the first two semi-clear images together into an animated gif to give a rough sense of stereo, and someone noted the larger lobe appeared relatively flat. I think it was on Reddit. I couldn't find the comment itself, but here's an example of the image:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/...

(The image was posted multiple times. Reddit has dupe issues too ;-)

...justified prejudice.

Can prejudice be justified?

Prejudice means to form the opinion without pre-existing knowledge. Reason requires knowledge. Justifying an opinion requires reason. Ergo, prejudice can never be justified.

Knowledge of statistics is your justification. I choose not to play Russian roulette because even though the chance of jackpot is only 16.7%, the consequences of that jackpot are terrible.

...justified prejudice.

Can prejudice be justified?

Prejudice means to form the opinion without pre-existing knowledge. Reason requires knowledge. Justifying an opinion requires reason. Ergo, prejudice can never be justified.

Connecting these two themes: There are KKK supermarkts in Finland. https://www.reddit.com/r/Accid...

See r/reclassified for a list of the latest banned/quarantined subreddits. 10 in the past 24 hours.

Or bitcoin multi-sig.

However, there still has to be money there to use it, and it appears there is none.

as a step toward someday preventing inherited diseases

"the hope is that the approach could help blind people carrying the mutation have genetically related children whose vision is normal"

Very surprisingly to me, this is generally NOT an immediate accepted topic / action / result. IT'S GONE NOW -- I read it and was shocked. I immediately thought of Ender's Game book 3? where the ?antagonist? -- who had to start and follow wood grain lines until the gods were satisfied -- didn't want to be cured, but also couldn't disrespect her father, so was cured against her will.

There was an article (actually, an opinion piece) that was (not any more!) at: https://www.pluralist.com/post....

It said: A prominent disabilities activist spoke against the use of genetic editing to eliminate diseases from birth because it would be tantamount to a "genocide" against the culture of the disabled.

Link. Other link Discussion

We're talking about removal of diseases," she said. "That's forever. That's a change -- a modification -- that will be passed on to future generations. So that's actually genocide. It's a form of eugenics where certain lived experiences are seen as undesirable and unimaginable."

... argued that disabled people are a community unto themselves and that eliminating their conditions means erasing the potential future of their culture. She asked, "Where is the line between what society perceives to be a horrible genetic mutation and someone's culture?"

The Eye of the Beholder

I'm like: DO IT. And do it AGAIN just to make sure. And if you're bored, check to see if you need to do it AGAIN. If you want to be deaf, you can always stick bananas in your ears. Or your eyes. Or any other random orifices.

as a step toward someday preventing inherited diseases

"the hope is that the approach could help blind people carrying the mutation have genetically related children whose vision is normal"

Very surprisingly to me, this is generally NOT an immediate accepted topic / action / result. IT'S GONE NOW -- I read it and was shocked. I immediately thought of Ender's Game book 3? where the ?antagonist? -- who had to start and follow wood grain lines until the gods were satisfied -- didn't want to be cured, but also couldn't disrespect her father, so was cured against her will.

There was an article (actually, an opinion piece) that was (not any more!) at: https://www.pluralist.com/post....

It said: A prominent disabilities activist spoke against the use of genetic editing to eliminate diseases from birth because it would be tantamount to a "genocide" against the culture of the disabled.

Link. Other link Discussion

We're talking about removal of diseases," she said. "That's forever. That's a change -- a modification -- that will be passed on to future generations. So that's actually genocide. It's a form of eugenics where certain lived experiences are seen as undesirable and unimaginable."

... argued that disabled people are a community unto themselves and that eliminating their conditions means erasing the potential future of their culture. She asked, "Where is the line between what society perceives to be a horrible genetic mutation and someone's culture?"

The Eye of the Beholder

I'm like: DO IT. And do it AGAIN just to make sure. And if you're bored, check to see if you need to do it AGAIN. If you want to be deaf, you can always stick bananas in your ears. Or your eyes. Or any other random orifices.