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  1. Re:What interested me on Most Cave Paintings Were Painted By Women, Says Penn State Researcher · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The Kinsey studies were flawed and debunked a while ago. Get with the times.

    Just like Newton's ideas about gravity and the mechanistic universe were shown as flawed and debunked by the advent of relativity and quantum theory.

    Being incomplete, yes, even being flawed, is not to be unexpected for scientific theories and studies. Indeed, almost all such endeavors in the history of mankind turned out to be flawed and incomplete. That does not diminish their importance though, as attempts to reduce the blurriness of our understanding of the world.

    This is why I led my post with the deliberate statement of "[...] if the Kinsey studies have shown one thing [...]"; implying directly that I know that they were somewhat flawed and in many ways also a product of their times.
    Still, their importance (along with similar studies done in Europe around the same time) helped western society grasp that a binary model of sexuality is even more deeply flawed and incomplete.

    That is not to say the binary model does not approximately correspond to nature -- after all most species need heterosexual sex to procreate. It merely needed pointing out that it was missing a lot of the nuances of reality. Nuances that, when ignored, can lead to to wrong conclusions and predictions. And since these are applied to humans (instead of falling apples, to stay with Newton), the results of such errors can be quite ugly.

  2. Re:What interested me on Most Cave Paintings Were Painted By Women, Says Penn State Researcher · · Score: 5, Informative

    The 10% includes those who have bisexual urges, but identify as heterosexual.

    In that case, the number would be likely much higher. After all, if the Kinsey studies have shown one thing, it is that pure homosexuality is as rare as pure heterosexuality. Most people fall into the range where they "merely" strongly favour one gender over another, but not to the exclusion of the other.

    Furthermore, sexual attraction is not the same thing as actually wanting sexual intercourse. It ranges from simple and almost universal things like the benign interest in the aesthetics of human bodies -- no matter the gender --, over gendered group bonding (best example: sports clubs) up until bonding with a specific individuals (best example here: soldiers in war).

    And then remember that your mind is also capable of empathy on all levels. For example, if you see someone cut themselves, you most likely feel a mirror of their pain. That's why horror movies are so effective.
    The same is true for sexuality. After all, if that were not the case, porn would not be as effective and desired (by any culture, any gender, really).

    For example, if you see a movie in which two people kiss, do you totally ignore one partner? No, you perceive and are affected by them both. You might like some combinations of genders better than others, but you can not deny that the kiss will affect you either way and that something in your brain will mirror the feelings (physical as well as emotional) conveyed by the kiss.

    Additionally, sexuality is the result of a developmental process and like any such feature (height, skin color, etc.) it has as much a genetic "pre-set" component as well as a environmental component that can divert the development. If you flood a male embryo with androgen-blockers, the embryo will turn physically female, along with an increased chance to be attracted to men. Same if you flood a female embryo with the right cocktail of male hormones.

    And like your final body height is influenced by the supply of nutrients during development, sexual orientation is influenced by a myriad of environmental factors. And like height, the result is a sliding scale. In many ways, your genes only supply the starting point for that first cell, but not where you will end up.

    As such, if you don't limit "bisexual urges" to people who actively strive to have physical sex with either gender, you will see that your 10% is an estimate on the lowest conservative threshold.

  3. Re:Sour Grapes on Car Dealers Complain To DMV About Tesla's Website · · Score: 1

    Private law (privileges) do not mean that they only apply to yourself. It means that the law is your own law.

    For example, a privilege of kings in times past was to hunt in the royal woods (i.e. all woods owned by the king; under strong feudalism that meant all woods). Only the king and his men were allowed to hunt. If you were caught "poaching", that was usually punished quite draconically.

    As such, the law was private in so far as that it applied to, or benefited a select few; not private in so far as that only the king was beholden to it.

    Another form of private law is when you enact a general law that ostensibly applies to everyone, but only benefits specific individuals. One such law was the three-class voting system of 17th-19th century Europe.
    For example, in the German Empire (1871-1918), every free man over 25 was allowed to vote. But the vote was not equal (aside from excluding ~70% of the population to begin with).

    You see, the parliament was split into three categories of seats: 1/3rd of the seats were elected by the general populace. 1/3rd by the clerus (church) and the last 1/3rd by the landed aristocracy.
    Which meant that 90% of the voting populace was represented by the first third; the 8% working for the church got the next third and the last third was voted in by a paltry 2% of the voting populace (~0.5% of the general population). Three guesses how the parliament usually voted...

    This law applied to everyone, and by becoming filthy rich enough to buy yourself into either the church or into landed aristocracy, you could increase the effect of your own vote. But still, this law was in effect a private law, as it applied to different people differently -- in other words: it granted a privilege.

    Some private laws are unavoidable or sensible -- like withholding the right to vote from significantly mentally disabled or ill persons; or from children whose vote would be no more than either white noise or the vote of their parents.

    But most private laws are just this: plainly unjust.

  4. Re:Sour Grapes on Car Dealers Complain To DMV About Tesla's Website · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As a Texan I am absolutely disguisted by this. So having a conservative state legislature is bad for a lot of reasons. However, supposedly one of the benefits is keeping the government out of things it has no business in. So what the living fuck happened.

    To be a cynic:
    The voters got exactly what they wanted: Private enterprises buying their own law with no government in sight to stop them. That's what privilege means in its pure form: Private Law.

    After all, remember that a democracy needs at least three pillars to survive: A strong executive (government), a strong legislative (parliament) and a strong judicative (courts).
    Weaken one of them, and you open up the chance for people to abuse the disproportional strength of the other two (or even one).

    Strong executive/legislative with a weak judicative leads to a police state, where the due-process of law is abandonded.
    Strong legislative/judicative with a weak executive leads to corporatism with a nice load of loophole abuse and unfair privileges -- which is what you see above.
    Strong executive/judicative with a weak legislative leads to a static, reactionary state, where a small elite forms a wall against any change.

    Do note that countries that lose yet another pillar are usually civil-war-torn dysfunctional messes or dictatorships of the worst calibre.

    So, why do you want a weak executive again? Or, if you interpret "small government" to include both legislative and executive, why are you so crazy to want that?

  5. Re:Missing the point as usual on Why Computers Still Don't Understand People · · Score: 1

    Just as a minor node to myself; it is "James Clerk Maxwell" not "James Maxwell-Clark". Figures I would misremember his name after just having read an article about the Lewis & Clark expedition. :P

  6. Re:Missing the point as usual on Why Computers Still Don't Understand People · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Even if we restrict the definition of "science" to your definition; that is that science is purely "evidence-based, hypothesis-driven testing", computer science would still fit the bill.

    Remember, that CS is as diverse a field as modern physics is. You have theoretical CS, where you tackle questions like: "What is a good, logical definition for computability?" or "How can you logically prove that a program terminates/runs in X time/consumes X resources, no matter the input". This is fully equivalent to the questions of theoretical physics, where you tackle the Grand Unified Theory -- joining gravity, the weak and strong force as well es electromagnetism.

    These theoretical question can be brought up without need of evidence -- if all you're interested in is disproving something. According to your definition, this means that the theoretical aspects of both physics and CS are not "science". Okay, let's run with that.

    The nice aspect of theoretical questions that can't be disproven by pure thought is, that they lead us on to try to discover concrete evidence that a given theory is true or false in real application! And this is where your rather narrow definition of science comes in, and the point where we find that both practical physics and practical CS fulfill the criteria.

    For example in physics, we can test the theory of relativity by building telescopes that look at stars and black holes, to see whether the hypothesis' predictions hold true to raise the hypothesis to the state of a theory. As can be seen with the term people use for "X of relativity", this has happened for relativity.

    But if you look with even more than a superficial glance at CS, you will see that the same process is at work in moving from theoretical CS to practical CS. One open question of theoretical CS is whether P = NP or not [1]. So far, we are incapable of disproving either possibility with pure thought. Thus, we turn to practical CS where people try to find evidence of either in the real world. After all, if you can create a program on a real computer that solves an NP-hard problem while never leaving the limits of P, you have conclusively shown that P = NP. So far, we've only found approximative or heuristic solutions that do that, so after 50 years of turning up with "no evidence" we are allowing ourselves to say that the hypothesis of "P != NP" should be treated (even if only cautiously) as a theory -- and we're indeed doing that, as you can see if you look at most modern encryption methods.

    But you might say: That is not enough! After all, you could reduce any written computer program on a physical hardware to a sequence of logical steps in a system modeled with pure-thought. And indeed you can, as the Turing-Model of computation promises exactly that -- and so far physical evidence agrees with us. But isn't the same true for physics? After all, physicists search for such a description, too! It's what Maxwell-Clark, Einstein and lots of other physicist were and are after when they ultimately search(ed) for the Grand Unified Theory. How can you blame CS for already having found its Unified Theory?

    But the last example finally puts the nail in you view: What about Quantum Computers? They are the point where physics and CS meet; both on the theoretical part (Quantum Theory / Quantum Computation) as well as the practical part (building the thing and proving that the shit actually works as advertised).

    So, if we accept your definition of science; then it follows directly that if CS is not a science, Physics can't be either.

    [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem

  7. Re: You know on Obama Administration Overrules iPhone Trade Ban · · Score: 1

    I think you misunderstood the topic. Please re-read my posting and that of the parent again.

    The topic was not about the SoC (where previous iPhones indeed already used the Apple A3-A5 bridges/systems). The topic was only about the CPU .

    And the CPU part of the A6 is based to nearly 100% on the ARMv7 specs. If you compile stuff with an ARMv7 compiler, it will run completely unmodified on an A6 -- because its CPU is nothing but an ARMv7 with additional bits bolted onto it.

    If you're generous, it's at best like the early AMD CPUs. A core licenced from Intel, created in a manufacturing process mostly designed by AMD (since Intel doesn't license that) with a few additional bits bolted on. Newer AMD Cores are diverging from that, thanks mostly due to microcode translation making x86 a very "virtual" design. And if you remember, ARMv7 -- being mostly still a RISC design -- can't and indeed doesn't need bother with that.

  8. Re: You know on Obama Administration Overrules iPhone Trade Ban · · Score: 1

    > IOW all based on ARM Holding chip designs - a company co-founded by Apple. Boo-fucking-hoo.

    The question was about whether or not it was "designed by Apple", specifically "in California".

    ARM is a British company, headquartered in the UK. They do have an office in the Silicon Valley, but they also have ones in Japan, Germany, Sweden, France and a lot of other countries. So if that's your logic you must say that Apple devices are pretty much "Designed all over the world".

    I freely support you on the point that ARM was indeed founded as a Joint-Venture between Apple and 2 other companies (Acorn and VLSI), but nowadays Apple only holds ~13% in shares. If holding shares nowadays counts as "being designed by", ohhh, boy, copyright and patent law just got a million times more complicated than they already are.

  9. Re: You know on Obama Administration Overrules iPhone Trade Ban · · Score: 2

    > the CPU is very much "designed by Apple in California", though manufactured by samsung and/or TSCM.

    If you mean by "designed by Apple" in so far as that Apple demands all its suppliers to print the Apple logo (and only that) on the chip, then yes. Other than that, though, you're sorely mistaken, as a 2 minute search would've easily told you:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

    CPU
    1st gen and 3G: Samsung 32-bit RISC ARM 1176JZ(F)-S v1.0[3]
    3GS: 600 MHz ARM Cortex-A8[4]
    4: 800 MHz ARM Cortex-A8[5]
    4S: 800 MHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9[6]
    5: 1.3 GHz dual core Apple A6

    So only the iPhone 5 has a "design" by Apple. And that is stretching the meaning of design quite a bit (thus the scare quotes). 99% of the design of the A6 is based on the ARMv7 specification; after all, it has to, since it needs to be compatible with the previous ARM CPUs used in previous generations.

    To use a car analogy: Calling the A6 "designed by Apple in California" is like saying that taking all the blue-prints from Volvo and just adding a BMW label plus steering wheel turns your Volvo into a BMW.

  10. Re:But will Microsoft sue? on Linux 3.11 Officially Named "Linux For Workgroups" · · Score: 1

    All the points you raised in your posting work just as well when you replace "ext2" with "FAT32" -- which is the current default amongst users and industry as well.

    Let's see, your arguments for ext2 are:
        - It has been tested to death --> (check for FAT32)
        - It has implementations on virtually every OS and platform --> (double-check for FAT32)
        - It would need backing from major OS powers --> (FAT32 already has it)
        - Ext2 is powerful enough --> (so is FAT32, feature-for-feature actually)
        - It has a long history of backwards compatibility --> (FAT32 has seen several extensions; all of them backward-compatible)
        - You could access it from Win95 --> (true for Win95 since OEM Service Release 2.1; not that anyone cares.)
        - You could include a FAT partition to browse it on major OSs (implied: for those that don't support it) --> (Not needed for FAT32; even on DOS)

    So if we take a rational look at your argument, we see that FAT32 wins even then. Why? Because it's exactly as you said: It is powerful enough, for the purpose.

    As for the other niceties that ext2 has over FAT32; like native symlinks, support for larger files, slightly better permission concept, being more efficient on directories with many, etc. don't factor in, since on USB disks, these don't really come into play. And those that might (like the large directory penalty) are nowadays circumvent by aggressive caching.

    The only point you could raise is that ext2 is fully open source and free (libré), while FAT32 merely has an open specification and a handful of minor features that still have patents on them. But as you see in the real world, that was no hindrance at all for its universal implementation.

  11. Re:Please on Ask Slashdot: Supporting "Antique" Software? · · Score: 1

    By the way, here's a working link for those who wish to download this version of DosBox, while the original website is down:

    http://www.emucr.com/2013/02/ykhwongs-dosbox-svn-daum-build-20130205.html

  12. Re:Please on Ask Slashdot: Supporting "Antique" Software? · · Score: 2

    DOSBox can't handle Control-Break, which was used an awful lot (for good reasons and bad) in the DOS era.

    See my post from further up in this thread where I've linked to the SVN Daum build of DosBox. Among other things, it contains a very good "Ctrl+Break" patch that adds that particularly little oddity with almost 100% accuracy.

    Nowadays, the SVN builds of DosBox can do so much more than the Vanilla DosBox, it's no wonder the maintainers can't decide which of those patches to add to the mainline first.

  13. Re:Please on Ask Slashdot: Supporting "Antique" Software? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, newer SVN + patches builds for DosBox go much further than that:
    http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/SVN_Builds

    The best one, if you ask me, is the SVN Daum build (alas, their website is down at the moment). To quote its set of difference to Vanilla DosBox:

    Description: The Windows build incorporates Direct3D with pixelshaders, OpenglHQ, Innovation, Glide, zip/7z mount, Beep, NE2000 Ethernet, Graphis user interface (menu), Save/Load states, Vertical sync, CPU flags optimization, Various DOS commands (PROMPT, VOL, LABEL, MOUSE, etc) and CONFIG.SYS commands (DEVICE, BUFFERS, FILES, etc), Continuous turbo key, Core-switch key, Show details (from menu bar), Nice DOSBox icon, Font patch (cp437), MAKEIMG command, INTRO, Ctrl-break patch, DBCS support patch, Automatic mount, Printer output, MT-32 emulation (MUNT), MP3CUE, Overscan border, Stereo-swap, SDL_Resize, MemSize128, Internal 3dfx voodoo chip emulation, etc.

    I emphasized the important bit. What these two little words mean is the this DosBox build can not only emulate a DOS printer to dump stuff into various output formats (PNG, PDF, etc.), but it can also pass along the output to a Windows printer driver (which allows you to print to any USB printer) as well as use a real parallel port on your computer to let the DOS talk directly to the printer.

    I know at least one company that is using this DosBox build to support printing out of a 20+ year old billing software.

  14. Re:FTA on Oculus VR Co-founder Andrew Reisse Killed In Auto Collision · · Score: 5, Informative

    If cars were banned people would just leave the cities. Might be a good thing after generations of living like rats.

    Actually, the opposite would happen.

    If you would ban cars, people would leave their suburbs in droves and return back into the city core.

    After all, that's how it was from the very first cities of Mesopotamia (~65k inhabitants for the city of Ur in 2000 BC!) over the cities and city-states of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece (~100k inhabitants in 1000-500BC), continuing with Ancient Rome and the first large cities in South America (up to 250k inhabitants) all the way to the metropolises of the industrial Revolution (London, Paris, Berlin; with millions of inhabitants) and finally the mega-cities of today; like Tokio, Shanghai, Singapore, Mexico and New York City with each near or exceeding tens of millions of inhabitants.

    As you notice; all the way up to the very recent histories, these cities grew from ~65k people to over 6 million people; all without the help of cars. The jump from then to now (when cars were available) only pushed that up by a factor of 2.

    Cars are actually the reason why cities grew slower than before, with the suburbs and "greater metropolitan" areas soaking up most of the excess population that'd otherwise live much closer to the city core where they could make use of public transportation much more easily. You would see nearby cities grow together, until the boundary between them vanishes; like the Ruhrpott [1] (which grew without the presence of cars) which is more like a huge city with multiple city cores.

    So tldr; : No cars would mean even bigger cities. Not in terms of density, but sheer diameter and area filled with people.

    [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhrpott

  15. Re:Energy a bit more important than Beer on German Brewers Warn Fracking Could Hurt Beer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Your post in one line (to save time):

    You don't know it'll be done right, I don't know it'll be done wrong, so let's assume I'm correct because I told you I am.

    Did that about sum it up?

    I am not the original poster, but let me respond with: Yes, and that is why any sane person should err on the side of safety.

    After all, if I can't prove you are guilty and you can't prove yourself innocent; I have to assume you are innocent. Because if you are actually guilty, I have merely just not punished you for what you already did. But if you are indeed innocent, I would commit a crime (or at least wrongdoing) on top of yours.

    On the other hand, if someone has told you that I wrecked my previous 10 cars, you would probably not lend me your car; even if you have no proof for it and I don't have a proof against it. Here, the safe approach is to not lend me the car (unless I can prove to you I desperately need it and you believe me).

    Erring on the side of caution is in itself always a very good thing.
    The fine details come from when you believe the scales are in balance. For example, in the above case of the car, the person who told you that I'm a car-wrecker could've been a person that you know very well, or a random maniac with soiled clothing. I think in the latter case you'd be more inclined to believe my (still equally baseless) statement of innocence in terms of car-wrecking.

    Now look again back at the track record of all parties in the question of "Is fracking safe?" and ask yourself: Are the scales in balance or even tipped in favour of the safe approack of not allowing fracking? If yes, then choose the safe route. If not, then you can contemplate being adventurous -- but be ready to examine the scales if new evidence comes up.

    You see, the problem is not the question itself; just which side you find more trustworthy and reliable in its arguments and proofs.

  16. Re:H goes up, anti H goes up, unless anti-N is pre on Does Antimatter Fall Up? · · Score: 1

    But if you have an oil/water mixture in the same environment, no buoyancy -- as you explained it in more technical terms -- occurs.

    Replace "the same" with "a zero-gravity". Note to self: Don't try to think about the next sentence when typing the current one. :P

  17. Re:H goes up, anti H goes up, unless anti-N is pre on Does Antimatter Fall Up? · · Score: 1

    "The first mistake is to assume that helium rises. The truth is that it falls down towards the earth just like any other object. The reason for what you see is much simpler: It does not rise; it's just that everything else simply falls harder." (Freely translated from memory and German)

    That is actually very misleading, to the point of being incorrect.

    At the atomic level, a molecule of Oxygen falls at the same rate as an atom of Helium (about 9.8 m/(s^2), depending on altitude), so nothing really "falls harder".

    Yes.

    This is why I specifically pointed out that there might be inaccuracies due to translation (and why I explained it in more detail further below). The term "falling harder" is on its own indeed slightly misleading compared to the German I translated it from. The forces acting on individual atoms are of course identical in both cases. After all, if only subject to gravity, a 1 gram feather will fall just as fast as a 1 kilogram brick.

    But if you have an oil/water mixture in the same environment, no buoyancy -- as you explained it in more technical terms -- occurs. This is why I said that without an external impulse (as in: a force acting upon it), regular air will not displace helium just like water will not displace oil.

    In the end, you can always dig deeper and deeper for more and more technical explanations. Each one iota more factually correct than the next, but also far harder to understand. This is why you invent abstractions and add a caveat to the tune of "this explanation is abridged". After all, there is no buoyancy, no gravity, no abstract "forces" acting upon anything. These are all mere abstractions for more fundamental processes that have only one thing in common: They are easier to understand.

    After all, try to show someone the formulas that combine the standard model with relativity theory to explain the apparent curvature of space and its effects on matter down to the subatomic level. And then try to get from there to why helium rises. All the while explaining to them why some other concepts do not apply and why (for example how an oil/water emulsion overcomes the buoyancy of oil).

    Good luck. :)

  18. Re:H goes up, anti H goes up, unless anti-N is pre on Does Antimatter Fall Up? · · Score: 4, Informative

    3 questions.

    1. Hydrogen rises in gravity because it is less dense than air(mostly Nitrogen), So if there was no air/vacuum then hydrogen would fall towards the earth.?

    I can't say anything to the other two questions, but this question is easily answered by something my high school physics teacher said to me. It has stayed with me since then as it is as eye-opening as it is obvious (in hindsight):

    "The first mistake is to assume that helium rises. The truth is that it falls down towards the earth just like any other object. The reason for what you see is much simpler: It does not rise; it's just that everything else simply falls harder." (Freely translated from memory and German)

    Helium only rises over the air, because regular air has the stronger draw to be below it. This explains why, in the absence of gravity; there is no lift. In the absence of a pull, the air has no impulse to displace the helium.

    More generally, the same is true for liquid mixtures like oil/water. In gravity, the oil will rise above the water. In (close-to-)zero gravity, the oil and water will separate but stay where they are. That is because the water can't displace the oil without gravity pulling it more strongly down.

    The same is true for solids. In meteorites with too little gravity, no submersion of the "heavier" elements like iron happen. This is why Earth has an iron core, but iron-rich asteroids have it distributed all over their volume.

  19. Re: Poor Linking on Weirdest DLC Sponsorship Ever: SimCity, Brought To You By Crest · · Score: 1

    Sarah Kerrigan is from Starcraft, from 15 years ago, she's a terran ghost that becomes Zerg. Booker DeWitt is the protagonist from Bioshock Infinite, which came out three weeks ago and is fantastic.

    Sarah Kerrigan is also from Starcraft 2 and plays the main role in its new extension "Heart of the Swarm" that also coincidentally came out about a month or so ago.

    I should also add that Starcraft 2 is quite fantastic itself. Just for completeness' sake, you understand. :-)

  20. Re:Archer? on Microsoft Apologizes For Cavalier 'Always-Online' DRM Tweets · · Score: 1

    Or the existing emulators could use a plugin system for always-on titles where you need to supply the emulator with the relevant plugin to emulate the online server.

    You seem to be missing the point here. It's not that you can't emulate the remote servers (you can, as pirates have proven for certain very popular games).
    It's that you have to do it at all.

    The SNES has between 700 and 1500 games (depending on what region you're in). The number of programs you need to emulate almost all of them: 1

    In contrast, if every single one of those was an always-on game, you would need -- as you put it -- no less than 700-1500 plugins. How many people do you think will actually sit down and write all those? After all, some games might just need to send and receive a short decryption key. Others might need to load game assets from it. They're simply all too different.

  21. Re:Archer? on Microsoft Apologizes For Cavalier 'Always-Online' DRM Tweets · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "I have no interest in purchasing games with an expiration date."

    Although in reality you always have. Any game constructed for a specific platform has a limited lifespan. And that's all games.

    With the brilliant advances in emulation recently, I find it hard to believe that an always on server couldn't be emulated just as easily as the hardware of an 80s arcade machine. Just saying.

    I get the feeling that you seem to be engaging in a from of double-think.

    Just so I get it right: You say that all games have an expiration date, as the hardware/software they run on will not be available permanently. You equate that to the identical impermanence of the remote servers in always-on games. Then you say that the latter can be emulated quite easily, just like the old hardware is.

    But does that not mean that your first point is totally moot? Because as long as you have reliable emulation, offline games do not have an expiration date; especially if the emulators are Open-Source and thus easily (depending in the code) convertible between platforms.

    I for one strictly believe that one of the very first software tools that is going to be written for the first off-the-shelf quantum computer will be an SNES emulator.

    Always-on-games are a different beast though. Because instead of writing an emulator for a whole platform, thus covering almost all titles for it at the same time; you need to write a completely new emulator for every single always-on game, since they're all fundamentally different.

  22. Re:Afghanistan may not be all that bad. on The Largely Unknown Success Story of Afghanistan's Television Network · · Score: 1

    Dummy post to undo accidental misclick on moderation after a reload of the page. Too bad that Slashdot does not allow one to change a moderation.

  23. Re:Precious eggs... on Scientists Have Re-Cloned Mice To the 25th Generation · · Score: 1

    So, just like diamonds, that's artificial scarcity at full work here.

    According to Wikipedia, a woman has something around 300.000 egg cells when she turns fertile. Let us assume 50.000 cells as the average for all women between 16 and 40. So how many human females do we have in that age range?

    According to the US census [1], there were ~4.5 billion (short scale) humans on this planet between 16 and 64. To subtract the oldest 24 years, let us be pessimistic and assume an equal distribution; so we need to subtract one half (16 to 64 = 48 years; 16 to 40 = 24 years). We also subtract one half of that, as we only want women.
    Therefore, we have roughly 1.125 billion human females of fertile and (in many countries) legal age.

    So, (1.125 x 10^9) * (5 x 10^4) = 5.625 x 10^14 egg cells. 10^12 is a trillion (short scale); so we have somewhere around 562.5 trillion human egg cells on this planet earth.

    According to [2] a single human egg cells weighs between 0.00177-0.0042 mg. Average of 0.001mg. That means the total mass of all human egg cells is: ~0.5 trillion milligrams. Since milli = 1/1000, that makes 0.5 billion grams. Since 1kg = 1000g, we have 0.5 million kg of human egg cells. That means a bit over half a megaton of human egg cells at this moment.

    According to Google, that's 17 636 981 ounces of human egg cells.

    Plus, if even 1 out of every 50.000 cloning attempts works (assuming you're only producing female clones), it's self-replenishing. :p

    [1] - http://www.allcountries.org/uscensus/1353_age_distribution_by_country.html
    [1] - http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Weight_of_a_human_egg_cell

  24. Re:What do they consider a user? on Opera Picks Up Webkit Engine · · Score: 2

    Glad to be of help:

    https://addons.opera.com/en-gb/search/?query=adblock

    Sometimes, things can be so easy. :)

  25. Re:printf on Typing These 8 Characters Will Crash Almost Any App On Your Mountain Lion Mac · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Based on what you said, the summary title is incorrect. The programs aren't crashing, but rather are ending normally, just not when the user thinks they're telling it to.

    It is easy to argue that while this is technically a "normal" shutdown given the code of the program; it is certainly not a normal shutdown given the task and role of the program.

    You know: Letter of the law versus spirit of the law.

    Your program can only execute the letter of the law (its code), but its true purpose should always be the spirit (its intended role). Otherwise, any bug inside the program would need to be considered as a "normal program exit", as the bug is an inevitable result of its code. Since that is obviously not the case:

    This assert being thrown IS a bug, and the subsequent application exit not a normal shutdown. There is nothing to defend here as being "good".