Slashdot Mirror


User: sholden

sholden's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,275
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,275

  1. Re:methane? on Titan Occupies A Solar System Sweet Spot · · Score: 2, Insightful

    1. Go to bookshelf
    2. Take out the dictionary
    3. Look up the word theoretical

  2. Who cares on Some Rights May Have To Be 'Eroded' For Safety · · Score: 1

    They've already lost the right not to be shot eight times in the head (well OK they missed once)) while being restrained by police, so does it matter?

  3. Re:Consoles are often sold at a loss on Blu Ray Drive Will Cost $100 Per PlayStation 3 · · Score: 0

    Except that then the statement would have exactly the opposite meaning than what the OP was trying to say.

    Unless he wanted to say it was up for debate...

  4. Re:This is new? I've had it since 1997 on New Winzip in the Works · · Score: 1

    Maybe if you'd been a little earlier and the competition wasn't already entrenched...

    Maybe if you hadn't used a retarded name.

    It's probably better software (it would be difficult to be worse...) but which is best is about number 62 on the list of things that matter.

  5. Re:I wonder... on 9 Weeks to Pump Out New Orleans? · · Score: 1

    But neither do Americans in that case, so it's pretty much irrelevant...

  6. Re:But not all of the Arctic ice cap is afloat on Ice-Free Summers Coming To Arctic · · Score: 1

    If you used the metric system maybe you wouldn't be so retarded?

  7. Re:find a flaw on Pokerbots Making Online Players Sad · · Score: 1


    Collusion of this sort doesn't give you a very huge advantage. You have a bit more information about the statistics of card distribution by knowing the other players' hole cards, but it's not a terribly big deal.


    Knowing someone folded the Ace of hearts preflop, when there are four hearts on the board and you have the King of hearts is a very useful bit of information.

    There are lots of cases where you have the second nuts, and knowing that no one has the nuts because your partner folded a key card earlier is very valuable information.

    But players can collude just as well as bots...

  8. Re:What's up with the bits? on Maturing Net Grows More Slowly · · Score: 1

    When talking about network traffic a byte is eight bits. The router and statistics counter doesn't give a damn that you're using hardware with 7 bit bytes.

    Pick a random IP related RFC and implement it using 7 bits wherever it says byte, see how well that works. Heck even RFC791 slips up and uses byte instead of octet once.

  9. Re:Guise? on Lockheed Martin Hardware to Protect NYC Transit · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So that he could be identified, since being anonymous doesn't help the cause, or maybe they didn't mean to be suicide bombers but expected to leave the bombs to explode after they had left, but a jewish consipracy decided otherwise. Having ID also makes it less likely for things to go horribly wrong when you get asked for it somewhere (and being asked for it goes hand in hand with random searches and video cameras watching your every move)...

    Well, as large as your knowledge of what bombs do to identifications might be, in the case of the London bombings various forms of identification were found at the scenes. Which makes sense to me, bombs aren't going to do much damage to a thin piece of plastic other than move it around. People die because their organs don't cope well with shockwaves and debris - but small pieces of plastic don't have organs. Buses get shreded because their structure tries to resit the shockwave, and fails - but small pieces of plastic don't attempt to contain the blast and hence don't get ripped to shreds. Heat does bad things to small pieces of plastic but unless the explosions results in a fire which isn't extinguished quickly there isn't enough heat for enough time.

    But of course my small amount of common sense will have to give in to you unbacked up assertions. You are an export in explosions, right?

  10. Re:Going faster or going smarter? on Japan Plans Test of 'New Concorde' · · Score: 1

    It's aimed at the Tokyo/LA flight, which currently takes 10 hours or so. Cutting that down to 4 hours would be worhwhile for lots of people, even if it involves an extra short flight from too a major airport (which it already does anyway since you don't get ten hour across the pacific flights from your local regional airport.

    Not everyone only does short little hops from New York to Los Angeles.

    But yes going faster has limits, once you get the Sydney/LA flight down to 2 hours it's fast enough for me...

  11. Re:Digital Restrictions Management on New Display Interface Standard in the Works · · Score: 2, Insightful

    By not using the hardware acceleration, that does the "replace blue bits with video" bit.

  12. Re:Science is not wright all the time. Blasaphmy!! on The Milky Way is Not a Spiral? · · Score: 1

    So drop all the prophecies about the Messiah?

    Just how the heck do you know Jesus was the Messiah then?

    And what do you do with all those bits of the New Testament which not only refer to the Old Testament, but appeal to it's authority as their only argument?

  13. Re:Science is not wright all the time. Blasaphmy!! on The Milky Way is Not a Spiral? · · Score: 1

    If you change the stated time frames, the stated order, the stated mechanism then yes it all fits with the available evidence.

    Amazing! How do you know which bits your allowed to change?

  14. Re:You are being Poisoned on Space Meat Coming to your Kitchen · · Score: 1

    And yet life expectancy of western countries is much higher than it was in those countries a few hundred years ago.

    I guess having lots of crappy food is better than having no food.

    Yes, a healthy diet is better for you than a non-healthy diet. That much is pretty obvious (it's the definiation of healthy after all), classifying things as poison is going a fraction overboard though.

    There are people for whom legumes are a deadly poison, so by your "one person is one person too many" standard we better scratch peanuts, soy, lentils, etc. Same for dairy products. Same for wheat.

    Better ignore all those people with birch pollen allergies, otherwise we have to scratch apples, carrots, cherries, pears, peaches, plums, and potatoes too... After all a chemical reaction causing just one person to get sick is one person too many.

    If your body doesn't get enough oxygen it also dies. Do you consider that a chemical bondage?

    And people are working on improving organic farming so your final question is silly - the answer is "we are". I guess the real question is, what are you doing?

  15. Re:That's all good, but.. on Modded Hybrid Cars Get Up to 250 MPG · · Score: 1

    45 * 737 / 264.172051 == 2.79?

    It fails the common sense as someone already pointed out.

    Using ~125 as the answer and trusting the rest of your numbers for no apparent reason.

    So a gallon of gas equivalent woud be: $3.50, at 10c/kWh which is less than I pay for electricity.

    Last time I bought gas it was significantly cheaper than that.

    Of course there's the efficiency of internal combustion engines versus that of power plants and batteries and electric motors, but that's a different issue.

  16. Re:Burning methane on Siberian Permafrost Melting · · Score: 1

    But one molecule of methane gives one molecule of CO2 when burnt. And methane has a molar mass of 16, while CO2 has a molar mass of 44.

    Since the GWP compares the estimated contributions based on mass, so the fact that our greenhouse has mass increases by factor of 2.75 is significant (O is a tad heavier than H).

    So one unit of methane has a GWP of 23 but burning it gives off 2.75 units of carbon dioxide, for a total GWP of 2.75.

    So a bit under over 8.4 to 1.

  17. A rather large claim on Spring Into PHP 5 · · Score: 1

    Without any evidence at all.

    A smarter approach is to learn the language basics in sequence as rapidly as possible, not getting bogged down in excessive sample code.

    Define "excessive". And why is that way smarter?

    Learning by example is a pretty common pedagogic approach after all.

  18. Re:Please just drop it. on Extra Daylight Savings May Confuse the Gadgets · · Score: 2, Interesting


    It can be hard to justify a the cost of a $3.00 spiral to a $0.50 incandescent bulb, though. Mine have been going strong for 2 years now, rather than replacing them every 6 months or so.


    Only another year and you'll break even...

    Ignoring the energy costs of course :)

  19. Re:Guess about what really happened. on Rackspace, Indymedia, and the FBI · · Score: 1

    Fallujah is in America?

  20. Re:Guess about what really happened. on Rackspace, Indymedia, and the FBI · · Score: 1

    How many mosques did the Government burn down in America this week?

  21. Re:But see, they signed a peice of paper on Wayback Archives as a Law Tool · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And?

    That the priginal point isn't a problem was my point - that it was sarcasm is irrelevant to what was expressed.

    Determining who to believe is what courts do. The technician swears under oath that the archive supplied hasn't been tampered with. The other side can argue the testimony is untrustworthy or that the technician can't know. It's no different than a doctor saying "yes those X-rays are of the person in question and were taken on this date".

    Or a police officer saying "He ran a red light".

    Yes it's not foolproof. People can lie. People can be paid off. But it's the system as it stands - and the opposing side gets a chance to discredit the person making the claims and also to provide evidence that contradicts the claims.

  22. Re:But see, they signed a peice of paper on Wayback Archives as a Law Tool · · Score: 2, Informative

    They might. But if the other side can provide some evidence that it isn't a true archive than said technician is in deep shit.

  23. Re:Yeah, but has he actually played GTA? on Hillary, GTA, and High School Football · · Score: 2

    There is the weasle phrase "most of" in there, but of course GTA isn't what is being refered to. GTA is mentioned as what the moral panic is over, the example games just mentioned (and hence probably being refered to) are World of Warcraft, Halo 2 and Madden 2005.

    I haven't played any of those games, but World of Warcraft is a MMORPG of some form and hence probably has bizarro 'to-hit' calculations that players try and extract in order to work out which item of equipment is best...

  24. Re:What's wrong with the example? on Learning Perl, 4th Ed. · · Score: 1

    I'm guessing some < and > characters didn't get escaped and hence some text disappeared when the HTML parser parsed it.

  25. Re:Pricing on AMD and Intel Notebooks Head to Head · · Score: 1

    In Australia you do, since it's a federal tax. The only way you don't pay it is you are exempt for some reason - and then you have a mountain of paperwork - or because you and the retailer is breaking the law.

    Of course you can just order from overseas, but if it's AU$500+ you'll get billed for the GST component before customs let you have it.

    In the US you tend not to, since sales tax is state level so you avoid retailers in your own state and forget to include it on your state tax return - but in Australia that's not an option.

    But that's yet another reason the pre-GST price is the one that matters when comparing prices like this.