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User: pclminion

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  1. Re:Dihydrogen Monoxide *is* dangerous on City Officials Almost Ban Foam Cups · · Score: 1

    Oxygen is also a critical element in causing forest fires! Save the trees! Ban oxygen!

  2. Re:DHMO? on City Officials Almost Ban Foam Cups · · Score: 1
    Styrofoam cups should be banned anyway because they don't decompose (as opposed to cardboard cups)

    Steel also doesn't decompose, shall we ban it?

    Styrofoam isn't made from H2O, but from polystyrene...

    And why is polystyrene bad? Because it's used to make styrofoam cups? That argument is circular.

    I agree with you that styrofoam cups are wasteful, but there are hundreds of other products we also use which do as much or more damage to the environment, yet we don't seem to worry about those. Zip-loc bags? Those stupid "Swiffer" disposable mops? Plastic eating utensils? The computer you are currently typing on is much more dangerous to the environment than a styrofoam cup. If you ingested some of the compounds used to manufacture it you would die.

    Styrofoam was originally picked as a "taboo" material in the 80's-90's because it was manufactured with CFCs. It's made a different way now.

    Can we please concentrate on things that have real environmental impacts instead of selecting silly little things to "fix" and getting all emotional about them?

  3. Re:Trying to remember Chem I... on City Officials Almost Ban Foam Cups · · Score: 1
    The naming is typically based on oxidation numbers (or charge, for ionic compounds). If you look it up in Google you'll learn all about it.

    For example, lithium is in the same column of the periodic table as hydrogen, and it forms Li2O. The oxygen is central in that case, too, but we don't call it "oxygen dilithide," we call it "lithium oxide."

    For CO2, it's "carbon dioxide" because the carbon is using extra electrons to complete the valence shell of the oxygen.

  4. Re:A poem. on City Officials Almost Ban Foam Cups · · Score: 1
    It works either way. The other way has its own, equally pleasing rhythm, if you can find it.

    His original version has hints of "The Raven" in its rhythm (among other things).

    The goal of poetry is not to sound "smooth," it's more complex than that. It's true that this poem is humorous, but it has its own subtleties.

  5. Re:Like inside my computer... on Lifting The Lid On Computer Filth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I did this on purpose to a 486SX-20. We wanted to find out if the motherboard could run while submerged in antifreeze. The answer is no -- antifreeze apparently has a low impedance at multi-MHz frequencies. We put the motherboard in the sink and rinsed the antifreeze off with tap water -- not even distilled water. Then we blow-dried it for about 30 minutes, and plugged in back in, without antifreeze that time. Still worked. And we discovered that antifreeze cleans a motherboard extremely well :-)

  6. Re:Why there are no pipes on Fault Tolerant Shell · · Score: 1
    Only one of the sub-processes is a child of the shell, so only one exit status can be monitored. To work around this, you really need to build a mini-OS environment on top of unix.

    Am I the only one who doesn't see how the second sentence follows from the first?

    Solution: fork each child process directly from the shell.

  7. Re:Not good on Fault Tolerant Shell · · Score: 1
    But... //tmp is equivalent to /tmp, there's no problem with that command :-)

    For that matter you could say ////////tmp

  8. Re:This isn't just about RIAA/MPAA on MPAA Puts Words in Mouth of CA Attorney General · · Score: 1
    If the air ceases to be polluted, do you then have an obligation to support the filtermask manufacturers?

    Again, this analogy is completely wrong. People won't want filter masks once the air is clear. But people want music. To propogate this back into your analogy, it's like the air clears, and people for some reason still want the masks. Yet you're saying they should now be free, because the air isn't polluted?

    You people come up with some real weird analogies. Does greed cloud the mind, you think?

  9. Re:This isn't just about RIAA/MPAA on MPAA Puts Words in Mouth of CA Attorney General · · Score: 5, Interesting
    If new thechnology will kill the music INDUSTRY, then let it die, since it is obviously flawed. It's called a market economy, if nobody wants your stuff, your fucked. Laws are not going help.

    But your analogy is completely wrong. People do want the stuff.

    The real question is, can you get people to pay any amount at all for it, when there's a "free" option on the Internet?

    Listen to your own attitude. You sound like the type of person who does the absolute minimum to follow the polite rules of society but beyond that, fuck everyone else. I mean, look at this statement:

    Someone's current chosen profession and it's ability to feed them or their family should not dictate my personal freedoms.

    You mean, your freedom to use their copyrighted material without compensating them? Selfish attitudes such as yours are actually quite prevalent in the world (imagine that), and believe it or not, most musicians and movie makers are not going to stand on street corners and manifest their arts for free, to anyone who comes by, out of the kindness of their hearts.

    Your analogy was of new technology coming in and displacing the old. But the analogy is wrong, and it doesn't event make sense, because there is no "new music" coming in and replacing the "old music." What has happened is that technology has given us a way to very easily deny artists compensation for their work.

    The trick in the next century will be to provide people with a way to pay what they think is fair for artistic creations. Then we'll see if the majority of people are fundamentally greedy.

    Answer this, honestly: is the $10 price of a DVD so unfair, really? Do you really think you should be able to get it free just because there's a convenient technology available to do it? If $10 is too high, what would you pay?

    You fly back to "capitalism" as an excuse for your greedy attitude, yet you don't seem to realize that if you have a method whereby you can always acquire a product for free, you completely undermine the basis for the system, which is that buyers and sellers agree on a price through the action of supply and demand. You've artificially turned the "supply" dial to infinity, and it's wreaking havoc.

    (None of this is to say that music or other content isn't extremely overpriced, but making it impossible for artists to get any compensation whatsoever for their work is not the solution.)

  10. Interesting on The Power of Sewage · · Score: 1
    It's interesting to see how much energy actually still remains in human waste products. It demonstrates just how inefficient our bodies are at extracting all the energy from the food we eat.

    If we were 100% efficient, all that would come out the other end would be something resembling ash, I would think.

  11. Re:IE part of the Longhorn on Making IE Standards Compliant · · Score: 1
    I'm now picturing a maniacal shepherd cackling as he clacks his sheep shears together.

    I think you meant sheer horror :-)

  12. Re:Sorry on ExtremeTech Wages War of the Codecs · · Score: 1
    Psychological factors play a big part in any lossy compression algorithm, so the only good way to test a video codec's quality is to look at it and see if it looks better than another codec.

    Except that human psychological responses can vary. What I perceive as good quality, you might perceive as unacceptable blocking artifacts. As a real example, I can't tell the difference between a tube amplifier and a solid state amplifier. Audiophiles can tell the difference easily. Obviously, I'm not the person you want judging the quality of audio amplifiers.

    However, I can easily tell you which amplifier is "better" if I have access to a spectrum analyzer. There is a relationship between actual signal distortion and what we perceive as "distortion" in the quality of the audio. The same of course goes for video.

    I'm perfectly willing to accept statements such as "Codec ABC seems blockier than Codec XYZ," as long as we have some agreed-upon definition of what the hell "blocky" means. Once you select a clear definition of a quantity, you'll find that in most cases you can measure it mathematically instead of relying on a subjective human response.

  13. Thank god. on Contour Crafting - Extrude-a-House · · Score: 4, Funny

    At first I read that as "Extrude-a-Horse." I was picturing some unfortunate horse being turned to goo as it was extruded through a small pinhole. Ick.

  14. Re:Is it just me or .. on Yellowstone Super-Eruption Threat Debunked · · Score: 1
    Why does everyone measure blast energies in "Hiroshimas?" How many people here have actually witnessed a nuclear blast? How does comparing an explosion to something few people have ever actually witnessed make it any easier to understand the scale?

    It's basically like saying, "It's 1848 times bigger than this other really fucking huge explosion that none of you actually saw." You might as well just say "It was a really fucking huge explosion."

    If anything, we should be talking about explosive magnitudes in terms of "St. Helens's." Many thousands of people actually witnessed that event.

  15. Re:What about water and air leakage? on Concrete Casts New Light in Dull Rooms · · Score: 1
    I don't think concrete sticks to glass. Do they add something or somehow treat the glass so that it sticks or seal the sides?

    Concrete releases heat as it sets. As it cools, it will contract slightly and grip the glass fibers. Glass might not "stick" to concrete, but anything will stay in place if you squeeze it hard enough.

  16. Sorry on ExtremeTech Wages War of the Codecs · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Sorry, but any "test" where there's no scientific definition of what an "artifact" is, nor any mathematical definition of "image quality," is total bull. Yes, it's important to include subjective experience in the criteria, but we also need hard numbers. Where are the hard numbers on luminance distortion? Chrominance distortion? How many bits per pixel do you pay for each decibel of noise reduction? What's the worst case performance (no correlation between frames)? Best case performance (no difference between frames)?

    I'm sorry, but some hand-waving, subjective "Hey, this thing kinda looks better than that thing" is not a test. Calling it a "War of the Codecs" is even more ridiculous.

  17. Re:WOW. on USB Swiss Army Knife · · Score: 3, Informative

    Argh. I meant New South Wales of course. I realize we're talking about Australia here :-)

  18. WOW. on USB Swiss Army Knife · · Score: 1
    Wow, it's great to know not to ever go to Wales.

    If I were to be attacked by a gun carrying or knife wielding maniac, I wouldn't be legally allowed to put up the slightest defense at all aside from maybe putting my arm out to get slashed.

    I can understand, in a way, not allowing people to carry guns. But I can't carry even the most basic form of defense? Are you banking on the criminals following the law on this one?

    Or is Wales some kind of utopia with no violent crime?

  19. Re:This may sound stupid but.... on Obtaining Legal MP3s Outside of the U.S.? · · Score: 1
    And I can't believe the propensity of people here to think that the difference in definitions is sufficient to absolve them from paying for music.

    As a matter of fact, I have big problems with people who infringe music copyrights. My solution is to not listen to music except on the radio. However, I feel it is extremely important to be clear that stealing and copyright infringement are not equivalent in any sense, except that they are both crimes.

    You might as well have said "Well Linux and Windows are both operating systems, thus it doesn't really matter what you call it." Quit being an ignorant ass.

  20. Re:This may sound stupid but.... on Obtaining Legal MP3s Outside of the U.S.? · · Score: 4, Insightful
    And if I burned 10,000 copies onto CDR media and started handing them out in Times Square, that wouldn't be stealing either.

    I can't believe the propensity of people here to equate "copyright infringement" with "stealing," considering they aren't even in the same class of crimes, carry significantly differently penalties, are prosecuted at different levels of the court system, etc...

  21. Hmm on Obtaining Legal MP3s Outside of the U.S.? · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    Sounds to me like American music companies aren't really interested in selling you their music. So why are you so eager to give them money for it?

    Why not listen to German music? Why is everyone so hooked on the (utter shit) music that comes churning out of American record labels like so much cat vomit...

  22. Re:Shannon limit applies only to linear systems... on Turbo Codes Promise Better Wireless Transmission · · Score: 1
    I think you are confusing the Shannon limit with the Shannon entropy. Shannon limit gives a maximum data rate for a channel given bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio. Shannon entropy gives the average number of bits required to optimally encode a source symbol.

    I don't even have the slightest idea what "linear" or "nonlinear" means in the context of information entropy. Thus I can only assume you're talking about the channel theorem.

  23. How to make a PC bulletproof: on Protecting Our Parents' PCs? · · Score: 1

    1. Install Linux on it
    2. Install VMWare on it
    3. Install Windows XP in VMWare with disk in undoable mode
    4. Install any software they might have a need for
    5. Commit the disk
    6. Switch disk to nonpersistent mode

    Voila, an iron-clad installation with basically zero support requirements. If something gets hosed, all that's required to fix it is a virtual "power cycle" in VMWare and everything is back to a fresh start.

    If they actually want to permanently install something, just shut down the VM, switch to undoable mode, reboot, install the software, shut down, commit, switch back to nonpersistent mode.

  24. Re:Why shell? on Wicked Cool Shell Scripts · · Score: 1
    $ ls -l /bin/sh
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Feb 14 2003 /bin/sh -> bash
    $ ldd /bin/sh
    libtermcap.so.2 => /lib/libtermcap.so.2 (0x4002f000)
    libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x40034000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib/i686/libc.so.6 (0x42000000)
    /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)

    The only statically linked shell on the system is /bin/ash.static (this is RedHat 8.0)

    I guess they really REALLY don't want you upgrading glibc :-)

  25. Re:My personal favorite; on Wicked Cool Shell Scripts · · Score: 2, Informative
    Those interesting in testing this should probably set 'ulimit -u 10' or some such thing...

    But yes, it is a shell fork bomb.