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User: pclminion

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  1. Re:Where do the hydrocarbons come from? on Lake On Titan Winks From a Billion Kilometers Away · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Methane is an organic material. Organics are one of the key building blocks of life. In fact, it is one of many byproducts of life processes. An abundance of organic material bodes well for finding life (probably bacterial) on Titan.

    I doubt it. "Organic" is an artificially created classification. It just means anything that is prevalently composed of carbon atoms. There happen to be a lot of carbon atoms in the universe, due to its relatively low atomic mass. There's also a ton of helium. It is not really surprising that these common elements might be found, in combination, in large quantities. We have large deposits of hydrocarbon here on Earth as well. Yes, these compounds are, according to our own definitions, "organic", and in fact originated from living matter, but we do not see organisms thriving in the deep oil wells.

    I do not see how an excess of methane would indicate the likelihood of finding "bacterial" life. What would the cell walls be composed of? It would have to be something like a lipid bi-layer, so that the membrane wouldn't just dissolve into the methane. But then, what's INSIDE the cell? Probably, it would be more hydrocarbons. These non-polar materials are ill-suited as stages for complex, biological chemical reactions. They cannot dissolve ions. Without soluble ions, hell, without soluble polar compounds, there isn't a whole hell of a lot of interesting chemistry that can take place.

    If we found tons of water that would be far more indication of the potential for life. Water has dozens of extremely unusual properties all of which make it conducive to life.

  2. Re:Yes. on Are You Using SPF Records? · · Score: 1

    I communicate with the homeless by thought projection. I like to let them know that they can come over for steak and beer any time they want. I think these thoughts vigorously every night. I have yet to hear any homeless person tell me they are not receiving my messages.

  3. Re:Put him away... on Sci-Fi Author Peter Watts Beaten, Charged During Border Crossing · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Now, when a police officer is in a situation like that, he usually likes to have complete control of the situation

    A situation like what? Somebody who is asking him a question? Police like to talk about how they need to protect themselves. They need to wake up and understand that they are in an unsafe profession. It is their duty to GIVE UP their own safety in return for the privilege of being able to arrest and potentially kill people. You don't get to have the same level of safety as everyone else. Police love to use excessive force because it keeps them safe. While this probably does help keep them safe, they need to suck it up and realize they have no RIGHT to be safe. If you want the right to be safe, don't go into law enforcement. The civilian population has a higher right to safety than the police, expressly because the police are the only ones with a monopoly on legal force.

    A few weeks ago in my locale, a police officer shot an unarmed 12 year old girl with a bean bag gun. Was the girl belligerant and uncooperative? Yes. Did the police officer perhaps make himself safer by beaning her? Yes. However, the man is a coward. If you want every day at work to be safe, why would you choose law enforcement as a profession?

    If the police being safe means that people get beat up and shot, then they don't deserve safety.

  4. Virtual worlds? How about the real one? on FTC Says Virtual Worlds Bad For Minors · · Score: 1

    I wonder how the FTC will react once it learns the explosive truth: the real world is bad for minors.

  5. Re:Support Kodak's printers send the others a mess on What Do You Do When Printers Cost Less Than Ink? · · Score: 0, Troll

    How the hell does PostScript imply "doesn't need a driver?" Oh, you mean you don't "need a driver" because any UNIX app with print capability does so using PostScript? What this really means is that a printer driver is built into every fucking application that exists. That's RETARDED design. I don't want to have to figure out PostScript (which, when it comes down to it, is an implementation detail) just so my app can print something.

    And don't even get me started on the fucked up architecture of App->PostScript->Pre-filter->Print-processor->Post-filter->lpr in order to speak to a printer that does NOT use PostScript. No, everything in the damn universe should not have to divert through PostScript land to speak to a simple raster-based print device.

    Oh, did I mention that PostScript is device-raster based which means that any device that uses it (especially color devices) needs to have a shitload of RAM?

    The "wonders" of PostScript are one of the largest mass-hallucinations in the UNIX world. Dude. I do not need my printer's PDL to be a Turing-complete programming language.

  6. It makes sense on Google Tries Not To Be a Black Hole of Brilliance · · Score: 1

    Makes sense to me. If you hire all the smart people, the only people left to do business with are idiots.

  7. Re:Too bad, and not the obvious reason on Federal Appeals Court Tosses Spam Patent · · Score: 1

    Uh, no. The OP implies that we can identify spammers by looking at who has licensed the patent.

  8. Re:I beat it ages ago on Man "Beats" World of Warcraft · · Score: 1

    Where the hell did he even IMPLICITLY place blame on the game? I see that nowhere in his comment.

  9. Re:Of course it is. on Is Linux Documentation Lacking? · · Score: 1

    For troubleshooting, you're gonna have to hit Google - you have better odds there that someone else had the same problem and posted it (and its solution).

    But I never feel satisfied after "solving" a problem that way. Sometimes people only post the vaguest of descriptions of what they did to fix something. Often the description omits basic steps that the other person assumes every one else will know -- real documentation doesn't omit steps. There are no reports of stability tests after the fix -- people just say "I fixed it" but how do I know if it didn't break two weeks later?

    I really only feel good about fixing something if I personally understand why the failure happened and know that my changes are a correct fix. I hate the crap where some piece of software stops working and the only thing I can get on Google is "You need to type blogglefart on line 797 of the config file."

    It still boils down to upping your skills on the OS and on general practices, though.

    You mean learning a bunch of obscure shit that rightfully should be hidden from everyday users? Linux constantly has its fly down and for some reason people are proud of that. I say all this as a Linux user for 13 years.

  10. Re:Too bad, and not the obvious reason on Federal Appeals Court Tosses Spam Patent · · Score: 1

    Why would a spammer care about IP law when he's already willing to commit computer crime and CAN-SPAM violations?

  11. Re:One million dollars on SETI@Home Install Leads To School Tech Supervisor's Resignation · · Score: 1

    The million dollars is what they are claiming to ALREADY have lost, not what they need to spend to fix it. Assuming that each SETI@Home installation increased the power consumption by 15 watts, then that's 365*24*60*60*15*5000*10 = 23652000000000 joules, which is 6570000 kWh. If electricity costs an average of $0.07 per kWh over that period of time, that's $459,900.

    That's not $1,000,000, but it's based on estimates. I'm sure the district has reason to want to overblow the costs, but they are not inconsiderable.

    (As a side note, even without SpeedStep, CPUs consume more power when actively computing something than when they are idling.)

  12. Re:Can confirm the issue from personal experience on Microsoft Investigates Windows 7 "Black Screen of Death" · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A user can list the contents of a directory if he has execute (X) permissions for that directory.
    A user can create new files/folders in a directory if he has write (W) permissions for that directory.
    A user can delete a file if he has write (W) permissions on that file.

    You actually only got 1 out of 3 correct.

    A user can list the contents of a directory if he has R permissions on that directory. The X bit controls whether that directory can be an element of a pathname which is being accessed. In other words, you can access a file in a directory even if you do not have R, provided you know the filename beforehand -- you just can't LIST the directory contents. It's like being blindfolded in a maze of rooms. The X bit allows you to open the doors -- if you already know where the doors are, you can still navigate. The R bit just takes off the blindfold.

    A user can delete a file if he has W permissions on the directory which contains the file. The permissions of the file itself (indeed, even the ownership) are irrelevant.

  13. Re:Contact Verizon and let them know you disapprov on Verizon Changes FiOS AUP, -1, Offtopic · · Score: 1

    "Oooh, scary! Somebody who's not our customer is going to continue not being our customer! We're trembling!"

  14. Re:Those silly Rascals on Microsoft's Top Devs Don't Seem To Like Own Tools · · Score: 1

    It's called Razzle, not Rascal. It basically means "top of tree" and it changes on a daily basis. Razzle has nothing to do with Visual Studio.

  15. Re:I owe my employer absolutely nothing on Recession Pushes More Workers To Steal Data · · Score: 1

    If you work "hard and smart" you should not have trouble finding a job. The market is very strange right now. You have to remember that the majority of people in any field are under-competent. It's this majority of workers who are having trouble finding alternate employment. In contrast, I've spoken with many old colleagues and friends over the past year who are BEGGING me to help them find qualified workers. The most recent instance was at my previous employer, who terminated their head network engineer for various reasons, and they are actually unable to fill his position now. Not because there is nobody looking for work, but because all the BEST people are already employed.

    I hate to break it, but if you're looking for work and can't find it, it means you aren't that good. Now, by violating your employer's trust, you are both a poor employee as well as one who can't be trusted. That will get you NOWHERE in the future.

  16. Re:And In Unrelated News... on Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort · · Score: 1

    "The arts are in decline. Nobody cares about math anymore. Kids these days have no respect for their elders. People are having immoral sex. Our politicians are either incompetent or bent on world domination. Civilization is coming apart."

    -- Some Roman dude, 2000 years ago, quoting some Egyptian dude, 6000 years ago.

  17. Re:A great reason to choose Firefox on New Attack Fells Internet Explorer · · Score: 1

    Okay dude. Set down the crack pipe. We're not evangelizing here, we're trying to make money. When's the last time you got scolded while trying to buy something? You probably canceled your purchase and stormed out. Bet you didn't ever go back, did you?

  18. Re:The weight of a virus on How Heavy Is the Internet? · · Score: 1

    When a bit pattern is stored on a magnetic medium, there is a certain energy associated with it due to the interactions of neighboring magnetic fields. Two opposed magnetic domains exert a force on each other. This force is caused by the presence of a magnetic field. This magnetic field entails a certain quantity of potential energy. E = mc^2. Thus, a bit pattern in fact has mass due to the intrinsic energy of its magnetic fields.

    The mass is maximum for an alternating pattern of bits, i.e. 101010101.... and minimum for a pattern of repeated bits, i.e. 0000... or 1111...

    Another way of thinking of it is that the magnetic head has to use more energy when writing a bit that differs in value from its neighbors, since it needs to "work harder" to align the magnetic domain opposite to its neighbors. This energy ultimately goes into the magnetic field between the domains, and contributes to mass-energy.

    It's not MUCH mass, but it's there.

  19. Re:Any good audio engineer will tell you- on Can We Really Tell Lossless From MP3? · · Score: 1

    You are missing the point. A "15 kHz signal" is by definition a sine wave. A triangle or square wave will have components at higher frequencies, and these will be sampled just like the fundamental. There is no ambiguity in the signal reconstruction. The ambiguity is due to aliasing during the sampling process. Your argument is basically that a 44 kHz sampling rate isn't high enough. Okay, fine. Use a higher sampling rate. It is not an argument against digital processing.

  20. Re:Any good audio engineer will tell you- on Can We Really Tell Lossless From MP3? · · Score: 1

    Meanwhile, a 15 khz tone on a CD has three samples per crest. With three samples there is no way to diffrentiate between a sine wave, a square wave, or a sawtooth wave; all will sound exactly the same.

    That doesn't matter. The reconstructed signal will be interpolated in some way. Whether you get a square wave, sine wave, or triangle wave is completely in the hands of the DAC. Obviously, the correct choice is to interpolate a sine wave, since any other choice would involve the introduction of higher frequencies. Or, to put it another way, if you actually tried to sample a 15 khz triangle wave you would end up with aliasing, because a triangle wave has overtones and some non-zero quantity of signal energy will fall outside of the Nyquist range. This is basic DSP shit.

  21. Re:Wow, that's impressive on China Bans Physical Punishment For Net Addicts · · Score: 1

    You are fucking crazy. I don't give a crap whether it's China, Uganda, the United States or Greenland. Beating people in custody is not okay.

  22. Bad press? Nobody gives a crap. on Did Microsoft Borrow GPL Code For a Windows 7 Utility? · · Score: 1, Insightful

    We have a society where a huge proportion of people violate copyright and feel okay doing it. Why would anybody give a crap when Microsoft does a little of the same? People will start taking the GPL seriously when they start taking copyright in general seriously. That is, never.

  23. Re:Genetics on Babies Begin Learning Language In the Womb · · Score: 1

    In a way that correlates nicely with their parents' native language? Are you asserting that one's native language is also genetically determined?

  24. Re:STFU if you're an American! on China Bans Physical Punishment For Net Addicts · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No. Fuck you. I speak out against this sort of torture and abuse no matter who commits it, or who it is committed against. Apparently, you think it's okay.

  25. Wow, that's impressive on China Bans Physical Punishment For Net Addicts · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wow, so you banned beatings for ONE class of prisoners. What a step forward China.