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User: Labcoat+Samurai

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Comments · 476

  1. Re:Go for it on US May Disable All Car Phones, Says Trans. Secretary · · Score: 1

    Should they get the same punishment if they were talking to a passenger? My phone interfaces with my car such that the sound comes through the speakers and a microphone picks up my side of the conversation allowing me to talk as though I were conversing with a passenger. By your metric, if I had an accident while I was doing that, I'd be treated as a drunk driver, but presumably not if it were with a passenger.

    Furthermore, they *just aren't the same*. Evey time I've seen some silly study comparing the two, the number one thing they neglect is that you can drop the phone or stop paying attention to the call at *any* time. You can't stop being drunk on command. And your judgement and reaction time are not impaired. The tests they run are bullshit. I remember when Mythbusters did this, they required Adam and Kari to respond to challenging questions while driving a skills test. Nonsense. They would have known, instantly, in a real situation that they were having difficulty concentrating on both and they, as smart drivers, would have just started ignoring the person on the call.

  2. Re:Contradicts what the military says on Video Games Found To Enhance Visual Attention · · Score: 1

    Heh :) Maybe looking for deer tracks or other signs of one's quarry is something that translates well... who knows?

  3. Re:Contradicts what the military says on Video Games Found To Enhance Visual Attention · · Score: 1

    Maybe if you've hardly ever been outdoors, you'd be bad at *knowing* that something is out of place. I don't know, doesn't seem like a very damning indictment here. Video games could still improve your reaction time and attention to relevant detail while not being as useful for outdoor military patrols as hunting experience, which seems much more closely related to the task.

  4. Re:Too Cool on Exciting Kinect Stuff Already Coming Out · · Score: 1

    What, exactly, is backwards? If the Kinect sensor is analogous to the Wii sensor bar, then what is analogous to the Wii remote? It would have to *also* be the Kinect sensor. Since there's only one device, there's nothing to reverse. And furthermore, it's kind of strange to compare the two when they're almost nothing at all alike. The Wii remote detects the relative orientation and distance of two dots. It's ingenious in its simplicity, no doubt, but it's a stone axe next to IR painting and reading an entire scene. The amount of data Kinect feeds is leaps and bounds beyond what the Wii remote feeds.

    But you make an excellent point. None of that would matter if not for a functional body recognition algorithm. Otherwise it'd just be a nightvision 3D camcorder.... which is cool, I suppose, but has no particular gaming application. On the other hand, one could argue that a similar thing is what's interesting about the Wii. I mean, without the processing built on top, what use is knowing the distance between and relative orientation of two dots?

  5. Re:Okay... on UK Games Retailers Threaten Boycott of Steam Games · · Score: 1

    You're probably right, but DRM is doing it's job to some extent if it even *delays* cracking by a bit. Some people are going to want the game right away no matter what... now as to what effect that has, I really have no idea. It would be fallacious to assume that Steam DRM must be effective because it continues to exist, but it seems like such an attractive fallacious conclusion to jump to.

  6. Re:Nice demonstration of "reasonable restrictions" on UK Politician Arrested Over Twitter 'Stoning Joke' · · Score: 1

    If "just kidding" were added, would that make the statment legal? I'm genuinely curious.

  7. Re:Won't Be On The Market Long Enough To Matter on iFixit Tears Down Microsoft's Kinect For Xbox 360 · · Score: 1

    An athlete is by definition competitive. Read the dictionary definition.

    So when I use the phrase, "competitive athlete" you feel the need to break my balls, but evidently it's ok for you to use the phrase "competitive tri-athlete"? Are there tri-athletes who are not athletes?

    Besides, I took your advice and looked it up, and, no, not all athletes are competitive by definition. Merriam-Webster, for example, defines it as "a person who is trained or skilled in exercises, sports, or games requiring physical strength, agility, or stamina." That is, unless exercises are also competitive by definition.

    My point was just that physical activity is not a bad thing, and if something like the Kinect can facilitate physical activity, we shouldn't throw it away as a waste of time simply because it isn't *enough* physical activity by some arbitrary standard

  8. Re:Won't Be On The Market Long Enough To Matter on iFixit Tears Down Microsoft's Kinect For Xbox 360 · · Score: 1

    If you want exercise, join Crossfit, swim, run, ride bikes, be a competitive triathlete or swimmer - all of which we do.

    That's right folks. If you want exercise, become a competitive athlete. Anything less is a waste of your time.

  9. Re:So do I... on Facebook Knows When You'll Get Dumped · · Score: 1

    When we were dating, she'd do any thing, any time. BJs while driving, stand-ups in her parents back yard, you name it. Constantly. All the time, any time I wanted it, and more.

    And more? What, so she raped him occasionally?

  10. Re:I read slashdot on Facebook Knows When You'll Get Dumped · · Score: 2, Insightful

    She knows what you're doing. She's not an idiot (and if she is really that dumb, why do you want her?).

    I was totally with you until then. Clearly they want her because she is hot. Duh. Her intelligence probably has nothing to do with it. This was a concept I wrestled with as a teenager. I operated under the assumption that anything I wanted so badly had to be worthy of that desire. Therefore, I projected the illusion of intelligence onto beautiful girls, and ended up surprised time and again when they would date the most idiotic jerks they could find, and generally competed with one another to make the stupidest possible decisions. Lesson I learned is that those girls are just as bad as the guys they date, only I was as blind to their faults as they were to those guys' faults.

  11. Re:I'm sitting this one out on 'Cellphone Effect' Could Skew Polling Predictions · · Score: 1

    There's a completely different reason why I tend to be reluctant to vote.

  12. Re:I thought we all came from neanderthals? on Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage · · Score: 1

    But to answer your question, no. We split off from a common ancestor. Homo just identifies the genus and doesn't imply any order of ancestry.

  13. Re:Wait.... on Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't want to pretend I could answer this without a cursory look around, but it doesn't appear as cut and dry as you say. First, double the calorie intake seems absurd on its face, and the figure listed on wikipedia is a more reasonable sounding 100-350 calories. Second, it doesn't sound like it's as simple as it being an ice age. Evidently they're physically well suited to the cold, but might have run into other problems with fluctuating climate. And finally, we get to the theory I had always heard, which was that they either came into conflict with modern humans and were driven to extinction or were absorbed into human social groups. Presence of Neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans and Asians seems to lend credence to the absorption theory.

    As for my comment about luck, my understanding is that humans came awfully close to extinction at a point in our history too. Might be that if things had gone ever so slightly differently for the Neanderthals, they could have pulled through. Or if things had gone differently for us, we might not be here.

    There's my limited understanding at any rate

  14. Re:Wasn't there a study... on Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage · · Score: 2, Informative

    The species level is intended to be roughly the level of genetic similarity where animals breed true. So if we classify them as a subspecies, our *best guess* is that we'd breed true with them.

    Furthermore, this has evidently been an ongoing debate in the scientific community (I was operating from memory of college anthropology earlier, but I went and did a little poking around just now), and the school that classifies them as Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis is absolutely saying that interbreeding is possible.

    And the presence of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans seems to suggest they are right.

  15. Re:I thought we all came from neanderthals? on Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage · · Score: 3, Funny

    I don't think that's the politically correct term, but no, not unless they adopt.

  16. Re:Wait.... on Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage · · Score: 1

    Well, they did survive, obviously.

    Good point, and by that reasoning, since Ozzie *is* part Neanderthal, my theory that the Neanderthals would disagree with him already has some small percentage of a strike against it.

  17. Re:Wasn't there a study... on Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage · · Score: 5, Informative

    The way I've always understood the classification is that we're Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and they were Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis, meaning they were a different subspecies, not genetically different enough to prohibit interbreeding.

  18. Re:Oh the irony. on Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage · · Score: 4, Funny

    True, I have a feeling that if you threw Ozzie out into the wilderness to support himself via a hunting/gathering lifestyle, he would fail miserably, emphasizing his neanderthal heritage, but maybe if you took ancient neanderthals and threw them into the heavy metal lifestyle, they would have succeeded.

  19. Re:Labcoat-Samarai-Logic ???? on Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage · · Score: 0

    Ouch, tough crowd. Well I hate to argue over something I was meaning as a witty jibe at best..... but yes, I was aware of that, but the article implies he said it after the fact, so it's a fair extrapolation in absence of further contradiction that he sees this as an answer. It wasn't "I thought I might have something special in my DNA, but then it turned out it was Neanderthal, so I was wrong".

    Sure, it's speculation, but it kinda ruins the quip to put a ton of disclaimers on it. Oh well, perils of going for funny.

  20. Re:Wait.... on Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage · · Score: 1

    Sure, and honestly, we don't even know they had much less survivability in their time. Might have been luck. Just seemed like an amusing irony to me on the surface.

  21. Wait.... on Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage · · Score: 5, Funny

    So in Ozzy-logic, you're better at surviving because you have Neanderthal DNA? The Neanderthals would likely disagree.... if they could ;)

  22. Re:Meditation on FBI and NYPD Officers Sent On Museum Field Trip · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well this is odd. I do not recall clicking the button to post anonymously. And yes, I realize the irony of that.

  23. Re:this-isn't-how-paper-books-act on Amazon To Allow Book Lending On the Kindle · · Score: 1

    Do you really believe what you say, or are you just trolling? Do you think you should have to lend out your Kindel just to lend one book? I don't have to lend out my entire library just to lend a book. and, having bought a physical book.

    Seems to me that you've pointed out both an advantage and a disadvantage of the Kindle vs traditional books. Enormous space savings vs loss of fine granularity. Is the ability to have your entire library in your backpack worth the drawback of having to lend your entire library if you want to lend a book to a friend? Vote with your dollar :)

  24. Re:In Response to 'digital media should be free'.. on Amazon To Allow Book Lending On the Kindle · · Score: 1

    Why is the profitability of the publishing industry my responsibility?

    Well it isn't. It's their responsibility. This is just about understanding their motivations. They don't have any responsibility to you either. As a business, they have a responsibility first and foremost to make money, and their secondary responsibility, whenever it is in line with their first responsibility, is to make the consumers happy. Look at it this way, if I owned an ice cream parlor, I could make my customers *really* happy by just giving the ice cream away for free, but that's no good for me. I also don't want to unnecessarily antagonize them, since that reduces sales. So keep them happy as much as possible without sabotaging my profitability.

    If the publishers want to stay in business they will need to realize that in the current state e-books just aren't worth what they are asking for them.

    I guess that remains to be seen. They seem to be doing all right so far. Isn't the Kindle Amazon's top selling item? Certainly a high seller, at any rate.

  25. Re:In Response to 'digital media should be free'.. on Amazon To Allow Book Lending On the Kindle · · Score: 1

    Well, one problem I see is that I don't think those are static groups of people. For example, if you make it easier to get free books, the leecher populiation is likely to increase, having pulled from the cheapskates, where many of the cheapskates may have otherwise paid for your eBook if it wasn't made excessively easy to get for free. I mean, you certainly have an interesting model; I'm just highly skeptical that human nature supports it in all but a few cases.

    Also, consider the type of fiction an author might write. If your fiction is targeted at well-educated adults, you're more likely to find people willing to donate. If your fiction is targeted at teenagers, you're more likely to find tons of leechers who don't fully appreciate the economic realities you're facing.... and even if they did, they likely don't have the means to donate as much anyway.