Right, I've read that article before. Just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's true.
It doesn't say where all these bacteria are supposed to be living. You know - the ones that it claims outnumber us 10 to 1? It makes vague references to the gut and the skin, which might very well be true, but it's certainly not true for us, overall.
When we actually have bacteria running around at those levels in our blood, it's called septicemia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepsis), and it kills you.
>>You are falling for the fallacy that the CEO has a clue while in fact he is a complete moron.
Very true.
I laughed this morning what I got an email from the Netflix CEO saying that he'd screwed up with the whole DVD+Streaming split thing.
And then he went on to shove both feet in his mouth by explaining how the problem was with *communication* and not with his decision, and then proceeded to shove even more feet in his mouth by announcing that they were going to split the company in twain, with different websites and queues for each.:P
It's like apologizing for hitting someone, saying the problem was that you didn't hit them hard enough, and then giving them two more black eyes.
>>And how about a situation where you're just watching something and someone in the same room says a word that the console (mis-)recognizes?
You have to say the word Xbox to get its attention. So it's "Xbox pause", for example. That said, it will indeed fuck up occasionally - the worst is when it things you said "Xbox fast forward", and it nicely spoilerizes the next 10 minutes for you while you yell at it to stop. This happened to me a few times (including it just flipping to the next chapter), and since there's no apparent way of killing the voice recognition, I had to unplug my Kinect in order to watch video on it.
Actually, the worst part is that since it listens to everyone it's like you have five people holding the remote at once. Xbox, Pause! Xbox, Play! Xbox rewind!
Nobody IS saying that "replace coal now or millions will die" is a scientific conclusion. It is a policy conclusion based on a scientific conclusion. What they do say is that carbon increases heat absorption, we're increasing carbon output, and the temperature and weather is measurably changing. But policy is never a conclusion of the scientific method. Policy is the logical conclusion that rational people make in the face of scientific evidence and in light of facts revealed by the scientific method. The very idea that there should be evidence to support a policy conclusion, as opposed to the fact conclusions upon which the policy conclusion is based, indicates that you basically have no understanding of either science or policy.
Sure, but that said, it's also a fallacy to say that the people who are good at the science must necessarily be good at writing policy. Scientists are notoriously bad at understanding people, and a lot of AGW solutions proposed by them would be catastrophic if implemented.
I don't know, likewise, any scientist who has ever used any evidence derived from the scientific method to conclude that in a scientific sense that "god doesn't exist."... Only in the fevered imaginings of fundamentalists are scientists drawing the conclusion from scientific evidence and methods that god doesn't exist.
You don't hang out with enough atheists then. Hell, even Stephen Hawking thinks that science has proved that God doesn't exist. His argument is that there wasn't time before the big bang, and therefore nothing could have existed before the big bang, including God.
I think it's an absurdly wrong argument, but these arguments are certainly made.
>>I have no sympathy for pious nerds who know perfectly well that tablet Android is (at best) a desperate work in progress, buy it anyway - and then inevitably wind up back at their PC dissatisfied, frustrated and utterly underwhelmed.
I basically had to buy a tablet for work. The iPad is certainly the better experience, but having an external keyboard (with the EEE Transformer) won the sale.
Apologies for ruining your perfectly good preconceptions.
>>It is your nostalgia that is running at 5000 MHz.
No, I actually benchmarked this kind of stuff, and still have my records for it.
The internet browsing experience is quantitatively slower today than it was in the past, and tablets are even worse than desktops, with noticeable input lag and such.
>>Your 100MHz example is probably using Linux and either some lightweight browser and you're comparing your 2600K running Vista and IE.
100MHz running Win95 and Netscape vs. my 2600K (running between 1.7GHz and 4GHz depending on what it feels like) running Firefox.
If you ignore dialup connections (I had campus internet in the last half of the 90s) I honestly thing the web has become much less responsive over time. And tablets are even less responsive than desktops.
>>Your 100MHz Win95 computer could not handle "web browsing" on today's internet
While I understand that you think that all the Javascript stuff has made today's internet a crazy CPU intensive thing, you're greatly exaggerating things. Slashdot loaded faster on my old 100Mhz machine than it does on this overclocked 2600K (about twice as fast, in fact), though it did have campus internet instead of this relatively slow 24Mbps connection that I have now.
Have you ever tried browsing "today's internet" with javascript disabled? A lot of sites work just fine. Still is no excuse for the poor browsing and email experience on a tablet. At least word processing has the excuse they don't have dedicated keyboards a lot of the time.
>>Your 100 MHz PC was also handling indexed-color pixels with no alpha blending as well as the far simpler web page layouts that were common at the time. Furthermore, "smoothly" was interpreted in context of the 0.02 to 0.05 Mbps Internet connections that were common in the Windows 95 era.
I had a 100Mbps connection at the time. Loading Slashdot on my current 24Mbps and overclocked 2600K takes a fast 7 count. Loading Slashdot back in the day took less than half the time.
I use the old commenting system on/., so unless you're honestly trying to claim that Slashdot has increased its graphics load by 30x in the last 15 years, I think you're misremembering how things used to be.
>>It's so odd how the people that want a tablet with the functionality of a real computer are looked at like they're bizarro
Seriously. When I complained on Slashdot that tablets aren't as good as PCs at relatively simple and common things like web browsing, email, and office apps, I got flamed for having my expectations set too high.
Really? I'm not asking a tablet to be able to play DXHR or Crysis or something. My 100MHz Win95 computer could handle email, web browsing, and word processing smoothly. Is it too much to expect a Honeycomb tablet, with its 10x faster Tegra core, to be able to do these very simple things smoothly? Instead, there's weird input lag all over the place and while it works for short trips away from home, I'd never want to be stuck using it for long periods of time.
. In New York, to be unenforcable due to unconscionability, the provision must reflect both "procedural" and "substantive" unconscionability at the time it is made. In other words, one party must have used its superior bargaining position to somehow trick or "surprise" the other party into accepting a term which was unexpected or out of the ordinary, and the term itself must be unreasonably oppressive to the party that was tricked or surprised into accepting it.
I ANAL, but it seems to me that silently changing TOS terms and making hundreds of dollars of games that you bought and paid for with good faith unplayable if you do not accept their new terms to be the very definition of trick/surprise and unreasonably oppressive.
Right, so when I'm working late and I'm trying to pull up some API documentation and it turns out it's blocked, and the sysadmins have all gone home for the night, what then? I'm stuck. (Assuming I don't just bypass the whitelist entirely by ssh tunneling my connections through my home linux box.) Unless you'd like for me to call up the guy at home? Oh, but that sort of explodes your "it's not too much work" notion.
Whitelisting is simply not conducive to a good work environment.
>>Block everything. Allow what needs to be allowed.
And then you'll have to hire 10 more IT guys just to deal with all the legitimate requests for unblocking that will come pouring in.
I used to work at a place like that. It eventually was just easier for them to give me the password to unblock sites myself, rather than pester them about it.
>>you may be surprised to find that 40k in 2007 or 1970 (adjusted) has much different purchasing power.
CPI is always hard to adjust for. But for things that I care about (computers), I'd much rather be living now than in the 70s, in both price and power.
>>I urge you to examine Elizabeth Warren's analysis of the middle class and ACTUAL cost inflations
I've actually pulled the actual numbers from federal sources. The middle class really is better off now than at any time before by pretty much any measure. And by "now", I mean "right before the current recession".
>>The data presented in wikipedia is not robust
I'm rather disappointed that you would prefer to believe your incorrect beliefs over facts, but that's just how people of a certain political mindset are wired, I guess.
Years ago, I didn't know what "^H^H^H^H^H" meant. (It is, apparently, how one typed a backspace on a rather old type of computer). When I asked what it meant (as it had interested me) I was told by a few kind persons, but I was also chided about not knowing about an obscure computer that was popular before I was born.
Ouch. Don't revel in your ignorance. Unix/Linux isn't "obscure". Neither are DOS/Windows machines.
Open a terminal on your Linux box. Type something. Hit ctrl-h a few times. See how the characters vanish? Neat, huh? There's lots of shortcuts like that.
The reason that ^H became so well known, and not ^U (which is a shortcut I use every day - it erases your entire line of input) is due to the modem days causing the ctrl-h's to appear when people typed backspace some of the time (depending on the settings and lag).
Well, it's sort of an orthogonal issue. There's lots of stories that don't make CNN that aren't appropriate for/. -That said, I agree with what you're saying in spirit - that it's nice that there's a website like Slashdot that will run stories about neat, hackish things like the tricorder-like thing described in TFA.
>>You realize of course that incandescent light bulbs have NOT been outlawed? The law only establishes a minimum efficiency. You aren't being forced to do anything.
Depends where you're talking about, I guess. In communist Cuba they are banned outright. Here in California (I know, I know, not much difference) I couldn't t find any 100W incandescent bulbs the last time I went to Lowe's.
So call it what you want. If you can't buy it except on the black market (i.e. Canada), it's a ban.
You're an idiot. I can see flicker up to about 80 Hz, and couldn't stand older plasmas and CRTs. You cannot see the 120Hz flicker in a decent CFD. The only possible objection to them is color temp, but you didn't even bring that up.
And for the idiots about to correct my 120Hz value to 60Hz, the voltage goes through zero twice per cycle.
It's an urban legend that humans can't see flicker above 30 or 60Hz, mainly due to people confusing that with the speed at which motion in movies appears fluid (above 24Hz or so) and not a series of frames. Some people are also confused because they can't see frame rate advantages over 60Hz in video games, which is also not what we're talking about.
Humans can detect flicker at a much higher rate than the hertz of most non-incandescent light sources.
>>No it isn't. It just seems natural to you since you're used to it. To everybody not still wedded to archaic units, meters are perfectly natural and usable.
Natural in the scientific sense, not the psychological sense. In other words, Kelvin are a better unit for temperature than Celsius, since you have to convert Celsius to Kelvin in order to do any thermodynamic calculations. A nano-lightsecond (aka a foot) makes a lot more sense to work with than the rather arbitrary meter unit. Call it a nls.
In fact, this thread shows exactly why that is true. If people used feet/nano-lightseconds instead of meters, the OP would have been able to much more easily calculate how far travels in a 1GHz processor (i.e. one foot) or a 8Ghz processor (1/8th of a foot or.125nls) and how that compares to the 17mm die size. Ah, see, but wait - we're using the non-natural mm measurement, so we have to convert to nls! 17mm = 0.0558nls. So we're still below the theoretical maximum by about a factor of two, though path length issues are obviously going to set a hard limit before that.
Yes. "2+2=4" is not politically acceptable. It *must* be 5, because 5 is more than 4. Against this sort of logic scientists have no chance, especially when there is a small but ever-growing cottage industry selling books and other materials related to the "5 answer", and it is really what people wish were true. Selling bad news via science isn't easy.
Wait...your analogy went kind of afield there. Is it Al Gore that is claiming 2+2=5, or the AGW deniers? Because they both believe in crazy, stupid stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
>>by count you have more bacteria than cells read this : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080603085914.htm
Right, I've read that article before. Just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's true.
It doesn't say where all these bacteria are supposed to be living. You know - the ones that it claims outnumber us 10 to 1? It makes vague references to the gut and the skin, which might very well be true, but it's certainly not true for us, overall.
When we actually have bacteria running around at those levels in our blood, it's called septicemia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepsis), and it kills you.
>>You are falling for the fallacy that the CEO has a clue while in fact he is a complete moron.
Very true.
I laughed this morning what I got an email from the Netflix CEO saying that he'd screwed up with the whole DVD+Streaming split thing.
And then he went on to shove both feet in his mouth by explaining how the problem was with *communication* and not with his decision, and then proceeded to shove even more feet in his mouth by announcing that they were going to split the company in twain, with different websites and queues for each. :P
It's like apologizing for hitting someone, saying the problem was that you didn't hit them hard enough, and then giving them two more black eyes.
Fucking hilarious.
>>And how about a situation where you're just watching something and someone in the same room says a word that the console (mis-)recognizes?
You have to say the word Xbox to get its attention. So it's "Xbox pause", for example. That said, it will indeed fuck up occasionally - the worst is when it things you said "Xbox fast forward", and it nicely spoilerizes the next 10 minutes for you while you yell at it to stop. This happened to me a few times (including it just flipping to the next chapter), and since there's no apparent way of killing the voice recognition, I had to unplug my Kinect in order to watch video on it.
Actually, the worst part is that since it listens to everyone it's like you have five people holding the remote at once. Xbox, Pause! Xbox, Play! Xbox rewind!
>>90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial
Modern urban legend that isn't even vaguely true.
Ask yourself - if you take a powerful wide-spectrum antibiotic, do you suddenly drop from your natural 400 pounds down to 40?
>>The "what have you done for me lately" crowd has an interesting way with words that never fails to amuse me.
Does AMD actually have a decent driver for their family of video cards for Linux?
The irony of TFA is that it's apparently been 4 years since they committed to open source, apparently.
Sure, but that said, it's also a fallacy to say that the people who are good at the science must necessarily be good at writing policy. Scientists are notoriously bad at understanding people, and a lot of AGW solutions proposed by them would be catastrophic if implemented.
You don't hang out with enough atheists then. Hell, even Stephen Hawking thinks that science has proved that God doesn't exist. His argument is that there wasn't time before the big bang, and therefore nothing could have existed before the big bang, including God.
I think it's an absurdly wrong argument, but these arguments are certainly made.
>>I have no sympathy for pious nerds who know perfectly well that tablet Android is (at best) a desperate work in progress, buy it anyway - and then inevitably wind up back at their PC dissatisfied, frustrated and utterly underwhelmed.
I basically had to buy a tablet for work. The iPad is certainly the better experience, but having an external keyboard (with the EEE Transformer) won the sale.
Apologies for ruining your perfectly good preconceptions.
>>It is your nostalgia that is running at 5000 MHz.
No, I actually benchmarked this kind of stuff, and still have my records for it.
The internet browsing experience is quantitatively slower today than it was in the past, and tablets are even worse than desktops, with noticeable input lag and such.
>>Your 100MHz example is probably using Linux and either some lightweight browser and you're comparing your 2600K running Vista and IE.
100MHz running Win95 and Netscape vs. my 2600K (running between 1.7GHz and 4GHz depending on what it feels like) running Firefox.
If you ignore dialup connections (I had campus internet in the last half of the 90s) I honestly thing the web has become much less responsive over time. And tablets are even less responsive than desktops.
>>Your 100MHz Win95 computer could not handle "web browsing" on today's internet
While I understand that you think that all the Javascript stuff has made today's internet a crazy CPU intensive thing, you're greatly exaggerating things. Slashdot loaded faster on my old 100Mhz machine than it does on this overclocked 2600K (about twice as fast, in fact), though it did have campus internet instead of this relatively slow 24Mbps connection that I have now.
Have you ever tried browsing "today's internet" with javascript disabled? A lot of sites work just fine. Still is no excuse for the poor browsing and email experience on a tablet. At least word processing has the excuse they don't have dedicated keyboards a lot of the time.
All this should be settled computer science.
>>Your 100 MHz PC was also handling indexed-color pixels with no alpha blending as well as the far simpler web page layouts that were common at the time. Furthermore, "smoothly" was interpreted in context of the 0.02 to 0.05 Mbps Internet connections that were common in the Windows 95 era.
I had a 100Mbps connection at the time. Loading Slashdot on my current 24Mbps and overclocked 2600K takes a fast 7 count. Loading Slashdot back in the day took less than half the time.
I use the old commenting system on /., so unless you're honestly trying to claim that Slashdot has increased its graphics load by 30x in the last 15 years, I think you're misremembering how things used to be.
>>It's so odd how the people that want a tablet with the functionality of a real computer are looked at like they're bizarro
Seriously. When I complained on Slashdot that tablets aren't as good as PCs at relatively simple and common things like web browsing, email, and office apps, I got flamed for having my expectations set too high.
Really? I'm not asking a tablet to be able to play DXHR or Crysis or something. My 100MHz Win95 computer could handle email, web browsing, and word processing smoothly. Is it too much to expect a Honeycomb tablet, with its 10x faster Tegra core, to be able to do these very simple things smoothly? Instead, there's weird input lag all over the place and while it works for short trips away from home, I'd never want to be stuck using it for long periods of time.
I ANAL, but it seems to me that silently changing TOS terms and making hundreds of dollars of games that you bought and paid for with good faith unplayable if you do not accept their new terms to be the very definition of trick/surprise and unreasonably oppressive.
Right, so when I'm working late and I'm trying to pull up some API documentation and it turns out it's blocked, and the sysadmins have all gone home for the night, what then? I'm stuck. (Assuming I don't just bypass the whitelist entirely by ssh tunneling my connections through my home linux box.) Unless you'd like for me to call up the guy at home? Oh, but that sort of explodes your "it's not too much work" notion.
Whitelisting is simply not conducive to a good work environment.
>>Block everything. Allow what needs to be allowed.
And then you'll have to hire 10 more IT guys just to deal with all the legitimate requests for unblocking that will come pouring in.
I used to work at a place like that. It eventually was just easier for them to give me the password to unblock sites myself, rather than pester them about it.
>>cognitive dissonance of learning yet another www site
That's not cognitive dissonance.
You, on the other hand - talking about why Facebook is great even though you hate it - is a perfect example of cognitive dissonance.
>>You see a 10-fold increase between 1970 and 2010. You inflation adjusted wages aren't even 2fold
Do you even know what inflation-adjusted dollars means?
And why comparing it against unadjusted prices, in just one category, accomplishes nothing more than your ignorance of economics?
I'd like to echo Blackest's post beneath you.
It really is worth the time learning to use a UNIX system, if you're at all a techie. (Gamer != techie, btw.) It's fun... and educational! Seriously.
You can install a virtual linux box on your windows machine. You don't need a separate box to do it.
>>Well, not really. In modern processes signal propagation time isn't the limit, it's charging and discharging capacitors.
I think you missed the "theoretical limit" part of the calculation. =)
It's a fun back of the envelope calculation. 1GHz = 1 foot. 8GHz, therefore, is 1/8th of a foot.
>>you may be surprised to find that 40k in 2007 or 1970 (adjusted) has much different purchasing power.
CPI is always hard to adjust for. But for things that I care about (computers), I'd much rather be living now than in the 70s, in both price and power.
>>I urge you to examine Elizabeth Warren's analysis of the middle class and ACTUAL cost inflations
I've actually pulled the actual numbers from federal sources. The middle class really is better off now than at any time before by pretty much any measure. And by "now", I mean "right before the current recession".
>>The data presented in wikipedia is not robust
I'm rather disappointed that you would prefer to believe your incorrect beliefs over facts, but that's just how people of a certain political mindset are wired, I guess.
Ouch. Don't revel in your ignorance. Unix/Linux isn't "obscure". Neither are DOS/Windows machines.
Open a terminal on your Linux box. Type something. Hit ctrl-h a few times. See how the characters vanish? Neat, huh? There's lots of shortcuts like that.
The reason that ^H became so well known, and not ^U (which is a shortcut I use every day - it erases your entire line of input) is due to the modem days causing the ctrl-h's to appear when people typed backspace some of the time (depending on the settings and lag).
>>You realize of course that incandescent light bulbs have NOT been outlawed? The law only establishes a minimum efficiency. You aren't being forced to do anything.
Depends where you're talking about, I guess. In communist Cuba they are banned outright. Here in California (I know, I know, not much difference) I couldn't t find any 100W incandescent bulbs the last time I went to Lowe's.
So call it what you want. If you can't buy it except on the black market (i.e. Canada), it's a ban.
It's an urban legend that humans can't see flicker above 30 or 60Hz, mainly due to people confusing that with the speed at which motion in movies appears fluid (above 24Hz or so) and not a series of frames. Some people are also confused because they can't see frame rate advantages over 60Hz in video games, which is also not what we're talking about.
Humans can detect flicker at a much higher rate than the hertz of most non-incandescent light sources.
>>No it isn't. It just seems natural to you since you're used to it. To everybody not still wedded to archaic units, meters are perfectly natural and usable.
Natural in the scientific sense, not the psychological sense. In other words, Kelvin are a better unit for temperature than Celsius, since you have to convert Celsius to Kelvin in order to do any thermodynamic calculations. A nano-lightsecond (aka a foot) makes a lot more sense to work with than the rather arbitrary meter unit. Call it a nls.
In fact, this thread shows exactly why that is true. If people used feet/nano-lightseconds instead of meters, the OP would have been able to much more easily calculate how far travels in a 1GHz processor (i.e. one foot) or a 8Ghz processor (1/8th of a foot or .125nls) and how that compares to the 17mm die size. Ah, see, but wait - we're using the non-natural mm measurement, so we have to convert to nls! 17mm = 0.0558nls. So we're still below the theoretical maximum by about a factor of two, though path length issues are obviously going to set a hard limit before that.
Wait...your analogy went kind of afield there. Is it Al Gore that is claiming 2+2=5, or the AGW deniers? Because they both believe in crazy, stupid stuff.
Like Al Gore's famous flooding simulation, which gives no indication of the time scale involved: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XxV9TOCdIY
Or Al Gore's mythical drowning polar bears: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9sFgUwiKik
And so forth. There's a lot of serious factual errors in An Inconvenient Truth.
He's a very bad spokesman for global warming, and a horrible exemplar for someone trying to live an "environmental" lifestyle.
>>Second is a metric system unit...
Yeah, but a foot isn't. That's the funny thing. A foot is a better natural unit for distance than a meter.
We really ought to be using kilofeet and millifeet rather than meters. =)