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  1. Re:Science vs Religion: Contradictions? on Evangelical Scientists Debate Creation Story · · Score: 0

    I know you're sarcastic. Yet I hope you realize that high fructose corn syrup is a scapegoat. It's not much different from cane sugar. HFCS contains monosaccharides -- both fructose and sucrose, in pure form. HFCS used in drinks and most sweets has between 45% and 55% fructose, rest is glucose. Cane sugar is 100% disaccharide sucrose -- that's simply fructose and sucrose bound together with a fairly weak bond. That bond is broken by our digestive system to yield -- o horror -- 50% fructose and glucose. The energy we use to break the bond is fairly minuscule IIRC, and plays no role in reducing caloric intake from cane sugar.

    So, the term HIGH fructose syrup is really a misnomer. There's just as much bioavailable fructose, to within a couple percent, in HFCS as used in drinks/sweets as there is in cane sugar.

  2. Re:Mod Parent Up IMMEDIATELY on Download.com Now Wraps Downloads In Bloatware · · Score: 1

    I don't think it needs to cost that much in your time. You don't need to babysit backups, right? You could be doing 10-20 computers at a time. I don't find regular KVMs very useful, though -- not for monitors, that is. If you have a KVM that can put four 800x600 screens on a larger display, that's fine. I simply use a bunch of monitors. They are cheap these days. If I were to routinely "reconstruct" PCs, I'd probably have a C-shaped desk with room for 10-15 machines surrounding me.

    There are problems that are hard to fix without reinstalling Windows, in absence of proper product documentation. I had an XP machine recently where Adobe Reader X would always have issues with printing. Sometimes it'd print, sometimes it'd spool forever, sometimes it'd say there's nothing to print. Reinstallations of printers or reader fixed nothing, so I didn't even have a choice. And this was a machine that never ever had malware on it, just routine updates for a couple of years.

    I presume that reinstalling software shouldn't take long, and backing up a user's profile in its entirety isn't hard. If someone pays for software and can't reinstall it, I guess it's their fault...

  3. Re:A few things. on When Schools Are the Police · · Score: 1

    Don't ever say that to a kid. Unless you're both in on the joke. But I think you know that already. Just had to be said, just in case.

  4. Re:A few things. on When Schools Are the Police · · Score: 1

    I know about that. I think the cutoff around here is 12 years. Just to think that I didn't burn the house down when I stayed home alone at age 10. I sure must be on some sort of a watch list by now.

    On a serious note, though, this law must be some sort of an overreaction for parents who abuse their kids and leave them home unsupervised when they are little. Some lawmaker must have been sick to their stomach or something after hearing some testimony. Admittedly, I know a child surgeon who deals occasionally with rather horrific cases of abuse. Even though a very good doctor I'd trust my kids to in a heartbeat, if you use hammers all day long, eventually it seems a hammer is a solution to everything. So is the case of that doctor: parental abuse must be the answer to every injury out there. It gets especially hairy when you befriend both the doctor and the parents who almost lost a kid due to misdiagnosed "abuse"...

    I think that people who can't use their reason, and only reason, in dealing with things at work, even horrific things, should never write laws. This would exclude, umm, most of them I guess.

  5. Re:Mod Parent Up IMMEDIATELY on Download.com Now Wraps Downloads In Bloatware · · Score: 1

    As far as OEM XP boxes go, you need a handful of OEM reinstallation CDs and you're all set. No need to do any sort of cleanups. Do a slipstream of latest patches twice a year and you're all set - that is, if you're into big-time cleanup/reinstallation. For windows 7, you don't even need to do any of that: use whatever install media you've got, and use a loader to set the installer to match the OEM COA's vendor (say HP, Dell, etc). You can then disable the loader, since the BIOS signature is present anyway.

  6. Re:Wow, when you can't trust CNET on Download.com Now Wraps Downloads In Bloatware · · Score: 1

    It's interesting that I never used filehippo, but I decided to sneak a peek. Here's what I saw at the very top of the page:

    In the latest updates table, 50% of entries are served by ninite. In popular software table, 100% of entries are served by the same. No, I don't work for ninite, don't get paid by them, and they are free for personal use. Bybye hippos of the world, for me at least.

  7. Re:Wow, when you can't trust CNET on Download.com Now Wraps Downloads In Bloatware · · Score: 1

    In all cases I know of, it happens but only if you pay no attention to opt-out checkboxes hiding in visual clutter in one of many installation "wizard" pages you have to click through. Somehow automated installers like ninite don't have a problem with bypassing that. Neither did I when I still installed crap manually.

    Alas, I don't really know what download.com is for. I never ever had a need to get anything from their site. Reputable projects have their own websites, or are hosted at sourceforge, etc. I think that download.com's only raison d'être is to poison google search results, nothing more. It serves no purpose to those who are informed.

  8. Re:Result of Truancy Laws on When Schools Are the Police · · Score: 1

    I've looked through the pages on the Amazon preview, and I must say that I can't but agree with what's said there. Guide them, educate them, love them, but let them be people, not slaves. Yep.

  9. Re:A few things. on When Schools Are the Police · · Score: 1

    I agree. The U.S. society tries to portray minors as those no-can-do idiots who, somehow, at the time their 18th birthday's midnight strikes, become responsible adults. Just like that. Magic. I think it's mostly due to many people who fail at parenting. Being involved in your kids' development does not mean hovering above their head the whole time. Helicopter parents are IMHO one of key reasons why kids are treated like retards. And in being so treated, they truly turn into retards -- after all, there's no pressure on them to behave at their true level of capability.

  10. Electric blankets, anyone? on GE's World War II Era "Copper Man" Gets His Due · · Score: 4, Informative

    Trivia: the copper man used to test and advertise heated electric blankets. The same ones whose failures cause an estimated 5000 fires each year in the U.K. The ones that were sold for more than a decade in the U.S. without adequate safety circuits.

  11. Re:Stroking a blow! on 25,000 Danish Hospital Staff Moving To LibreOffice · · Score: 1

    I agree, but in terms of corporate applications, that would be considered "throwaway". I've heard it used to reconcile hundreds of millions of dollars worth of accounts, and a part of a process whose progressive failure caused failures on the billion dollar scale. Spreadsheets have their place, but business critical roles where millions of dollars are involved is not one of them.

    I use pyspread with some in-house tweaks for unit-checked engineering calculations. That's about as far as I'd go, though.

  12. Re:Freedom isn't free. on 25,000 Danish Hospital Staff Moving To LibreOffice · · Score: 1

    That's precisely how NOT to use Excel, even though many people think it's fine and dandy. It's a road to hell in terms of stability of data. I'd take a standalone VB6 application any day over something that tries to do the same thing but crams a spreadsheet somewhere in there just so people don't have to "carry executables around". Yeah sure.

  13. Re:Stroking a blow! on 25,000 Danish Hospital Staff Moving To LibreOffice · · Score: 1

    Forgot to add: obviously this applies whether the spreadsheet is Excel, Gnumeric or OO.org Calc.

  14. Re:Stroking a blow! on 25,000 Danish Hospital Staff Moving To LibreOffice · · Score: 1

    Using Excel or any spreadsheet for anything but prototyping or throwaway calculations is insanity anyway. A friend of mine was dealing with cleaning up mess in multibillion USD corporations where all of financial data reconciliation was done using spreadsheets. It's not the right tool for this job.

    If your business critical workflow includes clicking in spreadsheets, you're doing it wrong, most of the time.

  15. Re:Stroking a blow! on 25,000 Danish Hospital Staff Moving To LibreOffice · · Score: 1

    It's not an insurmountable obstacle. Perhaps they'll use some of their $7M savings to pay for a bunch of patches.

  16. Physical plant is the first choice to make on Ask Slashdot: Best Wi-Fi Solution For a Hotel? · · Score: 1

    First of all, you need something to transfer the data over until it hits the air. For that you have a couple options as to the physical plant -- the stuff the data goes over: phone line wire (cat3), twisted pair (cat5), power lines (with 120VAC on them), fiber optic, and coaxial cable. CAT3 (phone wire) is cheapest, especially if you can reuse existing lines. Cat3 will support 10BASE-T Ethernet and DSL. Cat5 will support 100BASE-T Ethernet. Fiber Optic -- can be ATM or Ethernet. If coaxial cable (RG-59 as used in cable tv) can be used with no other signals on it (if you can), then 10BASE2 is a "simple" but obsolete and slow solution. Best forget about it. You'd much rather use something like Gefen TV Ethernet over Coax to push a 100Mbit/s full duplex Ethernet link over the coaxial cable. If you have to coexist (tap into) existing cable TV distribution plant, then use a DOCSIS-based solution.

    I would not use 10BASE-T since a segment is limited to 100m in length, same for 10BASE-2, and it's really obsolete. So you are left with, most practically:
    - Cat3: DSL
    - Cat5: 100BASE-T Ethernet or DSL
    - Fiber: 100BASE-FX Ethernet
    - Coax: Gefen solution for dedicated run, DOCSIS solution for coexistence with cable tv distribution

    That's just the first step, but a very important one. You have to inventory existing physical plants that are available, also inventory available power, and price all options out.

  17. Re:History of HP on HP Spinning Off WebOS and Exiting Hardware Business · · Score: 1

    Tektronix these days is nothing special, especially after it got acquired by Danaher. HP's scopes are better these days, especially their mid-range stuff.

  18. History of HP on HP Spinning Off WebOS and Exiting Hardware Business · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So, HP was an instrument company, started with an ingenious application of a light bulb no less. Then they became a computer company sort of by attrition, since they needed machines to control their instruments -- IIRC. Then servers came sort of naturally when they got to dabble with UNIX. Then the core instrument business got spun off as Agilent, pretty much tarring the name of Hewlett and Packard IMHO. Then the PC business gets spun off too. So what remains is servers? What the heck software is HP shipping that hasn't to do with their own hardware? It's becoming more and more of a joke to keep the same name. Their business got nothing to do with Hewlett nor Packard. They're turning in their graves. </rant>

  19. Re:Blatant propaganda on SpaceX Given Approval For ISS Mission · · Score: 2

    You're silly. The "safety regulations" are not hiking up the prices. Everyone wants a successful mission. Cutting corners usually means losing the mission. There's nothing particular that SpaceX is doing differently in the safety department that the big boys (Lockheed and Boeing) do differently. SpaceX just happens to waste an order of magnitude less money doing so. I guess you're nowhere near the current government contracting: they waste so much money it's crazy. Your mistaken belief is that somehow SpaceX is a "budget knockoff" type of a deal. I'm worried you're a shill for United Launch Alliance -- because they'll be getting their ass handed to them. If everything goes allright for SpaceX, in about 10 years there will be nobody else left selling launch services in the U.S. -- the customers aren't silly. At prices charged by SpaceX, for reasonably priced cargo you can get one launch failure and one successful launch for the price of one successful launch with closest competitor.

  20. Re:Will Russia drop the prices now? on SpaceX Given Approval For ISS Mission · · Score: 1

    Not so fast with internal blood pressure! The relative peak blood pressure is, say, 120mmHg = 16kPa = 0.16bar. The boiling point of water is about 50C at that pressure, so you're right -- at the systolic peak the blood will not boil. I don't know how high the absolute average pressure in your body would be with vacuum on the outside. I'd guess around 6kPa, since that's the boiling pressure of water at your internal temperature. However, there are large veins close to the heart with negative blood pressure -- if you'd puncture them at atmospheric pressure, you'd get air sucked into the system. Assuming your internal body pressure hovering around 6-10kPa, the blood in those veins (and in the right ventricle) could indeed boil for a part of each diastole. If anything, it'd probably decrease the efficiency of the right heart, as it'd deal with heavy cavitation in the atrium. I have no idea how the pressures are in the left atrium, though. Exposure to vacuum must not be good for your lungs either...

  21. Re:Check his palms for what? on Anti-Piracy Lawyers Accuse Blind Man of Downloading Films · · Score: 1

    Obviously, people who are old enough know enough about zoology to be able to invoke, say, semi-aquatic nocturnal rodents. If you're into botany instead, you may talk of shrubs. Use of vernacular seems to be all-defining to some people. Talking like someone with at least half of a brain, seemingly makes you a kid. Hey, I wouldn't mind to be a kid again!

  22. Re:Check his palms for what? on Anti-Piracy Lawyers Accuse Blind Man of Downloading Films · · Score: 1

    'twas a meta-joke -- obviously I'm no good at it. I apologize.

  23. Re:Check his palms for what? on Anti-Piracy Lawyers Accuse Blind Man of Downloading Films · · Score: 1

    I guess meta jokes are not all the rage anymore, huh? Anyway, obviously the real answer is that masturbation is what makes blind people get beautiful eyelashes. There.

    The discussion that follows is hilarious enough, that was my intent, if half-assed. Mission accomplished?

  24. Re:Check his palms for what? on Anti-Piracy Lawyers Accuse Blind Man of Downloading Films · · Score: 1

    Whooosh. I'll ruin the joke, but I guess it has to be explained. When you masturbate, you're likely to pull your pubic hair out (no matter your gender). They may well get stuck between your fingers and other areas of your hand. intellitech was thinking about "cum shot residue" -- that's close enough, but it'd be too obvious to make a good joke IMHO. The joke is, thus, that you can check if someone masturbates by looking inside their palms/between their fingers for pubic hair. Of course it's only a joke: if for nothing else than men and women still like to occasionally scratch themselves on their privates, and may as well pull a pubic hair or two without having to masturbate. Is that clear?

  25. Re:Check his palms for what? on Anti-Piracy Lawyers Accuse Blind Man of Downloading Films · · Score: 2

    So, you never looked at your hands afterwards? :)