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User: Angry+Toad

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Comments · 388

  1. Re:Was pleased to be involved in this... on Amazon's AbeBooks Backs Down After Booksellers Stage Global Protest (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    However I'd really appreciate it if they would remove the endless clutter of "print to order" book services from India. Sometimes you have to scroll through pages of that trash before you hit actual books.

  2. Re:"Hate speech" can be anything the censors disli on AI Still Useless at Catching Hate Speech, Research Finds (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    What constitutes an attack? If I make the statement "Gender is inextricably linked with an individual's genetics", I would be called out for hate speech in some places, on the grounds that I have "attacked" the gender identity of some self-identified groups. These groups may even in fact have had their existence codified into law at this point. Yet my point is merely a statement of opinion about biology. The label of hate speech is regularly used to shut down opinions that someone dislikes. Some forms of hate speech - direct threats of violence to an individual or group for instance - are already and correctly criminalized and do not need to be additionally labelled as such. The point of having a "fuzzy" definition (lacking a clear breakdown of what constitutes an attack for instance) is quite directly to allow for non-threatening but disfavored opinions to be silenced.

  3. Seriously? Ain't nobody got time for that. All I can cite is from personal experience, and I've been around cancer for quite a few years. Billionaires? Did Jobs not pay the cancer mafia maybe?

  4. You know who gets cancer? Doctors. Their kids. Pharma execs. Government regulators and their wives and husbands. Billionaires. Mob bosses. Everyone. Nobody is sitting on a cure.

  5. Re:Those where the glory days on The Pirate Bay Turns 15 (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 2

    Right but in practical terms it's still trivially easy to download whatever you want whenever you want it. All they're really doing is forcing what would have been paying customers to fly the black flag instead.

  6. No, in the case of charity money it's actually pretty standard that there be a "subject to availability of funds" clause somewhere.

  7. Re:Big deal. on Stonehenge Builders Used Pythagoras' Theorem 2,000 Years Before He Was Born (techtimes.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you're making a right triangle of any kind it follows Pythagoras by default - it wouldn't be a triangle otherwise. I wish they had given some kind of example of what indication there was of an understanding of the math involved.

  8. Re:Now all we need is... on Sequencing the Weed Genome · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Dandelions. That way either - 1) They find some way of eradicating dandelions effectively, or 2) Hey, free pot dandelions everywhere. Either outcome would be acceptable.

  9. Re:False on Are Fake Geeks Dooming Real Ones? · · Score: 1

    Yup - I remember when Nerd and Geek were serious, nasty insults.

    I was, am, and expect to remain fully nerdy, for real, long after the trend of the moment has passed us by.

  10. Re:I was waiting for a passenger on United Airlines Passengers Stranded By Computer Outage · · Score: 1

    I was stuck in O'Hare for about 4 hours last night waiting on a flight to Vancouver - they finally got around the whole mess at midnight by the startling notion of using a clipboard and a booking list and then carefully checking everyone's ID. Shockingly this worked quite well.

  11. Re:Occam's razor... on Free Radicals May Not Be Cause of Aging · · Score: 1

    Humans live for decades, rats for a few years. The net effect of the protocol is a % increase related to how late you start the diet, so for any humans in their 50s (say) who started the diet in the late 70's or the early to mid 1980s, you would only expect to start seeing any effect at all on the survival curve around now. That's in the best possible case, in which you assume that an experimental and a control cohort were selected and studied since then, which they were not. In fact decent animal studies on the CR effect only started up in the 90s, and I'm unaware of any kind of actual human work done on the effect at all, at any point. I think the worst you can say about it is that it's a total unknown - that's perfectly fair. We're decades away from being able to draw any serious conclusions about human results, positive or negative.

  12. Re:Occam's razor... on Free Radicals May Not Be Cause of Aging · · Score: 1

    That seems like a non sequitur - this is a discussion about evidence. An insufficient amount of data has been gathered to support or disprove this effect in humans. Unless you can cite a study I'm unaware of which specifically demonstrates that this phenomenon is not relevant in human cells, then we're still looking at an unknown. I'm unaware of any data in nonhumans which would lead me to expect that this effect would not pertain.

  13. Re:Occam's razor... on Free Radicals May Not Be Cause of Aging · · Score: 1

    CR Society has only existed since 94, and apart from that I'm unaware of any serious collective effort prior to that to practice the idea. The CR effect as a whole has only been widely broadcast and understood (for very small values of "widely") since the 70s, and proper science done on humans is only in its infancy at this point. Way too early to make any calls yet, is my point.

  14. Re:I had a feeling this was coming... on Future of NASA's Manned Spaceflight Looks Bleak · · Score: 1

    When the shuttle program ends, it will be the end of the US manned space flight program.

    I think this is probably the real summary - the USA basically can't afford space operations beyond satellite launch/maintenance anymore. Nerdy dreams to to the contrary, it's all over.

    The torch will be passed to someone else, probably in a decade or two. Likely the Chinese, but who knows.

  15. Re:Hmmm.. on Ray Bradbury Loves Libraries, Hates the Internet · · Score: 1

    Indeed, people are being way too hard on Ray over this. He's old and has no significant connection with the new tech. He doesn't get it. Fair enough, it is his right to go into the twilight ignoring whatever he wants to ignore. This still doesn't negate all the awesome things he wrote long ago.

  16. Re:Troll Contest on NYT Explores the World of Internet Trolls · · Score: 1

    The NYT article was also about the kind of people who mount elaborate campaigns to torment the families of children who commit suicide. This is about a million miles away from making snarky comments online and light years away from anything Socrates did.

    The only vaguely interesting part of the article was when they started talking to his mother. I would have liked to see them follow that angle up - these are seriously emotionally disturbed individuals with ridiculous rationalizations of their cruelty.

  17. Re:It Makes Me Queasy... on To Stet Or Not To Stet, That Is the Question · · Score: 1

    Re the troll-rating - I don't mean genetically incompetent to render standard english, duh. I mean they have not been provided with (or valued) sufficient education to do so.

  18. Re:CDs are still readable on Best Way To Store Digital Video For 20 Years? · · Score: 1

    In honor of this thread I just pulled out two of my oldest burned CDs.

    MP3 Collection #1, date stamped July-Nov 1997 Imation 3M CD-R 650 4x (Green) Copy/Paste of entire disk to hda Result: 100%, no problems. Listening to Alice's Restaurant.

    MP3 Archive #2, date stamped Oct-Nov 1997 No-name bulk CD, 650 (Gold) Copy/Paste of entire disk to hda Result: 100%, no problems.

    This isn't totally fair as I know there are a couple of later disks with the odd bad file, but still.

  19. Re:Palm Tungsten on Have You Changed Your Opinion On eBook Readers? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Amen, I love using my Tx as an ebook reader. I haven't read a paper book in ages. The portability is great - on the plane, the bus, waiting in the car, wherever, I have a library with me at all times.

  20. Re:Fermi Paradox on Why Life On Mars May Foretell Our Doom · · Score: 1

    The Fermi Paradox is absurdly overrated as a tool for thinking about life in the universe. Since we see no aliens either: 1) there is no other intelligent life in the galaxy, or 2) the specific assumptions of the model underlying the "paradox" are flawed. Since we cannot distinguish between 1 and 2 we are no further ahead and the paradox informs us of nothing.

  21. Re:Fermi Paradox on Why Life On Mars May Foretell Our Doom · · Score: 1

    If we found a planet full of sentient Octopi things who lived at an approximately stone-age level of development, would it really be our first priority to land and start handing out Smart Cars, tubes of antibiotic, and microwave ovens?

  22. Re:Some Thoughts on What is the First Day in a University Lab Like? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    2. There usually is not an official hierarchy, but the unofficial hierarchy generally runs along the lines of PI -> Postdocs -> Graduate Students -> Research Assistants -> Undergraduates -> Others, modified by time of residence and area of expertise.

    Very much modified by time! God help you if you treat the 25-year Research Assistant who runs the lab as "lower" than some Johnny-come-lately postdoc. You will be a marked man.

  23. Re:WUBI? on Ubuntu 8.04 Beta Released · · Score: 1

    I wish I had some mod points right now for this - I'm currently in a similar situation where I'm locked down in to Windows for 80% of everything I do and my laptop is too mission-critical to even think about messing with the partitions. VirtualBox has been a godsend, even though it seems slightly blasphemous to be virtualizing linux under Windows.

  24. Re:Hiding something? on China Blocks YouTube Over Tibet Videos · · Score: 1

    So because America has a few ridiculous restrictions, that justifies the fully barbaric Chinese stance?

  25. Re:Hiding something? on China Blocks YouTube Over Tibet Videos · · Score: 1

    I'll comment as I damn well please. That's what an open society with free speech is about.