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User: tpengster

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Comments · 89

  1. Re:This ruling is interesting on Network Associates Loses Battle to Silence Reviewers · · Score: 1

    The end result could be reeling back in the EULA, and maybe getting some spyware people thrown in jail (including MS).

    Getting MS people thrown in jail?? I don't know what you're smoking, but i'd like some of it. We couldn't even get a decent remedy against them for their clear violation of antitrust laws. Somehow I don't see the Feds hauling Bill Gates off to the pen for EULAs

  2. Re:Wild ramblings... on The Speed Of Gravity Revealed · · Score: 1

    If an object the size of the sun suddenly acquired the 99x its mass, would it not either collapse upon itself, or expand rapidly, nova, and the core would collapse upon itself, causing the same result, a singularity, with a small event horizon.

    A collapse would occur if the force of gravity overcame the electromagnetic force. This would, as you say, require an increase in mass.

    However, the sun would only appear 99 times as massive to an observer outside the sun. The particles in the sun, would have no velocity relative to each other. Thus there would be no mass change from the viewpoint of observers within the sun, and no collapse.

  3. Re:Piratical on European Copyrights Expire; RIAA Nervous · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Um... since these copies are being made after the copyright has expired, how are these "piratical products"? Where has piracy been committed?

    But then, why bother being objective when we can just call our opponents pirates in 7 different parts of speech? (Even though "piratical" is a noun according to your fine dictionary)

    Letting the RIAA control the language, (or in this case, the grammar) of the debate is the reason they are winning in the first place

  4. Piratical on European Copyrights Expire; RIAA Nervous · · Score: 5, Funny

    "The import of those products would be an act of piracy," said Neil Turkewitz, the executive vice president international for the Recording Industry Association of America, which has strongly advocated for copyright protections. "The industry is regretful that these absolutely piratical products are being released."

    I'm quite regretful that such stupidical comments can make the NYT

  5. Episodic Memory on What's Your Earliest Memory? · · Score: 1

    Remembering past experiences is called episodic memory. There are a few things that enable it: 1) Sense of subjective time. Remembering what happened yesterday involves travelling backwards in time mentally. There is no evidence that other animals do this; probably because it is not necessary biologically. 2) Autonoetic awareness. This term refers to a special type of consciousness that allows us to separate real events from imagined. This is why we don't confuse events happening now from memories; or experiences from dreams; or sensory input from imagination. 3) Sense of self. This is the notion that time travel requires a time traveller. This information was taken from: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0961/2002_Annual /83789638/print.jhtml Some good evidence that episodic memory is "special" is the case of amnesiacs. After recieving brain damage, e.g. to the medial temporal lobes, one might lose all knowledge of personal experiences, and yet retain basic language and mathematics skills. I believe that this is consistent with damage to the hippocampus. These people can also learn some factual information although they have trouble picking up many mundane facts due to their inability to remember experiences. You may remember a movie not too long ago named Momento whose main character had this problem.

  6. Re:Essentially another first-poster, a 100 years a on Kiwi Flight Before the Wright Brothers? · · Score: 1
    Inventions and discoveries often happen contemporaneously. One of them gets the credit, and the others peddle paranoid theories.

    Newton sent forged letters to the Royal Astronomical Society "proving" that he invented calculus before Liebnitz. Society seems to have forgiven him however.

  7. Re:WARNIGN!! on Psst! Eight Bits Gets You "The Two Towers" In China · · Score: 1
    A slashdot reader would not worry about the sun and any allergic reactions in that rare situation wouldn't be noticable among the other skin problems.
    You know you're on the wrong forum when this comment gets modded insightful
  8. Re:Porn University? on An Interesting Look at the Video Game Industry · · Score: 0, Redundant
    With the porn industry with estimated $11 billion in annual sales (besting the video game industry by $1.6 billion), where's the Porn University?

    Indiana.

  9. Intellimouse explorer on Mozilla 1.2 Unleashed · · Score: 1

    I have an intellimouse explorer and I can't use my forward and back mouse buttons in mozilla. This has been listed on bugzilla for over 2 years. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would give mozilla a try if basic things like this worked out of the box.

  10. Re:Deep Fritz on Slashback: Dilemma, Privacy, Chess · · Score: 1

    Processing power has very little effect here due to the combinatorial complexity of search. In chess a one thousand-fold increase in computing power would only allow us to search 2 levels deeper.

  11. Sustainability link on Will Earth Expire By 2050? · · Score: 1

    People interested in this subject might want to look at John McCarthy's Sustainability pages: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/

  12. Structure on "Random Walkers" may speed P2P networks · · Score: 1

    This paper only applies to unstructured networks like gnutella... for optimization purposes wouldn't it be much smarter to simply to create a hieararchy of nodes and cache information from lower nodes in the higher ones? This would greatly reduce message overhead since a search request to one super-node would effectively search all the subnodes.

  13. Re:Millennium Bridge - Kansas City skywalk on Debug your Code, or Else! · · Score: 1

    The skywalk collapse wasnt so much due to the dancing as it was to the change in design made by the engineers on the site. It was too hard to use cables long enough to reach the top and bottom platforms, so they just had cables to the top platform and cables from the top to the bottom. As a result the cables were only able to support half the tension that the original designers intended.

  14. Re:How is it... on Instant Messenger or Instant Advertiser? · · Score: 1

    what is 1000000000000000000000000000000*100000000000000000 0000000000000 SmarterChild: 1,000,000,000,000,000,127,793,096,885,319,003,999, 249,391,192,200,302,120,927,232 Children these days...