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User: JebusIsLord

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Comments · 1,133

  1. Re:BMI Is not a Good Measure on Being Slightly Overweight May Lead To Longer Life · · Score: 1

    *sigh* BMI is not "broken". It just measures something other than what you are personally interested in. For a populational average, it is an excellent and accurage measure of relative weight. This study examined mortality in slightly overWEIGHT people. These people will however on average also be over-fat (edge cases cancelling eachother out), so the results are applicable.

  2. Re:BMI Is not a Good Measure on Being Slightly Overweight May Lead To Longer Life · · Score: 1

    Exactly. BMI is a perfectly acceptable measure for the purposes of this study. On average, persons with a large BMI are "overweight" (have a high body fat percentage). There are always edge cases (bodybuilders, weaklings) but the result is valid and useful information: Those with a BMI between 25 and 30 live longer.

    Those afformentioned body builders and weaklings may want additional research into specifically body fat percentage and mortality rates. This study was only interested in relative weight.

  3. Re:marijuana legalization issue was Painful to Wat on Open Government Brainstorm Defies Wisdom of Crowds · · Score: 1

    references please. I'd love it if such a study really existed.

  4. Re:marijuana legalization issue was Painful to Wat on Open Government Brainstorm Defies Wisdom of Crowds · · Score: 4, Funny

    You'd have to knock me out with a schedule II substance in order to drag me to a journey concert.

  5. Re:marijuana legalization issue was Painful to Wat on Open Government Brainstorm Defies Wisdom of Crowds · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm not sure why this is flamebait... it is well known that THC reduces your response time. If/when I have driven stoned, i've been real careful, but once I tried to turn into a bus stop which I thought was a driveway.

    I don't think legalizing will make the problem worse, however, and I don't think it is nearly the issue that alcohol is.

  6. Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? on Windows 7 "Not Much Faster" Than Vista · · Score: 1

    technically devices don't reserve memory, they reserve memory addresses. There are 2^32 addresses in a 32-bit system, which equates to 4GB. Video RAM will take up address space too, so if you have 4GB of RAM in your system some of it will not be addressable. It isn't in USE per se, its just off the map.

    That's why moving to 64-bit Windows shows all 4GB.

  7. Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? on Windows 7 "Not Much Faster" Than Vista · · Score: 1

    Vista runs fine on a 4 year old machine WITH 4GB of RAM. Its a cheap upgrade.

    Shame on MS though for not being honest with the system requirements... if they just sold the 64-bit version by default and said "4GB or more memory recommended" on the box, people would have been a lot happier.

  8. Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? on Windows 7 "Not Much Faster" Than Vista · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've been evaluating the Win7 RC here at work for a week now, and I can tell yo that I am pretty excited for this release.

    Vista suffered from being a major architecture overhaul with few bullet-point features. Windows 7 adds those features, many of which take advantage of the underlying changes from Vista.

    XP mode looks to me like it will help us transition our existing (2000+) deployment packages to Win7 slowly, rather than requiring a complete re-certification process. (I'm not 100 on this yet, but so far so good).

    Vista improved OS deployment via the WIM format significantly, and Windows 7 adds all sorts of usability tweaks that I think are highly inspired by the iPhone and gestures. It also adds codecs, while stripping out useless cruft like Windows Mail and DVD creator.

    Discussing the speed of it in relation to XP is sort of disingenuous... it runs great on modern hardware, and does a lot of things XP will never do.

  9. Re:What the hell?! on Apple Rejects Nine Inch Nails iPhone App · · Score: 1

    Great album, but if you're going to quote lyrics, go for the really shocking ones:

    I am a big man
    (yes I am)
    and I have a big gun
    got me a big old Dick and I
    I like to have fun
    held against your forehead
    I'll make you suck it
    maybe I'll put a hole in your head
    you know, just for the fuck of it
    I can reduce you if I want
    I can devour
    I'm hard as fucking steel, and Iâ(TM)ve got the power
    I'm every inch a man, and I'll show you somehow
    me and my fucking gun
    nothing can stop me now
    shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot
    I'm going to come all over you
    me and my fucking gun
    me and my fucking gun

    Regarding the topic at hand, Apple says they will be taking resubmissions soon, once the app store implements content ratings.

  10. Re:One Resource on Classic Books of Science? · · Score: 1

    They didn't need myths, of course - the church was very busy at the time telling us the earth was the center of the universe, and having anyone who disagreed burned as heretics.

    I think the flat-earth thing is a modern meme that spreads simply because it is more entertaining than the truth. "they were sooo stupid back then!"

  11. Re:Hahaha, good one. on Senator Arlen Specter Becomes a Democrat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "socialism" doesn't mean what the bulk of americans (ie "you") think it means. Most of Europe, Canada and South America are "socialist". We say "socialism" and you hear "communist dictatorship" which is something completely, completely different.

    Sort of like how "liberal" is slanderous to you guys... so weird.

    Stop thinking in black & white, flush the cold-war era propaganda from your mind, and you'll find there are some excellent lessons to be learned from a system not driven wholy by greed.

  12. Re:Yet another new version on Microsoft Suffers Leaks, Lagging Sales Numbers As They Look Forward To Windows 8 · · Score: 1

    A computer guy who doesn't like change, huh? We have a name for you people around the office... Unemployed.

  13. Re:How about earth? on Using Light's Handedness To Find Alien Life · · Score: 1

    The answer is that two mirror image mollecules won't necessarily fit into the same chemical receptor (think Tetris), and therefore have different biochemical effects.

    Codene is actually the stereoisomer of heroin, but it doesn't fit most of our receptors so appears mostly inert.

  14. Re:Don't panic on The Universe As Hologram · · Score: 2, Insightful

    explain please how an entity can design itself. Just because what you typed reads like valid english, doesn't make it a profound truth. In your case, you're just blabbering nonsense.

  15. Re:That's what abortions are for ... on My Genome, My Self? · · Score: 1

    A huge problem though is in deeming what is "defective". The fact that a gene exists in any significant part of the population beyond what you'd expect given random mutation, implies that it must have (or had) a reproductive benefit. For example, some jewish people have a gene that makes them slightly more succeptable to Tay-Sachs disease, which is an almost certainly deadly recessive trait. However, being a carrier for it grants immunity to Cholera, which would have been advantageous for a population that has been living in disease-ridden ghettos for millennia. Another deadly recessive trait is sickle-cell anemia. Being heterozygous for this trait still has non- life-threatening symptoms, but also the benefit of malaria immunity. Not surprisingly, sickle-cell anemia is prevalent in tropical african populations.

    My point is, by weeding these genes out we create a monoculture of humans that will be less able to adapt evolutionarily to new diseases and environmental stress. Genetic diversity is a natural safety mechanism for species, as any agriculture expert will tell you.

  16. Re:Berne convention? on Psystar Claims Apple Forgot To Copyright Mac OS · · Score: 1

    I mean tightly control their licensees, so the market isn't flooded with crummy apple clones. Not talking about the technology, here!

  17. Re:Berne convention? on Psystar Claims Apple Forgot To Copyright Mac OS · · Score: 4, Informative

    Back then a computer was $4000, which included significant margin. Nowadays, computers (yes, even Macs) are much cheaper, and the margins are lower. Apple sells a new copy of OSX every year to most of its customers, with or without a new computer. This could make them money, if tightly controlled.

  18. Re:Berne convention? on Psystar Claims Apple Forgot To Copyright Mac OS · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'll be really surprised if Apple doesn't agree to simply make a deal with Psystar to manufacture clones for a licensing fee. It isn't that radical - Apple licensed Mac clones back in the late 80s - early 90s (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#The_first_Macintosh_clones ). My uneducated guess is that Psystar has been negotiating for a licensing agreement for a long time, and then calculated that an outright court battle would land them a better deal than paying the fees initially suggested by Apple.

    That or they're a fly-by-night outfit.

  19. Re:Great, needed this as of last week.. on VirtualBox 2.1 Supports 64-Bit VM In 32-Bit Host · · Score: 1

    Worked under 6.0.5 as well, as long as you have the VT extensions enabled in the BIOS.

  20. Re:What about other chipmakers? on Khronos Releases OpenCL Spec · · Score: 1

    What does this have to do with the Mesa and X.org teams? They're graphics guys, and this isn't for graphics. I'd like to see inclusion in GCC (auto-vectorization maybe?) though.

  21. Re:Offtopic on Nmap Network Scanning · · Score: 1

    You probably missed the part where NMap is open source.

  22. Re:No surprise on Age of Conan Servers To Merge, Funcom Sees Layoffs · · Score: 1

    Can I humbly recommend LOTRO? Its very WOW-like, but prettier and somewhat slicker. My coworkers and I have all switched over, and are quite happy with a new world to explore.

  23. Re:Great on the isle? on Age of Conan Servers To Merge, Funcom Sees Layoffs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The LOTRO UI pretty much just works. I haven't felt a burning need to customize any of it. This is a Good Thing, because casual gamers are not going to customize - if the default UI sucks, then the game appears to suck.

  24. Re:Stigma on Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Expected Tomorrow · · Score: 1

    Not being able to find the network panel is a "show stopping bug"? I agree its in a weird place, but come on...

  25. Re:It's a deformed child, not a moral trophy on Down's Symptoms May Be Treatable In the Womb · · Score: 1

    Call me an idealist (though most would call me the opposite) but... wouldn't it be better if we could use our capacity as a "rational species" to handle our own population issues? I'm hoping we can. If not, we'll hit the point where deaths = births fairly quickly anyhow. No need for your plague - this'll be equally unpleasant.