SI is a planetary standard. the only (ONLY) arbitrary measure in it is the actual length of the metre, because at some point someone had to choose something.
Actually the second is quite arbitrary, too (why 1/86400 of a day? Why not 1/10000? Or 1/60^3? Or...) Indeed, I'd say the second is more arbitrary than the meter, because the meter was defined as 1/10000 of a certain meridian between pole and equator, which is a much more "round" number than 86400 with the latter not even being a power of an integer (well, except that it's 86400^1, of course).
Well, nobody hinders you from using SI prefixes on seconds. It's highly unusual, but in principle you can say "see you in 3.6 kiloseconds" instead of "see you in an hour" (although you'd likely choose a more "round" time, like 3 ks or 4 ks). A day is 86.4 ks, a week about 0.6 Ms, a century a bit more than pi Gs. The age of the universe is about 434 petaseconds.
Or in reverse, 1 ks is 16 min 40 s, 1 Ms is about 11.5 days, 1 Gs is about 31.7 years.
Well, I guess the only people stomping with their feet are those who hold the trademark for the name OpenOffice... or did they just give that trademark up after it became the de facto name for OpenOffice.org?
The marketing department has found tin foil hat jokes to cause mostly negative emotions. However we are currently developing a new gold foil hat joke product line.
Hey, can somebody post the story of Slashdot's origin, please?
Once upon a time, there was a lonely slash. And far, far away there was a lonely dot. They both were lonely wandering around the internet, seeking for someone with whom they would be for the rest of their life. One day they met, and immediately knew that they were made for each other. So they went together and formed Slashdot.
but the researchers know. check medline. almost every research article on diabetes begins with words to the effect of "fed the rats sugar until they developed diabetes". feeding rats sugar is THE consistently reproducible method of inducing diabetes.
I don't think anybody denies that eating too much sugar can cause diabetes (well, OK, there may be some retards who do, but if a scientist denied it, I wouldn't consider him serious). There is also little denying that western people generally eat too much sugar. However, that's a whole different thing to saying "sugar is toxic". Sugar is not toxic. You need a certain amount of sugar (preferably by eating fruits, which makes sure that you won't get too much of it, and in addition gives you all the other substances in the fruit).
Heck, you can poison yourself by drinking too much water. Is water toxic?
A toxic substance is a substance which you should avoid consuming at all. Which for sugar would mean, avoid eating fruits. You don't really think that's a good idea, right?
So in other words, if someone publishes something, I can get a patent on it if I just file it less than one year after publication (assuming he didn't already)?
Well, if the RIAA can pull numbers out of their ass, they why not security consultants as well? After all, 95%* of all statistics are pulled out of someone's ass anyway.
*) I got the percentage by <strike>taking the first numer I thought of</strike> careful analysis of all the data I had about this <strike>(where "all I had" basically means "none")<strike>.
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 4, Funny
But 100% of all people who died have been drinking dihydrogen monoxide during most of their life (not always in pure form, though). Some died from withdrawal symptoms, though.
Of course, sugar is a chemical compound of carbon and DHMO (sugar is C6H12O6, that is 6 C + 6 H2O), therefore it's only natural to assume that the toxicity of DHMO is also found in sugar.
Also if you eat sugar, your body creates carbon dioxide from the carbon in it. Therefore eating sugar is bad for the climate (for the same reason, you shouldn't do sports; the climate effect happens only if you actually burn the sugar, not if you produce fat from it).
We need to figure out a way to provide people everywhere with highly potent weapons that are locked via GPS to only function within their own borders.
Hm. I was kind of joking, but if we could pull that off...
And if the U.S. want to invade a country, they just manipulate the GPS in that region, and all weapons cease to function...
Of course, those weapons would have the same problem as any other form of DRM (and yes, that GPS lock would be a form of DRM): You cannot effectively protect something which the person you want to protect it from has full access to.
You forget: In the case of UFOs, extraterrestrials are involved. It's no problem for an alien to beam away a flash drive which some government agent forgot.:-)
When you paint it all black it is positively LOADED with information.
No. It is loaded with color, but it isn't loaded with information. But then, even with physical blacking, doing it wrong might keep the information recoverable. Of course with physical documents they probably wouldn't publish the original, but a copy. And that copy would only contain what you can see. So maybe what they should introduce is a "photocopy" software for PDFs which removes any information which cannot be seen with the naked eye.
initscripts. If you're not writing them, you aren't a software developer.
And I always thought it's the sysadmins who write the init scripts...
I guess anyone who writes software on Windows or OS X, or writes application software which is started by the user, not by the system at startup, as well as anyone doing embedded development on specialized devices which don't run a traditional operating system at all, isn't a software developer, then:-)
You phrase the question differently than I would. I would ask why is perl not the default shell language.
Because a language which compiles the full file before execution simply isn't usable for an interactive shell. When doing interaction you can't wait whether a function called now but not yet defined will be defined later. You need to execute a command as soon as it is issued, or give an error if you can't. And it has to be possible to change the definition of a function later.
Also, the primary use of the shell is to start other programs from it. Therefore something which needs an extra command to do that simply isn't acceptable as shell. A shell has to take any command it doesn't know as call of a program.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the second is quite arbitrary, too (why 1/86400 of a day? Why not 1/10000? Or 1/60^3? Or ...) Indeed, I'd say the second is more arbitrary than the meter, because the meter was defined as 1/10000 of a certain meridian between pole and equator, which is a much more "round" number than 86400 with the latter not even being a power of an integer (well, except that it's 86400^1, of course).
Actually the Roswell accident proves it: The space ship wouldn't have crashed if they did not have their own version of metric/imperial mismatch. :-)
Well, nobody hinders you from using SI prefixes on seconds. It's highly unusual, but in principle you can say "see you in 3.6 kiloseconds" instead of "see you in an hour" (although you'd likely choose a more "round" time, like 3 ks or 4 ks). A day is 86.4 ks, a week about 0.6 Ms, a century a bit more than pi Gs. The age of the universe is about 434 petaseconds.
Or in reverse, 1 ks is 16 min 40 s, 1 Ms is about 11.5 days, 1 Gs is about 31.7 years.
Well, I guess the only people stomping with their feet are those who hold the trademark for the name OpenOffice ... or did they just give that trademark up after it became the de facto name for OpenOffice.org?
The marketing department has found tin foil hat jokes to cause mostly negative emotions. However we are currently developing a new gold foil hat joke product line.
For the normal consumer it's not called "DRM", it's called "My new Blu Ray player doesn't show Full HD on my five year old HDTV."
Hey, can somebody post the story of Slashdot's origin, please?
Once upon a time, there was a lonely slash. And far, far away there was a lonely dot. They both were lonely wandering around the internet, seeking for someone with whom they would be for the rest of their life. One day they met, and immediately knew that they were made for each other. So they went together and formed Slashdot.
Summary says there are 4 HDD companies left.
Who are the 4?
I can think of Seagate, WD, Toshiba.....
The summary says there were four companies left after WD bought Hitachi. So the fourth one was Samsung.
It's quite easy to find a bug that already has a bug report: You just read the bug report database.
So among the things I shouldn't eat are:
I guess I should go to a meat-only diet. :-)
I don't think anybody denies that eating too much sugar can cause diabetes (well, OK, there may be some retards who do, but if a scientist denied it, I wouldn't consider him serious). There is also little denying that western people generally eat too much sugar. However, that's a whole different thing to saying "sugar is toxic". Sugar is not toxic. You need a certain amount of sugar (preferably by eating fruits, which makes sure that you won't get too much of it, and in addition gives you all the other substances in the fruit).
Heck, you can poison yourself by drinking too much water. Is water toxic?
A toxic substance is a substance which you should avoid consuming at all. Which for sugar would mean, avoid eating fruits. You don't really think that's a good idea, right?
So in other words, if someone publishes something, I can get a patent on it if I just file it less than one year after publication (assuming he didn't already)?
They claimed Tokyo Disney Resort removed the cables? :-)
Well, if the RIAA can pull numbers out of their ass, they why not security consultants as well? After all, 95%* of all statistics are pulled out of someone's ass anyway.
*) I got the percentage by <strike>taking the first numer I thought of</strike> careful analysis of all the data I had about this <strike>(where "all I had" basically means "none")<strike>.
But 100% of all people who died have been drinking dihydrogen monoxide during most of their life (not always in pure form, though). Some died from withdrawal symptoms, though.
Of course, sugar is a chemical compound of carbon and DHMO (sugar is C6H12O6, that is 6 C + 6 H2O), therefore it's only natural to assume that the toxicity of DHMO is also found in sugar.
Also if you eat sugar, your body creates carbon dioxide from the carbon in it. Therefore eating sugar is bad for the climate (for the same reason, you shouldn't do sports; the climate effect happens only if you actually burn the sugar, not if you produce fat from it).
SCNR :-)
"Garden of Eden Creation Kit" has such a nice ring to it.
As long as there are no apples involved. :-)
We need to figure out a way to provide people everywhere with highly potent weapons that are locked via GPS to only function within their own borders.
Hm. I was kind of joking, but if we could pull that off...
And if the U.S. want to invade a country, they just manipulate the GPS in that region, and all weapons cease to function ...
Of course, those weapons would have the same problem as any other form of DRM (and yes, that GPS lock would be a form of DRM): You cannot effectively protect something which the person you want to protect it from has full access to.
You forget: In the case of UFOs, extraterrestrials are involved. It's no problem for an alien to beam away a flash drive which some government agent forgot. :-)
There's a bit of difference between a slashdot comment and a state secret.
No. It is loaded with color, but it isn't loaded with information.
But then, even with physical blacking, doing it wrong might keep the information recoverable. Of course with physical documents they probably wouldn't publish the original, but a copy. And that copy would only contain what you can see. So maybe what they should introduce is a "photocopy" software for PDFs which removes any information which cannot be seen with the naked eye.
Well, then add 1a: Never ever distribute content in the form of a MS Word document (or in another format meant for editing instead of distribution).
You can listen to non-mainstream music on mainstream media.
Well, obviously they fled through time to 2020. :-)
And I always thought it's the sysadmins who write the init scripts ...
I guess anyone who writes software on Windows or OS X, or writes application software which is started by the user, not by the system at startup, as well as anyone doing embedded development on specialized devices which don't run a traditional operating system at all, isn't a software developer, then :-)
Because a language which compiles the full file before execution simply isn't usable for an interactive shell. When doing interaction you can't wait whether a function called now but not yet defined will be defined later. You need to execute a command as soon as it is issued, or give an error if you can't. And it has to be possible to change the definition of a function later.
Also, the primary use of the shell is to start other programs from it. Therefore something which needs an extra command to do that simply isn't acceptable as shell. A shell has to take any command it doesn't know as call of a program.