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  1. Re:Deaths per TWh on Chernobyl's Sarcophagus, Redux · · Score: 1

    Did in fact read it as a total rather than an average and assumed the China figure was an error. Makes more sense now.

  2. Re:Deaths per TWh on Chernobyl's Sarcophagus, Redux · · Score: 1

    How many births outside of China is coal responsible for to make those numbers?

    Or, they are not net, then when did China cease to be part of the world? I hope there was some kind of memo about this, I haven't seen it.

  3. Re:Getting it done, again. on Chernobyl's Sarcophagus, Redux · · Score: 4, Funny

    You mean that people would glow with approval?

  4. Re:Will they fucking let this go already? on Winning Algorithms For Rock, Paper, Scissors · · Score: 1

    Play Lizard 100% of the time.

  5. Re:Oh goody on SanDisk Announces 4TB SSD, Plans For 8TB Next Year · · Score: 1

    That's interesting, thinking of scenarios where there is no adversary (other than "dumb luck") would a usage pattern like the following degrade the life of the drive:

    Random access to live data: e.g. using the drive as a cache or hosting a database on it that contains live data. (in both cases assuming the size of the cache/database was filling the drive).

    Or, to put it another way: what is the probability that a (uniformly?) random-access pattern on a drive-filling file would trigger the worst-case behaviour?

  6. Re:Oh goody on SanDisk Announces 4TB SSD, Plans For 8TB Next Year · · Score: 1

    How is that the worst case? Block erasure is only necessary to free up space, not to make a write.

  7. Re:i've worked on that bridge on The Ways Programming Is Hard · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Build Phase involves the programmer typing "make all" and going to read Slashdot or fetch a coffee.

    How dare you perpetuate this insulting and offensive view of programming. All real developers know that it involves sword-fighting on wheelie chairs.

  8. Re:Primary school might be too late on Programming Education Making A Comeback In Primary Schools · · Score: 1

    :) That is a lot more detailed than the response I was going to write. Nicely put.

  9. Re:Primary school might be too late on Programming Education Making A Comeback In Primary Schools · · Score: 1

    Efficiency is the ratio of useful output to wasted effort. Are you really in a position to evaluate what kind of society that would produce and how their global output would compare to our current system?

    It may sound expensive in comparison to our current education system, but expense is a different issue to efficiency. What kind of society would result from every individual being raised to their own personal maximum potential. I suspect that the productivity of such a society would be higher than our own, and surprised that you feel capable of calculating the trade-off that implies between allocation of resources into education and increased productivity across the board.

  10. Re:Mostly functional works quite alright on Erik Meijer: The Curse of the Excluded Middle · · Score: 1

    once you allow monads which are needed to make FP Turing complete.

    Artful troll, no?

  11. Re:Louis CK on Joss Whedon Releases New Film On Demand · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but anybody would react like that after watching The Road. I only paid a couple of bucks to rent it on bluray and it still put me off of watching movies for a while. If I want that kind of experience again I could sit and poke my self in one eye with a rusty fork repeatedly for two hours until little bits of brain start to fall out.

    ps Not my favourite movie of all time. Definitely not top 5.

  12. Re:software on Fifty Years Ago IBM 'Bet the Company' On the 360 Series Mainframe · · Score: 1

    I was going to mod you up as I once had to study COBOL for exams, a long time a go. But then I clicked on your hidden replies and my, oh my. I had to reply instead to say that you really have attracted one of the most virulent trolls that I've ever seen on slashdot. You should get some kind of flair next to your username or something.

  13. Re:Huh? on Start-Up Founders On Dealing With Depression · · Score: 1

    If you are tired from working too hard then your body can recharge. Taking a weekend completely away from work can bring you back to normal. If your levels of exhaustion get worse then it can take longer. When a complete two-week break from work cannot undo the damage and bring you back to a normal level it is a sign that your body has adapted to a new level of normal.

    I'm not sure that there is a real difference between burn out and depression. They probably overlap to some extent and share symptoms. I think that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain (hence SSRIs as an effective treatment). Burn out is caused by an inability to produce any more adrenaline; living in a state of constant stress has affected the bodies ability to produce it on demand and caused some kind of adaptation to its effects.

    There are tests for determining stress levels in the run-up to burn-out that measure cortisone levels in the blood. Too high above base level can indicate the presence of too much stress. After burn out the levels collapse to below a normal base-line.

  14. Re:Never understood the modes on Neovim: Rebuilding Vim For the 21st Century · · Score: 1

    Fear not, there is probably a wizard to do that for you.

  15. Re:Never understood the modes on Neovim: Rebuilding Vim For the 21st Century · · Score: 1

    Because most of the commands accept modifiers, e.g. 10dd to remove 10 lines of text, or }d to delete the rest of the paragraph. Because more complex commands are multiple keystrokes what you suggest would involve typing while holding down the ctrl key - it is easier to hit a key once to enter/exit the mode. For selecting text in vim you can do shift-v and then then select a text range with the cursor keys (or any other movement command).

  16. Re:First hand knowledge on Intel Announced 8-Core CPUs And Iris Pro Graphics for Desktop Chips · · Score: 1

    The GP's confusion is probably due to the relationship between throughput and latency. Intel's designs have one cycle of latency for basic arithmetic operations (add, sub, xor etc), but they can despatch multiple operations per cycle. The Core 2 was the last chip that I looked at in detail and from memory it could execute three basic instructions per cycle with a one cycle latency. On benchmarks this looks like 1/3 cycle per 64-bit operation. The previous chip that I looked at from Intel (which was not a Core design so I guess it was a late P4 design) could do two basic instructions with a one cycle latency so it looked like a 1/2 cycle operation. But all of these operations were 64-bit, I've never seen a 64-bit design from Intel that used 32-bit operations internally.

  17. Re:If you don't like it.... on Jewish School Removes Evolution Questions From Exams · · Score: 1

    So, you are saying that if disagrees with the age of consent then he should join a street gang and kill someone?

  18. Re:If you don't like it.... on Jewish School Removes Evolution Questions From Exams · · Score: 2

    Here you go, pal. You'll find free and fair elections as a central principle.

  19. Re:But why wouldn't they? on How Ireland Got Apple's $9 Billion Australian Profit · · Score: 1

    Also, doesn't Apple have a duty to shareholders to cough up as little in taxes as legally possible?

    You should trying asking that to Tim Cook at a shareholders meeting and see what kind of response you get. Last time he was described as "visibly angry".

  20. Re:Bizarre advice on Mathematicians Are Chronically Lost and Confused · · Score: 1

    One that is clear, however, is that most mathematicians have no fscking clue what the word "obvious" means. There are some brilliant, dead authors that I would love to punch in the face.

    .

    I think that they know exactly what it means, but that you are confusing it with the non-technical meaning. In maths it generally means "I have managed to work this out, and I suspect that you will be able to (eventually) without my help. If you cannot, that I presume that you are an idiot and that you do not deserve my help". Contrast the meaning with the technical use of non-obvious: "Oh fuck, we're boned".

    In general you should treat obvious things with care, and only skip past the trivial.

  21. Re:Half right on Scottish Independence Campaign Battles Over BBC Weather Forecast · · Score: 1

    It's not particularly hard to fix: spin the viewpoint around the country. For the southern forecast a view from across the channel (pretty much what it is now). For Scotland spin round to viewing from the north, Wales from the west etc. This then has the benefit that whatever region is being discussed takes up most of the screen and the rest of the UK drops away in perspective.

    Whoever they outsourced to is not just less smart that they think they are. They have gone full-retard.

  22. Re:Falkvinge et all investigaton suggests inside j on MtGox Files For Bankruptcy Protection · · Score: 2

    And so the point of maintaining the blockchain with a record of where each coin goes is....

  23. Re:As Frontalot says on Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Trust Bitcoin? · · Score: 1

    Not exactly. Speed is of the essence.

  24. Re:Reading vs writing on The Neuroscience of Computer Programming · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure if Science is phrenology by another name, but they certainly look similar at your level of detail:

    a) Part of the task under study is definitely linguistic
    and
    b) No effort has been made to separate this linguistic part from the rest of the task
    so
    c) The study has not produced evidence because of a validity threat: namely the confounding factor that the task has been presented in a linguistic form.

    I wouldn't want the terminology to get in the way of the original point: the task has been phrased in textual form, areas of the brain used in text recognition lit up, the researchers concluded that programming was the same as language skills. Their conclusion was bogus because presenting a non-programming task to the participants would have provoked the same response if it was done in written form. Obviously this would be impossible to fix in the study design.... without replicating the results on a non-textual experiment, such as a graphical language.

  25. Re:In other news.. on Delayed Fatherhood May Be Linked To Certain Congenital and Mental Disorders · · Score: 1

    But on the bright side, it is unlikely that your negative views on continuing the human race will be passed onto another generation.