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User: pjt33

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Comments · 3,770

  1. Re:camoflage, not awareness. on What Clown On a Unicycle? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    i've been hit by a car before because even though my bike had lights and I was wearing reflective clothing, the driver was only looking for the large twin headlights of a car.

  2. Re:Overrated on Programming With Proportional Fonts? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nonsense. Differing widths of tab-stops only cause problems when people mix tabs and spaces.

  3. Re:Indeed on The FBI's Newest Tool — Google Images · · Score: 2, Informative

    Pure democracy doesn't work for anything larger than Ancient Athens.

    And Athens didn't have universal suffrage. It's easier to have time to be involved in politics when you have slaves doing the hard work.

  4. Re:Terrorrism on Airport Access IDs Hacked In Germany · · Score: 1

    So what you're saying is that in the right situation it's very easy to get a large number of people with guns past security?

  5. Re:guess what! on Airport Access IDs Hacked In Germany · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They x-ray your bags before you can get on a long-distance train in Spain. They don't yet make you walk through a metal detector, though.

    The only people it hits hard are the rich, or folk who have to travel for work. The general public can sneer at them complaining because they deserve it for being able to fly that often.

    Having to travel for work is often far from a privilege, although I suppose that people who haven't done it may think it's glamorous.

  6. Re:LPD screen or LPD screen? on Forget LCDs and LEDs, Here Come LPDs · · Score: 1

    Gentleman vs female is not a dichotomy.

  7. Re:LPD screen or LPD screen? on Forget LCDs and LEDs, Here Come LPDs · · Score: 4, Funny

    A gentleman? I think you missed a minor detail there...

  8. Re:5. Developer Cooperative on An Android Developer's Top 10 Gripes · · Score: 1

    No support for palettes? Or do you really need 32-bit colour?

  9. Re:Toughts About Direction on Mozilla To Ditch Firefox Extensions? · · Score: 1

    The short version of the other side is that the Awesomebar has (or, at least, had when it came out - it may have improved) worse usability than the address bar in FF2.

  10. Re:Makes you wonder on Blu-ray Capacity Increase Via Firmware · · Score: 1

    I have heard that all three PS lines came with locked memory which was gradually unlocked to allow games more access. No references, I'm afraid.

  11. Re:Sorry, you lost me on Framerates Matter · · Score: 1

    I understood the summary as meaning "As more and more games have framerates better than 60fps I'm noticing lots of people saying that it's not really necessary to do better" (and presumably that the extra processing power should be spent on AI or what-have-you).

  12. Re:Any animator knows... on Framerates Matter · · Score: 1

    If by 'supposedly' you mean 'definitely' and if by 'most movie theaters' you mean 'all theaters and even all motion picture production processes in recent years', then yes.

    If by "all" you mean "all US". In Europe it's 25Hz.

  13. Re:Why not? on Ubuntu "Memberships" Questioned · · Score: 1

    Or you could parse that as "You'll end up with another Debian, with nothing to distinguish it from the many other Debian-based distros". I don't read Nimey's post as implying anything about Debian.

  14. Re:take Discreet on Which Math For Programmers? · · Score: 1

    Apart from Karp, who proved it NP-complete in 1972.

  15. Re:The Second, If Not Both on Which Math For Programmers? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Gradients, divergences, curls, triple integrals and partial differential equations are a lot of fun, but they just don't come up that often unless you're a physicist or a games developer.

    Speaking as a games developer, I consider graph theory fundamental too. Basic to intermediate vector calculus is required for physics, and graph theory is required for things like AI pathfinding. The graph theory course has the advantage that it will probably include some stuff on algorithms, algorithmic complexity, etc.

  16. Re:Good. on Y2.01K · · Score: 1

    Power requirements fluctuate. You get spikes caused by things like lots of people cooking breakfast at the same time (a 2kW electric kettle by itself draws more power than most of the other stuff in the house put together; if your country has a lot of electric showers then lots of people turning the shower on at the same time would be even worse); lots of people making drinks (those kettles again) during the ad breaks in popular TV shows; etc. Power generation needs to be ramped up in anticipation of these demands because storing electric energy is inefficient and generators don't just come online and immediately start operating at capacity on the flick of a switch.

  17. Re:Perfectly secure airport on Fixing Security Issue Isn't Always the Right Answer · · Score: 1

    Serves you right for using a stuffed baby elephant as an earring last Hallowe'en.

  18. Re:How about a couple of.... on Fixing Security Issue Isn't Always the Right Answer · · Score: 1

    And if they do come out the screen's broken.

  19. Re:FireFox is great, but... on Testing a Pre-Release, Parallel Firefox · · Score: 1

    I find that once it dies it dies. I can wait two days, but if I want to view a Flash app in Firefox I'm going to have to restart it.

  20. Re:FireFox is great, but... on Testing a Pre-Release, Parallel Firefox · · Score: 1

    I have similar problems (Firefox, Ubuntu), except that it doesn't crash the browser: just the plugin. It seems to have fewer problems in Konqueror, so I tend to use that for Youtube.

  21. Re:FireFox is great, but... on Testing a Pre-Release, Parallel Firefox · · Score: 1

    Win 3.1 couldn't. 16-bit. Maybe MS thought that by 2009 people had had enough time to port their old 16-bit programs?

  22. Re:Floating Mountains on Avatar Soars Into $1-Billion Territory · · Score: 1

    What is this "background material" that people keep referencing

    A handful of books and a documentary by Grace.

    and why wasn't it in the movie?

    Isn't 2:48 long enough already?

  23. Re:Floating Mountains on Avatar Soars Into $1-Billion Territory · · Score: 2, Informative

    They use strip mining and transport the ore in large trunks. If they want to mine the floating mountains they'll have to airlift their mining machines into place, transport the ore with their fliers, and worry about unbalancing the mountain and making it roll over.

  24. Re:Floating Mountains on Avatar Soars Into $1-Billion Territory · · Score: 4, Informative

    Did you see the floating unobtanium chunk that Parker (the manager) had on his desk? Same principle scaled up. The background material explains it by saying that unobtanium is a room-temperature superconductor and the mountains float due to the Meissner effect.

  25. Re:Extremely predictable plot... on Avatar Soars Into $1-Billion Territory · · Score: 1, Insightful

    More like champagne. Large quantities of valium don't cause people to babble incoherently about how wonderful it is.