It's all fine to say, "his time came" in retrospect, but beyond metaphor, the phrase has no actual use since there's no way of determining when the time is, or, indeed, whether the time was predetermined at all.
Just to repeat what others have said, a TV has a refresh rate of 60Hz but doesn't flicker - the flickering is caused in multi-sync monitors because the phosphors decay too quickly at the lower refresh rates. Slow phosphors eradicate flickering at slow refresh rates - my monitor isn't too bad at 60Hz, since its maximum rate is only 80.
The problem with (most) LCDs is that the image only changes at the point of moving to the next frame. This means that persistence of vision causes two frames to be visible, unless new technology, Black Frame Insertion, is used.
I'd've thought that producing magnetic interference would be the bigger worry. Certainly not allowed on planes or in hospitals, if they want to keep an air of consistency about them.
Or that their system was compromised by a thin, crispy biscuit.
Re:This is also the Pirate Party's stance
on
Patents Don't Pay
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· Score: 0, Redundant
I was worried for a while the Slashdot consisted entirely of Libertarians. Thankfully, this appears not to be the case, and someone appears to realise that the free market simply is not the universal fix-all, especially in the realm of pharmaceutical development. One of my sibling posts says the government is only good at screwing things up - he apparently didn't read the parent. The government should be giving out grants to companies who will do then research the most important drugs. There need be no Federal Drug Development Institution or suchlike.
Re:This is also the Pirate Party's stance
on
Patents Don't Pay
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Better than the current system where developing drugs for one of the 20 worst ailments probably isn't economically viable, so the drug is never produced. The pharmaceutical company instead goes for the easy cash by researching the next diet pill, and the result is obvious.
"My pharmacological background is limited, but I imagine that side effects with naturally created drugs are minimized compared to those synthesized in a lab."
I'm afraid you imagine wrong, at least in a theoretical sense. Side effects (and primary effects) are determined solely by the interaction of the chemical(s) with the human body, and there's no overarching difference between synthetic and naturally occurring chemicals - when you get down to it, it's all just a bunch of quarks and electrons. It tends to be possible to create more complex compounds naturally, however. So when we manufacture penicillin, we get some mould to secrete the basic ingredient, then substitute on different chemical groups to obtain different effects in the body - to produce a stronger, faster acting compound, with fewer or lesser side effects - hopefully.
When it comes down to it though, lead compounds for drugs aren't really designed, they're discovered. Most of those compounds - like those that spawned aspirin, paracetamol, penicillin and the like - are naturally occurring. I suppose a few must have been discovered in synthetic compounds, but not many. The reason being that natural compounds, due to the way they are produced, can be much more complex. Drugs can have many chiral centres, and in classic syntheses, you'd obtain a mixture of all the different possible isomers - usually only one works. When an enzyme produces the feedstock, the compound is more likely to be a pure, or purer mixture, since the shape of the enzyme tends only to catalyse the production of one isomer. This restricts synthetic medicines to much simpler molecules until our synthetic procedures improve (which they are doing - designer molecules are becoming possible.) Even then, however, we have some way before we look at the shape of receptor sites and try and devise molecules to fit them. We are still at the stage where we notice a compound has a physiological effect, and then start looking closer.
> There are better things to fill your mind with than these trivialities.
This, I feel, is worth emphasising. It's a common joke that memories operate on a "one-in, one-out" policy and, although that might not be true, it would seem that it's easy to remember something if there's less overall to remember. I spend far too many hours on wikipedia, soaking up entirely useless, but very interesting, bits of (hopefully) information, and I'd much rather save my brain's bytes for that than on remember phone numbers and birthdays. As it happens, I also have a pretty good memory, can remember my own phone numbers and so on (although I don't remember birthdays - either manually or electronically) but when it gets further afield than that, it's much more preferable to write something down or enter it in a phone calendar than to push out what I was reading yesterday evening about the geological composition of Surtsey.
Etc. what? You're the beacon of freedom? I find that hard to believe - we're pretty much all as useless as each other, and if we're not yet, we will be in a few years' time.
If you have a sophisticated enough setup (such as, perhaps, someone with a financial interest may have - a remanufacturer, for example) then surely you would still just be able to monitor the signals sent to the chip to tell it its been refilled a few times, and analyse that. Once you've worked out the communication between the chip and the refiller, cheap knock-offs can be sold.
And how exactly is "Jimmy's Ink" going to work with a "Genuine HP Inkjet" when it doesn't have this new chip in it, and thus looks to the printer like "Jimmy's Ink" and not "Genuine HP Ink?" Do you really think that a cryptographic chip is going to be able to look at the label on the cartridge or box? Of course not, it's going to identify the ink to the printer as being "compatible."
Some other folks suggested you were being sarcastic. I hope so, but doubt it.
I find it difficult to see how "addiction" to things like gambling and gaming can really seen as a disorder. On the contrary, it seems that it is entirely natural, if unfortunate, for human beings to be "addicted" to things like gambling and so on. Some more than others admittedly, but it seems logical that humans do pleasurable things often. It is also widely known that animals in general are more likely to make the short-sighted decision, so if gambling is pleasurable but breaks the bank, we may well gamble our savings away.
This seems to bring into question how we might define disease or disorder more accurately. It would appear counter-intuitive to label things as disorders if they are very very common, albeit damaging.
Other people had dealt with the actual point of the post, though, and even I, not normally much of a grammar Nazi, find that the word irregardless grates against my ears or eyes. It's a prime example of sloppy thinking, since anyone who was paying attention to what they were saying or writing would realise that it logically meant the opposite of what it should. Alas, meaning is, of course, use, so "irregardless" means "regardless," but we shouldn't try to destroy what little logic our poor language has left.
On an unrelated note, does using the phrase "grammar Nazi" fulfill Godwin's law?
I don't think so, since irredundantless would actually mean redundant. For the full analogy to work, the word would have to logically mean the opposite of what it was intended to (since irregardless would logically mean regardful) Or perhaps I'm reading too much into it.
While some of the meritocracy associated with text-only gaming disappears when you fire up TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or whatever, in my experience plenty remains. I've played TrueCombat:Elite for a good while now, and I would never want to go back to text-only. Gaming has now become for me a social experience - it's no longer just about relaxing for half an hour fragging some terrorists, it's now about fragging and actually talking to people who can quite honestly call friends. Yet these friends are respected because of who they are (and, to an extent, how well they play) not according to any social stereotype.
Age enters into it somewhat, admittedly. But we happily play alongside a 16 year old friend of ours (although the clans have an 18-years rule) and he is respected because he is friendly. At the same time, I've made friends with a mass of people who I would otherwise never have been able to - not in the way that I have. I now know a Scot from Dundee who's married with two children, I know tens of Germans, several of whom are twice my age or more. In real life, I, as an 18-year-old, would perhaps know and talk with a married 36 year old, I might even be friends with him. But I would never, I would say, have the kind of frank, uninhibited conversation that we all do - it's more like a bunch of blokes at a bar, and if you go to a bar you don't go with people twice your age, usually.
Without voice chat, I would perhaps "know" some of these people - I remember before I used to log on to TeamSpeak I would recognise a few of the regulars on the servers. But one can never hold a conversation of the same type purely through the in-game text chat feature. The conversations we have online range widely in topic - we see little glimpses of each other's home lives, mundane things like the Scot having to leave temporarily because one of his daughters is holding a tin of paint (a new variation on the "it's past the 13-year-old's bedtime) or discussions of Marmite which proceed from my becoming peckish. We discuss television, politics, language, photography, share jokes and behave altogether more like... blokes at a bar than gamers at their PCs.
Do those 419 scams even exist? It would seem that, since they need a correct email address for you to reply to, you could just DDoS them if you had sufficient willing vigilantes. If not, you could always create a botnet...
That's all fair, but somewhat secondary to the point I was replying to; that traditionalism does not override actual harm. If there is harm being done, tradition is not a reason to carry on doing it regardless - whether or not, in this case, harm is being done. I wasn't arguing either that whaling is or isn't harmful.
As a sibling pointed out, the analogy doesn't quite work, but that doesn't matter. The point is that, no matter how indignant people get about traditions being trampled, indignation simply does not trump actual harm to things. If it were tradition for half the population of Norway to murder half the population of Sweden every year, there might be public outcry if it were outlawed, but it would still be the right thing to do.
It's only justice if you agree that he deserved to die, and it's only justice if he got what anyone else would've got who committed the same kind of crime. Justice appeals to the notion of fairness. It's not fair if the punishment doesn't fit the crime, nor if it is different to a punishment given out for an equivalent crime. The only way true justice can therefore be dealt is by mutual agreement, and vigilantism is not, generally.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me guess, you're a reseller for t0p qu4l1ty c14lis?
Gosh, I just bet you were Mr. Popular!
It's all fine to say, "his time came" in retrospect, but beyond metaphor, the phrase has no actual use since there's no way of determining when the time is, or, indeed, whether the time was predetermined at all.
It's viruses not virii unless this is supposed to be "geek humour" as per the article.</nazi>
It's alright, I'm sure someone will get a five-finger discount on it.
The problem with (most) LCDs is that the image only changes at the point of moving to the next frame. This means that persistence of vision causes two frames to be visible, unless new technology, Black Frame Insertion, is used.
I'd've thought that producing magnetic interference would be the bigger worry. Certainly not allowed on planes or in hospitals, if they want to keep an air of consistency about them.
Or that their system was compromised by a thin, crispy biscuit.
I was worried for a while the Slashdot consisted entirely of Libertarians. Thankfully, this appears not to be the case, and someone appears to realise that the free market simply is not the universal fix-all, especially in the realm of pharmaceutical development. One of my sibling posts says the government is only good at screwing things up - he apparently didn't read the parent. The government should be giving out grants to companies who will do then research the most important drugs. There need be no Federal Drug Development Institution or suchlike.
Better than the current system where developing drugs for one of the 20 worst ailments probably isn't economically viable, so the drug is never produced. The pharmaceutical company instead goes for the easy cash by researching the next diet pill, and the result is obvious.
I'm afraid you imagine wrong, at least in a theoretical sense. Side effects (and primary effects) are determined solely by the interaction of the chemical(s) with the human body, and there's no overarching difference between synthetic and naturally occurring chemicals - when you get down to it, it's all just a bunch of quarks and electrons. It tends to be possible to create more complex compounds naturally, however. So when we manufacture penicillin, we get some mould to secrete the basic ingredient, then substitute on different chemical groups to obtain different effects in the body - to produce a stronger, faster acting compound, with fewer or lesser side effects - hopefully. When it comes down to it though, lead compounds for drugs aren't really designed, they're discovered. Most of those compounds - like those that spawned aspirin, paracetamol, penicillin and the like - are naturally occurring. I suppose a few must have been discovered in synthetic compounds, but not many. The reason being that natural compounds, due to the way they are produced, can be much more complex. Drugs can have many chiral centres, and in classic syntheses, you'd obtain a mixture of all the different possible isomers - usually only one works. When an enzyme produces the feedstock, the compound is more likely to be a pure, or purer mixture, since the shape of the enzyme tends only to catalyse the production of one isomer. This restricts synthetic medicines to much simpler molecules until our synthetic procedures improve (which they are doing - designer molecules are becoming possible.) Even then, however, we have some way before we look at the shape of receptor sites and try and devise molecules to fit them. We are still at the stage where we notice a compound has a physiological effect, and then start looking closer.
Which, incidentally, I learned by application not by rote, since Word's spellchecker repeatedly squiggly-lined me for it.
This, I feel, is worth emphasising. It's a common joke that memories operate on a "one-in, one-out" policy and, although that might not be true, it would seem that it's easy to remember something if there's less overall to remember. I spend far too many hours on wikipedia, soaking up entirely useless, but very interesting, bits of (hopefully) information, and I'd much rather save my brain's bytes for that than on remember phone numbers and birthdays. As it happens, I also have a pretty good memory, can remember my own phone numbers and so on (although I don't remember birthdays - either manually or electronically) but when it gets further afield than that, it's much more preferable to write something down or enter it in a phone calendar than to push out what I was reading yesterday evening about the geological composition of Surtsey.
Etc. what? You're the beacon of freedom? I find that hard to believe - we're pretty much all as useless as each other, and if we're not yet, we will be in a few years' time.
If you have a sophisticated enough setup (such as, perhaps, someone with a financial interest may have - a remanufacturer, for example) then surely you would still just be able to monitor the signals sent to the chip to tell it its been refilled a few times, and analyse that. Once you've worked out the communication between the chip and the refiller, cheap knock-offs can be sold.
And how exactly is "Jimmy's Ink" going to work with a "Genuine HP Inkjet" when it doesn't have this new chip in it, and thus looks to the printer like "Jimmy's Ink" and not "Genuine HP Ink?" Do you really think that a cryptographic chip is going to be able to look at the label on the cartridge or box? Of course not, it's going to identify the ink to the printer as being "compatible."
Some other folks suggested you were being sarcastic. I hope so, but doubt it.
I find it difficult to see how "addiction" to things like gambling and gaming can really seen as a disorder. On the contrary, it seems that it is entirely natural, if unfortunate, for human beings to be "addicted" to things like gambling and so on. Some more than others admittedly, but it seems logical that humans do pleasurable things often. It is also widely known that animals in general are more likely to make the short-sighted decision, so if gambling is pleasurable but breaks the bank, we may well gamble our savings away.
This seems to bring into question how we might define disease or disorder more accurately. It would appear counter-intuitive to label things as disorders if they are very very common, albeit damaging.
I'm handing in my geek card. I actually thought this story was referring to food.
On an unrelated note, does using the phrase "grammar Nazi" fulfill Godwin's law?
I don't think so, since irredundantless would actually mean redundant. For the full analogy to work, the word would have to logically mean the opposite of what it was intended to (since irregardless would logically mean regardful) Or perhaps I'm reading too much into it.
While some of the meritocracy associated with text-only gaming disappears when you fire up TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or whatever, in my experience plenty remains. I've played TrueCombat:Elite for a good while now, and I would never want to go back to text-only. Gaming has now become for me a social experience - it's no longer just about relaxing for half an hour fragging some terrorists, it's now about fragging and actually talking to people who can quite honestly call friends. Yet these friends are respected because of who they are (and, to an extent, how well they play) not according to any social stereotype.
Age enters into it somewhat, admittedly. But we happily play alongside a 16 year old friend of ours (although the clans have an 18-years rule) and he is respected because he is friendly. At the same time, I've made friends with a mass of people who I would otherwise never have been able to - not in the way that I have. I now know a Scot from Dundee who's married with two children, I know tens of Germans, several of whom are twice my age or more. In real life, I, as an 18-year-old, would perhaps know and talk with a married 36 year old, I might even be friends with him. But I would never, I would say, have the kind of frank, uninhibited conversation that we all do - it's more like a bunch of blokes at a bar, and if you go to a bar you don't go with people twice your age, usually.
Without voice chat, I would perhaps "know" some of these people - I remember before I used to log on to TeamSpeak I would recognise a few of the regulars on the servers. But one can never hold a conversation of the same type purely through the in-game text chat feature. The conversations we have online range widely in topic - we see little glimpses of each other's home lives, mundane things like the Scot having to leave temporarily because one of his daughters is holding a tin of paint (a new variation on the "it's past the 13-year-old's bedtime) or discussions of Marmite which proceed from my becoming peckish. We discuss television, politics, language, photography, share jokes and behave altogether more like... blokes at a bar than gamers at their PCs.
Do those 419 scams even exist? It would seem that, since they need a correct email address for you to reply to, you could just DDoS them if you had sufficient willing vigilantes. If not, you could always create a botnet...
That's all fair, but somewhat secondary to the point I was replying to; that traditionalism does not override actual harm. If there is harm being done, tradition is not a reason to carry on doing it regardless - whether or not, in this case, harm is being done. I wasn't arguing either that whaling is or isn't harmful.
As a sibling pointed out, the analogy doesn't quite work, but that doesn't matter. The point is that, no matter how indignant people get about traditions being trampled, indignation simply does not trump actual harm to things. If it were tradition for half the population of Norway to murder half the population of Sweden every year, there might be public outcry if it were outlawed, but it would still be the right thing to do.
It's only justice if you agree that he deserved to die, and it's only justice if he got what anyone else would've got who committed the same kind of crime. Justice appeals to the notion of fairness. It's not fair if the punishment doesn't fit the crime, nor if it is different to a punishment given out for an equivalent crime. The only way true justice can therefore be dealt is by mutual agreement, and vigilantism is not, generally.