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User: Twinbee

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  1. Shades of..... on Nobody Is Sure What Should Count As a Cyber Incident · · Score: 1

    How about if the severity is a not a polarized boolean value for.... wait for it.... shades of grey!

    Here are some words to add to your dictionary for those troubled by such a story:
    continuum, continuous, polarized, grey shades, black and white, degrees, magnitude.

  2. Re:Asimov was right on Bring On the Boring Robots · · Score: 1

    Thanks, but I'd rather interact with real souls than AI zombies who only appear to act human. And that's ignoring aesthetic considerations.

  3. Re:I'm one of those engineers... on Musk Says Drivers May Become Obsolete, Announces Juice-Saving Upgrades · · Score: 1

    You're forgetting that even if we don't solve the lane marking problem, it'll be orders of magnitude cheaper to put down special markers on the road that AI can read perfectly, than it is to keep wasting millions of man-hours per day having to drive a car manually.

  4. Re:my car my rules on Musk Says Drivers May Become Obsolete, Announces Juice-Saving Upgrades · · Score: 1

    You're the first person I've heard that has spoken about giant speeds as a result of driving AI. You may be anon, but I think that's an awesome concept.

  5. Re: my car my rules on Musk Says Drivers May Become Obsolete, Announces Juice-Saving Upgrades · · Score: 1

    Funny and true!

  6. Just like we don't have flying cars because it's not practical from production cost or for the manufacture or owner to take on that liability as a mechanical failure at altitude is immediately a costly accident.

    That doesn't take into consideration that the manufacture can put all liability on the customer as a condition of purchase. Nor does it account for that the customer could be very rich and want to avoid 2 hour queues daily to get to work and back.

  7. Nit picking on Musk Says Drivers May Become Obsolete, Announces Juice-Saving Upgrades · · Score: 1

    "ending range anxiety,"

    The comma should go *outside* the right quotation mark, not inside it.

  8. Re:UV sensitivity on New 3D Printing Process Claimed To Be 25X Faster Than Current Technology · · Score: 1

    You insensitive clod! I've just bought a 100 watt - 6000K colour temperature LED floodlight to emulate sunlight indoors. It looks amazing, and feels like the ceiling has been lifted off to let the sun in (but without the drawbacks that solution would otherwise offer).

  9. Re:Nitrogen asphyxiation? on How To Execute People In the 21st Century · · Score: 1

    How about Argon, or one of the other noble/inert gases?

  10. Re:Nitrogen asphyxiation? on How To Execute People In the 21st Century · · Score: 1

    Does xenon or argon suffer from that problem too?

  11. Re:Nitrogen asphyxiation? on How To Execute People In the 21st Century · · Score: 4, Informative

    You're absolutely right. We HAVE found a humane way, and nitrogen (or argon) asphyxiation is not just just painless, but also maybe even pleasant. Here is the proof (you only need to view the first 5 mins, but the whole 10 are fascinating):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    I think the death penalty's quite barbaric, but if we must have it, then that is the way to go.

  12. Re:This is a bug not a feature on New Crop of LED Filament Bulbs Look Almost Exactly Like Incandescents · · Score: 1

    A few years ago I was exactly like you. Even now, I still very much agree with you in 'spirit', and perhaps in the VERY long term (1000-10000+ years) evolution may fix the 'bug' which stops your argument from making perfect sense.

    This 'bug' is that blue light affects melatonin production (decreases it, so it's harder to get to sleep). This isn't something you can get around. Subjectively, it could also be said that orangey hues (even more red than incandescent!) look 'cosier' and are a nice contrast to the day's blue light. Due to the nature of qualia, that's almost impossible to disprove. Heck, even green and blue illumination is a nice change occasionally.

    Yours though is the first comment I've read in my life that even goes in this direction though, so I think that's awesome in itself. You might be interested in my post at CandlePowerForums which tried to find out what colour temperature is subjectively closest to pure white: http://www.candlepowerforums.c...

  13. Re:Ugh on Was Linus Torvalds Right About C++ Being So Wrong? · · Score: 1

    "Bloated" as in so many different ways to do things that only the person who wrote the code can understand it. Too much redundancy basically.

    Decent languages? Try D. C# is bloated too, but at least it offers managed memory and you can fall back to non-managed code at any stage.

  14. Re:Ugh on Was Linus Torvalds Right About C++ Being So Wrong? · · Score: 1

    I'd the this 'real language' to get rid of those god-awful headers and support ^ as exponentiation - something so commonly used. Less bloat would be nice too.

  15. Re:Scrapping DST worldwide for 24 time zones on Daylight Saving Time Change On Sunday For N. America · · Score: 1

    Except that it did work at some point, and then Slashdot cut it down arbitrarily. Also the number of characters (including html and link) is less than in your sig, so explain that.

  16. Re:Scrapping DST worldwide for 24 time zones on Daylight Saving Time Change On Sunday For N. America · · Score: 1

    Yeah that's a bug with Slashdot and not my fault. I tried ages ago several to edit the sig, and Slashdot always cut it off.

    Anyway, I can see you're just trolling and don't really want to discuss things on their own merit so there we go.

  17. Re:Double Head-Fake on SpaceX Worried Fake Competitors Could Disrupt Its Space Internet Plan · · Score: 1

    Can you elaborate on that?

  18. Re:Scrapping DST worldwide for 24 time zones on Daylight Saving Time Change On Sunday For N. America · · Score: 1

    are not going to make one whit of difference in the cosmic scheme of things.

    Well not with that attitude we won't. It would have been easy to say that before the switch to metric. Oh I forgot, that's only in sensible countries, because most (not all) of the US public is too indifferent to care.

    This seems like less of a problem as time goes on, given the fact that ever-increasing numbers of time-telling devices are connected to reliable sources of time.

    Kludges breed more kludges which may even need a degree of maintenance forever. On the other hand, it's relatively easy for everyone if we just switch to 24 time zones, or even better in the long run, UTC. The latter is too much too quickly, so I'm not so idealistic that I think we should go that far just yet.

    Assuming, at least, that the humans programming those devices weren't as fucking lazy as you are.

    Try "as busy as I am". Or how much benefit it would gain for my user base, relative to working on other features which may take priority.

    Of all the possible things (that are out of your control), why choose that one?

    Because that's the topic of discussion. I get annoyed about lots of things including, just a few of which include latency/lag, many poor standards (computer and non-computer), under-funding of scientific research, and loss of productivity due to the fixation on the 8 hour workday, noise pollution (gas cars, buses and trucks mainly), air pollution, lack of automation in every-day work environments, the lack of good taste in music/art/aesthetics from most people, the false notion that more jobs = better when in reality the reverse is true as we free up time, etc. etc.

    And yes, global warming and social injustice are giant issues. But those issues are much harder to solve, so weighting should be adjusted accordingly. But for example, I particularly love Tesla Motors, and how Elon is trying to save the world from potential disaster (in his words: "We are running the most dangerous experiment in history"). SpaceX's mission to get humans on Mars is a GREAT thing too along those lines. And as capitalist as I am, I believe a Universal Basic Income (starting off at a small amount) is the best way to tackle poverty, yet not many seem to see the obvious.

    In case you still think I'm a shitty programmer by the way, I invite you to try the Opalcalc software in my link. There's nothing else like it, and it's not hard to see why.

  19. Re:Scrapping DST worldwide for 24 time zones on Daylight Saving Time Change On Sunday For N. America · · Score: 1

    I don't think you realize also how much confusion it generates for ordinary people, including administrators and the general public who has to worry that their clocks are set right. If mistakes are made by admins, then the knock-on effects can be even worse.

    Heck even taking a couple of minutes to change the clocks multiplied by a billion people equals a LOT of time lost. Not to mention that DST often affects sleep cycles in a bad way, or at least in a mildly bad way for perhaps most people.

    I'm going to be a bit harsh now, and I may even be at least partially wrong, but you really don't seem to care about unification, consolidation, standards, or simplifying things as much as you should. Exaggerating to illustrate a point, I suppose you like to see hundreds of incompatible competing standards, just so you can go through the effort and 'fun' of trying to support them all. For example, you may not care about the elegant 'hack' of UTF-8. After all, who cares if we have hundreds of different text formats floating around - let's build ugly kludge after kludge in software to support them all!

    I have no doubt your programming skills are capable of taking on such tasks, but the fact you're not even SLIGHTLY bitter about the mess that is time zones indicates that for better or for worse, elegant design and unification is not your first priority. And I think that's where you're mistaken.

  20. Re:Scrapping DST worldwide for 24 time zones on Daylight Saving Time Change On Sunday For N. America · · Score: 1

    Did you deal with all the arbitrary intricacies that the aforementioned video showed? And if you did (good for you), did you think it was a productive use of time? Do you think tens or hundreds of thousands of programmers multiplied by that waste of time is a net benefit to society generally?

  21. Re:Scrapping DST worldwide for 24 time zones on Daylight Saving Time Change On Sunday For N. America · · Score: 1

    It's not even for me, as C# handles most of the crap anyway, so things are (relatively) trivial, just time consuming and long-winded. It's how appalling the system is and how much time it wastes for everyone involved.

  22. Re:Scrapping DST worldwide for 24 time zones on Daylight Saving Time Change On Sunday For N. America · · Score: 1

    Actually you know what?

    Just see this (very humourous) Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    NOTHING will show you better how idiotic the whole system is, and how much time it has wasted (and will continue to waste due to the ongoing changes governments worldwide make on a whim).

  23. Re:Scrapping DST worldwide for 24 time zones on Daylight Saving Time Change On Sunday For N. America · · Score: 1

    Spoken like someone who has never really had to deal with the subtleties of time zones. Just read this message here: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskSci...

  24. Related stories on Sewage Bacteria Reveal Cities' Obesity Rates · · Score: 1

    Just recently we had a story on a woman who gained weight after a fecal transplant: http://science.slashdot.org/st...

    Swapping the bacteria in our mouth may also prevent bacteria by killing off the Streptococcus mutans, perhaps the main contributer of tooth decay.

    I really think this relatively new area in science could help if we pursue it carefully.

  25. Scrapping DST worldwide for 24 time zones on Daylight Saving Time Change On Sunday For N. America · · Score: 1

    Never mind just America, let's work to scrap DST worldwide. DST (or daylight saving time) is a great source of confusion. It complicates administration, as well as making life tough for programmers and every day people who need to make sure their clocks are reset twice a year.

    However, if we scrapped DST (along with 15 or 30 minute offsets), we would only have 24 time zones - one for each hour! This is a reduction from the hundreds we currently have in use around the world. Each location would simply be assigned to an offset from UTC (0-24).

    For many reasons, it'd be nice if everyone used UTC as their only time, but in the mean time, twenty four consistent, simple and clear zones should be enough for everybody.