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User: QRDeNameland

QRDeNameland's activity in the archive.

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Comments · 1,062

  1. Re:what a stupid design on A Software Malfunction Is Throwing Riders Off of Lime Scooters (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    If your functional requirements don't include:

    4. The toy should not arbitrarily cause injury or death to the user;

    ...guess where the stupid starts.

  2. My initial read... on Year-Over-Year Smartwatch Sales Jumped By 61% In the US Last Year (bgr.com) · · Score: 3, Funny

    At first I read the headline as "Year-Over-Year Sammich Sales Jumped By 61% In the US Last Year ". Too close to dinner time, I guess.

  3. Photos use to be considered "strong evidence", then Photoshop etc. came along to make doctoring cheap and common, and people stopped trusting photos. The same will happen to audio and video once they see enough fudged examples.

    Is that really true, though? Yes, Photoshop has made photo doctoring easy, but the digital age makes it easy enough to detect and debunk. AFAIK, it is extremely difficult to doctor a photo well enough that simple forensic analysis can not determine that it was manipulated, and even without that, if someone can show the original undoctored image, the fake is easily debunked.

    And really, how often is this an issue? The last time I can recall a doctored photo even being noted in the news is a year or so ago when someone posted a doctored photo of Whoopi Goldberg wearing a t-shirt depicting Trump blowing his brains out (caption: Make America Great Again). It was quickly debunked, just by providing the original photo. I can't even recall any other recent example of a doctored image being a newsworthy item. If that's as significant a case as we've seen, is it really a huge problem?

    From that perspective, the hue and cry over "deepfake" video seems way overblown to me.

  4. Re:In my opinion... on 'Mindful People' Feel Less Pain, Study Finds (medicalxpress.com) · · Score: 1

    The definition used in this study is "mindfulness is the self-reported score on the Frieburg Mindfulness Inventory". That's exactly what it is, and how it's objectively measured (by asking people to self-report it). Yes that is an objective measure even though it's an objective report of a self-reported subjective thing, just like "QRDeNameland likes vanilla ice-cream" is an objective report of your self-reported subjective preference.

    The only thing the FMI measures is response to the FMI, answers to 14 vague question which as you concede are arbitrarily subjective. Whether it actually has any relation to 'mindfulness' or any other thing you want to use it as a proxy for is anyone's guess. Sure, they may be some MRI similarities that correlate to how one answers the questionnaires, but who's to say what it means, if anything at all. And I've yet to see anything that shows that any of this is well-tested or replicated. Can such a 'measurement' really be considered objective? I don't think so, even if you disagree. The history of science is littered with so-called 'objective' measures that turned out horribly flawed (total serum cholesterol as an indicator of heart disease risk, for just one example).

    And while this particular study may not be touting solutions, I can assure you that many if not most doctors and mental health professionals are pushing mindfulness as essentially settled science. It isn't even close. The leaps of faith required to press such flimsy evidence into clinical practice is indeed magical thinking, whether you consider the FMI 'objective' or not.

  5. Re:"Mindfulness" obviously an oxymoron on 'Mindful People' Feel Less Pain, Study Finds (medicalxpress.com) · · Score: 2

    Ah, yes...the delicate science of Tautology.

  6. In my opinion... on 'Mindful People' Feel Less Pain, Study Finds (medicalxpress.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    Mindfulness is the new religion of modern medicine. What exactly is it? No one can clearly explain. How is it achieved? Well, opinions differ. How can it be objectively measured? Yeah, that's what I thought.

    But yet we have oh so many "studies" showing mindfulness purported to effective, of course always for conditions like pain or depression/anxiety that they lack good and/or safe treatment for. But substitute "mindfulness" with "prayer" (which itself could be seen as a form of mindfulness), would the study be taken seriously by the medical community? Yet I fail to see any significant difference between the two.

    And hey, if it works for you, great! However, it's insulting when a practitioner of supposedly science-based medicine starts touting ill-defined magical solutions as if they were science.

  7. Re: Well Fuck on No Healthy Level of Alcohol Consumption, Says Major Study (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Living does not require you to inhale smoke of any kind.

    You were obviously not living on the west coast of N. America over the past week.

  8. It's not plastic...it's people!!

  9. The densities are incredibly high, there is no doubt about that. A manufacturing process is all that remains to accomplish the claims.

    Well, if you read the article (yeah, yeah, I know), there's this:

    "Unfortunately, writing speeds still leave something to be desired. According to the accompanying paper, writing each 8-bit ASCII code took between 10 and 120 seconds, which isn't exactly practical for today's consumer products."

    Not saying they can't overcome that eventually, but that would need to be solved long before the manufacturing process.

  10. Re:How about not blowing away work? on Windows 10 To Use Machine Learning in Latest Attempt To Make Reboots Less Annoying (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't know, maybe you can turn that option off in Windows. I haven't used Windows since 7, and I know I could back then. Has MS removed that from Win 10?

    No, you can't turn the option off, though you do can set a time window of something like 8-12 hours per day where it won't do the upgrade/auto-reboot.

    The best workaround I've found so far is, if you are always using a Wi-Fi connection, is to set the connection to Metered Connection, and Windows won't download the updates. When you want to do updates, turn off Metered Connection, download the updates, let them install and reboot, then set the connection back to Metered. It's a bit of a pain in the ass, but it puts the power of when updates happen back into your hands.

    The thing that pisses me off the most about it is that all I really ask for is that it not reboot until I can make sure everything that was running is safely shut down. I run a few different OSes in VirtualBox that are usually running at all times, and have had a few borked because VirtualBox does not shut the VMs down cleanly during the auto-reboot.

  11. Re:How about not blowing away work? on Windows 10 To Use Machine Learning in Latest Attempt To Make Reboots Less Annoying (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Or VirtualBox VM sessions. This is the one that pisses me off most.

  12. Re:Call me a big effin idiot, but... on Slashdot Asks: Do You Need To Properly Eject a USB Drive Before Yanking it Out? (daringfireball.net) · · Score: 1

    My rules for ejecting detachable drives are basically this:

    Rule 0: Always have a backup of any files you care about on a separate physical media.

    Rule 1: If it spins, always safely eject it.

    Rule 2: If it's solid state, feel free to just yank it out. Worst case scenario, you bork the filesystem and reformat, and you still have the files because of Rule 0.

    The only times I've ever had any problem with yanking out a thumb drive/SD card are the few occasions I accidentally pulled it out while it was writing, or when I've had a dodgy drive spontaneously go offline due to a bad connection/firmware issue/whatever.

    I'm sure there are other edge case exceptions where you would always want to safely eject a thumb drive; some people mentioned using encryption, but for general use, if you already have good backup practices, the risk is pretty much negligible.

  13. When I visited the Van Gogh museum over 25 years ago, I saw that one and liked it so much I bought a print of it in the gift shop, and I still keep it hanging in my home.

  14. Re:Numbers correct? on E-Waste Mining Could Be Big Business (bbc.com) · · Score: 2

    I thought the same thing, but I googled the historical price of gold and it was far cheaper before 2004 when CRTs still still common (roughly between $250-400 per oz from the late 80s to around 2004). Still, it would raise the question of why you haven't seen people offering money for old CRTs since gold has been in the $1000+ per oz range, which has been at least 8 years. Nor do I really understand why it would be so hard to recycle. I have a friend who works as a dental ceramist, and they periodically send off the dust collected from the grinders, old dental work they accumulate, and even the dust in their carpets to assaying labs where separate all the various metals from each other and the ceramics and other detritus, and they pay a pretty good return for the value of the precious metals extracted. If they can do *that* profitably, it seems inconceivable to me that they couldn't do the same for discarded electronics, especially if there is anything like 5.6 grams of gold in a typical CRT. I'd be interested if anyone could shed some light on that.

  15. This is how bad the article is: it first says the recording was sent to a random person in Seattle, THEN it says it was someone on their contact list. Random, not random. Same sentence.

    Yeah, that bugged me, too. At best it might be 'a random person on their contact list, who lives in Seattle'. And to be really pedantic, the better term is almost certainly 'arbitrary'.

  16. Re:My Proverb.... on Late To Bed, Early To Die? Night Owls May Die Sooner (livescience.com) · · Score: 1

    From HST's suicide note:

    "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun - for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your (old) age. Relax - This won't hurt."

    To my reading, his suicide is entirely in line with his stated philosophy...the only problem was that his body held out longer than he thought. That is the hazard of the "live fast, die young" credo: what do you do when you survive the consequences and end up old and worn out? I don't mean to help rationalize suicide, but it fits his stated belief.

  17. Re:As long as companies... on Update: Possible Active Shooter Reported at YouTube HQ (theverge.com) · · Score: 1
    Seems like everyone took the opposite of the AC's point.

    Substitute "don't ban" with the essentially synonymous "allow": "As long as companies allow guns on their property, this will continue to happen."

    ...and the responses are arguing against firearms in the workplace, which is pretty much what was said in the first place.

  18. Re:We've got videophones, though... on The 50th Anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" · · Score: 1

    Also, we've basically got video phones now, although it's clunky and more difficult to use than a phone call was back then.

    Video phones were not science fiction in 1968. The first prototypes of videotelephony date to the late 1920s, Bell Labs was demonstrating intercontinental video phone calls at the 1964 NY World's Fair, and that technology was commercially available by 1970, only 2 years after "2001". There are many reasons why it failed in the marketplace, but the main one is that virtually no one wanted it, and the few who did had no one to call (i.e., no "network effect"). Otherwise, it would have almost certainly been a mature technology by 1980, rather than taking another 25 years or so to be commonplace, with the advent of most people already owning equipment capable of doing it (i.e., internet connected computers).

  19. Re:How to go to heaven on The 50th Anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" · · Score: 1

    So if god created man in his image, why did he do such a shitty job? We are what god made us after all, so if he made us sinners then it's his own damn fault. "The fall" is just god's excuse for shoddy (and probably drunk) workmanship.

    Hey, let's get serious...
    God knows what he's doin'
    He wrote this book here
    An' the book says:
    He made us all to be just like him,
    So...
    If we're dumb...
    Then God is dumb...
    (an' maybe even a little ugly on the side)

    Frank Zappa - "Dumb All Over"

  20. Re:"Don't be evil" on YouTube, the Great Radicalizer (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    Google is not yet even 20 years old, and it's been only two and a half years since the Alphabet restructuring when "Don't be evil" was swapped for "Do the right thing". If that translates to decades for you, well...stupid shit indeed.

  21. Re:UK police scanning your screen saver images! on UK Police's Porn-Spotting AI Keeps Mistaking Desert Pics for Nudes (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 3, Funny

    Just hope they don't call in Colonel Panic.

  22. Re:What is the solution to printing rarely? on Ask Slashdot: Do You Print Too Little? · · Score: 1

    Yep, my dad still uses his 4L with no issues. For any piece of computer technology to still be fully useful after 25 years is quite astonishing.

  23. Re:... and also think of ... on The Environmental Cost of Internet Porn (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 5, Funny

    Exactly my thought. If, hypothetically, 100,000 Pornhub fap sessions results in just one fewer successful procreative sexual encounter, then that's 230,000 fewer babies per year just from Pornhub. Weighed against 11,000 lightbulb's worth of power usage, that's a no-brainer.

  24. Re:What Could Possibly Go Wrong?! on Amazon Is Reportedly Building a Doorbell That Lets Drivers Into Your House (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    But I'm just not sure who would actually want this.

    I wasn't sure who would want an always-on listening device in their home either, but evidently many people enthusiastically embraced the Echo and the like.

    I think the same way about it as you, but don't underestimate the ease with which a disturbingly large portion of the population will happily trade privacy and/or security for convenience.

  25. Re:We're talking about Old French here! on Internet Activists Urge Congress to Fire Trump's FCC Chief Ajit Pai (vice.com) · · Score: 2

    Being curious, I decided to check this out, and I found nothing to suggest that "bête" was even a common synonym for penis, much less the original meaning.

    Wiktionary, which you cite for your examples, says the same thing as the GP: Borrowed from French bête noire (literally "black beast"). Nothing about penises.

    Unless you have a source I somehow missed, I conclude "bête means penis" is 100% bullshit.