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User: Smauler

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  1. Re: Doesn't the UK... on UK ISPs Quietly Block Sites That List Pirate Bay Proxies · · Score: 1

    That's kind of the point... TPB can't block UK IPs, because of TPB proxies. TPB itself is already blocked by most (all?) UK ISPs, so TPB blocking UK IPs would not make one bit of difference.

    TLA overload, sorry.

  2. Re:Actually, ALL American... on China's Arthur C. Clarke · · Score: 0

    Interestingly, far more Europeans have died because of disease (syphilis) due to contact with the Native Americans than the other way around.

  3. Re:Gut flora on Sewage Bacteria Reveal Cities' Obesity Rates · · Score: 1

    For many, eating normally for a human being is a sure recipe for weight gain.

    No, it's not. Really, I don't know how you think this.

  4. Re:There is other evidence on Sewage Bacteria Reveal Cities' Obesity Rates · · Score: 1

    More efficient gut flora is _always_ going to result in weight gain. That's the point of gut flora.

  5. Re:Gut flora on Sewage Bacteria Reveal Cities' Obesity Rates · · Score: 1

    There are plenty of excuses.

    I'm 6'6", had a 6 pack when I was 20, and weighed 100kg, and was pretty fit with a low fat index. I was easy BMI then (100/2^2, 25), but BMI was irrelevant, because I was relatively fit and active. I'm still easy to calculate BMI, but weigh 115kg or so now. 5kg more, and I hit obese.

    Now, I would like to lose a little weight, but I put on a bit of muscle in my 20's. I don't think I could ever hit a decent BMI.

    I eat/drink probably about 2000kcal/day, but I'm not that active currently. I used to do physical work regularly (and ea a whole load more), but don't currently.

    I know that if I eat a lot, I will get huge. I don't.

  6. Re:As an Engineer/Journeyman Machinist I can tell on The Origin of Life and the Hidden Role of Quantum Criticality · · Score: 1

    And the solar system is completely unexplainable with quantum physics, and particles are completely unexplainable with relativity. It doesn't mean we should just say "God does it", and be done.

  7. Re:Ok, How did the black participants respond? on Racial Discrimination Affects Virtual Reality Characters Too · · Score: 1

    Many black people call themselves "Nigger" too, doesn't mean it can't be racially offensive.

  8. Re:So basically we're finally catching up to Novel on Linux 4.0 Getting No-Reboot Patching · · Score: 1

    sorry AC, I've got no mod points for you, but you are exactly right, except in the good old days of NW 3.x , netware admins would laugh at someone bragging about 300 days of uptime.

    I've had over 200 days uptime on my Vista desktop system, and that was ended by a power cut. Uptime isn't really anything to brag about any more.

  9. Re:Interesting idea, nasty downsides on New Seagate Shingled Hard Drive Teardown · · Score: 1

    Just simple HDD. With the Vista installation I've striped the hard drives.

    I personally was astonished how quick XP booted. I always remembered a dearth of incomprehensible chuntering. It seems I set up a decent system. I repeat, 13 seconds to desktop.

  10. Re:Interesting idea, nasty downsides on New Seagate Shingled Hard Drive Teardown · · Score: 1

    I had reason to boot up an old XP system I set up for my mum to play games recently (my graphics card died). I timed the boot : 13 seconds from bios to desktop.

    I used to have 15 second boots on my system with Vista too, it's now closer to 30 with all the cruft I now have.

    Does anyone need much quicker than that on a desktop system?

  11. Re:I hate gender bias in studies on Research Suggests That Saunas Help You Live Longer · · Score: 1

    Breast cancer amongst men is diminishingly small comparatively. Testicular cancer is pretty inconsequential too. Prostate cancer, now, kills almost as many men as breast cancer does women.

  12. Re:5% Gross is a terrible deal on Unreal Engine 4 Is Now Free · · Score: 1

    It's (relatively) easy to build a game world, but it takes time to deliver content for that world. No amount of hand waving about new technologies and the ease to produce a new game can get around the fact that just about every game needs lots of writing.

    FTL is a good example... the engine is simple, the maps are procedural. That was not the difficult bit. Writing scripted events that merge with the procedural framework, and writing enough of them so that the game is not repetitive, that's the difficult bit.

  13. Re:I hate gender bias in studies on Research Suggests That Saunas Help You Live Longer · · Score: 1

    For fucks sake. Guess what, gender specific studies are sometimes done with women too. Restricting variables helps make studies more useful statistically.

    If you want to get angry about gender imbalance in medicine, try looking at breast cancer research vs prostate cancer research.

  14. Re:Smoking Hot Blondes on Research Suggests That Saunas Help You Live Longer · · Score: 1

    As AC has already mentioned, 100F is not that hot. England's record temperature is 101.3F, for example, recorded in Kent.

  15. Re:Going my own way on One Astronomer's Quest To Reinstate Pluto As a Planet · · Score: 1

    As far as I'm concerned, if it's orbiting a star, and it itself isn't another star, and it's got, or had, enough mass such that it pulled whatever it is made of into a spheroid, it's a planet.

    So how many planets orbit the Sun, according to that definition?

  16. Re:And still on One Astronomer's Quest To Reinstate Pluto As a Planet · · Score: 1

    Really, the only categorization issue that I'm adamant about is that Pluto-Charon is called a binary. The Pluto-Charon barycentre is not inside Pluto, therefore Charon is not rotating around Pluto, the two are corotating around a common point of space between them. That's a binary.

    That definition works, until you realise that Jupiter's barycentre with the Sun is outside of the Sun. Would you consider Jupiter and the Sun a binary system?

    To be honest, I don't, but I don't have any real reason _why_ I don't. We could make some arbitrary percentage to define something as a binary, but that's nowhere near as neat as the barycentre not being inside the main body.

    Also, if you define binaries as the barycentre being outside of the main body, you're arbitrarily discriminating against small dense suns and planets compared to large diffuse suns and planets. For example, just about any planet orbiting a white dwarf will have a barycentre outside of the white dwarf, whereas just about any planet orbiting a red giant will have a barycentre inside the red giant.

  17. Re:There goal is at odds with yours. on Intel To Rebrand Atom Chips Along Lines of Core Processors · · Score: 1

    The point is that they deliberately obfuscate. "This generation is better than the last" can be sold to people with higher powered processors, whilst still being technically true. Like I said earlier in the discussion, I still use a core2duo E6850, and I do use it for gaming. It's nearly 10 years old.

  18. Re:"Good", "Better", "Best"? on Intel To Rebrand Atom Chips Along Lines of Core Processors · · Score: 1

    The real problem is that i3, i5, and i7 have never been good, better, best.

    My core2duo E6850 is now absolutely ancient (and feeling it's age after having been run at nearly 100 degrees Celsius for a significant portion). My dad was going to retire his old i3 to the garage as a backup, but I jumped at the chance to nick it. That was, until I looked at the benchmarks. They're about the same. New thermal paste is easier.

    It's all about the benchmarks, people. There are plenty of i5's that will outperform i7's in many tasks.

  19. Re:Should a Service Robot Bring an Alcoholic a Dri on Should a Service Robot Bring an Alcoholic a Drink? · · Score: 1

    It's very very easy to build a robot that can do this, you just tape a dictaphone on a roomba saying all these things. However, you'd be pretty stupid to believe the robot.

    This is kind of the point of the Turing test. I believe, however, that AIs will achieve perfect mimicry of consciousness before they achieve actual consciousness. At that point, you're pretty much stuffed, because there's no way of differentiating the two.

  20. Re:Yes. It will. on 18 Months On, Grand Theft Auto V's Mount Chiliad Mystery Remains Unsolved · · Score: 1

    Didn't 1 and 2 have the same engine?

  21. Re:Electric not the answer on The Best, and Worst, Places To Drive Your Electric Car · · Score: 1

    I would not assume "the motor does not wear" in EVs. They certainly will wear, but it is also very possible that they may last a lot longer than ICEs. We'll see in 10 years when we have a lot of cars with a lot of miles on them under a lot of different conditions. Body resilience & condition is a large part of resale value as well.

    Very few cars are scrapped because of engine failure. Engines don't generally break unless you do something stupid to them.

  22. Re:Who uses any of that crap anyway? on Gadgets That Spy On Us: Way More Than TVs · · Score: 1

    Owning and wanting gadgets does not make you a "hipster".

    I'm not even sure where you got that association from. Hipsters generally don't own anything interesting at all.

  23. Re:Gullible people on Elon Musk To Write a Book About Earth Sustainability and Mars Colonization · · Score: 1

    I generally agree with you. However, with :

    3) how many entrepreneurs have 5 of 5 companies be successes?

    If we guess at 1 in 5 companies being successful, then having 5/5 is about 1/3000. There are way, way more than 3000 entrepreneurs in the world. Just by chance there will be many successful people in the world, and past performance is obviously not a good indicator of future performance, using chance.

    I'm not saying Elon Musk isn't talented, just that with an entirely random distribution you will get people who go from success to success.

  24. Re:Where's the crossover? on Microsoft Releases Windows 10 Preview For Phones · · Score: 1

    God forbid letting users actually decide when to switch user interfaces, it must be done automagically.

  25. Re:Wow, the stairs and the rough terrain! on Boston Dynamics Introduces Their Newest Four-Legged Robot, 'Spot' · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I do notice they've got no videos of this robot going down stairs. That's _way_ harder than going up stairs.