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User: Gaffod

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Comments · 136

  1. Re:Doesn't even need to have anything wrong at all on The Dutch Repair Cafe Versus the Throwaway Society · · Score: 1

    >I have an old laptop sitting around that I have run some clean up tools on and I'm still not quite ready to put it up on Freecycle.

    I don't understand this. Just run DBAN or some other safe-erase program. Are you afraid of magic forensics which can recover overwritten data?

  2. More like cosplay for your car on Star Wars Landspeeders Are Here · · Score: 1

    So he put a funny looking chassis on a car, basically. Why do we care? Is Slashdot gonna cover every boring cosplay forum post as well now?

  3. Better living through cell phones on Scientists Put an End To Smelly Socks · · Score: 1

    Am I the only one who has grown cautious of putting electronics on my ear, in close contact, for many hours of the day? We'll either end up with a super AI or WiFi headaches...

  4. Re:It's all about goals on Geocaching Shuts Down British Town · · Score: 1

    No. That tired old "remark" is not clever either. The aim of terrorism is to intimidate the government of a country into giving concessions, not to give nosy, bored coffee shop employees an excuse to make a fuss.

  5. Re:I hope this doesn't fly ... on Intel Wants To Charge $50 To Unlock Your CPU's Full Capabilities · · Score: 1

    This is a case of you buying a Core i5 and Intel saying "here is exactly what you paid for, and by the way, if you ever decide you should have bought a Core i7 instead, we can magically teleport one into your computer for just $50".

    Well if they can afford selling me an i7 for the price of an i5, even though I might never unlock, why don't they just go ahead and do so? I don't understand, is there a reason why processor must cost a certain amount of money, even if all the expenses going into making them are less?

    If indeed the company runs out of low end processors, and starts selling crippled high end ones, why bother crippling them? Just sell the high end unit for the low end units price, hell call it a sale or limited time offer or whatever. Won't more people buy an i7 than an i5 if they were the same price? It's not like they're stuck with it later either, I don't think Intel is seriously unable to say, "sorry guys, our stocks are properly balanced now, back to the usual prices".

  6. Re:This is painfully obvious. on Researchers Say Happiness Costs $75K · · Score: 1

    I am talking about the security of your assets, not your person. Managing a large sum of money takes effort (and usually money). You can't just stuff a bunch of millions under a mattress. You could buy gold, and even then it is not a perfectly safe investment, but that won't maximize your income. Then there's also figuring out where to keep that gold.

  7. Re:This is painfully obvious. on Researchers Say Happiness Costs $75K · · Score: 1

    You are assuming income and/or funds are linearly related to security under some definition of it. This is not necessarily true. It is correct that having more money gives you more ability to deal with potential threats to your security. In this way increasing money leads to increasing security. However, greater funds tend to attract greater threats and take more substantial effort to protect and maintain. This is why rich people do not lead completely stress free lives. There are more stressful and less stressful ways to make money, but I would suspect that if risk is proportional to income then it is impossible to eliminate some degree of stress from the act of increasing income.

    It is possible that the particulars of the relations are such that up to a point, security benefits from extra money outweigh the cost incurred by having to manage those additional assets, after which increasing your money does not increase your happiness (limit of the difference is +0) or decreases it (e.g. happiness goes up with x^2 and stress cost with x^3). If so, it is possible that this point is $75k.

    That suggests the question of boundless economical growth is at all possible, for example with corporations. Although huge, profitable corporations do exist, I think it is true that ultimately any market is finite- same as and because of the people on the planet, and the resources on it are finite, hence there is a diminishing returns acting on the agent. But is it possible that the diminishing returns become comprised largely of the security expenditures? Or, what about countries? Is there a fundamental limit to how large a state can becomes before it fails to maintain its own integrity, leading to eventual collapse?

  8. Re:Not really, no on Ancient Nubians Drank Antibiotic-Laced Beer · · Score: 1

    You drop a pathogen into a solution that's 2%-8% alcohol with a PH around 4-5 that's had most of its sugars and oxygen consumed and tell me how it does.

    First off, many bacteria produce the ethanol themselves. For ethanol to be sterilizing, it must be 60-80%, at which point it chemically degrades cellular envelopes of cells.

    Second, oxygen is a non-issue. Anaerobic respiration is the default, not exception with prokaryotes.

    As for how the "pathogen" will fare, it will see the low pH and lack of abundant energy sources, and form an endospore. Once it is drank, the pathogens will happily resume their life cycle and multiply inside your body.

  9. Re:Federal funds used to destroy embryos... on Court Rules Against Stem Cell Policy · · Score: 1

    It's as capable of developing into an independent organization as a liver cell is without the proper environment.

    And there is no environment which allows a liver cell to develop into an organism. That is why the bill does not cover liver cells. Getting it yet?

  10. Re:Federal funds used to destroy embryos... on Court Rules Against Stem Cell Policy · · Score: 1

    A hESC is capable of developing into an independent organism, and in its natural environment does so. A liver cell does not.

  11. Re:Sickening on NIH Orders Halt To Embryonic Stem Cell Research · · Score: 1

    fertilization seems to me like the most obvious point to declare a human life as started without getting into judgement calls and gray areas.

    Except then abortion really does become murder, and smoking near a pregnant woman (and chances are you can't even tell, if the "human life" literally has few enough cells to count on a hand) becomes attempted homicide. Of course, you are probably so far gone that you are absolutely fine with that.

  12. Re:Business vs. gaming PCs on It's Official — AMD Will Retire the ATI Brand · · Score: 1

    Oh sure! Now Office workers will pay too much for power they don't use, and gamers will have to pay even more absurd prices if they want anything more than crippled PCs.

    On the plus side, though, this might improve laptops.

  13. Re:Teach 'em the basics on What 'IT' Stuff Should We Teach Ninth-Graders? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You could expand this to include concepts and the more obscure (but important) terms regarding computers. There is no point teaching what a CPU does and the rough differences between single and multi-core: That is trivial for a motivated, observant person to learn on their own; they have access to the thing and can play around with it all they want. What they don't have access is the inner workings of large networks (both corporate and the Internet itself) as well as the history of computing.

    Again, it is irrelevant whether they have a good grasp of history at the end of it, and there is probably little reason to go for that. Just 9th grade is a short time and students have other classes to worry about. What matters is giving them exposure to the history, so that they hear about things they probably wouldn't have heard of reading on their own. The key is to have students recognize that there is a long history of the field which is, for lack of a better term, "history" which can tell us much about why things in computing today are the way they are.

    With regard to the programming language, I'd suggest the same strategy. Explain the basics, don't go in details. Really teaching a language is a 2-3 year long dedicated course for undergrads, you would underwhelm ninth-graders if you tried to teach everything.

  14. Re:see power point can cost you your job on PowerPoint Rant Costs Colonel His Job · · Score: 1

    You "guarantee" it? How, pray tell? Are you a military planning policy maker of some sort?

  15. Re:see power point can cost you your job on PowerPoint Rant Costs Colonel His Job · · Score: 1

    A relation map does not simply duplicate a checklist's functionality. I do not think you have been able to follow the discussion.

  16. Re:see power point can cost you your job on PowerPoint Rant Costs Colonel His Job · · Score: 1

    Some nodes are too abstract for practical mission planning use, as I have said splitting abstract and practical elements into separate graphs for theorizing and planning would be better.

    I do not think its best use is to illustrate the simple point. I would expect that colonels are able to believe their general when he says "the situation is complicated", rather than demanding evidence like wisecracking schoolchildren.

    Note how a different kind of arrow is used to show delayed effect. That kind of detail is pointless for a 10-second snapshot.

  17. Re:see power point can cost you your job on PowerPoint Rant Costs Colonel His Job · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I do not understand this whole thing. The slide touted in your link as the epitome of what is wrong with PowerPoint slides (what does a complicated diagram have to do with presentations?) looks very useful. It illustrates many relationships between the many elements involved, and illustrates how ANSF, for example, has no effect on the economy or infrastructure or vice versa.

    Admittedly there is too much information in it, it should be split in 2 for showing institution interactions and concepts, and strength of relation should be shown by line thickness.

    I routinely deal with very similar charts for biochemistry and intracellular signaling. They are a godsend for those times when you get lost and forget which element does what, and with complicated systems I get lost every 5 minutes.

  18. Re:"Grandparent..."? on Wired Youths In China & Japan Forget Character Forms · · Score: 1

    Yes, that's what I meant. I realized it only after I posted, sorry.

  19. Re:So tell me ... on PR Firm Settles With FTC On Fake Game Reviews · · Score: 1

    There's a difference between being paid to express your opinion, and being paid to adopt an opinion and then express it. It's called a conflict of interest.

    It would be pretty nice if reviewers had to disclose those, now that I think of it. Having a note saying "CoI: I was paid by the developer to write a positive review." under a pile of baloney (and knowing that there is legislation ensuring that you can trust that note) would change things quite a bit. It would probably make review magazines/sites more expensive as well, but I'd gladly pay more for at least slightly more honest journalism.

  20. Re:Please explain more about the harm. on Wired Youths In China & Japan Forget Character Forms · · Score: 1

    If you measure everything with money, you are correct.

    Turkish scientific and cultural output went up almost immeasurably from the 19th century to the 20th, as well as the quality of life for everyone except maybe the royal family. Your little truism is absolutely orthogonal to the matter; the fallacy you warn against has not occurred.

  21. Re:Please explain more about the harm. on Wired Youths In China & Japan Forget Character Forms · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Could you explain more about the harm? Overall, Turkey seems to be doing very, very well.

    Parent is a quaint breed of reactionary and has no clue what he is talking about. Firstly the switch was not just script, before there was an "Ottoman" language which was very heavily influenced by Arabic (in terms of vocabulary and phrase grammar) which rendered any government writing barely comprehensible to the average peasant. For Turkish itself as it is spoken now and as it was spoken before the Arabic influence (there are plenty of Turkish-speaking peoples who were never part of the Empire), Arabic script is not appropriate at all- groups of phonemes are mapped to the same character and some groups of characters are mapped to only one Turkish phoneme. This is partly because Arabic and Turkish have significantly different phonetic structure.

    The switch got rid of the writing system and a lot of the vocabulary, such that it is feasible for the average high-school educated Turk to pick up the constitution and make some sense of what it says. (Complexity of legalese aside)

    The historical record did not go anywhere. Any Turkish undergrad history program worth its salt will have an Ottoman class in the 2nd and 3rd years, which allows students to become perfectly proficient in it. The Turkish historical community is reliable enough to produce translations of important documents without any major political bias. Ottoman courses for interested laypersons are ubiquitous, cheap and often free.

    The only two drawbacks were basically overcoming the friction from a clueless populace which wanted a sultanate to continue, and the aforementioned extra courses that undergrads have to take now. I tried learning quite a few writing systems out of personal curiosity, and I'd say the Turkish writing system is almost perfect (by the way, there is an objective definition of that), with a few minor exceptions (foreign loanwords and some nuances in stress can be tricky).

  22. Re:As someone who has worked with Religious Folk. on Nuns Donate Their Brains to Alzheimer's Research · · Score: 1

    A lot of these people are Smart and have PHD

    Can you give some examples please? I find the idea a bit incredible.

  23. Re:Hemp eh? on Canadian Cannabis Car · · Score: 1

    hemp is illegal for monetary reasons, its use as a recreational drug was leveraged to make banning it all the more palpable to the American people.

    I think it is illegal because the cannabis you can smoke looks similar to the one used for fiber, which makes it harder to spot marijuana fields from the air because now you have to check each one more closely, as well as having to constantly inspect the (presumably) vast industrial fields to make sure they aren't hiding some drug plants in their fiber crop.

  24. Re:Interesting on Video Adverts On the Printed Page · · Score: 1

    If the cost is not prohibitive, this could actually be great for textbooks.

  25. Re:Knowability on 'Retro Programming' Teaches Using 1980s Machines · · Score: 1

    PEEK at a certain address and it tells you the current hour.

    You are complaining that now you don't have to hunt for the address through your notes, and instead can simply call something like System.getCurrentHour()? Or does it bother you that the same command works on hundreds of different systems?

    Oh wait, you are complaining because you wasted time perfecting a task which should have been left to the software anyway, and now that software is doing it, your efforts have been rendered irrelevant.