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User: fj3k

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  1. Re:Why has it taken 50 years? on The Dead Sea Scrolls and Information Paranoia · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ... And it must be demonstrably true to be scientific. ...

    It must be demonstrably true to be considered true; but it also must be demonstrably false to be considered false. Perhaps there are people who have found what they consider demonstration of its veracity? Even if you doubt that, you cannot call it false until you have demonstrated it to be false.

    Ah, my only gripe really is that atheism is neither the obvious solution, nor a scientific one. It's just another (minimised) system of faith.

  2. Re:That's not the only thing... on Moon Younger Than Previously Thought · · Score: 1

    Oh no! He thinks the world is 6000 years old!

  3. Re:Correction on Apple Hopes To Drop Samsung As Chip Supplier · · Score: 1

    Of my friends with iPhones, aprox. half have said they would not buy an iPhone again.
    That said, of those who said they wouldn't buy one again and have bought a new phone, less than half bought a different phone. But that's not a representative set, they are the people who buy new stuff when new stuff comes out.
    As an aside, of my friends with Android phones, none have said they would change. But the android phone owners are in the minority.
    As presented, these facts don't make any sense to me.

  4. Re:We are evolving.. on Do Gadgets Degrade Our Common Sense? · · Score: 1

    That we as a group are living our lives more and more through screens and by dilution less and less in the sun.

    Interestingly, I was out of the city with a bunch of mates recently and we took the opportunity to do a bit of star-gazing given that there the stars were visible. Most of them were city kids, and had never seen the stars. I did my best to point out a few constalations I remembered before a couple of them realised they had a star-finding app on their phone. This quickly turned into a planet hunt, but after scanning the skys for a while we were disappointed to find that the only celestial body above the horizon was Saturn; all the rest were on the other side of the Earth. Nevertheless most of the group was excitedly pointing out when they found the location of a planet until one guy excitedly yelled 'Hey, the Sun is on the other side of the planet too!'

    He still hasn't lived that down.

  5. Re:Think again on Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Leave My Router Open? · · Score: 1

    Isn't that his point?

  6. Re:Not so bad to have different systems. on Why Does the US Cling To Imperial Measurements? · · Score: 1
    When we encounter aliens, the world will probably convert to their standard system of measurements for convenience when building the spaceships they designed. Of course, the USA (excluding NASA and the military), Liberia and Burma will stick with imperial. This will have the unintended consequence that an US built space ship will malfunction due to a mistake relating to a alien-measure/imperial conversion; resulting in the planet-sized ship crashing into Earth, killing everyone.

    Thanks a lot America! Jerks!

  7. Re:Not so bad to have different systems. on Why Does the US Cling To Imperial Measurements? · · Score: 1
    But these are just cultural comparisons. I would explain, in celcius, that same temperature range as -20 to 40. It's not exact, but that doesn't matter. And as for thinking in terms smaller distances than a mile, 1km is an easy walk. 2km isn't bad, but tiresome to do every day, 3km is far when I'm tired, 4km is the absolute max I'll walk in one go. Obviously these figures are actually rounded off to general measurements that I'm used to. When driving, multiples of 5 or 10km are much more useful; anything less than 5 is just 'a short distance'. Scale and precision are not benefits of a system, they're just part of the way your brain uses the numbers.

    As for what the body can detect, I bet that study was 'ok, let's change the temperature by 0.5 F and see if he notices', not 'let's change it by 0.40568 F and see if he can tell us that's what the change was'. If so, had they had done the study with 0.5 C, then their conclusions would be 'people can detect half degree celcius changes!'

  8. Re:Proof on OpenGL SuperBible 5th ed. · · Score: 1

    I think you'll find that the issues come from both sides not keeping to the specs...

  9. Re:No mention of Apple? on Oracle Needs a Clue As Brain Drain Accelerates · · Score: 1

    If your cell-mate protests your imprisonment by staging a hunger strike, it might not help you out, but it's a nice gesture.
    If your jailer protests your imprisonment by disposing of that symbolic key to your cell you can be pretty sure he's not really doing you a favour.

  10. Re:article didn't define "entity" on Pope's Astronomer Would Love To Baptize an Alien · · Score: 1

    Your logic is flawed; you can only state that you would have no opinion had you been aborted. Otherwise you would not only have no opinion on abortion, but should not be able to form the opinion that the GP is likely a creationist.

  11. Re:Damnit on Social Media Can Help You Fake Your Own Death · · Score: 1

    Northland summer: "occasionally rising above 30C"
    No wonder there aren't many Aussies there; the good weather of Australia starts in the 30s.

  12. Australia isn't really that kind of lucky. It's more lucky in the sense of, "That almost killed me. I keep surviving these things, aren't I lucky."

  13. Re:Did you actually read my question? on The Great Typo Hunt · · Score: 1

    There are people who care about precise meanings, and people who don't care about precise meanings. Sometimes one group will win out on how we move forward, other times the other will. The imprecise side of the collective 'us' allowed the American/rest-of-us spelling rift to take place, but it was the precise side that formalised it. You can get annoyed at people who, through their laziness, make it difficult for you to understand what they are saying; or you can choose to let it go. Nobody is perfect, and there is often lots of fun in pointing out the stupid things people say without meaning to.

  14. Re:Yep on Dell Selling Faulty PCs · · Score: 1

    I bought my first dell computer a year or so ago. The hard drive died a couple of months later. After an eleven minute phone call they'd organised a tech to come out and replace the drive and check why the hinge light had been flickering. I've never had such a short phone call with tech support before, even when I already know the problem they usually insist on doing some dumb check or subtly hint that it was probably something stupid I'd done; but this guy was like, 'yep, sounds like you're right'. It would have been two days for the tech to come except I wasn't available that day. Does happen.

  15. Re:Dirt floor? on School Putting Autistic Children in Fenced Enclosure · · Score: 1

    I don't know about where you're from, but in Oz we have this thing called "grass". It's what people normally expect a playground to be covered in... except for the sand-pit... oh and basketball courts, etc.

  16. Re:Seriously... on xkcd, Devotion To Duty · · Score: 1
    I hate onion. Seriously, no analogy, I hate onion. The rest of my family is obsessed with it. I tried expressing my distaste for it by calmly asking for it to be not added to my food; but in the end I lost out because it's easier to make one dish than two when there's only a minority that don't like one non-essential ingredient and the rest do. When I was a teenager, I did the teenager thing of getting really upset that 'nobody get's it'. Now my response is to pick the onion out and simply respond to the inevitable questions, "I don't like onion... I just don't."
    If you don't understand why someone doesn't like onion, you'll never find out from me. It's worth neither your effort nor mine.

    However there is one more thing I've learnt; expressing an opinion of distaste for something where it is clearly a matter of taste generally just degenerates into an baseless insult to the cook (or cartoonist). You don't find XKCD funny? Fair enough, but remember that's just your opinion. My mum thinks the Simpsons aren't funny, it's "just stupid"; that doesn't make it so. To state an opinion in the manner that I've seen on the XKCD sucks blog isn't enlightened, it's just playing the "I am so much smarter than ..." game that the site claims to abhor.
    That's why I don't get XKCD sucks.

  17. Re:93% of Programmers Think You're Wrong on Why Programmers Need To Learn Statistics · · Score: 1

    Using your example you should have interpreted the #-# as the first number is the one you know and the second number is the one you don't know. Thus you cross out the 0-0 and 0-1 because the known number is 1 and those have the known number as 0. So then you're left with the 1-0 and 1-1 as the possible ones so the probability is 50%

  18. Re:It's a trick question on Are You a Blue-Collar Or White-Collar Developer? · · Score: 1
    My experience of engineers who see programmers such are those who think programming is engineering's easier cousin; less of the brain work and more of a guess/check experience. They do an engineering degree, decide that's too much work, then get a job as a programmer and drive their co-workers nuts with their unjustified superiority complex. It's bad enough that by doing 'introduction to programming for engineers' they think they've become programming geniuses; even more than someone whose entire degree was based on programming. I knew one who insisted that Java was the best programming language in response to me suggesting that I preferred C. I asked him which other languages he'd used, but Java was the only one he knew. Of course, as an engineer he knew better than me. I had one engineer bragging about how high he scored on an online IQ test, and helpfully pointing out that if other people didn't score that high it's not necessarily a bad thing. I didn't have the heart to tell him I'd scored 10 points higher on the same test.

    However, that said the arrogance I can easily deal with. It's the horrible code these guys produce that really riles me. Programmers might not follow engineering practices, but that doesn't mean we just hack some random code together without putting any degree of thought into it. But that's what these guys seem to think is acceptable.

    Also, a hash is not an acceptable method of sorting a pair. The fact you had to skew your data to use the hash so should have suggested that perhaps there's a better way. Do not use DOM parsing if you're just going to traverse the tree linearly once and then throw the thing away. THINK!!!

    I don't believe all engineers are like these. I'm just annoyed.

  19. Re:I wonder on Firefox Most Vulnerable Browser, Safari Close · · Score: 1
    My personal favourite section is the 'HTTP Probes and Attacks Statistics'. It's just the way it's done.
    "Microsoft fixed blah",
    "Apple fixed blah, which would otherwise cause end-of-world",
    "Problem found in Oracle which can cause end-of-world",
    "Problem found in Microsoft, but it's been fixed so only dumb-dumbs affected".

    Well, that's the gist anyway.

  20. Re:No. on Plug vs. Plug — Which Nation's Socket Is Best? · · Score: 1
    LEDs and glow in the dark dots have been going in and out of fashion for decades. I saw one and thought it was new and exciting, then found another that was probably 20 years old...

    Whilst I agree with how nice the symmetrical Italians' plugs look, if you look closer they have two different, and incompatible, sizes for different rating. Having not seen this in use I don't know how inconvenient that is (maybe not at all...); but I have extensive experience with the Australian way and like the way that's done here.

  21. Re:No. on Plug vs. Plug — Which Nation's Socket Is Best? · · Score: 1

    That's shocking!

  22. Re:Mod parent up... on FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial · · Score: 1

    Ah, but if you're using sci-fi to allow your elephant to exist, then technically your elephant is sci-fi. And part of being science fiction is being fiction. Therefore your elephant still doesn't exist! Reality sucks sometimes.

  23. Re:Obligatory on Ant Mega-Colony Covers the World · · Score: 5, Funny

    I've tried that, but they keep bugging me about killing the ants...

  24. Re:Real summary: on An Argument For Leaving DNS Control In US Hands · · Score: 1

    Either the submitter can't read, or he's completely devoid of critical sense.

    I concur. All you need for an argument against this a the same calibre is "Americans are stupid, so they should hand it over."
    I'm not flaming, Americans are great people and all. I'm just saying stupid generalised arguments call for stupid generalised arguments.

  25. Re:Climate Change? No. on Is Climate Change Affecting Bushfires? · · Score: 1

    Control burns aim to get rid of the stuff that will burn quickly in a bushfire. Dead leaves, dry grass, etc. all allow a fire to spread fast, and also jump via embers blown several k's away from the fire. Trees burn slowly and don't catch alight as easily. Thus to make a bushfire more manageable, you get rid of that which helps it get out of control.