Posts by J

Re: long legs mean high speed

Right. But that does not fit the data, because the 10% longer legs (instead of 5%, the winners) were *less* attractive.

"But 99.9% of our ancestors didn't know any of this medical stuff, so I really doubt the detailed list of deadly faults has any relevance"

Er, that's not really how evolution works, mate... You don't need to be choosing the characteristic (consciously or not) -- otherwise non-human organisms wouldn't evolve, right? If you choose the "good" one (and the propensity to make that choice is inheritable), your descendants will be better off than those who do the "wrong" choice. Not that I really have a reason to think this particular case of the longer legs has anything to do with that anyway...

Penguins have quite short legs.

First...

First they came for the paedophiles but I...

Then they came for the terrorists but I...

Then they came for Paris Hilton, and the whole IT world started a riot.

PH because she is a child at heart, I mean, mind.

Re: Will the first cure from embryonic stem cell research please stand up....please....anyone?

Er... could it be because there is *vastly more money* injected into adult stem cell research than into embryonic stem cell research, since the government funding agencies of the biggest research powerhouses do not allow ESC research, or therapeutic cloning-based research? (some might have changed a bit recently, but it's been too recent). Research is not free, you know. We can only go where people will pay us to go, which is an unfortunate consequence of the system oftentimes, but unavoidable.

Want to push your "morality"-based, from-the-gut conclusions, that's fine and within your rights, but don't try to sound like much rationality entered the equation.

Medical genetics, says it all -- usually not much.

Is SAMP any less genuine as an open source stack than LAMP?

Indeed not, I think.

And I wish them success and hope they grab some 10 or 15% of the market. In an ideal situation, no vendor would have much more than that and everyone would be forced to use REAL standards and things would interoperate and be cheaper. Like what happens in the automotive industry </end obligatory horrible analogy with car stuff>, and other ones too.

I saw, 57 comments...

...and wondered, what on Earth (or in the galactic centre) are so many people commenting on a story like this one?

Then it dawned on me: it must be the Trekkies!

But the important thing, and I suspect nobody has said it (can't be bothered to read it all): I want my anti-matter-powered flying car NOW!

Lovely article

And I, for one, welcome our new bacterial overlords.

I the vulture vomiting in disgust or is it "just" plague?

Maybe...

I happen to think this effort by MS to push OOXML as a standard is a good sign. In the past they did not even bother trying, since they knew they could release whatever they wanted and sheeple would just follow and their stuff would be a "de facto" standard -- who cares about "de jure"?.

What are they afraid now that makes them try this new approach to screwing everyone over?

Brilliant!

Very good spoof, I'm off to watch the other ones now... :-)

Yep, understanding the German is distracting. But at least makes it easier for you to spot that Stalin was "translated" as Sony, I believe!

being taxed indcrimitly is wrong

VERY wrong! Gee, word of the week...

Re: Hungarian nose flute

The air could come from way worse places, so don't complain too much now.

Miscellaneous

"Trying to figure this out is making my brain itch, inside"

OK, here's what you gotta do. Stick your finger up your nose, completely, and scratch it! We don't accept returns.

"i'm only wearing black until they make something darker"

Google it, and you'll find a few places that sell something like that -- although I haven't seen any that has black lettering... :-) One stupid store even sells it in different colours. I guess they did not get the joke...

"How do these nanotubes hold up against the average car-wash I wonder?"

I would guess that the owner of such a car wouldn't go to an average car-wash, but have top less babes do the service at his own mansion, manually...

Paris because she can scratch her brain with her finger and would be a passable car washer.

Re: Ain't free

Yes, it is, if you want to follow the GPL:

http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/opensource-license.html

online sellers who deceive end users?

My arse... It's very likely that:

1- People shopping for software of that caliber will be searching for something legit on eBay, yeah right.

2- They will be deceived and believe that the 12 quid copy they see there is not pirate, and just costs some 1000 times less due to... er... some market force thingy or other. Uh huh.

And what about getting the people who bought the copies too? I suppose they would be interested in trying that, no?

Books...

I'm a big fan of books (and of the interwebs too, btw), but I'd like to point out that books can be published by ANYONE with the money.

You know, it's not because it is in a book that it is good stuff. You still got to have decent background information in your brain AND critical thinking skills. Just see the "cdesign proponentsists" (Google is your friend, haha!) -- they've got a lot of books out, even if all they say is junk. They do not publish in peer reviewed sources (which can also contain bad/ mediocre stuff), because they are not saying anything useful.

Now, I'd also like to say that copy/paste goes both ways, as mentioned by someone above in the "Johnny" case -- it makes it easier for the student to cheat, but it also makes it easier for the instructor to catch. I've personally come across such a case, in graduate school no less, PhD level. I teach a class in some other professors' courses, and they ask me to give the students an assignment. Simple stuff, because they have a week to do it. One of the assignments last year contained an answer that was *obviously* not written by a student. It's easy to tell. And by the way, the stupid guy got it all wrong anyway, having barely adapted the two pieces of a PDF lecture (posted in another Uni's website) to the problem I had given... He didn't even change the numbers from the PDF's example to the numbers involved in the exercise. A quick Google search of a piece of a sentence turned up the original source in milliseconds. Another few seconds after a Control-F and I had the specific paragraph...

Re:Has everyone missed the point...

OK, so someone will write (or more probably copy) a nice tutorial on how to use your router safely, or some other networking issue. You know, "Networking for Newbies" type of stuff would fit the bill. And place the exploit there. How about it? When you google for this, this site might show up. You might notice it's not what you were looking for only after you opened it. Happens all the time to me.

Don't think that only pr0n and h4x0r websites can be "dodgy"...

One hour?

THAT was funny! After the software tells you (does it?) "completed", wait an hour just in case it decides to do something else? I wonder how many times before MS software behaved like this, but we didn't know and happily proceeded to turn the thing off or whatever...

@@colin

But where does it say that the guy has had children? In the Darwin Awards site at least there is no indication he's had any. Just because he is old, it does not mean he procreated already. But he still might have, he wasn't THAT old...

Incomplete

They gag ordered them into not talking about the sales figures, but forgot to gag order them into not talking about the gag order into not talking about the sales figures... Is this even English by now?

The icon is me.

@Gary

"Can't quite follow your logic on this one.All you have to be to become a sworn enemy of a large number of our Arabic population is white and Christian. I qualify on both counts. OOH Dear, should I buy a flak jacket!"

Maybe you know logic (can't tell from this), but you sure must know very little else. Or you are a racist or something. Do you think only your little country contains white Christians?

Either way, the world is full of white Christian people whom "the Arabic population" does not hate. Take Brazil (my country), for example. Fore some funny, unfathomable reason "they" are not our sworn enemies. I suspect they don't even hate us, to begin with. Too many browns there for your taste too, you say? (yep, there are more Lebanese descendants there then there are Lebanese in Lebanon today!) OK, take Argentina? Or Australia? Quite white, and Christian. Very probably more so than the US. Are "they" sworn enemies of these guys, too? Of the Austrians, or the Swedes?

Oh, and I suppose you also don't know that Iranians are NOT Arabs, and their language, even if using the Arabic script, is actually from the Indo-European family (so you can understand: same family as English, Italian or Sanskrit), and not the Semitic family (Arabic, Hebrew).

Maybe you just forgot to write the other half of your expression: "is white and Christian and imperialistic pigs". That might qualify, maybe.

Re: Death Penalty

"One thing some people against the death penalty seem to ignore is that in the US, you must be convicted by a jury of you peers (taxpayers) beyond any reasonable doubt."

That means nothing, and that is why I'm usually so reluctant on this subject. How many people have been found innocent even after being gone through the process you describe, and sometimes more? Racism and other prejudices really cloud people's judgment (and you should see how racist blacks are against *themselves*, it's amazing!). The Innocence Project, heard of it? They use DNA evidence to show that an inmate is not guilty. Two hundred and ten people were exonerated by this project so far, 15 of which were on death row! A guy was freed most recently, after twenty-freaking-seven years in jail while innocent (misidentified in a photo lineup or something): http://www.innocenceproject.org/

Makes one think, doesn't it? What about losing 27 years of your life? (and life in prison is full of interesting situations you'd rather not be part of, no?)

On the other hand, there is no doubt this guy from the article here did what he did, is there? In my opinion, there is no reason why a 20 year old should do that and continue to live. He is just worse than any other, non-human animal. Even if he is mentally sick, can he be "recovered"? The 17 year old who happily went along should spend at least a few decades doing heavy work in a prison. If I understood correctly, her sister can get a lesser penalty than that, but needs some too of course.

What about big mafia bosses, drug kingpins, mass murderers? Cases of great harm where there is no doubt they are the perpetrators? Why spend the money to keep these guys in jail for life? I like to think that spending life in jail doing heavy work would be much harsher penalty than being killed. But I know that, in my S. American country at least, these big criminals don't work in jail, can control their business from there (where they are actually somewhat protected from their competitors outside and end up living longer), and end up escaping whenever they feel like. Just kill them, and spend the money working on the treatment to the REAL causes of criminality, like poverty, injustice, etc.

Life isn't sacred, nothing is. Get real, absolutist people. The problem is not the death penalty in and of itself; it's the way it is applied. If laws and procedures got corrected, there is no reason not to have death penalty for exceptional, *really* beyond reasonable doubt heinous cases.

But that's just what I think now, it might change tomorrow.

YP-P2

"Why peepee too"? "Horizontal stroke"!?

Couldn't they ask someone who actually speaks English before choosing names for this thing?

Idea!

"Victims are unlikely to know they've been infected because the installation is clear and seamless, and the malware uses few PC resources."

Maybe Bill Gates should get in touch with these guys before he retires. Clear and seamless installation, use of few PC resources...

Re: Wonder if radar guns work at that speed....

Well said, you and some other guys. And nothing like an article on either:

-speed

-global warming

-high-def

to get past a 100 comments in no time. So here goes my contribution.

Yeah, yeah, all you macho super drivers/riders are great, I'm sure you're completely objective and realistic about your skills. I'd love the speed limit to be higher too. Problem is the world is full of:

- bad roads

- bad, BAD drivers

- loose animals

- people's expectations (as said above, you don't expect someone to catch up to you from half a mile in 15 s -- which is what would happen at 120 mph)

- fallen objects (how many damn pieces of tailpipe or other blocks of unidentified mechanics have I swerved around, I lost the count)

- sudden mechanical failures of the crappy 1980's pieces of junk ahead of you

- ever seen how those big lorry tyres (trying to speak Brit now) disintegrate and fly all over the place sometimes, leaving quite a few dangerous pieces behind?

- all kinds of unpredictable crap -- gravel, puddle of oil, who knows. I've had my scares more than once on my bike, even going only slightly above speed limits (cough cough).

Ever heard of tunnel vision?

Ten, twenty or so mph above the limit is nothing to get worked up about, obviously. And yeah, crazy speeds can be fun sometimes, but it is just plain stupid out there in the real world. Go get in a track, or does that defeat the purpose of looking macho to your chav mates?

Damn, they banned the account of that video at least several hours ago. But that "Paris ring road" one sure was pure stupidity, there's no way anybody could defend THAT one.

Paris, because of the "Paris ring road" AND because she must be the only one who can't understand the concept that the real world roads out there are not to be mistaken for race tracks (or a place for drunk drivers).

Dead scuba diver

Yeah, I've heard that one: people find a scuba diver, in full gear, dead in a burnt forest. What the hell happened? Well, you know those helicopters with the big buckets full of water, to throw on the flames? So, according to this legend the bucket gets filled at the sea, and... you get the picture.

More!

"If it didn't go off, what the hell's he paying $81k in compensation for?

And if he can't even code file-deleting malware properly, he should have lost his job ages ago for just being crap."

They should have gotten even more, exactly because of that! Having an incompetent idiot in the payroll is surely a loss of money...

Just tried...

I've never used iTunes to buy music, and probably never will (running Linux). Last weekend I just tried the Amazon MP3 download thingy, and it works nicely. U$0.89 for a DRM-less track. For sheer irony value, I made a point that my first ever MP3 purchase was that "1234" song of the iPod Nano ad -- which is one of the top sellers on Amazon, by the way (that's how I got the idea). Not that I really care for the song itself (cutesy and all that, not much my style, and the best part is basically what plays in the ad, the first 30 s). But I thought it would be fun anyway.

Now, buying albums from Amazon, from Linux... no way. Shame, stupid proprietary program. Until Amazon stops doing this, the only way is virtualizing some old copy of Win2K... It worked there too. :-)

Pretty funny

Good video. I would never have imagined I would be laughing at Bill Gates as a comic character because he (or whomever wrote the thing) intended it. Oh, well. I'm sure he's the one laughing, really...

Oh...

It was surely designed for the American market... Ugly thing in "leopard" pattern.

Re:Research Geeks Need To Get OUT More?

Hm, I don't know if that explains it. Wouldn't the same effect be observed in men, even if not as strongly?

If...

If he was a Nordic god, someone else would glue him to the floor, against his will. But then again he would free himself, if only with much hammer damage to the place...

Vulture because that's the closest to an eagle.

Ah...

...there she is! I missed her. Well, not really, but not a bad picture to see, cellulite and all.

Unlosable...

The keys to the dark room and centrifuge room in my old department were tied to 2 liter plastic bottles (empty, of course), so no idio... I mean student would stick it in the pocket, forget about it, take it home, lose it... Maybe 2 liter PET bottle should be made into military grade stuff too?

Re:And this is a bad thing?

Well, call me cynic (I am)... but what would you expect www.CATHOLICnews.com to say?

Re: Well...

"... not too much bother as you can batch-convert your old documents to newer formats anyway."

Great idea! I just don't know why then people keep moaning they cannot switch to OpenOffice, because they would have to convert their humongous amount of files...

Because, you know, MS Word itself cannot correctly open its own old formats, as I've seen many times with stuff I created 10 or 12 years ago. Lots of damn little square on the screen... (and it's not a font problem, btw)

Driving habits

Yep, that is the problem, mostly. As someone said above, how many times there are huge SUVs with one or two people inside? Do people really need that to go to Food Lion? (store here that only sells... guess it?) Got your first baby? People start bugging you to get a minivan, seriously! It happens with a Brazilian friend of mine here, married to an American guy -- his family keeps asking if they're not gonna get a minivan. She tells him that if he buys one, he can stuff it... Hell, I grew up with two other kids and a Grandma traveling in the back seat of VW cars like Passat and its corresponding station wagon (when we got a bit bigger), and it wasn't any disaster... OK, we Brazilians are not as fat, but nonetheless...

What about people going to the movies in Hummer H2s or those humongous pickup trucks? More than once I've seen one or two Hummers, invariably taking a bit more than one parking spot, at the movie theater's parking lot. In at least one of the cases I saw only two people coming out of one of them. WTF? And then people complain about the price of gas, which is about $2,85 here now.

I'm all for having the vehicle that suits your REAL needs (and not just to compensate for the size of your, er, self-esteem), which is quite different from this ridiculous culture of have-to-have-bigger.

Hm...

"So far it is unclear as to how and why Howell was targeted by the RIAA."

Smacks of illegally obtained evidence... hacking random people's computers to find files?

And what happened to fair use anyway?

What about...

Well, they tested him for alcohol. But what about other, more er... interesting substances more apt to produce hallucinations?

@@fess up!

"I watch QVC on cable, it's quite interesting and often has some nice bargains. I see nothing to be ashamed of [and it also makes me feel sooooo superior ;) ]"

Hmmm... I believe that would sound much more convincing coming from someone who is not anonymous coward...

Pathetic...

Pathetic that anyone would defend such ridiculous, unreal ban.

This being the US, I would bet that the offenders used cars to go where their victims were in every single case. Ban them from driving, then, since cars were an indispensable element in their committing the crimes. Just in case they get smart and try to use the bus or a taxi next time they get horny: ban then from using ANY means of mechanical transportation (and when that Star Trek thing comes along, ban that too). But do allow them to go around by horse, we're not insensitive savages after all and these people have to get a living somehow in today's world, even if they once did (or not) do something really bad.

What do you say, there are legitimate uses for cars and transportation that these people should be able to use? Wonders never cease...

I'm pretty sure someone could create an OS- and architecture-independent device that connects to the person's internet cable and records what they do, and someone reviews what the software flags, or something on those lines -- OK, it wouldn't be perfect, and privacy would be gone for these people, but at least the ex-cons would have a much fairer chance of living in the modern world. Probably such thing already exists and is used on you anyway, just more remotely (NSA anyone?). But I guess that there would be work and thinking involved just to preserve some people's rights... And who wants to preserve rights, specially of former criminals, right?

Re: Let's consider this....

"The so called "scientists" can't predict weather for a month in advance, what makes abyone think they can, with ANY kind of accuracy, predict what the weather will be like in one, ten, or twenty years in the future."

I'd have to remind you that, in complexity science, it is usually the case that the big picture is easier to see and accurately predict than the fine details (that may not be the case with climate science yet, I'm not sure, but that is the general point). But since you are so advanced you can tell the guys are "so called scientists", just like that, then I believe I won't need to explain any further, right?