Re: "Diabetes is caused by obesity isn't it?"
No.
It can be linked to fat (does not need to even be obese!), in type II cases. But there are people who are diabetic for completely different reasons.
Posts by J
1044 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007
It's Sadville: The Movie!
Royal laptop theft 'will expose picture'
France liberates Jesus Phone from Orange
Censored scenes from the Congress WMD report
Wednesday 17th December 2008 19:10 GMT 
Run to the hills! Run for your lives! But where?
"the Commission claims it gathered the thoughts of two hundred experts"
Would be interesting to see whether the experts are, like in the DoJ, a bunch of Liberty "University" graduates...
"jeopardize sensitive US information"
Like, let other govs know the US is doing something it was not suppose to? Something illegal and/or immoral for sure?
"Now would somebody please send this memo to the UK gov?"
Oh, don't worry. No need to send anything to the UK gov. If this "common sense" trend does continue (which is a long shot), the UK (America's lapdog) will just follow along with whatever the US is doing. It's been going on for quite a while, so why would it change now? That's what the once proud British Empire became, sad sight...
Apple's holiday Mac sales flatline
Microsoft spits out ODF plans for Office 2007 SP2
Novell dishes up OpenSUSE 11.1 details
Tuesday 16th December 2008 21:31 GMT 
Re: Microsoft's deal
Well, I used to run SuSE (and then OpenSuSE), but switched to Ubuntu, a little after the deal. But it was more of a coincidence. I had an old (9.3) version of SuSE at work (was changing HD) and a slightly broken install of OpenSuSE 10 at home, so I had to reinstall anyway. Gave Ubuntu a try and it was OK, so stuck with it for a while.
The MS deal brings mixed feelings, sure; but thinking more rationally, I don't mind it after all. So what they are working together? Hating them just because of being MS, even considering all their immoral practices? Well, as a matter of fact I do. But, on the other hand, OpenSuSE or SLED are still (mostly) FOSS, and that's what matters. If Novell started using MS practices and stuff like that, THEN I think it would be necessary to be against them in practice. So far, they are following the Way of the Free, so what's to complain about, really, besides puritanical considerations?
Anti-radiation phone chip withdrawn from sale
Tuesday 16th December 2008 21:31 GMT 
I wonder...
"scientific proof of doctors and professors was brought into doubt"
I wonder, but am too lazy to check, whether they ever named the "doctors and professors", or gave the references to the peer reviewed, respectable-journal-published "scientific proof" they refer too...
Any time you see something like "many scientists agree with (or doubt)" something and it all sounds sketchy, you can be sure there will be no accompanying list of names or respectable publications. Or they will be engineers, or something -- which normal people sometimes mistake for scientists.
Profs: Eating Belgian truffles will make you buy a Mac
Tuesday 16th December 2008 21:23 GMT 
@Coincidences
It's not called "coincidence", it's called correlation. By the way, as the old saying goes, correlation is not causation. But it IS something very different from coincidence, or chance.
E.g.: if you look at the graphs, the more priests a city has, the higher the number of crimes committed. Duh... :-)
Pirate flag? Go to http://www.venganza.org to understand (or not) why.
Apologies after teacher's 'Linux holding back kids' claim
Tuesday 16th December 2008 19:30 GMT
@Gordon Pryra
"Like the tosser above who posted "it makes you acutally have to think while you install it". And that is a good thing? Why?"
It seems obvious that you don't understand much about thinking (or spelling) in general, let alone why it's important for the educational process. So I guess it is no use anybody explaining it, is it?
Monday 15th December 2008 23:04 GMT
Re: the teacher
Well, nothing to say about the teacher in particular, even considering she was just ignorant -- we are all born that way, so no big shame there. So I hope something good comes out of this for everybody.
The deeper question is the thing she says, and many people who should know better also believe, that you have to teach the kids what they will use at work. That's obviously what's implied in that sentence about Windows running in most of the world's computers and teaching them anything else being a disservice or whatever. That is WRONG. Well, it depends on what you think schools are for, anyway.
If you think schools are just monkey training places, then fine. You MUST teach them Windows and Word and Photoshop and whatever the laundry list big names are at the time in some area. And then send the kids to the mills to use that "knowledge" as yet another nobody -- it might all be obsolete anyway by that time. That's fine, we need those people too. It's a capitalist world after all, so that's one need fulfilled.
The thing is that other people (me included) believe that what should be taught is concepts, and analytical skills, and critical thinking, and logic, and important facts that are needed to ground one's knowledge, things like that. People good at those things are needed too, you know, and if we teach more kids well, we might get more of these people. Of course, you CAN teach computing concepts using anything, including Windows (although it might take more work in my opinion). You can use Linux or Macs or Solaris or whatever too. I myself would think that Linux in general, by being more transparent in what it's doing, is a better choice, actually. Failing to do what you want (less common nowadays) also helps in educating, hehe. I mean, I learned much more about mechanics when I had an old, frequently troubled motorcycle and car than when they would "just work". Nowadays Linux just works for most things people do, but the nice thing is that you can still mess with everything under the hood if you want/need/are told to do by your teacher.
What is booting a computer? It's much more than pressing a button, which might not be obvious to a Windows or Mac user when they do it. That's why I dislike the Ubuntu (to name one distro) thing of putting a nice animated splash on top of the ugly boot messages. It takes away that information, that awareness, the being closer to what's really going on. Sure, you don't need to have it, and unless I'm having trouble booting, I don't look at it myself (when I do reboot, which is almost never, hehe). But for someone who is learning, it makes a world of a difference. Even if they don't ever see it again after school, they'll have an idea of what it is that happens behind the shiny little graphic gimmick put there to kill the time between button-push and mouse-working. Or: what is a computer program? A window with buttons and menus that you click on, right? That's all them office workers need to know? Maybe. But I'd hope they would learn better and make their choice. Write their own little programs -- both command line and graphical -- and compile, and link, and execute, and then discover that their other computer at home can't run it (why!?). To learn the concepts, even if they never write a program again. That's what I believe what school is for.
When I was in school in the 80s/early 90s, we had no computers in schools in my country (maybe the richest private schools did, but mine was a small, cheap one). So by about 1990, I decided to enroll in a short 4-month course (2 hours a week only) on computing, at a small private computing school. Eight bit computers (crappy, Brazilian assembled, imports were not allowed those days), no hard drive, only the 5 1/4 inch floppies. It was DOS, don't remember the version. And Wordstar, dBase III+, and Basic. One month for each. I still have the materials and disks in some box back home. What good was that when I got to the lab a couple of years later and sat in front of a 386, with a mouse (a wot?), running Windows 3.11 and Word? From an operational point of view, no good at all. Everything worked differently. But the deeper concepts were the same, and the adaptation was fast. Now, using Linux and MySQL and OpenOffice and Perl for my bioinformatics work, those days are long gone, but it was all built on those primitive tools, from a time when you had to know much more about how computer things worked than now to be able to use them. It's of course better nowadays, from the user standpoint. But what about the educational standpoint?
I will never need, say, history or literature or art for my work, but I'm extremely glad someone forced me to learn something about them. Given a choice, I'd probably have skipped it all.
Ah, I feel like an old cranky geezer indeed...
Monday 15th December 2008 23:00 GMT 
Too weird
@AC "uhhhh"
"9th grade science teacher told the class an example of plasma was mayonnaise and that milk sold in stores had human bones in it"
Hm, that's a bit too much... Maybe the girl has had a small recollection fault there? Is she too literally minded sometimes, maybe? Does she have problem getting sarcasm (to reference another El Reg article from the past few days)?
Thinking a little about it here, because there MUST be a rational explanation for the things allegedly said by the teacher, I came up with the following two ideas that might explain it:
1) in trouble trying to explain what plasma is (how many people really can?) or give an idea how it might look like (how many have seen it at all?), the teacher could have said something like "a homogeneous mess of particles, you know, kind of like mayonnaise is to food...".
2) the bone's one is more plausible, maybe: the teacher might have said something about "milk having a lot of things that are good for human bones and go in its composition", or something like that; which is true, since vitamin D3 and calcium are essential to keep bones in good shape.
Where's me Pollyanna hat, lads?
Flab-fighting EV powered by pizza
Asus sexes up Eee PC 1000 series
Are iPhone users just tight?
Monday 15th December 2008 18:51 GMT 
Editor unavailable?
"but there real boost was"
Argh... That's the mistake I most love to hate. Not being a native speaker of this barbarian language, I get quite confused by this type of thing. Wake up, editor! (is there one?)
@Thomas "which I consider fun but which is not exactly pretty"
Well, at the risk of starting a flame war... I guess you're doing it right. I'd say pretty does not matter, as long as it's fun for most people. I mean, I still play stupidly simple games on my 8 year old Palm, and they sure are not exactly pretty in that handful of greyscale shades they come in. But since they are fun, I play them every once in a while.
Mercedes reveals plug-in, fuel-cell concept cars
Dell battles HP to trash Mother Earth
Bollywood to remake The Italian Job
Lego terrorist threatens democracy
Wednesday 10th December 2008 01:42 GMT 
Stupid
Oh, c'mon... A little plastic thingie is now a threat, really? As mentioned before, this is not for kids. And second, pretending that something does not exist has never solved real problems, I suspect. Although yeah, such a toy for kids would be somewhat in poor taste -- I suspect the families of terrorism victims would not be very amused by the disrespect. Kinda like making Lego concentration camps, let's say. But if you don't like it, don't buy it.
"Its just a modern day version of cowboys and indians! Good guys vs bad guys, where is the harm in that!"
Maybe in the stupid maniquean view of the world that it encourages?
That penguin looks like Lego/Playmobil.
Wednesday 10th December 2008 01:42 GMT 
@AC "Lego werent like this when i was a kid"
"This was put together by an actual Reverend, its near enough the full bible portrayed in lego. Some of it is pure genius, the rev obviously has a sense of humour."
Some reverend. Well, an atheist reverend maybe? :-)
I have seen some of the books before, and in it he said he, an atheist of all people, was doing the series. So I went to the site to see if it was the same thing... Yes.
The hint from his "content notice": "The Bible contains material some may consider morally objectionable and/or inappropriate for children. These labels identify stories containing: N = nudity S = sexual content V = violence C = cursing"
Or from his description of the Book of Job: "The Bible's book of Job, which has just been illustrated by The Brick Testament, tackles these questions head-on and provides God's definitive answer on the matter. You should totally go read it. But if you don't, here's a paraphrase: "I'm God. I can do whatever I want and I don't have to answer to you. Now go sacrifice some animals."
Firm touts anti-radiation chip for phones
Pilots survive night on Hudson Strait ice sheet
Tuesday 9th December 2008 21:23 GMT 
Er...
"didn't have any survival gear, or rockets or flare guns because we didn't have time to get it out of the plane"
I don't know how the situation was, and don't really want to criticize the guys, but... Couldn't one of them have grabbed some stuff in the time between sending the SOS and crashing? A couple rockets/flare guns or whatnot? Or were two people actually needed to land the thing? (I don't think so, but have no real experience) No watch, FFS?
Scorpions tale leaves IWF exposed
Google Oompa Loompas cloaking user agents?
Santa booted from iPhone app store
Tuesday 9th December 2008 10:09 GMT 
Stupid parents...
Well, everyone knows kids love these types of humo(u)r... If the kids of these people complaining are having problems with the song, then I guess they have other, more pressing problems to deal with, really...
We were a bit more hardcore back in Brazil though, and used to enjoy a song called "Papai Noel filho da puta", by an old local punk band (Garotos Podres). Look it up, it's even on YouTube. :-)
One of my grandmas laughed hysterically when she first heard the opening line (which is the yelled title) of that one -- we thought she'd be mad but she actually agreed with the song, hehe.
Hackintosh clone surfaces in the Argentine
Samsung SyncMaster 2263DX 22in monitor
Second Firefox 3.1 beta under starters order
Apple spreads 300 million iPhone apps
Craiglist rant man on criminal libel rap
Friday 5th December 2008 20:07 GMT
WTF?
So they do think that it is fine for someone to go around saying (when it's not true) that she abuses the child, performs "sexual services" for someone and all that? I understand they might be criticizing the part about not saying bad things about the dead even when they are true things, but it does not seem like that is the case. And in any case, nobody is forbidding anyone from saying anything. Just applying the consequences... :-P
There's gold in green: profiting from climate change
Friday 5th December 2008 19:47 GMT
Since when?
Interesting article, but the question is: so what? I mean, since when have governments (or not) being doing exactly that, in any and all areas where money might be involved? No novelty here, obviously.
A little "correction":
"carbon offsetting – paying poor people not to develop their economies"
If it was that, it would be fine, but I suspect you are wrong. It should read something like "carbon offsetting -- paying stupidly rich people from poor countries not to develop their economies". If the money of such offsetting DID go to societal improvement and all that, it would be better than developing the economy (which is probably unsustainable). In fact, a very few people in the poor countries will see this money, and the rest will live on in shit as they have since forever: anyone who believes "trickle down" economics has drool trickling down their chins, or have never seen how the Third World works.
Friday 5th December 2008 19:47 GMT
@Soviet-style Cronyism
"The censoring of thousands of scientists against the idea of "manmade global warming" by the media and government is just astounding"
What an idiotic thing you just said, regardless of whether man-made global warming is real or not. I suspect you are also a creationist, or closely allied with one, because that's exactly what they say once every five minutes. You are bullshitting.
Give us a list of at least 2001 (less than that and it's not "thousands") climate scientists who are being censored, and how. You can't probably give us 20, let alone 2000. If you can't, just shut up then.
Israeli Linux fan squeezes Windows refund out of Dell
Friday 5th December 2008 16:02 GMT
@Rich
"If you don't like the way a company does business, then don't do business with them! Put them *out* of business."
Well, it appears YOU do not understand the real world. You know, the one outside of the free market religion ideas. What you say would work, but only in ideal circumstances. But when ALL major companies just adopt the same practices (for whatever reason), then you do... what? Put them all out of business, how? OK, build your own computer? Or find some small online store that does what you want and hope they are not a scam? Not everybody wants (or knows how) to do these things. Very few do, actually, if my sampling is anything to go by.
Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority, that's all there is to it.
Thursday 4th December 2008 21:54 GMT
Hm...
The EULA says: "contact the manufacturer or installer to determine their return policy for a refund or credit"
So, the EULA does not guarantee anything! By what is written above, one could very well contact the "manufacturer or installer" and then find out that their "policy for a refund or credit" is... there is no such thing here, sod off. There you go, you have just determined it -- never says you will actually get a refund or credit. If that conflicts with laws (which will be different in each country, maybe), that's a different question altogether...
Apple prepping $99 Wal-Mart iPhone?
Friday 5th December 2008 05:12 GMT 
Not too bad...
Not that I'd get one, but this does not sound too bad... My current cell phone plan here is the most basic one from my provider, and it's $33-$35 a month. Includes almost nothing, some 200 min (which I never get close to using up), no free texts. Obviously no data or anything like that -- my phone is extremely primitive. So $70 does not sound like too much if it includes data and etc.
Whatever, what I'm interested in is a 32GB iPod Touch. If Apple would just stop making it hard for Linux fanbois to use the thing, I would have bought it already. As it is not, I have to keep waiting for the nice hackers out there to take care of business before.
Tell Santa to bring more assault rifles
Thursday 4th December 2008 21:50 GMT
Crazy
@Mike Moyle
"you folks on that side of the pond are blessedly beyond racial prejudice"
I deeply doubt that.
Now, as Mark_T wrote above, it's hard to understand, this cowardice/utter panic and death fixation... I myself enjoy target shooting since I was 10 or so, but if that possibility went away tomorrow that would not be any problem, life would go on as normal. I have no reason to be obsessed about guns; I'm mentally healthy. It's quite sick and should be treated, really. Maybe it's some type of homoerotic thing, I don't know... Some way to express what this "puritanically minded" society works so hard to repress in other areas? Who knows... As long as I (or mine) don't get shot, y'all can send each other to hell really -- the problem is that there are commonly "collaterals".
And also, to believe that a bunch of overweight couch potatoes from the populace with gunpowder weapons (assault or not) can scare your government structure into submission is a very delusional thing -- tell us one instance of that ever having happened, please, since I'm not very conversant in American history. But I'm sure "they" want you to keep believing it, keeps you quiet.
'Faith-based' investment firm fingers holiday's most sinful games
Thursday 4th December 2008 07:06 GMT
Anti-who?
Violent games, anti-family? Well, I guess it depends on the family.
I wonder whether they evaluated that game some fundie nuts created, Left Behind or something (you won't catch me dead visiting the site of a "faith-based investment firm" (but then again, aren't they all? (nested parenthesis galore! I should try Lisp, maybe)), so don't tell me to follow the link...)
"The firm said it cooked up the list because it thinks most parents are mouth-breathing morons that can't read the ESRB rating and warning right there on the game's box."
Sounds pretty accurate as far as their target demographic goes, methinks.
Supersonic fighters could snuff out hurricanes
Wednesday 3rd December 2008 18:52 GMT
@Question from the ignorant
And people complaining about the planes not being up to hurricane winds... Well, the Hurricane Hunters are not going supersonic, but they have been flying into hurricane eyes for decades, and with very old planes too. They even take media people with them sometimes: http://www.hurricanehunters.com/
Teen-bothering sonic device now does grownups too
Tuesday 2nd December 2008 19:09 GMT 
Ai, ai, ai...
It was going OK until the following stupid part:
"It seems that the rights of loitering youths in this case trump those of local authorities, property owners or residents to make noises if they choose to. Liberty might have some problems here - a Mosquito is basically just a speaker. The sound that a Mosquito makes has already been sold as a ringtone, and a crackdown which tried to prevent people using their stereos at ambient-plus-5-decibels would be very hard to enforce."
As others have pointed out, there an inordinate amount of difference between listening to music too loud for your own pleasure (and annoying some people in the process), and making a sound, in public, whose only purpose is to hurt. And anyway, I thought there were laws already being enforced against having a loud party in a residential area after some time in the night. At least some places do, and it is enforced. You know, police and all that. Technology cannot solve everything at the press of a button; sometimes hard work is the only way.
And why would it be "very hard" to enforce? And what does being "basically just a speaker" and sold as a ring tone have to do with it at all? Radar detectors are illegal in the US state where I live, and they enforce it. A gun is just a little more than a tube that shoots lead pellets, and people buy it for target shooting and hunting. Therefore I guess you believe it's impossible to enforce any prohibition against using guns to shoot people, right?
Apple tells Mac users: Get anti-virus
Selfish worm targets month-old Windows flaw
Yes! It's the USB Toaster!
The Apple Armada - Still worthy of the Jolly Roger?
Tuesday 25th November 2008 23:12 GMT 
Nothing against philanthropy, but...
"If you look at the US system it is very diffrent to the UK system. There is very little state help for the poor."
Yeah, that's something that bothers me about living here in the US. I make less than $40k and I guess a little less than 1/3 of that goes away as taxes of all stripes. Then people prefer to use that money to kill poor people across the world, instead of using it to make the lives of everybody better in here -- some regions of the country have 25% poverty rate, I've heard. Go figure.
"This is not the American way. The American way is that we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, not look to government for a hand out."
That's quite a stupid idea. Actually, not really, per se. It would be a good one, if everybody started with equal conditions and had the same opportunities in life. Which I don't have to tell you they never do.
You know, there comes a point when the majority of the people don't even have boots to begin with, figuratively speaking. Believe me, I come from a 3rd world country, and not one of the toughest ones by a long shot, and so I have seen first hand how it works if you let inequality run rampant. They lost before they were even born, and you think the crumbles thrown by the super-rich will be fine as substitute. Do you think that is good since that's the American way? (according to you)
Boffins crack secret of dolphins' aquatic prowess
25 years of Macintosh - the Apple Computer report card
Tuesday 25th November 2008 20:27 GMT
Really?
"Apple isn't doing as well as their marketing would have you believe"
Well, far from me defending a company, any company, let alone Apple. All I have ever bought from them is my first gen 4GB iPod nano (I like it), which I plan to retire when (if) I get a Touch. But I dislike Apples dictatorial style and all that.
That said, the article did not present marketing. Or at least not just. As far as I could see, the article presented some charts with not too shabby numbers on them. I wish I had a company doing that badly. Or are you implying those numbers are fake (marketing)? Call the SEC or whatever, then?
@AC "That old trope again.."
Well, but they do not listen with their senses+reasoning, they listen with their emotions... There's serious research about this, "the taste of brand", you know. And they have no clue what you are talking about anyway. Your reasoning is thus wasted on those you're trying to reach, really.
Net pedants dismantle Quantum of Solace
Monday 24th November 2008 22:12 GMT 
@Sarah Bee
"THAT CHEESE IS NOT WHERE IT WAS A SECOND AGO THEY DONE A WRONG"
Have you considered that if it was one of those incredibly bad smelling French cheese it might have just moved itself in between shots? With all the crazy organisms that seem to be growing on that, I wouldn't be surprised.
And also, have you considered how sneaky fast some mice in movie sets can be nowadays?
Honda whips out fuel-cell sci-fi style sportster
Monday 24th November 2008 22:10 GMT
Fugly
That's the word -- although this one is an improvement over other "green" car design I've seen before.
Now to the naysayers... If anyone only listened to you, we'd be still living in caves. Which might have been a good idea, but anyway:
"Who would be stupid enough to be carrying gallons of flammable liquid (which is highly explosive in aerosol form) in a flimsy tank under their vehicle? That's just stupid, think what happens in the first collision... Just stick to the well tested and time honoured horse buggy: you just need a pasture to refill the power source of that one! Where do you see them places to buy gasoline? These people researching and wasting money on internal combustion so-called engines are all fulez and will never succeed with these smelly, noisy, dangerously fast explosive monstrosities. So just give up, plant more grass, and breed more horses."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
