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Comment Re:Smarts (Score 0, Flamebait) 122

Overly artistic people tend to not plan enough, painting themselves into a corner.

Good musicians are generally good at analytical tasks, including math, but also have the artistic ability needed to take that critical step back and pay attention to the system design

TLDR; some people are somehow better at some things than some other people. In other words:

A lot of very people don't bother going beyond a certain point simply because their primary interests lie elsewhere.

Comment Re:C!=C (Score 1) 270

I read the GP as "Facebook usage may correlate, but doesn't necessarily cause [increased STD rates]." In which case it would be perfectly correct.

Regardless, any discussion of causation based on the information provided in TFA is completely worthless. It simply says that there is geographical correlation between Facebook use and STD rates, that some people with Syphilis have had sex with people they met online, and that people who meet over the internet are more likely to engage in "risky" behavior.

The titles "Facebook Leads to Increase in STDs in Britain" (/.) and "Facebook blamed for rising STD rates in Britain" (TFA) both imply causation when in fact none has been shown. I think this is what the GP was pointing out. I'm sure you'll find plenty more alternate theories of causation in other threads.

Comment Re:What's up with /. Headlines? (Score 1) 389

noun gerund adjective noun verb adjective - WTF!?

Fixed that for you. "Security" is the type of advice being given, so it is effectively an adjective in this sentence. It's just subject-verb-adjective with a complex subject.

A headline with the same structure could have been: "Students Taking Music Lessons Considered Intelligent", which I don't think anyone would have a problem with.

The real issue with this headline is that it's unclear if 1) advice is rational, 2) the rejection is rational, or 3) the users themselves are rational, which could be made clear by these alternatives:
1) "Users Reject Rational Security Advice, Researcher Argues"
2) "Rejecting Security Advice Is Rational For Users, Researcher Argues"
3) "Rational Users Reject Security Advice, Researcher Argues"

The "considered" construction can be elegant in some cases but I don't think it should be used when it can introduce this sort of ambiguity.

Comment Re:Surprise (Score 2, Insightful) 272

I wouldn't let Microsoft off the hook just yet. Lithium ion batteries need to be slow charged the last 10-15% of their charge cycle or they will be damaged. There are already known unfixed issues with the Vista/7 battery controller, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear some lithium ion batteries are failing through mismanaged charge cycles.

If the operating system (or any software) were in charge of regulating the battery charge cycle, how would the battery charge safely while the system was powered off? There should be hardware in the charge circuit to prevent this kind of damage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_controller

The Internet

First European Provider To Break Net Neutrality 343

Rik van der Kroon writes "Major Dutch cable provider UPC has introduced a new network management system which, from noon to midnight, for certain services and providers, caps users' bandwidth at 1/3rd of their nominal bandwidth (Google translation; Dutch original here). After the consumer front for cable providers in The Netherlands received many complaints about network problems and slow speeds, UPC decided to take this as an excuse to introduce their new 'network management' protocol which slows down a large amount of traffic. All protocols but HTTP are capped to 1/3 speed, and within the HTTP realm some Web sites and services that use lots of upstream bandwidth are capped as well. So far UPC is hiding behind the usual excuse: 'We are protecting all the users against the 1% of the user base who abuse our network.'"

Comment Reverse engineering (Score 5, Interesting) 326

Apple says they haven't actually rejected the app, they're just continuing to "study it," and that it may "alter the iPhone's distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone's core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging, and voicemail."

So Apple is holding Google's app in limbo until they have time to reverse engineer the functionality and release it as native functionality of the iPhone?

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