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Comment Re:Boo, you fad killer! (Score 4, Interesting) 111

People believing they are smarter than billions of years of evolution gives me no assurance that these people have a clue, let alone care about modifying people.

Putting evolution on a pedestal isn't much smarter. It's not some godlike entity which designed humans with a goal in mind, it's a very long, very sinuous process which often gives locally optimal but globally suboptimal results. There is no reason to think that humans, for some reason, can't do better.

Comment Re:Check their work or check the summary? (Score 1) 486

No, what happens is that people will pre-allocate a super large memory buffer (and if their buffer is too small? whoops), or they'll completely forget to do free(), or they'll just copy code from the internet that does it for you.

Incompetence crosses language boundaries, if you think C would make them learn any faster, you're utterly kidding yourself.

Comment Re:Summer cooling? (Score 4, Interesting) 247

The EPA has a page on the very subject, claiming that green roofs not only help with cooling, but also heating, since they act as insulators. They also reduce pollutants in the air and combat the heat island effect present in many large cities. I am not aware of many negatives for them, aside from the maintenance required for the more elaborate ones.

Comment Re:As a bilingual speaker (Score 2) 274

And vice-versa! Being a native French speaker, there are many common English mistakes that I just cannot see myself making, such as their/they're (leur/ils sont). Since the two words have completely different spellings in French, mixing them up is almost impossible, even though I've stopped translating words in my head long ago.

Comment Re:Vice Versa (Score 2) 274

Immersion learning is by far the best way to learn quickly and effectively. It's often used successfully to learn particularly different languages, such as Japanese or one of the many dialects and languages spoken in China. You're better off going there and learning by being forced to speak and think in the language almost 24/7.

Comment What's the saying again? (Score 3, Funny) 389

Oh yes! A fool and his money are soon parted. The guy may not even be wrong, but quite frankly if Apple sells so many watches each year all it tells me is that there's an awful lot of suckers on the watch market. Still, I don't think Apple has the same prestige as Swiss watch brands, and perhaps far more importantly your Swiss watch won't become outdated within a year, with all support for it probably ceasing within five at most.

Comment Re:Is there really that much involved besides look (Score 1) 389

Add functionality to the bands (would love control on the band (swipe or whatever) in addition screen since my finger isn't transparent).

Pebble are already working on this with their "smartbands" which act as quick-swap accessories for their new Time, though whether it'll catch on is another matter.

Comment Re:Awesome Models (Score 1) 235

Temperature doesn't exist at the atomic level. It's a measurement of how much movement there is in a set of atoms. At zero Kelvin, there is theoretically no movement whatsoever. In a gas, atoms are moving in all directions and colliding with the container walls all the time (that's pressure), which changes their velocity and direction. They can also collide with one another, but that's much less frequent, comparatively speaking, since gases tend to have very low density.

Now, since the parent was talking about a cloud of "heating gas", it means the gas is being heated in some way. This can happen through a number of different ways, but most of those ways will only act upon a small subset of the full gas being considered. Thus, at any given time, the probably of a random sample of atoms in a heating gas to be of a significantly different speed (that which you call temperature) than the rest of the gas is actually measurably higher than zero, with how high depending on how much heat is being applied and in which manner.

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