Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Human Subjects (Score 3, Insightful) 91

"In reality, the worst case scenario now involves an immune host/carrier. "

Looks like in reality you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about. Such a person/vector would be a pathologist's fucking wet dream to forming a vaccine against the disease in the first fucking place.

You watch too much TV.
You can't just find "patient 0", or "the primordial sample" as TNT's shitty show calls it, and then magically get a cure shat out.
You can't just find some schlub who's immune and magically figure out why and make a vaccine to immunize other people.

Comment Re:talk about "old tech" (Score 1) 94

The whole point of the picture element is that you don't have to download all the possible sizes, just the one that's appropriate for your display.

What's appropriate for my display, exactly?
You have to base it on the VIEWPORT, but that's VARIABLE because the USER can change that shit.
Any viewport change and you risk having to download the newly "appropriate" version.

This shit is retarded - just provide a decent size by default and offer a link to the original size.
The whole premise of why we'd want to do this is retarded as well. Phones are getting resolutions of 2560x1440 now.

Comment Re:Her work (Score 1) 1262

How can you tell when you receive a lot of death threats whether any of them are credible? Some people are very angry about what she has been saying, probably most of them don't think it would be a god idea to kill her, but in this case most is the operative word, especially when the people giving them know where you live....

The fact that you're receiving a lot of death threats tells you that none of them are credible.
When you receive one death threat, it's worth looking into. The police will investigate, offer protection, and determine if it's credible.

Also, if you're getting death threats over the internet in response to some stupid shit you said, then it's not a credible death threat.

Comment Re:Bad business practice (Score 1) 139

Only you normally don't need to be online, as Steam has an offline mode?

Steam's offline mode does not work. It has never worked. It will never work.
The entire premise is fucking retarded - you have to be ONLINE in order to enable OFFLINE MODE. You have to KNOW that you're going to go offline in advance,
If you're not in offline mode and you have no internet connection and you launch Steam, it will simply fail to connect and you can't do anything with the Steam client.

If you are in offline mode and you do have an internet connection Steam will revert to online mode when it feels like it and start to do all the things you don't want it to do. And if a game has an update available, Steam will refuse to let you launch the game while in offline mode. Steam can learn of updates while in offline mode if you do have an internet connection, and lock you out of games.

If you are in offline mode it's just a matter of time before Steam decides you need to reauthenticate. Time, connection to a network (with or without internet connectivity), fucking connected bluetooth devices, etc. can all trip Steam's alarms and cause it to shut you out of your games until you reauthenticate.

Comment Re:It's supposed to look that way (Score 1) 167

There are a number of titles on NES that I can think of such as Empire Strikes Back which only look correct on CRT or anything that does proper NTSC color artifact emulation. (and actually sonic games on genesis too!) I've written a game editor for Apple // graphics which uses NTSC artifacts as part of the editing experience -- and also part of the image dithering/conversion algorithms -- and believe me: It makes a huge difference when you are designing graphics with a 6-color palette where you actually get an extra handful of extra "fringe" colors when using some combinations. If you are still unsure, use an emulator with NTSC emulation (Blargg's is great) and then switch over to plain RGB. There is a huge difference.

Also, a final note on this (Caveat: I am an emulation author and this information is in a very well written wikipedia article on Y'UV if you want to fact check me...) You will NOT EVER get the same colors from RGB than you get from a CRT. The color spaces are different. Emulators can simulate (and in some cases very well) what an analog display does, but it only goes so far. In the NTSC-to-RGB conversion process you wind up having to transform from one color system (Y'UV) to another (RGB) using some rather simple math but then you also have to alias the results to fit the values (which are often outside the 0-255 range). There are colors in the Y'UV spectrum (I'm talking about the Apple colors but there are some on Atari and NES too) that are so saturated that they look completely neon, and those colors actually don't exist in the RGB spectrum at all so you wind up with a rather muted look compared to the real thing.

A scan doubler is okay I suppose for this, but really if you want it to look old school nothing beats the real warm glow of a CRT. If you want to play retro games on an RGB screen, just use an emulator. They're cheaper, and if done correctly you're lucky to ever really notice a difference. :-) I think that you can take a Raspberry Pi and make a dedicated emulator solution for 20% the cost of this scan doubler solution and be just as happy if not happier.

You can't say YUV has colors that RGB doesn't and expect that to apply to reality. You have to compare the actual output of a CRT to the actual output of something displaying an RGB signal. Monitors and TVs have such wildly different physical mappings for given color spaces that you simply can't make such a blanket statement.

Comment Re:Sigh (Score 5, Interesting) 341

We ALL know how Politicians get bought and sold so let's cut the "total" bullshit here.

Yes, they do. But not all of them and certainly not in the manner that the GP presented. One needs to actually understand how the system works before one condemns it and/or proposes fixes for it. Incidentally, most of the people in politics hate the system as much as you do. You think they enjoy spending so much of their day begging people for money so they can fund their campaigns? The real world isn't House of Cards, most people actually enter public service for noble reasons, ranging from the mundane fixing of potholes to the desire to advance a social cause. The problem is two fold:

1) Campaign finance reform is inherently suspect because it's passed by people who have an incentive to make it harder for incumbents to lose elections. There's a reason why opponents frequently referred to McCain-Feingold as the "Incumbent Protection Act"

2) Meaningful campaign finance reform would require a Constitutional Amendment; the idea I most liked was the notion of precluding private donations but giving every American citizen X dollars to allocate as they see fit. It's an awesome idea but one that's utterly unconstitutional. Perhaps you should start building a network for this concept rather than spouting talking points about money going into Senators pockets?

Comment Re:Correlation Does Not Imply Causation (Score 1) 281

Having everybody live off a high protein diet is unsustainable. There are whole segments of American society that couldn't afford it, never mind the third world, and even if money was no object it would be completely unsustainable from an environmental standpoint.

It's cute though that you took what I was saying and morphed it into "cutting sugar is unsustainable"; all I did was condemn your silly paleo diet, not the notion of cutting sugar or making other healthy lifestyle choices. One can cut out soda (or even enjoy it in moderation) without adopting a made up diet that claims to be what our ancestors ate.

Of course, physical activity is even better. I eat whatever the hell I want. You can do that when you're averaging 30 miles a week of running. Pass the cheesecake, mmm'kay?

Comment Re:Sigh (Score -1, Offtopic) 341

Of course they will, while comcast is telling them this, they are stuffing wads of money in the senators pockets.

You know that talking point is total bullshit, right? What you describe would be a felony offense in the United States. Nor can corporations give money directly to campaigns. They can donate to PACs, which are a special animal in the American political system, but they can't donate directly to campaigns or candidates. When people tell you that "Big oil/telecom/Hollywood/whatever gave X dollars to Y candidate" they really mean that the employees of those industries gave X dollars to Y candidate. Work at a gas station and donate $20 to your State Assemblywoman? That's added to the total donation from "big oil" when her opponent needs a talking point.

I realize such intricacies don't make for good talking points but it would be extremely helpful if people would at least learn how the system works rather than spreading FUD that only serves to undermine the tenuous amount of faith we have left in our system.

Comment Re:Correlation Does Not Imply Causation (Score 1) 281

Try doing any cardio of moderate to heavy intensity (which you really ought to be doing, if you want to live a long life) without carbs. Your diet is a fad and an utterly unsustainable one (from an environmental standpoint) at that. If you really want to live like our ancestors did start having sex at 10 and forgo modern medicine. You'll be dead in your 20s and the carbon impact of your selfish lifestyle will cancel itself out.

Comment Re:Correlation Does Not Imply Causation (Score 1) 281

she says this while sat there drinking coffee

What's wrong with coffee?

If she doesn't change her lifestyle, i'm estimating she will be bedridden within 5 years and dead within 10, whereas if she put some effort in, she would have a chance of living a lot longer.

Except she won't be. And that's the problem. If they take their blood pressure and cholesterol meds they fucking live forever and just keep on eating. Meanwhile the rest of us get to subsidize their lifestyle choices because our healthcare system doesn't allow insurance underwriters to take lifestyle choices into account. The 40 year old sedentary fat ass pays the same as the 40 year old marathon runner.

Comment Re:Correlation Does Not Imply Causation (Score 1) 281

Yeah... and I have found something that works extraordinarily well at burning fat: sprinting. I do a 15 min jog and then 10 reps of 20s sprints/10s rest. Somehow, this basically just completely bypasses the normal laws of physics and starts telling your body to burn fat immediately

Fat metabolism doesn't work that way; your body can metabolize a finite amount of fat in a given time and when the muscles call upon more energy (as they invariably will if you're sprinting) the difference is going to come from glycogen. It does take a few minutes for the fat metabolism to get going -- this is one of the reasons why distance runners warm up and/or start slow in long runs -- though there are interesting studies that suggest caffeine can accelerate the process.

Comment Re:Correlation Does Not Imply Causation (Score 2) 281

The human body is designed for long periods of rest and short bursts of activity, e.g. running away from / after some animal. While sustained exercise does burn a lot of calories and have other benefits, short bursts put muscles into high energy mode constantly so as to be ready.

The human body isn't "designed" for anything but it is remarkably adapted to endurance events. You almost can count on one hand the number of animals that can keep up with a human through a moderate endurance race (5k or 10k) never mind a marathon. Horses, dogs, the ostrich, and a few others. It's no mistake that we domesticated the first two in that list. Humans have even been known to beat the horse at a marathon on particularly hot days.

Point being, I'd question your claim that the human body is "designed" (adapted is really a better word, FYI) for long periods of rest w/short bursts of activity. What you've described there are the big cats and other ambush predators.

Comment Re:Correlation Does Not Imply Causation (Score 1) 281

Diets that produce lower insulin response give a metabolic advantage and reduce hunger.

That may be true but at the end of the day it's still going to come down to self control. We're one of the few (the only?) animals blessed with the ability to override our base instincts. I guess some people are too powerless to do that.

Combined that's roughly equivalent to a 1.5 mile jog for a 200lb adult, nothing to sneeze at.

Run 20 to 40 miles a week and you will sneeze at a 1.5 mile "jog" :)

Comment Re:Correlation Does Not Imply Causation (Score 1) 281

my net calories to a reasonable level. Reasonable ranges from 2,000 on days of doing nothing to >5,000 on days with mega hikes or long runs.

(Those numbers would be totals, not net, obviously. My net intake averages around 2,500, which is about right for a high metabolism male....)

Slashdot Top Deals

And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones

Working...