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Comment Re:Facebook search is horrible (Score 2) 33

Yeah, I have several friends who will post/share things on their wall to "find later." Yeah, there's pretty much no way you're going to find that later unless you manually scroll through pages and pages of old posts. Finding stuff on FB is darned near impossible, with their "search" being woefully inadequate. I copy off to Evernote when I can, though FB has taken the genius step of disabling copy (and paste, for some odd reason) in Android, which means running FB in a mobile browser if I really want to archive something.

Of course, searching your own (or friends) history isn't the point of FB, but it seems like a pretty big miss if you want people to stay encapsulated in the system for marketing purposes.

Comment Your "data" doesn't prove vaccines are bad (Score 2) 1051

You're playing games with words and statistics. To wit:

"children who haven't received DTaP vaccines are at least 8 times more likely to get pertussis"

There, you could stop right there. But your statistics belie the truth. If we expect that 16% of children are only partially vaccinated and 4% are unvaccinated, in a population of 100000 children, in which 0.1% get pertussis you get:

81 children out of 80,000 get pertussis, or a vaccinated infection rate of 0.01%
11 children out of 16,000 get pertussis, or 0.07%
8 children out of 4000 get pertussis, or 0.20%

In other words, it means that your child is 20x more likely to get pertussis in the event of an outbreak if her or she is unvaccinated vs being vaccinated. The linked studies you made actually prove the OP's point - a successful vaccine prevents transmission: you do not become s silent "carrier" unless you suffer from a successful infection. And in the case of the linked studies, the concern is over particular vaccines which are not as effective in producing a robust antibody reaction. They're saying you need more/better vaccines, not fewer.

Comment About time (Score 3, Funny) 179

5.5" phone screens are at 2560x1440, with 4k on the way. 8k on a monitor...what's the hold up?

Phones seem perfectly able to light the screen and drive the pixels at less than 4W TDP. Seems odd that 8k is such a large challenge given volume, mass and power budgets 20-100x that of a phone.

Comment Re:Does anyone remember Amadou Dialo? (Score 2) 207

How can you safely produce your wallet, which usually resides in your pocket? If you're all fired up worried about getting shot, put your hands on the hood of the car and tell them which pocket your phone is in. Having had my share of traffic violations requiring identification, it's never been an issue. Then again, I'm not black, so I get a lot more leeway in what constitutes a threatening move and what doesn't.

Comment Why not? (Score 1) 207

A proper implementation should be by the OS maker, though, which automatically locks the phone when the app is accessed - or in which the license/insurance/registration information can only be accessed from the home screen via a special unlock code/access which does not unlock the rest of the phone contents.

While a super-secure app isn't really necessary for police, since they can just call in your license number and verify you're legal/in the system, for things like age verification, you'd have to add some kind of simple challenge/response functionality for people who don't have access to police records (bouncers, cashiers, bartenders).

Not that it matters. Until Apple/Google get the whole NFC payment bullshit worked out and every vendor has an NFC terminal we're going to be carrying around other slabs of plastic to pay for things. Carrying a license isn't really an extra burden.

Comment Re:Summary assumes wrong (Score 1) 567

cue cute black girl shrugging and saying "why not both?".

Monitors are cheap - landscape in the middle and portrait on the sides. And make 'em big (I have 2 decade-old 1600x1200 20" dell monitors flanking a 2560x1600; works perfectly)

Personally, I think monitors for computers should be in the ISO 216 / A series size. 1.41:1 "works" for a lot of content, and doesn't get weird when you shift to portrait (if portrait is your thing, or you're using a convertable laptop in portrait mode).

Comment Re:Poor enunciation (Score 1) 244

While that's somewhat true, the mere act of singing properly (extending vowels and turning dipthongs/consonants at the beginning of the "next" word) leads to this quite a bit. I once learned a song mostly from a commercial recording, then found out that the (somewhat odd) words I'd learned in one phrase were different than what I'd learned. Thing was - it didn't matter. The vowel and consonant sounds were identical for all practical purposes, and it didn't matter which "words" were there.

Comment Re:BPG natively supports 8 to 14 bits per channel (Score 1) 377

If you're not using RAW, you're doing it wrong. JPGs are for end use, and as such will never really benefit from higher bit depths. It's like being concerned that your music isn't being released in 24bit/192kHz. Those people who can tell - and viewing conditions where - the differences can be seen are so rarified that you may as well use a TIFF at 16 bits and (if you want) lossless compression. It's not as if we're worried about space constraints *in those situations* these days.

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