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Comment Human body can't work against laws of nature (Score 1) 470

Human body cannot get energy out of nothing. Human body has to maintain body temperature which is usually above the surrounding temperature and this takes constant energy. And if you eat nothing or just little, the body has no other choice than start getting the energy by burning fat and other human tissues.

However, it is worth to notice that excessive eating doesn't always has to cause obesity. For example, if you have malabsorption, a large portion of the energy that would have been available in the food, just goes directly through your intestine. That is not against laws of nature. However, getting energy out of nothing, is against laws of nature. You cannot store more energy as a fat, than the amount of energy your food has (and in reality your body has to create heat etc and cannot store all that energy as fat).

Comment Inbreeding is much worse thing (Score 1) 233

Cloning doesn't increase the risk of getting genetical diseases the same way as does inbreeding between close relatives. However, current cloning techniques can increase some other genetical risks, but techniques can be improved and many other things increase risk of genetical diseases as well -- like getting a child when you are nearer the age of 40 instead being about 20 years old.

Comment Not transferring memories can be desireable (Score 1) 233

Sometimes it is even desireable that clone wouldn't have the same memories. If the cloned person has had many traumatic events in life, it might be good idea not even try to transfer them somehow to the clone and just let the clone to have better life without all those negative memories.

Comment Getting cloned is an honour (Score 1) 233

What is so tough about that? I wouldn't be against cloning myself or being a clone myself -- although I don't insist of getting cloned. In my opinion, being a clone or a person who is cloned, is an honour. It is a proof that you are so special person that there are people want to clone you and not some disgusting person that nobody likes.

Comment Meaning of pardon (Score 1) 231

It seems that you nor the justice minister Lord McNally don't seem to understand the meaning of pardon. Pardon is forgiveness of a crime and the cancellation of the relevant penalty. It doesn't mean that law wasn't broken at the time. If a person is proven to be innocent after first being convicted, the more proper way of dealing with it, is overturning the conviction/retrial etc, instead of just pardoning.

Comment Your life might be in danger (Score 1) 471

And your life might be also in danger. For example, it is not unheard in many countries that Muslim family have killed their son/daughter if they have found out that he/she is not heterosexual or is having sex before marriage.

And there are many other issues that might more or less destroy you life/family even in western countries, if your name is connected to some things that you might want to discuss with a pseudonym. For example, some diseases, mental health problems, being victim of (sexual) abuse as a child etc might be problematics for many people.

Comment Not working? (Score 1) 91

Not working is relative. Raspberry Pi has some issues (for me the main issue seems to be the low powered USB port which in practise requires using it with a powered USB hub), but it seems to work better than I imaged it would work. And it might have some compatibility problems (sometimes I have had to remove and then re-insert an USB device to make it work) with some devices.

So far, I haven't tried any torture tests or used oscilloscope to check if I am able to detect stuttering when using USB sound card. However, I haven't heard/noticed any stuttering when I have used it to play something, if the load has been light.

Of course it is not perfect. For example, web browsing could work a bit faster. It would be nice if there would be good Android port for it. It would be nice, if the build in sound using 3.5 mm audio connector (instead of using HDMI or external USB sound card) would have better quality etc.

Comment Re:Yay (Score 1) 2987

I guess that even NRA isn't insane enough to demand the right to bear nuclear weapons. Mentally unstable person with nuclear weapons can cause enormous damage and MAD doesn't work with insane persons. BTW, I heard that president Nixon used to order nuclear attacks when he was under influence of alcohol, but luckily the orders weren't ever followed.

Weapons have some valid uses. It is just unfortunate that weapons tend to draw nutters like some magnets.

Comment Compare this to Iraq or Vietnam war (Score 1) 2987

This reminds me of so called missing white woman syndrome. When something similar or even worse happened in Iraq or Vietnam by US soldiers, the killers didn't usually even face any serious sentences (these are just two examples of the cases that news reporters bothered to report, but there has been countless other cases that were never reported):

Haditha killings

My Lai Massacre

Comment Re:I read the article (Score 1) 536

I agree that he has far too simplictic view. In practise, error handling code should in many cases be much more complex than the code that is executed in normal cases, because errors can happen in quite many forms (and recovering from them may depend on the input) - like wrong input, out of memory, out of disk space, insufficient (file) permissions, filesystem/disk disappearing/corruption, problems in network connections, lack of some kind resources, hung transaction, user yanking usb device off etc. And these things can change during the execution of program, especially if the error condition is deliberably caused be malicious attacker - like changing file permissions, replacing files if links, renaming files etc. However, in most cases, error handling core isn't given much thought and typically it is not well tested.

And it depends a lot on the situation, what would be the best (but probably still not completely satisfactory) way of handling the error. Should everything but error log be cleaned? Should we clean something, but leave some kind of transaction log for trying the same thing later? What if we get new error during cleaning process? Is it better to try to save as much data as possible or is it better try to erase all temporary files etc? Should we try do the operation again automatically and if so, how soon and how many times should we try to repeat it? Is it possible to use some alternative method to do the same thing? How to get error message that is as meaningfull as possible to the user -- or should we be careful not to reveal too much information about internal state of the program to possible attacker? Should we wait for user input for handling the error?

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