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Comment Re:Good grief.. (Score 1) 942

I think when your ultimate goal is to slaughter and consume .. an animal stops being a "pet".

Indeed if you are raising animals for food it's advised that you don't treat them as pets...

I mean.. it's an interesting report.. but I don't think anything realistic has been proposed here. They may as well have proposed we treat our cars as pets..

Some people already do.

Why even bother looking at this stuff.. there's all kinds of other areas that could realistically be addressed. For example phone books! The amount of resources spent printing and distributing something that 70% of the time probably ends up in a land fill untouched is astounding. I saw some documentary where they were taking core samples at junk yards.. there were literally layers of phone books.. they used it to date the segments..

Regular books and newspapers have also been found in old landfills and remain readable after nearly a century. Paper is far better recycled. If you want to compost it then it needs to be cut into small bits (e.g. with a cross cut shredder or even a woodchipper) and well mixed with with other organic materials.

Comment Re:I don't think so... (Score 1) 207

Agreed with the parent's comments. Reminds me of this sentiment:

Some things won't go away just by making them illegal. Some women will decide (perhaps against all advice of their family and church) to terminate... and when they do, they need access to safe medical care, not preaching, social damnation, and horrible injuries. If self-inflicted or unlawful medical procedures are all that's available, then that's what these women will use.

Comment Re:This is the Sound of (Score 1) 815

They're called limiters and they exist. But when the amplifier clips hard, it's usually not the amplitude of the signal that kills the speaker, but the unusual frequencies that get added. No limiter will help in that case.

I have to disagree with that. While clipping can generate high order harmonics those will generally only hurt tweeters. When mids and woofers (sub woofers etc) get a clipped signal it's the extra power that sends them beyond mechanical or thermal limits that kills them.

Comment Leadership by Lottery (Score 1) 762

Like someone once said: If a person wishes to rule, that person should in no way be given any power.

Yeah, the problem is that we seem to adapt only marginally to the alternatives, which are:

1) Randomly select (and periodically change) leadership
2) Distribute leadership over as much of the group as possible.

I suppose there's another model, which is to entirely eschew systemic power, but that runs on the assumption that if you don't architect a system there won't be one.

Comment Re:I've conducted my own blind tests... (Score 1) 567

You are not quite getting it. But that is understandable, as this is quite a commonly misunderstood part of information theory.

No; rather, it is a way in which information theory has different definitions than normal use. The poster is using the English definition of compression, and you are using a more technical definition that is part of a specific field's jargon. Since this is an English discussion, I think the above poster can be reasonably viewed as correct.

Comment Re:Two words (Score 0) 448

Really? Which standard does HTML5 correspond to? There is no HTML5 standard. Right now, it's just browser makers doing their own proprietary things hoping to make it standard when things are finalized.

I'm sick of people claiming Video tags, or various other HTML5 things are standard. They're not. Not until the standard is ratified, everything is subject to change.

Comment Re:IPhone. Blah Blah Blah (Score 1) 423

Cut and paste? It's been out for months now, never used it. MMS? Never used it. MP3/AAC ringtones? Always supported, (you have to change the file extension is all), but actually never used them. Video recording? Never used it (and yes I have a 3gs.)

Good for you. You bought an expensive phone and don't use all the features. I've used MMS, cut and paste, an MP3 ringtone and video recording on my Nokia N82 since I bought it in 2007, for about the same price as a first gen iPhone. Newsflash: Some customers actually use the features of their phones, and some customers they don't. Plenty of people expect these sorts of features to be standard at the iPhone's price point, though.

With iPhone I use everything that comes with it and then some because the iPhone makes it easy.

Except apparently video recording, MMS, cut and paste...

Comment Re:The game (Score 1) 201

I never really understood this business model. Say you have 10,000 players all paying $15 a month. Now you make it free, and you've got 20,000 players, but only about 10,000 pay any money and of those only 5,000 have a second or third transaction. It doesn't seem to add up. Granted, DDO wasn't going anywhere and was in the doldrums and this keeps it alive. There are significant support costs involved, it's not like it's just a web site that pays its hosting fees through a little bit of ad revenue.

Similarly, Guild Wars is the same. Free to play (though you have to buy the game). Very popular still, lots of activity. I know some players do pay for extra character slots, or pay to buy up their skills to max. But there aren't that many things you can really buy if you look into it, I can't imagine they get even $5/month per player. But they probably also have lower server costs because of the way the game works (mostly instanced).

That said, the free-to-play model is nice. I'm not big on the DDO play style, so I can't see myself playing for a full month. But I could see doing it for a week every couple of months or so. Also a lot of players like me can't see themselves paying two or more full time subscriptions (some people do :-), so it's nice to have a side game like DDO or Guild Wars at times. Wish Champions Online had this sort of model, that's the sort of game where you can log in for an hour a week and still have fun.

Comment Re:Of course there is parity between the US & (Score 1) 107

As the AC already pointed out, Sony isn't a US corporation. Also, Canon does the same thing. In the US, the 5D Mark II lists for $2699USD, and in the UK it lists for £2690GBP.

If we're going to be jumping to random conclusions based on little to no data (after all, this is /.), these two data points should be enough to conclude that Japanese corporations have trouble doing currency conversions. Actually, to be more precise, customers of Japanese corporations have trouble doing currency conversions, otherwise they would know they are being ripped off.

But in reality, these are just two data points and the more likely scenario is that these two companies (among others, I'm sure) have just found another way to screw over some of their customers.

Comment Re:Actually the 47th (Score 1) 232

computing friggen large numbers isn't as easy as it appears. Consider the fact that your computer contains a discrete(limited) number of bits, and the processor can operate on about 64 bits at a time (depending on architecture). Try putting 2^100 into a scientific calculator, it will probably overflow (can't represent a number that large). 2^43,112,609 is a huge, huge, number.

Comment Misleading National chart (Score 1) 541

A friend of mine works in the ER of a large NYC hospital. Contrary to the flu trends chart saying this region has "high" flu activity, she says the ER is seeing just a trickle. She also says nearly half the staff she's spoken to -- doctors, nurses -- say they won't be getting the H1N1 shot before the deadline. "They can't fire us all."

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