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Comment Re:Fahrenheit: It's for telling temperature (Score 2, Interesting) 1233

"Fahrenheit also has more descriptive power due to smaller degrees"

Maybe so, but can you tell the difference between 72 F and 74 F? I highly doubt it, and that is a larger difference than one degree Celsius. Anything that needs more precision than that can use decimals.
100 F being "pretty hot" and 0 F being "pretty cold" doesn't really help anyone too much, whereas 100 C being, "don't go outside because you'll boil to death", or 0 C being "it could snow at this temperature", seems like a much better arrangement.

No one should ever need to use Fahrenheit, or god forbid, Rankin, which is even worse, and I am of the opinion that Fahrenheit and Rankin should not exist, and therefore no one will need to use them interchangeably. Same goes for the imperial measurement system. It also does not allow "more descriptive power", since it can only be subdivided by multiples of 8, or 12, or whatever you felt like at the time before it just gets ridiculous.

Comment Re:This Legislation Needs More Youtube Justificati (Score 1) 620

Great video. But at least one of the cars was driving on the wrong side of the road.

The girls and the first car they hit were both driving on the left, but the third car was driving on the right hand side of the road. Also, he had to be at least a few hundred metres out when the crash first occurred. That driver must have been texting too.

Comment Re:Missed one: (Score 1) 397

All nice and well, but that's still not understanding women. You just have the operators manual. It's similar to knowing how to drive a car, or knowing that you can run. Most people can (somewhat) drive, but they probably couldn't tell you how it worked. They can give you an explanation like "the gas goes through the pipes to the engine and then it goes vroom!", but they won't understand how it works. It just does; much like your explanation on how you understand women. You don't. You simply know how to push the buttons in the right way to get them to do what you want.

Comment Re:Wow. This is the only poll which tells you. . . (Score 1) 315

"An answer between the most and least popular" depends on whether "most popular" refers to the option of most popular or the option with the most votes. Being ambiguous, you could decide whichever one makes you right (the latter), however, being a dick and having voted for the least popular, I'm going to decide that it's the former option, and that everyone's wrong.

Comment Re:Money laundering made easy? (Score 1) 472

"considering the very high melting point of gold"
Gold has one of the lowest melting points of all metals. Just over 1000 degrees Celsius. Clearly this is still very hot, but something as easy to find as a charcoal or natural gas can reach this temperature. A blowtorch is even hotter.
Now, I'm not sure how tight the security is around these things, but if you wear a ski mask, that could possibly be enough, and as long as you're not doing anything suspicious to the machine, very few people will pay you mind.

Comment Re:Uhhh... (Score 1) 485

well, yes and no. when the police look at something, it either has to be in plain sight, or they need a warrant for it to be admissible in court. something similar /should/ apply to regular people too, so, if the photos were just there, then it's fine, but if they were in an envelope, he'd need a valid reason for actually looking through the guys stuff and finding it.
Medicine

Submission + - How Common is Scientific Misconduct?

Hugh Pickens writes: "The image of scientists as objective seekers of truth is periodically jeopardized by the discovery of a major scientific fraud. Recent scandals like Hwang Woo-Suk's fake stem-cell lines or Jan Hendrik Schön's duplicated graphs showed how easy it can be for a scientist to publish fabricated data in the most prestigious journals. Daniele Fanelli has an interesting paper on PLOS One where she performs a meta-analysis synthesizing previous surveys to determine the frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct. A pooled weighted average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once -a serious form of misconduct by any standard- and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behavior of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others. "Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct," writes Fanelli. "It is likely that, if on average 2% of scientists admit to have falsified research at least once and up to 34% admit other questionable research practices, the actual frequencies of misconduct could be higher than this.""
Operating Systems

Submission + - Ext4: Stable for production systems? 1

dr_dracula writes: Earlier this year the ext4 filesystem was accepted into the Linux kernel. Shortly thereafter it was discovered that applications, such as KDE, were at risk of loosing files when used on top of ext4 http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/19/1730247. This was diagnosed as a rift between the design of the ext4 filesystem and the design of applications running on top of ext4. The crux of the problem was that applications were relying on ext3 specific behavior for flushing data to disk, which ext4 was not following. Recent kernel releases include patches to address these issues. My questions to the early adopters of ext4 is if the patches have performed as expected. What is your overall feeling about ext4? Do you think is solid enough for most users to trust it with their data? Did you find any significant performance improvements compared to ext3? Is there any incentive to move to ext4, other than sheer curiosity?

Comment Why? (Score 1) 184

Why is there even a need to reduce/eliminate lightning in the first place? from what I can find, there's an average of 90 lightning related deaths per year in the USA, which is not very much at all. There seems to be no reasonable explanation on why lightning needs to be stopped. Seems the resources could be better spent preventing other things.

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