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Comment Re:Diabetics? OtherFalse Positives? (Score 1) 325

I never, ever drive after having drunk any amount of alcohol the previous 12 hours. Not because I am a saint but because it is easier to get right than trying to judge state of intoxication.

Yeah, I'm, by choice, in dietary (mild) ketosis so I am likely giving off ketone bodies in my breath. They are know to confuse breath-a-lyzers. Does that mean that I will not be to drive a car?

Oh, and I have driven while tired and I bet that that is ten times worse than drunk driving so I don't do that either.

Comment A lot of science has become a job (Score 1) 248

The work of many scientists is one of applying for funding and implementing experiments as described in their projects. The blood and passion has disappeared. Among the people who stayed in academia in my generation, I don't see them pursuing /that/ singular idea.

Maybe I am the last of the romantics. So be it.

virve

Comment And that's a good thing (Score 1) 180

I'm all for various forms of retro tech but, seriously, statistical tables? I don't want them back.

I like things such as slide rules, pocket calculators, and even statistical graph paper but tables don't aid my intuition one little bit. If I were to need a statistical table, I would calculate it with a spreadsheet or R or whatever tool handy.

Comment Re: Slashdot racists will be out in force (Score 1) 101

The rus(sians) are not vikings.

Eh, sort of. The founders and leaders of the Kievan Rus were Vikings.

Allegedly, the origin of Rus is in Roslagen (in Sweden) similarly to the word in Finnish Ruotsi for Sweden.

You would likely be able to unconfuse yourself, if you distinguished by Rus and Russians; also the ruling classes and the great unwashed masses.

The rus(sians) are slavic, the vikings are germanic (or teutonic as the english oddly call the germanic tribes).

The term Teutons goes back, at least, to Strabo.

Comment Re:Huffman alternative (Score 4, Insightful) 135

Look, they clearly state that the operate at the level of JPEG-files. So, where is the confusion coming from? They are analyzing JPEG files and using features of that format to compress the already compressed files further.

Which I, honestly, find very impressive.

The reproduce JPEG files in a bit-by-bit faithful fashion. And the have tested in on 16 million (or was it billion) files where it worked without problems plus they don't replace user files unless they have checked that it decodes correctly. I presume that the process is actually transparent to the Dropbox user.

I don't see the problem that you have with this, sorry.

Good work lads!

Comment Re: It's what they say (Score 1) 112

The use of "y" at the end of a word and "i" in its place in the middle of a word was a convention by printers which made it easier to deal with the "y" descender in a stylish way.

I would not say this in many forums, but this is slashdot....

*I* find it convincing and interesting though a reference would be nice. And this is /. so it is appropriate to learn something new and slightly odd.

A pet hate of mine is faux archaic signs like "Ye olde cheese shoppe". The "ye" is just a misunderstanding AFAIK of "the" written with a slightly open, regional form of the letter thorn which vaguely looks like a "y" though it just means "th".

Comment Re:How about fixing the systems? (Score 1) 143

Leap seconds are announced months in advance

i.e. with less warning than the revalidation time for a lot of safety-critical systems.

Hmm., hopefully safety-critical systems are implemented so that they have provisions for leap seconds built in already. What should be needed is organizational procedures for setting the appropriate flag in time.

Further, I would expect that many safety-critical systems are more concerned with elapsed time from some epoch (switch on, last firing of engine, last heart-beat) and less about civic(?) calender time (we meet on January 2nd, 2016 11:01:14 EST).

Finally, in really hairy cases things should be referred to a simpler, monotonous scale (TAI or, yuck some domain specific scheme).

virve

Comment How about fixing the systems? (Score 1) 143

As I see it, this is a question about standardizing and implementing systems properly. Leap seconds are announced months in advance.

It can't be such a big problem systems that handle this correctly.

But then, daylight savings time still seems to give problems. Sheesh!

virve

PS. Anybody who knows about problems with leap days?

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