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Comment Re:Yeah, (Score 1) 5

Ritalin (speed) literally numbs your emotions - which is why it's used as a "solution" for situations like the one above.

Ritalin is methylphenidate, not amphetamine (speed).

Ritalin (speed) literally numbs your emotions

What is the scientific basis for this claim?

Methylphenidate and other dopaminergic stimulants can reduce hyperactivity for those with a genetic variant that affects the dopamine D4 receptor. Since D4 is also linked to emotional processing, this could explain a subjective reduction in emotions in some individuals. I think there are many people who do NOT feel emotional numbness on methylphenidate.

Youtube

Submission + - YouTube's ready to select a winner (youtube.com)

Proudrooster writes: From YouTube. Thanks for all your great entries.
YouTube finally has enough videos to begin selecting a winner.
What do you think is the #bestvideo on YouTube?
We've been thrilled with all of the diverse, creative entries we've seen so far, and we can't wait to begin the process of selecting the best video. We'll be announcing the winner in 10 years. All videos will be deleted within the next 24 hours.

Comment Re:Does it matter? (Score 4, Interesting) 226

I can only speak for the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, but modern Android devices are faster in part because of software performance improvements. Android 4.1 and 4.2 both have performance improvements, and upgrading the Tab 2 from the 4.0 it came with to 4.1 or 4.2 makes the OS visibly faster. The Nexus 7 comes with Jelly Bean (can't recall if 4.1 or 4.2 out of the box), so everything is fast to begin with.

In this way, Android is similar to Mac OS X - initial releases were rather slow, and subsequent versions (10.1, 10.2, maybe 10.3) were faster simply because there was a lot of easy optimization work to be done.

As an iOS user I didn't really like Android until Jelly Bean.

Comment no, this is nothing new (Score 2) 1

I recall seeing this before.

They give devices away, but don't pay to have them shown:

Gavin Polone, who produces HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, says about the Apple-producers relationship that “Apple won’t pay to have their products featured, but they are more than willing to hand out an endless amount of computers, iPads, and iPhones. It’s kind of a graft situation.”

Comment Re:TVs (Score 1) 436

5:5 pulldown is real (playing each frame from a 24 fps source five times on a 120 Hz display), and does not involve motion interpolation. Watching content played at constant frame raters looks better, but it's a luxury many will find unnecessary.

Some people like motion interpoltaion too.

Comment Re:TVs (Score 4, Insightful) 436

People aren't buying expensive TVs because they are 3D; they are buying high end TVs which mostly happen to have 3D.

Now if these 3D TVs had real 120 Hz input (for two frames of 1080p60 in 3D using shutter glasses) it might be a useful feature to use without the glasses on. But so far I think they all only support two frames of 1080p30 at most - standard HDMI doesn't have enough bandwidth, and newer spec hardware and cables are required.

With 48 fps movies, we may see more TVs using 240 Hz, but probably none with any high-bandwidth inputs, especially if 3D goes away.

Comment Re:Define "enable?" (Score 1) 236

I think ipv6 is available across much (maybe most or all) of the Comcast network, but will only be usable with compatible clients with ipv6 DHCP support (and specifically DHCP6-PD for routers.) Most consumer routers that are currently deployed don't support IPv6 and some older ones that do might not work properly with prefix delegation. They may only enable it for modems that they have certified for IPv6.

Comment Re:Who proved the collision was an accident? (Score 1) 200

The collision appears to be caused by negligence, and was not simply an accident.

The way I read the article, nothing suggests the collision was caused by negligence. I think the article would have been written differently if this was the case. An attentive driver might have resulted in a 25 mph collision instead of a 45 mph collision, or hitting a car in another lane to avoid hitting the motorcycle...

Comment Re:775 fine for permanently disabling two people?! (Score 1) 200

FTA, the charge was "distracted driving", not something closer in meaning to "crashing into a vehicle/motorcycle and causing injury" or even "failure to control vehicle". The fine & speaking tour seems more reasonable to me considering it was for the distracted driving charge. I've known people to get more tickets in no-injury collisions.

Reading the article, it looks like this happened in 2009, and no other charges or details were mentioned - so I'm guessing there is more to the story here. There are many possibilities, but my guess is that the situation would have resulted in something happening even if the truck driver was paying full attention to the road - could have been a near miss, could have been a lower speed collision...

Comment Re:What about ODF? (Score 1) 119

Unreasonably accusing someone of dishonesty is a terrible way to start a reply.

I agree completely. But you still haven't explained how a RCS can determine the sequence of user actions performed within an application that led to a new state without being programmed to interact with the application, or the application being programmed to interact with the RCS.

The example in my previous comment demonstrated two different sequences of events that both lead to the same result given the same original state. How does the diff between two document versions get turned into Office-style tracked changes? In a typical application, this information is lost as soon as the undo buffer is cleared.

Here is another way of posing this question: If I open a file in a text editor, make a lot of changes, write it to disk with a new name, and quit, how can you reconstruct the undo buffer given only the original file and the new version of the file?

Comment Re:What about ODF? (Score 1) 119

I've worked with systems built upon traditional RCS components that enabled every feature you've described to be applied to any document, regardless of source format, extremely easily. These were internal systems, but they do exist.

I'm not sure if I can believe you. Such a system would have commercial value, and you should be able to refer us to the vendor.

Such a system would also need to have some awareness of the source format to approach the level of detail of change tracking in Office. For example, for ODF and OOXML, the RCS has to know at least to unzip the file and apply diff to the contents inside... and then there would have to be tools to do something with these diffs.
Assuming it can diff two documents, how does a RCS figure out the differences between these two short documents:

Today is Friday

today is the day Friday

These changes take less than a minute to make by a user, and without application-level support, a RCS will just have the state before the user opened the file and after they saved. But integrated change tracking will generate different sequences of events depending on how the user made the change. If they selected the entire line and pasted the new content:

  1. delete "Today is Friday" at position 0
  2. insert "today is the day Friday" at position 0

If they made each change individually, this will be reflected in the change history, and the changes will be logged in the order in which they were made, so this is only one of 24 possible sequences:

  1. delete "t" at position 0
  2. insert "t" at position 0
  3. insert "the day " at position 9
  4. apply italic formatting from position 17-19

A sophisticated RCS with differencing support that was aware of the file format could try to recreate a history like this (by assuming all changes were made from left to right), but can't actually determine the actual sequence and timing of the changes.

The difference seems trivial with a small sentence, but it is a lot more significant when editing a bigger paragraph.

Comment Re:Strawman detected (Score 1) 119

No, it's not; the external RCS being *strictly better* at management of changes is the valid reason.

As I explained in my other comments, traditional RCS doesn't do the the same thing as change tracking. RCS will only manage .

Not exposing yourself to risks is a bonus.

It's a similar risk to using white-out on paper.

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