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User: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

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  1. Re:Who's going to pay for it? on FAA Wants All Aircraft Flying On Unleaded Fuel By 2018 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As the owner/operator of a complex network of around 100 billion neurons, along with support infrastructure, I'm not entirely sympathetic to your desire to continue emitting lead. Nothing personal.

  2. Re:Yes on Proposed NJ Law Allows Cops To Search Phones At Crash Scenes · · Score: 4, Funny

    But, but... Due Process is hard! *tearful face*

  3. Re:Not for DoD on Backyard Brains Shows You How to Remote Control a Cockroach (Video) · · Score: 1

    The DoD won't want these because you can't mount significant weapons on them. For real weapons, you want to mount lasers on sharks!

    There are so many values of 'significant weapons'.... Cockroaches are a bit on the small side for explosives, and directed energy is right out; but pathogens, toxins, and radionuclides should all fit within insect-deliverable limits...

  4. Re:Cruelty to animals plain and simple on Backyard Brains Shows You How to Remote Control a Cockroach (Video) · · Score: 1

    No, it's not plain and simple cruelty. It can be later used to fix people with tetraplegia. Or a lot of neurological diseases.

    They are not making it for the sake of having "remote controlled bugs".

    It crosses the line into advanced and complex cruelty once a 'timeshare treatment' model is introduced, where people who can't afford the cost of neural repair surgery have to sell off blocks of time for strangers to amuse themselves by controlling their electroded limbs over the internet...

  5. Re:Cruelty to animals plain and simple on Backyard Brains Shows You How to Remote Control a Cockroach (Video) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm going to have to add more obviousness to my sarcastic posts, I take it?

  6. Re:2 way communcation on Backyard Brains Shows You How to Remote Control a Cockroach (Video) · · Score: 1

    I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine - just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness. Dark. Rigid. Cold. Alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.

    Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Man and Machine"

  7. Re:Cruelty to animals plain and simple on Backyard Brains Shows You How to Remote Control a Cockroach (Video) · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hmm, I must have been absent the day our history class learned about Nazi experiments in implanting electrodes in the antennae of Jews so as to control them with cute little RF backpacks...

    Also, Genesis 1:26.

    "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

    RF cockroach backpacks are just an advanced technique for exercising dominion over a creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 100% authorized by the relevant deity.

  8. Re:The problem is statistics on Reversible Male Contraception With Gold Nanorods · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Male sperm travel faster, it sounds credible to me that based on cycle the male sperm could have an advantage (less effective at waiting for an egg to drop perhaps, but if the egg is right there, they get in it first). 120 M to 100 F at fertilization I think.

    The X/Y size difference is actively being exploited for IVF sex-selection; but apparently the accuracy is a bit tepid even with fancy flow cytometry techniques.I'd imagine that less carefully calibrated distance-based tests would show even weaker results(and not have the amusing side effect of making ethicists cry, which is a pity).

  9. Re:Updates on Oracle Reinstates Free Time Zone Updates For Java 7 · · Score: 2

    flashplugin-nonfree.deb is actually just a set of wrapper scripts that downloads Flash from Adobe's site, not a proper Flash install package as such. Adobe is so dreadful that they won't even let you download the .msi(for the platform they actually care about) without signing some stupid 'redistribution agreement' and going through a(trivial) approval process to get the magic URL...

  10. Re:Just waiting on Oracle Reinstates Free Time Zone Updates For Java 7 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    for the first anti-Java rant. Just waitin'....

    I have nothing against Java(though the sandbox they use to try to make the JVM safe enough to do web applets in is a total clusterfuck); but this doesn't exactly raise my confidence in Oracle's wise stewardship of the platform...

    "So, um, guys, we accidentally deprecated the tool that is required to keep timekeeping functions working properly in our latest JVM release, because we apparently didn't realize that it was still necessary and were just deprecating stuff related to release N-1 more or less at random! Sorry about that. We'll consider checking for interactions next time."

  11. Out of curiosity... on Nicaragua Gives Chinese Firm Contract To Build Alternative To Panama Canal · · Score: 1

    Apparently, there is a sea-level discrepancy of ~20cm between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal. That's largely irrelevant; because it isn't a sea-level canal.

    If one were to build a sea-level canal across the area(or nearby), what would the effect be? Some initial flow quickly reaching equilibrium? A more-or-less-permanent(for human purposes, let's say a few centuries at least) flow? Would the erosive effects be substantial enough that part of the canal could dig itself, if an initial cut was made to allow the flow to start?

  12. Re:The new commerce gatekeepers on Nicaragua Gives Chinese Firm Contract To Build Alternative To Panama Canal · · Score: 1

    Like iOS, they get to set the price to move the goods around.

    I'm pretty sure that you can just 'sideload' through the Strait of Magellan if you feel like it.

  13. Re:data sample question on Scientists Explain Why Chairman of House Committee On Science Is Wrong · · Score: 1

    I figure that there isn't a whole lot you can do about the class of 'wholly different than materialism on metaphysical grounds; but carefully crafted to be observationally identical to materialism' positions. The number of such positions is pretty much bounded only by your patience and imagination(though, incidentally, this creates the...somewhat troublesome...outcome that an advocate of one such position has no real argument to make against any other such position: you may prefer to believe that the fossil record was created with all the appearances of being millions of years old 6,000 years ago; but if I turn around and insist that the world was actually created just before my alarm clock went off this morning, with the appearance of being rather older, we are at an impasse).

    Given that that is a morass of 'not really refutable, by design; but also pretty useless, because it could be used to assert essentially anything', my take is that it's best to ignore it(outside of PHIL101) and just focus on what is accessible to us on empirical grounds. Empiricism may not ever lead us to Truth, capital 'T'; but it certainly yields all kinds of neat incremental advances. The best we can do is attempt to turn this knowledge to our benefit, and to share how what you can learn from empiricism is actually pretty cool.

  14. Re:IMEI on Apple's War Against Jailbreaking Now Makes Perfect Sense · · Score: 2

    Whats wrong with IMEI blacklisting.

    Only works across whatever region(s) share blacklists.

  15. Eh. on Mobile Devices Will Outnumber People By 2017 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They won't "control" us in any cool, malevolent-supercomputer-overlord, kind of way; but I'll confidently predict a downright alarming number of man hours spent drooling mindlessly and poking at the blinky lights that live behind the glass on the shiny thing.

    It's too bad, really. Getting crushed by a malevolent supercomputer would be flattering in a way(just like being assassinated, only people worth mentioning get that). The fact that humans will spend time sucking up to a Tamagotchi if you let them is... rather less flattering.

  16. Re:No updates in 6 years? on FLAC Gets First Update In 6 Years · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm pretty sure that flac doesn't need 3d Flash embedded object support...

  17. Re:How stupid is a Mac Pro Cylinder? on Apple Shows Off New iOS 7, Mac OS X At WWDC · · Score: 2

    Other than the single internal SSD, there appear to be no internal storage upgrades(Apple or otherwise).

    Luckily, only ~$1,000 will get you a nice, shiny 4-bay thunderbolt disk enclosure, so you'll be back where last year's model started!

  18. Re:The TB bus does not have a lot of bandwidth on Apple Shows Off New iOS 7, Mac OS X At WWDC · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Thunderbolt 2 is 20Gb/s"

    Remember that 'Thunderbolt' speed numbers include both the PCIe and the Displayport data channels(and, to the best of my knowledge, the capacity allocation between the video and data channels is fixed, even if only one is being used). By aggregating the previous 4 10Gb channels into two 20Gb channels, they allowed full Displayport 1.2 resolution and expect to bottleneck external storage devices slightly less; but the PCIe side still looks like PCIe 2.0 x4. Not slow; but substantially slower than x8 and x16 PCIe 2.0 and slower still than PCIe 3.

  19. Re:How stupid is a Mac Pro Cylinder? on Apple Shows Off New iOS 7, Mac OS X At WWDC · · Score: 2

    I mean really... why?

    Apple appears to have decided that users just loved the good old days of SCSI-based external enclosure rat's nests accompanying their elegant all-in-ones, and have decided to update the technology accordingly.

    Luckily, since external thunderbolt enclosures are alarmingly expensive and totally out of step with the new look, any attempt at expansion shouldn't be a dreadful mess!

  20. Re:How stupid is a Mac Pro Cylinder? on Apple Shows Off New iOS 7, Mac OS X At WWDC · · Score: 4, Informative

    If Apple's (rather painfully self-satisfied) slideshow thing is anything to go by, there isn't a single standardized part in the entire computer, with the exception of the RAM, and possibly the CPU, depending on whether they went socketed or BGA.

    The two GPU cards are probably PCIe electrically; but the shape certainly isn't compatible, the CPU card is its own animal(one that packs a whole four RAM slots, that's Serious Workstation material right there...), and PCIe-attached SSDs in the mini-PCIe form factor are relatively odd ducks(most that are that size and shape are mSATA, and PCIe direct-attached cards are usually rectangular PCIe 8x cards.

  21. Re:Fantastic... on Scientists Explain Why Chairman of House Committee On Science Is Wrong · · Score: 1

    'Christian Scientist' is a very specific religious flavor, and one whose...troubled...history with medical science is a matter of record and continues to this day.

    The name makes it sound like some much more general strain of Christianity; but it's really very much its own thing, and its intense idealism is rather problematic for any sort of empirical endeavor.

  22. Quickly! on The Turbo Entabulator: A 3D-printed Mechanical Computer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Fetch my sturdiest manservant and the overclocking whip!

  23. Re:seems a bit specialized for the current state on India To Develop Military Robots For Warfare · · Score: 2

    Automated fire control, with either the assumption that all targets are valid targets or with a human Yes/No step is indeed the (relatively) easy part. If you want the robot to be anything but a static turret, ideally plugged in to the electrical grid, you fall into the morass of hard robotics problems once again.

  24. Re:seems a bit specialized for the current state on India To Develop Military Robots For Warfare · · Score: 4, Insightful

    On the other hand, if you are trying to get funding for basic research approved, attaching weapons to your grant proposal can be very helpful indeed...

    Since actually getting a robot to kill somebody(in a manner more sophisticated than a land mine) requires all sorts of other capabilities to be worked out first, you can just write "Killer Robots OMG National Security" on your application and then spend a decade doing the basic research you actually wanted to do anyway.

  25. Re:Someone start a defense fund on USA Calling For the Extradition of Snowden · · Score: 1

    Is there any evidence that the NSA doesn't have all of the domestic providers tapped? There is no specific reason to believe that Verizon was the only one.

    The only documentation is for Verizon; but the others are assumed to be subject to the same. I think that the poster was referring to the list of tech companies cooperating in the 'Prism' slides. The rest of the industry is presumably not immune to the old 'national security letter with attached gag order' trick; but are not listed as being so... overtly customer-service-oriented and convenient as the Prism members.