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User: Grantbridge

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Comments · 73

  1. Re:Keeping spoilers close to the chest??? on Nearly Half of Game of Thrones Season 5 Leaks Online · · Score: 1

    Actually, this series is diverging pretty heavily from the books.

  2. Re:Don't do the crime on Proposed Penalty For UK Hackers Who "Damage National Security": Life · · Score: 2

    What counts as "unauthorised" though? What if it's your job, but your boss gets you to do something which his boss didn't authorise. Was that authorised use of a computer system?

    What if you use a false name on facebook and so breach the T+Cs, is that unauthorised use?

  3. Re:UK article, US units on U.K. Supermarkets Beta Test Full-Body 3D Scanners For Selfie Figurines · · Score: 2

    Weight is normally KG now, I have no idea what my weight is in stone. Height is still probably more often in feet than cm. Weight or height of anything you buy is always in kg/m though.

  4. Re:UK article, US units on U.K. Supermarkets Beta Test Full-Body 3D Scanners For Selfie Figurines · · Score: 2

    UK used to use Imperial measures, but now everything is metric with the exception of distances on road signs which are in miles. Milk and beer is normally sold in 568ml units, which happens to be the same as 1 pint!

    American units are different, their pints are smaller (16 vs 20 fl.oz.)

  5. Don't worry, I have a slideshow explaining this! on Windows 0-Day Exploited In Ongoing Attacks · · Score: 4, Funny

    Just download this handy powerpoint slideshow and I think you'll find it explains how this attacks works in perfect detail...

  6. Read the Paper, article is exagerating "Quantum" on First Demonstration of Artificial Intelligence On a Quantum Computer · · Score: 1

    (I can't believe I didn't notice I misspelt Quantum in that subject field.)

  7. Read the Paper, article is exagerating "Quahtum" on First Demonstration of Artificial Intelligence On a Quantum Computer · · Score: 4, Informative

    What they actually did if you read the paper is:

    1) Encode a 6 or 9 image into 2 numbers, based on the number of excess pixels in the left vs right, and top vs bottom quadrants. From the article: After these preprocessing, the two printed image with standard font can be represented by ~x1= (0:9872;0:1595) for character "6" and ~x2= (0:3544;0:9351) for character "9"

    2) Use a training algorithm to find the appropriate pulse sequence to give a up result from the molecule's NMR C13 spectra from a 6, and a down signal from a 9.

    3) Run the NMR spectrum, feed in pulses based on the parameters produced from pixels encoded in a vector form like 1), get the result of "up" for a 6 and "down" for a 9.

    It's certainly neat experimental NMR work, but I don't really see how it's quantum computing. But then maybe that's the NMR spectroscopist in me talking....

  8. PETA won't be happy until all animals are extinct on PETA Is Not Happy That Google Used a Camel To Get a Desert "StreetView" · · Score: 5, Informative

    PETA don't like animals having any relationship with humans. They put down the vast majority of dogs they recieve rather than re-home them because they think that's more "humane" (and it's cheaper..)

    They would rather you killed the camel and used a jeep to travel across the desert.

    They are scum, and they won't be happy until there are no animals left on planet Earth except mankind.

  9. Re:solution? on New OS X Backdoor Malware Roping Macs Into Botnet · · Score: 1

    It's not like their search function works particularly well anyway....

  10. Re:Illigal or not? on For Now, UK Online Pirates Will Get 4 Warnings -- And That's It · · Score: 1

    OK, I was referring to downloading a film. If you upload and seed a film the day before release, you could get prosecuted under 2A(b).

  11. Re:Illigal or not? on For Now, UK Online Pirates Will Get 4 Warnings -- And That's It · · Score: 2

    It's never been criminal. But breaching copyright could get you sued by the copyright owner. The new system of warning letters is replacing a proposed "3 strikes" system where you would lose your internet access after 3 warnings, but with no accountability for being accusing of copyright infringement this was a stupid system.

    The new one is simply sending warning letters to let people know they have been reported as infringing copyright, and so might want to be careful to avoid being sued in the future.

  12. Re:Chemcially feasible? on Mathematicians Solve the Topological Mystery Behind the "Brazuca" Soccer Ball · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, you can make the ring, but how do you get it to be flat so they will fit into a sphere?

  13. Chemcially feasible? on Mathematicians Solve the Topological Mystery Behind the "Brazuca" Soccer Ball · · Score: 1

    I can't see those 8 member flat rings being at all chemically feasible. I really don't think this is possible to make as a carbon molecule.

    Aromatic rings need to have 6 or 10 electrons in the delocalised orbitals, so an 8 member ring is going to need to have some other elements/groups to be at all stable...

  14. Re:FOOTBALL... NOT "SOCCER"!!! on Mathematicians Solve the Topological Mystery Behind the "Brazuca" Soccer Ball · · Score: 0

    Football can mean either Rugby or Soccer. Since Rugby is short for Rugby Football, and Soccer is short for Association Football.

  15. Re:Should have upgraded Openssl on Heartbleed Bug Exploited Over Extensible Authentication Protocol · · Score: 1

    Well yes, they should have. Sadly for users this isn't always the case. :(

  16. Re:Should have upgraded Openssl on Heartbleed Bug Exploited Over Extensible Authentication Protocol · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Some android phones cannot be updated without rooting them, if the manufacturer hasn't released an update.

  17. Re:Since when... on Torrentz.eu Domain Name Suspended · · Score: 4, Interesting

    City of London Police are a very strange entity, since the Corporation of London isn't really a democratic body, and their police force should be viewed as serving the interests of their corporate masters, rather than the people at large. As such, I wouldn't obey any instruction from them without a court order.

    http://www.theguardian.com/com...

  18. Important Quote from Article on Scientists Solve the Mystery of Why Zebras Have Stripes · · Score: 5, Informative

    Relevant quotes missing from summary:

    "researchers built horse mannequins, painted them in a variety of patterns, coated them with sticky stuff, and found that horseflies seemed to avoid landing on the fake horses that were painted with black and white stripes."

    "The proposed explanation was that the flies preferred to land on dark surfaces. Such surfaces reflect the kind of polarized light that reminds the flies of the water or mud where they breed. Light surfaces aren't as attractive, but dark-and-light patterns are even worse — perhaps because such patterns confuse the flies' navigational sense."

  19. Re:Transaction ID Bug on Mt. Gox Shuts Down: Collapse Should Come As No Surprise · · Score: 1

    http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com...
    Has some relevant information.

  20. Transaction ID Bug on Mt. Gox Shuts Down: Collapse Should Come As No Surprise · · Score: 5, Informative

    There was a bug in the code whereby you could get MtGox to send out your bitcoins to your address, but rebroadcast the transaction under a different transaction ID. This mean when MtGox checked to see if their transaction worked, it looked like it hadn't (since the transaction ID didn't match.) They then re-sent you the bitcoins you already had received, giving you twice as much as they should have.

    Apparently the bug has been there for years.

    It's like getting a cheque, and changing the cheque number from 123 to 124. The new cheque still looks valid so it cashes fine, but you go back to the sender and complain you never got a cheque. They see cheque 123 was never cashed, and so write you a new one. You cash that one as well. At some point they should notice that they've paid out twice as much as they should have, but for MtGox they didn't notice this for a long time.

  21. Re:The Worst Offender on How Well Do Our Climate Models Match Our Observations? · · Score: 1

    Well the enclosed nature of a greenhouse certainly has the majority of the effect compared to letting the air simply escape. But the opaque to infra-red nature of glass provides insulation which lessens the heat loss at night. Its only a small effect compared to simply enclosing a space with rock-salt, but it still provides additional heating.

  22. Re:The Worst Offender on How Well Do Our Climate Models Match Our Observations? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How long do you think it'll take for you to bleed to death if I shoot you with a pistol? Its not an easy problem to predict. You don't know precisely where you will be shot, if the bullet will go straight through or lodge in bone, or ricochet. You don't know how long your blood will take to clot. You can be pretty sure that, left unattended, you will die from being shot. But predicting exactly how long you will have is rather hard. CO2 levels cause global warming by basic physics, just as a greenhouse is warmer inside than outside. You trap the heat in, but let the visible light through. What the exact consequences of a certain CO2 level are is hard to say preciously, but if CO2 levels keep going up and up and up you can be sure that the polar ice caps are going to melt and sealevels are going to rise dramatically. Precisely when this will happen is as hard to predict as how long it'll take you to bleed out from a gunshot wound, but you wouldn't argue that because its hard to determine how long you have, it's not worth trying to avoid getting shot!

  23. RTFA on Gabe Newell Responds: Yes, We're Looking For Cheaters Via DNS · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the actual article: 1)This is no longer in operation, it was only running for a couple of weeks in the constant cat-and-mouse game with cheat developers 2)It was targeted at the DNS for DRM servers which cheat authors used to SELL cheats to PAYING customers. The system simply reported if the MD5 hash matched the DNS for the known cheat DRM servers, once the cheat had been detected during gameplay already. The DRM servers were not running a website.

  24. Re:Wait, what? on Google Apps License Forbids Forking, Promotes Google Services · · Score: 1

    Wow, I didn't realise so much had been moved into the Google box from the Android box as time went on. Still, Amazon have produced an Android device without any of Google's bits, but its primarily an Ereader.

  25. Re:Wait, what? on Google Apps License Forbids Forking, Promotes Google Services · · Score: 4, Insightful

    All of Android is open source, except Google Play/Market, Gmail app, Google Maps, etc If you want your phone to have the Google App store, then you need to obey their terms and conditions. Just because the OS is open source doesn't mean any program which runs on it has to be. There are plenty of non GPL programs available for Linux! An android phone WITHOUT access to Google app store, Google Maps, Calender, Gmail etc isn't going to be much use to the majority of Android users. This is how Google controls Android.