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User: i.am.delf

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  1. Re:Connect with a VPN on Verizon's Accidental Mea Culpa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You can also escape this bottleneck using an IPv6 tunnel to he.net.

  2. Re:Resistance and temperature on Man-Made Material Pushes the Bounds of Superconductivity · · Score: 5, Informative

    The application I can see is stronger magnets. Right now the superconducting magnets we have are limited by the amount of current they can carry before they start misbehaving. The crappy part is that while we have superconductors which work at liquid nitrogen temperatures, they can't carry a whole lot of current. This leads to MRIs and NMRs using liquid helium cooled magnets which cost a ton of money to maintain. If this material can operate at LN2 temperatures and give the current density of the liquid helium magnets, they will have an amazing product on their hands.

  3. Re:EA vs Zynga on Zynga Sues EA For 'Anti-competitive' Practices · · Score: 2

    Sometimes you need to root for both sides to fight and both to lose. I can't remember the original quote but it was about America selling weapons to both sides of a conflict because the US wanted both sides to lose.

  4. I always thought that this was a pretty neat thing. http://science.slashdot.org/story/08/10/22/1757257/x-rays-emitted-from-ordinary-scotch-tape?sdsrc=rel Only works in a vacuum etc, but still pretty awesome.

  5. Re:Domestic use only, I presume on Indian Gov't Uses Special Powers To Slash Cancer Drug Price By 97% · · Score: 2

    I'm sure if they tried to export this drug they would be seized as counterfeit or unapproved.

  6. Re:Just keep in mind the tradeoff on Indian Gov't Uses Special Powers To Slash Cancer Drug Price By 97% · · Score: 1

    Don't forget this. http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/en/d/Js6160e/6.html Look at table 4.3. The only markets that matter are the US and western Europe. Everywhere else is peanuts in comparison. The US, Europe and Japan collectively pay for the vast majority of the world's drug R&D through both government grants, venture capital and big pharma research.

  7. Re:Public Funds on Copyright Claim Sets Back Cognitive Impairment Testing · · Score: 1

    Let me introduce you to the Bayh Dole act. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act Before this act, all IP generated by federally funded research was assigned to the federal government which in essence put it into the public domain. The argument comes down to this. Before Bayh-Dole, most research likely to result in profitable products was conducted in companies and the results of the research were kept as trade secrets. After Bayh-Dole, we have much more research being conducted in universities and non-profit institutes. You need to publish your results in order to secure more funding, but the products of the research are assigned to the schools who license them. These licenses in turn fund the schools. Bottom-line, returning to public domain for federally funded research would "close source" research and probably stifle innovation.

  8. Re:Fire the board on HP Rethinking Wisdom of Spinning Off PC Division · · Score: 3, Informative

    The real HP was spun off by Carly into Agilent. As far as I know they are still doing just fine doing all those things that the original HP used to do.

  9. Re:RISC? on Intel's RISC-y Business · · Score: 1

    My god could you imagine the heat dissipation of a 64 core alpha processor. I had a desktop with an EV7 in it. That thing was a space heater. I just looked it up. The spec was 125W for that thing.

  10. Relative EM radiation strength on "Wi-Fi Refugees" Shelter in West Virginia Mountains · · Score: 1

    The thing that kills me about this "WiFi allergy" business is that it is a recent phenomenon. For the last 100 or so years we have been surrounded by much stronger EM radiation. Your typical WiFi card/router outputs about 30mW. Average cell phone of today is less than 1W and typically much less. Typical radio communication gear can be from 5W to 1.5kW. Broadcasters can go up to 50kW. Radar transmitters, not including the gain of their antennas, can be in the low megawatt range. Even when you account for the drop in irradiation intensity due to distance on these powerful transmitters. Think of an airport. Think of how many people a day go through an airport. Now think of the radar intensity of a 1MW transmitter at 1 mile(inverse square law). You get a whopping 300mW/m2, but this is still much less than the exposure limit of 10mW/cm2 or 100W/m2. Now put think of the intensity of those cell phones and WiFi cards. If this allergy to radio existed and was present in even a small fraction of the population we'd expect to see people suddenly come down with symptoms every time the approached any of these large transmitters. Even if you absorbed all of the radiation it would still be less than what you would get from radar.

    Oh yeah and there is one more source that we are surrounded by all day every day. It is nearly impossible to escape. The 60Hz radiation from the power grid.

  11. Re:He is not being a hypocrite on After Rick Perry's Stem Cell Treatment, Misplaced Enthusiasm? · · Score: 1

    This is what I don't understand about the "but they aren't embryonic so its ok" argument. Thats not how science works. We didn't go back and forget how to reprogram embryonic stem cells and then relearn how to program iPSC. We used all the data from the old embryo destroying techniques to figure out how to use them. In essence, you are benefiting from the destruction of embryos.

  12. Re:my brother installed some stuff on 3.11 on World Wide Web Turns 20 Today · · Score: 1
    I remember all of this as well. My first experience seeing the web was at the JPL open house in 1993. The pages they had loaded up were JPL, NCSA and CERN. I remember my first thoughts were its like gopher but with inline pictures.

    I'm sure everyone wants to forget the pain of the old days too. Installing trumpet stack on your Windows 3.1 box and then struggling for days trying to figure out what was going wrong. Oh and don't forget having to install the 32-bit extension on to old 16-bit Windows so that you could use NCSA Mosaic/Mozilla.

  13. Re:Still don't see what it has to do with teleprin on Telex Would Work, But Is It Overkill? · · Score: 1

    Came here to say this. Reusing names within the same field is fail. If you cannot be bothered to google a term to make sure it is relatively unused, you are lazy. When you work in electronics, computers or communication and don't even realize there is a protocol called Telex already....
    It would be like someone say I have a great idea for a computer. We shall name it UNIVAC...

  14. Re:This wouldn't be a big deal except on Google+ Account Suspensions Over ToS Drawing Fire · · Score: 1

    If you really depend upon your Gmail account for personal or business reasons, its probably worth shelling out the $5/mo for a paid business account. In addition to extra storage, it will also give you access to 24/7 customer support.

  15. Re:Civil and criminal liability on FBI Seizes Servers In Virginia · · Score: 2

    I wonder is the FBI could subpoena a critical control system say a Siemen's SCADA controller that had been hacked. If this control system were used to control a machine capable of causing grievous bodily harm or death, would the FBI not be negligent? If the FBI took a server legitimately housing an e-commerce site containing customer data, would that be considered a data breach under California law?(FTCA torts are determined under state law not under Federal)

    The FTCA specifically allows claims based upon negligence to be brought against the Federal government. However, you are correct that this liability is limited by the exemption you have posted. I don't think that any reasonable person could suggest that if data were stored on a server at Google and distributed over an entire datacenter, that the entire datacenter could be seized. That exemption gives Federal employees the leeway to search a house they reasonably believe contains a fleeing suspect. It does not cover something like seizing all the cars on a block because one contained drugs. No reasonable person would suggest such a ludicrous argument in that case nor should anyone suggest that since these 100 or so servers are in close proximity in a data center they may all be seized.

  16. Re:Scientific Method on War Over Arsenic Based Life · · Score: 2

    It is not even a matter of reproducible results. This whole affair is a logic exercise, the experiments performed cannot rule out other trivial explanations for the results. Science does not only require an experiment showing the plausibility of one explanation, but also the implausibility of alternative reasonable explanations.

  17. Re:Scientific Method on War Over Arsenic Based Life · · Score: 1

    This whole affair is an example of peer review gone wrong. It is clear that Science in their haste to publish this article probably didn't do the best job of picking reviewers of this paper. Had they sent this article to even one critical reviewer, none of this would have happened. The paper would have been delayed for publication for a few months while the authors did some more rigorous experiments.

  18. Re:Devils Advocate on Doctors To Patients: First, Do No Yelp Harm · · Score: 1

    Its even more than just this. In the US and many other countries there are patient privacy laws(see HIPAA). Normally on Yelp, a customer posts a negative review about a store or restaurant. The owner can come along and acknowledge it, dispute it, or comment on it. In the case of medicine, the doctor is barred by law from commenting on any specific patient's care. For example, if a patient, says my wound became infected because of this doctor. The doctor could not respond, proper care of the wound would have prevented that infection. In any case when in comes to medicine, the conversation becomes completely one sided.

  19. Re:Not Quite on Telehack Re-Creates the Internet of 25 Years Ago · · Score: 1

    Green phosphors while easy to construct and high brightness are a disaster for eye strain. After staring at a terminal for 4 hours straight you come to appreciate amber and paper-white terminals.

  20. Re:There Is No Cat... on Zediva Fights Back Against MPAA · · Score: 5, Funny

    Because of quantum entanglement, if you have a long cat in a long box when you open the end in New York and find a tail, the end in Los Angeles is definitely a head.

  21. Re:Why would you think the numbers would match up? on Ask Slashdot: How To Monitor Your Own Bandwidth Usage? · · Score: 1

    I don't know how it works in your state, but if you sell something by a unit of measure, your measurement methodology and accuracy must be guaranteed or you are setting yourself up for an epic fine. It doesn't matter if it is pieces, pounds, tons or bytes. You fake it and the cash strapped counties will come after you.

  22. Re:next step towards the corptocracy on RIAA, MPAA Recruit MasterCard As Internet Police · · Score: 1

    This is pretty much the definition of restraint of trade. If financial companies run this course, they might find themselves on the receiving end of a different kind of lawsuit, anti-trust. Imagine the following scenario. Company A makes a product. Company B decides that this infringes on their patent and goes to the ITC. ITC decides that Company A's product is infringing. Would all companies selling this product be conducting illegal business under Mastercard's rules?

  23. What does this accomplish? on DOJ Ramping Up Crackdown On Copyright-Infringing Sites · · Score: 1

    This sort of campaign accomplishes about zero in the real scheme of things. All they are doing is removing the public face of piracy while the sources and distribution networks still exist. It will just push piracy off of Google and back to the dark reaches of the internet where it has always existed. In fact, why even bother with the internet when there are plenty of DVD fabs in Southeast Asia cranking out true physical copies. Those have real economic harm to the entertainment industry as they redirect actual sales vs phantom sales lost to piracy over the internet.

  24. Re:Went to http://startpanic.com/ on History Sniffing In the Wild · · Score: 2

    Hah I tried this in 9.0.597.0 without incognito and it detected... startpanic.com only

  25. Re:Good. Hope this keeps up on US Marshals Saved 35,000 Full Body Scans · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately the DHS and the TSA are arms of the Federal government and as such civil suits against them can be very difficult. This is because most federal agencies have sovereign immunity. There are only 2 avenues where sovereign immunity has been waved tort(FTCA) and contract law(Tucker Act). You'd probably have better chances if the police officer did arrest the TSA officer because it would cause FUD within the TSA itself.