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User: Viper23

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  1. Re:Where's the... on Murderer With "Aggression Genes" Gets Reduced Sentence · · Score: 1

    So, what if they say "my environment made me do it". does that make it any better?

    At what point does the reconciliation of my perceiving you as a threat vs. the reality of you not actually being a threat need to be measured in order for a group of 12 people to assign guilt. Really, guilt or not guilt, crime or not crime comes down to which 12 people are trying to figure out whether or not they would have done the same thing given the same set of external stimuli.

  2. Re:Where's the... on Murderer With "Aggression Genes" Gets Reduced Sentence · · Score: 1

    Funny, my dog thinks the same thing every time he looks at my cat. There's nothing really differentiating you from the other animals other than the fact that you are a different kind of animal. There is no more personal responsibility involved in people being put down for killing people than there is in the fact that we put down bears that kill people. Your "personal responsibility" is to survive, and that means not doing things that cause the villagers to pick up their pitchforks, torches and come visit you in your castle.

  3. Re:Do we WANT them to ban laptops? on Laptop Fires On Airplanes · · Score: 1

    Ah yes. The case of the infamous Ass Blaster.

    Please remove your shoes, remove laptops from their cases, drop your pants and bend over. You may now board.

  4. I understand we're geeks and all on NCSU's Fingernail-Size Chip Can Hold 1TB · · Score: 1

    but:

    The process would allow them to develop a new generation of ceramic engines able to withstand twice the temperatures of normal engines. The engines could potentially achieve fuel economy of 80 miles per gallon, Narayan said.

    Could we at least have mentioned that this technology could potentially double the fuel efficiency of car engines???

  5. Re:What is the ETA? on NCSU's Fingernail-Size Chip Can Hold 1TB · · Score: 1

    Not to mention, this a lab chip. How long before it can survive being in a consumer environment?

  6. Dumbed down web sites and layered programming on The Sad State of the Mobile Web · · Score: 1

    People who use the web from a cell phone seem to want web pages with maybe two buttons and a text field. Should we really make the rest of our users suffer through dumbed down sucky interfaces in order to only have one development track?

    Instead, we make a dumbed down mobile version that allows a user to step wise perform most of the core functions of our app. while leaving a feature rich environment for our PC based users. Since all of it is run from a decently segregated app layer, slapping on a different UI is not that big of a deal... maybe the real problem here is that a lot of development shops don't know how to work in layers.

  7. A virus is a virus on Bahama Botnet Stealing Traffic From Google · · Score: 1

    It's a nifty trick, but we should still dispatch ninja's to assassinate the people who wrote it. At this point I consider "death by ninja" to be the only hope I have of reducing the memory and CPU usage footprint of my AV software.

  8. Re:If asteroids have water... on More Water Out There — Ice Found On an Asteroid · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Thing is that they do have water on them.

    Europa
    Mars
    Neptune

    If you go and look up the planets in our solar system, you will notice that most if not all of them list water as part of their composition. It's just that on most of them it's either so cold that the water exists as ice or it's so hot that the water is permanently steam. What's special about the Earth (at least for the moment) is that we have the right temperature for the water to be liquid.

  9. Re:Maybe the Augustine commission is right. on More Water Out There — Ice Found On an Asteroid · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's cheaper because we've come up with better ideas on how to do it. That's what's so great about technological progress and all. What’s expensive yesterday becomes cheap tomorrow because we've found a more clever way to do it.

    As for the "money is keeping us on the ground" argument. The real issue and the real use / value of money is resource allocation based on utility value. We'd rather have HD televisions then people on Mars, so we spend our resources on those. Actually, other than the gee wiz factor of saying "look that red ball over there has people on it" most people don't really see that much utility to sending people there. That is what's really keeping us here. Far that matter, most human space travel is rather meaningless. For the cost of putting a few people on Mars we could swarm a good portion of the space between here and there with robots to do what ever it is that we intend to there, but we haven’t even found that utility value high enough compared to say... feeding people.

    So, why are we not all over space? Short answer is that for the moment, we've got better and more important things to do.

  10. Re:2006? on Japanese Ruling Against Winny Dev Overturned On Appeal · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It got overturned now.

    Before it was just part of the usual corporate shenanigans. Now, we might very well be witnessing one of the first signs of sanity amongst the human species since the invention of the internets.

  11. So if I want to get my product noticed on Photoshop Disaster Draws DMCA Notice For Boing Boing · · Score: 1

    All I have to do is produce a Photoshop disaster and then DMCA request the blogosphere when they make fun of me?

    SWEET!

  12. Re:Robots on Front Row Seats To NASA's Lunar Impact · · Score: 3, Informative

    The reason it's so cold is that it's in a crater that doesn't let the sun in. As for freezing your robot, there is no atmosphere to leach heat off of your robot, so at the most you'd need to make up for heat lost through your highly insulated tires.

    The main advantage of using a robot (other than "you've got a robot on the moon") is that you can study the structure / layout of the minerals in place rather than just their composition...

  13. Robots on Front Row Seats To NASA's Lunar Impact · · Score: 1

    Is it really so hard to set up an excavation robot on the moon that we have to keep dropping things on it?!?

    Also...

    Trying to get rid of mental image of Man on the Moon wearing a blindfold while smoking a cigarette.

  14. Re:But on Hyperdrive Propulsion Could Be Tested At the LHC · · Score: 1

    BTW, you don't need magical suspended animation.

    1. Frozen embryos. (Already have this tech)
    2. Artificial wombs. (Getting close on this one)
    3. Automated learning systems. (Also pretty damn close)

    Thaw, birth and teach them when the ship finds them a home. (You could even test the system over a 20 year cycle in our own solar system and at the end of the test "Surprise, you're actually still here!")

    The point might not be to get YOU to a new star system... just a sample of humanity so we know that some of "us" are out there being "us".

    Send thousands of these ships out there looking for a place to land, and see if anyone ever calls back.

  15. Re:But on Hyperdrive Propulsion Could Be Tested At the LHC · · Score: 1

    Alternately, if you're not thinking of yourself, but of the potential for future generations' travels through space, you could preposition fuel at waypoints already traveling at useful speeds for their craft to catch up to...

    It might take you a couple hundred years to set up, but some projects just might be worth the time / effort / expense...

  16. Technical Issue on Why the FBI Director Doesn't Bank Online · · Score: 2, Funny

    Robert Mueller,

    There has been a technical issue we need to resolve with your account at counter-intel.fbi.gov.

    Please click on the above link and fill in your details. Follow the on screen instructions and the error will be corrected.

    Thank you and have a good day,

    FBI Technical Support

  17. In other news on Why the FBI Director Doesn't Bank Online · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Chinese and Russian governments scramble to create look-alikes for the FBI's intranet.

    EMail Robert Mueller pretending to be from tech support.

  18. Re:What's the point of Flash today on Decoding Adobe's Big Device Push · · Score: 0

    Consider the existing code base and how awesome it would be to be able to leverage all of that on all of these mobile systems... how long would it take you to recreate the contents of kongragate in HTML 5 vs. how long would it take to recompile what already exists.

  19. Finally! on Decoding Adobe's Big Device Push · · Score: 0

    I can escape from that damn room on every device I own!

  20. Current estimates on NASA Downgrades Asteroid-Earth Collision Risk · · Score: 0

    I love how they never take the time to point out that A LOT can happen to that thing's trajectory to change the +/- .00001 % error required for it to smack head on into the earth. Yet they're willing to toss out numbers like 4 in a million.

    We don't know enough about "near earth objects" much less about "near Apophis objects" to make those kinds of predictions that far in advance.

    Guess if it makes the folks back home feel better...

  21. Why mechanical robots? on Autonomous RoboFish at the London Aquarium · · Score: 0

    Can anyone tell me a reason why the following wouldn't work? I know it requires a few more years of technological development, but with today's advancements with such things as carbon nano tubes, it seems like we're not that far off from a day when it might be possible. If so, I would argue that we could take much of the energy we pour into robotics today, and go straight for the gold.

    Biological Engineering

    Take a stem cell from a mouse.

    Turn off all developmental signal genes.

    Use nano needles to inject developmental signals to specific locations in order to induce development (Cell specialization)

    As the animal develops add more needles and use them to continue guiding development.

    When the animal desired has finished developing, apply a chemical signal to turn the developmental genes back on.

    Since the different cell types are already in the vicinity of cells they expect, they keep their form and function.

    Shock the animal into life.

    Imagine a whale-sized creature that has a passenger compartment built in to it. One which has specific nerve nodes that allow the crew to tell the creature where to go, and where the creature can be fed from the inside by the crew.

    You have a custom animal which will never reproduce so it will have 0 environmental impact. If the animal is doing something bad, you just stop making that animal.

    Using this technique means that you don't have to go through the pains involved with developmental genetics.

    It also throws most of the design responsibility on the shoulders of mechanical engineers. This is because the problems that need to be solved are things like fluid flow rates, weight stresses, and energy flows. Not trying to predict what a minor change in genes does after 20 divisions.

    There are people today working on solving the question of enervating lab grown muscle tissue. Once you can draw arteries in muscle, it is not too far a leap to draw nerve cells in the same muscle.

    Having this technology would make robotics nearly irrelevant. We would already have perfect machines that heal themselves, consume the same type of fuel that we do, and know how to run themselves without needing a large amount of programming.

  22. OFF-TOPIC but you seem like the right bunch on Watch the First 9 Minutes of Serenity · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    to pose this question to:

    Can anyone tell me a reason why the following wouldn't work? I know it requires a few more years of technological development, but with today's advancements with such things as carbon nano tubes, it seems like we're not that far off from a day when it might be possible. If so, I would argue that we could take much of the energy we pour into robotics today, and go straight for the gold.

    Biological Engineering

    Take a stem cell from a mouse.

    Turn off all developmental signal genes.

    Use nano needles to inject developmental signals to specific locations in order to induce development (Cell specialization)

    As the animal develops add more needles and use them to continue guiding development.

    When the animal desired has finished developing, apply a chemical signal to turn the developmental genes back on.

    Since the different cell types are already in the vicinity of cells they expect, they keep their form and function.

    Shock the animal into life.

    Imagine a whale-sized creature that has a passenger compartment built in to it. One which has specific nerve nodes that allow the crew to tell the creature where to go, and where the creature can be fed from the inside by the crew.

    You have a custom animal which will never reproduce so it will have 0 environmental impact. If the animal is doing something bad, you just stop making that animal.

    Using this technique means that you don't have to go through the pains involved with developmental genetics.

    It also throws most of the design responsibility on the shoulders of mechanical engineers. This is because the problems that need to be solved are things like fluid flow rates, weight stresses, and energy flows. Not trying to predict what a minor change in genes does after 20 divisions.

    There are people today working on solving the question of enervating lab grown muscle tissue. Once you can draw arteries in muscle, it is not too far a leap to draw nerve cells in the same muscle.

    Having this technology would make robotics nearly irrelevant. We would already have perfect machines that heal themselves, consume the same type of fuel that we do, and know how to run themselves without needing a large amount of programming.

  23. Just store it.... on Protecting Your Company While Protecting Privacy? · · Score: 1

    Storing the information without looking at it until a complaint is filed should be perfectly reasonable legal protection. Even if you look at the e-mail your employees are sending out, the mail has left the building before you see it. So, either way the damage is already done. In the same sense, a company wouldn't be expected to bug employees they send out together on business trips to make sure they don't harass each other. They wait for a complaint to be filed.

    As far as web browsing, the company really shouldn't care what the employee is looking at as long as it doesn't disrupt their project completion, and no one complains as to the material on their computer screens.

    Basically, companies have gotten so worried about the idea that their employees might be cought doing something wrong that they want to catch them before the even do anything. Even the police don't do that. They come in to clean up after the fact.

  24. Re:Genetic "Junk"? on Artificial Chromosome Inheritance · · Score: 1

    Don'tcha get it? The creative powers that be commented their code ;)

    Also, since the compiler was optimizing for speed rather than size, many loops were unrolled, and data segments were inserted all over the place because far pointers in DNA are very cycle expensive.

  25. Hmm... on The Confounded Mr. Valenti · · Score: 1

    Has anyone asked the most obvious question?

    Does he think that it is illeagal for this knowlage to exist? I think the question here is much deeper than freedom of speech. The question really seems to be freedom of thought. Is it legal for there to be human knowlage which enables one to crack a DVD?