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User: blueg3

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  1. Re:They'll probably be silenced for national secur on Google Files First Amendment Challenge Against FISA Gag Order · · Score: 1

    Pretty much. Everyone heard about Dotcom's arrest, it made big news, and there was significant political fallout. Roughly what would happen if they arrested Page in a similar fashion.

    I hear he's back making a new, similar business venture. Sounds like they disappeared him good!

  2. Re: Not a silver bullet, but a hold-over tactic on Pandora's Promise and the Problem of "Solutionism" · · Score: 1

    ...unless we find a natural way of converting light into energy.

    Yes. If only there were such a thing.

  3. Re:NIMBY on Pandora's Promise and the Problem of "Solutionism" · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you think curbing CO2 emissions is expensive, wait until you see the cost of relocating New York City.

  4. Re:$1 Grant on California Bill Would Mandate Open Access To Publicly Funded Research · · Score: 1

    Journal policy, generally. But most journals don't restrict the publishing of preprint copies, which is what polite authors offer, gratis, on their personal Web sites.

  5. Re:Why does this sound so strange ? on California Bill Would Mandate Open Access To Publicly Funded Research · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Free and unlimited access to publicly funded research should already, without a law to enforce it, be a fact. So it is here in Europe, at least.

    Yeah! That's a change the European Union made weeks ago.

    The policy change brings the EU in line with the U.S. and Australia, which both recently made open-access publishing mandatory for any papers that received government funding.

    Oops.

  6. Re:Great concept! on California Bill Would Mandate Open Access To Publicly Funded Research · · Score: 3, Informative

    Useful tip: Once you find the abstract (usually on a pay site), search Google for the paper title and authors. Google Scholar is particularly useful here. Find the preprint copy of the paper, which is usually hosted on an author's Web site or on a site like arXiv. Download that.

    If you really want to read a paper and can't find a preprint, e-mail one of the authors and ask for a preprint PDF.

  7. Re:Lies? on Jeremy Hammond of LulzSec Pleads Guilty To Stratfor Attack · · Score: 1

    They can claim anything they want (not always, but often). You shouldn't necessarily believe them if they don't provide evidence, though.

  8. Re:Speak metric at home on White House: Use Metric If You Want, We Don't Care · · Score: 1

    You can't actually convert between volume and weight in a general fashion. Products with oz and fl-oz would just be products with mL and g and equally uncovertable. (Unless, you foolishly "remember" that 1 mL = 1 g.)

    Oz and lb are different by a factor of 16. Should be able to multiple by 2 in your head 4 times, really.

  9. Re:English system is fine on White House: Use Metric If You Want, We Don't Care · · Score: 1

    Quick, you have a transaction that uses 3 CPU-seconds, you have to do 5 million such transactions per day, how many CPU do you need? Have fun calculating 24x60x60 in your head. Now, instead, there are 5M per month, have more fun multiplying by 30, er... no, 31, er... no! 28 so your system won't fall over in Feb. But then you are calculating storage requirements, remember to multiply by 31 this time so your storage can hold in Jan/Mar/May/etc. Do you get a WTF yet?

    This is why this is such a contentious issue -- people *this bad* at math have an opinion about units. You should not be frightened by simple problems!

    Oh, BTW, how many days are there between 4th August and 3rd November (3 months), and how about 4th June to 3rd Sept (another 3 months)? Notice that the answers are different? How many days are there in 1st/2nd/3rd/4th quarters of a year? Notice the day counts are different, but businesses still report financials on quarterly basis, thus creating seasonal fluctuations even when there is none in the underlying business? WTF?

    A business quarter is 13 weeks so that the number of days is the same in each quarter.

    Incidentally, you can't have a metric calendar because the year isn't easily divisible. Hell, you can't have an integral calendar. (Hence leap objects.) Welcome to the level of calendar complexity that the Romans figured out. (You could have a calendar with 13 4-week months. We don't.)

  10. Re:L/Km and MPG are BOTH stupid. And redundant. on White House: Use Metric If You Want, We Don't Care · · Score: 1

    That's nonsense. It's J*s/C^2.

  11. Re:Start here on White House: Use Metric If You Want, We Don't Care · · Score: 1

    When they post nutritional information in ounces, they mean weight. I hope you can appreciate that there's no such thing as "fixing" the fact that you can't easily convert volumetric to weight measurements.

    Here's a helpful tip for volumetric measurements.
    1 cup = 8 oz
    1 oz = 2 T
    1 T = 3 t
    There. Now do math.

    Better yet, stop buying cookbooks that list measurements in volume. It's not an accurate way to measure. Hell, if you can't remember the conversions, if they list it in volume, it's so low-accuracy you should just take a stab at it. 2 tsp salt? That's "some". 1 Tbsp sugar? Slightly more that "some". 1/4 tsp cayeene? "A little bit".

  12. Re:Start here on White House: Use Metric If You Want, We Don't Care · · Score: 1

    Beer and water generally use fluid ounces. (In fact, water could use floz or ml depending on how you get it -- beer uses oz and wine uses ml, so it'll be one of those.)

    Did you know if you're measuring things for yourself, you can choose to use whatever units you want? And you can even convert between units!

  13. Re:It is a broken system on White House: Use Metric If You Want, We Don't Care · · Score: 1

    For a start there is no agreed upon standard for several of the units e.g. fluid ounce for which the Imperial unit is not the same as the US unit...

    Hopefully you can see that there are, in fact, two agreed-upon standards. The US Imperial system and UK Imperial system are not the same. That shouldn't be too confusing, since according to you, the UK doesn't use the Imperial system any more. So clearly fluid ounces is always in US Imperial units.

  14. Re:Start here on White House: Use Metric If You Want, We Don't Care · · Score: 1

    US 1 and US 15, for starters. Along parts of them.

  15. Re:Start here on White House: Use Metric If You Want, We Don't Care · · Score: 1

    However, while the metric system is many things, 'awkward and unnatural' isn't one of them. You look up 'awkward' in the dictionary and there's the Imperial system. 5280 feet in a mile? 16 ounces in a pound? Water freezes at 32 degrees?

    The units you actually need to convert between tend to be related by either powers of 2 or multiples of 12, which are extremely convenient when working with fractions. The SI system is designed instead to be convenient when working with decimal numbers.

    In science and engineering, decimals are more common and SI is more useful. But then, SI is more useful in science and engineering anyway because the scientific units in SI are sane, as opposed to the Imperial scientific units -- where they exist. Don't complain about 5280 feet in a mile. Nobody really converts feet to miles. But units like horsepower are just a headache. Fortunately, scientists have it easy -- they just use SI. (Engineers are boned. Sorry.) And being familiar with Imperial units doesn't hurt them -- scientists work mostly in weird units that you don't develop familiarity with anyway.

    Now, in construction and manufacturing, it's common to use fractions, and they use Imperial. This is where the real cost of any kind of "switch" to metric comes in -- there's a whole set of manufacturing standards that are specified in Imperial units. You can't just convert them to "metric equivalents" with any reasonable degree of accuracy. And transitioning to metric manufacturing is pointless, expensive, and downright stupid.

    Water freezes at 32 degrees?

    It doesn't really matter what number water freezes at. It's arbitrary. Most users of Imperial units remember that 32 is freezing. If they're clever, they also remember that 37 is roughly the air temperature where there could be ice on the ground. But the freezing and boiling points of water rarely are useful in real life. Do you know the freezing and boiling points of other substances in Celcius?

    Really, the stupid temperature systems are the ones that don't have 0 as absolute zero.

  16. Re:A camera in every living room on Xbox One: No Always-Online Requirement, But Needs To Phone Home · · Score: 1

    Then it will phone home when it's next plugged in. If that's even what it actually does (considering there are no authoritative, straight answers yet). Because you'd have to be an abject moron to make it so that it breaks if it's unplugged for 24 hours. They might manage to hire someone that dumb in engineering, but they'll be stopped to prevent the class-action lawsuits and/or mass customer support problems whenever there's a natural disaster or university moving day.

  17. Re: What and what? on Why We Should Celebrate Snapchat and Encourage Ephemeral Communication · · Score: 2

    That's not actually the case here. People seem to be assuming that you can recover Snapchat images because they're deleted but the data is still resident on disk. Sure, that's a common reason for being able to recover data from a computer. It's not the case, though.

    The problem seems to have first been documented by Decipher Forensics. It's clear from their writeup that they didn't do data carving to recover deleted files. The images are simply stored an a directory that's not user-accessible and not deleted.

    Within this folder were located every image sent to [a SnapChat] account ... including the images that had been viewed and were expired.

  18. Re:A camera in every living room on Xbox One: No Always-Online Requirement, But Needs To Phone Home · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Presumably, you can turn it off from the console. But you, of course, have to take MS's word that it's really off.

    Unless you, you know, unplug it.

  19. Re:If it's not on arxiv, it doesn't count? on Why Is Science Behind a Paywall? · · Score: 1

    That seems weird. I think Ginsparg was at Cornell at the time, and the original host of arXiv was LANL, before it was arXiv, even.

    Anyway, arXiv costs about half a million a year to run now and is mostly funded by voluntary (small) donations from other universities. On a per-paper and per-university basis, it's dirt cheap. But, to be fair, it's not a publication -- it doesn't have peer review. It's a preprint server. It's mostly useful for a) the absolute newest pre-review work and b) getting free copies of things once they're published.

  20. Re:Fourth Amendment on US DOJ Say They Don't Need Warrants For E-Mail, Chats · · Score: 3, Informative

    So, by you, police do not need a warrant to search your apartment? After all, your apartment is not YOURS.

    Not true, actually. In the US, a renter has the right of possession of his apartment but not the right of ownership. Thus your apartment is "yours" in a legally meaningful sense. (It is also, in another sense, the owner's.) The owner has the right of ownership but not of possession (he's rented that right out to the renter). As such, in many states, it's illegal for the owner to enter the apartment without the renter's permission.

  21. Re:Ever thought it might be a good idea? on Using YouTube For File Storage · · Score: 1

    Not at all. You're thinking of technical workarounds to the law -- which geeks often do, and which is generally not correct.

    See, the two videos posted to YouTube aren't gibberish. They aren't raw materials. By using one to decrypt the other, you're not transforming them in the same way you're performing a transformation when you Photoshop a picture or mix chemicals together to make a bomb. You started with a video, encrypted it, converted it into an odd visual encoding, and posted the result to YouTube. Even though the result can separately be interpreted as a "gibberish video", it's history makes it clear that it's not, and through that history it retains its essence as a copy of the original video. Likewise, you cannot claim that a copy of the video on your hard drive is just a bunch of bits on disk, and you can't claim that a copy of the video on a VHS cassette is just magnetized tape.

    The properties of encryption actually make it easy to prove that if the two videos can be combined to produce the "illicit" video, then it must have been the illicit video in the first place. The probability of producing anything intelligible (or even with a valid format) from a ciphertext and a key that don't go together is impossibly small. If you combine a ciphertext and a key and get something intelligible out, it must be the case (statistically) that they in fact go together and that the ciphertext was produced using that plaintext and key.

  22. Re:Ever thought it might be a good idea? on Using YouTube For File Storage · · Score: 1

    How would you prove without the key that the video on YouTube is not gibberish video data?

    Why not use the key that you said was posted as a separate YouTube video?

    ...and the encryption key as another video onto YouTube?

  23. Re: Yawn on Observed Atmospheric CO2 Hits 400 Parts Per Million · · Score: 1

    Six identified oscillations with NO -- repeat, NO! -- parameter fitting

    I actually count a lot of parameters. Let's say roughly eighteen. That's pretty serious parameter fitting.

  24. Re:It's a 3D printed gun shape on Defense Distributed Has 3D-Printed an Entire Gun · · Score: 2

    I find this all very weird because as a physicist, I ended up having to learn machining. Loved it, very useful. But on the other hand, it's very clear (and often complained-about) that there are no young professional machinists out there -- every decent machinist is old and near retirement. While the demand for it is drying up, there's enough that there's some pretty serious risk of having a shortage of skilled machinists in the future.

  25. Re:ah the anti-NSF crowd again on SOPA Creator Now In Charge of NSF Grants · · Score: 1

    Logic and philosophy, a.k.a. the educated man's common sense, had a good run of things. That was back when there were four elements, light traveled through the ether, and heat was a fluid.