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User: Radagast

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  1. So, how about... on Imprisoned Physicist Honored For Refusing To Work On Iran's Nuclear Program · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Any prizes for Mordechai Vanunu?

  2. 26k characters? on Meet the Guy Who Fact-Checks Stephen King On Stephen King · · Score: 1

    How are there 26 thousand characters in King's work? He's written 56 novels, which is a lot, and a bunch of short work, but still, if half those characters are from his novels, that's 232 characters per novel. He'd need to introduce a new one every few pages, constantly, throughout the novel. Unless this counts people who are just mentioned once in passing, crowds, and whatnot, I have a hard time believing that.

  3. Sailing? on The Augmented Reality America's Cup · · Score: 1

    People actually watch sailing in any numbers? I thought it was mostly something TV stations showed to be able to sell advertising slots to Rolex, who value the eyeballs of the 0.1%.

  4. Re:Excellent! on BBM Coming To iOS and Android · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeah, except more, since ICQ numbers at least had the decency to stick to decimal.

  5. Excellent! on BBM Coming To iOS and Android · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now I can use this supremely user-friendly chat system that assigns me a random 8-digit hex string as an ID on my iPhone!

  6. So, how is this argument different? on Why We'll Never Meet Aliens · · Score: 1

    How is this argument different from "The singularity, because reasons, and beyond that, nothing is knowable"?

  7. Re:What could I connect this to? on New Thunderbolt Revision Features 20 Gbps Throughput, 4K Video Support · · Score: 1

    No, Firewire is pretty much dead, although it was good for a while.

    It seems to me that Thunderbolt has had faster and wider adoption than Firewire did over the same time after introduction. Thunderbolt is also a lot more useful than Firewire, since it's essentially PCIe over a serial cable. It's fairly trivial to adapt existing PCIe drivers to run the same hardware as an external TB box (or the PCIe card in a TB PCIe chassis), so it's very flexible.

    Basically, TB finally delivers on the ancient promise of a universal IO interconnect.

  8. Re:What could I connect this to? on New Thunderbolt Revision Features 20 Gbps Throughput, 4K Video Support · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's simply false. There's a large amount of Thunderbolt accessories, including video gear, PCIe expansion chassis (very useful for laptops), and docks. Sonnet just announced this Thunderbolt dock, which seems to be a pretty great deal for laptops.

  9. Re:Adoption by Mass Market? on New Thunderbolt Revision Features 20 Gbps Throughput, 4K Video Support · · Score: 4, Informative
  10. Re:Red Camera not really 4K on Surgeon Performs World's First 4X HD Surgery · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Red One at 4k is about 3.2k resolution optically, if you test it with a resolution chart.

    I'm not sure where you get the idea that that's similar to the resolution you get with video cameras with 2/3" optics and a prism. Video cameras are 1920x1080 at the most (many formats are less horizontally), and prism alignment is never perfect, but even if it were, you'd never get more than 1920 lines horizontally, which is far less than the Red One's 3.2k, or even the 2.8k you claim. Besides, they're claiming "4X HD", which would mean 3840 pixels horizontally, and 3.2k is quite close to that.

    Also, I'd generally be skeptical of anything "scientifically proven by Kodak". There are certainly very smart people working on Imaging Science for Kodak, but there's a tiny bit of vested interest in making digital look worse than film here. Hell, if you go to the website for Kodak motion picture products, more than half the front page real estate consists of ads for why film is still better, digital has lots of problems, film is the standard for professionals, etc. I think Kodak doth protest too much...

  11. Not really on HP Restores Creased Photos With Flatbed Scanners · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I was hoping they were using that 3D information to do something interesting to actually restore the image. They're not.

    They're basically using rudimentary 3D information that they can get out of the scanner to determine that a crease exists. They then remove it with a simple infill algorithm, which is as basic as it gets (although it often works ok), and which you can find in most image editing software. It's no coincidence that the example image they use has a crease going over mostly similarly colored and low-detail areas.

    So what they're doing is not an improvement to restoration, it's just an improvement to defect detection. Basically, it saves you having to tell the software where the defect to be fixed is, the fixing is the same quality as it's always been.

  12. Re:The Cult of Celebrity and Authority on When Celebrities Speak on Science · · Score: 1

    So when celebrities are liberal, democrat, or otherwise disagree with you, they should shut up, while if they're conservative, republican, or generally agree with you, they're "well grounded" and should speak up, and also pelt the other celebrities with rotten produce? Because that's what I get from your examples (modulo Tom Cruise, who everyone agrees is a nut), and your self-description as a conservative on your journal.

  13. Understatement on Open-Source Streaming Translations in Porto Alegre · · Score: 2, Funny
    The World Social Forum (WSF) (choose your language on the site), which ends today in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has less money to spend on computing than the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos, Switzerland.


    Was I the only one who was reading this sentence expecting it to end with "held in Davos, Switzerland, spends on catering"?

  14. Re:Pull your heads out of your skinny nerd butts on NYT On The Internet And Child Molestation · · Score: 1

    I don't want to piss on your parade or anything, and I haven't even read the article, since it doesn't overly interest me.

    But. How the hell can you call sexual abuse of children "undiscussed"? Ever since the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria in the 1980s, it seems like we're hardly talking about anything else.

    Also, how was widespread infidelity fallout after the Kinsey Report? And, how's that related to child abuse?

  15. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong, but.. on Brazilian Government Continues Push For Free Software · · Score: 3, Interesting

    John Gilmore pointed out once that the telecom industry in the US contributes 1-2 orders of magnitude more money to the economy. The extra use of bandwidth if everything the RIAA and MPAA ever made was made free would, if properly priced by the telecom companies, most likely make up for the loss.

  16. Re:Why the lack of high resolution LCDs? on Sony to Stop Producing Smaller CRTs · · Score: 1

    I don't want an ADC, I want DVI input. Most all graphics cards these days have them, anyway.

    As for the lack of need for higher resolution, there's nothing keeping you from cranking up font sizes and the like, and getting prettier font rendering.

    So I still think this makes no sense.

  17. Why the lack of high resolution LCDs? on Sony to Stop Producing Smaller CRTs · · Score: 1

    So, I've been wondering for a while about this. I love LCDs, but I'm one of those people who likes to have all the fonts tiny, to squeeze as much space as possible out of the desktop.

    Now, I can buy a cheap laptop with a 15 inch, 1400x1050 screen, like the one I'm typing on now, for less than 1200 dollars. But I can't seem to find an LCD monitor with the same specs at all, and anything that gets even close (1280x1024 or above) is ridiculously expensive.

    What's the deal? I'm assuming the LCD on this laptop doesn't represent more than 50% of the retail price. So why can't I get a 15", 1400x1050 LCD monitor for 600 dollars or so? IS THERE A CONSPIRACY HERE?

  18. Re:Pass the CD... on All schools In Denmark switching to Linux · · Score: 1

    A couple of hundred CD-R drives, or the equivalent thereof?

  19. Translation on All schools In Denmark switching to Linux · · Score: 5, Informative

    Free software for school use
    By Keld Louie Pedersen

    Denmark's 1.1 million students and teachers can now turn their backs to Microsoft corporation. At least when it comes to office software.

    A deal between the Silicon Valley company Sun Microsystems Incorporated and UNI-C means that the country's students and teachers can download the office program StarOffice 6.0 from Sun at no cost and freely install it on their home computer. Alternately, they can buy it on CD-ROM at cost, 10 kroners per CD. The schools can buy StarOFfice in packages of 50.

    Sun has made the deal with UNI-C according to the guidelines announced by education minister Ulla Toernaes (Left Party) on October 30th, on how educational institutions should act when offered free office software. Amongst the requirements are that such software donations are without cost for the state, and that UNI-C Denmark's information technology center should be responsible for distributing licenses.

    UNI-C's expenses are covered by the 10 kroner the distribution of CD-ROMs brings. Sun makes a server with the free Linux operating system available for those students and teachers who want to download StarOffice 6.0.

    "UNI-C exists to help the Danish educational world, so we're naturally very pleased to be able to distribute this type of initiative from Sun", says Dorte Olesen, director of UNI-C.

    The world's undisputedly most wide-spread office system is Microsoft Office, although this does not exist in a version that can be used on computers with Linux as the operating system.

    Because of Microsoft's dominance in both office and operating systems, several government institutions are working on creating alternatives, primarily the combination of Linux and StarOffice.

    If all 1.1 million students and teachers make use of the offer, the total value will, according to Sun Microsystems, be around 200 million kroners.

  20. This is a duplicate on Face Transplants On The Way · · Score: 3, Informative

    ...from a few days ago.

  21. GTK2? on Mozilla 1.2 Betas Start Flowing · · Score: 1

    So, does this use GTK2?

  22. But Murakami is clearly a postmodernist. on Two Books from Haruki Murakami · · Score: 1

    Murakami's work is pretty clearly postmodernist, especially Hard-Boiled Wonderland, which is probably as close to textbook postmodernism as anything I've seen. And it's also a really good book, of course.

  23. How about a free software logo? on OSI Launches Certification Program With Logo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    For those of us who prefer not to use the term "Open Source", how about something similar from the FSF? The FSF already maintains a list of licenses that it considers free software licenses, after all, and it'd be nice to be able to show that your software is truly free, as well as supporting the FSF (make the graphic link to the Free Software Definition, perhaps).

  24. Uhrm. on Interview With WOLK Creator Marc-Christian Peterse · · Score: 1

    He says "the O(1) scheduler really only helps if you have more than ~200 processes, below that, it slows everything down a lot" (or something similar).

    That doesn't make sense. If the new scheduler is O(1), it should be faster in all cases, and under no circumstances slow things down.

  25. Re:hmm.. on Mandrake Asks for Support · · Score: 1

    Yeah, the Microsoft page consistently spells "Linux" "LinsuX".