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  1. It killed my arch linux installation on Choose Your Side On the Linux Divide · · Score: 1

    I'm not an expert on systemd or why the change was deemed necessary. All I know is that last year when Arch Linux made the change, the update crashed my installation and I had to reinstall from scratch. As a non-expert casual user, the switch came out of the blue, was never justified, and when I went into the forums the attitude from the "experts" was shut up and learn to live with it.

  2. Early societies were egalitarian? on The Benefits of Inequality · · Score: 1

    The paper posits that early societies were relatively egalitarian. That's ridiculous. In any group of human beings, a hierarchical structure is always created. What creates the hierarchy changes (brawn and hunting skills back then, brains today), but one always forms on the basis of something. Have the authors never even been in first grade?

  3. This is not a full cure on Experimental Drug Compound Found To Reverse Effects of Alzheimer's In Mice · · Score: 1

    All this drug does it improve the conversion of short-term memory to long-term memory. This is a problem in patients suffering from Alzheimer's but no way can it regain memory stored in neurons already lost to Alzheimer's. I hope this treatment works, but it's not even clear it will stop the progression of the disease to it's ultimate conclusion.

  4. It's not that much on Big Bang Actors To Earn $1M Per Episode · · Score: 1

    After she got her Oscar, Helen Hunt was making $1 million per episode in "Mad About You". Paul Reiser had a clause in his contract that his salary would match Hunt's, so he got $1 million as well. The main stars of "Friends" and "Seinfeld" were supposed to be making in the $1 million per episode range at the end of their series, plus generous fees for syndication. The five or six main voice actors in "The Simpsons" are supposed be making close to $1 million per episode.

  5. Not the first cockpit without a front window on Airbus Patents Windowless Cockpit That Would Increase Pilots' Field of View · · Score: 1

    The Spirit of St. Louis had no front windshield because of the placement of tanks. Lindbergh would yaw the plane to look out a side window when he wanted to look ahead. The plane was also equipped with a periscope for take-offs and landings, though it's not clear Lindbergh used it while in flight.

  6. The article didn't say what consitutes "subsidies" on Study: Global Warming Solvable If Fossil Fuel Subsidies Given To Clean Energy · · Score: 1

    The article ultimately points to an IEA website for the data on subsidies. If you look there (http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/resources/energysubsidies/ ), much of the subsidies are in the form of fuel price subsidies in developing countries (see http://www.iea.org/subsidy/ind... ). According to a 2009 IEA document (http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/media/weowebsite/energysubsidies/second_joint_report.pdf ), this accounts for $312 billion a year. The rest is attributed to "tax expenditures, under-priced access to scarce resources under government control (e.g. land) and the transfer of risks to governments (e.g., via concessional loans or guarantees. These subsidies are more difficult to identify and estimate compared with direct consumer subsidies." If you take away fuel subsidies in India, for example, many people could not even cook their food, much less get around. In many countries eliminating fuel subsidies would result in mass hardship and even civil disruption. Blithely assuming such subsidies can be eliminated is not a practical solution.

  7. Depends where you are in life on Workaholism In America Is Hurting the Economy · · Score: 1

    I don't know why everybody assumes there is only one life/work balance that's optimal throughout your life. When you first get out of school, want to make a mark, and don't have a family, it's often very rewarding to put more hours into work. But later on in life when you get a family and other interests, work just isn't as important for most people. It's not that one is better than the other, it's that priorities change as you age.

  8. Re: Sure, why not? on Obama To Ask For $1 Billion Climate Change Fund · · Score: 1

    Elon Musk himself said the government loan was not critical to the success of Tesla http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/elon-musk-daimler-not-the-government-saved-tesla/ . He just took the money because it was cheap.

  9. Re:Then Fire Him on NSA Head Asks How To Spy Without Collecting Metadata · · Score: 1

    He's leaving next spring anyway. The Obama administration has already decided he should be replaced with a four-star general or an admiral of equivalent rank. They decided this because the head of the NSA is also the head of the armed forces Cyber Command ( http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303293604579256222466393090 , paywall)

  10. Re:Youtube? on Bots Now Account For 61% of Net Traffic · · Score: 1

    The numbers given for Netflix and Youtube are all peak period figures, usually the local evening. Take a look at the Sandvine report at https://www.sandvine.com/downloads/general/global-internet-phenomena/2013/2h-2013-global-internet-phenomena-report.pdf .

  11. Re:But.. on Global Biological Experiment Generates Exciting New Results · · Score: 1

    The largest driver for resistance is the over-use of antibiotics in non-health care related fields, like industrial agriculture

    There's some truth to that, but to say the "largest" driver is something that nobody has ever demonstrated.

    Growing up my family had a hog farm. It was started in the '30s before antibiotics and saw the effect of them on herd health when they became available for agricultural use in the '50s and going forward.

    Keep in mind that farms don't use the most expensive antibiotics. Instead, they use common ones such as the various penicillin derivatives and sulfa drugs. They also use antibiotics which were never approved for humans.

    So while farms may be the source of resistance to penicillin and sulfa, they can't be the source of resistance to expensive antibiotics used in hospitals. For example, we're running out of TB antibiotics that work. Most of these are never fed to farm animals, so any resistance comes from improper use in the human population. My point is that while farms may be a source of resistance, human misuse must also be a significant factor. Getting rid of factory farms won't solve the issue.

    From the experience of my family farm (which was not a factory farm), there's no doubt the improvement with the introduction of antibiotics in herd health was huge. Before antibiotics we had massive die-offs that could take 25% of the herd. The only treatments we had for things such as dysentery were arsenic and copper sulfate, which were very hard on the animals (you basically try to kill the bacteria before you kill the animal). Other diseases such as pneumonia had no treatments. When antibiotics came along in the '50s the improvement was dramatic. While there was some resistance developed to the penicillin drugs, they still were effective in controlling dysentery and other diseases. It did take careful management.

  12. It won't stop all trolls on Huffington: Trolls Uglier Than Ever, So We're Cutting Off Anonymous Commenting · · Score: 1

    The Wall Street Journal has forced commentators to use their real names for years. It hasn't stopped trolling at all. Some people just don't care what their online reputation is.

  13. Re:How many hard drives? on NSA Utah Data Center Blueprints Reveal It Holds Less Than Thought · · Score: 1

    Annual disk drive production is around 600 million HDDs per year ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2012/10/03/have-hard-disk-drives-peaked/ ).

  14. Re:Win modem on WD Explains Its Windows-Only Software-Based SSHD Tech · · Score: 1

    I would be concerned about how accessible my data was without the drivers. So you're using Windows and your data is partly on the platter and partly on the SSD; you reboot to an OS without the driver (i.e. the driver breaks when you upgrade Windows, you boot into Linux, whatever) - can you still get at your data. My guess would be that whilst the contents of the drives will be accessible as two independent drives, they will be in some undocumented format and therefore irrecoverable.

    Not necessarily. Don't confuse the decision about *what* to cache with the actual structure of the data on the hybrid drive. Firmware on the hybrid drive can easily keep track of which data on the SSD and HDD is correct, even when you are running Linux or some other OS. The Windows drivers could be used to decide where to put the data (SSD or HDD) during Windows operation, but it also implies that the firmware on the hybrid drive knows where the data is (since it actually put it wherever the Windows drivers commanded).

  15. Doesn't explain dry climates on Researchers Explain Why Flu Comes In the Winter · · Score: 1

    What about places such as Wyoming and Colorado that are dry (under 50%) for most of the year?

    Also, my family had a hog farm growing up. The hogs were outside exposed to the elements. Every November in the early '80s we got hit with a major influenza outbreak in the hogs approaching 100% among the hogs weighing 60 to 180 lbs. There was no major change in the humidity, and didn't depend on rain or other weather events. Assuming the infection mechanism is similar (and certainly the influenza viruses were similar or the same since hogs are the source of many influenza virus mutations crossing over to humans), how does this result explain this?

  16. Re:Where does extra energy go? on Mathematical Breakthrough Sets Out Rules For More Effective Teleportation · · Score: 1

    Actually, just this last year two rubidium atoms 20m apart were entangled ( https://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6090/72.abstract ).

  17. Re:Color me unimpressed on Seattle To Get Gigabit Fiber To the Home and Business · · Score: 1

    I don't know about KC, but in Boulder, CO the power utility Xcel in 2008 delivered fiber to the curb for every home and business in the city of 100,000 (it was planning to run its smart grid demo over it). But the cost ballooned from $15 million to $45 million just to install the fiber and Xcel abandoned the project not long after the fiber was installed. Now the fiber network is only used to periodically poll meters every few minutes and may go dark entirely if Boulder decides to break away from Xcel (they can't afford to buy the fiber).

  18. Re:Gotta keep moving on Algal Biofuels Not Ready For Scale-Up · · Score: 1

    Sure, it could be always be improved, but look at the actual numbers. You would have to improve it by huge amounts. To reduce nitrogen and phosphorus use you would have to figure out how to recycle it or bioengineer the algae to use much less of it. Recycling it would require a lot more input energy, perhaps making the whole process a net loss no matter what we do. And if we could bioengineer algae to use less fertilizer, we would have done the same thing for our crops a long time ago.

    It may be doable, but it won't be for a long, long time. People are already looking at these same issues in our crop production, which is even more important than fuel production. If there was a big win somewhere, we would have found it a long time ago.

  19. Re:Cows eat Grass on Sweet Times For Cows As Gummy Worms Replace Corn Feed · · Score: 1

    Don't worry. The price of gummy worms in the store is far above what cattle producers can afford to pay. Any gummy worms that wind up at cattle feedlots will be out-of-date or otherwise defective.

  20. What about power requirements to run a linac? on Accelerator Driven Treatment of Nuclear Waste · · Score: 1

    The paper pointed to by the article (http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/accelconf/IPAC2012/papers/moyap01.pdf ) talks about needing a 1.5 GEV superconducting linear accelerator to create the neutrons. While that's not the Tevatron or LHC, it's still going to soak up a lot of power. How much of the power of the reactor will go into keeping the linac running? I didn't see any estimates in the paper.

  21. Re:Amazing! on Images Show Apollo Moon Flags Still Standing · · Score: 1

    So when we finally make it back to the moon do we disturb the Apollo 11 site to raise the flag again, or do we leave just the way it is for historical purposes?

  22. Re:One word on Can a Regular Person Repair a Damaged Hard Drive? · · Score: 1

    No, the drive generally does not remap bad sectors on writes. Even today writes are done blindly; the drive seeks to the track and then pumps out the bits when the sector comes under the head. The drive has no idea whether or not the media was good or the bits were written properly. It used to be many years ago that the drive had to read a "sector header" (which was located just before the data area) to find the sector, and during a write an error on this small read (only a few bytes) could trigger a remap. I don't know if sector headers are still used today, but if not a write won't trigger the remap.

    If you want the drive to discover and remap the bad sectors, you've got to have it do reads. Any reads will work, even a simple dd to /dev/null.

    I don't know why the random data writes worked for the OP in this thread, unless he was also doing reads.

  23. Re:Nuke it from orbit on Ask Slashdot: How To Clean Up My Work Computer Before I Leave? · · Score: 1

    Guttman has updated his original paper a few times, the last being around 2011. In his updated epilogue he says "In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a blend of scenarios involving all types of (normally-used) encoding technology, which covers everything back to 30+-year-old MFM methods (if you don't understand that statement, re-read the paper). If you're using a drive which uses encoding technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected". This was true in 1996, and is still true now." See http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html#Epilogue

  24. It doesn't make a big difference for HDDs on Asus Delivers Speed Boost With USB Attached SCSI Protocol · · Score: 1

    If you look at the hothardware benchmarks, they found very small improvements for high-performance HDDs, and only on large transfers. Contrary to what MojoKid wrote, even USB 2.0 was good enough for the usage patterns of most hard drives. While the USB 2.0 transfer speed couldn't handle the outer zones of the fastest hard drives, it could handle their inner zones and slower hard drives. When you factor in that most disk commands have sizable delays due to seek and rotational delays that the new USB Attached SCSI Protocol can't do anything about (command queuing and seek optimization are generally overrated), there just isn't just isn't a lot to be gained using this new protocol with hard drives. It does make a big difference with SSDs, though.

  25. Re:Does SATA fit into the mix anymore? on Asus Delivers Speed Boost With USB Attached SCSI Protocol · · Score: 1

    SATA ports aren't that expensive to implement, and there is a huge developed base for them. The hardware and protocol was designed from ground up to handle disk drives. SATA won't be going away anytime soon.