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User: Darth+Cider

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Comments · 197

  1. Office Space message board is funny on IMDb Is Shutting Down Its Long-Running, Popular Message Boards After 16 Years (polygon.com) · · Score: 1

    Office Space had a long message board thread in which people shared their depressing work experiences, with unlikable coworkers and terrible bosses, and it was really funny, but it's been deleted. It's the only thing I would have missed, but since it's already gone, who cares?

  2. Gravity Light is cheaper. It won't charge phones but doesn't require a battery to provide LED light.

  3. Do it in ROM on Is Whitelisting the Answer To the Rise In Data Breaches? · · Score: 0

    Why aren't OSes in ROM? Why do they have to be in read-write memory? If it's so expensive to suffer breaches, why trust any rewritable core? (I guess because OSes are never released as finished products, without built in security holes.)

  4. Re:I'm not an artist... on Reverse Engineering the Technical and Artistic Genius of Painter Jan Vermeer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Then too, there are savants like Alonzo Clemons, whose sculptures are strikingly realistic but made entirely without tools, just his two bare hands. We know this because we have film of him doing it. Was Vermeer a savant? He certainly could have been. Finding a way to fake the work of a master using mechanical means does not prove the master used the same techniques, even if he could have. Penn Jillette, ever the blowhard, is merely hyping the documentary he helped finance. Unless someone finds Vermeer's camera obscura in an old barn, nothing has been proven so far.

  5. The Fine Print on Researchers Report Super-Powered Battery Breakthrough · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the supplemental material: "The energy densities of the microbatteries are initially superior to the supercapcitors, but lose an average 5% total energy density after each cycle."

  6. Send it around the sun first on NASA Considers Putting an Asteroid Into Orbit Around the Moon · · Score: 1

    Send it around the sun one time, really close, before placing it in lunar orbit, and you'd have a thermal energy source of great usefulness.

  7. Hooke the pretender on 17th Century Microscope Book Is Now Freely Readable · · Score: 1

    Biographies of Isaac Newton do not show Robert Hooke in a good light. He was a pretender to genius and laid claim to ideas that Newton developed in full, whereas Hooke had the most rudimentary sense of them. He was in science what we'd call a patent troll in the field of business. Just because he has a name one might have heard before is no reason to accord to him the profound dignity of scholarship this article purports to bestow. He looked through a microscope. Wow! Newton invented the theory of optics. (And many other things that Hooke very presumptuously claimed to be his own discoveries.)

  8. The Ipad Death Watch on Why 2012 Will Be the Year of the Android Tablet · · Score: 1

    No doubt, this prediction will soon be added to The iPad Death Watch

  9. Re:Why assume a nation-state is behind this? on Was Russia Behind Stuxnet? · · Score: 1

    Wrong. A conflict with Iran would not profit even defense contractors. The war in Iraq was different - it was profitable because there was no threat to international security. A conflict with Iran, which would be presumptively nuclear, would be an armageddon scenario, and markets would crash. Weapons builders would not fare better in such a conflict than if there had been no conflict. I don't think it's clear to people that private enterprises have more to lose than governments in such a scenario. They have more to gain from Stuxnet than governments do.

  10. Re:Why assume a nation-state is behind this? on Was Russia Behind Stuxnet? · · Score: 1

    No, there is a kind of conflict that even weapons dealers don't profit from. The kind that sends the stock market crashing to new lows. The kind that ruins all of one's trading partners. A conflict with Iran would be terrible for business for everyone in the free world. If my point wasn't clear, that's my point again - that the ones who really have the most to lose in a conflict with Iran would be private enterprises, not nation-states.

  11. Why assume a nation-state is behind this? on Was Russia Behind Stuxnet? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's just assumed that Stuxnet is SOOOO advanced that only a nation-state could devise this zero-day infiltration into the centrifuge system of Iran.

    Why assume that nation-states are behind it, and not corporations? A lot of companies would be hard hit if Iran became a threat to stability. Even major defense contractors, who profit from building weapons, would see little upside in a conflict with Iran.

    The news and the internet buzz all say that it has to be a government backed thing, but what if it is simpler than that? It is far simpler to imagine that a private concern is behind it. They can pay for the talent. They have as much at stake as any government.

  12. good line on Woz Is First In Line For iPhone 4S · · Score: 1

    Woz was also first in line to design an Apple computer. That's still one of the coolest things anyone has ever done. The snarky commenters here ought to contemplate this Zen riddle: "What did the bald man say about his comb?" (A: "I'll never part with it.") If Woz wants to hang out with other Apple fans and show his enthusiasm, why paint it as anything but a guy trying to have some fun? I wonder what question Woz will ask Siri on his first try.

  13. artificial on Jupiter-Sized Alien Planet Is Darkest Ever (Barely) Seen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Maybe it's a Dyson sphere.

  14. Terman and Hollingworth studies on What Does IQ Really Measure? · · Score: 2

    The Prometheus Society has a great article, The Outsiders, on two important studies of IQ, one by Lewis M. Terman, who provided the "Stanford" half of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, and the other by Leta S. Hollingworth, whose book on her findings is Children Above 180 IQ. Both studies were longitudinal and long-term, drawn from very large pools of subjects.
     
    Conclusion? The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be maladjusted.

  15. Re:market share on Apple Asks Security Experts To Examine OS X Lion · · Score: 1

    Your final calculation is wrong. You said 2M macs at $2 apiece, so the profit for exploiting macs would be $4 million, not $2 million. You flubbed where it counted most, in "looking at the final numbers." You make a lot of bad assumptions, too, which will be obvious to anybody who read your post and actually paid attention to it.

  16. Try Again on Microsoft's Approach To Battling the iPad In the Workplace · · Score: 1, Informative

    You're not ready for release. If I increase text size, words disappear. (Words on the left-hand side of the paragraph are pushed further to the left and become invisible. Words on the right-hand side of a paragraph increase in font size and remain visible.)

    I read slashdot on a monitor across the room, so I *always* increase text size. You really have to fix this.

  17. What an evil genius would do. on The Spread of Do-It-Yourself Biotech · · Score: 1

    A smart evil genius wouldn't create a plague. He or she would be more interested in creating a strain of tomato (or some other benign plant) with THC or cocaine or opium in its leaves. This is the stuff of folklore, well-known as a can-do sort of idea. It isn't farfetched. I don't know why it hasn't happened already.

  18. Correct on Look For AI, Not Aliens · · Score: 1

    AIs in distant galaxies know about Earth already and are just waiting for our AIs to develop tachyon communications. I thought that this was a given.

  19. Re:Well this just proves on Russian Spy Ring Needed Some Serious IT Help · · Score: 4, Informative

    That listening device hidden in the great seal was invented by Leon Theremin, the same guy who invented the theremin musical instrument.

  20. Problems are obvious on NY Governor Wants To Expand DNA Database · · Score: 3, Informative

    Crooks can just salt the scene of the crime with DNA not their own.
     
    DNA tests are not quick, either - forget what you have seen on TV. The FBI backlog is overwhelming, as it is for State labs in most cities. DNA evidence collected at a crime scene is likely not to be analyzed before the trial date.
     
    New York City doesn't have the money to do this, anyhow. The cost would be exorbitant, even with a balanced budget.

  21. Re:what plato is.. on Where Were You When PLATO Was Born? · · Score: 1

    The PLATO Notes application that allowed communication was written by David Woolley, who was 17 years old at the time.

  22. Probiotics? on Bio-Detector Scans For 3,000 Viruses and Bacteria · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I hope they consider the effects of beneficial bacterial flora in the body and create an array that can test for them too. It would be interesting to compare symbiotic cultures that reduce the effect of pathogens. (Now that antibiotics are so much less effective. Let the bacteria duke it out among themselves.)

  23. Build your own on Best Alternatives To the Big Name Social Media? · · Score: 5, Informative

    Check out the free and open source software, Caucus and build your own social network. I belong to such a Caucus-based community, where invited members can speak openly, and I strongly agree that Facebook is seriously limited by privacy concerns.

    You could also look up "The Well" and see what communities of a similar nature are out there. Seems you're looking for something like that.

  24. /b/ on "Moot" Working On Reboot of 4chan Platform · · Score: 4, Insightful

    this is your id and this is your id on drugs /b/
    see? same thing
    and that's even if you don't know anything about drugs

    it's not as if /b/ tries to be the wild wild west
    it just is
    what else is left that's like the old usenet?
    or like a place without rules?
    it's there.. not that one can continue to feel well
    if one looks into /b/ too deeply
    so it's funny to think that net freedom is healthy coz /b/ is there
    yet.. there you have it

  25. Conclusions on FBI Obtains Phone Records With a Post-it Note · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The obvious inferences, which aren't being expressed here so far, are:

    1. Journalists are still important, in that they dig up this kind of information.
    2. We all knew this would happen, after the relaxation of civil liberties laws.
    3. There are probably worse things going on that we will never know about.
    4. It's patriotic to insist that law enforcement personnel do what is right, and obey the law, and not look for ways to subvert it or bend the rules, because otherwise they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

    It's human nature to take the easy way and do what is expedient, which is how it plays out in TV cop shows. But in the real world, these guys have to do what is right, for the sake of the light of liberty - which is incredibly fragile. They're supposed to be defenders of the Constitution, which is a very fragile idea about freedom. I hope the agencies involved see the big picture and understand what is really at stake, rather than get defensive and cynical about troublesome rules and regulations that "only make their work harder."