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User: Guy+Harris

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  1. Re:Stop posting opinions in TFS! on Industry-Based ToDo Alliance Wants To Guide FOSS Development · · Score: 1

    Now the entire comment section for this article will essentially be a huge subthread for that guy's inflamatory comments.

    Yeah yeah, I know this is par for the course for /. and that's the part that really sucks.

    Are you sure that's not the intent for /.?

  2. Re:Eugen Fischer on Schizophrenia Is Not a Single Disease · · Score: 2

    I'd expect most people to interpret "eugenics" as the Greek stems for "good" and "genes", because that's where the word comes from. A fairly obscure nazzy doktor with a similar name isn't what tainted the word.

    I'd expect most people neither to associate it with the Greek stems in question nor with Eugen Fischer; I'd expect them to have no clue where the word came from.

  3. Re:Then I guess you could say... on Schizophrenia Is Not a Single Disease · · Score: 1

    I'd be cool with it if it were Ed Harris

    If you're referring to Pollock, hee came across in the movie as being manic-depressive, not schizophrenic.

  4. Re:What lots of people see on Artificial Spleen Removes Ebola, HIV Viruses and Toxins From Blood Using Magnets · · Score: 1

    When people read the summary of this story, I'm sure a lot will be like "blah blah blah blah MAGNETS GOOD FOR HEALTH AND CURE EBOLA blah blah blah.

    Just as the PhD Comics comic referred to in another posting says.

  5. Re:Bad Fake Science Alert on Artificial Spleen Removes Ebola, HIV Viruses and Toxins From Blood Using Magnets · · Score: 1

    "When antibiotics are used to kill them, dying viruses release toxins"

    Too bad SlashDot isn't a science web site...

    Neither is the International Business Times, whence this article refers.

    The web site for Nature magazine, however, is a science web site, and there's a much better story there on the same topic.

  6. Re:antibiotics vs viruses on Artificial Spleen Removes Ebola, HIV Viruses and Toxins From Blood Using Magnets · · Score: 2

    I know how that one turns out. Making such a basic mistake make me doubt the other claims being made.

    Yes, I'd be inclined to pay attention to only the claims in the Nature news article on the same topic.

  7. I call bullshit on this. Not a credible source, and whoever submitted the article bungled the science...

    A better source is the article in Nature .

  8. Re:Say what now? on Artificial Spleen Removes Ebola, HIV Viruses and Toxins From Blood Using Magnets · · Score: 1

    When antibiotics are used to kill them, dying viruses release toxins in the blood that begin to multiply quickly.

    Is it just me, or is this sentence completely devoid of any scientificic sense in many different ways (antibiotics killling viruses? Toxins multiplying ??)

    No, it's not just you, and, yes, that sentence is completely devoid if any scientific sense. Better sentences can be found in the news article from Nature .

  9. Re:Woohoo!! on Artificial Spleen Removes Ebola, HIV Viruses and Toxins From Blood Using Magnets · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, for years we were told magnet therapy was bullshit. Now there's money to be made by "legitimate" medicine, though, it's suddenly scientifically acceptable.

    Well, there's "magnet therapy" as in "wear a magnet on your body", and there's "magnet therapy" as in "coat extremely small magnetic particles with a protein that binds to bacteria, viruses, and bacterial toxins, run your blood through a machine where the particles bind to the bacteria/viruses/toxins and get magnetically removed from the blood, and pump the blood back in".

    It's quite possible for the first form of "magnet therapy" to be bullshit and the second form of "magnet therapy" to work.

  10. Re:Antibiotics and Viruses on Artificial Spleen Removes Ebola, HIV Viruses and Toxins From Blood Using Magnets · · Score: 5, Informative

    Makes me want to go to Harvard.

    Makes me not want to read the International Business Times, but to, instead, read the news article from Nature , as suggested in another post.

  11. Re:I just unplug my landline phone on Turning the Tables On "Phone Tech Support" Scammers · · Score: 1

    So, why do you waste money on the phone?

    It provides a convenient phone number to provide to people who require one but to whom you don't want to talk, e.g. charitable organizations that will pester you to increase your donation. Turn the ringer off, give it an answering machine or similar service, and let people leave messages which you pick up later.

    (It may also work better for speakerphone calls than a mobile phone.)

  12. Re:Is that what qualifies as news in Canada? on CBC Warns Canadians of "US Law Enforcement Money Extortion Program" · · Score: 1

    Of course! It's all rainbows, sunshine, lollipops and unicorns up here so there's nothing interesting to report.

    Yup. And honored by a "mainly Canadian economics blog", no less.

  13. Re:Worse than that... on How Scientific Consensus Has Gotten a Bad Reputation · · Score: 1

    "Rejects empirical data" is another way of saying "taking it on faith", i.e. the Austrian school is a religion by another name.

    Oh I feel your pain. I've had to put up with those damned mathematical religionists taking it on faith that not all primes are odd, when time after time my experiment taking a random sample of one thousand of the first billion primes has kept showing them all to be odd.

    And I've had to put up with those damned geographers claiming they've seen triangles with three right angles when it's been mathematically proven that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees! "Empirical evidence" indeed!

  14. Re:Worse than that... on How Scientific Consensus Has Gotten a Bad Reputation · · Score: 1

    Another possibility is that the "well-reasoned logical argument" wasn't actually well-reasoned. For example, I've seen a perversion of the Austrian School axiom

    And, of course, an axiom is just a starting point; if the axioms are inconsistent with each other, or with reality, the conclusions drawn from the axioms could be bogus, no matter how air-tight the reasoning.

  15. Re:Bah humbug censorship on Responding to Celeb Photo Leaks, Reddit Scotches "Fappening" Subreddit · · Score: 1

    Consider also that the technicalities of a backup are beyond most non-technical consumers. Which is the group most people, including celebrities, fall in to.

    They wouldn't be if the phone wasn't a deliberately arcane restricted POS.

    Because some other type of phone would require you to understand the technicalities of a backup? Sounds like the kind of phone most non-technical consumers wouldn't use.

    Or because, with some other type of phone, the technicalities of a backup would be simple enough for non-technical consumers to use?

  16. Wrong release note links; here's the right one on LLVM 3.5 Brings C++1y Improvements, Unified 64-bit ARM Backend · · Score: 4, Informative

    The article pointed to the very very very very very incomplete release notes for stuff after 3.5.

    You wanted to link to the 3.5 release notes.

  17. Re:My opinion on the matter. on Choose Your Side On the Linux Divide · · Score: 1

    The whole "under 1024 is safe" is generally regarded for connecting *to* ports under 1024, not receiving connections from them.

    It's only "safe" if you 1) trust that the machine to which you're connecting restricts the ability to bind to ports under 1024 (not guaranteed), and that the only people running processes on the machine in question are either trustworthy or are restricted from running programs that bind to those ports (not guaranteed), and that the system services you care about have ports under 1024 (not guaranteed).

    And what guarantees that a "system service" (whatever that might mean) has a port under 1024? Perhaps a better scheme for determining whether to trust a service is called for here - one that would probably obviate the need for "privileged ports".

    Yes, some services (NFS in particular) want to trust incoming connections from 1024 but they're in the minority.

    One would hope that services that trust untrustworthy guarantees would be in the minority; in the best of all possible worlds, they would be completely non-existent.

    If I was so inclined as to trust port numbers alone (and for the record, I don't trust incoming port numbers at all)

    Good. Ideally, nobody would trust them, and claims such as "It prevents regular user programs from masquerading as system services, which usually sit below port 1024." would be treated as the uninteresting claims that they are.

  18. Re:There's a lot more going on... on Research Shows RISC vs. CISC Doesn't Matter · · Score: 1

    The discussion was about adding more registers in a CISC architecture, and so CISC functionality is the context.

    "CISC functionality" is the ability to execute a given CISC instruction set with acceptable performance. Transistors can be used in several different ways to achieve that, and you can choose to use fewer transistors in one place on a chip in favor of more transistors in another place, and if that choice means you still get better overall performance executing the same instruction set, that choice is a good one.

    When you ask what "the same functionality means" that is absurd. You can't implement a subset of the functionality and still have the same functionality.

    Again, as long as the full instruction set can be executed (even if some of it is executed by trap code), you don't have a subset. You may happen to execute some functions slower, and other functions faster, but if the net result is faster execution of the code actually run on the machine, you have a better implementation.

    I'll put this in simpler terms. Smart people design CPUs and they don't add a bunch of registers even though that would be useful.

    Smart people add registers iff they're sufficiently useful that it's worth either increasing the die size or taking transistors away from other functions.

    The reason they don't do it is because of the additional chip real estate it would cost in an already over-taxed landscape, not because they are lazy or haven't though of the idea.

    For existing architectures, the reason they don't do it is that it would require changes to the instruction format, which, for most instruction set architectures, would be a royal pain. For x86, they (AMD, to be specific) could and did add Yet Another Prefix to double the number of registers as the instruction set already had a tradition of adding prefixes. For ARM, they were already introducing a 64-bit variant of the instruction set, and didn't have to maintain binary compatibility. For, for example, System/3x0, you'd have to add prefixes to an instruction set lacking prefixes, or somehow use opcode bits to refer to additional registers. If somebody were to design a brand new CISC architecture (in an era where we're not designing many new instruction set architectures at all), they could design one with 32 GPRs.

  19. Re:isn't x86 RISC by now? on Research Shows RISC vs. CISC Doesn't Matter · · Score: 1

    The AMD-64 architecture - is that also register limited?

    With 16 GPRs, it has fewer registers than all the major RISC architectures other than 32-bit ARM, just as the 32-GPR System/3x0 (including its 64-bit z/Architecture version) does. It's less register-limited than x86, but that's not setting the bar very high. (Note that IBM recently added instructions to z/Architecture that do arithmetic on the upper 32 bits of the GPRs; that suggests that there's some register pressure with only 16 GPRs, although if they still have to make use of base registers, even with PC-relative branches, that might add some additional pressure that x86-64 doesn't have.)

    Or did AMD toss something like 32-64 program accessible registers @ the problem?

    No, they didn't; x86-64 has, as noted, only 16.

    And if they did, would Intel have limited theirs?

    Limited their what?

  20. Re:ROLF! on Canada Tops List of Most Science-Literate Countries · · Score: 1

    Better than, say, the health care systems in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Taiwan, etc.?

    there are a lot of shitty developing countries with healthcare that's much worse, and there's the united states.

    There are a good number with better healthcare than Canada no question, but the number of countries with much worse or none eclipses that list

    There's "the alternatives" and there's "the alternatives worth considering". The latter category excludes the developing countries in question, as well as the US. Hopefully the people in charge of health care in Canadian governments (federal and provincial) are looking at the alternatives in the latter category to see what they can learn from them.

  21. Re:There's a lot more going on... on Research Shows RISC vs. CISC Doesn't Matter · · Score: 1

    No. That's correct. You can't add registers, keep the same functionality, and add all the circuitry to suport said functionality by reducing functionality and taking away regsiters. Who would have thought?

    That isn't answering the question I asked.

    The question I asked was "You can't trade off, say, transistors used for registers (especially given that the bigger processors do register renaming, so you have more hardware registers than the actual RISC/CISC instruction set provides) for transistors used for some other purpose?"

    I said nothing about keeping all the same functionality, if by "functionality" you mean, for example, "on-chip caches of the same size" and "same number of hardware registers including ones used for renaming of the architected registers" or "complexity of the branch prediction hardware" or .... Yes, there may be tradeoffs you have to make in how you use your transistors, but if the benefits of the additional registers outweigh whatever performance benefits you lose by reducing the size of other functional units by however much the additional registers require, that might be the right tradeoff to make.

  22. Re:There's a lot more going on... on Research Shows RISC vs. CISC Doesn't Matter · · Score: 1

    Whereas some CISC instructions involving arrays could kick off 10+ memory touches as a side effect ... That CISC operation that made 10 memory touches took roughly 10-18 bytes of instruction storage (68K example)

    OK, that's probably using "memory indirect postindexed mode". Addressing modes that complex are something some CISC processors had, but not others; x86 is much less complex (scaling, but no memory-indirect or auto-increment/auto-decrement), and S/3x0 even less complex than that (no scaling, just double-indexing).

    How often was that addressing mode used, in practice? Was it used often enough that you saved enough code space that you could make the I cache smaller?

  23. Re:Is the anonymous reader aware of Europe? on Canada Tops List of Most Science-Literate Countries · · Score: 1

    I"m well aware of various European health care systems and also what is wrong here but I'm not most Canadians.

    Then presumably, if the anonymous submitter was Canadian, they were one of "most Canadians", and offered his or her hypothesis about the attitudes towards science and the Canadian health care system because either 1) they didn't pay attention to the EU results or 2) they assumed that European countries are like the US in their heath care systems.

    Or perhaps they were a typical Amurrican and made the same silly assumptions.

    In any of those cases, if the second paragraph of their submission had been eaten by a grue, nothing of value would have been lost - heck, something would have been gained. (I mean, my knee-jerk reaction would have been to blame "We depend too much on science and not enough on faith" on Amurrican religiosity, but, absent any data on whether the more-religious countries in the EU have a sufficiently-high level of agreement with that assertion as to drag the EU average down, even with those countries in the EU that are less religious than Canada, I wouldn't wonder too hard about that one.)

  24. Re:My opinion on the matter. on Choose Your Side On the Linux Divide · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here

    That if you think a packet coming from a privileged port is coming from a program run by a user whom you can trust, that's only true if you can trust everybody who's plugged a personal computer into your network or you can ensure that nobody on any of those computers gets to run programs with sufficient privileges to get to use privileged ports. (Remember that this subthread started with a mention of privileged ports, which I do not consider one of the Great Ideas In Network Security.)

    When I gave this Connectathon talk, somebody asked about the

    MacOSX automounter daemon
    Launched in user’s session by launchd - exits when idle
    Runs with user’s credentials

    slide, with "ZOMG WHAT IF THE NFS SERVER ONLY SUPPORTS MOUNT REQUESTS FROM A PRIVILEGED PORT!!!!1111ONE!!!!", I forget what I said, but, in retrospect, I wish I'd said "oh, we're going to remove the root-only restriction on privileged ports", and taken delight in any pathetic squeals of terror that resulted.

    (We ended up, for other reasons, running automountd as root in a privileged session, so that wasn't an issue.)

    sudo won't let you run anything it's not configured to let your user or group run. If you're allowed to sudo as a non-admin user then either your system or your admin is broken.

    Who's "you" in this context? I am an admin user on my Mac; if that means that plugging my machine into your network would terrify you, then you'd better somehow make sure that never happens. Don't expect me to care about your problem.

  25. Re:Is the anonymous reader aware of Europe? on Canada Tops List of Most Science-Literate Countries · · Score: 1

    It's what we're most exposed

    So? Most of us USans are mostly exposed to the US system as well, but that's not an excuse for being clueless about the rest of the world.

    I.e., if "gee, our health care system doesn't let people who aren't well off get no health care" is offered as an explanation for why Canadians are less likely than people in the European Union to say that "We depend too much on science and not enough on faith.", whoever offers that explanation really needs to start looking at European health care systems, or, at least, to get a by-country breakdown of the EU figures and see whether there's any correlation between having a health care system that lets the poor fall through the cracks and believing that "We depend too much on science and not enough on faith."

    (And if they weren't even bothering to care about countries other than the US when concocting that hypothesis, they need to get out more.)

    Or, to put it another way, I refuse to give a damn whether it's what you're most exposed to, as it's completely irrational to care; if I were Canadian, I'd be embarrassed to see a fellow countryman acting as if the US was the only other significant country on the planet and as if the EU didn't exist.