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Comments · 64

  1. Re:WTF??? on Largest Data Breach Disclosed During Inauguration · · Score: 0

    Your comments have nothing to do with reality. I read this story on line this morning before I left the house. That would have been about 9am EST--three hours before the inauguration. Since I scan the headlines for three news services before leaving, I can't say for certain which it was. Probably either the AP or NYT.

  2. Re:HOTMAIL on Email-only Providers? · · Score: 1

    How do you scan the mail store for viruses? New viruses, phishing scams, etc. will often slip through undetected and need to be cleaned out after new antivirus definitions come out. A nightly scan of the mail store is a must. Does Archiveopteryx provide you with a mechanism to scan and remove suspect messages from the DB?

    After 9 years of running my company's mail server, I've learned enough hard lessons to be afraid of sysadmin newbies running their own mail servers. Hell, it gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach to think of how clueless I was when I started. I wouldn't let me (circa 2000) anywhere near a network!

  3. Re:5x mass = 5x gravity on Astronomers Claim Discovery of Earth-like Planet · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oh for god's sake, people! Do a little math.

    Let's assume that the average density of the earth-like planet is the same as Earth. (It wouldn't be an earth like planet if it were significantly different.) Then we can use the volume of the sphere to relate the mass and the surface radius. Since M = 4/3 * \pi * R^3 * \rho, where \rho is the density, it is easy to see that the surface radius goes like the cube root of the mass. Putting this into Newton's equation, we can see that a = GM/R^2 means that the surface gravity is also going to go like the cube root of the mass. If the mass is five times that of Earth, then the surface gravity will be the cube root of 5 greater than Earth's or about 1.7 times Earth normal.

    Taking differences in the mean density into account is no more difficult, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

  4. Re:When did we PROVE evolution to be true??? on Louisiana Passes Intelligent Design Law · · Score: 1

    Evolution has just as much of a lack of evidence as Intelligent Design.

    This is just an instance of willful stupidity. Go visit talkorigins.org for a nontechnical discussion of evolution and its evidence.

    Just let poor gullible children think for themselves for once!

    I will if you will. Unfortunately, it's their gullibility which makes them susceptible to IDiots. Children have to be guided and protected from stupid ideas for the same reason that you have to keep them away from open flames.

    Honestly, evolution and science are the least of religion's problems with education. History and geography are probably more responsible for a loss of religion than science. The moment a child learns to imagine how their convictions would have changed had they been born into a different culture, religion is doomed. As soon as you realize that Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and Christians (to name a few) have equal evidence and firm convictions for their beliefs, it is impossible to take that sort of voodoo seriously.

  5. Any signal on a neutrino telescope? on Supernova Birth Observed From Orbiting Telescope · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Were any neutrino telescopes collecting data at the time? If so, did they see a signal? The delay between the time of arrival of the X-ray burst and the neutrino signal would put bounds on the mass of the neutrino. Given the distance to the supernova, there probably wasn't much of a signal, but it would be interesting to know if anything was seen.

  6. ATI drivers not available either on Fedora 9 (Sulphur) Released · · Score: 1

    It looks as though the ATI drivers aren't available from livna yet either. I think I'll hold off until they're ready. I like Fedora, but it can be a little too cutting edge sometimes.

  7. Building custom spins... on Fedora 9 (Sulphur) Released · · Score: 1

    What I would really like to be able to do is to build my own custom spin of Fedora 9 from within my Fedora 8 setup. It's seems wasteful to have to install a new distribution before I can build a custom spin of it. There doesn't seem to be a reason that they couldn't publish sufficient updates to 8 to allow this to work. Basically, it should only require installing new comps files and anaconda packages on 8 with maybe updates to Revisor. Everything else gets pulled off of the internet.

  8. Re:Six P's on Whitehouse Emails Were Lost Due to "Upgrade" · · Score: 1

    I had a boss with a sign like that. It said Prodigious Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. He pointed it out to me one day, so I responded with Asinine Alliteration Always Attracts Attention.

  9. A: Birthday, San Francisco 1906 and Britney Spears on Star Swallows Companion, Burps Out Planet-Forming Cloud · · Score: 1

    Q: Name a cake, a quake, and a flake.

    I miss Carnak.

  10. Re:I can answer one of these on Modeling Urban Panic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ambrose Bierce defined it best in his "Devil's Dictionary"

    riot n. A popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders.

  11. Re:P**n on Microsoft Wants To Give You A Rorschach · · Score: 3, Funny

    I usually suggest to people that they come up with a positive self talk phrase, take the first letter of each word, then replace a letter with a number that resembles it.

    Something like "I am a happy person who loves their life." turns into "Iaahpwlt1", which is long, contains numbers and letters and no dictionary words whatsoever.

    I use mnemonic devices also, but perhaps I should rethink my current "Nobody loves me, I wish I were dead" password. Oh, what's the use. It wouldn't matter anyway.

  12. Re:I'm an entomologist... on Science In Islamic Countries · · Score: 1

    At least you're not some low-life lepidopterist. They smell funny...probably because they never bathe. And you wouldn't believe the things I've seen them eat. They're disgusting. We should send them back to where they came from. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire

  13. Re:RFC-Ignorant.org on DynDNS Drops Non-Delivery Reports · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why are you accepting a message for a nonexistent user in the first place? As soon as the sending SMTP connection specifies RCPT you should be able to check if it is valid and terminate the connection if it is for a nonexistent user. This can all be done before the DATA command is issued. Why waste cycles virus scanning, spam screening and bouncing a message for a user you don't even have? You're not just RFC ignorant, you're ignorant of how to properly run a mail server!

    Note that the method above gets rid of NDRs for nonexistent users but still provides them for a user over their quota or suffering other delivery problems.

  14. Re:Faster than light travel? on Massive Star Burps, Then Explodes · · Score: 1

    I hope you aren't an accountant, because your math sucks. A speed of 10 million miles per hour works out to about 3000 miles per second which is way below the speed of light.

  15. Ah, yes! My first Christmas bonus. on America's Worst Christmas Parties · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I was straight out of graduate school. I took a job in the Northeast, and the company paid all of my moving expenses to relocate me from Texas to Massachusetts. Five and half months later I'm sitting in my office when the vice president comes around to give me a bonus check. Now I wasn't even expecting a bonus, so I was thrilled to get it! Then I opened the envelope and discovered that they had given me a bonus of $2400...from which they then deducted my moving expenses, leaving me with $59. In a matter of seconds, I went from being thrilled to get any kind of a bonus (no matter how small!) to feeling like I had been servered a piping hot bowl of cream of shit soup.

  16. Re:Where do they all go on How They Make LEGO Bricks · · Score: 1
    The article says they make 18 billion a year! Since they've been building bricks since 1958, that means there's a HELL of a lot of bricks somewhere.

    Did you look under the sofa?

  17. Re:This is just a part of Large Hadron Collider on World's Largest Supercooled Magnet Activated · · Score: 1

    Right so we have theories such as for example...

    (1) Higher energy collisions occur in the atmosphere.

    With point (1) we actually have an assumption which is a fair assumption,...

    That's not an assumption. It's as well established a fact as any other in the world. See: Ultra-high-energy Cosmic Ray and its references to the primary literature. If you want to discount such evidence, you might as well forbid children from jumping on their beds because they're in danger of launching themselves into space since gravity is just an assumption.

    For example we have a concentrated particle beam than would not occur naturally in our atmosphere

    It's difficult to even know how to respond to such a statement. Are you concerned that the concentration of particles in the LHC beam is higher than in the atmosphere? It isn't. Are you concerned that particles in the LHC beam will somehow form an unruly mob and behave in a way that is different from the individual particles? They can't.

    The only reason for using what you call concentrated beams is to reduce the mean time between interesting interactions to something which can be measured in a reasonable time. When an interesting interaction does occur, it is between a quark in a proton colliding with an (anti)quark in an anti-proton. The other quarks in those two particles have no influence on the collision, much less the other particles in the beam. Each event is completely independent of the others. There is no difference between shooting a million particles at a target once, and shooting one particle at the same target a million times. Statistically, you will end up with the same results. Or, put another way, you have the same probability of producing a particular interaction in both cases. It simply takes more time and energy to perform one experiment than it does the other.

    And don't forget that the physics is independent of the inertial frame of reference. From the point of view of the ultra-high energy cosmic ray, someone fired the Earth in its direction at practically the speed of light! Now that's what I call a concentrated beam of particles! I doubt if CERN is going to be up to that task anytime soon.

    We cannot know its truly 100% safe and we cannot know any percentage figure that gives the degree of its safety. Any such figure would be based on assumptions and feelings and not based on science.

    Quite the opposite is true. It is your argument which is based on assumptions and feelings and not on science. Your objections are based on complete ignorance of the subject.

  18. Re:Image to text on Bot Nets Behind Recent Spam Surge · · Score: 1
    I haven't gotten a single spam to my "real" email address, but my catch-all has been getting hammered the past month with bounces. It seems about time to disable them, I wonder what percentage of emails floating around are actually just errors from spammers sending to nonexistant accounts.

    I run the mailserver at a small business in New England. (It's not my day job, but I became sick of spam 6 years ago and decided to become the company expert.) I've basically eliminated most of the bounces due to nonexistent users at our company by using the Cyrus IMAP system's Sendmail map daemon (smmapd). This lets sendmail query the Cyrus server to see if a recipient is valid before the mail has been accepted. It stops the message at the RCPT stage so that we don't have to virus scan, spam analyze or attempt delivery of the message only to bounce it back to some innocent bystander. Doing this reduced the load on our server by quite a bit.

    We rejected approximately 200000 messages last month at the RCPT stage. No, that's not a typo. We reject on the order of 7000 messages a day from spammers attempting to guess user names at a company with only 45-50 employees.

  19. Re:Yea there out there. on FDA Set To Approve Products from Cloned Cows · · Score: 1

    Do yourself a favor and complete this experiment.

    • Gather some small pots with soil
    • Place 1 seed of your favorite plant (daisy's will work just fine) in each pot
    • Water half of the plants with boiled water (tap, bottled, whatever) that you let cool before watering plant
    • Water the other half with water (same source as above) boiled in a glass in a microwave, again that you let cool before watering

    Watch what happens over a 10 day period. You tell me if scientists fully understand what a microwave does to our food.

    First, I'd like to know what you think will happen. I know what I think will happen. Given enough test plants to eliminate statistical variations, there will be no difference between the plants watered by microwaved water and those watered by unmicrowaved water.

    Water is made up of an Oxygen atom bound to two Hydrogen atoms. A water molecule absorbs microwave radiation changing the quantum state of the rotational and vibrational levels of the molecule to a higher state. Through collisions with other water molecules, energy is transfered from the rovibrational states of the excited molecule to the translational states of both molecules. This raises the temperature of the water. It's called equipartition of energy. If there is more energy in the rovibrational states than in the translation states, then collisions are more likely to transfer energy downhill to the colder degrees of freedom. When you heat water on a stove by adding energy to the translational degrees of freedom, collisions tend to transfer energy into the rovibrational states. Equilibrium between the rotational, vibrational and translational degrees of freedom is reached in microseconds (in liquid water) regardless of how the energy is introduced. This is all very well understood.

  20. Re:My Take. on Eric Schmidt on Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    This is part of the problem. People are confusing the issue of bandwidth usage with the two-tier internet. As I understand it, the issue is not about paying for the cost of bandwidth or speed. The issue is over prioritizing the routing of packets. By paying more money, you can have better QoS for traffic to and from your network. The issue isn't about people paying for their bandwidth usage, but rather about paying for preferential treatment for their traffic. Some see this as anticompetitive in that it offers companies with deeper pockets an unfair advantage over others.

    QoS is (at least it seems to me) a zero sum game. Packets from one node can only have higher QoS if packets from other nodes recieve lower QoS. Thus, for someone to obtain perferential treatment, everyone else has to suffer degraded service. It's kind of like having traffic laws which require you to pull over to the side and let Steve Ballmer pass you whenever you 're on the road at the same time. To push the analogy further, they want to sell you better traffic access not just by widening the road, but by selling you preferential access to the road.

    Proponents of the two-tier internet seem to be deliberately attempting to confuse the issue by making it sound as though companies do not currently pay for access in proportion to their bandwidth usage, and that the consumer is somehow footing the bill for it. If you just listen to what they say, without digging deeper, then you will walk away feeling that they are making a legitimate point. When you look deeper at what they are saying, you realize that they are grossly misrepresenting the issue.

    How does this affect the consumer? If you are interacting with a company that has paid for privileged access, they you will experience better service. However, if the consumer is trying to access unprivileged systems, then they will experience degraded performance. Peer to peer networking would suffer the most. There's no one for the telecos to charge for bittorrent traffic! But more than that, your local schools and government services will either have to pay more for the higher level of service (raising your taxes!) or suffer lower quality of service.

    I have to admit that opponents of the two-tier internet are also grossly misrepresenting the issue by painting such a black and white future. Things aren't quite as stark as they make them appear.

    This is all just my interpretation of the issue. It's a difficult, subtle issue, and I may be wrong in my interpretation.

  21. Re:Ozone hole is bad science. The thinning is natu on Ozone Layer Improving Faster Than Expected · · Score: 1
    This is exactly the kind of response I expected. These topics always bring out people with a political agenda skewing their science.

    You're the one with a political agenda. I'll listen to the side that presents data. So far, you have not. All you've offered is hand waving and bad analogies.

  22. Re:Ozone hole is bad science. The thinning is natu on Ozone Layer Improving Faster Than Expected · · Score: 1

    Arguments like this always sound sensible to the uniformed and uneducated, but they are totally lacking in any predictive powers. The problem with your argument is that you fail to quantify any of your statements. Yes, sunlight produces ozone from diatomic oxygen, but at a rate that is dependent upon the solar flux and oxygen concentration. That rate can be measured in the lab. CFC's catalyze the destruction of ozone. The rate at which this occurs can also be measured in the lab. Going through all of the reaction processes, you can build up a set of coupled differential equations describing the change in the concentrations of the various molecular species with time. Your hand wavy description of your theory describes nothing. If you want to contradict the atmospheric chemists, then show where the chemical reaction rates are wrong, or show where they are missing a reaction pathway. That would be a convincing argument. This drivel is just a rationalization for ignoring the science. Why is the ozone hole important when the cold, long antarctic night indicates that we should expect the ozone concentration to decrease? Because it forms a natural experiment. Since sunlight mediates the production of ozone, removing that production term from the set of reaction pathways allows you to study the combination of terms which remove ozone from the atmosphere. What is important is the rate at which the ozone hole forms. It provides a sensitive test on the reaction pathways which remove ozone from the atmosphere. There are natural as well as anthropogenic source terms to the reaction pathways which affect the ozone concentration. Many of the natural terms are produced randomly, such as sulfuric acid production from volcanos. Long term predictions of these effects must use average values for these random terms. As a result they will sometimes be high and sometimes low. There is nothing surprising about the difference between the predictions and the current measurements. You would expect them to disagree somewhat. The issue is whether the divergence from the model predictions is larger than the expected variations due to the historic values of the natural source terms. The next step would be to inventory the actual production rates for the natural contributions and see if they differ from the average values used by the models in such a way as to account for the differences. Don't be surprised if they do. They chemistry is pretty fundamental and well understood.

  23. Re:Terrible loss of civilizations on Radioactive Warning for Future Generations · · Score: 2, Informative
    There's even been discoveries that humans actually co-existed with dinosaurs.
    This so called evidence has been discredited for a very long time. Please visit the talkorigins.org page on Paluxy. The "human-like" nature of the footprints are superficial at best and do not hold up to careful examination. After reading the discussion at t.o. you can return to the bible.ca site you listed and see the features they described in the images for yourself. You can then make up your own mind.
  24. Re:Summary of Kent Hovinds video on Evidence of the Missing Link Found? · · Score: 1
    5. ... Evolutionists would claim that the Grand Canyon is formed over a long period of time even when the conjecture clearly violates laws of physics.
    Exactly how does the slow formation of the Grand Canyon violate the laws of physics? Be specific and show your work.
  25. Re:Problematic Signature Release Issue on January 2006 Virus and Spam Statistics · · Score: 3, Funny
    Your post is never going to compile dude. MyWife is supposed to be the first argument of KamaSutra().

    Yeah, but the second argument is PoolBoy