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User: Trepidity

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  1. Re:More important: Why are they drying up? on Ask Slashdot: With Grants Drying Up, How Is a Tech Non-Profit To Survive? · · Score: 2

    The government should broadly decide what kinds of scientific research to fund, but it should not micromanage them, because red tape and micromanagement by bureaucrats is not how innovation happens. The government's job in funding scientific research is to allocate money and get the fuck out of the way.

  2. Re:Endorse a Theme Park on Ask Slashdot: With Grants Drying Up, How Is a Tech Non-Profit To Survive? · · Score: 1

    However, under no circumstances should you follow the variant of this plan that includes an eccentric millionaire in Belize and freebase bath salts.

  3. Re:More important: Why are they drying up? on Ask Slashdot: With Grants Drying Up, How Is a Tech Non-Profit To Survive? · · Score: 1

    The problem is that the donors are often themselves large organizations full of people with questionable motives, so an increase in donor micromanagement may actually decrease the quality of services rather than improve it. It's not like either the government or places like the Ford Foundation have particularly strong accountability imposed on them.

    In academia at least, I think it's generally made things worse. Whereas previously a lot of interesting research would slip through the cracks and get funded on a DARPA project, now that DARPA micromanages everything, nothing gets done unless a DARPA bureaucrat signs off on it first, so you have research by government committee.

  4. related Pac-Man hacks on Salvaging E.T. In Software, Instead of New Mexico · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you like this kind of investigation, you might be interested in hacks of the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man. The port from the arcade was notoriously bad, because the hardware of the Atari basically didn't map well onto the graphics needed for the game. As a result, everything is basically wrong: the pills are fat dashes, the elegant outline graphics of the original are blocky opaque colors, etc. But worst of all, since the Atari's two sprite registers are used to draw both Pac-Man and the ghosts, whenever there are more than 2 ghosts+PacMan on a horizonal scanline, they start flickering because the porters resorted to the horrible hack of round-robin rotating which sprites got to be drawn in the 2 sprite registers. (This looks slightly less horrible on a CRT with phosphor decay, but it still looks bad.) Anyway, if you want more on the details of why this port sucked, and how it can be traced to hardware mismatches, it's covered in detail in ch. 4 of the book Racing the Beam .

    But on to the hacks: Rob Kudla discussed and did some work towards a better Atari 2600 port in the late 1990s, and there are now a number of attempts, though many of them do cheat by doing things like using an 8K ROM rather than the original 4K.

  5. Re:Statistics can be misleading on Surgeries On Friday Are More Frequently Fatal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The summary does make it sound like these are raw numbers being quoted (44% and 82% more likely to die), but you're right, the actual study, which the summary should've summarized better, gives something more specific:

    Compared with Monday, the adjusted odds of death for all elective surgical procedures was 44% and 82% higher if the procedures were carried out on Friday or at the weekend, respectively

    That is, they both 1) adjusted for (at least some) other factors that predict outcomes; and 2) limited their analysis to elective surgical procedures, i.e. they did not include emergency weekend surgeries.

  6. Re:Uh on Montreal Union Wants a Camera On Every Policeman's Uniform · · Score: 1

    Isn't recording space these days cheap/compact enough that they can just record all the time, and not even contain functionality for being turned off? I mean, the officer could still deliberately disable the device, but if it had no on/off switch and they had to overtly damage/destroy it, that would be a higher bar (and a lot easier to punish them for).

  7. Re:Wrong naming on NASA Wants To Test 3-D Printing Aboard ISS · · Score: 1

    Someone seems to have already slapped a 'TM' on that...

  8. Re:Overseas laws on Singapore Seeks Even More Control Over Online Media · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Extraterritorial laws can sometimes be enforced, but I'm not sure Singapore is really in a position to do so. The U.S. is probably the most effective at enforcing its laws extraterritorially (much to the dismay of many non-Americans), and the UK does so somewhat with its notorious libel laws, but Singapore ain't no US or UK.

  9. Re:obviously I disabled it to post this... on Slashdot Killed My Kickstarter Campaign · · Score: 1

    Who can afford a tuner in this economy?

  10. not surprising on Electric Car Startup 'Better Place' Liquidating After $850 Million Investment · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Without a significant existing electric car userbase, the only real way to make money on this would be to get a manufacturer to buy in. But the only manufacturer that seems willing to spend much money on any kind of quick-charge network is Tesla, and they chose an alternate solution.

  11. Re:Uebersetzungsfehler? on German Brewers Warn Fracking Could Hurt Beer · · Score: 2

    It does: the Reinheitsgebot specifically required that the malt be made from barley.

  12. Re:Uebersetzungsfehler? on German Brewers Warn Fracking Could Hurt Beer · · Score: 1

    I suppose it depends on whether you consider the modern Biergesetz a descendant of the Reinheitsgebot. Most brewers do, at least for advertising purposes. And the Biergesetz, which regulates what is legal to call "beer" in Germany, has been amended many times.

    Actually, usage even in Germany is quite inconsistent: you will find hefeweizen claiming to be brewed in accordance with the Reinheitsgebot, even though under the historical Reinheitsgebot that cannot be true.

  13. Re:Uebersetzungsfehler? on German Brewers Warn Fracking Could Hurt Beer · · Score: 0

    It's been amended much more than that, to allow many other ingredients in addition to yeast. For example, the use of wheat malt in beer was banned under the Reinheitsgebot, but Germany is now famous for its hefeweizen.

  14. Re:They also want to allow private cyberwar... on US Entertainment Industry To Congress: Make It Legal For Us To Deploy Rootkits · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Foreign cyber spies" sounds like a phrase my grandfather who knows nothing about computers would use.

  15. interesting choice of words on Yahoo Joins Growing List of Bidders For Hulu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Note all this discussion of "revenue" rather than "profits". Sometimes it's a useful proxy, but not always. In this case, they're spending $1.1 billion to buy Hulu. If that just gets them some revenue, that is by itself not very impressive, because they start $1.1 billion in the hole! They could've generated, say, $100m/quarter in revenue just by "paying" that money to themselves over the next 3 years. It's only worth buying a company with it if you hope to actually get back more than $1.1 billion!

  16. Re:Proof of wrongdoing? on Data Leak Spurs Huge Offshore Tax Evasion Investigation · · Score: 4, Insightful

    International Business Corporations are ridiculously common. You don't have to be rich, many people with average income have those.

    I would be surprised if that's true. How common are IBCs among people making, say, $50k (the median U.S. household income)? How about even $80k, or $120k? My guess is that they're negligible until you get to more like $500k+, though I'd be interested in some numbers either way.

  17. Re:I thought that's what data.gov was? on Obama Announces Open Data Policy With Executive Order · · Score: 1

    Most amendments to existing law already are written as diffs in the first place, stuff like "subsection 23(b) of U.S. blah blah is hereby repealed, and in its place the following language is inserted".

  18. I thought that's what data.gov was? on Obama Announces Open Data Policy With Executive Order · · Score: 1

    This initiative has been going on for a while. Is the issue that not enough agencies are getting their data out fast enough, or comprehensively enough?

    I'm also a little bit skeptical of relying on a random private company, GitHub, to be the canonical data host. What's wrong with hosting it on data.gov? Or if it's going to be hosted in the private sector, how about with a public-interest organization like the Internet Archive?

  19. Re:Good points on The New AI: Where Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence Meet · · Score: 1

    Any proposed mechanism of intelligence should be discounted unless it behaves the same way as a brain.

    This doesn't make any sense unless you have a purely tautological definition in mind.

  20. a bit too blatant on Using YouTube For File Storage · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you start uploading videos to YouTube with nothing but frames of QR codes, you're pretty likely to have your account closed and the videos deleted.

    It would be more robust if you made the video look like something that could plausibly be on YouTube as a "normal" video, even if it's something really boring. Probably especially if it's something really boring. Record one of your pets and use the low-order bits of the video and/or audio to steganographically include some data.

  21. Re:Compare to recognizing people on Popular Android Anti-Virus Software Fooled By Trivial Techniques · · Score: 2

    That's closer to how it works when trying to recognize people you don't know well, though. Police sketch-artists sometimes make a few different versions of a sketch, e.g. one with and one without a hat, one with short and one with long hair, etc., because it's not necessarily easy for people to recognize one as the other if it's a stranger.

  22. Re:Not really on The First Fully 3D-Printed Gun Has Been Successfully Test-Fired · · Score: 2

    But that isn't what they demonstrated here: they demonstrated the ability to 3d-print a rudimentary one-time device.

  23. Re:the gizmos = huge pr0fit$ on Why Your New Car's Technology Is Four Years Old · · Score: 1

    Remember when Mazda tried to make having an mp3 player actually the headline feature of a limited-edition car?

  24. Re:and if the GOP gets there way any one on this on Injectable Nanoparticles Maintain Normal Blood-sugar Levels For Up To 10 Days · · Score: 1

    I think it's pretty unlikely that, having had one go at it, the Supreme Court is going to take another look at the Constitutionality of the law overall, especially once it starts being implemented. They had their shot and made a 5-4 decision, and unless someone flips, that will probably stick.

    I could see more specific parts being litigated though, e.g. there's currently some kind of controversy over the scope of what federal exchanges can do, which are supposed to be available to people in states where the states themselves have chosen not to set up state exchanges.

  25. Re:and if the GOP gets there way any one on this on Injectable Nanoparticles Maintain Normal Blood-sugar Levels For Up To 10 Days · · Score: 3, Informative

    Assuming the GOP doesn't manage to repeal Obamacare (which it doesn't seem likely they'll be able to), preexisting conditions will no longer be excludable starting 8 months from now.