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User: blackbearnh

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  1. Check Out the Open Humans Foundation on Ask Slashdot: Do Citizen Science Platforms Exist? (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    There are lots of opportunities to contribute (either your personal data, or code/tech.) There are open APIs to let you design opt-in activities using everything from step data off of personal devices to entire genomes.

    https://www.openhumans.org/ [openhumans.org]

    OBJ DISCLAIMER: I was just elected to the OH Board of Directors...

  2. Tennis Courts? Please use SI Football Fields! on Google's Balloons Connect Flood-hit Peru (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    I'm always upset when I see journalists using non-standard units. No one uses tennis courts anymore. Football fields, schoolbuses and milli-Library-Of-Congresses please! (Or, if you live in the UK, Football fields (the other kind), double-decker buses, and fempto-Houses-of-Commons.

  3. They can just replace The Stig with Jeff Bezos...

  4. Re:For Geldings only? on The Bronies Get Their Own Charity · · Score: 2

    I know the original comment was a troll, but I'll state for the record that the Fund will have no say in the administration of the scholarship, CalArts will run it just as they do all their other scholarships. In fact, the IRS was pretty adamant about that point.

  5. Re:Huh... on The Bronies Get Their Own Charity · · Score: 1

    Interesting... Did you know that 85% of female bronies dislike or are at best neutral to the term "pegasister"? Bro is gender neutral in this day and age.

  6. Re:not charity on The Bronies Get Their Own Charity · · Score: 2

    1) Unless you think that pretty much every piece of quality animation produced in the last 30 years (Iron Giant, Dexter's Laboratory, everything from Pixar, etc.) is "soul-crushingly-commercial toy-selling animation", you might want to do a little research on CalArts and their animation program.

    2) In addition to the scholarship, the Brony Thank You Fund also donated nearly $20,000 to Toys for Tots, over $10,000 to the College View School, and over $1,600 each to GLSEN and Engineers without Borders in the last 12 months. Bronies for Good (a brony fundraising group) raised over $100,000 to aid an orphanage.

    The only sarcasm I can detect around here is yours...

  7. Re: Can someone explain bronies? on The Bronies Get Their Own Charity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How about people who are genuinely appreciative of an animated cartoon with all-ages appeal, quality animation, and great voice work.

    Not everything needs to be some kind of snarky ironic entity. There's room in the world for sincerity, as much as the Internet tries to beat that sentiment into oblivion.

    And for the record, less than 20% of bronies self-identify as furries, the vast majority are heterosexual, and the fandom has nothing to do with pedophilia.

  8. Anyone seen Elvis Costello around today? on Margaret Thatcher Dies At 87 · · Score: 1

    I think he had an appointment pending, assuming he has a good pair of hiking boots handy.

  9. Re:CS Monitor? on Is the Maker Movement Making It Cool For Kids To Be Nerds? · · Score: 1

    Are we confusing Christian Science with Scientology? If not, I worked for 3 years in the newsroom of the Monitor, and Christian Scientists are among the least proselytizing, most laid back folks I ever ran into.

  10. Re:Gah, Mixed Units! on A 9V Battery To Your Brain Can Improve Your Gaming · · Score: 1

    Sorry, meant to say it assumes a 100V signal (100V x 2mA = 200mW, or 1/500 of 100W)

  11. Re:grammar on Managing the Most Remote Data Center In the World · · Score: 1

    I'll take credit for the gripped vs griped issue (I'll blame it on the fact I posted it past midnight, 3 timezones west of my normal). But if you check Firehose, the story started out with the headline of "Most Remote". And for the record, I'm neither a Wookie, nor related to Humpty Dumpty. I'm a Ninja Coder of the Kung Fu Panda school.

  12. Re:Why Where and When? on The Best Medications For Your Genes · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm not going to argue about the mysterious information you have, since you don't go into details on it, but as the author of the article, I should tell you that it's part of the "O'Reilly Insights" series, not a straightline Forbes piece, and I very much was writing it from the perspective of "here's a significant piece of medical advancement that will affect us as individuals, and is also going to make drastic changes in the pharma industry.

    You say that there aren't enough drugs that genetic variance makes a difference in, and it's all a big scam to get people's data. Personally, I think that major differences in the effectiveness of the leading breast cancer drug, and huge variance in the uptake of the most commonly prescribed blood thinner, are pretty significant, and I'm damn glad I know that I overmetabolize Coumadin, because I could very well be in an ER with a stroke some day.

    We're just in the very earliest stages of looking at how genetic variation affects medicine, and once we start to build a larger database of fully sequenced individuals, I'm sure we'll find more and more cases of genome-influenced variability.

    And for the record, I'm an applicant to the Personal Genome Project, which is about as public a distribution of genomic information as you can get, so I am certainly putting my money where my mouth is as far as choosing the benefits of greater knowledge over the fear of discrimination.

  13. Re:Christian Science Monitor? Religion+science? on Who Will Fix the Internet? No One, Apparently · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/about_the_monitor.html Is 7 Pulitzer Prizes, including one for uncovering the death camps in Bosnia, serious enough?

  14. Re:Running out of cats? on Apple To Ship Mac OS X Snow Leopard On August 28 · · Score: 1
    Simmons: Why 'Warthog,' Sir?

    Sarge: Because 'M12 LRV' is too hard to say in conversation, son.

    Grif: No, but, why 'Warthog'? I mean, it doesn't really look like a pig...

    Sarge: Say that again?

    Grif: I think it looks more like a Puma.

    Sarge: What in Sam Hell is a 'Puma'?

    Simmons: Uhh, you mean like the shoe company?

    Grif: No! Like a Puma! It's a big cat, it's like a lion.

    Sarge: You're making that up.

    Grif: I'm telling you, it's a real animal.

  15. Re:Humans have ~810.6 MiB of DNA on Sequencing a Human Genome In a Week · · Score: 1

    Right, but that's the finished product. You start with a ton of fragments that you need to sequence and fit together, and there's overlap, and multiple reads (like 30?) of each sequence, so you end up with much much more data that gets refined down into the end sequence.

  16. Re:Moore's law at work? on Sequencing a Human Genome In a Week · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It wasn't the computing power that was the holdup, it was the sequencing throughput. Also, as noted in the article, they can do it in a week now partially because they have the completed human genome to use as a template to match things up against. As I analogized in the interview, it's like the difference between putting together a jigsaw puzzle with the cover image available, and doing one without.

  17. Re:Here's what I want to know... on Sequencing a Human Genome In a Week · · Score: 3, Informative

    I wondered the same thing, so I asked. From the article: And between two cells, one cell right next to the other, they should be identical copies of each other. But sometimes mistakes are made in the process of copying the DNA. And so some differences may exist. However, we're not at present currently sequencing single cells. We'll collect a host of cells and isolate the DNA from a host of cells. So what you end up is with when you read the sequence out on these things is, essentially, an average of this DNA sequence. Well, I mean it's digital in that eventually you get down to a single piece of DNA. But once you align these things back, if you see 30 reads that all align to the same region of the genome and only one of them has an A at the position and all of the others have a T at that position, you can't say whether that A was actually some small change between one cell and its 99 closest neighbors or whether that was just an error in the sequencing. So it's hard to say cell-to-cell how much difference there is. But, of course, that difference does exist, otherwise that's mutation and that's what eventually leads to cancer and other diseases.

  18. Re:Please on Groklaw's PJ Says SCO's Demise Greatly Exaggerated · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Oh yes, they were lawyers, albeit providing advice pro bono. One is even a bankruptcy attorney, who gave me explicit advice how I could have stayed in the game had I wanted to make the effort.

  19. Re:Please on Groklaw's PJ Says SCO's Demise Greatly Exaggerated · · Score: 5, Informative

    According to multiple folks I consulted, I'm still a creditor, I'm just the VERY last in line to get anything. Which, practically speaking, means I'd never get anything anyway. But it was an easy way to get copies of all the bankruptcy proceedings, since they had to send me a copy of everything.

  20. Re:Please on Groklaw's PJ Says SCO's Demise Greatly Exaggerated · · Score: 5, Funny

    Too late, SCO's been off the market for a while. Just before they went under, I bought 10 shares at 0.50/share, then paid the $15 to get a physical certificate so I could frame it and put it in my bathroom, along with the rest of the toilet paper. Which is why you can find my name in various court documents in the SCO Bankruptcy, since I registered as a creditor. I'm getting bumped off, though, because they challenged and I don't have the time and energy to do all the hoops to stay on the list.

  21. Re:Any tech life after 50? on Judges Reinstate Charges In Google Age Discrimination Suit · · Score: 1

    Well, I just turned 45 and I consider myself (as a senior software engineer) to be at the top of my game. I've made a point of (selectively) keeping up with the latest. I taught myself Rails this summer, and I've spent the last 3 weeks learning Salesforce.com coding for work. I don't think it's age that pushes people out of the industry, it's failure to stay current. If you get cozy with whatever you're doing right now, and don't keep your skills fresh, you're certain to age out of the industry.

    James

    (Who just learned he's eligible for AARP membership in 5 years. Dinner at 4PM, here I come!)

  22. Re:Much ado about nothing on Is Virtual Rape a Crime? · · Score: 2, Informative

    Or you can trick someone into accepting and running your animation -- all it takes is for them to click on an object you control once. If they do that, you gain the ability to make their avatar do anything you want, as if you installed a rootkit on their avatar. So 'standing still' isn't a problem. You can be tricked into cooperating.

    Actually, it takes more than that. In order to run llStartAnimation on someone, you first need to do an llGetPermissions on them, which brings up a popup window asking permission to run animations. The only exception to this is if you "sit" an object (right-click it and select Sit), in which case the script still has to run llGetPermission, but it returns immediately because sitting on something is implicit permission to be animated, that's how poseballs work.

    However, even if you somehow got into a situation when (either by sitting or granting permission) you were running an animation you didn't want to, Tools->Stop All Animations will turn off anything you didn't want to do.

  23. Youtube Link on Life Inside a Cell · · Score: 4, Informative
  24. Obj HHGttG Reference on Designer Mice Made to Order · · Score: 3, Funny

    Oh, those clever mice, letting their genes be manipulated, mysteriously developing arthritis, glowing in the dark.

  25. Things That Happen to Sr. Editors During Reunions on Free Software Mag Interviews Sys-Con Publisher · · Score: 4, Informative
    Yep, I was at my 25th High School Reunion when this broke today, here's my initial comments, more to come later in the weekend.

    James Turner
    Senior Editor
    LinuxWorld Magazine