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User: adrianbaugh

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  1. How to test these new placebos on Placebos Are Getting More Effective · · Score: 1

    This is all very well but it comes from research involving Big Pharma products - bought and paid for!!! To test these new placebos we need some kind of control. Like, some kind of substance that has no effect on the patients so that we can use it to gauge the placebos agains......

    Arse.

  2. Yawn on Cinder Mobile OS Lets Users Send More Power To Slow Apps · · Score: 1

    So they've included a widget to set the nice level, and it runs java (or similar) apps. News at 11....

  3. Depends on your field, but.. on Open Source Software For Experimental Physics? · · Score: 1

    my researcher friends routinely use Octave, perl, I know of R being used... Not sure about data recording programs though, perhaps that is more specialised (or I just never needed them in my field). LaTeX, as auxiliary software, is pretty standard for writing up papers.

    Of course, since it's Turing-complete you could just use emacs for everything... or vi... :-)

  4. So he can dial any phone number... on Developing "Eyes-Free" Gadgets and Applications · · Score: 0

    ... as long as it begins with 5?

  5. JFS on On the State of Linux File Systems · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sad to see JFS being overlooked so. While it may not have the postmodern features to compete in the wake of JFS, it's still in many cases the best current filesystem for linux. It's remarkably crashproof, has the lowest CPU loading of any of {ext3 jfs xfs reiser3}, good all-round performance (generally either first or second in benchmarks) and is fast at deleting big files. I haven't used anything else in a couple of years - I used to put reiser3 on /var, but got fed up with its crash intolerance. It's sad to see jfs so overlooked, because at least until btrfs or tux3 come out it's arguably the best option available.

  6. Re:Hmmmm on Complaints Pour In After Digital TV Test · · Score: 2, Informative

    External antennas are the way to go anyway, preferably coupled with a good masthead amplifier. I use a Televes DAT75 with an FTE masthead amp. I'm 70 miles from my transmitter (in the UK) and get absolutely perfect reception on the TV's internal DVB tuner (slightly less good using the twin Hauppauge in my mythTV box, but that's Hauppauge for you....)

  7. Re:10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..." on Will W3C Accept DRM For Webfonts? · · Score: 1

    For most people, perhaps. Unfortunately it's also well proven that people with certain types of reasonably common visual / neurological disability find serif fonts much harder to read than sans. So you're properly screwing up accessibility for a few people just for the sake of a marginal improvement for everyone else.

    And I'm highly skeptical of your claim that sans is easier to scan - in many sans fonts l, 1 and I, and O and 0 are extremely difficult for OCR to distinguish without using contextual information.

  8. Re:Good Featurelist on Linux 2.6.26 Out · · Score: 1

    KernelNewbies is your friend.

  9. Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! on Brightnets are Owner Free File Systems · · Score: 1

    We already rely on exclusive use of certain integers for particular individuals / organizations - pgp keys, etc. They're only (relatively) short - a few thousand bits, say - whereas the number representing MS Office is extremely long (many millions of bits). The set of all numbers representing actual creative works is incredibly sparse. It would take you a long time to get MS Office out of a random number generator...

    So your concern of privatising the entire integer space isn't really valid. As you say, the number is just a representation - it's the creative work that matters and it doesn't affect anything how you dress it up.

  10. Why use email? on White House Refused To Open Unwelcome EPA E-Mail · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is a nuts use of email. For something this important you'd expect the documents to be sent by courier or registered post, signature on delivery etc. That way, you can prove they've received it and if they've chosen not to read it it's their bad. Anyway, why should the White House need to see this? The court has decided the EPA has the authority to introduce the rule and it's then up to the judiciary to enforce it. The legislature is surely out of the loop by this point.

  11. Re:Ready for the laptop! on Getting Past "Ready For the Desktop" · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yeah, I have that too. Large parts of my experience are still pretty inconsistent, particularly most of the drunken times at university.

    Not sure what it has to do with linux being ready though... ;-)

  12. Re:Ready for the desktop? on Getting Past "Ready For the Desktop" · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Exactly. You can find Ubuntu packages for the vast majority of applications (and likewise for SuSE, Fedora etc.) Certainly you'll be able to find at least one application to do whatever you want to do (though it may not be your obscure pet application of choice).

    The fact that there's some weird little application used by about 5 people (including the maintainer...) that Ubuntu can't be bothered to package doesn't mean that Linux isn't ready for the desktop.

  13. Delighted on UK Uses CCTV, Terrorism Laws, Against Pooping Dogs · · Score: 1

    I'm actually delighted about this. I live in an area where there is a considerable problem with owners letting their dogs shit on the pavement and not clearing it up. It's right next to an infants' school and a narrow picturesque footpath (which becomes almost impossible to walk along without treading in shit).

    The local council has put up warning notices about the fines available and the supposed policemen that check on the paths, but I've never seen any policemen lying in wait for dog owners -- realistically it's not a good use of police time to have someone physically patrolling for people letting their dogs shit on the pavement. However, if a machine can take the graft out of catching such people then I'm all for it.

    Nobody has a problem with CCTV footage being used to solve murders. Murders are universally reckoned to be bad. Similarly, the problem of dog shit on the streets is universally reckoned to be bad (with the possible exception of a few selfish dog-owners who don't want to take responsibility for their animals' actions). So this seems like an efficient way of doing so and a good use of the technology. I don't see why someone would have a problem with this.

    Where I do have a problem with such technology is where it's used to enforce hotly debated laws (some of the "anti-terror" laws restricting our right to protest, speed limits on main roads and motorways etc.) But those are more because of problems with the legislation itself, not the cameras used to enforce it.

  14. Re:Needed that bad? on Patch the Linux Kernel Without Reboots · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How do you know that your test boxes are configured precisely identically to the production boxes?

    dd your production box's system filesystems to another hard drive, put in an identically specced machine, boot that?

  15. Incompetence on the part of the university on Student Faces Expulsion for Facebook Study Group · · Score: 1

    If true, this is shocking. For the senior management of a university to attempt to ban student study groups is for them to demonstrate their fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of learning and scholarship.

    The fundamental aim of a teaching university is to increase the students' understanding of their subject - nothing more. Of course, you need some form of assessment to determine whether or not a student's understanding has indeed improved, and in those assessments of course collaboration has to be seen as cheating and bad.

    However, assessment is a highly unusual situation in academia. It is the only situation in which consulting references is bad, and the only situation in which collaboration is bad. In every other aspect of academic life collaboration is not just "not cheating" - it is essential. Just as academic staff need to collaborate on writing papers, undergraduates must/b> collaborate by working together in study groups outside formal lectures and tutorial sessions to jointly improve their grasp of the subject. Such teamwork is universally approved of everywhere from business to the military to academia - except here, apparently. For the university to take the viewpoint the article suggests is academically reprehensible. The fact that today students can collaborate on facebook (or wherever) whereas formerly they would have got together in one of the dorms is neither here nor there.

  16. Re:Configurable? on KDE 4.0 Is Out · · Score: 1

    Right, back to KDE3 for me now.

    After you've submitted bug reports, I hope.

  17. Re:Best tools .... on Goodbye Cruel Word · · Score: 1

    In which case LaTeX (or the various GUIs eg LyX) ought to do just fine... (Or, indeed, kate.)

  18. Writeroom looks okay... on Goodbye Cruel Word · · Score: 1

    but if you want spartan, why not just use vi?

  19. Re:Sellouts on Science Text Attempts to Reconcile Religion and Science · · Score: 1

    That's a ridiculous statement. The scientific method simply isn't the right toolbox to discuss questions of faith (and vice versa). Just because (say) woodworking uses different tools to plumbing doesn't mean you can't do both. Science can answer questions about the physical world, in which context it seems dangerous to use religious ideas; religion (in which category I include atheist religions such as humanism) can answer questions about our moral compass, which science cannot. While science can invent the atom bomb and describe its effects, it cannot say whether or not we should use it.

    To put it another way, science and religion are orthogonal. There's no point in trying to apply the tools, the methods or even the language of one to the other. But both can teach us things about the world.

  20. Re:Great!!! on Russia Weighs Going Cyrillic For DNS · · Score: 1

    I take it there is some good reason why a new but backwards-compatible version of DNS can't be released that uses unicode? Never mind Cyrillic, or Chinese characters, I want a domain name in Tengwar!

  21. Believe it when.... on High Efficiency Hybrid Car Planned For 2009 · · Score: 1, Funny

    So will the firmware for this be written in native perl 6, and will it come bundled with a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever?

  22. Re:A slogan on Toshiba Builds Ultra-Small Nuclear Reactor · · Score: 1

    Do you live in the arctic / antarctic then? Solar doesn't need actual sunlight you know, illumination through clouds will suffice. You might need a slightly larger array, but it's still cleaner than nuclear. (FWIW, I'm in favour of nuclear myself. But some of the FUD spread about alternative energy is breathtaking...) Not to mention, if you /do/ live in the arctic / antarctic then you have a coastline, in which case wave power is cleaner. And you have plenty of wind (might have trouble keeping the ice off the turbines though!)

  23. Studios' problem on MPAA Boss Makes Case for ISP Content Filtering · · Score: 2, Informative

    Notwithstanding all the technical problems (which themselves are probably insuperable), Dan Glickman misses the point. He says copyright infringement costs the studios $6bn per year. But he wants the ISPs to fix the problem. I can't think of a suitably wacky analogy for the moment, but this is fundamentally not the ISPs' problem (and installing filtering would likely annoy much of their customer base). So what possible motivation do they have to spend money to fix it? (I don't see the studios offering to buy any of the necessary kit for the ISPs even though it's indubitably more in their interest to implement filtering than it is the ISPs' interest.

  24. Release schedule... on Backing Up Your Brain · · Score: 1

    I'm guessing it'll be released shortly before Duke Nukem Forever...

  25. Re:Encryption increases SPEED, does NOT lower risk on Encrypted Torrents Growing Fast In the UK · · Score: 1

    How do they "know" that the torrent contains copyrighted material? Equally valid uses of an encrypted torrent would be to share public domain material about falun gong with Chinese, or to share footage of Burmese government clampdowns where some of the sharers could be arrested if caught. It's this presumption that all encryption = bad that gives various commercial bodies the lever to poke unreasonably into people's privacy.