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User: Cyberax

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  1. Re:Map of intended locations on Tesla To Blanket US With Superchargers In Two Years · · Score: 1

    Note, that they've just _reduced_ the amount of catalyst, not eliminated it completely. Fuel cell cars are not possible in any large quantity - there's not enough platinum for that. Also, they STILL have the problem with catalyst poisoning - it's happening even faster than Li-Ion battery degradation (good news is that you can reuse platinum cheaply).

    And on top of it, hydrogen is mostly produced from methane. And it's more energetically favorable to simply burn methane in a regular combustion engine.

  2. Re:Punishment for not complying? on Judge Orders Child Porn Suspect To Decrypt His Hard Drives · · Score: 1

    Technically, a lot of states have unlimited court contempt periods. The record time, I believe, is about 10 years (in Florida, which is a known head case). However, after a year or so you can probably legitimately claim that you have completely forgotten the password.

  3. Re:More ridiculous sensationalism on Tests Show That Deadly New Flu Could Spread Among People · · Score: 0

    Actually, ferrets are used EXACTLY because they are the closest model organism to human when the flu virus is considered. So it really is alarming.

  4. Re:For free? on WIPO Panel Says Ron Paul Guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking · · Score: 0

    So? He's still using a government-approved organization. Real libertardian would set up his own DNS root server and ask their followers to use it.

  5. Re:Learning is great on Australia Makes Asian Language Learning a Priority · · Score: 1

    This. I first became fluent in _written_ English (which is not that bad) but then I actually started _speaking_ it. And I'm still surprised from time to time by pronunciations.

  6. Re:This is rather disconcerting. on Inside the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit · · Score: 1

    Law enforcement? I think you're confused. This unit is created specifically to commit crimes!

  7. Took them long enough... on Dell Dumps Its Public Cloud Offerings · · Score: 1

    So they've finally realized that OpenStack is just a death-knell for the IaaS industry. It commoditizes it and enables a race to the bottom, like it earlier happened with web hosting and later with individual VPS hosting. A couple of years from now and we're going to be swamped by small companies offering OpenStack-based clouds.

    And so instead of trying to capitalize on their own server production unit and compete on price, Dell's going to try and differentiate themselves using some half-assed proprietary offerings. And since every company trusts Dell enough to build their critical infrastructure on Dell's proprietary systems then it certainly is going to be a smash hit in the industry. Not.

  8. Re:Ugh on IBM Takes System/z To the Cloud With COBOL Update · · Score: 0

    That canard is getting old.

    These days I can easily give each user a separate server, even several servers. They are freakingly cheap - I can buy decent compute nodes for a $5k apiece (and it's going to be much more powerful than a mainframe partition of the same cost). Sure, there's also the question of shared storage/database, but that is also readily solved by a multitude of NAS/DB vendors. About administration costs - it's very hard to find mainframe specialists. So just their salary can outweigh every cost advantage of a 'single' mainframe system.

    I actually don't really care about manufacturing quality as long as it is good enough. I feel that we should design systems that can tolerate failures rather than trying to design infallible systems.

  9. Re:Ugh on IBM Takes System/z To the Cloud With COBOL Update · · Score: 0

    I certainly would prefer a $10k Dell server to a multi-$100k IBM shitframe. And then add redundancy with a couple of other $10k servers from Dell.

    I've seen too much crap about the 'reliability' of big iron in the real world. Out here, outside of marketing brochures, IBM hardware and software quite often fails - and usually with much worse consequences. See, most people expect commodity hardware to fail and _plan_ for it.

  10. Re:It doesn't matter and doesn't help. on NTSB Recommends Lower Drunk Driving Threshold Nationwide: 0.05 BAC · · Score: 1

    Actually, that's incorrect. Individual variations account for the amount of alcohol and time required to reach certain BAC level, but they have little effect on the resulting impairment.

  11. Re:Mythbusters show just how impaired you are at . on NTSB Recommends Lower Drunk Driving Threshold Nationwide: 0.05 BAC · · Score: 1

    0.00 is unreasonable (you're hitting endogenous alcohol background). 0.01 is prohibition level. 0.05 is already close to the upper scale of reasonableness.

  12. Re:No. Bad Conclusion. Bad. on Carnivorous Plant Ejects Junk DNA · · Score: 2

    Again, we CAN describe the function of about 70% of junk - it simply wants to replicate itself as much as possible. Google for "retrotransposons". Non-junk actually _has_ a purpose - it's used to encode the cell functions.

  13. Re:No. Bad Conclusion. Bad. on Carnivorous Plant Ejects Junk DNA · · Score: 1

    There is junk DNA. Read about SINEs and LINEs for a start.

  14. Re:No. Bad Conclusion. Bad. on Carnivorous Plant Ejects Junk DNA · · Score: 1

    I'm extremely familiar with genetic algorithms. Pure junk is generally useless because you're no better off than starting from scratch. You need at least something that is _almost_ junk or a way to create imperfect copies of existing functional elements within a genome.

    Unsurprisingly, there are mechanism for both of these. And they don't need junk DNA - bacteria can evolve just fine and they have virtually no junk DNA.

    Then the question: "why junk DNA?" and the answer so far is that it has negligible fitness penalty, any observable effects become noticeable only when DNA grows to humongous size (20-30Gb) because it takes very long to replicate it.

    Next question: "Then why does this plant has so little junk?". That's probably because it has some rogue transposable element that chews portions of DNA randomly.

  15. Re:No. Bad Conclusion. Bad. on Carnivorous Plant Ejects Junk DNA · · Score: 2

    Oh no. Not ENCODE junk again.

    ENCODE detected that at some point in the life of cell about 80% of DNA was translated into RNA. That doesn't mean it's functional in any way - it's just transcribed. Also, I'd like to see your source for the 50% evolutionary conservation of junk DNA - the top estimate is about 15% of the whole genome ( http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/349505/description/Reports_of_junk_DNAs_demise_were_based_on_junky_logic_and_dubious_definitions ).

  16. Re:No. Bad Conclusion. Bad. on Carnivorous Plant Ejects Junk DNA · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Wrong! Most of junk DNA is... wait for it... JUNK!

    We can tell the composition of the junk for approximately 66% of the human genome. There is a small amount of regulatory elements mixed with all this junk, but the junk itself is not necessary for anything.

    Even without the extreme examples such as bladderwort we readily observe 10x variability in the amount of DNA between fairly recently separated species.

  17. Re:FDA driving the shift to "defined-medium" cultu on Engineering the $325,000 Burger · · Score: 1

    Lots of tissue media (and enzymes) are so expensive because there's no large-scale demand for them, so vendors have to recoup their R&D by jacking up the prices. I know for a fact that a couple of very expensive enzymes used in preparation of DNA libraries are sold with 20x markup. Yet it's barely enough to get even because it took tens of millions of dollars to develop them.

  18. Re:I hope on Engineering the $325,000 Burger · · Score: 4, Informative

    I used to work in a company that grows animal tissue cultures. You certainly CAN grow lots of tissue types without horse serum or any animal-related products. In fact, lots of lab protocols require that.

  19. Re:Is Apple being compensated? on Apple Deluged By Police Demands To Decrypt iPhones · · Score: 1

    Right here: http://images.apple.com/iphone/business/docs/iOS_Security_Oct12.pdf - grep for the 'keybag' section.

  20. Re:Is Apple being compensated? on Apple Deluged By Police Demands To Decrypt iPhones · · Score: 2

    Dudes, Apple holds your encryption key in escrow to allow device restores. That's even disclosed in their freaking policy.

  21. Re:Is Apple being compensated? on Apple Deluged By Police Demands To Decrypt iPhones · · Score: 1

    Are you stupid? Apple holds your encryption keys in escrow so you can restore them if you accidentally forget them. Everybody with a couple of functioning brain cells should know that if a company can restore password for you then they can do this for law enforcement as well.

  22. Re:Not to mention... on Why Your New Car's Technology Is Four Years Old · · Score: 0

    I'm planning to create a blog with description and probably post it on Slashdot someday. I'll put everything on Github once I deal with a couple of issues.

  23. For a change, I _hate_ Zen Garden on CSS Zen Garden Turns 10 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yes, I absolutely hate and detest CSS and Zen Garden. Their so called 'designs' are filled with absolute pixel sizes and assume a lot about fonts used - set fonts to 250% and lots of these 'designs' become unintelligible. That crap has set us back at least 10 years in UI design.

    It has only recently became possible to use CSS to create table-like sites, and it's still NOT possible to create non-trivial sites that resize themselves based on content.

  24. Re:every time i see "Ender's Game" on Ender's Game Trailer Released · · Score: 1

    Actually, I do base some of my purchases on personalities. Especially for movies - I'm not going to watch the "Oblivion" because of that Shitentology crap that Tom Cruise is fond of. I won't go to see "Pain and Gain" because it's based on real events, I'll try not to buy anything associated with Mormon church.

  25. Re:I can't wait on Device Can Extract DNA With Full Genetic Data In Minutes · · Score: 1

    Definitely. We're using Illumina sequencing with our preparation on top of it. The upside is that our technology really works right now :)