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Comment Re:Comparison to Wikinews (Score 1) 167

Well based on the current interface, it will differentiate itself by making articles a series of disconnected statements, with no editing for flow at all. This makes it easier to link back to the original source of each statement, but kills any sort of readability like the worst of the inverse pyramid writing style rising again after its near death.

Comment Re:US Centric? (Score 1) 167

I still don't know what to make of this since it wasn't just one paper, but all the ones I looked at. I'm no conspiracy nut, but how does that happen?

If they were all wrong in the same way, it is possible you were just reading slightly edited versions of the same account provided by a news feed like the Associated Press.

Comment The speech synthesizer was not changed (Score 3, Informative) 56

From the second link:

Wood showed WIRED a little grey box, which contained the only copy of Hawking's speech synthesiser. It's a CallText 5010, a model given to Hawking in 1988 when he visited the company that manufactured it, Speech Plus. The card inside the synthesiser contains a processor that turns text into speech, a device that was also used for automated telephone answering systems in the 80s.

"I'm trying to make a software version of Stephen's voice so that we don't have to rely on these old hardware cards," says Wood. ...

Hawking is very attached to his voice: in 1988, when Speech Plus gave him the new synthesiser, the voice was different so he asked them to replace it with the original. His voice had been created in the early 80s by MIT engineer Dennis Klatt, a pioneer of text-to-speech algorithms. He invented the DECtalk, one of the first devices to translate text into speech. He initially made three voices, from recordings of his wife, daughter and himself. The female's voice was called "Beautiful Betty", the child's "Kit the Kid", and the male voice, based on his own, "Perfect Paul". "Perfect Paul" is Hawking's voice.

Comment Re:BLUE ray (Score 2) 194

If you look at the absorption and efficiency plots in the linked nature abstract, the improvement is pretty broad spectrum as it is. Based on the Fourier analysis plots, it does seem like a slightly wider pit spacing would better concentrate the energy in their desired sweet spot, but CDs and DVDs would be too wide. HD-DVD actually looks like it might have the most ideal pit spacings.

Comment Re:BLUE ray (Score 4, Insightful) 194

Now that they have a proof of concept, it is an obvious thing for researchers to try different pit sizes and patterns in order to optimize the efficiency

Actually, that already happened. As the abstract of the paper notes, previous research has already identified how to theoretically optimize patterns, but arbitrary patterns require expensive photo lithography equipment to create. This research shows that an existing inexpensive mass production technique generates results that are almost as good as the optimized patterns, but not quite as good because the spacing of the pits is a bit too periodic (especially across tracks rather than along them).

Comment Awesome (Score 2) 181

We prefer Firefox, but I was about to switch my wife over to using Chrome as it has become impossible to figure out which of the dozens of tabs she has open was slowing everything down, even with ad-blocking enabled. It will be interesting to see how the multi-process support impacts memory overhead, though, as Firefox has had the lead on Chrome in that area.

Space

Life Insurance Restrictions For Space Tourists 68

RockDoctor writes: Reuters reports that there are changes afoot for life insurance contracts, which will require additional premiums for "space tourists." While not likely to be a disabling issue for the industry — the statistics for astronauts dying in flight are not that bad — it is an issue that people considering such a jaunt will need to address. Obviously this has been brought to the fore by the unfortunate crash of the Virgin Galactic craft under test. Relatedly, an article at IEEE Spectrum explains why SpaceShipTwo's rocket fuel wasn't the cause of the accident.

Comment Other statues don't apply (Score 1) 251

Total overreach, and I don't understand why they couldn't have gone with some simpler "destruction of evidence" charge (which I'm sure is still fairly serious and would turn a fine into a prison sentence).

Because previous laws aren't applicable to this situation. To my knowledge, and according to the two surveys of federal obstruction of justice statutes, all previous laws (like 18 U.S.C. 1503 and 1505) only apply when there is judicial or grand jury proceeding at the time. The purpose of 18 U.S.C. 1512(c) and 1519 (enacted by Sarbanes-Oxley) were to expand the scope of obstruction laws to apply when an investigation was underway but charges had not yet been filed. That is what the prosecutor means when saying the intent of these sections was to close a loophole or fill gaps in the current law. I have to agree that it needed to be filled, and this was the correct statute to apple to this case.

In both the new and old statutes cases the offender must be aware of the proceedings or investigation and act with intent in order for the law to apply, so they can't be abused in that manner. Sarbanes-Oxley also doubled the maximum penalties for these laws, which increases the potential for abuse. Personally, I would feel better if the statutes explicitly stated that the maximum penalty should be proportional to the penalty of the crime being covered up. That is currently up to judicial discretion and precedence, AFAIK.

Comment And they change (Score 1) 165

And those risk tolerances change over time. It's been 10 years since SpaceShipOne won the X-Prize, and Virgin Galactic started taking reservations not too long after that. Someone could have gotten married and had multiple kids since then. What was an acceptable risk to them as a bachelor, may not be an acceptable risk as a parent. I wouldn't be surprised if this has been a latent concern for some time, but one could be ignored for the meanwhile since it was still a ways off. Heck if the schedule kept slipping like it has been, the risk equation could have changed again, so why not kick the decision down the road. This crash forced the issue into clear view.

Comment Re:If lack of security updates didn't kill IE 6... (Score 1) 70

Yeah, but not by default. I agree that this won't influence most businesses who are still running IE. But old grandma running IE 6 will find that her internet is broken, and will ask someone to fix it for her, which most likely will involve upgrading to an newer browser.

Comment Re:If lack of security updates didn't kill IE 6... (Score 2) 70

It may also bring back the days of banks requiring the use of IE, as none of the citi group websites support any version of TLS. Of course, those in the know should cancel their citi accounts. Even if you don't use their website, if their security is this lax in one area, it probably isn't great in others as well. Sucks for people with mortgages and such that are very expensive to move to another company, though.

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