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Comment Re:Ever done business in China? (Score 0, Troll) 338

OTOH, the Chinese classic - the "Tao teh Ching" positively prohibits cunning and urges people to stop being too smart. It also talks about how the government should never interfere with the people and never to make too much of a commotion about anything.

I never knew Ayn Rand plagiarized her screed from the ancient Chinese.

Comment Re:Insane (Score 1) 216

The key part was "Of all the ways they could screw up". And for many, not being able to buy groceries for 2 weeks is pretty damned bad.

I suppose they could have accidentally mailed fliers laced with ricin and DMSO, but that's a bit of a stretch.

Yeah, only Ubisoft does that to their customers.

Comment Just goes to show (Score 5, Insightful) 209

DNA by itself should never be used as the sole evidence to convict someone. It can be a useful indicator for finding suspects, but there always needs to be more direct evidence to provide a conviction. It is not just that people who don't have twins can be convicted solely based on DNA evidence, while people who do have twins cannot because of the possibility of convicting an innocent person. And that is not even going into DNA collisions or tainted samples.

Comment Re:well yeah, (Score 1) 185

"Does the resulting CO2 from burning methane contribute less to greenhouse effect then the pure methane?"

Very much so. It really is a win win.

Except that the water vapor released is an even more potent greenhouse gas. The catastrophic AGW scenario of CO2 is entirely dependent on the greenhouse effect caused by water vapor that is accelerated by CO2 induced warming, not by the greenhouse effect caused by CO2 alone. Depending on who you ask, the increase of water vapor will either accelerate the warming or stop it due to the extra cloud formation blocking the radiation.

Comment Re:French Engineers (Score 1, Troll) 634

Eighty years ago the French engineers built a wall to protect France from Germans. The Germans walked around it and invaded the country.

Ten years ago the French engineers built a nuclear aircraft carrier that was too short to allow planes to land on it. It was also exposing the crew to radiation.

Now they designed a network-based DRM, which was cracked almost immediately, until (surprise!) the servers went down in flame.

Bunch of buffoons.

And 123 years they built the Eiffel Tower.

Bush is gone, the French are no longer the enemy. Give it up.

Comment Re:Questions... (Score 2, Insightful) 206

Does this only apply to image data, or will we be able to use this to clean up other databases? Will it work with sampled sounds? Names and addresses and inventory?

Of course not. It's not magic. There are certain assumptions that can be made about most real-life images, mainly that they have small total variance. That means they have large areas of near-constant intensity/color distribution separated by interfaces with large jumps (like a cartoon image would have).

Though this method uses the l_1 norm and not total variation.

More importantly, HOW does it work?

See here.

Comment Re:This is like the Bigfoot argument (Score 2, Insightful) 807

By that I mean there will be people that believe what they want no matter what the evidence. To be clear I mean there's zero solid evidence of Bigfoot yet some will always believe in it.

I think you got your analogies screwed up. Or do you compare AGW to Bigfoot?

I find it bizarre that people refuse to accept we are having an impact on the environment. The evidence is everywhere. I'm not talking global warming both sides of that argument are bordering on religion I'm talking how much the world has changed. Look at common resources. Ever watch any of the logging shows? What they are cutting now are so small no one would have bothered with them 20 or 30 years ago but in many areas it's all that's left and it's so bad that when they do find old growth trees the lumber mills aren't even set up for them. They are simply too rare to bother with.

Deforestation and overlogging are problems that do not depend on the AGW hypothesis. You're making the green fallacy of equating any and all negative changes in the environment to CO2.

Look at swordfish. They said 200 years ago you could all but walk across the Grand Banks because of all the fish. Now the swordfish they take are virtually all immature fish that have yet to reproduce. Most fisheries have collapsed, a fact. When was the last time you saw a butterfly? How many and how often? When I was growing up you'd see them by the hundreds virtually any summer day. Now I see a few a year. Same with frogs.

Speak for yourself. There might be variations in local spiecies populations due to human actions. That has nothing to do with whether CO2 is causing global changes.

Most great apes are down to a few percent of their original populations. It'd take a good sneeze to wipe them out and they are our closest relatives.

Again, caused by deforestation and expanding human land use, not CO2.

People say the snow storms proved global warming was a hoax. Well guess what I live in central Maine and we have already lost most of our snow and it's getting up into the 50s. This is supposed to be the worst time of year for snow and cold. Don't believe anyone or any study if you want.

Individual weather phenomena are never evidence for, or against, AGW.

Trust your eyes. I see radical change everywhere I look.

It's surprising how much "evidence" you can see proving something you've already made your mind up about being real. The same way only deeply religious people ever seem to find evidence by God.

What people still can't get through their heads is the warming is overall and we are experiencing both extreme hot and cold days. It's the average that is towards warming.

No one is really disputing the warming. What is being disputed is how much of it is due to CO2 and what will be the effect in the future.

The real point is we are headed for more extreme weather and that is very bad.

The claim that AGW causes extreme weather is highly disputed even among genuine climatologists.

With species extinction people need to understand it took hundreds of millions of years to create this much diversity and it will take that long to restore it. Even if it came back in a few million years look at it this way we've been around for 200,000. That means no human will ever see it this diverse again.

Statements without evidence based on hubris.

We are in the middle of one of the worst extinction events in Earth's history and we are the cause and there's no debate about that one.

Blatant lie wrapped up in an assertion of absolute truth.

Most species are dying from habitat loss, we call them cities.

Do you even know how many species there exist in the entire world?

Comment Re:Part of a general pattern (Score 1) 276

Switzerland is what would happen if a bunch of libertarian-leaning Republicans went out and started their own little country. Every free man has a gun for national defense, privacy is respected, most people are very conservative and suspicious of foreigners, business is very loosely constrained (to the point of encouraging money laundering and tax fraud), and the country consists of a federation of autonomous cantons and a federal government with little power.

Which makes it odd that Republicans always rail against direct democracy as some kind of precursor to tyranny. Seems to work fine for Switzerland.

Comment Re:Then give legal liability shield too (Score 1) 505

The reason many researchers, especially climate scientists, are not so happy about divulging their models and data is that they can be sued by crackpots, as it has already happened.

If it has already happened, what additional harm can come from disclosure? In the US you can sue anybody at any time for any reason whatsoever.

Space

Submission + - Signs of water found on Saturnian moon Enceladus (spacefellowship.com)

Matt_dk writes: Scientists working on the Cassini space mission have found negatively charged water ions in the ice plume of Enceladus. Their findings, based on analysis from data taken in plume fly-throughs in 2008 and reported in the journal Icarus, provide evidence for the presence of liquid water, which suggests the ingredients for life inside the icy moon. The Cassini plasma spectrometer, used to gather this data, also found other species of negatively charged ions including hydrocarbons.
Communications

Submission + - First Room Temperature Germanium Laser Completed (mit.edu)

eldavojohn writes: MIT researchers have built and demonstrated the first room temperature germanium laser that can produce light at wavelengths suited for communication. This achievement has two parts, 'unlike the materials typically used in lasers, germanium is easy to incorporate into existing processes for manufacturing silicon chips. So the result could prove an important step toward computers that move data — and maybe even perform calculations — using light instead of electricity. But more fundamentally, the researchers have shown that, contrary to prior belief, a class of materials called indirect-band-gap semiconductors can yield practical lasers.' While these are only the initial steps in what may become optical computing devices, the article paints it as very promising. The painful details [PDF] will be published in the journal Optics Letters.
Security

Submission + - Google and NSA Teaming Up to Battle Cyberattacks

Hugh Pickens writes: "The Washington Post reports that an agreement is being finalized between the National Security Agency and Google to analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm says originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google — and its users — from future attack. Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership but sources with knowledge of the arrangement say the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google's policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans' online communications. Any agreement would mark the first time that Google has entered a formal information-sharing relationship with the NSA, sources say. In 2008, google stated that it had not cooperated with the NSA in its Terrorist Surveillance Program. "The critical question is: At what level will the American public be comfortable with Google sharing information with NSA?" says Ellen McCarthy, president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance."

Comment Re:First thoguht on RTFA (Score 0, Troll) 605

fascism
/fæzm/ Spelled Pronunciation [fash-iz-uhm]

–noun
1. (sometimes initial capital letter) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

Courtesy of Dictionary.com

Lack of brain function courtesy of Fox News.

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