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Submission + - Generating Sequences of Primes in Conway's Game of Life (njohnston.ca)

trcollinson writes: One of the most interesting patterns that has ever been constructed in Conway’s Game of Life is primer, a gun that fires lightweight spaceships that represent exactly the prime numbers. It was constructed by Dean Hickerson way back in 1991, yet arguably no pattern since then has been constructed that’s as interesting. It seems somewhat counter-intuitive at first that the prime numbers, which seem somehow “random” or “unpredictable”, can be generated by this (relatively simple) pattern in the completely deterministic Game of Life.
Science

Submission + - Tracking Designer Drugs, Many At Once (acs.org)

LilaG writes: Drug tests spot banned substances based on their chemical structures, but a new breed of narcotics is designed to evade such tests. These synthetic marijuana drugs, found in "herbal incense," are mere chemical tweaks of each other, allowing them to escape detection each time researchers develop a new test for one of the compounds. Now chemists have developed a method that can screen for multiple designer drugs at once, without knowing their structures. The test may help law enforcement crack down on the substances.

The researchers used a technique called "mass defect filtering," which can detect related compounds all at once. That's because related compounds have almost equal numbers to the right of the decimal point in their molecular masses.

The researchers tested their technique on 32 herbal products with names like "Mr. Nice Guy" and "Hot Hawaiian." They found that every product contained one or more synthetic cannabinoid; all told, they identified nine different compounds in them — two illegal ones and seven that are not regulated.

The news story appears in Chemical & Engineering News and the original paper is (behind a paywall) in Analytical Chemistry.

Comment Mini-ITX Intel Atom-NVIDIA-ION and XBMC (Score 4, Interesting) 140

Tiny cheap solutions like the raspberry pi are kind of limited.

I've got an Intel Atom/NVidia ION mini ITX board that was pretty cheap. It has a single PCIe x16 slot and 4 SATA ports and was worth less than $100. There are similar chipsets which I'm sure would work equally well and still beat the crap out of tiny boards like R Pi.

It's a file server, a media center, and it even does well with office suites and web browsing. Media players like XBMC are no problem, as are standard peripherals like wireless keyboards. I can also drop in up to 4Gigs of RAM and some 12TB of hard drive space.

Way, way way more flexible than any ARM device on the market could possibly be, and much more mature and easier to get working for multiple common tasks - not just playing media.

Comment Re:Still needs more research (Score 3, Insightful) 398

It's not about HFCS directly. It's the fact that is has trace amounts of a pesticide in it - pesticide that's intended to kill insects!

Now, I admit that I didn't fully read the article, but I'm pretty sure you're missing something fundamental. Monsanto GMO is not directly a problem. The problem is dumping pesticide on things because the crops have been given GMO resistance.

Gee - feed something with trace amounts of bug killer to bugs and it kills bugs. How did no one think of this earlier???

Comment I've never understood this problem. (Score 4, Insightful) 105

It seems to me that people blame cheap memory and making larger buffers possible for this problem, but no - if there is a problem, it's from bad programming.

Buffering serves a purpose where the rate of receiving data is potentially faster than the rate of sending data in unpredictable conditions. A proper event driven system should always be draining the buffer whenever there is data in it that can possibly be transmitted.

Simply increasing the size of a buffer should absolutely not increase the time that data waits in that buffer.

A large buffer serves to minimize potential dropped packets when there is a large burst of incoming data or the transmitter is slow for some reason.

If a buffer actually adds delay to the system because it's always full beyond the ideal, one of two things is done totally wrong:
a) Data is not being transmitted (draining the buffer) when it should be for some stupid reason.
b) The characteristics of the data (average rate, burstiness, etc.), was not properly analyzed and the system with the buffer does not meet its requirements to handle such data.

In the end, it's about bad design and bad programming. It is not about "bigger buffers" slowing things down.

Comment Post-Production use! (Score 1) 841

No, there is no audible difference between 44.1kHz and 192kHz if all you want to do is listen. However, if the intent is to do any post-production work, re-mixing, mash-ups, whatever - then the quality makes a big difference.

Try running time-shifting or pitch-bending (not dumb-resample where time and pitch both change), and I assure you, you'll get much cleaner results starting with the 192kHz file.

Submission + - Not All Conservatives Are Stupid (sagepub.com)

swbirding writes: "The Journal Psychological Science has published a recent study by Hodson and Busseri which found that "lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies". It appears from the well validated study that the reason people with lower intelligence levels are more likely to be racist is the conservative ideologies which they generally adhere to. However, the Guardian in a February 12 article by George Monbiot notes that "This is not to suggest that all conservatives are stupid. There are some very clever people in government, advising politicians, running thinktanks and writing for newspapers, who have acquired power and influence by promoting rightwing ideologies.""
Privacy

Submission + - Canadian MP pushes warrantless search bill. (www.cbc.ca)

SuperSlug writes: A Canadian member of parliament Vic Toews is using American style rhetoric to push through a bill that would steal Canadian's right to privacy claiming, "You are with us or you are with the child pornographers." Canadians need to stand up for their rights and contact Vic Toews and their member of parliament to make it understood that this type of politics is unacceptable in Canada. Here is Vic's email address. toewsv1@parl.gc.ca

Comment Why is this a problem? (Score 5, Insightful) 630

The ability to be picky with online dating is the whole point! You can put all of your cards on the table before ever even meeting someone. In this busybody world, people don't want to have to go through traditional dating, only to find out months into a relationship about some strong deal breaker like wanting kids. That's just a disappointing waste of time and people are starting to realize it.

If you're looking for someone to spend your life with, you damned well should be picky. For the record, I met my partner online many years ago on a niche dating site, so maybe I'm a little biased.

Submission + - How useful is ipv6 depends on the destination webs (atoomnet.net)

TeddyR writes: IPv6 enabled TOP 1000000 websites as of Jan 8 2012
From the site:
"Here is a list which contains all popular sites (according to Alexa) with an IPv6 address. Out of the 990068 tested websites only 14229 have one or more IPv6 addresses. That is 1.44%.
  Out of the 24500 IPv6 addresses 18766 are connectable. That is 76.6%."

Even more shocking is that many of the top ipv6 sites are not the "goto" sites for many users and are not US based sites, showing how far the US must go in order for ipv6 to be useful.

A question for slashdot maintainers: why isnt slashdot.org on the list by now?

Piracy

Submission + - NinjaVideo.net founder gets 14 months (techworld.com.au)

angry tapir writes: "A Virginia judge has sentenced Matthew David Howard Smith, a founder of the NinjaVideo.net website, to 14 months in prison, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday. Smith was indicted along with four others late last year. The DOJ charged that they illegally provided copyright-protected movies and TV programs for download from the NinjaVideo.net website. The site operated from February 2008 until authorities shut it down in June 2010."

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It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. - Voltaire

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