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Comment You are my hero (Score 1) 272

by Richard.Tao (#30246676) Attached to: National Satiety Alert System should be set at ...
I just had a similar revelation. I just had my first Thanksgiving away from home and family. I'm on study abroad in Glasgow Scotland. Two other American friends and I spent all day cooking for about 10 other international students from around the world. Then we gorged, then partied. It was fantastic.
I think there's definitely a problem with holidays like Thanksgiving. Families feel the need to emulate what they seen on TV and what society expects of them. Awkwardly large gatherings of people you don't really know. I had the best Thanksgiving of my like 4000 miles away from home.
Social Networks

Submission + - Iranian Twitter Revolution

Submitted by Richard.Tao
Richard.Tao writes: The Iranian elections have widely been considered as rigged across the world, further proof of oppressiveness of the Iranian government is it's clamp down on protests from the results. They've blocked many media sites and social networking sites and it seems, for some reason, that Twitter is the bastion of the revolution.
I recently got a twitter account to follow the feed and rumors abound as to how best fight the Iranian government. A real worry is that people posting legitimate news from Iran will be noticed and imprisoned by the government, which has sadly been happening a lot.
There have been a ton of posts of supposed cures to protect the Iranian posters. The most prevalent is having people outside of Iran change their time and location to Tehran so the authorities have too many Iranians to sift through, would that help? Another major suggestion is hosting proxy servers so people can bypass the Iranian filters. Also there's a roomer that the government is blocking the tag people have been using to communicate, #iranelections, is that possible?
With so many roomers flying it seems impossible to separate fact from fiction, and ideas possibly suggested by the Iranian government to sabotage the twitter revolution. What is the best and most efficient way to run a twitter revolution and protect the people giving us news from Iran?

Comment Re:Frankly I'm siding with Verizon. Good for Veriz (Score 0, Troll) 593

by Richard.Tao (#28060793) Attached to: Verizon Tells Cops "Your Money Or Your Life"
The article didn't say they refused out of privacy concerns, it said they refused because of an unpaid bill. I would agree with you on the privacy issue though, they shouldn't be allowed to randomly turn on your phone and track you just because the police say so, unless, they have the permission of a concerned relative/spouse. If there's a means to find a lost and sorely missed loved one, it should be used.

Comment Well... (Score 1) 210

by Richard.Tao (#27699053) Attached to: Using Light's Handedness To Find Alien Life

That would be an immense technological feat. Where already doing something similar with a telescope that looks for planets by seeing the slight dimming of stars caused by the planet eclipsing then star. It was compared to seeing a fly pass by a headlight a mile away.
Detecting a minor variation in the handedness of the light that the planet happens to catch on the surface then reflect back into space, which is light years away, whose feeble light is VASTLY over powered by it's home star. I'm guessing will have to wait many years for this, and there maybe a more feasible technique that comes along before it.

Comment Re:I'm skeptical.... (Score 5, Informative) 210

by Richard.Tao (#27698995) Attached to: Using Light's Handedness To Find Alien Life
You appear to be wrong on a few big things...
-most compounds are not chiral, so even if a dead planet had some pure enantiomers, they would be insignificant compared to one with life, life produces a crazy large amount of them
-no one has quite figured out why life has the handedness it does, some say it could be because of silicon catalyzing a certain handedness, others disagree, there is not an answer to this question yet, but it makes sense that life would evolve to have a specific handedness so all the parts could be interchangeable and we don't have bizzaro ecoli floating around that can exchange DNA with normal ecoli
-since when does polarized light catalyze chiral reactions?? UV light can catalyze reactions, and chiral molecules can cause a reaction to form with a specific handedness, but only chiral MOLECULES can catalyze reactions to cause a more enantiomericly pure product

Comment Re:Business focus, not consumer focus... (Score 1) 913

by Richard.Tao (#27623903) Attached to: To the extent there are taxes, I mostly favor ...
Really now?
The disparity between poor and rich has grown over the past years. This occurred as business got taxed less under Bush. Taxing profits makes a lot of sense to me. A large portion of the profits would either go to wall street or executives who control most of the stock, not to a lay person.
I believe that cutting taxes on the poor, those most likely to spend the money they get, either on needed bills, debts, or new things, will help infuse money into companies. That seems like a much more reasonable scenario where everyone is helped out, much more then then the 'trickle down effect' which seems like utter bull shit that just promotes further disparity.

Comment Re:Organlegging (Score 1) 201

by Richard.Tao (#27511029) Attached to: New Discovery May End Transplant Rejection
So your dismissing the whole benefit of it?
A friend of a friend (yes, someone I didn't know) died a less then a week ago. He had an infection that escalated because of the immune system inhibitors he took.
These systems will, and should, improve. Organ harvesting needs to be combated separately, hopefully stem cell can be used to grow new organs, or maybe someday we will be able to have spare organs at hospitals that could be transplanted to any patient with this! Yes organ harvesting is one of the sickest things going on these days, but that shouldn't halt future discoveries.

Comment Wait, how does it get passed? (Score 4, Insightful) 242

by Richard.Tao (#26869261) Attached to: Acquired Characteristics May Be Inheritable
Females have all the eggs made before they're born, so how could the genetic material in them be affect by the conditions that the mother grew up in? Sperm DNA seems like it could be modified by the father according to living conditions, but it seems odd to think that environmental information in the brain would be passed down to the testes and such... It seems more plausible to think it's just the mice had a better mother.
Censorship

Submission + - Dangerous old Internet, meet new Secure Internet? (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
castrox
castrox writes: "The New York Times is asking the question "Do We Need a New Internet?" The background being the spread of worms such as the rather widespread Conficker worm. Apparently the solution to operating system vulnerabilities is a secure Internet. So what would such a new Internet look like? NYT theorize that

What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a "gated community" where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety.

Some apparently prestigious scholars have their say. Nick McKeown, a Stanford engineer:

Unless we're willing to rethink today's Internet, we're just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.

Some people are not late to spout doomsday scenarios (Rick Wesson, the chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer consulting firm)

If you're looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships streaming toward us on the horizon

It appears the Internet is just too unsafe for people and agencies all over the world."

Comment Re:Sounds like... (Score 4, Interesting) 482

by Richard.Tao (#26195777) Attached to: Octopuses Have No Personalities and Enjoy HDTV
Despite the fact you very well maybe right, a pet owner is more likely to humanize their pet then anyone else. People are notorious for anthropomorphizing things, like cars... so a definitive study on personality would be important. Also, does life span have any effect on personality? Do mice have personalities as much as cats? It seems logical that shorter lived creatures wouldn't have as much time to develop them, having less environmental stimuli, less memories, so they'd need to inherit reasoning skills. But I also have the feeling I may be quite wrong.

Comment Violent Video Games Lead to... (Score 1) 500

by Richard.Tao (#25612913) Attached to: Video Games Linked To Child Aggression
So these kids were asked to track their own violent behavior when they played video games? People have been ingraining in society the idea that video games are bad, and that kids would be more apt to consider themselves violent, or would in general consider themselves more violent when playing a violent video games. The media needs to find something else to hyper focus on.
The Internet

Submission + - Film Shows Evidence of Imminent World Government

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: This two hour movie contains the most startling and conclusive evidence that the world, as portrayed by global media, is a lie.

"Zeitgeist was created as a non-profit filmiac expression to inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective and to understand that very often things are not what the population at large think they are. The information in Zeitgeist was established over a year long period of research and the current Source page on this site lists the basic sources used / referenced.
...it's important to point out that there is a tendency to simply disbelieve things that are counter to our understanding, without the necessary research performed. However, if one takes the time to read the sources provided, they will find that what is being presented is based on documented evidence."

It is a documentary about Religion, Terrorism, and Money. It melds known facts with obscure ones, and paints a picture of how things are, and how they could be. Everyone who cares about the world should watch this, and think about what it means to them.
In any other age, this information would have been buried. This film showcases the power of the internet, and true value of information, and what freedom really means.

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