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Comment Re:Inaccessible to whom? (Score 1) 63

by inflamed (#45381643) Attached to: Could We "Wikify" Scholarly Canons?
Having dwelved in same field (a few years of academic research), I have to point out that there is an infuriating reliance on black-box methodology in computational chemistry and molecular modeling. Conversely, I've read synthetic methodology chem papers with obvious errors (at least in the supporting information documents); e.g. describing preparing a solution with a final volume of 2.5 mL in a vessel of smaller capacity (1.5 mL or 2 mL). If a writer provides too little information, there is an implicit assumuption that the writer has the wisdom to determine what's relevant. An alternative is that meaningless yet observed (once) correlations, when observed, lead to publications. There's no such thing as too much information, but researchers become frustrated and cut corners if obligated to fill in what they perceive as the smallest details, such as the size of a microcentrifuge tube in which a solution was prepared. I think a more dynamic and accessible peer review system is warranted. A web of trust model, perhaps.

Comment Re: DoS? (Score 1) 361

by inflamed (#45196375) Attached to: CryptoSeal Shuts Down Consumer VPN Service To Avoid Fighting NSA

The effect will hopefully be for users to make their own damn vpn (really, it's not hard) and stop trusting third parties for things that should be confidential.

Setting up your own VPN isn't going to fix a thing. Whether you establish your credentials in plaintext or encrypted, there is a MiTM vector for capturing those credentials - unless you're moving data by sneakernet.

Comment Re:Maybe, but risks offending high paying customer (Score 1) 318

by inflamed (#45078805) Attached to: The Ridiculous Tech Fees You're Still Paying

The only one that's ripping me off right now is AT&T, and that's only because Comcast would screw me harder. All I'm buying from them is DSL and I'm paying $47 a month. Meanwhile on my phone I not only get unlimited internet* (with email from my 10 year old address, YouTube, Google), but a phone with long distance, voicemail, 411, roaming, all unlimited and included in the $42 I pay them. I'm not going to name them but they're not the only ones and some may even be better. I've been with them for 5 years with no problems except their website is an ugly clusterfuck, but most are these days.

Hell, even my credit card company doesn't screw me over, and I'll bet most of you the people you guys deal with don't screw you, either. But you're nerds, and we're not normal (at least I'm not). I use a small local bank, and they're damned near free. Wasting your money is stupid.

But most people? Hell, I'll tell people what I'm paying for my phone when they're paying three times that for less stuff, and they go on using the expensive carrier they're with. And switching carriers is easy; maybe expensive if you're on a contract but easy.

Why in the hell am I paying seven dollars more for internet alone than a phone WITH internet?? I guess because there's competition in the cell phone business. I wish my phone company sold internet.

* I listen to KSHE on it all day long at work, that's eight hours a day using its radio, plus when I ask it the temperature or read a novel or newspaper

Yikes. My "cell phone" company offers just LTE internet as a service. If I used my device as a phone only (say, 2000-3000 minutes and as many text messages) I'd pay $12/month. Voice and text data is small data.

Comment Re:Ignore the naysayers! Save your kid and do it! (Score 1) 682

by inflamed (#44998697) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Suitable Phone For a 4-Year Old?
Sorry, it was a completely true story, tongue-in-cheek only in delivery (as has become my fashion when relating that particular gem). Perhaps I should be more concerned about what I write since this thread is now "viral" on The Globe and Mail, but I'm not an IT guy or a security contractor or anything. I learned many (now obsolete) skills but more importantly, learned to work hard to achieve what I wanted (communicating with other people around the world who wouldn't look down upon my diminuitive form and assume I was ignorant), and achieving it with whatever I had available. I suspect my problem solving skills were enhanced by such endeavors as well. I am good at solving both puzzles and real scientific problems. Dr. Zim's post below about the iPod training device to earn an iPhone is actually pretty decent advice but I don't believe in training my kids. It's probably the pick of the thread for anyone desiring a normative reply.

Comment Ignore the naysayers! Save your kid and do it! (Score 2, Interesting) 682

by inflamed (#44989129) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Suitable Phone For a 4-Year Old?
I don't have a concrete recommendation on what to buy but want to offset the attacks you're getting with some encouragement. I am a well-adjusted father with a six year old daughter and an eight year old son. I spend lots of time with my kids every day, and don't ever feel like video chatting with them while we're not together, but have no issues with them having their own phones. I'm only 28 so I still remember what it was like to be four years old. I would have loved to have had such a device and wish I did have one at that age.

My first computer was an Apple ][e from a garage sale at the age of eight (circa 1993) and it took me very little time (maybe a year) to figure out how to dial up the local freenet on my 1200/300 baud (couldn't get a stable connection at 1.2 kbaud!) modem, register an account with a completely fabricated credit card number and fictitious identity (I recall I specified my address as 123 Pooskin Rd.), and enjoy several months of access to lynx and pine. Ah, the good old days...

Of course, when my parents found out, they freaked out and made me call up the freenet folks and apologize. I pretended to leave a message on their answering machine but (thanks to text files I'd read) I knew to put my finger on the "hang-up" switch while reciting my apology and explanation. The account worked for several more years (bless those techno-anarchists' hearts for recognizing a kid in need), but my dad went ahead and purchased PPP dial-up service shortly afterwards to prevent any more "incidents."

The moral of this story? If your kid needs mobile LTE internet, better give him a phone. Otherwise, he's going to get an early start on subversive behavior, perhaps stealing other people's phones.

Submission + - x86 Computation Without Executing Any Instructions (usenix.org)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Trust Analysis, i.e. determining that a system will not execute some class of computations, typically assumes that all computation is captured by an instruction trace. A team at Dartmouth College shows that powerful computation on x86 processors is possible without executing any CPU instructions. They demonstrate a Turing-complete execution environment driven solely by the IA32 architecture’s interrupt handling and memory translation tables, in which the processor is trapped in a series of page faults and double faults, without ever successfully dispatching any instructions. The 'hard-wired' logic of handling these faults is used to perform arithmetic and logic primitives, as well as memory reads and writes. This mechanism can also perform branches and loops if the memory is set up and mapped just right. The lessons of this execution model are discussed for future trustworthy architectures.

Comment Re:Quantum computing won't help NP-HARD (Score 1) 600

by inflamed (#44890359) Attached to: Physicists Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics
Proteins fold by trial-and-errol, and yes, they can become "stuck" in local minima (become denatured). That they don't routinely do so it due to evolved mechanisms (chaperones, a mostly-downhill energy gradient on the path from synthesis to folded state) and due to the rate of conformational exploration at higher-energy states. These mechanisms aren't obvious to us, and so we have a very difficult time predicting their course of action on a given polypeptide sequence.

Comment molecular dynamics on GPU (Score 0) 240

by inflamed (#44406121) Attached to: Same Programs + Different Computers = Different Weather Forecasts
In molecular dynamics simulations, kinetics are known to be approximate and states at a given time are not considered directly correlated with that time point; we only hope to get statistically correct distribution of states across ensembles. Consequently, differences in rounding between wildly different compiler/hardware architectures are expected. However, deterministic behavior of the system is achieved by employing higher precisions for accumulation steps, which ensures that averages over a sufficiently long time (big enough sample) are the same no matter what hardware is employed. Consequently a tremendous speed-up is possible running CUDA code on consumer grade nvidia cards which have far fewer double precision execution units than single float precision units. So, we have deterministic trajectories but nobody expects these to match real-world processes on a time-function basis :-)

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 111

by inflamed (#44045815) Attached to: NVIDIA To License Its GPU Tech
I may be mistaken, but I anticipate that licensing the hardware will require sharing the associated driver sources with licensees. That seems like a step in the right direction, albeit for more profitable reasons.

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