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Comment Read (Score 1) 139

Read the first paragraph of the license. It's covered by three patents, two of which are still in effect because they were granted in 1992. You have until September 2012 before they expire, assuming no continuations have been granted, and there is still the matter of copyright.

Comment Re:Too quickly (Score 1) 172

Shit, how about once every 9 months? That way when they decide to deploy an entirely new init system they might have some more time for integration and bugsquashing, and they could package PulseAudio properly for release like they initially didn't, or do a decent job packaging KDE4.

Or at least they could shove that extra time between the Beta and RC and spend a lot more time squashing bugs. After about 8.10 or so the bugginess of each release has felt like kind of a constant, and it's higher than it should be.

Comment Re:Sounds reasonable (Score 1) 830

Kurzweil's argument was

The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil. About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.

Meyers' "tangent" about biochemistry is spot-on. In order to simulate a thing you must first understand it, which we are nowhere close to doing when it comes to the gene-brain relationship. Meyers talked about genes and brains only because Kurzweil said it first and made some silly extrapolations about the complexity of the human brain. Kurzweil talks about the genome like it's a long computer printout and you can just read it and understand how to build to a brain -- or at least, deduce the operating principles of the brain. That's not how the genome works at all and in ten years we're not going to be anywhere near close to understanding it.

Comment Re:What about the insurance file? (Score 3, Insightful) 837

Step back out of the land of speculation. What is known about the insurance file:

* It's 1.4 GB
* It's encrypted with AES-256
* If anybody has the key they haven't published it.

What you can reasonably infer: It's information the gov. doesn't want released, providing Assange with "insurance".

Unless you have AES-256 goggles that let you peer through the encryption I would hesitate to comment in further detail on the contents of the file and therefore the moral character of the man who published it.

Comment Re:I'm sure... (Score 3, Informative) 269

In addition, Adobe is probably maintaining their version. From the GIMP resynthesizer website:

8/10/2009: I haven't really been keeping up with API changes in the GIMP, or with emails people send me. If you emailed me and I haven't replied, I'm sorry. If you want to take over as maintainer of this project, email me. Other emails will probably continue to sit unread in my inbox.

That would be as of August last year...

Comment Re:I don't buy this (Score 1) 307

Dropping anything normal for 24 hours is weird. I had a friend in high school (one of them cross-country folks) who would run a few miles each morning before school. One day he didn't, and there was a marked difference in his personality until he ran home (a distance of 5 miles) afterwards. He seemed mentally slower to respond than normal, yet craved physical activity. Was he "addicted" to running?

Actually, he might have been mildly so. Running makes you feel good because it stimulates the release of endorphins (a portmanteau of its earlier name, "endogenous morphine"). A runner's high actually is a high.

Comment Re:Virtual Box (Score 3, Insightful) 261

Great idea. Make the students waste their time fucking around just getting the thing up and running so they can start studying while every day the quarter slips away more and more. A virtual image is a great idea - hardware incompatibilities can happen at any level of the system (kernel, X.org, HAL/DeviceKit/CUPS/SANE regressions, etc, etc), so I think a good working knowledge of Linux is probably a prerequisite to troubleshooting hardware incompatibilities. Let the students actually understand what the kernel is and how modules work before making them go fetch sources to compile kernel modules.

Comment Re:Way to go (Score 4, Informative) 279

From the article:

I’ll note: this has nothing to do with dark matter. As it happens, 90% of the matter in the Universe is in a form that emits no light, but affects other matter through gravity. We know it exists, and you can find out why here. We know it exists locally, in nearby galaxies and clusters of galaxies, too. This new result doesn’t affect that, since the now un-hidden galaxies are very far away, like many billions of light years away. They can’t possibly affect nearby galaxies, so they don’t account for dark matter.

This will change the ratio of luminous matter:dark matter but not eliminate dark matter entirely.

Not that you said that it would necessarily get rid of dark matter, but it was a conclusion that suggested itself from the summary's wording.

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