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Comment: Checks and balances, anyone? (Score 1) 621

by XiaoMing (#43637427) Attached to: Former FBI Agent: All Digital Communications Stored By US Gov't

This is probably the most telling bit of it:

CLEMENTE: We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

Basically, this capability exists, can and does get used, BUT the fruits of which aren't directly presented in the courts, because that would divulge too much as to its existence. Instead, it gets used to get the suspect to admit what might otherwise be unattainable through a normal interrogation.

Now the scary part:
This could probably directly provide evidence for not just the Boston Marathon case, but many many other criminal cases in this country right now. For all those other cases though, we risk not convicting a criminal, or worse wrongfully convicting innocent people.

It's kind of sad/scary to think that the FBI effectively has a digital oracle that could provide the information to make many trials look like daytime soap operas.

Comment: Re:wait, will wiping off help? (Score 3, Informative) 275

by XiaoMing (#43609163) Attached to: Condensation On Your Beer != Good

By the time there's any condensate to wipe off the glass, hasn't the damage (i.e. heat from condensation) already been done? That's what warms the glass and its contents, not the water remaining on the side. So wiping it off won't prevent the warming.

What you said is correct: wiping will not help, as the condensation process is what causes the heating. The most telling bit comes from TFA:

“Probably the most important thing a beer koozie does is not simply insulate the can, but keep condensation from forming on the outside of it,” said Dale Durran, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences.

So either we start seeing stein-shaped koozies at our local dive bar... or nothing will really change from this "finding".

Comment: Re:Whats with the weird garbled text on slashdot? (Score 3, Insightful) 35

It's not every post... but it's nasty.

It's an april fools joke where they used the ROT13 "cypher" (replacement cypher where each letter is replaced by a letter 13 increments down the 26-letter english alphabet) on the posts. It's received quite a bit of "backlash" (bitching by people who can't be bothered to click twice to read the original post in english) which may explain why you're seeing this normal summary here.

Comment: Re:I am shocked (Score 1) 133

by XiaoMing (#43299625) Attached to: Bees Communicate With Electric Fields

If that is true, I guess the mother nature is far more advanced than I could even imagine. Sonar, ok, infrared sensors, ok, antibiotics, ok, aero/hydro dynamics, ok, but electric field communication, wtf? I thought this domain solely belonged to human race.

If that is true, I guess the mother nature is far more advanced than I could even imagine. Sonar, ok, infrared sensors, ok, antibiotics, ok, aero/hydro dynamics, ok, but electric field communication, wtf? I thought this domain solely belonged to human race.

Haha was the remainder of that post just used to justify your punny subject line? Sharks have actually been using electric fields for quite awhile to hunt various prey. And while I woudln't be surprised if it were true, the summary doesn't really suggest causality or even correlation with the bees, it just says "this number is big, it must be useful for something!". Odd for scientists to do that...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampullae_of_Lorenzini

Comment: No way!...?! (Score 1) 185

You mean to tell me that such an organized, concerted and government-directed effort by the Chinese to hack other countries on a corporate and national scale is actually BORING?

I can't believe it isn't more of a grass-roots effort with neat 3D graphics and Jolie boobs like in the movie Hackers!!

Comment: SD, FW, and Outlets! (Score 1) 570

by XiaoMing (#42825731) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Buying a Laptop That Doesn't Have Windows 8

As great as the 'Egg is, they tend to be overpriced for everyday purchasing.

If you can wait:
My best suggestion is to get an account at fatwallet (a coupon/deal aggregator and forums site), and set up a "topic alert" where you get emails sent to you whenever a good deal with a specific keyword (I used "i5" as well as "14" "14.1" for my keywords for my last lappy). Also frequently visit slickdeals as they have a nicer layout and faster response time for sales of limited quantity.

It's usually these deal aggregator sites that pick up the best limited quantity sales of clearances (which will almost always be Win7 nowadays). And this will include anything good from the 'Egg.

If you are lucky
Outlets! One of the greatest things about outlets is the option to buy laptops that people have ordered, built, but then cancelled. These are "New" (as opposed to the dented box, or refurbs) on the outlet, and often come hundreds cheaper than buying completely brand new.
Outlets also have sales of 20-30+% off that will be picked up by SD and FW.

Of course, finding one of these takes a bit of patience as well as luck, but that's how I got my most recent lappy.

Comment: What PC should mean. (Score 3, Insightful) 577

by XiaoMing (#42822315) Attached to: Apple Now the Top PC Vendor, For Some Values of PC

The Mac existed as a "Personal Computer" for several years before it was capable of compiling its own programs but nobody had any trouble calling it a "PC".

We counted Apple IIs and Commodore 64s as PCs. These new systems are far more powerful and capable, why not call them PCs too?

Taking the Apple click-bait out of the equation, this sounds about right from a broad view: Tablets and "smartphones" as PCs from a decade ago or-so in terms of computing power with funny form-factors and interfaces.

To all the apparent fanboys who think that dedicated media consumption devices should be PCs just because they perform better than something from two decades ago, there is one very obvious distinction that you are all blatantly but unintentionally pointing out:

All of these devices were still the cutting edge technology of their time, especially as far as personal productivity and capability was concerned!
Sure the very original mac couldn't compile its own code. But it also beat the hell out of a typewriter.
And the iPad's A# processors destroy the original Cyrix, 3/486, Pentiums what have you! I'm surprised we even bothered with those processors at all, pfft!

Now crawl out of the reality-distortion fanboy bubble and look at today and what do you see? These devices are far from forefront of doing anything productive, have just good-enough specs for media consumption, and are a pain to use even if you look at the most modest metrics of productivity such as responding (no, not just reading) an email, or working with a spreadsheet.

Yes, personal computers did used mean something. And I believe they still should.

Comment: Took me a second to see the logic... (Score 4, Interesting) 159

by XiaoMing (#42817821) Attached to: UK Court: MPAA Not Entitled To Profits From Piracy

From TFA:

[High court judge] Newey ruled that a copyright infringer cannot be compared to a thief who steals a bag of coins, as submitted by the studios' lawyer. "A copyright infringer is more akin to a trespasser" than to a coin thief, Newey said.

Originally, I thought the judge lost his marbles. Of course it's more akin to stealing something rather than just trespass, they are part of stealing/redistributing a product!

But then I realized how the media conglomerates played the whole DRM thing as effectively leasing you (and only you) the rights to listen to the music you purchased (and only in the media format they presented it!). That sure sounds a bit like charging an admission's fee to experience some wonderful scenery to me (a scenery experience that you obviously can't share with anyone else!). In that respect, it really does seem like NZB(2) did was criminally trespass over this entity of music or what-have-you that we are allowed to take part in (but not take a part of).

Seems like the MPAA screwed their own pooch on this one. I hope this sets a precedence (even if Bri'ish) and people can start owning their music again.

Comment: Need bigger brains for ./ commenters (Score 1) 121

There are quite a few posts talking about how this isn't natural selection. How it's not evolution. How they should have done this with genetic engineering. How everyone who can write a comment would have done it better than these guys. That's very cute.

It's important to keep in mind that natural selection will effectively span the full probability space of all possible traits as far as offspring go, and only the strongest survive.

What that means is twofold:

1. Given that you're trying to study tradeoffs in nature within the same species, you obviously don't want to engineer any combination of traits that wouldn't occur naturally.

2. What the scientists did was exactly what they should have done. They selected traits that could have occurred naturally, but with a small probability. By enhancing these traits, you can then assess how over time and generations the inheritance would play out.

Obviously, the study's scope wasn't as far-reaching as the ultimate evolutionary end-game of guppies (that would require somehow objectively quantifying the increase in survivability due to larger brain size vs. sheer number of offspring), but they do manage to demonstrate a pretty strong dependence (more than correlation, as this was a directly applied change vs. a control) of the compromise in energy expenditures in developing organs.

Yes, if the results were anything other than "common sense", it would be remarkably exciting news that would warrant further study as to the hiding spot of our brainy fish-overlords. But in science, sometimes it's just as difficult (albeit slightly less rewarding) to isolate a fundamental tenet in its most distilled form.

Comment: Summary was pleasant, TFA was garbage. (Score 5, Insightful) 132

by XiaoMing (#42437481) Attached to: NASA Faces Rough Road In 2013

From TFA (second link):

The dimensions of the train wreck that is the Obama space policy are impossible to exaggerate.

The dimensions of hyperbole in that statement are impossible to exaggerate, too. Reading that second link (possibly written by a very bitter pundit-turned-scientist Rove) was an absolute waste of time bemoaning everything from NASA considering too many options before making a decision, to Mitt Romney losing the presidential race. OP's summary was more educational and less biased than that pile.

I've got a very bad feeling about this. -- Han Solo

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