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Comment Re:InPulse watch (Score 1) 466

This watch looks pretty cool, and for $150.00, I'm thinking about getting one. I actually thought that's what this article was going to be about.

This watch is getting also getting a lot of talk on Hacker News.

What's amazing to me though, is that they make such a big sell of being able to hack and reprogram it, but the actual connectivity that gets the code and configuration to the watch isn't described in great detail, and it actually takes some digging to figure out that the technology used is BlueTooth only, and there's no MicroUSB jack or anything else available.

Also, they seem to be rebranding?

For whatever reason, (in particular, when you click on "BUY") http://www.getinpulse.com/ seems to redirect to: http://getpebble.com/

Comment I was considering something similar myself... (Score 1) 164

I just never had enough collaborators, to build up the enough steam for my projects.

Anyway, I had a couple of ideas I was toying with:

Global Open Bibliometric Living Investigator Network ID was supposed to help organize bibliographic data, for published research papers, and Library of Investigational Contributors and Helpers ID was supposed to be a repository of CVs and related papers ascribable to individual researchers and their non-scientific collaborators.

Neither of these ideas seemed to catch on, and I had a tough time garnering interest. This sounds like a really cool project! I hope it takes off!

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 403

Jean le Commerce can video-conference.

Uh, yeah but consider the infamous warrentless wiretapping of international communications traffic (a program which, by all accounts, seems to be as active, alive and healthy now today as it ever was in the past):

The NSA is authorized by executive order to monitor, without search warrants, phone calls, Internet activity (Web, e-mail, etc.), text messaging, and other communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S., even if the other end of the communication lies within the U.S.

All wiretapping of American citizens by the National Security Agency requires a warrant from a three-judge court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. After the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which granted the President broad powers to fight a war against terrorism. The George W. Bush administration used these powers to bypass the FISA court and directed the NSA to spy directly on al Qaeda in a new NSA electronic surveillance program. Reports at the time indicate that an "apparently accidental" "glitch" resulted in the interception of communications that were purely domestic in nature.

The exact scope of the program is not known, but the NSA is or was provided total, unsupervised access to all fiber-optic communications going between some of the nation's major telecommunication companies' major interconnect locations, including phone conversations, email, web browsing, and corporate private network traffic.

So maybe that's even a little bit MORE invasive than, traveling to the United States for face-to-face meetings...

Comment Re:Encryption is "professional" (Score 1) 500

That's the way it's always been. Presumably, ever since that whole thing where Phil Zimmermann was subjected to a federal criminal investigation for distributing PGP and allegedly attempting commiting the crime of "munitions export without a license", one might believe that they are hedging their bets on the seeminglt ever-tentative legality of encryption. One might also entertain the idea that this is the fallout of that whole pesky anti-trust case, and that the behavior is to avoid the perception of anti-competitive practices, and prod end-users toward exploring free market alternatives to baked-in encryption. One might further point to the fact that encryption is a value-added feature, and Microsoft has every right to charge more for it, and that it's just good business to do so. Although, honestly, the more likely truth is that they're in bed with the DoD on some level, and have agreed to curiously exclude the encryption feature from the version that will gain the widest adoption, given that it's also the cheapest.

Comment Re:Waiting for the same old comments (Score 2) 172

"In mathematical terms, the Euclidean distance between the centroids of the two clusters was significantly larger than the intra-cluster distances between any members of either cluster." Any English major could tell you what kind of cluster that sentence is!

That sentence is perfectly cromulent. The Euclidean distance between the averaged centers of two groups is clearly embiggened beyond the distances between individual members among each each group.

Comment Sentences? (Score 1) 111

Can they learn sign language like Gorillas, and communicate with sentence structure to convey an understanding of more abstract concepts like the passage of time? It seems like that could be a possibility, since sentence structure is kind of an extrapolation of spelling.

Birds (mostly I'm thinking of parrots) are known to develop large vocabularies, and gain a sense of context to the noises they make, as an exchange of information regarding their own situational awareness. Understanding noises and even words, and discerning their meanings relative to context is a task that many animals are capable of. Beyond mere habituation through operant conditioning, we have seen Dolphins, Dogs, Pigs, Horses, Elephants and all the Great Apes perform similar tasks through vocalization. But literacy and text is a pretty interesting twist for baboons.

Comment Scaling Up (Score 1) 156

Sounds like it's going to be a pretty gigantic leap to go from this experiment to an entire Internet. Keeping in mind that they only sent, received, and stored one bit, from one persistent store to another, each of which was capable of store who knows how many bits.

One bit.

How many bits (not bytes, bits) make up an "internet"?

+1 internets to anybody who can give a reasonable answer.

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