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Comment Re:Humans are just biased towards natural numbers (Score 1) 1260

I think it's time we make math more interesting and switch to base 23. Then it will be equally as complex as the US's Imperial ("Standard" or "English" or whatever) system of measurements- which might actually make more sense in base 23.. who knows. At least it will reduce the fixation on 9's and keep mathematicians busy for a few years while re-writing all their text books.

Comment Re:Not as Sharp (Score 1) 378

The reason they are not as sharp is because the reference image IS the JPEG version. They are using wikipedia images for examples, and they are working off the JPEG image to produce their WebP version.

They don't even know what quality the JPEG images were saved with, how many times they were resaved, or which JPEG algorithm was used.

I suspected the file sizes of the "original" JPEGs didn't match up with their quality. To verify, I took the second sample image, opened the "original" in photoshop, saved for web at 50% JPEG quality, and the file size was 139KB and the image was visually sharper and more detailed than the WebP version at 161KB. However, the WebP version was pixel per pixel, closer to the "original" and did not have the same JPEG artifacts you see in the new JPEG version. But I can't be sure this would be the case if a RAW image were used as the original.

Comment Re:OK, At least two problems with this anaylysis (Score 1) 226

Yeah, I'm thinking either they haven't considered a lot of things in this experiment, or they're keeping all the data to themselves until they can prove their speculations. I also hope they tested this with different elasticity coefficients and weights to be thorough.

To be honest, the results they are describing just make sense to me given what we already know about elasticity.. imagine the rubber band was made up of tiny links (like a the tread on a tank) and they were connected with the appropriate elasticity coefficient (that changes with the application of heat). I'm pretty sure if you model that you'll see that it's not so complicated after all.

United States

State Senator Caught Looking At Porn On Senate Floor 574

Everyone knows how boring a debate on a controversial abortion bill can get on the Senate floor. So it's no wonder that Florida State Sen. Mike Bennett took the time to look at a little porn and a video of a dog running out of the water and shaking itself off. From the article: "Ironically, as Bennett is viewing the material, you can hear a Senator Dan Gelber's voice in the background debating a controversial abortion bill. 'I'm against this bill,' said Gelber, 'because it disrespects too many women in the state of Florida.' Bennett defended his actions, telling Sunshine State News it was an email sent to him by a woman 'who happens to be a former court administrator.'"
Earth

Pumping Sunlight Into Homes 182

ByronScott sends a snippet from Inhabitat that begins "What if you could light your entire building using no electricity or artificial lights – but just the natural light from our favorite star, the Sun? Enter the Sundolier, a powerful sunlight transport system that's like putting a solar robot on your roof to pump sunlight indoors. The manufacturer claims a single Sundolier unit can provide enough light to illuminate a 1,000-2,500 sq. ft. area [93-232 sq. m] without any other sources." The company's website is a bit thin on details, such as what happens on cloudy days, or how many days of sunlight per year on average are needed for the device to perform acceptably.

Comment Filtering (Score 3, Interesting) 396

If you have a Cisco ASA 5510 or higher you can purchase the botnet filter for roughly $320 a year. Then enable the filter on your internal interface to block any outbound traffic going to the known botnet IP ranges. I would also recommend blocking unnecessary outbound ports and limiting necessary ports to specific machines (ex. Port 25 mail server only outbound). I would also look at setting up a proxy server such as SQUID proxy. I would do mime filtering on untrusted web traffic and perhaps using dansguardian for prebuilt whitelist/blacklisting. At my workplace I am fortunate enough to be allowed to do a default deny on the entire internet, only white-listing work related sites (of course I work at a bank). Antivirus should be considered a secondary defense in this day and age. You really need to look at getting an IPS device for your network and then perhaps an aggregated log server if you haven't already. These last two recommendations will cost some money. So short term I would focus on outbound firewall filtering and a proxy server.

Comment Re:Go go Nanny State... (Score 1) 794

"and somehow you can't see the difference between '*I* can scoop fetus out of *my* body' and '*you* can't put salt on *my* food.'" You can go somewhere else to eat if you don't like salt. Nobody is forcing you to go there. Who are you to impose regulations on the restaurant owner? You didn't fork up the money to start their business. They have the freedom to choose how they want to make their food and the public has the freedom to choose if they want to eat it. You don't like it? Start your own restaurant and then make your food without salt... See how far that gets you. Probably just about as far as any other liberal fascist idea. Your ideas only work at the expense of others which is why regulations are pushed down our throats. Is there a law against pissing in the wind? No because everyone knows it is fucking stupid. People who run their own business know how to run it best. Others like yourself, impose regulations.
Government

Bill To Ban All Salt In Restaurant Cooking 794

lord_rotorooter writes "Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn, introduced a bill that would ruin restaurant food and baked goods as we know them. The measure (if passed) would ban the use of all forms of salt in the preparation and cooking of food for all restaurants or bakeries. While the use of too much salt can contribute to health problems, the complete banning of salt would have negative impacts on food chemistry. Not only does salt enhance flavor, it controls bacteria, slows yeast activity and strengthens dough by tightening gluten. Salt also inhibits the growth of microbes that spoil cheese."
Image

The 10 Most Absurd Scientific Papers 127

Lanxon writes "It's true: 'Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior,' 'Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time,' and 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?' are all genuine scientific research papers, and all were genuinely published in journals or similar publications. Wired's presentation of a collection of the most bizarrely-named research papers contains seven other gems, including one about naval fluff and another published in The Journal of Sex Research."
Government

Submission + - bill to ban all salt in restaurant cooking (timesunion.com)

lord_rotorooter writes: Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn introduced a bill that would ruin restaurant food and baked goods as we know them. The measure (if passed) would ban the use of all forms of salt in the preparation and cooking of food for all restaurants or bakeries. While the use of too much salt can contribute to health problems, the complete banning of salt will have negative impacts on food chemistry. Not only does salt enhance flavor, it controls bacteria, slows yeast activity and strengthens dough by tightening gluten. Salt also inhibits the growth of microbes that spoil cheese.

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