I *think* the rule is the contractor can take 10% of your rate, the subcontractor can do the same, and the rest must go to your salary and benefits.

The workers are often full-time employees of the contractor (e.g., General Dynamics IT). They get benefits along with their salary.

Past Decade Warmest on Record, NASA Data Shows

Of course he didn't wear a condom -- they prevent leaks!

"Herp derp you're posting anonymously" isn't a good argument. It's not even a bad argument. It's just throwing out some retarded insult completely unrelated to anything he said. It's especially ridiculous seeing it come from someone posting under a pseudonym.

"sycodon" doesn't tell me anything more about who you are than "Anonymous Coward" does. All it says is that you're (probably) the same guy who made the other posts under the "sycodon" account. You aren't bravely putting forth personal information based on some sincere belief that one should be public about one's opinions on such matters if they truly believe them or anything like that. All you are doing is using your own personal Silly Internet Name instead of using Slashdot's publicly available Silly Internet Name and feeling smugly superior about yourself like there's any real difference.

First, here's the actual paper, since it clarifies what exactly he's suggesting and doesn't seem to be linked anywhere in the article.

It's not a suggestion that we start using non-square pixels for displays or cameras or scanners or what not, though he's certainly not being very clear about anything and the reporting on this is just making matters worse. What the paper proposes is a method where:
1) The image is split into 6x6 blocks
2) For each block, you go over the four rotations of the two following two-section masks:
The triangular mask:
ABBBBB
AABBBB
AAABBB
AAAABB
AAAAAB
AAAAAA
The rectangular(ish) mask:
BBBBBB
BBBBBB
BBBAAA
AAAAAA
AAAAAA
AAAAAA
for a total of eight effective masks, and average the values under each section, resulting in two values, A and B.
3) For the mask and rotation that has the largest difference between A and B, you output the mask, the rotation, and the A and B values, resulting in 19 bits from a 6x6 (288 bits) block.

Though he talks of non-square pixels and whatnot, it's really just a compression algorithm. A really stupid one. Basically it's a bad variation of vector quantization, with lots of baffling details. Why 6x6 blocks? Why those specific masks? Why are you maximizing contrast instead of minimizing error like any sane person would do, WHY? There's no rationale given for any of these choices, not theoretical, not empirical, not even subjective.

The same sort of rigor extends to his comparison, where he compares his compression algorithm to, instead of, say, another compression algorithm, the image apparently simply downscaled and then scaled back up. And not even with a halfway decent resampling algorithm, but with nearest neighbour. Not to mention that the "non-square pixels" version has 2.375 times as many bits to work with. If he'd done a comparison to a reasonably modern compression algorithm like JPEG, the results would be much less favorable to him.

tl;dr Some old guy put together his My First Compression Algorithm kit and it's being treated like a revolution in graphics by ignorant reporters. Nothing to see here, move along.

Convincing the public that space is cool! and exciting! so they can continue to get enough funding to at least barely get by has always been an important part of NASA. See also: all those pretty pictures they release.

They actually got it fixed a bit after I submitted this story. A shame, lemonparty was a big step up from the usual level of discussion on YouTube videos. More seriously, I'm interested in finding out exactly what happened here. Hopefully Google will post some sort of explanation. YouTube is a massive site and it's somewhat bizarre seeing them make the sort of mistake you'd expect from something put together by a drooling moron with nothing but a "How to learn PHP in 24 hours!" book.

I only skimmed the results and read some of them that looked promising (a Google search results page is not exactly the best way to do these sorts of things), but all the problems, the few there are, appear to be in the Working Group II report. The one he linked to was the Working Group I report, and was even explicitly labeled as such. If you know of "the problems with said report", it'd be nice if you could provide some sources, preferably reasonably credible ones, that actually point out such problems.

The post the parent linked to goes into extensive detail about the technical aspects of the codec, has a real world comparison, a proper one, and is overall an excellent article. In contrast, the article you linked to uses poor quality source videos, JPEG for their comparison images, and by their own admission didn't even manage to use the same frame for both codecs in the images, among other problems. If you're calling that a "real article", you are in no position to be calling someone else a troll.

And enough of these fucking asinine claims about the x264 developers being out to get your poor, precious VP8 that crop up every time someone posts that link. They don't work for MPEG. They don't make obscene mounts of money off of all the people using their free (as in both sense of the word) open source software. They're not secret Chinese agents working to destroy the West from within through the patent system. There is absolutely no motive for them to lie about this sort of thing. VP8 is simply not as good of a codec, and no amount of baseless accusations will change this.

2^(256/96) = ~6.35. So for your claim of it taking 96 characters to be true, those characters would have to be taken from a set of 6-7 characters. Which is an awfully questionable assumption. If you choose characters from, say, the full set of printable ASCII characters (95 characters), you only need log_95(2^256) = slightly less than 39 characters.

No, this is a fundamental flaw with unencrypted communication, which is exactly what you're doing when you use Tor to access things outside of the Tor network without additional encryption. Either stay inside the network or ensure whatever you're running over it has its own encryption, simple as that. As always, the biggest threat to security is incompetence.

Well that's the "real mechanism" part. As for the "measurable effect", please see figure 3 of the paper. They used an injection to cause inflammation and then tested the response of the mice to touch and heat, showing both increased sensitivity after injection and a return to lower levels of sensitivity after their acupuncture, with mice without the receptors that would cause the adenosine to be produced having no such reduction.

The results of this paper are exactly as I said. To quote the paper itself, "These findings suggest that A1 receptor activation is both necessary and sufficient for the clinical benefits of acupunctures."

Yes, it's obvious that the double-quote "skeptics" are supposed to be what he sees as "idiots who irrationally deny it to the bitter end". The problem is that his conception of this appears to be equivalent to ordinary skeptics who are not irrational idiots, as though anyone who demands extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims is just sticking their head in their sand. Though perhaps he just doesn't understand what people mean when they call something "bullshit".