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Comment Re:Not news: GWAS Often Fail (Score 1) 68

Nice to know your professional opinion about how useless this study is.

Re-read my comment: I didn't say it was a useless study, just the the approach (GWAS) has not surprisingly failed to identify the majority of the inherited variability in height.

That these studies regularly fail to do this is hardly a secret or controversial, and is well known in the field: it simply just isn't news.

Comment Not news: GWAS Often Fail (Score 4, Informative) 68

To be brutally honest, it's not surprising that yet another genome-wide association study has failed to explain even half of the heritability of a trait / disease / condition.

There's plenty of literature out there arguing whether these studies are a waste of money or not:

* http://blog.goldenhelix.com/?p...
* http://scienceblogs.com/geneti...
* http://gettinggeneticsdone.blo...

I would have been surprised if this study did find the majority of inherited variability in height.

Comment Re:Neat idea. (Score 2) 104

I know what you mean in regards to developing muscle memory. Rocksmith 2014 seems to have improved in this way - after a few plays it seems to be more stable in terms of song difficulty. In other ways, Rocksmith 2014 is all around a big improvement from the perspective of someone who could already play bass (not particularly well, but ok), but not guitar. I suspect it's probably better for the absolute beginner as well, but seeing as I didn't choose that option when setting up my profile, I have no idea how it eases you into playing.

I really do wish that there was a way to show proper score instead of the 'tab' though. Another wish would be "half-master mode" where instead of hiding the tab completely, you just get lyrics + chords to work around (for bass).

Still, I'd strongly suggest buying a decent second-hand guitar or bass and a copy of Rocksmith rather than a probably quite poor quality guitar with flashy LEDs.

Comment Re:How about we pay the author not to write them? (Score 4, Informative) 426

You should read Alistair Reynolds then - it's probably the best (and sadly, probably nearly the only) new hard science fiction there. It's really very good.

If you're not sure, try reading Galactic North - it's a collection of short stories, most of which are set in the Revelation Space 'universe'. It's interesting in that there is no travel faster than c, and people are the usual - grubby and self-serving - no Captain Picards.

Comment Re:No problem! (Score 1) 585

Easy solution to stop others reverse engineering the client and writing an open-source one or vice-versa: use asymmetric crypto. It's not really nice, but perfectly technically possible. Particularly, if you're selling one part then you can use a group-based approach, so if somebody reverse engineers one, then you know who did it.

This is a classic example of why the GPL is a bad idea - it's incredibly vague. Besides, if you actually cared about freedom you'd use a BSD or similar license. I only use the GPL if I want to dramatically restrict others' rights, not grant them.

Comment Re:Fire suppression (Score 1) 88

I think that typically new, fancy gases are used. I've seen FM200 (http://www2.dupont.com/FE/en_US/products/FM200.html) used. For example, Internode apparently uses both FM200 (triggered by smoke) and water (triggered by heat). There's a slideshow with some info buried somewhere inside about it here: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/306254/inside_internode_data_centre

I believe that it's pretty expensive though, and that Internode facility is a very small DC compared to some of the ones discussed in the article above, so I'm not sure what they'd use.

Games

EVE Devs Dissect, Explain Massive Economic Exploit 139

In December we discussed news that a major exploit in EVE Online had just been widely discovered after being abused by a few players for up to four years, creating thousands of real-life dollars worth of unearned in-game currency. Representatives from CCP Games assured players that the matter would be investigated and dealt with; a familiar line in such situations for other multiplayer games, and often the final official word on the matter. Yesterday, CCP completed their investigation and posted an incredibly detailed account of how the exploit worked, what they did to fix it, how it affected the game's economy, and what happened to the players who abused it. Their report ranges from descriptions of the involved algorithms to graphs of the related economic markets to theatrically swooping through the game universe nuking the malfunctioning structures. It's quite comprehensible to non-EVE-players, and Massively has summarized the report nicely. It's an excellent example of transparency and openness in dealing with a situation most companies would be anxious to sweep under the rug.
It's funny.  Laugh.

Apple Introduces "MacBook Wheel" 268

CommonCents noted an Apple announcement a few hours before the anticipated keynote. He says "Apples' latest must have gadget does away with the keyboard. With the new MacBook Wheel, Apple has replaced the traditional keyboard with a giant wheel."
Security

Submission + - Donating to Janitor Retirement Funds

alterimage writes: I'm a Computer Science major at night working by day in Accounting for a major telecom provider with a client list consisting of most the companies on this list. Daily, I see customer payments come and go in excess of $50,000. Strangely, rather than have these payments conducted by an IVR system or over the internet, the majority of these payments are conducted over the phone with individuals such as myself, who are instructed to write down and document all the specific banking information, and to keep them on hardcopy in an unlocked file cabinet, accessible to anyone..
Having experience with social engineering and fraud, I've already advised my boss that it's probably not a good idea for the minimum-wage cleaning staff to see bank routing and account numbers laying around everywhere, and was told that I'm over-reacting. So I ask Slashdot- At what point should the human aspect of security be considered in the business environment? Should I just smile, nod, and play along in this situation?
IBM

Submission + - IBM launching an open desktop solution

DJ_Maiko writes: "IBM just announced their intent to release an open desktop solution which they're calling "Open Client Offering." The new offering will make it possible for big businesses to present their employees with a choice of running Linux, Macintosh or Windows software on desktop PCs, using the same underlying software code, which will cut the cost of managing Linux or Apple relative to Windows. If this project succeeds, it will make it unnecessary for companies to pay Microsoft for licenses for items that don't rely on Windows-based software. IBM plans to also roll this out in-house to 5% of their 320,000 employees worldwide. This sure seems like a promising endeavor.

From the article:
  "We worked with the open source community and found a way to write software once that will work regardless of operating system. It will run on Windows, Macintosh or Linux," said Scott Handy, IBM's vice president of Linux and open source.

So what do you guys think, will this (finally) displace Windows as the flavor du jour in the business marketplace?"

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