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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.

Businesses

AU Goverment To Break Up Telstra; Filtering News 144

benz001 writes "The Minister who has pushed the ridiculous broadband filter plan has at least won a few brownie points with yesterday's press conference, in which he promised to force Telstra to split its network and wholesale businesses. Australia's largest ISP, and the country's main infrastructure owner, will be given a chance to implement the structural separation voluntarily; if it does not, the Government will step in with legislation. Here is the Minister's official press release." And speaking of the filtering program, reader smash writes "After several years of debate and electioneering, some statistics on the Australian national web filtering effort have been disclosed. Apparently, the typical Aussie web surfer is 70 times more likely to win the national lotto than stumble across a blocked page. Additionally, despite the claim that the main aim of the filter is to block child pornography, only 313 of the 977 total sites blocked is on the basis of child porn. At $40M AU so far in taxpayers funds, the cost so far is around $40,900 per blocked URL. Government efficiency at work..."

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."

Comment Re:Paper (Score 1) 175

Yes, seriously, do what the rest of us do when we need to do tissue culture - use a lab book, and prepare your experimental plan carefully ahead of time. Write out the quantities of stuff you need (remembering this was always hardest for me). Unless it's something like splitting cells you should be writing the experiment down for legal reasons anyway.

You'll probably need to bring things in/out of the hood occasionally in almost any experiment, so just make use of that opportunity to look over your notes again! You're going to need to spray your gloves down with ethanol to go back in, so another 15sec won't hurt.

NES (Games)

Nintendo DSi Sells Out Quickly, Reviews Coming In 72

The Nintendo DSi was released in Japan on Saturday, and the initial production run of 200,000 units has already sold out. 1Up has done some comparisons to the DS, and they have a video feature tour of the new hardware (which, predictably, has already been hacked). The image editing software is reported to be rather bare-bones, and the browsing is slow, but both features could likely be used with games in interesting ways. Nintendo will be launching a series of WarioWare games to demonstrate the DSi's capabilities. The DSi will likely reach North America next summer.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Is Foxconn deliberatley sabotaging Linux? (ubuntuforums.org) 3

Anonymous Coward writes: "A user on the Ubuntu forums posted a thread questioning the practices of the hardware manufacturer, Foxconn. From the Thread:
"I disassembled my BIOS to have a look around, and while I won't post the results here,I'll tell you what I did find.
They have several different tables, a group for Windws XP and Vista, a group for 2000, a group for NT, Me, 95, 98, etc. that just errors out, and one for LINUX. The one for Linux points to a badly written table that does not correspond to the board's ACPI implementation."
The worst part is Foxconn's insistence that the product is ACPI compliant because their tables passed to Windows work, and that Microsoft gave the the magic WHQL certification."

AMD-ATI Ships Radeon 2900 XT With 1GB Memory 132

MojoKid writes "Prior to AMD-ATI's Radeon HD 2000 series introduction, rumors circulated regarding an ultra-high clocked ATI R600-based card, that featured a large 1GB frame buffer. Some even went so far as to say the GPU would be clocked near 1GHz. When the R600 arrived in the form of the Radeon HD 2900 XT, it was outfitted with 'only' 512MB of frame buffer memory and its GPU and memory clock speeds didn't come close to the numbers in those early rumors. Some of AMD's partners, however, have since decided to introduce R600-based products that do feature 1GB frame buffers, like the Diamond Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB in both single-card and CrossFire configurations. At 2GHz DDR, the memory on the card is also clocked higher than AMD's reference designs but the GPU remains clocked at 742MHz"
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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