mlp

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• Commented on Personally, My Money's On the Narwhal
  This sounds like a good time for Weebl's Narwhal Song: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/Narwhals/...
• Favorited Countering the FUD about the "Orphan Works" copyright bill (that doesn't exist) on Boing Boing
• Commented on Crowdsourced science: HOWTO do agarose gel electrophoresis using nothing but a drinking straw, a 9V battery and a pair of alligator clips
  @Dangerpants: Two words, "methylene blue." Available at any pet store that sells fish supplies. Or, for folks with a few bucks to spare, SYBR Safe or GR Safe. (Ethidium bromide's nasty stuff anyway.) And yeah, I want to get my...
• Commented on Crowdsourced science: HOWTO do agarose gel electrophoresis using nothing but a drinking straw, a 9V battery and a pair of alligator clips
  @Marisa: One step at a time. :) First we had DNA extraction in a shot glass, now electrophoresis in a drinking straw. This opens the door to other low-cost techniques -- sequencing, Southern blots, PCR, you name it -- it's...
• Commented on BBtv: Star Simpson's first interview on the Boston airport LED sweatshirt scare.
  @106 Danegeld: "I've not seen breadboards on chests featured anywhere for their artistic merit." You've never shopped at Cyberdog, I see. Their production values are higher -- they use actual PCBs rather than solderless breadboards, the power supply is a...
• Commented on Tibet and human rights: New Amnesty ads (update: HOAX)
  Did they let one of their domain names expire? amnesty.com appears to be parked by a squatter, but it's on the image....
• Commented on Little Brother's ParanoidLinux now under development
  +1 to #11. I strongly suggest that the ParanoidLinux maintainers get deeply, intimately familiar with how traffic analysis works. This presentation from last year's Black Hat Briefings is a good start -- the panel included Jon Callas of PGP and...
• Commented on LA Times on guerrilla gardeners
  #3: Have you never heard of a little notion called 'the commons'? Let's just say it's not just for intellectual property anymore....
• Commented on Gun owners are the happiest people in the US
  I'm right up there with #7 and #34. I own a 12-gauge pump-action and a .40 Sig Sauer P226, and while I don't get to the range as often as I'd like, I find target shooting to be relaxing and...
• Commented on Countering the FUD about the "Orphan Works" copyright bill (that doesn't exist)
  @JFLawton: What's my dog in this race? I'm a programmer who works on both open- and closed-source software; I founded a tech startup about two years ago. I'm also a science fiction writer, albeit not a terribly active one any...
• Commented on Countering the FUD about the "Orphan Works" copyright bill (that doesn't exist)
  @fantasticpoison: Thanks for the correction -- edited the duration braino and added an IANAL note on the publication issue....
• Commented on Complaining about companies is part of the market
  What blows my mind is employees who, upon discovering that someone who has complained about their company's product or service, take it upon themselves to harass the dissatisfied customer. After a lousy experience with Hotwire.com last year, in which they...
• Commented on In Defense of Food: NPR interview with Michael Pollan about "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
  I am perpetually infuriated by Western medicine's persistent belief in the myth of the "ideal patient", with its insistence that a single diet, a single course of treatment for a given disease, a single way of addressing any thing having...
• Commented on Wiki-inspired "transparent" search-engine
  @2: haha, you had the exact same insight I did (which doesn't surprise me -- hi, btw!) To put it another way: an encryption algorithm is considered cryptographically secure when it is equally hard to figure out the plaintext when...
• Commented on Netgear's tiny Network Attached Storage RAID -- just right for a home entertainment/data server?
  @ifireball -- umm, according to CNET it speaks HTTP, HTTPS, NFS, SMB and AFP in addition to CIFS (well, and FTP/FTPS, but I can't see those being terribly useful for video streaming)....
• Commented on Netgear's tiny Network Attached Storage RAID -- just right for a home entertainment/data server?
  This looks like the bigger, tougher brother of the Linksys NSLU2, which is about the size of two packs of cards laid side-by-side, and has an Ethernet adapter and two USB2 connectors (expandable to 4 with some hardware hacking, IIRC)...