Does anybody know how mucus differs from the 'extracellular polymeric substance' of which biofilms are made, such that the one would be a haven for bacteriophages and the other a haven for bacteria?
Yeah I would think just throwing a pointed stick is a pretty ineffective strategy. But using another stick to give yourself a little leverage, along with bone tips instead of stone, makes it a pretty deadly weapon.
The atlatl, of course, is in a class by itself. That's an awesome piece of engineering.
The 'just throwing a pointed stick' might actually work; but require group endurance-hunting strategies(which are arguably a flavor of technology, albeit applied political science, rather than material science or engineering). At low speed, a pointy stick is unlikely to be very swiftly lethal; but(especially if it lodges in the wound) it will slow you down and cause continued bleeding and local tissue tearing.
Hunters who are equipped to work together to keep on the track of game as it slowly weakens would probably be able to hunt faster animals(if the animal isn't expecting a thrown weapon, you get a first strike with a potential to reduce its speed) even with dubiously lethal hardware; but less coordinated groups would need a solid kill, which you could probably only get with a thrust, until substantially better tech became available.
I suspect that it's a mixture of technical cluelessness and PR. The people who actually made the mistake that led to the records being exposed probably realize(now, I'm sure it was either an oversight or 'just temporary' at the time) that they fucked up; but they have little to gain by pointing that out.
People higher up the food chain probably have only the haziest distinction between 'something I didn't want happening' and 'something that you circumvented an access control to achieve' and, again, not much incentive to clarify the situation. "Getting hacked" isn't good; but it's a bad thing that just happens sometimes. "Being massively irresponsible" sounds like something that might incur liability.
I did make a mistake; they made 13 million in revenue(my use of 'income' was wrong), with costs of 25 million. So I (incorrectly) stated it as though they were making money; but they are in the red.
Oh, hardly. I find that they are an excellent heuristic for identifying people who are likely to be rather irritating in person, and quite possibly in whatever email resides above that vapid regurgitation... They really do a fine public service that way.
"Confidentiality: The information contained in this e-mail is intended only for the personal and confidential use of the designated recipients of the email. This message may be an attorney-client communication and, as such, is privileged and confidential. If you are not an intended recipient of this message or an agent responsible for delivering it to an intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this message in error, and that any review, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please delete it and all copies and notify us immediately by reply e-mail or by telephone"
To the signature section of all my emails. Surely that qualifies as due-diligence concerning information security?
The history of ironworking in general is a total mess: Not only were the best techniques(at any given time and place) some combination of trade secrets and National Security Stuff, leading to dubious recordkeeping, iron and most iron alloys corrode enthusiastically, often leaving archeologists to stare at an intriguing-looking rust stain and puzzle from there.
Then(as in the case of Damascus steel, as you mention) the properties of iron(actually a pretty lousy material, pure) change quite dramatically with the addition of relatively small amounts of various alloying agents, frequently ones that weren't even identified as distinct substances(much less 'identified' as 'elements') until centuries later, in addition to being sensitive to heating/cooling parameters and any other treatments affecting crystal structure.
There were improvements over time, of course; but until fairly recently, with modern metallurgy and chemistry, even a good-faith effort by the original craftsman to share his technique would likely leave us with considerable puzzling left to do.
I don't see how bringing out the speculative accounting hat changes things: yes, it's an 'asset'; but it's an asset whose current rate of return is worse than what you'd get by plunking $500 in a retail-bank savings account... Unless there is a yet greater fool waiting in the wings(who wasn't willing to outbid Yahoo and acquire tumblr now...), Yahoo just turned a huge pile of liquid assets into an asset whose rate of return isn't even positive. Compared to even a low-yield, highly conservative, investement of the money, that's a lot of opportunity cost that they'll need to scrape out of tumblr somehow, probably in a way that its users won't like...
Ok, let's take a look here: Tumblr, pre-aquisition, made $13 million in income with reported costs of $25 million. So, they are losing money, surprise, surprise...
Yahoo comes along and sinks $1.1 billion into the company. Unless they are total fuckwits(a possibility that cannot entirely be ruled out), they are going to want to squeeze that cash back somehow, whether directly by 'monetizing' the Tumblr userbase, or by some farcical theory about a halo effect drawing users to their other properties...
In what possible universe is a service that is going from "VCs are paying you to use it" to "Yahoo wants to scrape 1.1 billion dollars out of you" going to improve? At best, it might improve in an absolute, technical, sense; but be accompanied by a subscription fee or something. More likely, we'll start to see increasingly aggressive frog-boiling attempts at upping the advertising, theme microtransaction, and other revenues.
They might realize some incremental efficiencies in terms of web hosting costs, given Yahoo's volume and datacenter operations experience; but unless Tumblr's previous management was wholly incompetent, they were probably already using the cheapest commodity web platforms they could get their hands on, so I find it very hard to believe that there is enough fat to cut to magically fix the situation without end-user pain.
Please, do, tell me what 1.1 billion dollars worth of tumblr brings to the table that a mild reskin(to put the pictures with captions in columns, rather than in 'galleries') of flickr could have ready to demo inside a week and roll out in short order?
"...as they create a contact bridge between two points when they get electrocuted they release an alarm pheromone," says UT research assistant Edward LeBrun. "The other ants are attracted to the chemicals that other ants give off," he adds.
What kind of survival mechanism is that? "Oh! There's danger over there. Let's all go check it out..."
Given that(among the ants that don't have even cooler mechanisms, like specialized suicide soldiers who blow themselves up to shower the enemy with toxins) "swarm the enemy and keep biting and stinging without regards for casualties until nothing that isn't us is still moving" is considered a valid strategy, the chemical signalling actually makes sense: If an ant from another colony, or a predatory insect/arachnid, attacks a single ant, the ant's body automatically releases the alarm pheremone and the attacker gets zerg rushed.
It's just that, against implacable electronics that are totally indifferent to anything except being insulated by the uncounted bodies of the slain, this tactic doesn't work very well(see also: mammals that 'freeze' to avoid predators; but discover that cars aren't visual hunters; but they do kill anything that gets in their way)...
Seems like having a predilection for something that kills you is not an instinct that should be selected for. If they are electrocuted by the electronics shouldn't this problem take care of itself sooner or later?
I suspect that it depends on whether sensitivity to electrical fields is useful in other contexts, or(if not directly useful) at least tightly-coupled to some other sensory mechanism that is survival-critical and will take quite some time to iterate toward an electrically insensitive replacement.
Mass death upon the power lines is obvious folly; but electrification is, what, a century old(in any ecologically-relevant amount, I know about various independent developers of primitive chemical batteries going back a great deal further; but that sort of scale barely matters), the blink of an eye in evolutionary time.
If this electrical sense isn't all that useful elsewhere, or is just some accident that didn't previously cause trouble, it could actually be culled from much of the population fairly quickly. If it has some other use, or is connected to genes that code for multiple things, some of them extremely useful, they might take ages, if ever, to stop doing this.
I know most of/. will scoff at this assertion, but we may be witnessing a Biblical prophecy come true: "And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation, and the beasts shall reign over the earth."
By mass, beasts have always reigned over the earth... A mixture of applied landscaping, chemical warfare, and rifles have allowed humans to carve out an enclave free of large mammals we don't approve of, and some of the nastier bugs and microbes(wealthy areas of the Northern Hemisphere, at least. Your mileage may vary. Offer void where restricted by law or subverted by rapid evolution of antibiotic resistant microbes. Terms and conditions may apply); but we've never been close to having the upper hand against things too small to shoot and too resilient to just habitat-destroy into submission.
These foreigners are destroying good ol american jobs. I am liberal except for when it comes to things that effect me as I am a hypocrite.
Ah yes, isn't it repulsive how those 'liberals' just can't stay consistent on their support for indentured servants when their own economic interests are on the line? Truly a refutation of their ideology or something...
and they only took 15 million? One can only hope they didn't give up their rights in return.
I have to wonder why they talked to the VCs at all... I can imagine taking the risk if you've just started somebullshitwithnorevenuemodel.com and crazy guys in suits are offering you a giant stack of pretend internet money for it; but why would a company with an actual shipping product, and sales, and such, risk going up against the elite equity-diluting and value extraction skills of a hardened VC?
I, for one, am 100% gung-ho about having a 3rd-party in the 'cloud' handling every single one of my packets so that they can balance them between my connections!
The proprietary client adding complexity to my machine's network stack is a bonus, of course.
The videos are about people playing a game, not the game itself. That is a transformational use and thus a fair use. Nintendo is stealing from their own customers, plain and simple.
The other issue(aside from whether Nintendo has a right under law to do this or not) is whether Nintendo is being a load of idiots by doing this...
If a video of somebody playing a game is a good, or even adequate, substitute for that game, I think that it's fair to say that the game must really suck, badly. If it isn't a good substitute for the game, then "Let's Play" videos are likely to be free advertising for Nintendo, produced by enthusiasts. Given Nintendo's, um, totally commanding lead in the next-gen console area, maybe they shouldn't be turning that down, no?
Slave labor is hardly free: You need enough coercive violence to keep them motivated(and away from your throat), they have the same subsistence requirements as anybody else, they need training suitable to their assigned function, and you either need to allocate additional subsistence expenses for non-working pregnant women and children(if you wish to produce replacement slaves in-house) or factor in the cost of hunting and enslaving replacements from suitable human populations.
I assume that v2 will include facial recognition cameras, a body-tracking kinect-style sensor, and full integration with facebook so that the entire internet can know who you are hitting on before the drink has even finished changing hands...
I'm not at all surprised that it is essentially dead in laptops, for the reasons you indicate.
What does surprise me a bit is that the MxM SIG appears to have made no attempt(at least no attempt that wasn't at least large enough to fail visibly) to try to turn MxM, or a slightly modified successor, into something for small form factor desktops, all-in-ones, and the like.
A pretty substantial chunk of boring corporate desktops come in a small form factor flavor that incorporates some laptop parts, or near laptop parts; but still cram themselves tightly enough to leave room for a (half height) PCIe x16 slot(sometimes even two, in recent models). You'd think that something easier to swap than on on-motherboard option; but smaller than a full x16 PCIe card, might be a fit there. Aside from one or two of the iMac models, though, I've not seen MxM in space-constrained non-laptops anywhere.
Was there anything at all about CIOs, or was that just another pop-psych regurgitation of 'Primate Power: use these hackneyed verbal tricks to pretend that you are the monkey with the biggest cock in the room!' as seen far too often in the various 'self-help for the painfully mediocre' columns that run in various media?
Even under the (probably quite generous) assumption that this advice is true, it's the kind of thing that you aren't going to learn just by reading, any more than you can become a good actor just by skimming a few scripts.
Don't ask me. It was the Labor Statistics expert system that added 'organic fertilizer' as a job category. Apparently it's a growth industry, because the number of people who were previously unemployed; but applied for 'kinetic retraining' and found jobs there in the last quarter alone has been tremendous. The numbers don't lie!
Slashdot Mirror
Does anybody know how mucus differs from the 'extracellular polymeric substance' of which biofilms are made, such that the one would be a haven for bacteriophages and the other a haven for bacteria?
Yeah I would think just throwing a pointed stick is a pretty ineffective strategy. But using another stick to give yourself a little leverage, along with bone tips instead of stone, makes it a pretty deadly weapon.
The atlatl, of course, is in a class by itself. That's an awesome piece of engineering.
The 'just throwing a pointed stick' might actually work; but require group endurance-hunting strategies(which are arguably a flavor of technology, albeit applied political science, rather than material science or engineering). At low speed, a pointy stick is unlikely to be very swiftly lethal; but(especially if it lodges in the wound) it will slow you down and cause continued bleeding and local tissue tearing.
Hunters who are equipped to work together to keep on the track of game as it slowly weakens would probably be able to hunt faster animals(if the animal isn't expecting a thrown weapon, you get a first strike with a potential to reduce its speed) even with dubiously lethal hardware; but less coordinated groups would need a solid kill, which you could probably only get with a thrust, until substantially better tech became available.
I suspect that it's a mixture of technical cluelessness and PR. The people who actually made the mistake that led to the records being exposed probably realize(now, I'm sure it was either an oversight or 'just temporary' at the time) that they fucked up; but they have little to gain by pointing that out.
People higher up the food chain probably have only the haziest distinction between 'something I didn't want happening' and 'something that you circumvented an access control to achieve' and, again, not much incentive to clarify the situation. "Getting hacked" isn't good; but it's a bad thing that just happens sometimes. "Being massively irresponsible" sounds like something that might incur liability.
I did make a mistake; they made 13 million in revenue(my use of 'income' was wrong), with costs of 25 million. So I (incorrectly) stated it as though they were making money; but they are in the red.
Those disclaimers are worthless!
Oh, hardly. I find that they are an excellent heuristic for identifying people who are likely to be rather irritating in person, and quite possibly in whatever email resides above that vapid regurgitation... They really do a fine public service that way.
I always carefully add:
"Confidentiality: The information contained in this e-mail is intended only for the
personal and confidential use of the designated recipients of the email. This message
may be an attorney-client communication and, as such, is privileged and confidential. If
you are not an intended recipient of this message or an agent responsible for delivering
it to an intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this message
in error, and that any review, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this message is
strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please delete it and all
copies and notify us immediately by reply e-mail or by telephone"
To the signature section of all my emails. Surely that qualifies as due-diligence concerning information security?
There are also some not-immediately-obvious additional technologies which make spears substantially more effective.
The history of ironworking in general is a total mess: Not only were the best techniques(at any given time and place) some combination of trade secrets and National Security Stuff, leading to dubious recordkeeping, iron and most iron alloys corrode enthusiastically, often leaving archeologists to stare at an intriguing-looking rust stain and puzzle from there.
Then(as in the case of Damascus steel, as you mention) the properties of iron(actually a pretty lousy material, pure) change quite dramatically with the addition of relatively small amounts of various alloying agents, frequently ones that weren't even identified as distinct substances(much less 'identified' as 'elements') until centuries later, in addition to being sensitive to heating/cooling parameters and any other treatments affecting crystal structure.
There were improvements over time, of course; but until fairly recently, with modern metallurgy and chemistry, even a good-faith effort by the original craftsman to share his technique would likely leave us with considerable puzzling left to do.
As if millions of hypochondriacs cried out in terror and suddenly went to check WebMD.
I don't see how bringing out the speculative accounting hat changes things: yes, it's an 'asset'; but it's an asset whose current rate of return is worse than what you'd get by plunking $500 in a retail-bank savings account... Unless there is a yet greater fool waiting in the wings(who wasn't willing to outbid Yahoo and acquire tumblr now...), Yahoo just turned a huge pile of liquid assets into an asset whose rate of return isn't even positive. Compared to even a low-yield, highly conservative, investement of the money, that's a lot of opportunity cost that they'll need to scrape out of tumblr somehow, probably in a way that its users won't like...
Ok, let's take a look here: Tumblr, pre-aquisition, made $13 million in income with reported costs of $25 million. So, they are losing money, surprise, surprise...
Yahoo comes along and sinks $1.1 billion into the company. Unless they are total fuckwits(a possibility that cannot entirely be ruled out), they are going to want to squeeze that cash back somehow, whether directly by 'monetizing' the Tumblr userbase, or by some farcical theory about a halo effect drawing users to their other properties...
In what possible universe is a service that is going from "VCs are paying you to use it" to "Yahoo wants to scrape 1.1 billion dollars out of you" going to improve? At best, it might improve in an absolute, technical, sense; but be accompanied by a subscription fee or something. More likely, we'll start to see increasingly aggressive frog-boiling attempts at upping the advertising, theme microtransaction, and other revenues.
They might realize some incremental efficiencies in terms of web hosting costs, given Yahoo's volume and datacenter operations experience; but unless Tumblr's previous management was wholly incompetent, they were probably already using the cheapest commodity web platforms they could get their hands on, so I find it very hard to believe that there is enough fat to cut to magically fix the situation without end-user pain.
Hey, Yahoo, remember that other photo-sharing site you already fucking own?
Please, do, tell me what 1.1 billion dollars worth of tumblr brings to the table that a mild reskin(to put the pictures with captions in columns, rather than in 'galleries') of flickr could have ready to demo inside a week and roll out in short order?
"...as they create a contact bridge between two points when they get electrocuted they release an alarm pheromone," says UT research assistant Edward LeBrun. "The other ants are attracted to the chemicals that other ants give off," he adds.
What kind of survival mechanism is that? "Oh! There's danger over there. Let's all go check it out..."
Given that(among the ants that don't have even cooler mechanisms, like specialized suicide soldiers who blow themselves up to shower the enemy with toxins) "swarm the enemy and keep biting and stinging without regards for casualties until nothing that isn't us is still moving" is considered a valid strategy, the chemical signalling actually makes sense: If an ant from another colony, or a predatory insect/arachnid, attacks a single ant, the ant's body automatically releases the alarm pheremone and the attacker gets zerg rushed.
It's just that, against implacable electronics that are totally indifferent to anything except being insulated by the uncounted bodies of the slain, this tactic doesn't work very well(see also: mammals that 'freeze' to avoid predators; but discover that cars aren't visual hunters; but they do kill anything that gets in their way)...
Seems like having a predilection for something that kills you is not an instinct that should be selected for. If they are electrocuted by the electronics shouldn't this problem take care of itself sooner or later?
I suspect that it depends on whether sensitivity to electrical fields is useful in other contexts, or(if not directly useful) at least tightly-coupled to some other sensory mechanism that is survival-critical and will take quite some time to iterate toward an electrically insensitive replacement.
Mass death upon the power lines is obvious folly; but electrification is, what, a century old(in any ecologically-relevant amount, I know about various independent developers of primitive chemical batteries going back a great deal further; but that sort of scale barely matters), the blink of an eye in evolutionary time.
If this electrical sense isn't all that useful elsewhere, or is just some accident that didn't previously cause trouble, it could actually be culled from much of the population fairly quickly. If it has some other use, or is connected to genes that code for multiple things, some of them extremely useful, they might take ages, if ever, to stop doing this.
I know most of /. will scoff at this assertion, but we may be witnessing a Biblical prophecy come true: "And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation, and the beasts shall reign over the earth."
By mass, beasts have always reigned over the earth... A mixture of applied landscaping, chemical warfare, and rifles have allowed humans to carve out an enclave free of large mammals we don't approve of, and some of the nastier bugs and microbes(wealthy areas of the Northern Hemisphere, at least. Your mileage may vary. Offer void where restricted by law or subverted by rapid evolution of antibiotic resistant microbes. Terms and conditions may apply); but we've never been close to having the upper hand against things too small to shoot and too resilient to just habitat-destroy into submission.
These foreigners are destroying good ol american jobs. I am liberal except for when it comes to things that effect me as I am a hypocrite.
Ah yes, isn't it repulsive how those 'liberals' just can't stay consistent on their support for indentured servants when their own economic interests are on the line? Truly a refutation of their ideology or something...
and they only took 15 million? One can only hope they didn't give up their rights in return.
I have to wonder why they talked to the VCs at all... I can imagine taking the risk if you've just started somebullshitwithnorevenuemodel.com and crazy guys in suits are offering you a giant stack of pretend internet money for it; but why would a company with an actual shipping product, and sales, and such, risk going up against the elite equity-diluting and value extraction skills of a hardened VC?
I, for one, am 100% gung-ho about having a 3rd-party in the 'cloud' handling every single one of my packets so that they can balance them between my connections!
The proprietary client adding complexity to my machine's network stack is a bonus, of course.
The videos are about people playing a game, not the game itself. That is a transformational use and thus a fair use. Nintendo is stealing from their own customers, plain and simple.
The other issue(aside from whether Nintendo has a right under law to do this or not) is whether Nintendo is being a load of idiots by doing this...
If a video of somebody playing a game is a good, or even adequate, substitute for that game, I think that it's fair to say that the game must really suck, badly. If it isn't a good substitute for the game, then "Let's Play" videos are likely to be free advertising for Nintendo, produced by enthusiasts. Given Nintendo's, um, totally commanding lead in the next-gen console area, maybe they shouldn't be turning that down, no?
Slave labor is hardly free: You need enough coercive violence to keep them motivated(and away from your throat), they have the same subsistence requirements as anybody else, they need training suitable to their assigned function, and you either need to allocate additional subsistence expenses for non-working pregnant women and children(if you wish to produce replacement slaves in-house) or factor in the cost of hunting and enslaving replacements from suitable human populations.
all of Florida's landscaping business now under suspicion of being terrorists. Multiple instance of fertilizer being purchased have been witnessed..
Actually, you might want to skip the people buying fertilizer and just call in the people selling it...
I assume that v2 will include facial recognition cameras, a body-tracking kinect-style sensor, and full integration with facebook so that the entire internet can know who you are hitting on before the drink has even finished changing hands...
I'm not at all surprised that it is essentially dead in laptops, for the reasons you indicate.
What does surprise me a bit is that the MxM SIG appears to have made no attempt(at least no attempt that wasn't at least large enough to fail visibly) to try to turn MxM, or a slightly modified successor, into something for small form factor desktops, all-in-ones, and the like.
A pretty substantial chunk of boring corporate desktops come in a small form factor flavor that incorporates some laptop parts, or near laptop parts; but still cram themselves tightly enough to leave room for a (half height) PCIe x16 slot(sometimes even two, in recent models). You'd think that something easier to swap than on on-motherboard option; but smaller than a full x16 PCIe card, might be a fit there. Aside from one or two of the iMac models, though, I've not seen MxM in space-constrained non-laptops anywhere.
Was there anything at all about CIOs, or was that just another pop-psych regurgitation of 'Primate Power: use these hackneyed verbal tricks to pretend that you are the monkey with the biggest cock in the room!' as seen far too often in the various 'self-help for the painfully mediocre' columns that run in various media?
Even under the (probably quite generous) assumption that this advice is true, it's the kind of thing that you aren't going to learn just by reading, any more than you can become a good actor just by skimming a few scripts.
Don't ask me. It was the Labor Statistics expert system that added 'organic fertilizer' as a job category. Apparently it's a growth industry, because the number of people who were previously unemployed; but applied for 'kinetic retraining' and found jobs there in the last quarter alone has been tremendous. The numbers don't lie!