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User: durrr

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  1. Re:Really? on Firing a Laser Into Your Brain Could Help Beat a Drug Addiction · · Score: 1

    Gene therapy is not particularly hard, and there's clinical trials and decades old cases where it have had success. Why is this myth propagated?
    Did the major fuckup and misconduct in the Jesse Gelsinger case really have that much publicity?

    Though I guess, every religious nut, moral-code internet warrior, environmentalist nutcase and anti-GMO opinionist would of course latch onto this outlier case and present it as a rule rather than exception, because some delusion of purity is more important than saving and improving lives.

  2. Re:Really? on Firing a Laser Into Your Brain Could Help Beat a Drug Addiction · · Score: 3, Informative

    Optogenetics (as the technique is more commonly called) can be 'installed' with gene therapy vectors in adult mammals, the technique can be used for both activating and silencing cells.

    It have not been tried in humans due the excessive caution around everything that is gene therapy, along with the requirement for some mildly invasive neurosurgery.

  3. Re:No more "Culture" novels. Damn. on Iain Banks: Extremely Ill With Cancer · · Score: 1

    Surgery is out of the option due to the infiltration of large vessels, so really, it's pretty much radio and chemo that's the only options. And those are rarely curative on their own, surgery is always the best option.

    Unfortunately gall bladder cancers have abysmal prognosis, not as bad as pancreatic or stomach, but save for some recent developments in the market I'm afraid it's looking bleak in the long term.

    You can however buy time with chemo, get the tumor size down a fair bit and keep the infiltration and metabolic loads in check for a while. It can give up a few years.

  4. Re:No more "Culture" novels. Damn. on Iain Banks: Extremely Ill With Cancer · · Score: 2

    Very sad. Every new culture book release was like Christmas for me.
    If only we could borrow some technology from his books, to back him up or something...

  5. Re:It's Junk Science on Evidence For Comet-Borne Microfossils Supports Panspermia · · Score: 1

    Like "more than three ounces of shampoo?"

    I'm sure that would clean up the story.

  6. Re:What If? on Evidence For Comet-Borne Microfossils Supports Panspermia · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nah, it's a freshwater contaminated sample, the diatoms found are not fossilized and they are all existing species. Go read the Bad Astronomy blog for details.

  7. Re:The president should do an address on North Korea Threatens US With Preemptive Nuclear Strike · · Score: 1

    Have him pretend-ride a horse to the podium with Biden following, clacking a pair of coconut shells together.

  8. Re:First strike! on North Korea Threatens US With Preemptive Nuclear Strike · · Score: 1

    Are you certain about that? What if NK intentionally miscalibrated their nuclear devices for a lesser, but spot-on explosive yield. And put their supposedly failed satellite into a spin or 'nonfunctional' state to mislead.their launch and space capabilities.

    And as we speak, NK factories churn out MIRVed ballistic missiles in the thousands per day.

  9. Re:First strike! on North Korea Threatens US With Preemptive Nuclear Strike · · Score: 4, Insightful

    MAD also only works when both sides can actually destroy eachother. A NK nuclear strike could at best kill a few million people, after which their entire nation would go up in smoke(or by invaded on every front at the very least, nuking NK might not be a very popular option as fallout would drift out over japan(ironic isn't it that everything nuclear somehow end up affecting japan) and south korea.

  10. Re:Hmm on Discovery Increases Odds of Life On Europa · · Score: 1

    Various impact objects could be candidates too.

  11. Re:That's not a drone on Drone Comes Within 200 Feet of Airliner Over New York · · Score: 1

    That's called FPV, If you want it to be a drone you need autonomous flight system.

  12. Security? on Apple's Lightning-to-HDMI Dongle Secretly Packed With ARM, Airplay · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So I guess it may be possible to reprogram the ARM chip to maliciously invade the users computer.
    Might it even be possible to turn the adapter into a minion of evil by just connecting it to your computer assuming you have the right software running?

    So borrowing someones AV adapter can now be a security risk?

  13. Re:Doesn't work on Cliff Bleszinski: Vote With Your Dollars · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem with DLC can be traced back to one statement
    "Adjusted for inflation, your average video game is actually cheaper than it ever has been."
    And adjusted for inflation, oh wait, we don't adjust low wage incomes for inflation. Which means that if you aren't Cliff Belzebub, a lawyer, poltician, or rich in some other way, your wages have become cheaper at the same rate as games, and then DLC was added, and the whole game experience became twice as expensive.

  14. Re:Total BS on How the U.S. Sequester Will Hurt Science and Tech · · Score: 1

    Republican/Democrat is not a personal ideology, it's a pre-formed and canned opinion for people too stupid to use their own brains. Made by people too stupid to use their own brains hiring various people that can barely use their brains to concoct a misearble and corrupt system and propaganda flood.

    Hopefully the sequestration is more than a symbolic death knell for the system that is, but somehow I find that unlikely.

  15. Re:neat! on BigDog Robot Grabs, Lifts, and Throws Cinder Blocks With Its New Arm · · Score: 2

    The real application is obviously dwarftossing

  16. Re:Regarding the "three laws" on BigDog Robot Grabs, Lifts, and Throws Cinder Blocks With Its New Arm · · Score: 1

    The three laws apply to no robots at all, because they aren't intelligent enough to dynamically apply them. Not to mention even understand them.

  17. Re:How large would it be on battery power? on BigDog Robot Grabs, Lifts, and Throws Cinder Blocks With Its New Arm · · Score: 2

    That chassis supports batteries since 2008 when they demonstrated the fucking thing in their parking lot. And if not batteries it could probably run with a diesel generator.

    The cables are there because
    1.It's easier to develop a device that you can run without swapping batteries all the time
    2. Support cables to prevent it from falling over when you test and fine tune the movement algorithms

  18. Re:The Terminator on BigDog Robot Grabs, Lifts, and Throws Cinder Blocks With Its New Arm · · Score: 2

    An industrial robot from 2000 could've decapitated three people with the cinderblock and in the same swing thrown it twice as far.

    Cinderblock throwing have never really been any industry metric of robot strength though, but they've been very strong for a long while.

  19. Re:Stupidity on Play Wii, Become a Better Surgeon · · Score: 3, Informative

    There are laparotrainer kits for whoever is serious. But if you can train related motor skills by using a cheap ass toy you might as well do that initially and then refine the technique on the more expensive kits.

    And the kits are not a human-representative dummy really, you just do various tasks with the laparoscope.

  20. Re:I think on Plans Unveiled For Full Scale Replica of the Titanic · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yes, the league of Irony and Evil have agreed to fund a life-size replica of the iceberg that sunk titanic.

    If you happen to know the formula of ice-coloured stealth paint and/or how to build silent diesel electric motors, please send you CV to titanic_reenactment@repeathistory.com

  21. Re:How about O2? on Fingerprint Purchasing Technology Ensures Buyer Has a Pulse · · Score: 1

    And skinning a finger to translucency and using your own as a backing, or artificially pumping a blood equivalent fluid through a dead finger is impossible!

  22. Re:LOL Dice on CES: Using Eye Movements to Control a Computer or TV (Video) · · Score: 2

    Speaking of advertisements, I could see this being abused for next gen of intrusive ads.

  23. Re:If you had a Windows computer on Ask Slashdot: Starting From Scratch After a Burglary? · · Score: 2, Funny

    To you, minus, to grandparent, plus.

  24. Re:That is what they're for... on The Patents That Threaten 3-D Printing · · Score: 1

    Lost-wax casting have been around for ~5000 years. The reason why you wouldn't come up with the idea is that you're not a manufacturer and know nothing about manufacturing, whereas for those that know their shit it's nothing particularly new or fancy.

  25. Re:What's the point? on NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Uses 7.1 Billion Transistor GK110 GPU · · Score: 1

    They use a single monitor split in half. And the resolution is quite low.
    It's unlikely that they'll suddenly opt for dual 4k monitors unless they plan to release the retail version by 2018