You don't only get vaccinated for yourself. You also get vaccinated so that you don't transmit the virus to those with compromised immune systems.
If the vaccine doesn't reduce mortality, as this study suggests, then that indicates that the vaccine doesn't do anything. If it doesn't do anything, how it taking the vaccine helpful to other people?
I'm just waiting for a peta-hertz computer with a 500 exabyte hard-drive able to do universe simulations in real time that will fit in my pocket
It is impossible to simulate the universe. This is pretty easy to prove. If it was possible, using some device, to simulate the universe, then it is not actually necessary to simulate the universe -- we only need simulate the device which simulates the universe, since the device is necessarily contained within the universe. This should be easier, because the device itself is much smaller than the entire universe.
But if simulating the device which simulates the universe, is equivalent to simulating the universe, then that would mean that the complete set of states which define the universe can actually be represented by some subset of those very same states -- the subset of states which describe the device which is being used to simulate the universe. In other words, the universe is a set such that if you remove some subset of states you end up with the same set again. I hope you can see how this is a logical impossibility.
The issue that comes in that even the article talks about. Is the problem of when say Oregon becomes wildly popular and tries to contain more people than the server can handle.
In the short term, you would switch in a more powerful zone server from a pool of "battle servers." In the long term, you would carve the tile/zone into multiple pieces and split them between servers on an on-demand basis.
No, he already correctly addressed the problem you described. Since each server maps to a grid-space, if you are on server A and I am on server B, walk closer. It's an intuitive way of dealing with the problem, since it correlates with real-world experience.
That's mostly what I am getting at, but if the game rules allow for it, you shouldn't have to get closer to the other player to communicate. In that case, servers A and B would exchange messages directly with each other since they share a border. The worst case scenario would be a battle occupying a large space than spans two servers -- both servers might have to track each arrow/missile/combatant that crosses the border of the two tiles. A possible solution would be to temporarily merge servers A and B such that A simulated everything and B was temporarily idle. If server A cannot handle the total load of the battle then one of the emergency hot standbys would switch in.
I'm not talking about throwing players onto the grid "at random." The grid encodes the topology of the game space. Using the United States as an example, you could have a server for each state. As a player moves from one state to another their connection is transferred by the load balancer.
It is true that if two players are on different servers, there must be some inter-server communication for them to interact. It would be like two people standing on either side of the Washington-Oregon border for instance. But the idea is that this communication is limited to those users who are "physically" near each other in game-space. Long distance communication would be routed through a different network (the analogy in the physical world is the Internet itself.) The node is only an engine that serves to enforce physics and game rules. Players as well as objects and their accompanying behavior programs would actually be transferred between nodes as they move.
Since the game world is essentially a 2-D surface, why not arrange the servers in a grid topology? Each server can talk directly to the servers north, south, west, and east of it. Long-range traffic can either be routed through the grid, or, depending on its urgency, sent through a central router that is one hop from every node (i.e. the nodes are connected both in grid and star formation). A front-end load balancer takes care of transferring players' TCP connections from one node to the next as they move in game-space. That's a total of six physical network links: four for the cardinal directions, one to the star hub, and one to the load balancer.
Depending on how busy any one tile of game-space might be, the node serving that tile could be anything from a dual-core to a four-way quad core. For sudden, extremely heavy use of a particular tile, a more powerful node in hot standby could be switched in to handle the spike -- you could have an array of such "super nodes" always in hot standby.
The reason I come to Slashdot is because I don't want to waste my entire fucking life poring over every news site on the planet. Maybe you haven't noticed yet, but Slashdot has trouble even when it comes to responsible editing of article summaries -- why on Earth would you ever expect it to be a center of breaking news reportage?
I don't think that makes sense. Mars, as far as we know, doesn't have a pervasive biosphere. The reaction of the Martian climate to a given input probably has no correlation at all to the reaction the Earth's climate would have to the same input. Think about the amount of CO2 which is modulated into/out of the atmosphere by life.
The installed base is smaller. Therefore the return-on-investment must be lower for a certain development effort (even taking into account your postulate that Mac users are "richer", which I don't buy without seeing some numbers). Remember, malware authors don't do their work for free. A larger user base means proportionally larger returns for the person who contracted the malware development.
Okay, now that Microsoft makes an antivirus, someone explain to me why they haven't simply dedicated all this effort to debugging Windows, closing security holes and stabilizing code?
Because not all malware relies on software bugs. Malware can also rely on "wetware" bugs, i.e. the tendency of users to trust what the machine tells them, and authorize actions that they would not have authorized had they known the software was malicious. In other words, the social engineering factor. Even with 100% secure software, human imperfection is universal. (And if humans can't be perfect, why would we expect their software to be?) Recognizing known malware is critical to preventing its spread by unknowing computer users. The alternative is to cause the world to be free of idiots -- that isn't going to happen.
Until you want to ban all "unsavvy" users from the Internet (guess what -- it isn't going to happen), active defense against malware will always be a critical component of overall security practice.
Yeah, I had some trouble parsing that as well. So, we have a list of things Microsoft sucks at. Failing to let you know it's unhappy is low on the list, so it's decent at failing to let you know it's unhappy. So it's bad at letting you know it's unhappy. Which is in contradiction to the GP post (which states that it's good at doing same). Therefore, it's either a sarcastic agreement with the parent, or an obfuscated rebuttal. Beyond that I can't tell you.
I went to Portland State University in Oregon (definitely not a bad school). The median student age was quite a bit older than me. Your implication that once you attend school you are somehow "locked in" and can never go back is absurd. People can, and do, go back to school for second or third degrees all the time. If you're 30, 40, even 50 (and I've seen even older than that) and you want a degree, go get one. You may not be able to get into certain schools (usually private, elite schools where the student body is strictly 18-22) but that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. Far from it.
I'm pushing 30 myself, and considering going back to school part time to slowly earn a Master's in engineering. I have one child already and another on the way. I have a full time job. I can't go back to school full time, but that doesn't mean I can't go back to school.
$6 million? That's only $1 of funds for every 5.6 acres of land area. The idea that you could make any sort of impact with only $6 million is ludicrous, and just goes to show the complete ignorance of the public about "large" numbers. $6 billion would probably be closer to what you'd need.
Okay Malaysia, I'll play your game. Instead of calling it nasi lemak, I'll call it "creamy rice," and my customers will just think it's some American invention. The word Malaysia will never enter their thoughts. They'll never wonder how good the food might taste if they actually visited Malaysia. Instead of being an advertisement of your country and culture, it'll just be a source of profit for me.
I do know that in some cases even severed spinal cords could grow back correctly enough for partial function if treated soon enough with a particular substance. That substance is a common food additive, so phase 1 clinical trials might be skipped.
You may have ethical reasons for being vague about what exactly this "substance" is, but given what you've said here, I'd wager you're talking about glutamate?
I don't see why the parent post was rated "Troll", nor do I understand the other replies to it. The parent is expressing that "There's hope for us yet." We can hold very entrenched scientific ideas, but are not unwilling to discard them when presented with evidence of their falsity. This is a good thing, and I think the OP was just pointing it out.
or, we could simply call it a photograph and not worry about what detection and imaging techniques were used.
I would kind of prefer that we limit the use of the word "photograph" to include images produced by illumination by photons. There's a reason that the imagery produced by electron microscopes are called "micrographs," not photographs. The images are produced by the irradiation of the specimen with electron waves, not photons.
It is not illegal to pass a bicyclist, no matter how slowly they are going. That's what bike lanes are for -- you get a lane, the car gets a lane, everyone should be happy.
Legally passing a bicyclist doesn't really have anything to do with bike lanes. It is always legal for an automotive to pass a bicyclist, even if they have to cross a solid center lane marker to do it (in other words, you can pass a bicyclist even while in a "no passing" zone, so long as it is safe to do so).
This rule makes sense when you think about it. Without this permission, a slow bicyclist riding on a busy road with no bike lane could hold up miles of traffic. And impatient drivers trying to get around the cyclist WITHOUT crossing the center marker run a serious risk of striking the cyclist.
It's amazing how few drivers and cyclists actually understand the laws of the road.
I don't mean "duh" to the researcher -- obviously things must be tested and validated in the real world, not just postulated -- but it never made sense to me in the first place that brain cells can't regenerate. Why the hell not? What is the adaptive purpose of such a limitation? The brain consumes a huge amount of energy, much more so per-pound than any other organ in the body. That seems to imply that the brain is extremely important to the organism. Why would essentially the most important organ in the body have such a stupid limitation that it can't even recover from MINOR damage? That makes no sense.
One possible explanation for the very limited growth rate of brain cells is that if this growth rate were not tightly controlled, it could lead to "chaotic" brain tissue which could interfere with normal brain function. So general division of brain cells would not be desirable -- but I'm no neuroscientist.
The human behaviour they should put into those models arent panic or riots, but what humans do when know what those models predict. Thats the biggest problem about predicting what people will do, what if that people know that prediction?
If predicting a panic could cause a panic to not occur, I think I'll take that. Under what circumstances would panic be desirable?
If you don't want things to look executable, mount it with the noexec option (which you could put in fstab). That way nothing on the device, even with FAT, will appear executable.
noexec is not a security feature. Anybody with read access to the file can copy it to some other file system, set the execute bit, and execute it anyway. The only benefit of noexec is preventing yourself from accidentally executing something from untrusted media. If you're determined to do it, you can still do it.
Microsoft has been a drag on innovation for more than two decades. Its best, and seemingly only, plays continue to be copies of new technology.
If failing to innovate is a successful business strategy (and Microsoft sure seems to have proved that it is), why would you expect any company to do any different? The question isn't why Microsoft does not innovate, the question is why innovation is clearly not profitable.
If you do test positive for swine flu then proper public health measures can be taken.
Right, public health measures such as staying home and not spreading the shit around to everyone -- a measure that you SOUNDLY DEFEATED by leaving your house and walking into a medical center full of people in order to be "tested positive."
The most appropriate public health measure is to not expose other people. The most appropriate personal health measure is the same as it's always been for flu -- bed rest, hydration, and NSAID drugs in case of high fever. If you think you may have flu, please stay in your fucking home and don't give it to me, okay?
why isn't microsoft doing everything possible to destroy linux? Is this a "saved apple" moment all over again??
You seem to be making a strange equation between "maximizing profits" and "destroying Linux." The goal of most corporations, Microsoft included, is to make money. Utterly destroying a competitor which, although vocal, represents only a single-digit threat to their market share, seems like a rather irrational expenditure of resources.
You have an awfully pessimistic world view if you equate the maximization of your own success with the downfall of all others.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't only get vaccinated for yourself. You also get vaccinated so that you don't transmit the virus to those with compromised immune systems.
If the vaccine doesn't reduce mortality, as this study suggests, then that indicates that the vaccine doesn't do anything. If it doesn't do anything, how it taking the vaccine helpful to other people?
I'm just waiting for a peta-hertz computer with a 500 exabyte hard-drive able to do universe simulations in real time that will fit in my pocket
It is impossible to simulate the universe. This is pretty easy to prove. If it was possible, using some device, to simulate the universe, then it is not actually necessary to simulate the universe -- we only need simulate the device which simulates the universe, since the device is necessarily contained within the universe. This should be easier, because the device itself is much smaller than the entire universe.
But if simulating the device which simulates the universe, is equivalent to simulating the universe, then that would mean that the complete set of states which define the universe can actually be represented by some subset of those very same states -- the subset of states which describe the device which is being used to simulate the universe. In other words, the universe is a set such that if you remove some subset of states you end up with the same set again. I hope you can see how this is a logical impossibility.
The issue that comes in that even the article talks about. Is the problem of when say Oregon becomes wildly popular and tries to contain more people than the server can handle.
In the short term, you would switch in a more powerful zone server from a pool of "battle servers." In the long term, you would carve the tile/zone into multiple pieces and split them between servers on an on-demand basis.
No, he already correctly addressed the problem you described. Since each server maps to a grid-space, if you are on server A and I am on server B, walk closer. It's an intuitive way of dealing with the problem, since it correlates with real-world experience.
That's mostly what I am getting at, but if the game rules allow for it, you shouldn't have to get closer to the other player to communicate. In that case, servers A and B would exchange messages directly with each other since they share a border. The worst case scenario would be a battle occupying a large space than spans two servers -- both servers might have to track each arrow/missile/combatant that crosses the border of the two tiles. A possible solution would be to temporarily merge servers A and B such that A simulated everything and B was temporarily idle. If server A cannot handle the total load of the battle then one of the emergency hot standbys would switch in.
I'm not talking about throwing players onto the grid "at random." The grid encodes the topology of the game space. Using the United States as an example, you could have a server for each state. As a player moves from one state to another their connection is transferred by the load balancer.
It is true that if two players are on different servers, there must be some inter-server communication for them to interact. It would be like two people standing on either side of the Washington-Oregon border for instance. But the idea is that this communication is limited to those users who are "physically" near each other in game-space. Long distance communication would be routed through a different network (the analogy in the physical world is the Internet itself.) The node is only an engine that serves to enforce physics and game rules. Players as well as objects and their accompanying behavior programs would actually be transferred between nodes as they move.
Since the game world is essentially a 2-D surface, why not arrange the servers in a grid topology? Each server can talk directly to the servers north, south, west, and east of it. Long-range traffic can either be routed through the grid, or, depending on its urgency, sent through a central router that is one hop from every node (i.e. the nodes are connected both in grid and star formation). A front-end load balancer takes care of transferring players' TCP connections from one node to the next as they move in game-space. That's a total of six physical network links: four for the cardinal directions, one to the star hub, and one to the load balancer.
Depending on how busy any one tile of game-space might be, the node serving that tile could be anything from a dual-core to a four-way quad core. For sudden, extremely heavy use of a particular tile, a more powerful node in hot standby could be switched in to handle the spike -- you could have an array of such "super nodes" always in hot standby.
The reason I come to Slashdot is because I don't want to waste my entire fucking life poring over every news site on the planet. Maybe you haven't noticed yet, but Slashdot has trouble even when it comes to responsible editing of article summaries -- why on Earth would you ever expect it to be a center of breaking news reportage?
I don't think that makes sense. Mars, as far as we know, doesn't have a pervasive biosphere. The reaction of the Martian climate to a given input probably has no correlation at all to the reaction the Earth's climate would have to the same input. Think about the amount of CO2 which is modulated into/out of the atmosphere by life.
The installed base is smaller. Therefore the return-on-investment must be lower for a certain development effort (even taking into account your postulate that Mac users are "richer", which I don't buy without seeing some numbers). Remember, malware authors don't do their work for free. A larger user base means proportionally larger returns for the person who contracted the malware development.
Okay, now that Microsoft makes an antivirus, someone explain to me why they haven't simply dedicated all this effort to debugging Windows, closing security holes and stabilizing code?
Because not all malware relies on software bugs. Malware can also rely on "wetware" bugs, i.e. the tendency of users to trust what the machine tells them, and authorize actions that they would not have authorized had they known the software was malicious. In other words, the social engineering factor. Even with 100% secure software, human imperfection is universal. (And if humans can't be perfect, why would we expect their software to be?) Recognizing known malware is critical to preventing its spread by unknowing computer users. The alternative is to cause the world to be free of idiots -- that isn't going to happen.
Until you want to ban all "unsavvy" users from the Internet (guess what -- it isn't going to happen), active defense against malware will always be a critical component of overall security practice.
Yeah, I had some trouble parsing that as well. So, we have a list of things Microsoft sucks at. Failing to let you know it's unhappy is low on the list, so it's decent at failing to let you know it's unhappy. So it's bad at letting you know it's unhappy. Which is in contradiction to the GP post (which states that it's good at doing same). Therefore, it's either a sarcastic agreement with the parent, or an obfuscated rebuttal. Beyond that I can't tell you.
I went to Portland State University in Oregon (definitely not a bad school). The median student age was quite a bit older than me. Your implication that once you attend school you are somehow "locked in" and can never go back is absurd. People can, and do, go back to school for second or third degrees all the time. If you're 30, 40, even 50 (and I've seen even older than that) and you want a degree, go get one. You may not be able to get into certain schools (usually private, elite schools where the student body is strictly 18-22) but that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. Far from it.
I'm pushing 30 myself, and considering going back to school part time to slowly earn a Master's in engineering. I have one child already and another on the way. I have a full time job. I can't go back to school full time, but that doesn't mean I can't go back to school.
$6 million? That's only $1 of funds for every 5.6 acres of land area. The idea that you could make any sort of impact with only $6 million is ludicrous, and just goes to show the complete ignorance of the public about "large" numbers. $6 billion would probably be closer to what you'd need.
Okay Malaysia, I'll play your game. Instead of calling it nasi lemak, I'll call it "creamy rice," and my customers will just think it's some American invention. The word Malaysia will never enter their thoughts. They'll never wonder how good the food might taste if they actually visited Malaysia. Instead of being an advertisement of your country and culture, it'll just be a source of profit for me.
Whoa. From the Wiki article, it sounds like this condition renders one incapable of even imagining color in visual imagery, not just seeing it.
I do know that in some cases even severed spinal cords could grow back correctly enough for partial function if treated soon enough with a particular substance. That substance is a common food additive, so phase 1 clinical trials might be skipped.
You may have ethical reasons for being vague about what exactly this "substance" is, but given what you've said here, I'd wager you're talking about glutamate?
I don't see why the parent post was rated "Troll", nor do I understand the other replies to it. The parent is expressing that "There's hope for us yet." We can hold very entrenched scientific ideas, but are not unwilling to discard them when presented with evidence of their falsity. This is a good thing, and I think the OP was just pointing it out.
or, we could simply call it a photograph and not worry about what detection and imaging techniques were used.
I would kind of prefer that we limit the use of the word "photograph" to include images produced by illumination by photons. There's a reason that the imagery produced by electron microscopes are called "micrographs," not photographs. The images are produced by the irradiation of the specimen with electron waves, not photons.
It is not illegal to pass a bicyclist, no matter how slowly they are going. That's what bike lanes are for -- you get a lane, the car gets a lane, everyone should be happy.
Legally passing a bicyclist doesn't really have anything to do with bike lanes. It is always legal for an automotive to pass a bicyclist, even if they have to cross a solid center lane marker to do it (in other words, you can pass a bicyclist even while in a "no passing" zone, so long as it is safe to do so).
This rule makes sense when you think about it. Without this permission, a slow bicyclist riding on a busy road with no bike lane could hold up miles of traffic. And impatient drivers trying to get around the cyclist WITHOUT crossing the center marker run a serious risk of striking the cyclist.
It's amazing how few drivers and cyclists actually understand the laws of the road.
I don't mean "duh" to the researcher -- obviously things must be tested and validated in the real world, not just postulated -- but it never made sense to me in the first place that brain cells can't regenerate. Why the hell not? What is the adaptive purpose of such a limitation? The brain consumes a huge amount of energy, much more so per-pound than any other organ in the body. That seems to imply that the brain is extremely important to the organism. Why would essentially the most important organ in the body have such a stupid limitation that it can't even recover from MINOR damage? That makes no sense.
One possible explanation for the very limited growth rate of brain cells is that if this growth rate were not tightly controlled, it could lead to "chaotic" brain tissue which could interfere with normal brain function. So general division of brain cells would not be desirable -- but I'm no neuroscientist.
The human behaviour they should put into those models arent panic or riots, but what humans do when know what those models predict. Thats the biggest problem about predicting what people will do, what if that people know that prediction?
If predicting a panic could cause a panic to not occur, I think I'll take that. Under what circumstances would panic be desirable?
If you don't want things to look executable, mount it with the noexec option (which you could put in fstab). That way nothing on the device, even with FAT, will appear executable.
noexec is not a security feature. Anybody with read access to the file can copy it to some other file system, set the execute bit, and execute it anyway. The only benefit of noexec is preventing yourself from accidentally executing something from untrusted media. If you're determined to do it, you can still do it.
Microsoft has been a drag on innovation for more than two decades. Its best, and seemingly only, plays continue to be copies of new technology.
If failing to innovate is a successful business strategy (and Microsoft sure seems to have proved that it is), why would you expect any company to do any different? The question isn't why Microsoft does not innovate, the question is why innovation is clearly not profitable.
If you do test positive for swine flu then proper public health measures can be taken.
Right, public health measures such as staying home and not spreading the shit around to everyone -- a measure that you SOUNDLY DEFEATED by leaving your house and walking into a medical center full of people in order to be "tested positive."
The most appropriate public health measure is to not expose other people. The most appropriate personal health measure is the same as it's always been for flu -- bed rest, hydration, and NSAID drugs in case of high fever. If you think you may have flu, please stay in your fucking home and don't give it to me, okay?
why isn't microsoft doing everything possible to destroy linux? Is this a "saved apple" moment all over again??
You seem to be making a strange equation between "maximizing profits" and "destroying Linux." The goal of most corporations, Microsoft included, is to make money. Utterly destroying a competitor which, although vocal, represents only a single-digit threat to their market share, seems like a rather irrational expenditure of resources.
You have an awfully pessimistic world view if you equate the maximization of your own success with the downfall of all others.