Um, haven't most cars had this for a long time already?
Depends on whether or not you're the type of person that justifies spending $35K+ on a new automobile. I sure as hell don't. As long as it goes from point A to point B with decent gas mileage and doesn't shove a metal rod up my ass, it's fine by me. I don't need to waste another $20K-$30K for bells and whistles like extra drink holders and climate control zones. My 2009 Hyndai Accent cost me $12K brand-fucking-new and has nothing more than a check engine light. I can buy an after market engine error code reader for $100 and small seven-segment displays are dirt-fucking-cheap anymore. Only including error code readouts in models that cost $8K+ more than ones without is just fucking greedy. I mean hell, they could add it as an option on all models of car, and charge $500 extra for it. It would still be overpriced but I'd buy it. When are they going to start designing cars like computers so I can get only the features I want and none of the ones I don't, rather than what the industry thinks I want?
What I would think would happen is we would create a new sub-catagory of viruses. Exo-Virii or some such, if you will. On the face of it, it doesn't seem like such a complex matter for a virus to survive prolonged periods without a host. They are scraps of RNA encased in a protein shell. It doesn't seem that preposterous to imagine a protein shell that can last and protect the RNA payload for a long period of time. Luckily for us, viruses are not alive in the conventional sense, and thus do not evolve under environmental stresses. They are forced to mutate through copy-errors in order to propagate into new variants. So the likelihood of getting an Exo-Virus of any kind is statistically low.
What I would like to see the scientists do next, once they have this cancer thing nailed down, is use the tech to reprogram HIV so it attacks other HIV viruses. I'm not sure if that would work mechanically (as in, if the HIV would be capable of breaking the shell on another virus) but if so it would be revolutionary. Imagine everyone on the planet immune to HIV thanks to these little wonders of engineering. What would be even better is if they could expand it to attack all forms of viruses. Bye-bye common cold. Bye-bye influenza. It would be a truly great win for humanity.
That's just it. When the PC is idle its power consumption drops right off. Configured half decently the units even sleep/hibernate and the cost of being "almost on" is almost zero. Even the family home servers use a fraction of the power while idling at night. The average family powering a PC for facebook consumes almost no juice. A couple hours of light load a few times a day is NOTHING compared to a slammed at 100% CPU 24x7 for a year.
Then here is what needs to happen. These @Home projects need to add power management options to their software. My home computer's CPU gets scaled down to 25% (about 800Mhz) while idle, or doing while non-intensive stuff like basic web-browsing. Certainly there is some extra space in there that could be filled with @Home calculations without causing the CPU to ramp back up to full power. As long as the APIs are public (which I can't see any reason why they wouldn't be) then it should be trivial to have the @Home software poll the OS to find out what power save state it is currently in. Once you tell the software which power save threshold you want to refrain from breaking, it should be able to learn just how much it can squeeze out of your computer without breaking the rule you set.
Now, I've never used one of the @Home projects, but if this isn't already a feature it very well should be. Not allowing the user to choose to what degree they are willing to help just feels... I dunno, greedy to me...
It does occur to me though, that alternatively, you could use 3rd party software to manage your OS power options. So let's say you want @Home to run full blast while you're in bed, but don't want your computer running full blast too. Have the 3rd party software schedule your computer to be locked at 25% from midnight to 8AM and then @Home won't even have access to more processing power than you want it to have. So I guess there are existing solutions to the greedy @Home problem, they just require moderate out of the box thinking.
My first read of the headline made me think they came up with a way to make the average consumer into The Incredible Hulk. Then I realized it said Gamification and not Gammafication.
I can see no end of complaints coming from consumers if your rental period started in sync with the start of the download. Most likely (read: HOPEFULLY) they will have a button labeled 'unlock' or 'activate' or even a login screen in game that activates the game for play and kicks off the timer simultaneously. Any other implementation just strikes me as dumb.
Correct. Super and Hypersonic techs tend not to scale down to slower speeds at all. This is why you still need conventional tubines on supersonic jets equipped with ram and scramjet engines. They just don't operate at those lower speeds, and if you designed them to, they'd be much less functional at the high speeds (if they even happened to work at all.) It makes much more sense to use multiple engines operating within various ranges than have one engine that does it all.
So I guess you could ask why commercial airliners aren't equipped with ram and scramjet engines. I couldn't tell you for sure, but the most likely answer is that the public isn't well suited to supersonic flight. Grandma's holey 80 year old bones would snap like a twig.
Hardly. How the hell do you think the air-breathing jet got there in the first place? And all of the stuff the air breathing jet is going to launch? Yeah, that's right, it all went up on that same rocket. So your initial load up there costs exactly the same as it does now, plus whatever it costs to launch it from the jet. Now suppose you leave the thing up there to serve to fire off more payload into orbit. How do you resupply the thing? That's right, with the same rocket you used to put the jet up there in the first place. If used solely as a launching platform to make it "easier" to get items into orbit, it should actually end up costing more.
The advantage is not and likely never will be cost. The savings is time. As a friendly little goblin once told me: "Time is money friend!" You get to save one or the other, never both.
Projection of power is about what can be seen - not knowing something merely exists.
That 'God' fellow must be one bad-ass mofo then. Millions of Christians are convinced he exists even though they've never seen him, and still follow his word.
Though in commonplace I agree with with you completely. You have to show your power in order to make people fear/respect/acknowledge it.
In the Penn experiment, the researchers removed certain types of white blood cells that the body uses to fight disease from the patients. Using a modified, harmless version of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, they inserted a series of genes into the white blood cells. These were designed to make to cells target and kill the cancer cells. After growing a large batch of the genetically engineered white blood cells, the doctors injected them back into the patients.
They aren't injecting people with HIV. They are genetically engineering human white blood cells using the specific genes from HIV that cause it to only target specific types of cells. They use the genes to teach the specialized white blood cells to attack and kill cancer cells only. Then those white blood cells are injected into the patient that then go and kill the cancer. At no point is a whole, functioning version of HIV ever anywhere outside of a laboratory, let alone near the patient being treated. The risk of some form of 'regressive mutation' that you are suggesting, is all but impossible. Only in some bizarre fringe case where the sample HIV was actually alive and reproducing inside the laboratory without a human host, then sure, it might happen. But even then the HIV would be constrained to the lab and no threat to anyone (assuming the lab techs know what the hell they're doing.) Trust me, if HIV somehow starts magically reproducing without a host organism to support it, we have far greater concerns on our hands than cancer.
Nah, too much collateral damage. Just put em on a rocket with the guidance system locked on the Sun. Same end result, only nice and slow and torturous like they deserve.
'The analytical techniques probed the mass and other features of the molecules to identify the presence of extraterrestrial nucleobases. What they found was that they apparently did not come from the surrounding area.'
I'm not super at English and that took me all of three seconds to figure out. Lazy author is Lazy perhaps?
A lot of this was my first thought when I read this. Math is surprisingly magical when it comes to predicting the outcome of a basic two operand operation. Given that a small amount of tinkering could provide you with the encrypted representations of known values it becomes trivial to slowly expand your dictionary and eventually reverse engineer that dictionary to discover the key for the entire data set.
Sounds to me like Microsoft has a long way to go before this is even close to being ready for the wild. Hell, the basic concept alone sounds broken from square one.
You can't make new freqs fall from the sky you know.
Well, you kind of can. They just need to do what they did with HD radio. Improve transmission and reception technology such that you can utilize more and more precise frequencies. That's not to say that you could necessarily avoid using the frequency that is killing bees, but if you could squeeze more channels into a safer frequency range, I don't see anything stopping us from doing so in the future.
But that aside, yes, new frequencies just don't make themselves available. You have to develop technology so you can better utilize the ones that are already there.
It would set a precedent for sure if it happened, and if they "allowed" it to happen they would most likely just follow assassination protocol. With no Pres or VP we'd end up with the speaker of the house in office as the president. Probably wouldn't make much of a difference, but it would make for one HELL of a political statement.
You're conflating "terrorists" and "Muslims". Nice. So all that a terrorist would have to do to get through your profile would be to claim to be Christian.
It's not to say that all Muslims are terrorists, but haven't all of the terrorists we've caught or looked into after committing acts of terrorism turned out to be following some form of the Muslim religion? It was my understanding that they only commit terrorist acts because they're being offered 72 virgins in heaven in exchange for their committment to the jihad. I should think that any group willing to commit acts of terrorism in the name of their god probably doesn't look too lightly upon claiming to follow another religion even if it is only a means to an end. Claiming to follow Christianity for any reason would be sacrilege and likely qualify for forfeiture of said 72 virgins.
That's not to say that they couldn't change the rules to make it permissible; they wouldn't be the first religion to change the rules in the middle of the game. But with a group like this, with their heads this stuck in the sand with regard to the modern world and they way it's changing, do you honestly think they'd do that?
If a kid was going to detonate a bomb, do you think it'd look like a bomb? When people hijack airplanes do they travel on board with "I'm a hijacker" t-shirts?
I heard they hand out something like that in Islam heaven.
"I brought down a plane in Allah's name and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."
Slashdot Mirror
Um, haven't most cars had this for a long time already?
Depends on whether or not you're the type of person that justifies spending $35K+ on a new automobile. I sure as hell don't. As long as it goes from point A to point B with decent gas mileage and doesn't shove a metal rod up my ass, it's fine by me. I don't need to waste another $20K-$30K for bells and whistles like extra drink holders and climate control zones. My 2009 Hyndai Accent cost me $12K brand-fucking-new and has nothing more than a check engine light. I can buy an after market engine error code reader for $100 and small seven-segment displays are dirt-fucking-cheap anymore. Only including error code readouts in models that cost $8K+ more than ones without is just fucking greedy. I mean hell, they could add it as an option on all models of car, and charge $500 extra for it. It would still be overpriced but I'd buy it. When are they going to start designing cars like computers so I can get only the features I want and none of the ones I don't, rather than what the industry thinks I want?
Funny, but Arnie is Austrian.
What I would think would happen is we would create a new sub-catagory of viruses. Exo-Virii or some such, if you will. On the face of it, it doesn't seem like such a complex matter for a virus to survive prolonged periods without a host. They are scraps of RNA encased in a protein shell. It doesn't seem that preposterous to imagine a protein shell that can last and protect the RNA payload for a long period of time. Luckily for us, viruses are not alive in the conventional sense, and thus do not evolve under environmental stresses. They are forced to mutate through copy-errors in order to propagate into new variants. So the likelihood of getting an Exo-Virus of any kind is statistically low.
What I would like to see the scientists do next, once they have this cancer thing nailed down, is use the tech to reprogram HIV so it attacks other HIV viruses. I'm not sure if that would work mechanically (as in, if the HIV would be capable of breaking the shell on another virus) but if so it would be revolutionary. Imagine everyone on the planet immune to HIV thanks to these little wonders of engineering. What would be even better is if they could expand it to attack all forms of viruses. Bye-bye common cold. Bye-bye influenza. It would be a truly great win for humanity.
That's just it. When the PC is idle its power consumption drops right off. Configured half decently the units even sleep/hibernate and the cost of being "almost on" is almost zero. Even the family home servers use a fraction of the power while idling at night. The average family powering a PC for facebook consumes almost no juice. A couple hours of light load a few times a day is NOTHING compared to a slammed at 100% CPU 24x7 for a year.
Then here is what needs to happen. These @Home projects need to add power management options to their software. My home computer's CPU gets scaled down to 25% (about 800Mhz) while idle, or doing while non-intensive stuff like basic web-browsing. Certainly there is some extra space in there that could be filled with @Home calculations without causing the CPU to ramp back up to full power. As long as the APIs are public (which I can't see any reason why they wouldn't be) then it should be trivial to have the @Home software poll the OS to find out what power save state it is currently in. Once you tell the software which power save threshold you want to refrain from breaking, it should be able to learn just how much it can squeeze out of your computer without breaking the rule you set.
Now, I've never used one of the @Home projects, but if this isn't already a feature it very well should be. Not allowing the user to choose to what degree they are willing to help just feels... I dunno, greedy to me...
It does occur to me though, that alternatively, you could use 3rd party software to manage your OS power options. So let's say you want @Home to run full blast while you're in bed, but don't want your computer running full blast too. Have the 3rd party software schedule your computer to be locked at 25% from midnight to 8AM and then @Home won't even have access to more processing power than you want it to have. So I guess there are existing solutions to the greedy @Home problem, they just require moderate out of the box thinking.
Shit. I totally would have bought one to play games on.
My first read of the headline made me think they came up with a way to make the average consumer into The Incredible Hulk. Then I realized it said Gamification and not Gammafication.
:-(
My day is now thoroughly ruined.
I can see no end of complaints coming from consumers if your rental period started in sync with the start of the download. Most likely (read: HOPEFULLY) they will have a button labeled 'unlock' or 'activate' or even a login screen in game that activates the game for play and kicks off the timer simultaneously. Any other implementation just strikes me as dumb.
Correct. Super and Hypersonic techs tend not to scale down to slower speeds at all. This is why you still need conventional tubines on supersonic jets equipped with ram and scramjet engines. They just don't operate at those lower speeds, and if you designed them to, they'd be much less functional at the high speeds (if they even happened to work at all.) It makes much more sense to use multiple engines operating within various ranges than have one engine that does it all.
So I guess you could ask why commercial airliners aren't equipped with ram and scramjet engines. I couldn't tell you for sure, but the most likely answer is that the public isn't well suited to supersonic flight. Grandma's holey 80 year old bones would snap like a twig.
Hardly. How the hell do you think the air-breathing jet got there in the first place? And all of the stuff the air breathing jet is going to launch? Yeah, that's right, it all went up on that same rocket. So your initial load up there costs exactly the same as it does now, plus whatever it costs to launch it from the jet. Now suppose you leave the thing up there to serve to fire off more payload into orbit. How do you resupply the thing? That's right, with the same rocket you used to put the jet up there in the first place. If used solely as a launching platform to make it "easier" to get items into orbit, it should actually end up costing more.
The advantage is not and likely never will be cost. The savings is time. As a friendly little goblin once told me: "Time is money friend!" You get to save one or the other, never both.
Projection of power is about what can be seen - not knowing something merely exists.
That 'God' fellow must be one bad-ass mofo then. Millions of Christians are convinced he exists even though they've never seen him, and still follow his word.
Though in commonplace I agree with with you completely. You have to show your power in order to make people fear/respect/acknowledge it.
They aren't injecting people with HIV. They are genetically engineering human white blood cells using the specific genes from HIV that cause it to only target specific types of cells. They use the genes to teach the specialized white blood cells to attack and kill cancer cells only. Then those white blood cells are injected into the patient that then go and kill the cancer. At no point is a whole, functioning version of HIV ever anywhere outside of a laboratory, let alone near the patient being treated. The risk of some form of 'regressive mutation' that you are suggesting, is all but impossible. Only in some bizarre fringe case where the sample HIV was actually alive and reproducing inside the laboratory without a human host, then sure, it might happen. But even then the HIV would be constrained to the lab and no threat to anyone (assuming the lab techs know what the hell they're doing.) Trust me, if HIV somehow starts magically reproducing without a host organism to support it, we have far greater concerns on our hands than cancer.
It's also available online, but it uses Silverlight.
Nah, too much collateral damage. Just put em on a rocket with the guidance system locked on the Sun. Same end result, only nice and slow and torturous like they deserve.
Poor parent got modded offtopic for making an obtuse joke about the poor grammar and typos in the second sentence of the summary. Bad mod! :-(
The author should have just split the sentence.
'The analytical techniques probed the mass and other features of the molecules to identify the presence of extraterrestrial nucleobases. What they found was that they apparently did not come from the surrounding area.'
I'm not super at English and that took me all of three seconds to figure out. Lazy author is Lazy perhaps?
A lot of this was my first thought when I read this. Math is surprisingly magical when it comes to predicting the outcome of a basic two operand operation. Given that a small amount of tinkering could provide you with the encrypted representations of known values it becomes trivial to slowly expand your dictionary and eventually reverse engineer that dictionary to discover the key for the entire data set.
Sounds to me like Microsoft has a long way to go before this is even close to being ready for the wild. Hell, the basic concept alone sounds broken from square one.
You can't make new freqs fall from the sky you know.
Well, you kind of can. They just need to do what they did with HD radio. Improve transmission and reception technology such that you can utilize more and more precise frequencies. That's not to say that you could necessarily avoid using the frequency that is killing bees, but if you could squeeze more channels into a safer frequency range, I don't see anything stopping us from doing so in the future.
But that aside, yes, new frequencies just don't make themselves available. You have to develop technology so you can better utilize the ones that are already there.
How appropriate. Then they could just defend the killer at their trial and get their money back!
It would set a precedent for sure if it happened, and if they "allowed" it to happen they would most likely just follow assassination protocol. With no Pres or VP we'd end up with the speaker of the house in office as the president. Probably wouldn't make much of a difference, but it would make for one HELL of a political statement.
Right, my bad for misreading then. My rant still stands, personal attack aside. No hard feelings mate.
My apologies for the misplaced personal attack then. Just strike the first sentence of my previous post. :-)
You're conflating "terrorists" and "Muslims". Nice. So all that a terrorist would have to do to get through your profile would be to claim to be Christian.
It's not to say that all Muslims are terrorists, but haven't all of the terrorists we've caught or looked into after committing acts of terrorism turned out to be following some form of the Muslim religion? It was my understanding that they only commit terrorist acts because they're being offered 72 virgins in heaven in exchange for their committment to the jihad. I should think that any group willing to commit acts of terrorism in the name of their god probably doesn't look too lightly upon claiming to follow another religion even if it is only a means to an end. Claiming to follow Christianity for any reason would be sacrilege and likely qualify for forfeiture of said 72 virgins.
That's not to say that they couldn't change the rules to make it permissible; they wouldn't be the first religion to change the rules in the middle of the game. But with a group like this, with their heads this stuck in the sand with regard to the modern world and they way it's changing, do you honestly think they'd do that?
Makes me wonder if we could convince enough people to write in "No-one" if they would allow us to refuse to elect a president one of these times...
If a kid was going to detonate a bomb, do you think it'd look like a bomb? When people hijack airplanes do they travel on board with "I'm a hijacker" t-shirts?
I heard they hand out something like that in Islam heaven.
"I brought down a plane in Allah's name and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."
That's how I dispose of all my old fireworks; I smash them with a deadblow hammer.
What do you mean this thing has shot in it?
Yami