“The immune system produces these CD8 T cells in response to the usual seasonal flu,” Lalvani said. “Unlike antibodies, they target the core of the virus, which doesn’t change, even in new pandemic strains.”
This simple argument does not entirely convince me that they found a universal vaccine. Proving that it is universal should require extensive experiments on many different strains. Can any experts pitch in why they really did find the key to a universal flu vaccine?
Is there a discussion website with a higher signal-to-noise ratio in the comments? Even if the story is total crap, it is not hard to find brilliant comments right here on Slashdot. I don't think we have any reason to complain, as better just does not seem to be possible. (And here I am nominally disagreeing with a comment which explicitly bashes boring comments that do the same... bah)
Hmm.. Maybe I'm one of those cognitive dissonance people. I've always felt uneasy about Apple products. They have a history of rent seeking, and are not even hiding it: super-expensive addons, non user serviceable batteries, no removable storage on their phones, proprietary connectors, total vendor lock-in in both hardware and software, significant barriers to entry for software on their devices. I have been actively avoiding Apple products. Even if there were no alternative, I would prefer to go without. Looking around at meetings (at a University) feels a little creepy. People use almost exclusively Apple products: iPhones, iPads, Macs. Some of my family members are also heavy Apple product users. I just do not understand this phenomenon, and probably never will. I do not think the alternatives are better than Apple's stuff in any significant technical way, but they are not nearly as oppressive.
At this point, any semiconductor is fair game if it helps decrease feature size and power consumption (the main factor limiting performance nowadays). The substrate is likely to remain Si because of its low cost, large wafer sizes and low defect density.
But what does advanced semiconductor technology have to do with enthusiasts? I have not the slightest clue.
What I am more worried about is who the politicians are representing? I doubt it is in the general public's best interest to run an extensive, secret internal spying program. Trust in the government is more beneficial than catching a small number of criminals using this method. The secrecy of it facilitates selective enforcement, potentially giving certain people far more power than they should have. Are we seeing the tip of the iceberg of the real power struggle behind the scenes? Could it be that some powerful entities are deliberately sabotaging trust in the US government? Could this be a media circus distracting us from an even larger power grab?
Are you actually arguing that being homeless is a sensible choice for a person? That this person does not need some sort of help, be it financial or medical (mental health)? I'm sorry, people are not adapted to living outdoors, and they are living on someone's private or public property when homeless anyway. I just do not see any rational argument for letting people remain homeless. The harm to society far outweighs the advantages in my opinion.
I'm wondering who benefits the most from the existence of these secret courts, secret surveillance programs and never-ending war on terror. Is the answer really as simple as "certain well-connected corporations?" I'm curious to know more details about the structure of the real government of the US (not the puppets in office).
Actual religious belief is most certainly a delusion in the usual sense of the word, as a "belief for no good reason." However, there is definitely a lot of motivation for religious belief. For most people, social pressures win over rational arguments. In the more conservative societies, your life would be absolutely miserable is you do not adhere to the dominant religion. I'm not sure how many religious people actually believe, and how many practice religion because it is expected of them. It's pretty bad in the US too. For example, atheists are underrepresented in the government (are they represented at all?). This situation is far far worse than that for ethnic minorities.
I'm sure a custom DC-DC converter can be designed with good efficiency in the full 0-100% load range. The issue might be that the 12V battery is not charged from the main battery at all times, but still operates the 12V circuits.
And then I read http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Galactic_magnetic_fields and sure enough in the Milky Way "outside the central region, the large-scale [magnetic] field is mostly parallel to the plane of the Galactic disk." The central region is the exception, yet it still shows nebula alignment.. something still doesn't mesh.
Can you elaborate? I'm not even sure how galactic magnetic fields could align the star's rotational axes parallel to the galactic plane. Intuitively I would expect alignment perpendicular to the galactic plane, such that the galactic and stellar magnetic fields align. Perhaps the ancient galactic magnetic field was for some reason perpendicular to the rotation of the galaxy itself... it seems unlikely.. especially unlikely to last for a long time..
As a Russian speaker, I can clarify a little: The bulletin warns against traveling to countries with an extradition treaty with the USA, if you have a reasonable suspicion that the US authorities have some sort of issue with you. The existence of a warrant may be unknown.
You're right about the current state of things. Traditional CPUs are not going away. Some code is branch-heavy, but does SIMD really help there? Some compromises are being made in quality in GPU implementations, probably because NVIDIA severely limits the double-precision performance of their consumer GPUs. I'm just thinking that Intel's efforts might be better spent in improving GPU technology, rather than adding even more SIMD instructions to x86. The SIMD path seems to be a dead end, when compared to GPUs.
On another note, Intel has got to get away from DDR3.. ugghh. Memory technology has made such strides (GDDR5), but Intel seems to ignore them. The best approach will probably be to combine a beefy GPU with several x86 cores on the same die, with massive memory bandwidth (push the limit) and no PCIe bottleneck between them.
I'm wondering if all this SIMD is even worth it. It is far too difficult to program. For the average programmer, going the GPU (CUDA) route offers far more bang for their effort. These SIMD instructions will find very limited use, maybe in some video codecs. The same codecs probably run an order of magnitude faster on a GPU anyway, even on the Intel built-in one.
I would tend to agree that single-threaded performance has pretty much reached a practical limit. Calling SIMD single-threaded is a stretch, as it does not easily conform to the single-threaded programming model. Now we have a daunting task of figuring out which explicitly parallel architecture to concentrate on: Traditional multithreading vs. SIMD vs. GPU (SIMT) or a combination, or something else entirely. So far the GPU way seems to be winning for most tasks.
What if the laws that regulate pollution within a country also included requirements for import tariffs? The imported goods/commodities must have documentation on their production method. If the methods are polluting, and the pollution can affect the country of destination (e.g. emissions into the atmosphere or water), a calculated tariff is mandated. This might be a bit complex, but maybe better than doing nothing at all and letting developing nations pollute uncontrollably?
Serious question: What would it take to convince potential funding sources that this is even worth prototyping? Since this is being advertised as an open-source project, I think people need to work together to evolve the proposal to the point that funding for a prototype can be obtained. Who could be targeted as a potential source of funding?
Slashdot Mirror
“The immune system produces these CD8 T cells in response to the usual seasonal flu,” Lalvani said. “Unlike antibodies, they target the core of the virus, which doesn’t change, even in new pandemic strains.”
This simple argument does not entirely convince me that they found a universal vaccine. Proving that it is universal should require extensive experiments on many different strains. Can any experts pitch in why they really did find the key to a universal flu vaccine?
Is there a discussion website with a higher signal-to-noise ratio in the comments? Even if the story is total crap, it is not hard to find brilliant comments right here on Slashdot. I don't think we have any reason to complain, as better just does not seem to be possible. (And here I am nominally disagreeing with a comment which explicitly bashes boring comments that do the same... bah)
Hmm.. Maybe I'm one of those cognitive dissonance people. I've always felt uneasy about Apple products. They have a history of rent seeking, and are not even hiding it: super-expensive addons, non user serviceable batteries, no removable storage on their phones, proprietary connectors, total vendor lock-in in both hardware and software, significant barriers to entry for software on their devices. I have been actively avoiding Apple products. Even if there were no alternative, I would prefer to go without. Looking around at meetings (at a University) feels a little creepy. People use almost exclusively Apple products: iPhones, iPads, Macs. Some of my family members are also heavy Apple product users. I just do not understand this phenomenon, and probably never will. I do not think the alternatives are better than Apple's stuff in any significant technical way, but they are not nearly as oppressive.
At this point, any semiconductor is fair game if it helps decrease feature size and power consumption (the main factor limiting performance nowadays). The substrate is likely to remain Si because of its low cost, large wafer sizes and low defect density.
But what does advanced semiconductor technology have to do with enthusiasts? I have not the slightest clue.
the ones responsible: the politicians.
What I am more worried about is who the politicians are representing? I doubt it is in the general public's best interest to run an extensive, secret internal spying program. Trust in the government is more beneficial than catching a small number of criminals using this method. The secrecy of it facilitates selective enforcement, potentially giving certain people far more power than they should have. Are we seeing the tip of the iceberg of the real power struggle behind the scenes? Could it be that some powerful entities are deliberately sabotaging trust in the US government? Could this be a media circus distracting us from an even larger power grab?
Are you actually arguing that being homeless is a sensible choice for a person? That this person does not need some sort of help, be it financial or medical (mental health)? I'm sorry, people are not adapted to living outdoors, and they are living on someone's private or public property when homeless anyway. I just do not see any rational argument for letting people remain homeless. The harm to society far outweighs the advantages in my opinion.
I'm wondering who benefits the most from the existence of these secret courts, secret surveillance programs and never-ending war on terror. Is the answer really as simple as "certain well-connected corporations?" I'm curious to know more details about the structure of the real government of the US (not the puppets in office).
Actual religious belief is most certainly a delusion in the usual sense of the word, as a "belief for no good reason." However, there is definitely a lot of motivation for religious belief. For most people, social pressures win over rational arguments. In the more conservative societies, your life would be absolutely miserable is you do not adhere to the dominant religion. I'm not sure how many religious people actually believe, and how many practice religion because it is expected of them. It's pretty bad in the US too. For example, atheists are underrepresented in the government (are they represented at all?). This situation is far far worse than that for ethnic minorities.
I'm sure a custom DC-DC converter can be designed with good efficiency in the full 0-100% load range. The issue might be that the 12V battery is not charged from the main battery at all times, but still operates the 12V circuits.
And then I read http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Galactic_magnetic_fields and sure enough in the Milky Way "outside the central region, the large-scale [magnetic] field is mostly parallel to the plane of the Galactic disk." The central region is the exception, yet it still shows nebula alignment.. something still doesn't mesh.
Can you elaborate? I'm not even sure how galactic magnetic fields could align the star's rotational axes parallel to the galactic plane. Intuitively I would expect alignment perpendicular to the galactic plane, such that the galactic and stellar magnetic fields align. Perhaps the ancient galactic magnetic field was for some reason perpendicular to the rotation of the galaxy itself... it seems unlikely.. especially unlikely to last for a long time..
As a Russian speaker, I can clarify a little: The bulletin warns against traveling to countries with an extradition treaty with the USA, if you have a reasonable suspicion that the US authorities have some sort of issue with you. The existence of a warrant may be unknown.
You're right about the current state of things. Traditional CPUs are not going away. Some code is branch-heavy, but does SIMD really help there? Some compromises are being made in quality in GPU implementations, probably because NVIDIA severely limits the double-precision performance of their consumer GPUs. I'm just thinking that Intel's efforts might be better spent in improving GPU technology, rather than adding even more SIMD instructions to x86. The SIMD path seems to be a dead end, when compared to GPUs.
On another note, Intel has got to get away from DDR3.. ugghh. Memory technology has made such strides (GDDR5), but Intel seems to ignore them. The best approach will probably be to combine a beefy GPU with several x86 cores on the same die, with massive memory bandwidth (push the limit) and no PCIe bottleneck between them.
I'm wondering if all this SIMD is even worth it. It is far too difficult to program. For the average programmer, going the GPU (CUDA) route offers far more bang for their effort. These SIMD instructions will find very limited use, maybe in some video codecs. The same codecs probably run an order of magnitude faster on a GPU anyway, even on the Intel built-in one.
I would tend to agree that single-threaded performance has pretty much reached a practical limit. Calling SIMD single-threaded is a stretch, as it does not easily conform to the single-threaded programming model. Now we have a daunting task of figuring out which explicitly parallel architecture to concentrate on: Traditional multithreading vs. SIMD vs. GPU (SIMT) or a combination, or something else entirely. So far the GPU way seems to be winning for most tasks.
What if the laws that regulate pollution within a country also included requirements for import tariffs? The imported goods/commodities must have documentation on their production method. If the methods are polluting, and the pollution can affect the country of destination (e.g. emissions into the atmosphere or water), a calculated tariff is mandated. This might be a bit complex, but maybe better than doing nothing at all and letting developing nations pollute uncontrollably?
Aren't health care costs a closer comparison? Both cases of vulnerable people being taken advantage of on a large scale.
Serious question: What would it take to convince potential funding sources that this is even worth prototyping? Since this is being advertised as an open-source project, I think people need to work together to evolve the proposal to the point that funding for a prototype can be obtained. Who could be targeted as a potential source of funding?