Please tell us more about how samples indicating a dominance of meat and flesh are indicative of an "omnivorous diet"
OK, sure, from the fine article, which apparently you didn't read:
The tests revealed that the poop "clearly" contained high proportions of cholesterol and coprostanol from eating meat, but it also included significant plant sterols that "unambiguously record the ingestion of plants," the researchers report today in PLOS ONE.
Sistiaga says this is the first "direct" evidence that the Neandertals actually ingested plants, because the biomarkers were in their fecesâ"and not just on their teeth.
Ergo, omnivorous diet.
From the second article, in the conclusions section:
Taken together, these data suggest that the Neanderthals from El Salt consumed both meat and vegetables, in agreement with recent hypotheses based on indirect evidence.
So, the paper is saying that, it would appear that they ate vegetables.
Looks like Slashdot will mod anyone up these days
Post something intelligent under your own account, and you too can be modded up.
Well, I guess it depends on how we define 'cooked'.
Spiders and flies do that thing with the enzymes. Crocodilians sometimes age their meat before eating it. Leafcutter ants promote growth of fungus on the plants. Honey involves a couple of steps where you change it from one form to another.
Are any of these what we'd call cooking? Probably not. Does it imply that a very long time ago other critters figured out that sometimes you need to take steps to make something edible? Absolutely.
If we define 'cooked' as involving heat or flame... well, I don't think any other animal has been observed making direct use of fire. At least, not that I've ever heard of.
If we define 'cooked' as 'somehow transformed to make edible', well, then maybe.
Which means his theoretical model of how you go about this is rife with assumptions about perfectly spherical ducks.:-P
What kind of volume of material are you talking about for this wall? How would you get it there? Do we have any other 1000 foot walls do draw upon as reference?
My first though upon reading the headline was "right, sure it will".
The sheer number of side effects, and the sheer scale of the undertaking means by the time you find out if it's feasible, or even a good idea... you're probably already screwed.
So many of these things just sound to me like some loon has come up with an unworkable idea, which they then pitch as being a viable solution, despite having no evidence for that and no idea of what would really happen.
I predict this will never happen, could probably never be built, wouldn't work as advertised, and is therefore pretty meaningless. It's a Big Idea, with little practical value.
The whole simplistic notion of a single score to describe a mental ability that is as broad as "intelligence" is lacking in scientific rigour.
I am always reminded of the very brilliant Far Side cartoon when this topic comes up... Midvale School for the Gifted, and the kid is pushing on the door labelled pull.
Because, really, very smart people can do very stupid things just like everybody else. Sure, you might be really clever at some things, but you may well be a complete moron at others.
You mean, like a dating service? Seems to me the smartest thing to do is to use the best tool for the job.
Well, it basically means you've met all of the people in your local Mensa meetings, found them to be insufferable asses or complete dorks.
Now, you're going to broaden your search for people not in your local chapter, and find them to be insufferable asses or complete dorks.
Because, the handful of people I've met who admit to being members of Mensa have 'defective' written all over them. The smugness factor often puts them at risk of getting a well deserved smack.
Obligatory Simpsons reference:
Lisa: My family never talks about library standards. And every time I try to steer the conversation that way, they make me feel like a nerd. Comic Book Guy: We are hardly nerds. Would a nerd wear such an irreverent sweatshirt? [open his jacket to show off his shirt] Lisa: [reading the shirt] "C:/DOS C:/DOS/RUN RUN/DOS/RUN". [laughs] Lisa: Oh, only one person in a million would find that funny. Professor Frink: Yes, we call that the "Dennis Miller Ratio."
:-P
Applying for Mensa seems to disqualify you from normal human interaction for the rest of your life.
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention, but they can conduct a border search up to 100 miles from the border, with no probable cause or justification (or a warrant).
Government keeps making exceptions and saying "well, that doesn't apply here".
In this specific case, you can completely ignore the intent of the 4th amendment by saying "border search".
And, since about two thirds of US citizens are in this zone, most Americans can be searched in a way which would otherwise be illegal, but defended under a horseshit exemption.
This is what is referred to as the area which is now magically exempt from the Constitution. Because we can search anybody, for any reason, and bypass your Constitutional protections.
I had an experience which was somewhat opposite (though, in a lot of ways pretty much the same).
At one point, the company went with a big giant universal build system.
Every piece of software, every module, every final build... was recompiled from scratch on a nightly basis. It took a massive server farm many hours to do this. Even if no changes had been made.
What would happen would be someone would break a component. The build of that component, and every downstream dependency broke. The system had no concept of "this is a beta build, not for everybody" and "this is a release, and stable".
The result was that sometimes you'd have literally dozens of things which were now suddenly broken. It was too stupid of a build system to use the last known good.
So, all of a sudden you get one trivial change in some module about 4 steps removed from your stuff. But, it was all broken, and your stuff couldn't be properly built until someone fixed their stuff, and the build system went through at least one more cycle, often two.
Sometimes, companies get themselves into such a borked state with their build system (or lack thereof) that it makes doing any work impossible.
Some of us started keeping our own local copies, and writing local build scripts, because we couldn't rely on the company wide one to actually work much of the time.
Hopefully, everybody. Make the information public. Livestream it to the interwebs. Have citizen groups review it. Make review of the content mandatory if there is any dispute. If the police 'accidentally' turned them off or made sure they could't see anything.. throw out the case.
Do anything which opens the process and prevents abuse.
The cops will complain about their privacy and their rights, but using that to ignore ours is not what I'd call a good excuse.
Trusting them blindly clearly isn't working. So you structure the system so it says, "we don't actually trust you, and we don't trust the people who are supposed to be overseeing you".
By the people, for the people. Not whatever the hell we decide we want to do.
How many times have police officers need to be told they have no legal right to confiscate your phone, or force you to delete pictures from it? They obviously don't know or care what the law says. So, we obviously can't trust them.
Or, they'll go with their new favorite toy... illegally search your phone, and then go through the bullshit of parallel construction.
And then it would be "we got an anonymous tip, and confirmed it when we checked his cell phone", which will be used to cover up "we illegally searched his phone, and then called in our own tip".
And none of them will be charged with perjury or obstruction of justice.
Until we start seeing police officers charged and jailed for this crap, they'll keep doing it.
The police have become little better than those in banana republics where you have to assume they're all corrupt, because there's enough of them to make assuming the one you've got now is honest is a bad idea.
Using the patriot act to go after regular criminals is a good example of more police required to police said police.
More police just adds more layers in which they can game the system.
What needs to happen is a permanent recording of all interactions with people so they can't just get together and decide what their story will be.
We need to fix the system so that it has an inherent "we can't just take you at your word" element in it. Because time after time the police have demonstrated they neither know, nor care about, the actual law.
Sure, many of them may be honest. But if we just assume that enough of them aren't, and set up a system which shows what really happened... then maybe we might be better off.
I have lost count of the number of times I've seen stories in which the police collectively say "this is what happened", and when someone's cell phone video comes up they're proven to have been lying. And then their own internal review boards clear them of any wrong doing.
There needs to be more serious penalties for when police flout the law. And there needs to be more capturing of what actually happened, because when they do flout the law, the band together to hide that fact.
Increasingly, I think we need to apply the same thing to government. Because we can't trust them to follow the law either.
Supposing PayPal takes full financial responsibility, why should you care so much?
Because if they were regulated as a bank, they would operate under specific rules.
At present, they operate under "whatever the hell we want to do", and can basically do all sorts of crap a bank wouldn't be able to -- like seizing your money.
I place precisely zero trust in PayPal, and never have. Precisely because their dispute resolution process is non-existent, and made up and enforced entirely by them.
You can feel free to do whatever the heck you like. Me, I won't go anywhere near them.
Wrong. Cable companies were in full support of Aereo.
Horseshit.
From TFA:
Shortly after the service was launched, the nation's major broadcast networks filed a lawsuit claiming that Aereo illegally retransmited their programs without paying for them.
From later in TFA:
But the broadcasters said the test of the copyright law was "whether an alleged infringer is transmitting a performance to the public, not whether multiple people are capable of receiving each transmission."
You're completely wrong. This was the cable companies (most of which are owned by content providers) challenging this.
Now STFU about shit that at even the most trivial and basic level you are completely uniformed about.
I suggest you do the same, RTFA, and then go STFU your own damned self.
You're wrong, apparently you're an idiot, and you obviously feel compelled to act like an ass about it.
You're full of shit, but loudly proclaiming it tastes like mint. But don't accuse me of having an unformed opinion when you're clearly clueless on the subject.
The cable companies were very very opposed to this being legal. They sure as hell weren't in favor of it.
You know, a decent programmable thermostat which you can program with your schedule (mine has "Wake", "Leave", "Return", and "Sleep"), control the fan and the like isn't that expensive or difficult to use.
Mine is also supposed to be adaptive, and learn how much it takes to change the temperature at various times of day. If the next scheduled temperature change is getting close and it's way off, it will start doing things in advance of that.
If you really really need to do it from your smartphone, then I'm sure pretty much all of the products will have privacy issues. Because your data is available to an external entity, and they're all going to want to make money off that information.
To me, a programmable thermostat is a viable alternative, but I have no interest in controlling the temp from my cell phone or providing Google with the information about how I heat my home and when I'm there.
Fine, but then the airlines will open themselves to liability as someone says "unless you can give me a reason why you are denying me service, what you are doing is illegal".
If the no fly list is unconstitutional, how are airlines refusing service with zero evidence and no legal basis going to get away with this?
Unless the airlines have a policy "we can reject your ass for any reason we choose". And I doubt that would hold up in court.
Except, by the time a space agency is going to send you into space, your vitals have been measured 75 different ways, on numerous occasions, over an extended period of time. And then done over and over again.
If an astronaut had a heart attack in space -- every test available to modern medicine which was performed on them missed it as being probable. It costs way too much money to send people into space to miss things like that.
So, if all of that stuff missed it, and you had one, I should think it may well kill you. Because it will come completely out of the blue with no signs of it being possible. (Well, I guess micro gravity itself could be a factor)
I should imagine the vital statistics and internal organs of astronauts are pretty heavily measured and monitored long before you ever end up in space, so they're not going to miss any likely causes.
Slashdot Mirror
I already know the answer to this: room service.
OK, sure, from the fine article, which apparently you didn't read:
Ergo, omnivorous diet.
From the second article, in the conclusions section:
So, the paper is saying that, it would appear that they ate vegetables.
Post something intelligent under your own account, and you too can be modded up.
Otherwise, STFU.
We can call it Big Brother. That's a nice name which implies someone looking out for your welfare, right?
Sorry, citizen, all information once collected can and will be used against you.
In order to maximize corporate profits and governmental control, this information is vital to national interests.
Well, I guess it depends on how we define 'cooked'.
Spiders and flies do that thing with the enzymes. Crocodilians sometimes age their meat before eating it. Leafcutter ants promote growth of fungus on the plants. Honey involves a couple of steps where you change it from one form to another.
Are any of these what we'd call cooking? Probably not. Does it imply that a very long time ago other critters figured out that sometimes you need to take steps to make something edible? Absolutely.
If we define 'cooked' as involving heat or flame ... well, I don't think any other animal has been observed making direct use of fire. At least, not that I've ever heard of.
If we define 'cooked' as 'somehow transformed to make edible', well, then maybe.
They should have called them crapoliths. ;-)
I've always assumed that if they were hunter gatherers, part of the 'gathering' is likely to be food derived from plants.
If it has teeth like an omnivore, and poops like an omnivore, it's probably a freaking omnivore.
I should think not long after they got fire, they started cooking stuff.
My guess, they collected anything they knew they could eat, and ate it.
And not an engineer, as you said.
Which means his theoretical model of how you go about this is rife with assumptions about perfectly spherical ducks. :-P
What kind of volume of material are you talking about for this wall? How would you get it there? Do we have any other 1000 foot walls do draw upon as reference?
My first though upon reading the headline was "right, sure it will".
The sheer number of side effects, and the sheer scale of the undertaking means by the time you find out if it's feasible, or even a good idea ... you're probably already screwed.
So many of these things just sound to me like some loon has come up with an unworkable idea, which they then pitch as being a viable solution, despite having no evidence for that and no idea of what would really happen.
I predict this will never happen, could probably never be built, wouldn't work as advertised, and is therefore pretty meaningless. It's a Big Idea, with little practical value.
I am always reminded of the very brilliant Far Side cartoon when this topic comes up ... Midvale School for the Gifted, and the kid is pushing on the door labelled pull.
Because, really, very smart people can do very stupid things just like everybody else. Sure, you might be really clever at some things, but you may well be a complete moron at others.
Well, it basically means you've met all of the people in your local Mensa meetings, found them to be insufferable asses or complete dorks.
Now, you're going to broaden your search for people not in your local chapter, and find them to be insufferable asses or complete dorks.
Because, the handful of people I've met who admit to being members of Mensa have 'defective' written all over them. The smugness factor often puts them at risk of getting a well deserved smack.
Obligatory Simpsons reference:
Applying for Mensa seems to disqualify you from normal human interaction for the rest of your life.
Comcast is owned by NBC. Comcast is in the middle of buying Time Warner.
Those two combined means most of the US.
Like it or not, the broadcasters own the cable companies in most markets.
They are no longer separate entities.
Unless it would violate copyright.
And I wouldn't put it past them to say all actions of police and government are copyright, and therefore can't be recorded by you.
They'll always find a way to skirt around this if you let them.
And, of course, it's always possible for a remote wipe, so you'd better search them all just in case.
Problem solved. Law, what law?
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention, but they can conduct a border search up to 100 miles from the border, with no probable cause or justification (or a warrant).
Government keeps making exceptions and saying "well, that doesn't apply here".
In this specific case, you can completely ignore the intent of the 4th amendment by saying "border search".
And, since about two thirds of US citizens are in this zone, most Americans can be searched in a way which would otherwise be illegal, but defended under a horseshit exemption.
This is what is referred to as the area which is now magically exempt from the Constitution. Because we can search anybody, for any reason, and bypass your Constitutional protections.
I had an experience which was somewhat opposite (though, in a lot of ways pretty much the same).
At one point, the company went with a big giant universal build system.
Every piece of software, every module, every final build ... was recompiled from scratch on a nightly basis. It took a massive server farm many hours to do this. Even if no changes had been made.
What would happen would be someone would break a component. The build of that component, and every downstream dependency broke. The system had no concept of "this is a beta build, not for everybody" and "this is a release, and stable".
The result was that sometimes you'd have literally dozens of things which were now suddenly broken. It was too stupid of a build system to use the last known good.
So, all of a sudden you get one trivial change in some module about 4 steps removed from your stuff. But, it was all broken, and your stuff couldn't be properly built until someone fixed their stuff, and the build system went through at least one more cycle, often two.
Sometimes, companies get themselves into such a borked state with their build system (or lack thereof) that it makes doing any work impossible.
Some of us started keeping our own local copies, and writing local build scripts, because we couldn't rely on the company wide one to actually work much of the time.
Hopefully, everybody. Make the information public. Livestream it to the interwebs. Have citizen groups review it. Make review of the content mandatory if there is any dispute. If the police 'accidentally' turned them off or made sure they could't see anything .. throw out the case.
Do anything which opens the process and prevents abuse.
The cops will complain about their privacy and their rights, but using that to ignore ours is not what I'd call a good excuse.
Trusting them blindly clearly isn't working. So you structure the system so it says, "we don't actually trust you, and we don't trust the people who are supposed to be overseeing you".
By the people, for the people. Not whatever the hell we decide we want to do.
How many times have police officers need to be told they have no legal right to confiscate your phone, or force you to delete pictures from it? They obviously don't know or care what the law says. So, we obviously can't trust them.
Or, they'll go with their new favorite toy ... illegally search your phone, and then go through the bullshit of parallel construction.
And then it would be "we got an anonymous tip, and confirmed it when we checked his cell phone", which will be used to cover up "we illegally searched his phone, and then called in our own tip".
And none of them will be charged with perjury or obstruction of justice.
Until we start seeing police officers charged and jailed for this crap, they'll keep doing it.
The police have become little better than those in banana republics where you have to assume they're all corrupt, because there's enough of them to make assuming the one you've got now is honest is a bad idea.
More police just adds more layers in which they can game the system.
What needs to happen is a permanent recording of all interactions with people so they can't just get together and decide what their story will be.
We need to fix the system so that it has an inherent "we can't just take you at your word" element in it. Because time after time the police have demonstrated they neither know, nor care about, the actual law.
Sure, many of them may be honest. But if we just assume that enough of them aren't, and set up a system which shows what really happened ... then maybe we might be better off.
I have lost count of the number of times I've seen stories in which the police collectively say "this is what happened", and when someone's cell phone video comes up they're proven to have been lying. And then their own internal review boards clear them of any wrong doing.
There needs to be more serious penalties for when police flout the law. And there needs to be more capturing of what actually happened, because when they do flout the law, the band together to hide that fact.
Increasingly, I think we need to apply the same thing to government. Because we can't trust them to follow the law either.
Obvious, except to the government lawyers and/or attorneys general who issue the guidance which says "nah, we can do anything we want".
Because they've been arguing that this isn't your "papers and effects", and therefore they could whatever they pleased.
Because government and law enforcement have mostly been focusing on how to ignore the Constitution and claim it doesn't apply.
It's simply too inconvenient for them to have to follow all of these pesky laws.
Because if they were regulated as a bank, they would operate under specific rules.
At present, they operate under "whatever the hell we want to do", and can basically do all sorts of crap a bank wouldn't be able to -- like seizing your money.
I place precisely zero trust in PayPal, and never have. Precisely because their dispute resolution process is non-existent, and made up and enforced entirely by them.
You can feel free to do whatever the heck you like. Me, I won't go anywhere near them.
Horseshit.
From TFA:
From later in TFA:
You're completely wrong. This was the cable companies (most of which are owned by content providers) challenging this.
I suggest you do the same, RTFA, and then go STFU your own damned self.
You're wrong, apparently you're an idiot, and you obviously feel compelled to act like an ass about it.
You're full of shit, but loudly proclaiming it tastes like mint. But don't accuse me of having an unformed opinion when you're clearly clueless on the subject.
The cable companies were very very opposed to this being legal. They sure as hell weren't in favor of it.
So, please, take your stupid elsewhere.
Security by incompetence.
No thanks, Pay Pal. You're not a bank, and apparently terrible at security. So you're not trustworthy.
Client side enforcement of two factor authentication may give the illusion of security, but it's anything but.
This is either lazy/incompetent programmers, or idiot managers.
So, one small step for technology ... one giant leap backwards for your privacy?
Sorry, but no way in hell I'd trust Google with this kind of link into my home.
You know, a decent programmable thermostat which you can program with your schedule (mine has "Wake", "Leave", "Return", and "Sleep"), control the fan and the like isn't that expensive or difficult to use.
Mine is also supposed to be adaptive, and learn how much it takes to change the temperature at various times of day. If the next scheduled temperature change is getting close and it's way off, it will start doing things in advance of that.
If you really really need to do it from your smartphone, then I'm sure pretty much all of the products will have privacy issues. Because your data is available to an external entity, and they're all going to want to make money off that information.
To me, a programmable thermostat is a viable alternative, but I have no interest in controlling the temp from my cell phone or providing Google with the information about how I heat my home and when I'm there.
Fine, but then the airlines will open themselves to liability as someone says "unless you can give me a reason why you are denying me service, what you are doing is illegal".
If the no fly list is unconstitutional, how are airlines refusing service with zero evidence and no legal basis going to get away with this?
Unless the airlines have a policy "we can reject your ass for any reason we choose". And I doubt that would hold up in court.
Except, by the time a space agency is going to send you into space, your vitals have been measured 75 different ways, on numerous occasions, over an extended period of time. And then done over and over again.
If an astronaut had a heart attack in space -- every test available to modern medicine which was performed on them missed it as being probable. It costs way too much money to send people into space to miss things like that.
So, if all of that stuff missed it, and you had one, I should think it may well kill you. Because it will come completely out of the blue with no signs of it being possible. (Well, I guess micro gravity itself could be a factor)
I should imagine the vital statistics and internal organs of astronauts are pretty heavily measured and monitored long before you ever end up in space, so they're not going to miss any likely causes.