No, Shakespeare did. It was in the same play where he wrote the immortal lines, "Pray tell, doth this teabag ail you? Cry some more, biatch, cry some more. Thy tears are sweet, for I havest pwned thee."
He also wrote, "Truly, thou art hax -- I can seest by the pixels." But that was a different play.
"Google's Chrome browser will stop relying on a decades-old method for ensuring secure sockets layer certificates are valid..."
'Decades'? As in more than one?
The first web browser was made by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. That's technically two decades ago...but were there secure sockets? Layers? Certificates?
Yeah, I'm nitpicking. But the web didn't exist publically before 1994 -- I remember formatting HTML for Mosaic back then, as our company tried to keep on top of the bleeding edge. This stuff really wasn't that long ago. Correcting 'decades' is just a nitpick, but if you start using 'centuries' or 'eons' then this old man is going to have to get out of his chair and start giving history lessons.
The X-ray scanners are worse, yes. But everyone knows that, and they're likely to be replaced with terahertz scanners before long. The problem is that the terahertz scanners, while better than X-rays, are still not proven safe.
The radiation you get from airplane travel is full-body and full-spectrum, consisting of X-Rays, Gamma rays, radio waves, and everything in between.
The radiation you get from the terahertz scanners deposits all of its energy into your skin, in a small band of frequencies. That makes it potentially more likely to cause skin cancer than the broadband, full body radiation you get from air travel.
Look, either of these sources is insignificant compared to the energy you get from spending a minute out in the sunlight. But the type of energy and where it is deposited matters, and the terahertz scanners have not been proven safe. Making them mandatory is short-sighted and stupid...and inevitable, given the way governments work.
The key here is that they did back off, and the Democrats did not. They get credit for that. They were able to learn something when whacked with the equivalent of a rolled-up newspaper.
Now if we can just get them to stop peeing in Congress...
The Republicans deserve credit for how they stand up for freedom in general and against SOPA in particular. If I were a single-issue voter, this would make me vote republican. They have the correct position on this issue.
Of course, I'm not a single-issue voter, and the Republicans are pants-on-head-retarded about almost everything else. But give them credit for being right this once.
Now, now, let's not conflate lying with not knowing what the fuck he's talking about.
He obviously has no idea what he's talking about because he promised to have that moon base up by the end of his first term as president. That's a pipe dream, a fantasy so unbelievable that he may as well have been promising to meet moon-unicorns once we got up there. It takes at least five years just to get a satellite into orbit; there's no way we could get back to the moon, let alone establish a base there, without ten years or more of work. Promising it in four is delusional.
Anybody play the tabletop RPG Paranoia? The Computer (your friend, your boss, and the head of your government) was always crowdsourcing weapon testing to the player characters.
"Congratulations, citizen. You have been selected to test this box of grenades. To study the optimal grenade design, these grenades have random fuse lengths from zero to ten seconds. Please report your findings with whatever remaining limbs you can."
"Citizen, welcome to the world of high-tech weaponry. The ULTI-3600 assault rifle has a computer targeting system to maximize accuracy. Please note that to prevent friendly fire accidents, the targeting system will verbally ask for no less than five confirmations before taking any shot. To insure that you properly test this rifle it will now be welded to your arm..."
"The new Duo-strike vibro knife is twice as deadly as previous models, because the hilt has been replaced with another vibro blade. Pick it up, citizen. Go on. Don't you want to help The Computer test new weaponry? Or are you a traitor?"
I totally support the way our military is becoming like a dystopian comedy RPG.
Well, theoretically, a very strong radar pulse could cause ionization around the star sensors, which would make the spacecraft unable to tell which way was up and which was down. That would screw up the solar cell deployment pretty badly.
That's a crazy scenario, about on par with believing that reptiloids control Switzerland, but like all crazy theories there's a tenuous path of logic behind it.
But the company (THQ) learned from the blowback from SR2. They took extra care with Saints Row the Third, and it's a terrific PC game. All the menus, combat, and movement are optimized for the PC and function intuitively and smooth as glass.
Games built for consoles don't have to suck on PCs. THQ has proven this. Blizzard is known for the polish they apply to their games, so I trust they'll take extra care in making the PC version great. It's the management decisions for D3 that I fear. (No LAN, no offline play, etc.)
Mixed-gender chimeras happen in real life. In general it's not a huge problem for the organism. One part of the animal contains the sex organs, and those organs are appropriate for the genes in that part. The hormones are often wacky, of course. Yes, you can get hermaphrodites this way.
You may be under the impression that a chimera is a homogenous mix of cells from different gene lines. Actually, the gene lines usually occur in 'clumps' throughout the organism. The right arm might be all one gene line, while the torso is another, and the left arm yet a third. The clump around the lower abdomen will determine which sex organs develop.
The link I gave above (to vixra.org) explains it better than I can. I am a physicist, but not a high-energy quantum physicist, so you're basically asking the janitor at a hospital his opinions on a delicate surgery.:)
I think the problem is that in a meta-stable vacuum state, a large energy density might flip it to the inflationary mode. So the Universe might be destroyed by packing enough energy in a small area. The article mentions 1TeV as a possible threshold, which is far above anything we can generate on Earth. However, energies that large are generated by some stellar events and the Universe has survived them. So either there's some other mechanism stopping the vacuum from becoming unstable...or like you suggest, it just depends on half-life and we're only lucky that it hasn't happened yet.
Metastability might explain inflation. But it also invites the possibility that inflation could kick off again, and the universe could revert to a previous state where things like stars, planets, and life can not exist. That's what people have a problem with, I think.
Of course, the fact that this hasn't happened is proof that it probably cannot. The question we then need to answer is why not. It's as if God has us all in a gigantic microwave oven, and we're trying to figure out what's keeping him from hitting the 'Start' button...
What does vacuum instability mean? It means that vacuum might have a half-life, after which it decays into energy. This is a cool concept until you realize that the Universe is mostly made of vacuum. If the Universe were to spontaneously disintegrate, that would be Bad.
Of course since that doesn't happen, there must be new physics that keeps everything from fizzling out. That means that if the Higgs boson is found at 126 GeV then we're not done searching. There will be new questions to answer and possibly a new particle, the Higgsino, to look for.
Exciting stuff if you're a physics nerd. Or really for anyone who has a vested interest in the Universe continuing to exist.
So compressed, you have 4 megabytes of data...per individual. 7 billion individual human beings means you potentially need 28 petabytes of storage...
That's just for human beings. If we look at the sequences of non-human species the storage needed expands exponentially. Why, even if we used efficient DNA storage to keep all this data, we'd need a whole planet just to house it.
The article links to this Nature story that asserts that completely eradicating mosquitos would have no measurable effect on the environment. They don't really do anything but spread disease. They might have a role as a food source for other animals, but they don't appear to be very significant.
But we might be missing an important part of the chain, and wiping out the mosquitos might throw the world completely out of balance. Then again, humans have so many reasons to hate the little buggers that it still might be worth it.
Exactly. The important info was that the strain can be made to be transmissible by air in mammals.
Yes! That's the most interesting part of the original paper. They took a virus that was transmissible only by direct fluid contact, and they turned it into an airborne strain with a fairly long range. And they did that without reducing its lethality. That's a significant step toward weaponizing any virus.
Also, against some infectious diseases a strong immune system leads to a quicker death.
That was the case against the 2009 swine flu. The few people who died were healthy adults. The virus provoked such a strong immune reaction -- a cytokine storm -- that they drowned with fluid in their lungs. The stronger the immune system the more overreaction to this particular strain, and the higher risk of fatal pneumonia.
The immune system needs to be not too strong but not too weak to defeat a virus like this. That's why it has such a high fatality rate.
I think the point is that they are trying to automate the line manager's job.
Since we're already automated most of the line personnel's jobs, the ultimate goal is to have corporations with a CEO at the top and a smoothly functioning pyramid of robots below him, some of which do work and others who monitor the worker bots. Then we just need to automate the CEO. I suggest using a roulette wheel.
Both of these games aren't what the older (I'd assume slashdot?) crowd are looking for when it comes to single player, there's vastly better experiences to be had with far better told engrossing stories.
I guess I'm old, because in two days I'll be playing Skyrim.
Slashdot Mirror
My generation is through playing nice with bad politicians.
I wish that every generation would have your attitude.
No, Shakespeare did. It was in the same play where he wrote the immortal lines, "Pray tell, doth this teabag ail you? Cry some more, biatch, cry some more. Thy tears are sweet, for I havest pwned thee."
He also wrote, "Truly, thou art hax -- I can seest by the pixels." But that was a different play.
"Google's Chrome browser will stop relying on a decades-old method for ensuring secure sockets layer certificates are valid..."
'Decades'? As in more than one?
The first web browser was made by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. That's technically two decades ago...but were there secure sockets? Layers? Certificates?
Yeah, I'm nitpicking. But the web didn't exist publically before 1994 -- I remember formatting HTML for Mosaic back then, as our company tried to keep on top of the bleeding edge. This stuff really wasn't that long ago. Correcting 'decades' is just a nitpick, but if you start using 'centuries' or 'eons' then this old man is going to have to get out of his chair and start giving history lessons.
The X-ray scanners are worse, yes. But everyone knows that, and they're likely to be replaced with terahertz scanners before long. The problem is that the terahertz scanners, while better than X-rays, are still not proven safe.
There's a difference.
The radiation you get from airplane travel is full-body and full-spectrum, consisting of X-Rays, Gamma rays, radio waves, and everything in between.
The radiation you get from the terahertz scanners deposits all of its energy into your skin, in a small band of frequencies. That makes it potentially more likely to cause skin cancer than the broadband, full body radiation you get from air travel.
Look, either of these sources is insignificant compared to the energy you get from spending a minute out in the sunlight. But the type of energy and where it is deposited matters, and the terahertz scanners have not been proven safe. Making them mandatory is short-sighted and stupid...and inevitable, given the way governments work.
The key here is that they did back off, and the Democrats did not. They get credit for that. They were able to learn something when whacked with the equivalent of a rolled-up newspaper.
Now if we can just get them to stop peeing in Congress...
The Republicans deserve credit for how they stand up for freedom in general and against SOPA in particular. If I were a single-issue voter, this would make me vote republican. They have the correct position on this issue.
Of course, I'm not a single-issue voter, and the Republicans are pants-on-head-retarded about almost everything else. But give them credit for being right this once.
He mis-spelled it. He meant 'em-poorer', as in somebody who makes a great nation poorer than before.
Now, now, let's not conflate lying with not knowing what the fuck he's talking about.
He obviously has no idea what he's talking about because he promised to have that moon base up by the end of his first term as president. That's a pipe dream, a fantasy so unbelievable that he may as well have been promising to meet moon-unicorns once we got up there. It takes at least five years just to get a satellite into orbit; there's no way we could get back to the moon, let alone establish a base there, without ten years or more of work. Promising it in four is delusional.
Hey, if you don't find big breasted scorpions sexy, then you're just too close-minded to be a russian scientist.
Anybody play the tabletop RPG Paranoia? The Computer (your friend, your boss, and the head of your government) was always crowdsourcing weapon testing to the player characters.
"Congratulations, citizen. You have been selected to test this box of grenades. To study the optimal grenade design, these grenades have random fuse lengths from zero to ten seconds. Please report your findings with whatever remaining limbs you can."
"Citizen, welcome to the world of high-tech weaponry. The ULTI-3600 assault rifle has a computer targeting system to maximize accuracy. Please note that to prevent friendly fire accidents, the targeting system will verbally ask for no less than five confirmations before taking any shot. To insure that you properly test this rifle it will now be welded to your arm..."
"The new Duo-strike vibro knife is twice as deadly as previous models, because the hilt has been replaced with another vibro blade. Pick it up, citizen. Go on. Don't you want to help The Computer test new weaponry? Or are you a traitor?"
I totally support the way our military is becoming like a dystopian comedy RPG.
point it's solar panels away from the sun?
Well, theoretically, a very strong radar pulse could cause ionization around the star sensors, which would make the spacecraft unable to tell which way was up and which was down. That would screw up the solar cell deployment pretty badly.
That's a crazy scenario, about on par with believing that reptiloids control Switzerland, but like all crazy theories there's a tenuous path of logic behind it.
But the company (THQ) learned from the blowback from SR2. They took extra care with Saints Row the Third, and it's a terrific PC game. All the menus, combat, and movement are optimized for the PC and function intuitively and smooth as glass.
Games built for consoles don't have to suck on PCs. THQ has proven this. Blizzard is known for the polish they apply to their games, so I trust they'll take extra care in making the PC version great. It's the management decisions for D3 that I fear. (No LAN, no offline play, etc.)
Mixed-gender chimeras happen in real life. In general it's not a huge problem for the organism. One part of the animal contains the sex organs, and those organs are appropriate for the genes in that part. The hormones are often wacky, of course. Yes, you can get hermaphrodites this way.
You may be under the impression that a chimera is a homogenous mix of cells from different gene lines. Actually, the gene lines usually occur in 'clumps' throughout the organism. The right arm might be all one gene line, while the torso is another, and the left arm yet a third. The clump around the lower abdomen will determine which sex organs develop.
The link I gave above (to vixra.org) explains it better than I can. I am a physicist, but not a high-energy quantum physicist, so you're basically asking the janitor at a hospital his opinions on a delicate surgery. :)
I think the problem is that in a meta-stable vacuum state, a large energy density might flip it to the inflationary mode. So the Universe might be destroyed by packing enough energy in a small area. The article mentions 1TeV as a possible threshold, which is far above anything we can generate on Earth. However, energies that large are generated by some stellar events and the Universe has survived them. So either there's some other mechanism stopping the vacuum from becoming unstable...or like you suggest, it just depends on half-life and we're only lucky that it hasn't happened yet.
Metastability might explain inflation. But it also invites the possibility that inflation could kick off again, and the universe could revert to a previous state where things like stars, planets, and life can not exist. That's what people have a problem with, I think.
Of course, the fact that this hasn't happened is proof that it probably cannot. The question we then need to answer is why not. It's as if God has us all in a gigantic microwave oven, and we're trying to figure out what's keeping him from hitting the 'Start' button...
The fascinating thing about the energy they're talking about (125-126 GeV) is that it's too low. So low, in fact, that the equations predict vacuum instability at about that range.
What does vacuum instability mean? It means that vacuum might have a half-life, after which it decays into energy. This is a cool concept until you realize that the Universe is mostly made of vacuum. If the Universe were to spontaneously disintegrate, that would be Bad.
Of course since that doesn't happen, there must be new physics that keeps everything from fizzling out. That means that if the Higgs boson is found at 126 GeV then we're not done searching. There will be new questions to answer and possibly a new particle, the Higgsino, to look for.
Exciting stuff if you're a physics nerd. Or really for anyone who has a vested interest in the Universe continuing to exist.
Find me some tauntaun DNA and we'll talk.
I suggest looking on Luke Skywalker's winter outfit.
So compressed, you have 4 megabytes of data...per individual. 7 billion individual human beings means you potentially need 28 petabytes of storage...
That's just for human beings. If we look at the sequences of non-human species the storage needed expands exponentially. Why, even if we used efficient DNA storage to keep all this data, we'd need a whole planet just to house it.
The article links to this Nature story that asserts that completely eradicating mosquitos would have no measurable effect on the environment. They don't really do anything but spread disease. They might have a role as a food source for other animals, but they don't appear to be very significant.
But we might be missing an important part of the chain, and wiping out the mosquitos might throw the world completely out of balance. Then again, humans have so many reasons to hate the little buggers that it still might be worth it.
Exactly. The important info was that the strain can be made to be transmissible by air in mammals.
Yes! That's the most interesting part of the original paper. They took a virus that was transmissible only by direct fluid contact, and they turned it into an airborne strain with a fairly long range. And they did that without reducing its lethality. That's a significant step toward weaponizing any virus.
All we need now is the ability to target that virus to a specific human genotype. Then the Genocide Wars begin. But that's not forecasted to happen for another 25 years or so...
Also, against some infectious diseases a strong immune system leads to a quicker death.
That was the case against the 2009 swine flu. The few people who died were healthy adults. The virus provoked such a strong immune reaction -- a cytokine storm -- that they drowned with fluid in their lungs. The stronger the immune system the more overreaction to this particular strain, and the higher risk of fatal pneumonia.
The immune system needs to be not too strong but not too weak to defeat a virus like this. That's why it has such a high fatality rate.
God does not play dice.
...God is the dice.
I think the point is that they are trying to automate the line manager's job.
Since we're already automated most of the line personnel's jobs, the ultimate goal is to have corporations with a CEO at the top and a smoothly functioning pyramid of robots below him, some of which do work and others who monitor the worker bots. Then we just need to automate the CEO. I suggest using a roulette wheel.
Both of these games aren't what the older (I'd assume slashdot?) crowd are looking for when it comes to single player, there's vastly better experiences to be had with far better told engrossing stories.
I guess I'm old, because in two days I'll be playing Skyrim.