As you say, and the article says, people in those areas and native Australians have some percentage of Denisovan genes, though mainland Asians don't. (And most Europeans have some percentage of Neandertal - until the articles about the recent Denisovan genetics came out, everything I'd read had suggested that Asians didn't have Neandertal genes, or at least not close to as much as Europeans.)
The explanation's pretty obvious - at one point, one of the the Denisovan's said "Dude, why are we staying here in Siberia? It's too bloody cold! Let's go on vacation somewhere tropical, like Australia or Polynesia!" and everybody realized he was right and took off.
More seriously, though, the H. floresiensis hobbits seem like a really obvious next set of people to do DNA analysis on - we're not sure if they're modern humans or what,
The VAX 11/780 has a PDP-11/23 microcomputer as the console processor that booted the machine, and the 11/23 used an 8" floppy in some DEC format. There were drivers in 4.1BSD and maybe in System V that made the floppy device accessible if you wanted to use it.
We had a project in the late 80s which had a bunch of people sending us field data in all kinds of random and often inappropriate data formats, and one set of users sent us data on 8" floppies. We ended up deciding that yes, it really would be safe to put this dubious floppy into the console floppy drive, the machine really only used it at boot time, and we tried it and successfully copied the data into the Unix machine, where we could parse it into some useful format. Made sure to take the floppy out right after reading it and put the standard one back in. Other formats people sent us included a lot of VMS backup tapes, and a stack of tapes with duct-tape labels on them and a badly photocopied description of the bytes.
We don't avoid "virii" becaue we "refuse to use its Latin plural", but choosing to use something that is very deliberately NOT its Latin plural as a play-on-words jargon is just fine. Similarly, using "boxen" as a plural for "box", making the analogy to "vaxen", is fine. ("Boxen", with capital B, is a correct German plural; Google Translate thinks the German plural for "vaxes" is "VAXes"...)
There's at least one Roman grammarian who thought that the original word "virus" (poison, venom, slimy liquid) doesn't have a plural, though he probably didn't think about a collection of jars of snake poison, toad poison, arsenic, etc. There's some argument that it's 4th declension (so the plural would be "virus"), but even if it's second declension it wouldn't be "virii".)
but I know (..guitar riff..) it's your own damn fault.
Because really, 7% a week and the guy's not saying what he's investing the money in? It's occasionally possible to get that kind of interest from payday loans or financing cocaine imports, but in general you don't get high rates of return without either high risk or structural issues that can only be exploited for a short time. So either you're a sucker who doesn't realize it's a scam, or else you know it's a scam going into it, but hope you can make some quick money and get out before it collapses, which is to say "you're an even bigger sucker."
I had a 1985 Toyota Tercel wagon, which got about 27mpg when new. Toyota didn't really make an equivalent car last year, and I wanted a wagon or at least a hatchback. Ended up with a Kia Soul.
One problem with the light-weight high-mileage cars is that while they're fairly safe if they're only going to collide with other light-weight cars, they're not made to survive collisions with SUVs. So until a lot of the low-mileage cars age off of US highways, we won't be seeing a lot of the smaller cars around. Sure, Priuses will do ok, but things like the Smart Car just don't offer enough protection. (The Smart Car's also a lot lamer and less cost-effective than you'd expect. I priced them last year, gas mileage was only about 35-40, and you had to spend about $17K to get an automatic transmission and air conditioning, vs. the bare-bones model. If I lived in San Francisco I'd have considered it anyway, because of parking convenience, but just downsizing from a full-sized van to a smaller car makes a huge difference.)
* Ok, really 70-75 and 25-30, but typically either traffic is blazing along or else it's jammed up and slow. I don't usually see traffic going at the speed limit unless there's construction or there are cops around. I'm mostly on 101, 680, or 280; 237 does tend to go 40-50 at rush hour in the reverse-commute directions, though sometimes the sheep are going faster than the cars.
Getting the right answer quickly 50% of the time (and being able to quickly verify that it's correct) is much faster than getting the right answer 100% of the time if the calculations take longer than you're willing to wait (e.g. crypto problems where you can pick a key size for which cracking requires a computer the size of the planet to run for billions of years.)
And knowing that somebody else can guess the right answer 50% of the time, instead of having to wait arbitrarily long times, affects your choice of algorithms. This is why cryptographers are really concerned about quantum computers - they're the only significant threat to modern cryptography (except for special cases like differential power analysis when the attacker has physical access to your computer, or sloppiness like bad random number generators or protocols that leak information.) So while factoring "15" is obviously not a hard problem, if the methods used to do it can be extended to crack longer keys, and don't hit some kind of Heisenberg limit (Planck's constant is about 150 bits), then it's interesting.
A few years ago, my wife didn't play a lot of board games (she could demolish me at Scrabble, didn't like Risk, didn't play cards much), but she knew I'd had fun playing Settlers of Catan with some of my friends who liked it, so she got me a set for my birthday (and also made a cool hexagonal tabletop out of translucent acrylic, which fit the coffee table and gave us a good playing surface.) And we played a few games, and then a few more games, and she's gotten hooked by the whole mostly-Euro board gaming scene. Part of her explanation about it, besides the general puzzle-solving fun and opportunities for World Domination, is that it gives introverted people a way to be social in sufficiently constrained contexts that they can have fun without the having-to-be-extroverted stress levels of a typical party.
I usually go to a couple of traditional music jams a week; she games a couple of night a week. She's comes and listens occasionally, but thinks small doses of that are plenty, and thinks musicians' parties go on way way too long. (Which they do, because there's always another tune.) I end up at her gaming parties more often.
The REAL real question is "What are your latency and jurisdictional needs?" Do you need a VPN service that's located outside Australia for legal reasons, or do you want one that's in/near Australia for performance reasons? Is it ok if it's in the US or Europe?
If you want outside Australia, but relatively nearby, e.g. Hong Kong or Singapore, you'll want to use traceroute to check that your connection to them stays on your side of the Pacific Ocean, as opposed to going from Aus to the US and back across. That's less common than it used to be, given some of the newer submarine cables, but it's still not infrequent depending on your carriers' peering arrangements.
If you're gaming, you may care a lot (or may even want to not use the VPN for your gaming connections.) Similarly for VOIP to other Australians. But for typical web browsing, it doesn't matter as much.
Saying that it's ok to use the government to limit speech is evil, whether it's commercial speech or not. Using technology to block annoying people from speaking to you is just fine, even if that technology is a third-party service. Using technology to block technically bad advertising systems is not just fine, it's really nice!
I started running ad-blockers because too many ads were [BLINK]annoying animated gifs[/BLINK], which have since mutated into resource-burning browser-crashing Flash and Javascript ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, float-around-thingies, and other annoyances YELLING FOR MY ATTENTION. I'm not very bothered by Google text ads or even low volumes of non-singing non-dancing static image ads, but there's no obvious convenient way to block the annoying ones without blocking the well-behaved ones. (Sorry, Google, but I'm not going to bother using non-obvious non-convenient tools just to enable ads, even for sites I like.)
I also run ad-blockers and Ghostery because there's too much tracking going on. I don't want lots of random measurement systems watching everything I could do and deciding how they can monetize my user experience by selling tracking data to people who want to show me ads. If your web page wants to run trackers in your domain, fine, but leave the third-party stuff out of it.
The really important thing is to make sure Google (and the other search engines and ad services, if you care about them) can't see the spam. That's the real objective of the spammers, and those that bother checking may find that spamming you is less effective in fixing their page ranks.
There are a lot of ways to get an education besides going back to school, either full-time or night-school. I've had friends who got MBAs going to school at night, because they wanted both the knowledge and the official credentials to get a better job. Graduate technical degrees are usually harder to do part-time, though there are some places that support it. (For instance, Stevens Tech in Hoboken has a very broad-based undergrad engineering curriculum during the daytime for full-time students, but grad courses at night, mostly taught by adjunct faculty, for people with full-time jobs who want to get graduate degrees part-time.)
If your objective is to get the education, rather than the credentials, the options are a lot different. MIT and many other major universities are starting to put their courses online, so while the experience isn't the same as being in school, and you don't get a shingle when you're done, you also don't have to stop working for a chunk of time, and you can pick the courses you want to take without the same structural limitations. If you want to do computer science or math, that can work really well. If you want to do biology or chemistry or other fields that require actual labs and equipment, there's a lot to be said for an actual school. (On the other hand, there are starting to be DIY-Biology hackerspaces.)
MIT and a bunch of other universities are starting to put their classes online, generally for free. You get education, not credentials, but depending on your goals that may be fine.
It's a lot easier to move to random places when you're young and single than when you're older, more responsible, and potentially have a spouse or especially kids. And if you don't like it, you can move back home. (In my case, the cool place that I moved was California, and I wasn't young or single when I came here, but it is a big world out there with a lot of places you might like moving.)
The original poster didn't say what part of Southern Europe he's coming from - if it's Italy, France, or Spain, learning Spanish or Portuguese won't be that hard, and Brazil and Argentina are interesting places to go. (Friends of mine moved to Buenos Aires and like it.) Costa Rica's friendly and doesn't have a military, though there's enough political corruption that the economy's not as good as it should be. Canada's nice, though for weather reasons I'm too much of a wimp to consider anywhere but Vancouver, even though I have lived in climates more like Toronto's. Australia and New Zealand seem to be accessible (not sure how the immigration bureaucracy is if you're not from the US or a Commonwealth country.) Singapore's supposedly a very interesting place, but any country that executes people for possessing politically incorrect drugs strikes me as really inhospitable to freedom of thought. (Cousins of mine lived there for a few years, moved to back to the US when their kids were starting school.)
I've non-seriously looked at moving to Canada a couple of times. The first time was during the Vietnam draft; I would have probably done Conscientious Objector instead, but also I'd only seen the Frozen North parts of Canada and hadn't yet been to Vancouver. Fortunately, the draft was winding down and I had a high lottery number.
But more seriously, during the Bush years somebody posted the Canadian immigration points system to Slashdot. If you're under 20 or over 50, they really don't want you unless you've already got a job that will sponsor you, and otherwise it would take me a lot more work now than it would have then. You get points for advanced degrees and speaking the languages - it would have made sense to have my wife finish her master's degree and me to relearn my elementary-school French. (I don't remember if First Nations languages counted or only French and English. And French isn't really all that useful in Vancouver, except for immigration, and I don't speak Chinese even though probably more of the locals speak it than French.)
Yes, you can use liquid helium to cool it, and it's probably easier than running your own cryogenic cooling pumps. But unfortunately it's not cheap - it's about $10/liter, vs. less than $1/liter for liquid hydrogen or $0.10 for liquid nitrogen. And there's a limited supply of helium in the world, so it's likely to be getting more expensives. (Liquid H2 temperature is about 20K, so it's not quite enough for a maser that needs to be 10K.)
Room-temperature masers are much more practical. And they're a lot easier to attach to sharks.
My Amazon Kindle 3 fits in the pockets of about half my shirts, but it's very thin, and there's usually not room for much else with it (e.g. cellphone or not.) On the other hand, I'm a large guy, and it may be that larger shirts have larger pockets.
It certainly doesn't fit in the smaller pockets that used to be intended for a pack of cigarettes or a pocket protector..
(Yes, I know that saying "%s is gay" as an insult is homophobic and inappropriate. But using it for a bunch of paranoid homophobes is a reasonable exception.)
E-Ink models had already dropped when the Kindle Fire came out. This is the Android models dropping in response to competition in that market.
As far as I'm concerned, they're really different applications. E-Ink is wonderful for book reading, but I don't really get the 7" LCD tablet market. 10" is almost big enough to use instead of a laptop, but 7" just doesn't have enough pixels for general use, and is too big to fit in a pocket.
Amazing. My first thought about the topic was that now that people know that it would obviously be manipulated, and my next thought was that Colbert should do something about it. But sure enough, he's smarter than I am and had already done it:-)
Slashdot Mirror
As you say, and the article says, people in those areas and native Australians have some percentage of Denisovan genes, though mainland Asians don't. (And most Europeans have some percentage of Neandertal - until the articles about the recent Denisovan genetics came out, everything I'd read had suggested that Asians didn't have Neandertal genes, or at least not close to as much as Europeans.)
The explanation's pretty obvious - at one point, one of the the Denisovan's said "Dude, why are we staying here in Siberia? It's too bloody cold! Let's go on vacation somewhere tropical, like Australia or Polynesia!" and everybody realized he was right and took off.
More seriously, though, the H. floresiensis hobbits seem like a really obvious next set of people to do DNA analysis on - we're not sure if they're modern humans or what,
The VAX 11/780 has a PDP-11/23 microcomputer as the console processor that booted the machine, and the 11/23 used an 8" floppy in some DEC format. There were drivers in 4.1BSD and maybe in System V that made the floppy device accessible if you wanted to use it.
We had a project in the late 80s which had a bunch of people sending us field data in all kinds of random and often inappropriate data formats, and one set of users sent us data on 8" floppies. We ended up deciding that yes, it really would be safe to put this dubious floppy into the console floppy drive, the machine really only used it at boot time, and we tried it and successfully copied the data into the Unix machine, where we could parse it into some useful format. Made sure to take the floppy out right after reading it and put the standard one back in. Other formats people sent us included a lot of VMS backup tapes, and a stack of tapes with duct-tape labels on them and a badly photocopied description of the bytes.
full of dangerous viruses.
We don't avoid "virii" becaue we "refuse to use its Latin plural", but choosing to use something that is very deliberately NOT its Latin plural as a play-on-words jargon is just fine. Similarly, using "boxen" as a plural for "box", making the analogy to "vaxen", is fine. ("Boxen", with capital B, is a correct German plural; Google Translate thinks the German plural for "vaxes" is "VAXes"...)
There's at least one Roman grammarian who thought that the original word "virus" (poison, venom, slimy liquid) doesn't have a plural, though he probably didn't think about a collection of jars of snake poison, toad poison, arsenic, etc. There's some argument that it's 4th declension (so the plural would be "virus"), but even if it's second declension it wouldn't be "virii".)
I kind of like "viroids".
but I know (..guitar riff..) it's your own damn fault.
Because really, 7% a week and the guy's not saying what he's investing the money in? It's occasionally possible to get that kind of interest from payday loans or financing cocaine imports, but in general you don't get high rates of return without either high risk or structural issues that can only be exploited for a short time. So either you're a sucker who doesn't realize it's a scam, or else you know it's a scam going into it, but hope you can make some quick money and get out before it collapses, which is to say "you're an even bigger sucker."
I had a 1985 Toyota Tercel wagon, which got about 27mpg when new. Toyota didn't really make an equivalent car last year, and I wanted a wagon or at least a hatchback. Ended up with a Kia Soul.
One problem with the light-weight high-mileage cars is that while they're fairly safe if they're only going to collide with other light-weight cars, they're not made to survive collisions with SUVs. So until a lot of the low-mileage cars age off of US highways, we won't be seeing a lot of the smaller cars around. Sure, Priuses will do ok, but things like the Smart Car just don't offer enough protection. (The Smart Car's also a lot lamer and less cost-effective than you'd expect. I priced them last year, gas mileage was only about 35-40, and you had to spend about $17K to get an automatic transmission and air conditioning, vs. the bare-bones model. If I lived in San Francisco I'd have considered it anyway, because of parking convenience, but just downsizing from a full-sized van to a smaller car makes a huge difference.)
Either you're going 80, or you're going 20*.
* Ok, really 70-75 and 25-30, but typically either traffic is blazing along or else it's jammed up and slow. I don't usually see traffic going at the speed limit unless there's construction or there are cops around. I'm mostly on 101, 680, or 280; 237 does tend to go 40-50 at rush hour in the reverse-commute directions, though sometimes the sheep are going faster than the cars.
Getting the right answer quickly 50% of the time (and being able to quickly verify that it's correct) is much faster than getting the right answer 100% of the time if the calculations take longer than you're willing to wait (e.g. crypto problems where you can pick a key size for which cracking requires a computer the size of the planet to run for billions of years.)
And knowing that somebody else can guess the right answer 50% of the time, instead of having to wait arbitrarily long times, affects your choice of algorithms. This is why cryptographers are really concerned about quantum computers - they're the only significant threat to modern cryptography (except for special cases like differential power analysis when the attacker has physical access to your computer, or sloppiness like bad random number generators or protocols that leak information.) So while factoring "15" is obviously not a hard problem, if the methods used to do it can be extended to crack longer keys, and don't hit some kind of Heisenberg limit (Planck's constant is about 150 bits), then it's interesting.
But you can't tell which way he's rolling without opening his coffin.
I used to play NetHack a lot. The only time I sat in on a live D&D game, my Level 1 character got eaten by baboons after about an hour...
A few years ago, my wife didn't play a lot of board games (she could demolish me at Scrabble, didn't like Risk, didn't play cards much), but she knew I'd had fun playing Settlers of Catan with some of my friends who liked it, so she got me a set for my birthday (and also made a cool hexagonal tabletop out of translucent acrylic, which fit the coffee table and gave us a good playing surface.) And we played a few games, and then a few more games, and she's gotten hooked by the whole mostly-Euro board gaming scene. Part of her explanation about it, besides the general puzzle-solving fun and opportunities for World Domination, is that it gives introverted people a way to be social in sufficiently constrained contexts that they can have fun without the having-to-be-extroverted stress levels of a typical party.
I usually go to a couple of traditional music jams a week; she games a couple of night a week. She's comes and listens occasionally, but thinks small doses of that are plenty, and thinks musicians' parties go on way way too long. (Which they do, because there's always another tune.) I end up at her gaming parties more often.
The REAL real question is "What are your latency and jurisdictional needs?" Do you need a VPN service that's located outside Australia for legal reasons, or do you want one that's in/near Australia for performance reasons? Is it ok if it's in the US or Europe?
If you want outside Australia, but relatively nearby, e.g. Hong Kong or Singapore, you'll want to use traceroute to check that your connection to them stays on your side of the Pacific Ocean, as opposed to going from Aus to the US and back across. That's less common than it used to be, given some of the newer submarine cables, but it's still not infrequent depending on your carriers' peering arrangements.
If you're gaming, you may care a lot (or may even want to not use the VPN for your gaming connections.) Similarly for VOIP to other Australians. But for typical web browsing, it doesn't matter as much.
Saying that it's ok to use the government to limit speech is evil, whether it's commercial speech or not. Using technology to block annoying people from speaking to you is just fine, even if that technology is a third-party service. Using technology to block technically bad advertising systems is not just fine, it's really nice!
I started running ad-blockers because too many ads were [BLINK]annoying animated gifs[/BLINK], which have since mutated into resource-burning browser-crashing Flash and Javascript ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, float-around-thingies, and other annoyances YELLING FOR MY ATTENTION. I'm not very bothered by Google text ads or even low volumes of non-singing non-dancing static image ads, but there's no obvious convenient way to block the annoying ones without blocking the well-behaved ones. (Sorry, Google, but I'm not going to bother using non-obvious non-convenient tools just to enable ads, even for sites I like.)
I also run ad-blockers and Ghostery because there's too much tracking going on. I don't want lots of random measurement systems watching everything I could do and deciding how they can monetize my user experience by selling tracking data to people who want to show me ads. If your web page wants to run trackers in your domain, fine, but leave the third-party stuff out of it.
The really important thing is to make sure Google (and the other search engines and ad services, if you care about them) can't see the spam. That's the real objective of the spammers, and those that bother checking may find that spamming you is less effective in fixing their page ranks.
There are a lot of ways to get an education besides going back to school, either full-time or night-school. I've had friends who got MBAs going to school at night, because they wanted both the knowledge and the official credentials to get a better job. Graduate technical degrees are usually harder to do part-time, though there are some places that support it. (For instance, Stevens Tech in Hoboken has a very broad-based undergrad engineering curriculum during the daytime for full-time students, but grad courses at night, mostly taught by adjunct faculty, for people with full-time jobs who want to get graduate degrees part-time.)
If your objective is to get the education, rather than the credentials, the options are a lot different. MIT and many other major universities are starting to put their courses online, so while the experience isn't the same as being in school, and you don't get a shingle when you're done, you also don't have to stop working for a chunk of time, and you can pick the courses you want to take without the same structural limitations. If you want to do computer science or math, that can work really well. If you want to do biology or chemistry or other fields that require actual labs and equipment, there's a lot to be said for an actual school. (On the other hand, there are starting to be DIY-Biology hackerspaces.)
MIT and a bunch of other universities are starting to put their classes online, generally for free. You get education, not credentials, but depending on your goals that may be fine.
It's a lot easier to move to random places when you're young and single than when you're older, more responsible, and potentially have a spouse or especially kids. And if you don't like it, you can move back home. (In my case, the cool place that I moved was California, and I wasn't young or single when I came here, but it is a big world out there with a lot of places you might like moving.)
The original poster didn't say what part of Southern Europe he's coming from - if it's Italy, France, or Spain, learning Spanish or Portuguese won't be that hard, and Brazil and Argentina are interesting places to go. (Friends of mine moved to Buenos Aires and like it.) Costa Rica's friendly and doesn't have a military, though there's enough political corruption that the economy's not as good as it should be. Canada's nice, though for weather reasons I'm too much of a wimp to consider anywhere but Vancouver, even though I have lived in climates more like Toronto's. Australia and New Zealand seem to be accessible (not sure how the immigration bureaucracy is if you're not from the US or a Commonwealth country.) Singapore's supposedly a very interesting place, but any country that executes people for possessing politically incorrect drugs strikes me as really inhospitable to freedom of thought. (Cousins of mine lived there for a few years, moved to back to the US when their kids were starting school.)
I'll let the Europeans tell you about Europe :-)
I've non-seriously looked at moving to Canada a couple of times. The first time was during the Vietnam draft; I would have probably done Conscientious Objector instead, but also I'd only seen the Frozen North parts of Canada and hadn't yet been to Vancouver. Fortunately, the draft was winding down and I had a high lottery number.
But more seriously, during the Bush years somebody posted the Canadian immigration points system to Slashdot. If you're under 20 or over 50, they really don't want you unless you've already got a job that will sponsor you, and otherwise it would take me a lot more work now than it would have then. You get points for advanced degrees and speaking the languages - it would have made sense to have my wife finish her master's degree and me to relearn my elementary-school French. (I don't remember if First Nations languages counted or only French and English. And French isn't really all that useful in Vancouver, except for immigration, and I don't speak Chinese even though probably more of the locals speak it than French.)
Yes, you can use liquid helium to cool it, and it's probably easier than running your own cryogenic cooling pumps. But unfortunately it's not cheap - it's about $10/liter, vs. less than $1/liter for liquid hydrogen or $0.10 for liquid nitrogen. And there's a limited supply of helium in the world, so it's likely to be getting more expensives. (Liquid H2 temperature is about 20K, so it's not quite enough for a maser that needs to be 10K.)
Room-temperature masers are much more practical. And they're a lot easier to attach to sharks.
My Amazon Kindle 3 fits in the pockets of about half my shirts, but it's very thin, and there's usually not room for much else with it (e.g. cellphone or not.) On the other hand, I'm a large guy, and it may be that larger shirts have larger pockets.
It certainly doesn't fit in the smaller pockets that used to be intended for a pack of cigarettes or a pocket protector..
(Yes, I know that saying "%s is gay" as an insult is homophobic and inappropriate. But using it for a bunch of paranoid homophobes is a reasonable exception.)
1300 shell companies all tangled up in a maze of twisty little patent lawsuits sounds like a plot device from Charlie Stross's Accelerando.
E-Ink models had already dropped when the Kindle Fire came out. This is the Android models dropping in response to competition in that market.
As far as I'm concerned, they're really different applications. E-Ink is wonderful for book reading, but I don't really get the 7" LCD tablet market. 10" is almost big enough to use instead of a laptop, but 7" just doesn't have enough pixels for general use, and is too big to fit in a pocket.
Amazing. My first thought about the topic was that now that people know that it would obviously be manipulated, and my next thought was that Colbert should do something about it. But sure enough, he's smarter than I am and had already done it :-)