This is hypothetical. Even if somebody indiscriminately releases millions of genetically modified death-skeeters, it would not make mosquitoes extinct. There are more than 3,500 species of mosquito, for one. Also, from the BBC article, "Would it be wrong to eradicate mosquitoes?
The question is likely to remain hypothetical, whatever the level of concern over Zika, malaria and dengue. Despite the success of reducing mosquito numbers in smaller areas, many scientists say knocking out an entire species would be impossible.
"There's no silver bullet," says Hawkes. "Field trials using GM mosquitoes have been a moderate success but involved releasing millions of modified insects to cover just a small area.
"Getting every female mosquito to breed with sterile males in a large area would be very difficult. Instead we should be looking to combine this with other techniques."
It's not a question of if, but when. All it takes is one (or more) intrepid scientist(s) with jars of genetically modified mosquitoes, or one mistake by a lab tech somewhere. I think it might be something like the way killer bees were released into the wild and then spread.
Hello. I'm a math teacher, licensed to teach in two states, currently teaching algebra 2 and AP calculus. What are you talking about? I'm familiar with the common core state standards (CCSS). I've never heard of a "common core addition method." Care to enlighten me?
Please give a link to the online version of the CCSS that describes this algorithm. If, instead, you're seeing this algorithm described in some crap textbook your school district got from the lowest bidder, well, that's too bad. The publishers don't have their books vetted by common core. They are completely independent.
There is a point about security that all the glib commenters here (disable fingerprint allow PIN blah blah ) get wrong: real security is very hard to get right. As Steve Bellovin points out, the Needham-Schroeder key exchange protocol was published in 1978. It took seventeen years to find a flaw in it that allows a man-in-the-middle attack. It was "proven" mathematically correct, too. Still think Apple should just disable fingerprint auth on the iPhone 6? Then you're a fool who has no business commenting on cryptography. If you really want to do cryptography and get it right, you need to approach the subject with a large serving of humble pie.
Apple is damned if they do and damned if they don't here. Bricking the cryptographically secure device when hardware tampering is detected is the right thing to do.
I blame management, the prosecutors, and the judges. There was a serious lack of oversight, obviously.
Let's say she worked 250 days/year, a conservative assumption. That means she was averaging ~ 6E4/(9*250) ~ 27 analyses/day. Assuming 8 hours actual work/day, that means she was completing an analysis roughly every 18 minutes. I'm a physicist. I've worked in a manufacturing facility with a chem lab that analyzed production samples. Hell, sample prep can take 20 minutes! There is no way she was completing these analyses accurately. Her boss must have known something was amiss. A reasonable assumption is that he or she knew so and had wink/nod arrangement with the prosecutors and the courts.
Our "justice" system is deeply flawed, and this is more evidence of the systemic flaws in it. Kudos to Ms. Lithwick for covering this beat.
This "vulnerability" can be completely avoided by installing Firefox or Chrome on your android 4.3 device and using either as the default browser. It's irresponsible of/. to ring the security panic bell without mention of how one can simply neuter the threat.
I call BS. Do you have any evidence of bloat at the IRS? The Boston Globe has reported that the IRS is not "up to the basics of its job." The IRS makes billions of dollars in fraudulent payments "because it lacks the ability to check whether many returns are accurate before refunds are mailed." The IRS relies on tax preparers to file accurate returns. Guess what, they often screw up. The agency is "so short-staffed it cannot answer nearly 40 percent of phone calls, and it has failed to meet its own 45-day deadline to respond to millions of letters per year from taxpayers." Etc.
I've got a 2009 era MacBook Pro. Originally it ran Snow Leopard but since then I have upgraded OS's as they came out and now I'm on Yosemite. One thing I have noticed is that memory requirements have steadily gone up. At the moment I'm running an email client, Skype, Chrome and a password manager and it's using over 6GB of RAM. The same thing on Windows 8 uses less than 4GB of RAM. On Linux it's about 2.5GB of RAM.
The MacBook is pegged at 8GB of RAM - I can't add any more than that. So just a very basic load, like above, and I'm almost maxed out on RAM on OSX. That is unacceptable to me - almost unusable.
Memory usage understanding fail. Yosemite is using the RAM you've given it. It will most likely never get into swap unless you do some insane stress test.
Check out Siracusa's comments on Mavericks' compressed virtual memory system (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compressed-memory). By all accounts, compressed virtual memory in 10.9 and 10.10 is a net win for swap usage, battery life, and performance. Have you ever seen swap usage > 0?
Driverless cars open up huge possibilities. Think of long distance trips,...
I don't believe it. Where's the evidence of driverless cars cars that can replace cars driven by human drivers in all weather conditions, in heavy city traffic (rush hour in any big city), with a mudslide, a temporary detour, thunderstorms, reckless drivers, flood waters, drifting snow, a wreck up ahead, temporary lane restrictions, etc., and all the other unexpected events that human drivers deal with every time we get behind the wheel? I have seen pictures of the "driverless" car and articles written by credulous reporters. I looked at the official driverless car site on google+. I'm not impressed.
Where is the evidence? How about a map of the streets and roads the car has actually covered? How about turning it loose in Brooklyn at rush hour and seeing if it can make it to the Newark Airport?
Indeed. I could not agree more. It's only been 4 days since the views of machine learning expert Michal Jordan were posted on/. Sounds like Elon musk lends too much credence to horribly reductionist cartoon models of the brain. As Jordan says in the interview, "... it’s true that with neuroscience, it’s going to require decades or even hundreds of years to understand the deep principles." (my emphasis) He's talking about the brain and the nature of intelligence.
We have the faintest pico–glimmer of a clue about how the brain works. How can we emulate it with a machine?
Did the brute-force attack sidestep Apple ID two-step verification? I'm guessing no, and that none of the celebs who were hacked had bothered to enable the two-step login shuffle. You might think a celebrity could afford to hire someone to beef up their online security and advise them in such matters. Why don't they?
This focus on Lois Lerner is a republican red herring. The real scandal at the IRS is the billions in fraudulent return payouts they make every year. The Republican-led congress has cut the IRS budget by a $billion, but it's a net loss when one factors in the loss due to the fraudulent return payouts (identity theft) and the reduced take from collections (about $8 billion). Read the article at the Boston Globe website. The IRS budget cut increased the deficit.
Any astronomers analyzing the signal can detect time-dependent variations in intensity. This effect complicates the analysis a bit, but it won't fool a scientist.
How does a 500 year data set apply to a 4.5 billion year old planet?
This is absurd. Do seconds not matter, because, days, months, years? Earthquakes occur in about a minute or so, right? Seconds, even. How can they apply to a 4.5 billion year old planet? The mass of the earth is about 6E24 kg. Does a scale measuring micrograms not function on the earth? Do single cells of your body not matter because, you know, there are trillions of them?
I would recommend a book called 'How to lie with statistics.'
Yes, it is easy to lie with statistics. And it is nearly impossible to tell the (scientific) truth without statistics.
I recommend a book with the title Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences by Daniel S. Wilks to you. It's pretty dense, but, you know, science is hard. It's not for weak brains.
Let's not miss the opportunity to point a finger of blame at the RFC, which says " to make the extension as versatile as possible, an arbitrary payload and a random padding is preferred, ". https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf...
Arbitrary payload and a random padding for a heartbeat instead of a specified sequence of bits? This is very suspicious.
Well, the posting system stripped off my carefully inserted links. WTF, slashdot? I'd post the code to illustrate, but it just gets stripped out. Here are some URLS to go with my post:
The actual "disease" here is affluenza, or perhaps it's anxiety that overprotective mothers project onto their children. I grew up in a small town, had pets, played in the dirt every day. Nut allergies were unheard of. It's also very interesting that farmers and dirt poor people in 3d world countries don't get these allergies. This is a problem that city dwellers construct. It's called the hygiene hypothesis.
It is very suspicious that neither the BBC article nor the Lancet abstract report a mortality statistic. Is there some problem counting bodies of people who drop dead after nut ingestion? Please don't quote me the stupid 150 deaths/year number one sees in peanut allergy articles here in America. That number was an extrapolation from a single study done of farmers in a county in Minnesota. There were no deaths from anaphylactic shock identified in the study. Somehow, the authors waved their hands and estimated 150 deaths/yr in the entire US. Meredith Broussard covered this in an article published in Harper's in Jan 2008, "Everyone's Gone Nuts." It's behind a paywall, unfortunately. I recall that the article quoted a statistician at the CDC who said there was no more than a handful of deaths in the US from anaphylactic shock in a year. Of course, the food allergist nut cases (pun intended) attacked her in droves.
There is an article by Broussard online. It covers the money trail and details how some people profit from the nut allergy scare.
I think the nut allergies are a bit like the terrorism scare. It is massively overblown. Falls in bathtubs and lightning strikes are far greater threats.
The only physics bit that bugged me was the tether scene.
spoiler alert:
What bugged me far more were the "point and shoot" orbital transfers. To descend, you decelerate, and vice versa. Your average audience member has never heard of a Hohmann transfer orbit, after all. The transfer to the Chinese station was almost as bad as the star trek TNG where a radioactive space barge is towed (apparently radially) straight from a planet, through an asteroid belt, into its sun. Of course, it is difficult to imagine Bullock's character working out the burns for orbital insertions in zero g with no prior experience. She would need an app for that.
Despite these groaners, I greatly enjoyed the movie. It is far better than most anything Hollywood has done in this genre.
I can confirm this. I had coccidioidomycosis years ago and recovered on my own with no medical treatment. I have had no symptoms for more than 20 years. It was pretty bad when it hit me, I was weakened. The immediate effect is weakness. It laid me low for about two weeks. But then I recovered, and it faded away.
What is this vulnerability of a dam? Other than earthquakes, volcanoes, erosion, design errors, and tons of dynamite, I mean. I'm reading speculation about how control systems and whatnot might be exposed to nefarious internet packets from China. Dams are generally rather sturdy constructions. That's why they hold back all those cubic kilometers of water. Is the worry that floodgates will be opened and downstream havoc will result? Surely there must be interlocks in place to prevent that.
Slashdot Mirror
This is hypothetical. Even if somebody indiscriminately releases millions of genetically modified death-skeeters, it would not make mosquitoes extinct. There are more than 3,500 species of mosquito, for one. Also, from the BBC article, "Would it be wrong to eradicate mosquitoes?
It's not a question of if, but when. All it takes is one (or more) intrepid scientist(s) with jars of genetically modified mosquitoes, or one mistake by a lab tech somewhere. I think it might be something like the way killer bees were released into the wild and then spread.
Hello. I'm a math teacher, licensed to teach in two states, currently teaching algebra 2 and AP calculus. What are you talking about? I'm familiar with the common core state standards (CCSS). I've never heard of a "common core addition method." Care to enlighten me?
Please give a link to the online version of the CCSS that describes this algorithm. If, instead, you're seeing this algorithm described in some crap textbook your school district got from the lowest bidder, well, that's too bad. The publishers don't have their books vetted by common core. They are completely independent.
Great, another small sample size college student behavior result. I would take this, and any other such study, with a large grain of dead sea salt.
There is a point about security that all the glib commenters here (disable fingerprint allow PIN blah blah ) get wrong: real security is very hard to get right. As Steve Bellovin points out, the Needham-Schroeder key exchange protocol was published in 1978. It took seventeen years to find a flaw in it that allows a man-in-the-middle attack. It was "proven" mathematically correct, too. Still think Apple should just disable fingerprint auth on the iPhone 6? Then you're a fool who has no business commenting on cryptography. If you really want to do cryptography and get it right, you need to approach the subject with a large serving of humble pie.
Apple is damned if they do and damned if they don't here. Bricking the cryptographically secure device when hardware tampering is detected is the right thing to do.
I blame management, the prosecutors, and the judges. There was a serious lack of oversight, obviously.
Let's say she worked 250 days/year, a conservative assumption. That means she was averaging ~ 6E4/(9*250) ~ 27 analyses/day. Assuming 8 hours actual work/day, that means she was completing an analysis roughly every 18 minutes. I'm a physicist. I've worked in a manufacturing facility with a chem lab that analyzed production samples. Hell, sample prep can take 20 minutes! There is no way she was completing these analyses accurately. Her boss must have known something was amiss. A reasonable assumption is that he or she knew so and had wink/nod arrangement with the prosecutors and the courts.
Our "justice" system is deeply flawed, and this is more evidence of the systemic flaws in it. Kudos to Ms. Lithwick for covering this beat.
This "vulnerability" can be completely avoided by installing Firefox or Chrome on your android 4.3 device and using either as the default browser. It's irresponsible of /. to ring the security panic bell without mention of how one can simply neuter the threat.
The IRS is an unbelievably bloated agency.
I call BS. Do you have any evidence of bloat at the IRS? The Boston Globe has reported that the IRS is not "up to the basics of its job." The IRS makes billions of dollars in fraudulent payments "because it lacks the ability to check whether many returns are accurate before refunds are mailed." The IRS relies on tax preparers to file accurate returns. Guess what, they often screw up. The agency is "so short-staffed it cannot answer nearly 40 percent of phone calls, and it has failed to meet its own 45-day deadline to respond to millions of letters per year from taxpayers." Etc.
On Point Radio had a show about the IRS 11 months ago. Listen and learn: http://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/0...
I've got a 2009 era MacBook Pro. Originally it ran Snow Leopard but since then I have upgraded OS's as they came out and now I'm on Yosemite. One thing I have noticed is that memory requirements have steadily gone up. At the moment I'm running an email client, Skype, Chrome and a password manager and it's using over 6GB of RAM. The same thing on Windows 8 uses less than 4GB of RAM. On Linux it's about 2.5GB of RAM.
The MacBook is pegged at 8GB of RAM - I can't add any more than that. So just a very basic load, like above, and I'm almost maxed out on RAM on OSX. That is unacceptable to me - almost unusable.
Memory usage understanding fail. Yosemite is using the RAM you've given it. It will most likely never get into swap unless you do some insane stress test.
Check out Siracusa's comments on Mavericks' compressed virtual memory system (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compressed-memory). By all accounts, compressed virtual memory in 10.9 and 10.10 is a net win for swap usage, battery life, and performance. Have you ever seen swap usage > 0?
1) Is someone trying to short AAPL? 2) Slow day at /.? "Let's have another Apple fanboi flamefest."
Driverless cars open up huge possibilities. Think of long distance trips, ...
I don't believe it. Where's the evidence of driverless cars cars that can replace cars driven by human drivers in all weather conditions, in heavy city traffic (rush hour in any big city), with a mudslide, a temporary detour, thunderstorms, reckless drivers, flood waters, drifting snow, a wreck up ahead, temporary lane restrictions, etc., and all the other unexpected events that human drivers deal with every time we get behind the wheel? I have seen pictures of the "driverless" car and articles written by credulous reporters. I looked at the official driverless car site on google+. I'm not impressed.
Where is the evidence? How about a map of the streets and roads the car has actually covered? How about turning it loose in Brooklyn at rush hour and seeing if it can make it to the Newark Airport?
Indeed. I could not agree more. It's only been 4 days since the views of machine learning expert Michal Jordan were posted on /. Sounds like Elon musk lends too much credence to horribly reductionist cartoon models of the brain. As Jordan says in the interview, "... it’s true that with neuroscience, it’s going to require decades or even hundreds of years to understand the deep principles." (my emphasis) He's talking about the brain and the nature of intelligence.
We have the faintest pico–glimmer of a clue about how the brain works. How can we emulate it with a machine?
Turn off their water.
Did the brute-force attack sidestep Apple ID two-step verification? I'm guessing no, and that none of the celebs who were hacked had bothered to enable the two-step login shuffle. You might think a celebrity could afford to hire someone to beef up their online security and advise them in such matters. Why don't they?
This focus on Lois Lerner is a republican red herring. The real scandal at the IRS is the billions in fraudulent return payouts they make every year. The Republican-led congress has cut the IRS budget by a $billion, but it's a net loss when one factors in the loss due to the fraudulent return payouts (identity theft) and the reduced take from collections (about $8 billion). Read the article at the Boston Globe website. The IRS budget cut increased the deficit.
Any astronomers analyzing the signal can detect time-dependent variations in intensity. This effect complicates the analysis a bit, but it won't fool a scientist.
How does a 500 year data set apply to a 4.5 billion year old planet?
This is absurd. Do seconds not matter, because, days, months, years? Earthquakes occur in about a minute or so, right? Seconds, even. How can they apply to a 4.5 billion year old planet? The mass of the earth is about 6E24 kg. Does a scale measuring micrograms not function on the earth? Do single cells of your body not matter because, you know, there are trillions of them?
Here's a page with the basic science and statistics. Educate yourself.
I would recommend a book called 'How to lie with statistics.'
Yes, it is easy to lie with statistics. And it is nearly impossible to tell the (scientific) truth without statistics. I recommend a book with the title Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences by Daniel S. Wilks to you. It's pretty dense, but, you know, science is hard. It's not for weak brains.
Let's not miss the opportunity to point a finger of blame at the RFC, which says " to make the extension as versatile as possible, an arbitrary payload and a random padding is preferred, ". https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf... Arbitrary payload and a random padding for a heartbeat instead of a specified sequence of bits? This is very suspicious.
Andrew Gelman, statistics professor and blogger, has characterized the Technology Review article as "horrible" and a "monstrosity" on his blog. He is an MIT graduate. Correlation does not imply causation. It's clickbait, too.
Well, the posting system stripped off my carefully inserted links. WTF, slashdot? I'd post the code to illustrate, but it just gets stripped out. Here are some URLS to go with my post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01... Jane Brody on the hygiene hypothesis
http://www.slate.com/articles/... Broussard article on slate.com
The actual "disease" here is affluenza, or perhaps it's anxiety that overprotective mothers project onto their children. I grew up in a small town, had pets, played in the dirt every day. Nut allergies were unheard of. It's also very interesting that farmers and dirt poor people in 3d world countries don't get these allergies. This is a problem that city dwellers construct. It's called the hygiene hypothesis.
It is very suspicious that neither the BBC article nor the Lancet abstract report a mortality statistic. Is there some problem counting bodies of people who drop dead after nut ingestion? Please don't quote me the stupid 150 deaths/year number one sees in peanut allergy articles here in America. That number was an extrapolation from a single study done of farmers in a county in Minnesota. There were no deaths from anaphylactic shock identified in the study. Somehow, the authors waved their hands and estimated 150 deaths/yr in the entire US. Meredith Broussard covered this in an article published in Harper's in Jan 2008, "Everyone's Gone Nuts." It's behind a paywall, unfortunately. I recall that the article quoted a statistician at the CDC who said there was no more than a handful of deaths in the US from anaphylactic shock in a year. Of course, the food allergist nut cases (pun intended) attacked her in droves.
There is an article by Broussard online. It covers the money trail and details how some people profit from the nut allergy scare.
I think the nut allergies are a bit like the terrorism scare. It is massively overblown. Falls in bathtubs and lightning strikes are far greater threats.
The only physics bit that bugged me was the tether scene.
spoiler alert:
What bugged me far more were the "point and shoot" orbital transfers. To descend, you decelerate, and vice versa. Your average audience member has never heard of a Hohmann transfer orbit, after all. The transfer to the Chinese station was almost as bad as the star trek TNG where a radioactive space barge is towed (apparently radially) straight from a planet, through an asteroid belt, into its sun. Of course, it is difficult to imagine Bullock's character working out the burns for orbital insertions in zero g with no prior experience. She would need an app for that.
Despite these groaners, I greatly enjoyed the movie. It is far better than most anything Hollywood has done in this genre.
I can confirm this. I had coccidioidomycosis years ago and recovered on my own with no medical treatment. I have had no symptoms for more than 20 years. It was pretty bad when it hit me, I was weakened. The immediate effect is weakness. It laid me low for about two weeks. But then I recovered, and it faded away.
Crowds can be so ignorant.
What is this vulnerability of a dam? Other than earthquakes, volcanoes, erosion, design errors, and tons of dynamite, I mean. I'm reading speculation about how control systems and whatnot might be exposed to nefarious internet packets from China. Dams are generally rather sturdy constructions. That's why they hold back all those cubic kilometers of water. Is the worry that floodgates will be opened and downstream havoc will result? Surely there must be interlocks in place to prevent that.
Dams can fail. According to Wikipedia, the biggest dam failure in history was in China.