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Comment Re: Entropy underlies all? (Score 4, Interesting) 197

There's a gravity wave experiment in Poland looking at the simulation question. They've found our universe to cheat between the minimum length that would need to be simulated and the Plank length - it's all noise down there where we expected to find signal.

There could also be an undiscovered reason, but the shape of the noise matches to a few sigma that predicted by the 'spherical projection' simulation model, so that's a good place to look.

Comment Oh boy, rewind to the Spanish Inquisition! (Score 3, Insightful) 719

First, pointing a finger and screeching 'DENIER' seems a lot like pointing the finger and screeching 'HERETIC', lending credence to the whole environmentalism-as-a-substitute-religion theory.
Beyond that, these scientists might find more traction for their beliefs if they could get away from the folks who are peddling 'solutions' for AGW. You know, the activists who want to make energy so expensive that poor people will have to live in dark, cold homes, and gasoline so expensive that they have to stay in those cold, dark homes.
I imagine, however, that any activist or scientist advocating the use of 'denier/(heritic)' has substituted Gaia for God, and would be very happy to burn their opponents at the stake.
As for me, I'm not qualified to analyze the science. Instead, I'll consider the matter when the people who say it's a problem act like it's a problem. Until their personal conduct matches their words- buying carbon credits ('indulgences') doesn't count- then it's just a continuation of prior climate panics.

Submission + - Scientists Discover That Exercise Changes Your DNA

HughPickens.com writes: The human genome is astonishingly complex and dynamic, with genes constantly turning on or off, depending on what biochemical signals they receive from the body. Scientists have known that certain genes become active or quieter as a result of exercise but they hadn’t understood how those genes knew how to respond to exercise. Now the NYT reports that scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have completed a study where they recruited 23 young and healthy men and women, brought them to the lab for a series of physical performance and medical tests, including a muscle biopsy, and then asked them to exercise half of their lower bodies for three months. The volunteers pedaled one-legged at a moderate pace for 45 minutes, four times per week for three months. Then the scientists repeated the muscle biopsies and other tests with each volunteer. Not surprisingly, the volunteers’ exercised leg was more powerful now than the other, showing that the exercise had resulted in physical improvements. But there were also changes within the exercised muscle cells’ DNA. Using technology that analyses 480,000 positions throughout the genome, they could see that new methylation patterns had taken place in 7,000 genes (an individual has 20–25,000 genes).

In a process known as DNA methylation, clusters of atoms, called methyl groups, attach to the outside of a gene like microscopic mollusks and make the gene more or less able to receive and respond to biochemical signals from the body. In the exercised portions of the bodies, many of the methylation changes were on portions of the genome known as enhancers that can amplify the expression of proteins by genes. And gene expression was noticeably increased or changed in thousands of the muscle-cell genes that the researchers studied. Most of the genes in question are known to play a role in energy metabolism, insulin response and inflammation within muscles. In other words, they affect how healthy and fit our muscles — and bodies — become. Many mysteries still remain but the message of the study is unambiguous. “Through endurance training — a lifestyle change that is easily available for most people and doesn’t cost much money,” says Sara Lindholm, “we can induce changes that affect how we use our genes and, through that, get healthier and more functional muscles that ultimately improve our quality of life.”

Comment Re:Quite possibly the stupidest vulnerability ever (Score 2) 118

"Oh no, Linux includes a "wheel" user group by default that grants superuser privileges to users in it! And someone could possibly add themselves to that group and gain root access!"

I think what they're trying to say is that Polkit has different AAA rules than sudo does, which you might not expect. So, gain mastery of Polkit and all the other new *Kits and systemd and whatnot if you expect to be able to run a secure server.

Even if they are publicity whoring and trying to get the press excited about a "Christmas-themed" vulnerability (I was waiting for "Redhat added PolKit and you won't believe what happened next..."), there's a kernel of truth in there that's worth knowing about.

And, yeah, I wouldn't expect a CVE to be issued.

Submission + - FBI Retaliates on North Korea for Sony Attacks (nationalreport.net)

barbariccow writes: Wednesday evening, over 1,100 documents were leaked on the Internet by a North American hacker group, revealing a lengthy list of North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un’s most embarrassing secrets, including medical records that detail his struggles with erectile dysfunction.

Comment cui bono? (Score 3, Interesting) 141

Who benefits from banning [X]? With near certainty those are the people who bought off whoever is in power (the partisan nonsense in TFS is a smokescreen to keep you distracted). It doesn't matter if it's the UAW or the Auto Dealer's Association that is behind the corruption - you should be disgusted that politicians deign to tell you what kinds of cars you may purchase. "Yes, massa."

Comment Re:How do we know? (Score 0) 182

Why should we believe anything the "senior intelligence officials" tell us? They have a profound record of lying.

Occam's Razor. It's pretty clear to the rest of us that a hero-worshiping despotic regime like North Korea might lash out against a company- or movie theaters- making a comedy about killing their national hero/despot.

That leads to my question- are you posting from Pyongyang?

Comment Sony's hack is their problem. Threats, though.... (Score 1) 182

I don't really give a hoot about Sony getting hacked. What I do care about is Americans being threatened for lawful activity by agents of a foreign government. (That is, 9/11 style attacks for screening The Interview.) That threat made what was Sony's problem into a national issue that our government ought to deal with. Unfortunately I don't see much chance of the D.C. set showing any spine or defending any principles.

Comment Re:Wildly premature question (Score 1) 81

If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.

How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.

Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.

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