That's pretty silly, the mask thing. It's the people INFECTED with the virus who should be wearing masks, not healthy people trying to avoid the disease. (but then infected people should be quarantined in a hospital and not walking about on the street, so...)

What people should be doing instead is wearing thick, heavy gloves in public places. Almost all flu virus transmissions happen from your hand touching a virus-coated surface and then touching your face with your hand. Wearing gloves means that your skin won't come into contact with the virus, and the thick heavy nature of the gloves means you're not likely to forget the fact that you're wearing gloves and thus will avoid touching your face with them.

I clicked on the link and saw all the pictures. Sadly the Colosseum still looks like a ruin, and the government of Italy has no money to halt the decay let alone a restoration to former glory.

As a Rome Total War player and an aficionado of all things Roman, I would love to see the Colosseum as it was originally. Yes I realize a restoration would cost billions and modern Italy as a PIIG nation cannot afford it. It really speaks to the immense power, wealth and engineering skill of the ancients that they BUILT this thing so long ago.

I still keep hoping that some internet billionaire will take it upon himself as his life achievement to do a full restoration and that I will get to see it before I die. Barring that, I hope someone will do a very high quality rendering of every inch of the original Colosseum that we can navigate freely in Oculus VR. Maybe even host virtual games with thousands of online participants and spectators.

The 3D feature was called "dynamic perspective". The heavy battery drain was not actually from the gpu processing/rendering, it was because the feature needed 4 separate cameras (one on each corner of the phone) that had its own access to the facial recognition software.

Interesting read: http://www.fastcompany.com/303...

Their denial by itself doesn't mean much, since as you say they would deny it if they were responsible or not. However in this case it's quite possible they had nothing to do with it. Cyber criminals living in China != government of PRC

What would the Chinese gov't possibly want with the data stolen from Office of Personnel Management? Use the employee names and social security numbers to make stolen credit card purchases? Commit identity theft and take the employees' tax refund checks?

The type of data stolen here doesn't mesh with the stuff Chinese gov't usually steals: high tech industry data to help their domestic industry, military secrets like plans to the F-22, etc. It seems unlikely they would use up a zero-day exploit to break into a employee database and steal social security numbers.

who used to dictate the placement of every pixel on Amazon website, according to Steve Yegge.

Fire smartphone had 3-D features that required immense processing power (which meant sacrificing battery life and other things) and therefore written off by the engineers as being not practical. But Bezos was in love with the features and he basically said the phone ships with 3-D or you're all fired.

I can't see the Amazon game ending well.

They're having a hard time trying to restore from 8,000 year old backups (wooly mammoth).... 1 million is way beyond DNA specifications.

Carbon crystal storage is probably most likely to meet 1 million year MTBF requirement

what Tesla was to ipod

by roaming around the body and killing cancer cells.

You heard it here first.

I hear medical breakthroughs like this all the time, where a cheap simple device will replace expensive drugs. Then nothing happens and it's not heard of again.

Is it because A. it doesn't work as well as inventors hoped or has too many side effects, or B. pharma industry silences them by killing them or paying them to hush it up? Help me out here.

I don't know of any country on earth where heroin, methamphetamine etc. can be bought and sold freely among consenting adults. So you probably should say something is wrong with human society.

Shaped charge. You don't need any skill or knowledge, just get a hold of an old Soviet RPG round designed for armor penetration. Those things will penetrate tank armor and kill everyone inside... bulletproof glass would be like nothing. No sniper needed.

Robot science missions are great, but they're not the end goal in space exploration (and they shouldn't be). If all we did was launch Voyager and Mars Rover type missions every few years, there would be no need to develop anything beyond the ULA Atlas rocket. There would be no Saturn V, no Falcon HR etc.

Humans *want* to step on the moon and Mars and other places, so that gives us an incentive to develop the means to get there.

Correct. For the past ~2000 years, rise of trade, urban culture and sophisticated economies meant smart people tended to become more successful (wealthy) and breed more children. For example in the Far East nations, surest way for an ordinary person to raise your social status and income was to be really smart and score high on the social service exam which would lead to a government bureaucrat position. With the newfound wealth you could afford to not only start a family, but also a second family. Having second and third wives/concubines and huge families was socially acceptable and actually expected of someone in high position.

Incorrect. The forces that led to intelligent people breeding more children have stopped completely and reversed course in the 20th century.

How about setting up an earth-made prefab hab inside a Martian cave/lava tube? Then you get the radiation shielding benefits without having to launch or move any regolith.

I would agree that a moon base is more plausible than a Mars base. However, both endeavors are gonna cost a shit ton of money anyways, so why not go for the cool option that offers more future returns?

Also an escape craft to bring you back to Earth is not an issue since people are signing up for a one-way trip. Not necessarily talking about the Mars One thing here, which seems to me like a scam to collect "registration fees" from gullible people. But generally speaking I think a NASA or ESA mission to Mars should be a one-way trip as well. And as we found out recently, there is no shortage of volunteers.