Also have fun waiting 20 minutes for your microtransaction to clear.

The alternative answer is simpler: I simply don't care enough about most content providers to mourn or want to prevent their passing. They shut down, some other group opens up, better luck next time convincing me you aren't completely disposable. This is what newspapers are slowly discovering: the pay walls go up, and then you realize that they basically just report whatever is on someone's blog anyway.

It's a freaking port scan. It is not a denial of service attack. It is not remotely illegal and any private citizen is legally allowed to exactly the same and many researchers do without any need for special permissions.

This article could not possibly be any more pathetically sensationalist.

And so we circle back around to the rather thorough explanation given elsewhere in the comments on why you can't even get remotely close to computer simulations of biological systems, let alone infectious agents.

You clearly don't understand the field, its techniques or limitations because you've just dismissed literally every single molecular biology research technique and have just dismissed the vast majority of modern experimental methods.

And so once again: you have no idea how biological research works. Like you do realize tissue culture is a thing right? That you grow up viruses in suspensions of cells in a petri dish and study them, or in the case of this research (which is stated, plainly, in both the article and abstract of the paper) they infected mice and ferrets with the virus to study the effects.

Seems pretty obvious you didn't try and click through to the freely available abstract, which explains exactly why they did this. It's linked in the article in the OP (who notably also probably didn't read it).

Go and read the actual abstract. Or look above where I posted it. Because the article buries it under "PANIC", whereas the reasons to do this research are actually pretty obvious. I'll give you a hint: they didn't actually add anything. All they did was re-arrange the existing genome, and do some site-specific mutation tests.

I mean seriously. Skip the stupid article and actually read the abstract:

The entire point of this research was to test whether we're at risk of something like the 1918 flu virus reoccurring, since the current avian flu virus is strikingly similar. This strikes me as kind of an important thing to know, since it informs almost every aspect of disease-response planning.

The research was about taking avian flu, performing some fairly likely gene splicing of the type we know can happen during viral replication or incubation, and seeing if the observations of similarity are a problem. Turns out they are. But that also suggests that we might be able to make drugs which target the specific genes which confer the worst effects.

Unless of course we do something really stupid, like letting sensationalist bullshit convince people to go all anti-science.

Yes that has to be it. It couldn't possibly be because biological research is amazingly difficult, and of the tools we have to study cells (few) we have even fewer to study viruses.

The entire point of gain-of-function studies is that you need to do them in order to confirm a hypothesis about what genes in a virus are actually doing. If you don't do them, you can't know. Knock-out studies aren't enough - you can easily break a certain system, but it doesn't tell you that you actually understand how it functions.

Sensationalist articles like this are incredibly stupid and dangerous to boot. We only have the slim number of effective anti-viral drugs we do because of research like this. How else do you think they figure out which biological pathways are worth targeting to shutdown a virus?

And that's not all: the other side of gain-of-function is of course to try and predict future vectors. Since treating the common flu is usually a losing prospect at the moment, and it takes time to manufacture things, its important to determine if any given species could trivially gain extra functionality which would make it dangerous - since that affects decisions about what strains to grow up for the yearly flu vaccine.

The smart fridge is a product we could totally do and make useful if it wasn't stupid. A grid of load cells under all the storage racks, look down cameras, laser barcode scanner. Face and height recognition to identify users.

You could build a fridge which automatically tracked contents, calorie removal, maybe some electronic noses keyed to food spoilage emissions? UV lamps to self-sterilize when closed....its a space where a lot could be accomplished.

The Many sings to us... ...even technically true with SmartTVs.

Apparently you can't tell the difference between these two things?

Seriously, what is the major malfunction of device makers that basic, guest share Samba support is never put into these devices? Everyone has it, everyone comprehends it. Just let us access a damn SMB share as a list of files and play things.

No one anywhere, ever, cares about the clusterfuck that is DLNA.

I'm hearing a lot of reference to the Mill, but I'm very much unclear on whether they can actually do what they claim to do. The CPU isn't implemented and we don't have real world data on it, as far as I understand. History is littered with revolutionary seeming designs which in practice turned out to have very marginal or non-existent gains due to more frequent then expected edge cases and the like.

The feeling I get from the Mill is that it sounds a little bit too much like the monolithic/microkernel debate. Each has its advantages, but since both are very complicated it simply turns out that whoever can do the grindy parts of the work wins. x86 is the designated CPU architecture whipping boy, but the work to make it work has been done. We're not really paying for that legacy in any way which moving away from wouldn't have extreme costs associated with.

Conversely, sudden nutrient imbalances are kind of a bad thing to an ecology a lot of the time. Deadzone's form from undersea oil spills becaue the anerobic organisms take over, eat all the oil, and kill off everything else. Then that windfall eventually runs out and they of course all die off.

There's a reason for that too though, since they explicitly deploy and fly Viper's in the atmosphere several times during the run of the show. So they'd have to be at least aerodynamic enough for that (they also imply that atmosphere use uses way more fuel then space combat, relatively).