The durability is impressive. It's not like cleanroom fabrication and high-purity metallurgy were exactly top of the line in 1840, so I would have naively guessed that some mixture of corrosion and non-current-generating side reactions among impurities or airborne contaminants would have trashed it in less than a century, possibly a lot less, depending on the exact arrangement of the battery, even if the energy density is totally plausible in physics-experiment-land.

Snakebites are a bit of an edge case: the production of antivenoms essentially involves inducing an immune response (in a convenient, usually large, animal) and then extracting and purifying the neutralizing protein produced. So, it is very much the case that you can prime an immune system to recognize and respond to venom.

The trouble is that snakes tend to (in the case of actually dangerous snakebites, a dry strike is just a couple of puncture wounds) introduce a substantial amount of venom into the wound, and the venoms frequently kill (or cause nasty localized tissue destruction, there are lots and lots of neat variations) substantially faster than the human immune system can synthesize the necessary counteragent, even if the person has prior exposure.

An antivenom has the advantage of being a relatively massive amount of the correct counteragent, ready to be injected into the bloodstream faster than you could synthesize it yourself.

For the less dangerous venoms, and the lower-volume strikes, acquired immunity is more useful.

I've sometimes wondered whether the techniques used to produce vaccines against exogenous drugs could be modified to produce vaccines that suppress endogenous ones. If enforced nicotine withdrawl is unpleasant, I can only imagine that, say, losing the effect of endorphins might really ruin your day...

Aside from the crass pragmatists' "Well, I bet I can develop a drug that compensates for weakness of character and lack of willpower faster than most of the population can develop strength of character and lots of willpower..." Why does this bother you?

Is there evidence that people actually develop more willpower(rather than just smoking more) when these 'replacements' are available? If there isn't, surely reduction in smoking related mortality is a win regardless of willpower, and even if there is; exactly how many people of weak character are on the acceptable losses list?

On the more theoretical side, would you condemn a drug that was actually a general-purpose willpower simulant? That actually gave the person taking it all the changes associated with 'strong will' while it is in their system? Or would you consider that to be a great breakthrough, a drug that produces a highly valuable personality trait?

It is my (layman's) understanding that nicotine is not entirely harmless; but can also have some positive effects, and overall is considered a fairly low risk compound at suitable doses(it'll kill you good and proper in quantity).

Given that, why so much work trying relatively esoteric techniques for nicotine vaccines, or low-success behavioral interventions for smoking cessation, when the only real problem that is actually killing smokers right and left is the fact that they get their nicotine by huffing a grab bag of unpleasant incomplete combustion products?

Is it that there is something particularly compelling about cigarettes, such that even people with access to nicotine by other means still seek them out? Is it just an echo of drug warrior concern that somebody, somewhere, might be employing a psychoactive without suitable risk of death or imprisonment?

I don't get it.

Ah, that was ambiguous. I meant that there are zillions of 32-bit ARM devices in the field. Only a hilariously tiny percentage of those are RT devices; but given the absurdly gigantic number of ARM architecture CPUs shipped, and the fact that 64-bit ARM is still very new and a relatively modestly player even in higher end stuff(much less the 'just a bit more than a microcontroller' market, where it probably never will be, I'm assuming that 32-bit ARM is going to be sticking around for a good while yet. RT, Not So Much.

Unlikely. The effective death of Windows RT only affects some 32-bit ARM devices, of which there are still about a zillion in the field, and more rolling off the production line as we speak(and likely to continue to be for some time to come, unless ARM Ltd. decides to piss off every customer who cares about cheap CPUs and has no need to even touch the boundaries of a 4GB memory space.

The non-RT 'Surface Pro' devices were 64 bit x86s from the start(though there were a few devices that shipped with 64 bit CPUs and 32 bit OSes because Intel didn't have some feature working quite right in 64 bits at the time); but are unaffected, so irrelevant in any case.

This will also have no effect on systems that either have 32-bit Atoms, or 32-bit UEFI(will 64 bit Windows boot from that? it certainly caused a schism among mac models at one point), which are all x86.

You are certainly getting safer as time goes on in ignoring 32 bit OSes, especially x86; but this announcement will have no effect.

That isn't strictly true, unless you ignore the fact that x86s are available(what they'd cost if Intel weren't attempting to buy marketshare might be less exciting) at more or less the same power envelope as the punchier ARM SoCs. They still have nothing on the low end of what ARM can do; but that hardly matters for phones and tablets.

Windows/x86 devices are pretty common in similar sizes and prices to Android or iOS on ARM(and, actually, some Android/x86 devices are virtually indistinguishable from a Windows/x86 device from the same vendor until powered up). There is also still the more-or-less-complete-NT; but somewhat different UI and application layer in WP8, which isn't being axed.

I'm not sure why anyone would mourn the worthless abortion that was Windows RT. All the cruft of full Win8(more, in fact, since the 'WIMBoot' feature never made it over there), including a full desktop because they couldn't be bothered to port Office to their own new UI; but with pointless cryptographic lockdown to the wonderful world of a mostly impoverished app store. All with the mediocrity of a Tegra3, and at relatively modest savings over a real computer! What's not to love?

If they actually wanted to have a go at making NT multi-architecture again, that'd be one thing; but taking pretty much all of Windows 8, then gimping it just because you have a hard-on for Apple's app store success? An idea that stupid deserves death.

It depends on exactly what they mean by 'can't upgrade our computer systems'.

If that just means that, because our budget is smaller, we are being forced to go from an X year refresh plan to an X+1 or X+2 year plan, well, too bad, so sad. That may be strictly true; but it's also one of the (within limits) easy things to adjust as an IT budget moves around. There's a line below which it just isn't worth tossing near-new gear, and a line above which keeping legacy systems in production starts to cost more, sometimes radically more; but modest modifications to the basic systems are easy.

If they are saying that 'We can't cut Legacy Horror X off life support and adopt Shiny System Y; because of budget uncertainties', it is very likely that they are correct: A transition between two systems is not a fun time to hit a budget freeze that leaves you with almost zero room to deal with the unexpected. I don't know how urgently they actually do need to migrate; but if that is what they are talking about they are at least talking about a plausible issue.

I agree that it's entirely possible that the IRS audits more than would be maximally efficient, and also entirely possible that they choose targets poorly.

Where I'm less sure is the notion that funding issues would necessarily nudge them toward socially optimal auditing: There are three basic ways of lowering auditing spending: You can audit less, you can audit simpler cases(who will be faster to charge or exonerate), and you can avoid auditing hard cases(per hour, browbeating the financially clueless is going to be cheaper than dueling with somebody's hotshot tax attorney).

If your problem is strictly that you are auditing too many people, and you audit fewer to save money, all is well. Otherwise, though, the outcome may not be so good: Particularly if you are under pressure to hit some target number, picking on simple targets(who are still inconvenienced; but only have a 1040EZ on which to attempt creativity, and are more likely to not have all that much money in any case, so are probably less worthwhile) or avoiding hard targets(who are likely to be the people with the most to potentially hide, and the most complex situations in which to hide it; but also the ones most willing to put up a robust defense, making them more than usually worth a look; but less than usually attractive).

I have no wish to defend the frequency and distribution of audits, merely to express the strong suspicion that audit frequency is not terribly likely to decrease the way you would want it to as the audit budget does. It may well be that audits as a system need a thorough working over with the cluebat; but mere defunding is a different process.

The association between 'loud' and 'powerful' is a trifle odd given that noise (like heat) is an inefficiency, a mere byproduct of the vehicle's attempt to do its real job.

If all engines were of exactly equal (in)efficiency, using sound as a proxy for power would be sensible enough, since more powerful engines would bleed more waste noise; but this is hardly the case. Some engines achieve enormous power in near total silence, some fart-can nonsense is deliberately made louder, possibly even at the expense of performance.

Is the fascination with vehicles that make loud noises some sort of primal thing, that we'll probably never manage to breed out of people, related to some retro equivalent of the competition between bullfrogs trying to croak more loudly and deeply to impress mates with their inferred size; or is it a much more recent development, largely tied to the period of American automobile manufacturing where engine designs and manufacturing tolerances were a bit crude; but The World's Greatest Nation could always just add more cylinders and bigger fins to achieve the desired effect, and thus likely to die out once the population turns over and most people have only been exposed to relatively well damped and comparatively efficient IC engines, or to electrics?

Using your ears to judge a car likely won't go out of style(since your ability to sense the acceleration of an engine capable of ramping up like inertia is somebody else's problem is partially based there); but sound seems so...crude.

Indeed, it is perfectly possible that their IT strategy is utter crap(though it's also possible that their IT team is a bunch of plucky, hardworking, and dedicated people pulling off amazingly good results per dollar; I don't have the data to judge either way, and I'm pretty sure that either condemnation or praise for an IT operation of that size wouldn't fit in a slashdot post, though if anybody does know anything, I'd certainly be curious); but I've never understood the desire for an organization that wields a potentially dangerous, but necessary, power to be more dysfunctional and erratic in doing so.

I realize you are just grinding a hatchet here; but 'scientific consensus' differs from 'democracy' in the minor detail that 'experiments' and 'data' are involved.

In the short to medium term it can (and has) been the case that scientific consensus is following some mixture of confusion and groupthink into error(or, as some suspect the more theoretical aspects of physics of doing, into an unverifiable morass of elegant but meaningless mathematics); long term, though, it's hard to both ignore the world and generate useful results.

If you actually need the dynamic CMS features; but want something relatively set-and-forget, then yeah. CMSes can save a great deal of work over roll-your-own, even with the patching; but set-and-forget they are not, with Wordpress having a particularly bad rap.

Or, if all you really need is the various 'automagic' formatting, styling, layout, internal links, etc. that a CMS will do for free; but don't need much dynamism, TheRaven64's suggestion above is a good one. In the absence of a nice juicy web server exploit, or a serious misconfiguration, static content is much, much, easier to keep safe.

I'm pretty sure I've even seen arrangements where people use a CMS(possibly even wordpress, it was a while ago so the details are fuzzy) internally to get the easy editing and various automatic link updates and so on; but only expose a static snapshot, updated after each change made internally, to the world. Doesn't work if you actually need all the fancy CMS features to be available to the world; but if you basically just want the CMS as a less-broken website editor/generator, it's a fair compromise.

Bah! Who needs IT peons when you can buy 'Security Solutions' from your favorite vendors? Filthy neckbeards just spend their time pointing out additional problems that they claim to need more money to solve. Who needs people like that?