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Comment Some further detail (Score 2) 132

My parents were very good friends with the victim and his wife. His death had a large impact on his family and those that knew him. His death occurred only a few months ago. He was in otherwise good health until recently. Doctor's suspected something neurological but only diagnosed him with probable CJD *after* exploratory brain surgery. Needless to say, the entire hospital and staff were exposed; which prompted immediate attention from state and federal health officials. I'm actually surprised that news of this incident hasn't been publicized until now.

The family does believe that he contracted the disease during his out of the country travels, and *not* in Texas. As a previous poster mentioned, CJD is a tragic way to go. To the family, it was a sudden shock and a rapid deterioration with absolutely no hope for recovery. I have great admiration for his wife who stood by his side the entire time as she stood by and cared for him until the end.

Comment Re:More government control, that's the ticket (Score 1) 160

Oh, BTW, those 2 are pretty much same thing.
Child mortality drives life expectancy waaaay down. Is like, countries where life expectancy is 30. Isn't like people die at 30. If you made it to 30, most of the time you'll make it to 70. Is just that so many kids die it drives down the average.

There are calculations of life expectancy excluding under 3 or somesuch, but they are hard to find, and not as comprehensive.

Comment Re:More government control, that's the ticket (Score 2) 160

I've also read, although I'm too lazy to google for it, that where the US gets hit hard is infant mortality.
While part of that is immigrant population, poverty, another interesting factor is supposedly the US tries a lot harder to save preemies that would simply be considered stillborn elsewhere and not counted as infant mortality.

Comment Re:So this is what happens when Brendan Eich leave (Score 1) 361

Oh, and BTW, I find that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
works pretty darn well if you want to watch YouTube in Firefox without plugins.

You might have to fiddle with the addon pref "YouTube video loading method" and possibly hit the http://youtube.com/html5/ opt-in page first, but it usually just works.

Comment Re:So this is what happens when Brendan Eich leave (Score 3, Insightful) 361

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Well, here you are standing on principles. :)

You wanted to watch Youtube vids, so you run Google Chrome, which has even more liberal implementation of this DRM.

You didn't boycott Youtube.

So, this is why Firefox is implementing it. They no longer have the leverage. Google Chrome is bundled with Flash, with Adobe Acrobat, with Oracle Java. It is pushed on every google website people interact with - Search, Plus, Docs, Youtube, Translate. There's the google app store, ChromeOS, Android...

I doubt Brendan would have held out against this either. Firefox' choice is to accede to its users, or become even more marginalised.

I'm glad they are using their limited remaining leverage to try and at least ensure user privacy and security and offer something that is cross-platform, with an open source auditable wrapper and actually works under Linux.

Comment Re:Frequent hurricanes? (Score 1) 627

You'll get such things in any old red noise, which plenty of aspects of climate are.
I'm asking you what the cycle is... what is the length of time for example that you're claiming, and what do you think might be triggering it.

There *is* a sharp spike in ACE, and it might be related to, oh, who knows. Maybe the unusual strength of the solar cycle the past couple of cycles. Or maybe, oh, PDO or something.

But those aren't even necessarily cyclical. We don't know why the sun goes into depressions from time to time, and it might be simply chaotic.

The graph I was looking at, was really short. I'm curious how you could reliably extract any kind of cycle from just looking at it. So I wanted to know what your justification was.

Graphics

Valve Sponsors Work To Greatly Speed-Up Linux OpenGL Game Load Times 202

An anonymous reader writes "Valve Software has sponsored some interesting improvements developed by LunarG for the Mesa OpenGL library on Linux for deferred and threaded GLSL shader compilation. What these changes mean for users of the open-source Linux graphics drivers when running their favorite games is that OpenGL games now load a lot faster. As an example, the time from starting Dota 2 until the time actually being within the game is reduced by about 20 seconds on an Intel system. While Direct3D has offered similar functionality for a while, OpenGL has not, which has given it a bad reputation with regard to game load times until all shaders are compiled and cached — fortunately it's now addressed for OpenGL if using the Mesa Linux graphics drivers on a supported game."

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