Burma Shave.

Ok, how about this:

"Someone at Apple HQ sneezed."

Better?

Oh, now I went ahead and read TFA. It's all complicated and confusing.

The current thinking is indeed that viruses are an offshoot of 'modern' life (modern being sometime after the archea). These critters, because they contain gene sequences that seem to predate the prokaryote - eukaryote split and because we know that bacteria just love to transfer genetic information 'horizontally' - that is by tossing bits of DNA and RNA around so some unrelated organism can incorporate it into their genetic apparatus as opposed to simply eating it - that it may be that these big viruses started sometime after the RNA hypothesis took hold and created the first self replicating organisms. Or at least helped those first 'organisms' diverge and multiply.

At least it's a testable hypothesis. Once you have sequenced a number of the big virus genes and compare them you would presumably get an idea how old they are.

It would seem that even if this mechanism held, the critters would have had a long time to morph into another ecological niche so it would be hard to pin down what their function was (if any) at the beginning of life. But perhaps the Central Dogma is barking up the wrong tree after all.

It can't reproduce entirely on it's own, so it's not 'free living'. It does need a host. It's just it doesn't need the host for some of the tasks that most viruses need the host for.

It would seem that, instead of being a primitive form that was at the base of the the genetic tree, it's more likely to be an offshoot. It hijacked some additional molecular machinery from an extant organism rather that figuring it out on it's own.

It is easy to make good DACs these days. Basically any DAC, barring a messed up implementation, is likely to sound sonically transparent to any other in a normal system. When you look at the other limiting factors (amp, noise in the room, speaker response, room reflections, etc) you find that their noise and distortion are just way below audibility. Ya, maybe if you have a really nice setup with a quiet treated room, good amps, and have it set for reference (105dB peak) levels you start to need something better than normal, but that isn't very common. Even then you usually don't have to go that high up the chain to get something where again the DAC is way better than other components.

Now that said, there can be a reason to get a soundcard given certain uses. For example you don't always want to go to an external unit, maybe you use headphones. In that case, having a good headphone amp matters and onboard sound is often remiss in that respect (then again, so are some soundcards). Also even if you do use an external setup, you might wish to have the soundcard do processing of some kind. Not so useful these days, but some games like to have hardware accelerated OpenAL.

Regardless, not a big deal in most cases. Certainly not the first thing to spend money on. If you have $50 speakers, don't go and buy a $100 soundcard. If you have a $5000 setup, ok maybe a soundcard could be useful, but only in certain circumstances.

As a side note, the noise in a PC isn't a big issue. Properly grounding/shielding the card deals with it. A simple example is the professional LynxTWO, which is all internal yet has top notch specs, even by today's standards. http://audio.rightmark.org/tes...

This polling data is after the war was already started, so it doesn't count. It is much harder to get out of a war than it is to avoid it in the first place. So it is only effective to oppose starting the war. In later years there were hundreds (eventually over a thousand) of Americans in North Vietnamese prison camps. Thousands more were missing in action. Tens of thousands were dead, and their deaths would be "in vain" if we pulled out (there are no "sunk costs" in politics). North Vietnam was completely intransigent on all these issues. It was called a "quagmire" for a reason.

This is revisionist nonsense. Vietnam was the most popular war in US history. At the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, 90% of American's supported deeper involvement. No other war has ever had so much support. For instance, only 70% of Americans thought the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a good idea. Of course, support for any war declines as it drags on, especially if we appear to be losing. But it is a lot easier to get into a war than out, so it is only the support at the beginning that matters.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed the Senate with 98 votes. The two senators that opposed it were both voted out of office at the next election. It is silly to say that this war was forced on the American people by the politicians, when the truth is that it was fear of the voters that pushed the politicians into supporting the war.

I live in California, and I can assure you that competence is not a requirement here.

People don't get driver's licenses when they are born. Thousands of people born in the 1890s were still driving in the 1990s, and a few were still driving in the 2000s.

I see the plot of a new Micheal Bay (or maybe J.J. Abrams) movie: The US military, unable to get qualified recruits to fight the new Zombie wars, takes a cue from the Zombie playbook and develops the technology to bring life old soldiers. After a bit of a difficult start, the program exceeds all expectations until the previously dead soldiers revolt at being put back in the grave and bring Washington to it's knees by filing for Social Security benefits.

So they can't go to Syria or Belarus. That doesn't seem like a big limitation.

That is easy, when you flash the firmware on many of the high security types of systems it increments a counter when the bootloader loads the new firmware. they simply look at the counter and see if it matched the last time it was in for an update or was reported on the last update.

It's as simple as a small cheap i2C eeprom hidden away on the system that is not easily read from the running OS. the hacker would haveto disassemble the system hardware and basically reverse engineer the board to discover it. I have seen them hidden under other chips to save board space, but doing that would hide it from most hackers.

Intelligence is the ability to formulate an effective initial response to a novel situation.

"Formulate" is important, because intelligence is thinking not acting. "Initial response" is important, to rule out simply cycling through every possible response by trial and error. And "novel" is important, because intelligence is more than just remembering what you did last time.

There are two TLS extensions that fix these problems - one is including your certificate fingerprint in DNS and the other is multiple signatures. Both have good standards and the industry is painfully slow to adopt them.

It is odd that they use "potassium atoms" as a measurement for something made out of silicon. A silicon atom has a diameter of about 230pm, so 7nm is about 30 silicon atoms.