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Comment Re:Memorizing site-unique passwords isn't possible (Score 2) 267

Yeah, the suggested method for generating passwords generates needlessly long passwords. The total entropy is good, but the entropy per character is pretty poor. You get much better entropy per character with abbreviation passwords, where you have a sentence or group of random words and you use the first letter from each, or second, or last, or alternating, or whatever suits you. It's still not as much entropy per character as a random pattern, but it's much better than writing out full words - and pops into your head just as fast (because it is, in essence, the same).

Comment Re:what will be more interesting (Score 5, Insightful) 662

Are people really going to miss yet another totally fake show pretending to be reality? Is it just because this one combined cars and Daily Mail-style politics?

Sorry, but I have no sympathy for a primadonna for whom curses at an employee for 20 minutes and then physically assaults him up for half a minute (without any resistance from his victim) before someone pulled him off, all because the Clarkson's food wasn't warm. And this is hardly the first time Clarkson has behaved like this, he was already on "final warning" after a string of other incidents. What befalls him is his own bloody fault. And all of the abuse that the victim got over this whole thing... my favorite tweet on the subject was:

"Man assaults another man and victim receives abuse because people can’t watch a TV show about cars. Bravo society. "

Comment Most of Japan is very beautiful... (Score 4, Interesting) 197

.... but their beaches, usually not so much. So hopefully this won't be too much of an eyesore. Japan is usually pretty good about trying to fit human-made structures into the landscape; my friends and I had a running joke when we were there: "They have the prettiest drainage ditches here!" ;) That said, a 250-mile long, 4-story "anything", that's going to be hard to make look nice.

I'm rather curious about what kind of concrete they're going to use. Japan has been a pioneer in the use of fiber-reinforced concrete, I wonder if they'll use that in lieu of steel that may need cathodic protection in such a high salt environment?

Comment Re:Keyword "apparently" (Score 1) 111

Well, not exactly. The answer to the question of how the immune system can defeat a foe that is mutating and evolving so quickly is "it also is mutating and evolving quickly". Immunoglobulin genes in B cells mutate very rapidly. Those whose antigen binds best with an invader are stimulated to reproduce (and evolve more), ultimately differentiating into plasma B cells (whose job it is to mass produce antibodies) and memory B cells (which stay alive for long periods of time, allowing the body to "remember" how to fight off an invader that it fought off in the past).

That said, this only applies to genes responsible for antibody production, and only in B cells.

Comment Re:floppy disk (Score 2) 111

Where do you get that? Wikipedia says that the human genome is 3,23473 billion base pairs. I mean, you could compress that to fit on a CD, but it won't fit at one byte per BP. Won't even fit at 2 bits per BP.

And if we want to think of a BP like a letter in a piece of code, with an average programming code line length of say 15 non-whitespace characters, that corresponds to a program 216 million lines long. That'd be no little program...

Of course, only a tiny fraction of our DNA codes for what we would consider to be the "interesting stuff".

Comment Re:Given that humans still struggle... (Score 1) 129

Part of the premise to the problem is that you know it will work. If you'd rather, you can look at the scenario of a doctor with several dying patients who need transplants deciding to kill one of his other patients to save the lives of all of the others. It's a question of where the boundaries to sacrificing one to save multiple becomes troubling to people. Knowing how to define these boundaries are critical to being able to program acceptable "morality" in robots.

Comment Re:He's just in a hurry to get to the future (Score 1) 78

I don't vote party, except that I avoid both D and R whenever there's a candidate who doesn't want to put half the people I know in prison for smoking pot.

If anyone but Bruce Rauner had run against Quinn I would have voted for the Republican, becuase Quinn just wasn't a good governor. I think Rauner will be even worse, maybe even as bad as Ryan(R) or Blago(D), both were crooks. I don't know if Rauner is a crook but his policies are terrible. There were only two named on the ballot, so it was indeed a choice between two evils.

Look, Republicans are against the Social Security I paid into all my life and am now enjoying, against unions, without which I would have no pension, against the single payer health care system which has countries with it in place enjoying half the costs we face with far less infant mortality and longer life spans (Obamacare is really Romneycare in disguise); against the Medicare I again paid into and will get in a couple of years; against food stamps (that's simply un-Christian, yet they claim to be Christians?); against taxes (again, an un-Christian stance). Tell me, what Democrat views that the Republicans don't share are detrimental to me, a middle class retired guy?

But both parties are against pot legalization, for our insanely long copyrights, and quite a few more where there really isn't a valid choice.

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