According to MIT's Press Release (and their published works): "Most of the tests reported in this study were done in human and animal cells cultured in the lab, but the researchers also tested DRACO in mice infected with the H1N1 influenza virus. When mice were treated with DRACO, they were completely cured of the infection. The tests also showed that DRACO itself is not toxic to mice."

This may not pan out to being the panacea promised, but it certainly does work inside of animals. There are tons of questions about how such a drug should be used if it were to become available and pass testing, whether it should be reserved for viruses that will kill you very quickly, or whether it should be prescribed to keep people missing work from a cold or flu, but the fact is, there's something worth researching here.

And it's not like MIT's not going to publish the biggest claim they possibly can to draw in as much research funding as possible for this, even if it does turn out to only be effective against a handful of virus types, or if it does just kill the host organism or a incredibly significant portion of their remaining cells, re-releasing viruses into their systems in the case of long-term virus infections such as Herpes or HIV.

Still, the researchers are right that there's not a lot of hope the viruses have resistance-wise, as there's nothing for them to actively select around. The viruses that could survive this kind of onslaught are ones that can deliver a payload while remaining an intact virus, which would require some kind of in-virus payload replication, which would make it... you know.. not a virus anymore, some kind of protobacteria. We just wonder if the host can also survive the damage wrought by this drug.

If you had read your own link, you'd realize that it in no way invalidates the assertion that cats and humans are the only animals born deaf. It simply states that pearl-coated dogs are likely to inherit a degenerative neural disease which kills the auditory neurons during their lifetime; they are born with fully-to-partially functional hearing.

Still, it seems incredibly unlikely that only humans and cats are born deaf.

This is the iPhone we're talking about, how'd you manage to get a signal in the first place!?

(Must have one of those Vulcan pinch phone holders...)

It is likely that Apple uses Adobe's Open Source Media Framework to develop their plugins.

In this case, you're completely wrong. Apple has its own complete PDF stack which is used from its display server (Quartz, which is itself derived from Display PDF) up; the advantage is that you can dump a PDF from basically anywhere (what's on screen if it isn't 3D, offscreen widgets, etc) and print that exactly to your documentation, etc. It would make less than no sense for Apple to license Adobe's code, since it would be a complete duplication of something already in their software stack.

Or, in actuality, why the hangup on that aspect ratio anyways?

The loss of vertical resolution is really killer if you do anything like writing/programming/reading long webpages. Sure, you can up-end a 16:9 monitor and gain quite a bit, but then you lose horizontal resolution (which isn't as big a problem for the earlier tasks, but really destroys e.g. gaming, video watching, etc.)

My solution was to buy two 22" monitors and mount one of them in the tall fashion and the other regularly, but it always turns heads, and I'd really just love to have a huge 24-27" 5:4 monitor (with the same pixel density too.. if at all possible).

Shame it's Patent Pending.

Yeah, all several hundred billion pieces of it, after it smacks into the ocean. If the plane retains even a small fraction of the velocity it picks up in the test flight before impact, it's a goner.

GStreamer on Linux, QuickTime on OS X, or DirectShow on Windows

Or, GStreamer on Linux, OS X and Windows, since GStreamer supports playback through QuickTime and DirectShow natively. Why code for three frameworks when one portable one does everything you need?

The new indicator widgets are wide and don't seem to re-orient vertically,

That's not GNOME, that's Canonical. And there's a simple solution: don't use it. Just remove it and everything will go back to normal.

Marvel vs Capcom, as another example. But really, these types of games tend to be really fun. It's a shame IP law has made them more or less impossible to do correctly without someone bitching about their rights being trampled over.

Now they're doing the right thing and we get news how they refuse to patch the systems which .dll files have been damaged? Welcome to slashdot.

Why is not patching the system acceptable? Shouldn't it just determine if the DLL was damaged and replace it with the correct, working patched version if it is? Sorry, but automatically throwing their hands up and saying "you're fucked" is the Microsoft shortcut for not being able to fix their own security problems.

Well first of all, since it makes no sense for me to reiterate them here: wtfjs

Secondly, Prototype-based OO is quite ugly. Sure, it's workable, and you can argue that it's the more pure way to do OO as it emphasizes object orientation and encapsulates better, however, any way you try to sugar coat it, Javascript makes it a lot uglier than it needs to be.

Thirdly, the fact that it's a defacto standardized language, a lot like the web itself was defacto'd into existence rather than people trying to follow standards (which came later), each implementation is different enough that what will work in one does not necessarily work in another. While this is a lot better today than it used to be, there are still places where this is really rough.

Still, you can point out flaws and inconsistencies in any language, but the web-related technologies tend to be a lot more, well let's call them "special" (just to make them feel better).

Well you are definitely right in that you don't follow: "what is the smallest unit then" "it depends on what we're talking about." Planck areas or volumes would be much smaller than 10^-44.

Depends on what we're talking about. Probably Planck units is about the best we can do, so starting with ~10^-100-ish would be a good first guess.

...And the runtime environment has millions of lines of #ifdef __LINUX__, ...

Whether you hide behind a runtime is entirely irrelevant. Because the APIs differ between OSes, somewhere, someone had to write some nasty sticky portability shims.