It has the advantage of once having been worth something. People have a fondness for it. It might tempt back some of the old users. Social networks have an advantage in that they're worth more when more people are there, and that history might just barely let them leverage that.

The main value of the site, at least to me, was always its user base. I didn't RTFA because the commenters would often be able to give me a better summary of what was really going on. Especially when TFA was clickbait; I could see why it was clickbait without having to read it myself. Or for sciencey stuff that's out of my domain, Slashdot often had people who could explain it at my level. (That is, more than the average layman, but less than a grad student in that field.)

I'm not gonna get my hopes up, but I'll note that I'm still here, though mostly lurking. There may be others waiting for an improvement to the site's management to contribute more.

The title of the paper is "Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens". Note the absence of any question marks or qualifiers such as "could...?"

Dozens of the emails provided by Hillary Clinton have been retroactively classified as part of the review of her emails as they are screened for public release.

Nice. Retroactively classify information, then open a criminal inquiry over the release of classified information.

Absolutely no political motivation behind this witch hunt-- I mean investigation.

Especially with the large number of small devices in the mix. Increasingly, web sites are targeting tiny screens. Which actually makes the column feature moot; this feature would have come in handy a while ago.

Fortunately, if done properly, it degrades nicely. Small screen, one column. Wide screen, several columns (which has advantages over scrolling, since it's easier for the eye to jump a column than to keep track of a position during a scroll.)

It comes from cosmic rays, which are roughly constant over time. They're not completely constant, and so we already have to calibrate our C14 tests. (There's a whole bit of weirdness in the way we report dates as the calibration itself has been refined over time, and when you read an old document you need to know exactly how it was calibrated.)

But the variations in intensities happen over centuries, rather than years. And instead of covering the whole world, it's going to be localized by the varying factors of how much CO2 was emitted (as well as nuclear bomb testing, which has been making dating confusing for quite some time).

It may not be all that important, since it applies mainly to new objects, and we don't really need to date them if we actually know how old they are. And very recent objects are always problematic with respect to carbon dating; it's usually precise to decades, rather than years. But archaeologists from a thousand years from now may find this era very confusing.

It's not gonna help, though. Climate change doesn't wipe out humanity. It may wipe out other, less tenacious species. And it'll kill tens, maybe hundreds of millions of humans, and cost into the trillions of dollars. You might count it as just punishment, but it won't eliminate the problem. (It might teach them a lesson... but I doubt it.)

I find the lack of columns one of the more striking failures of CSS design. They don't appear to have consulted with anybody who actually knew anything about why things get laid on on a page the way they do. Line lengths are one of the more important factors in determining how easy it is to read something; the eye has a hard time tracking back on wide texts. Default layouts try to compensate with wide spacing, which just wastes a lot of space (and looks, at least to me, very unappealing).

I look forward to other browsers implementing this, so that web page designers (especially for responsible web pages) start using it instead of the hacks and design compromises they're currently forced into.

Poor people need to visit hospital more often, as their health is worse. And where better to frack than among poor people, whose political representatives don't give a crap about their welfare?

It's extremely impressive that they can do this without making to many false positives or negatives. Just picking faces out of a scene is already a dicey proposition. Being able to model "human" versus "non-human" when you get only a side or back view is a nifty trick, one we associate with full intelligence and not just heuristics. And you need to get it right the vast majority of the time, since if you get pareidolia'd into thinking that a piece of junk or a pothole is a human, you're going to need a lot of supervision. Or worse, mis-identify a human as a piece of junk and run over it.

It's clear that they're getting it right enough, often enough, and I'm really looking forward to letting them chauffeur me around. So apparently they can get it close enough without full AI. I wouldn't have said beforehand that I was certain it was possible.

It really is quite amazing to me that the one place that has an ideological interest in not believing in climate change (and the economic push to ensure that nothing is done about it) is the one place that's actually getting colder. If I were the type to believe in such a thing, I'd feel like somebody was playing a cosmic joke on us.

I don't think that the Republican party would really be taking all that different of a stance if the southern US were hitting heat records year after year... but it sure does make it easy on them to justify that stance to the public. To accept that it's going on requires believing in government reports rather than the evidence of your eyes, and since they've spent the last four decades insisting that the government has it out for you, they get a kind of perfect storm for denialism.

A human will, for the forseeable future, be potentially far greater at this kind of improvisational disaster-avoidance than any computer when dealing with limited data in situations where no course of action is clearly favorable.

That is a completely bogus argument. Machines don't have to match humans in every ridiculous driving scenario. Self-driving cars only have to be +1 better than the average human driver to take over. Google's self-driving cars are better than 90% of drivers on the road and that's good enough.

The biggest obstacle to driverless cars isn't the technology, it's the arrogance of human beings with illusory superiority.

A human driver could easily make the decision to swerve up onto the sidewalk, or even to brake-check and nudge itself closer to the car in front, thus giving the car behind time to stop.

Baloney. The car was stopped at a red light. Thinking a human driver is going to pull some amazing shit to avoid getting rear ended is just retarded.

Machines are better drivers than humans. Get used to it.

They said we'd hit Peak Attention-Seeking-Moron in 2007. We've proven them wrong. The fools, the poor, mad fools.

"/. comments seem to be a contest to see who can demonstrate the least knowledge of the subject".

Exactly. And the competition is white hot.

"And like I love, like, when a 16 year old, like, writes articles about stuff, like, they don't fully understand, like now. like dude".

That's rather funny, in view of some of the comments here about MUMPS' technical features. Criticizing a programming language and database management system based on a few lines of remarks made by someone who may not know much about it either... doesn't make a lot of sense.

What cuts a bit more ice with me is that MUMPS is still being used - by the people who are responsible for getting the work done.