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Comment Re:Why just Ebola? (Score 1) 55

The best treatment for distemper in dogs uses something similar: healthy dog is injected with Newcastle vaccine (yes, the stuff for chickens). Serum is harvested and given to a dog with active distemper infection. As yet this treatment is rarely used, but the recovery rate is very high (and extremely rapid), vs a high mortality rate with ordinary supportive hospitalization. Why this works is not entirely understood.

http://www.edbond.com/antidist...

Comment Re:First impressions (Score 1) 220

I use SeaMonkey (and PaleMoon when something insists on Firefox) and frankly it has a lot of the same problems. The newest incarnation of Google maps in particular has regularly stalled and crashed it, and run memory up over 1GB which it does not always return when the page is closed. It appears in part a byproduct of the cache structure (with no cache, the problem isn't as bad), and that may be filesystem-affected.

Comment Re:Painkillers, HA! (Score 1) 217

Selective breeding tends to relate to marketability. Did marijuana have much market value back before it was outlawed? Probably not, since it was just a common weed available to anyone who cared to pick it, and back in the day, opium was still legal too.

I would hazard that the pressure toward higher THC has come not only from buyers (after all a person could just consume more of the weaker stuff) but also from law enforcement -- since the larger the package, the more likely it is to be observed.

Comment Re:Painkillers, HA! (Score 1) 217

You can only judge by the samples you've got. I suspect they're pretty durn representative, and they seem to be reasonably consistent.

But if selective breeding works for other plants, why not for pot? Considering the variation known in marijuana, and that anyone can do a "smoke test" of their own crop, how difficult could it be to select toward higher THC content? Why wouldn't they, when it can be done rapidly and easily, and best of all increases your profits?

Comment Re:Painkillers, HA! (Score 1) 217

I assume the medical pot folks have a clue, and they say it tests quite a lot stronger than in the past -- more than six times stronger on average:

http://medicalmarijuana.procon...
========
The average potency of all marijuana in the US, according to the UMPMC's Dec. 2008 â" Mar. 2009 quarterly report, was 8.52% (5.62% domestic and 9.57% nondomestic).

The highest tested sample had 22.04% THC (domestic) and 27.30% THC (nondomestic). The highest tested sample ever tested between 1975 and 2009 had 33.12% THC (domestic) and 37.20% THC (nondomestic).

For comparison, the national average of marijuana's THC content in 1978 was 1.37%, in 1988 it was 3.59%, in 1998 4.43%, and in 2008 8.49%.
======

They also point out that today's joints are typically smaller, so the total dosage may be about the same, or at least not much higher. However, that also means it may be harder for a novice to determine his limits -- kinda like being handed a bottle of vodka for your first drink.

Comment Re:"Against a wall" (Score 1) 149

A great deal of a PC's heat exchange happens through the case. Plastic shells are therefore not a good idea. (If you don't believe me, wrap your machine in a towel, leaving the front and back open, and watch the temperature go up.) And this one has less surface area. My guess is it will actually run hotter than the same equipment in a standard case.

As to Dell's engineering for temperature mitigation -- a few years ago someone gift me a top-of-the-line Dell that had a chronic overheating issue. It had the hood-and-distant-fan arrangement that OEMs seem to like, but no CPU fan and only the most minimal heatsink, like we mighta used on a 486. I removed the hood and the crappy heatsink, added a standard CPU heatsink/fan (nothing special, just a cheap stock model) and the machine's operating temperature dropped by 40F degrees (yes, FORTY degrees Fahrenheit).

So much for all the engineering that's supposed to enhance cooling, eh? This was when I concluded that, given that excess heat kills a machine in about 3 years, these damn things are *designed to die*.

Comment Re:perhaps men and women are different? (Score 1) 579

A year or so ago an article on this very thing was discussed here on /. -- the upshot was that when you watch how kids behave, girls pack up as a dominant female, her immediate crony, and a bunch of hangers-on who are treated as underlings, while boys pack up as an amorphous group where all are more or less equal in status, despite one perhaps being the leader.

BTW it's pretty much the same with dogs, if you have enough to observe pack behavior.

Comment Re:Simple (Score 2) 635

Right now Walmart has 16GB Sandisk flash drives for $9 (look in the School Supplies section, same damn thing as in Electronics but in a garish case for half the money). Last year they had 64GB Sandisk flash drives for $8. Costco has 64GB drives right now for $24. This sort of pricing is tempting me away from DVDs as my backup medium, because flash is more reliable in long-term storage and takes up a lot less space. Yeah, DVDs are cheaper and faster to make, but reliability in storage isn't the best.

If you want to buy in real quantity, go to alibaba.com and you'll see what they really cost at wholesale.

As to old tech, I still have a machine with a 5" floppy and a QIC-80 tape drive. It often goes years unused, but when I need it, I'm glad to have it.

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