OK, I wondered. I'm sure you did. It is short for 'cross Assembler' - the software used to sequence the genome (I skimmed the paper). Not what you thought. No.

No shit.

I wish I could run this in a Parallels Desktop VM, under 10.9. That would be much more convenient than having to set up a separate boot partition. But right now it appears unsupported... unless someone knows better?

Not necessarily. It's often rendered as an NSGradient having the necessary colours at key positions. A glassy effect typically needs four colours, and they are computed off some base "theme" colour. Nevertheless the time to render this is extremely small, probably no greater than decoding and painting a PNG of the same area.

You need to watch this: http://youtu.be/P6MOnehCOUw

Laughs aside, I guess the point is, conspiracies just don't scale.

So why do all the media call the SU-25 a fighter?

Because any military aircraft is a "fighter", in simple terms, as opposed to a civilian aircraft. It's just the usual media assumption that their readers are lazy and stupid, and wouldn't know the difference.

Every minute playing chess would be better spent [fill in your personal alternative here]

Perhaps people like, y'know, playing chess as a game? It's interesting, it passes the time, and it's actually quite challenging to become even moderately good at the game. The fact that algorithms can play chess is irrelevant, playing chess is not an activity that humans play algorithmically - they learn to play it intuitively, using pattern recognition and a bit of analysis, not exhaustive analysis and a whole bunch of rules, tables and a large database of known games to draw on. Chess programs employing 'simple' heuristics don't beat every human player - top players can still beat the top programs, though it's getting close. The programs in typical chess implementations do beat novice players, but in turn they are easily beaten once you get better at the game.

It's like saying there's no point playing soccer because a machine that can fire balls into a net could be easily built that would beat a human goalie every time. It really misses the whole point.

crease the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization

What does that even mean? How can you 'crease the fluidity' of anything? Sound suspiciously like typical management-speak, and I don't think that's what MS needs at all.

Also in the news, we have Unicode! Slashdot, have you heard of it?

It is news, because it's in Düsseldorf! Frankfurt is so last century.

The last few years I've thought it would be awesome if I could watch the fireworks from a small private plane.

Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but watching fireworks from a plane is likely to be a big disappointment. Because you can see so much area from a thousand feet or so, the fireworks become comparatively tiny, and also often viewed against a background of urban lighting which makes them hard to see. Even huge public displays like the Sydney NYE displays look pretty unimpressive from the air. Fireworks are only impressive when viewed from the ground against a dark sky, close to their launch point.

I had to replace 2 33W CFL striplights recently. I could not believe how cheap they were - $4.50 (Australian, but that's almost equal to US) for two. How do they make them for that?

Not believing in a deity means accepting on faith that the universe came into existence without the help of a deity.

Certainly there are aspects of belief and "faith" even in an atheistic viewpoint, because there are some things that we simply don't know and, probably, cannot know. But saying "god did it" is a very absurd fallback, because it begs the obvious, childish, yet profound question, "where did god come from?" Adding another level of complexity to explain away the already difficult complexity we're faced with doesn't make the problem simpler!

Stupid is as stupid prays.

It's definitely true. I've had to replace a number of household white-goods items recently - dishwasher, oven and washing machine - which all failed due to bad design. As someone who once did design consumer goods for a living, it was easy to see where the failures had been either engineered in, or negligently ignored.

The washing machine failed due to intermittent contact between the spinning drum and the plastic casing that enclosed it (only a perfectly balanced load would avoid this contact, a rarity in practice). Eventually this wore through, allowing water to be ejected under pressure straight onto the back of the bare PCB that controlled the machine.

The dishwasher failed because the relay that controlled the main heater was underrated for the current draw of the element, leading to heavy contact wear and eventual failure. The PCB tracks connecting the same relay were also undersized and showed signs of delamination from the substrate due to heat. Which failed first was a matter of luck, but one of them definitely would, but after a period of working (3 years in my case).

The oven was the worst. The casing was so badly engineered that hot air from the back of the oven was fan-forced through a gap directly onto the back of the electronics controlling the timer functions, display, etc. This was gradually cooked to the point where the plastic surround that supported the PCB became depolymerised and so it just fell apart one day when the front panel buttons were pressed. The entire PCB was carbonised but somehow still did function, but as the mountings were now disintegrated (not even glueable), it was unrepairable.

It really annoys me that these things are made this way. It's not even cost-cutting, because the faults were not due to reducing costs of materials or construction, it was designed that way. In other words designed to fail. And the problem is people are now brainwashed into believing that five years lifespan for goods like this is OK, even 'doing well'. It's NOT! These things should last 20 years or more. I would definitely buy a brand that could be shown that it was engineered right, and that brand would surely clean up by having a much stronger reputation.

natural moron blur

Nah, that's just too much tequila.