HPV was/is incredibly common, now the particular strain that the vaccine was targeted for was quite rare, but it so happens that the vaccine also provides protection against most of the other strains as well. And yeah... if I can protect future generations from not only the pain and shame of genital warts (90% of which are caused by one of the strains the vaccine protects against) but also cut the rate of cervical cancer while I'm at it (admittedly the actual target of the vaccine) at the cost of... well statistically the vaccine is as safe as a saline injection so I would argue a cost of essentially 0.

No. Just no. The 'damage' that vaccines do is barely statistically significant, the benefits they provide are so fundamental that there are core aspects of our culture and society that have changed since their introduction. Your argument that vaccines are going to destroy our immune systems or cause the diseases to mutate shows a lack of understanding to how vaccines works; they train the immune system in the exact same way contracting the virulent disease would. Not only does it not weaken the immune system (in fact it strengthens it) it also prevents a large reservoir of the disease from ever building up in the population. Smaller reservoir means that mutations are less likely simply because the numbers are smaller.

Vaccines have saved more lives than the next 5 medical breakthroughs combined with the possible exception of basic sanitation (if you can call that a medical breakthrough). Trying to argue that "The vaccine debate is a religious one on both sides " is ludicrous, like saying the debate between the theories of relativity and the flying spaghetti monster are on equal ground. They're not, one is backed up by a mountain of evidence so large that people forget that the mountain isn't a natural feature of the world. Before vaccines, parents lived in real fear that their children would catch any one of a half dozen diseases that would maim or kill them, today parents spend hours worrying about a syndrome that has a .05% chance of happening to their newborn.

I agree that a distro using Debian packages and APT really ought to be dist-upgradeable. It's lame that it's not.

But the Mint guys are the ones working hardest to let me have the kind of desktop I prefer, so I'm willing to cut them some slack.

You can avoid some pain if you set your computer up properly. Put /home and / on separate partitions. Then, you can upgrade just by running the new installer! The installer always wants to clean-wipe the / partition, but it doesn't care whether you wipe /home or leave it in place. (I always back up the /etc directory, just by copying it somewhere on the /home partition. I also back up a complete list of all the currently installed packages.)

I'm certain that MST3K's producers made fully sure that the rights to play the movie in syndication were fully paid up

Yes, MST3K made sure they had a legal ability to do what they were doing. Cinematic Titanic continues this tradition. This is one reason why the movies they show tend to be bad: bad movies are cheap to license.

That's the brilliant part about Rifftrax. Since they are not redistributing the movie, they don't need rights. Thus they can do any movie they want, including Star Wars movies, Lord of the Rings, anything. They don't have to pay anything and they don't need to get permission first. (I don't think George Lucas would give permission to Rifftrax to mercilessly rip Episode 1...)

I'm just waiting for home Blu-Ray players to start offering an option to play an externally-downloaded audio track while playing a disc, or for AppleTV sort of products to do the same for general media files. There is no technical reason why this could not be done, and it would mean that when you pause the movie the Rifftrax pauses as well, much more convenient for the user.

A good LP-er doesn't just play the game, their value is in their commentary and jokes as they play the game.

I've never heard of this, but I believe you. My favorite podcast, Spilled Milk, is really funny and I think those guys would be just as funny if they stopped talking about food and started talking about some other topic.

Would you please post a link or two with some of your favorite "episodes" of LP?

Soylent green was 100% algae until Hollywood got hold of it.

So clearly, Hollywood is the enemy.

Read "Make Room, Make Room" to learn all about Soylent, and for that matter catch a great story that was muddled into unrecoverability by pinheaded filmmakers.

If robots are built from standard parts -- as surely they will be -- then a maintenance robot can fix either your household robot, or another maintenance robot. Just as a doctor can fix you, or another doctor, with equal competence (not saying it's high competence, but it is the same, nonetheless.)

There's absolutely no question that the advent of general purpose robotics would drastically shift our economy around. How well we manage that shift would be the fulcrum from which we tilt forward, or backward. Add AI to the equation, and things might go entirely another way, however. Clever functional programming is one thing; an intelligent, independent entity is another. I think it really comes down to AI, or no AI; the latter will work out well for us, the former... unknown.

For Intel to "win" the "mobile war" as the headline suggests, Intel would have to get the mobile device market to adopt proprietary Intel parts that only Intel can sell. Otherwise, Intel is just another vendor, and the mobile device makers can buy from Intel or not at their whim; Intel just being one of a group of commodity providers is not what Intel considers a "win".

I've said it before: Apple will never lock themselves in with Intel.

It's not a quantum computer, it's a quantum annealer. It can't run general purpose quantum computer algorithms like Shor's Algorithm but it can find the optimum values for a specific class of problems, the same ones that are sometimes solved with software simulations of quantum annealing appropriately enough. The latest research shows that it outperforms a regular computer by several orders of magnitude on those problems, but it remains to be seen if it performs better than an ASIC chip designed for the task.

Small towns are even more impressive. I can send stuff to my family members with nothing but a name, city, state, and zip and be confident it will get there. Granted, it's only a town of 1000 people, but I've always found it impressive the few times it's happened.

What SDR software is that?

SdrDx

You're thinking about it in terms of now. What can you do with Google Glass? Well you can take a picture, get directions, view messages, and do searches hands free. It's not really worth it; too geeky, too expensive, too physically wonky to be worth it.

But what can you do with it 10 years from now? User your imagination a bit and I'm sure you can think of some ideas for always on camera/display combo. And in 10 years the geek, hassle, and cost factors will be way down with slimmer designs. Hell, contact displays aren't impossible. Or if you want depth of field retina projection isn't impossible either.

Another thing to keep in mind, he sees the big picture with his charity work. Most rich donors would have looked at polio and said there's only a few thousand lives to save here, lets spend the money somewhere else where the impact will be bigger. But he looks at it and says we have the chance to wipe the disease off the planet and remove the threat forever. Not to say he's the first person to see things that way by any means. I just mean that most people in his position wouldn't think in those terms.

The s-meter in my SDR software has native Klingon support. It's one of the easter eggs. I'm imagining people finding it, then actually translating the s-meter readout by going to Bing. Having a little trouble with how they'll encode the input font, but I'm sure MS has it all figured out. Perhaps it's OCR.

I dunno if it's just me, because I'm wacky that way, but... lol.

Bestiality is soft porn? Those green alien women Kirk bangs aren't human, you know.

They're not beasts, either, though. Seems like "bestiality" isn't really a term developed with sexually compatible sentients in mind. What about sex with an artificially intelligent sexbot? Bestiality? I don't think so. Both would be consensual, informed... Seems like eventually, at least if these things arise in other than fictional venues, we'll have to expand our outlooks a bit. Even in fiction, you need a way to look at it that makes sense. Bestiality doesn't qualify.