Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Too Simplistic (Score 5, Informative) 59

There is an honest-to-goodness definition. Johns Hopkins has a good article about what UPFs are: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2...

The takeaway is - "Ultra-processed foods have one or more ingredient that wouldn’t be found in a kitchen, like chemical-based preservatives, emulsifiers like hydrogenated oils, sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup, and artificial colors and flavors. UPFs undergo processing techniques like pre-frying, molding, extrusion, fractioning, and other chemical alterations that leave the final products bearing almost no resemblance to the original ingredients."

(emphasis is mine)

Comment Re:Websites "must" respect them (Score 1) 60

Why do the websites have the authority in the first place to tell your browser what cookies to store? This is 100% on browsers to restrict what websites can do with cookies.

Firefox has offered this ability for, like, 20 years. And, 20 years later, it is still the only significant browser to do so.

Safari does block third-party cookies by default - which is certainly a good thing, but still not quite there.

Comment Re:Fck the EU (Score 1) 60

There are already http headers for do not track and it is a standard. Just force websites to respect that under threat of enormous penalties, that is all that is needed!

Of course, they can make that as annoying as heck too. In fact, during the past few weeks I've visited multiple websites that have apparently decided it's a good idea for them to tell me (via a raised notification I have to manually dismiss) that they are honoring my browser's enabled "do not track" setting.

Comment Re:Cryo-embalming (Score 1) 80

I suspect that a more fundamental problem is what you would need to preserve.

Embryos are clearly the easier case, being small and impressively good at using some sort of contextual cue system to elaborate an entire body plan from a little cell glob(including more or less graceful handling of cases like identical twins, where physical separation of the cell blob changes requirements dramatically and abruptly); but they are also the case that faces looser constraints. If an embryo manages to grow a brain that falls within expectations for humans it's mission successful. People may have preferences; but a fairly wide range of outcomes counts as normal. If you discard or damage too much the embryo simply won't work anymore; or you'll get ghastly malformations; but there are uncounted billions of hypothetical babies that would count as 'correct' results if you perturb the embryo just slightly.

If you are freezing an adult; you presumably want more. You want the rebuilt result to fall within the realm of being them. That appears to not require an exact copy(people have at least limited ability to handle cell death and replacement or knock a few synapses around without radical personality change most of the time; and a certain amount of forgetting is considered normal); but it is going to require some amount of fidelity that quite possibly wont' be available(depending on what killed them and how, and how quickly and successfully you froze them); and which cannot, in principle, be reconstructed if lost.

Essentially the (much harder because it's all fiddly biotech) equivalent of getting someone to go out and paint a landscape for you vs. getting someone to paint the picture that was damaged when your house burned down. The first task isn't trivial; but it's without theoretical issues and getting someone who can do it to do it is easy enough. The second isn't possible, full stop, in principle, even if you are building the thing atom by atom the information regarding what you want has been partially lost; though it is, potentially, something you could more or less convincingly/inoffensively fake; the way people do photoshop 'restoration' of damaged photos where the result is a lie; but a plausible one that looks better than the damage does.

The fraught ethics of neurally engineering someone until your client says that their personality, memories, and behavior 'seem right' is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader; along with the requisite neuropsychology.

Comment Methodology? (Score 4, Insightful) 92

Clicking through a few levels, it appears this is based on an analysis of stolen password dumps. It does not say whether they took steps to limit their analysis just to passwords grabbed in bulk as part of data breaches - so, if brute-forced passwords make up a meaningful percentage of the total, it's possible their overall counts are biased and inflated.

Slashdot Top Deals

As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error. -- Weisert

Working...