I never get tired of this game, and I still go through month long stretches of time where wheneve rI have spare time, I start playing it.

Lately I've discovered nethack 4 - it's an unofficially blessed fork of nethack and some fo the same core developers are contributing to it. The game mechanics and strategies are the same, but the user interface (still all character based by default) is a lot nicer. It also is a complete architectural change to a client-server model - and one fo the benefits of that is that save files have gotten a lot more robust & streamlined.

I'm not sure that I'd call permadeath 'controvertial'. It's a turn-off for a large portion of the gaming population, so they won't play that style of game. No controversy, though...

I'd say breaking into the whitehouse network is a bit more worrisome than breaking into the whitehouse website. The website is indeed a poster. The network (even unclassified) is still terribly worrisome. You think all secrets we don't want other governments to know are classified?

That's pretty much the definition of what science is. I'm not even clear what they think the alternative might be that would still qualify as science.

Well, there's lost, and then there's LOST. I can get a little in lost my own city for a few moments, then drive around, see a familiar landmark and get my bearings rather quickly. But getting totally lost in somewhere that's completely unexplorered is a very different experience.

The author is talking about the latter experience. Getting a little more concrete, he's talking about going off somewhere where science hasn't mapped any landmarks. The frontier of science is very different from the parts we're more familiar with. When you're in familiar territory people nod and agree with you, and you aren't saying much that's controversial. The frontier is a wild and crazy place where radical new ideas are born (and most of the time horribly wrong, like in his cautionary tales).

The best example I can think of someone that's that's a bit lost in "the woods" happens is physicist Lawrence Kraus and his Universe from nothing, who at times skirts the edge between science and philosophy. Another would be m-theory, and brain-theory, which propose alternate universes. Clearly something really out there and strange and unfamiliar.

You're right, that science is always about the unknown. The author is talking about the comfort level people have with the field they're in. For contrast, an example of in-town, back of your hand science would be something like confirming another aspect of relatviity. Very important work, but still largely familiar.

With the exception of the SS#, most of that data is publicly available on the internet for most people. If you know someones name, it's very easy to find someones phone#, address, birth date, relatives, former addresses, etc.

We don't live in as private a world as you're assuming.

You may want to re-read my post if you think I'm saying the oil is harmless. Or did you think a human being losing 18 liters of blood all at once is harmless?

Yup, just like adding up all the blood Americans lose to papercuts ever year. Assume 1 drop of blood is lost per papercut, or .06 ml. A highly conservative guess is 1/1000 americans get papercuts in a year. (300,000,000/1000)*.06=18 liters of blood. So obviously it wouldn't hurt you if you suddenly lost 18 liters of blood, since that amount is lost in minor little papercuts every year.

Scale matters, and concentrating a huge amount of oil, (or in the above example blood loss) makes a big difference.

He obviously must see and be directly involved in some aspects of AI that are causing him to be concerned.

You're assuming a rational person. The fact that he used the metaphor of freaking demons, pentagrams, and holy water is evidence that's not true. Obviously he doesn't think they're actual demons, but you can see where his mind is when he brings up the horror genre. That doesn't smack of people programming cars to making life/death decisions.

Umm.. OK.

Lest you forget, Microsoft was ruled both a monopoly in 2000, and ruled they miss-used their monopoly power. They were going to be split into multiple companies until the 2000 election changed the political landscape and the Federal government dropped the suit.

What makes you think Microsoft STILL doesn't hold monopoly power over the PC business? They don't hold as much of a stranglehold anymore, but I'd say it's still very much a monopoly.

*sigh*

The guy in Texas who had Ebola transmitted it to exactly two people, both of which were caring for him while sick. He didn't transmit it to ANY of his family members. I'd say that's a good indicator that the virus really is very hard to catch.

As far as your "idiot" theory goes, smart people screw up, and constant vigilance is hard, especially in an environment like in west Africa. At the moment, you're thinking with the fear generating part of your brain, not the thinking part of your brain. That's very bad, and causes more harm than good. Health officials are telling you it's hard to get because it IS hard to get. The average number of people that Ebola is transmitted to is about 2. That's a very low number. AIDS, which is also hard to catch is transmitted to an average of 4 people. Measles, which is very contagious is 18.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...

So please stop with the conspiracy theory. It's a disease, not a government secret. You can't keep a tight lid the real facts about a disease that people study and publish papers about in medical journals.

Also, consider there's thousands of health care workers in west Africa. There's been a handful of American healthcare workers who've caught the disease, but MANY OTHERS who haven't.

Actually the problems are the potential side effects of new vaccines, and not if it works or not...

If they're comfortable enough to give it to 10s of thousands of health care workers, who are wearing protective clothing, trained to deal with the exposure, and are highly monitored and controlled who they come into contact with, why wouldn't they give it to people at high risk of developing ebola?

If the risk is so high from the vaccine, then you sure as hell shouldn't expose 24,000 healthy people to it.

That's what you do if you already have a proven vaccine, yes.

And also what you should consider doing when you have a worldwide pandemic in a country that threatens to kill millions of people.

Doing this doesn't tell you what trials need to tell you:

That's why you do it with a small amount of the available vaccine. Note I said use a portion, not abandon the clinical trial. There's absolutely no reason why you can't use SOME of the vaccine to combait the disease. It might not work at all, but it's a decent gamble.

  If someone can think of alternative which delivers a better result, then I'm all ears

Simple. Use a portion of the 24,000 doses (a few thousand?) to spot vaccinate anyone who's had close contact with someone with Ebola, say all immediate family members. Those peoople are arguably at risk or at greater risk than health care workers. That's how polio is being eradicated. The WHO comes in and vaccinates an entire community when a poliio case is detected.

Exactly. The question is strange (and the attitude of the poster is odd too... 20 years ago is "days of yore", and "olden days"?) Methinks dusting off the word "whippersnapper" might be appropriate here.

Oddly enough, a similar question fell through a wormhole in the space time continuum from Usenet, circa 1994. "Now that we have massive HDs of 100s of megabytes, and not the dinky little ones of several megabytes from the Reagan era, do we still have to worry about having 95% usage alarms?"

The truth being, if you got to 95% usage somehow, what makes you think that you're not going to get to 100% sometime soon? Maybe you won't, but you can't know unless you understand how and why your usage increases. That's not going to be solved by a magic algorithm alone, it involves understanding where your data comes from, and who or what is adding to it. This isn't new. The heuristics and usage question, and estimating when action needs to be taken is just as relevant now as it was 20 years ago.

Interesting. The world population is about 7 billion now. 1% of that population is 70 mllion. So you think only 70 million people in the world have access to computers?

That's very easy to show you're way the hell off. The US population is 300 million, of which 75% have internet access at home. So that's 225 million people in the US ALONE that have access to a computer and internet access.

You also might want to update your view of the 3rd world from 50+ years ago. It's not simply a mass of people that are all farmers anymore. That exists in much of the world, but it's very quickly changing. Many people have computer access. I wouldn't venture a guess as to how many, but your view is clearly incredibly wrong just from a cursory examination.