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Comment Re:Suck it bitcoin haters (Score 1) 81

This was exactly my sentiment to reading recent articles on green energy solutions or digital open source currencies. /. used to be populated with true nerds interested in cryptography and novel solutions to problems. Now it's populated by pro-fiat trolls, anti-EV trolls, and even a surprising turn of very pro-State trolls advocating for fear and against scientific advancement.

Really, it's just trolls and the articles are just bait for the most part. It is disappointing. Gizmodo and Engadget were great for tech, but never insightful conversations or thoughtful treatments of OSS topics. But all of the graybeards have left, and a bunch of Woke folk are tooling around in their place, failing to comprehend how anything works, or why no one lines them. I'm saddened to see how toxic Slashdot (and the other sites) have become.
Medicine

Can You Get Covid-19 Again? It's Very Unlikely, Experts Say 55

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: The anecdotes are alarming. A woman in Los Angeles seemed to recover from Covid-19, but weeks later took a turn for the worse and tested positive again. A New Jersey doctor claimed several patients healed from one bout only to become reinfected with the coronavirus. And another doctor said a second round of illness was a reality for some people, and was much more severe. These recent accounts tap into people's deepest anxieties that they are destined to succumb to Covid-19 over and over, feeling progressively sicker, and will never emerge from this nightmarish pandemic. And these stories fuel fears that we won't be able to reach herd immunity -- the ultimate destination where the virus can no longer find enough victims to pose a deadly threat.

But the anecdotes are just that -- stories without evidence of reinfections, according to nearly a dozen experts who study viruses. "I haven't heard of a case where it's been truly unambiguously demonstrated," said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Other experts were even more reassuring. While little is definitively known about the coronavirus, just seven months into the pandemic, the new virus is behaving like most others, they said, lending credence to the belief that herd immunity can be achieved with a vaccine. It may be possible for the coronavirus to strike the same person twice, but it's highly unlikely that it would do so in such a short window or to make people sicker the second time, they said. What's more likely is that some people have a drawn-out course of infection, with the virus taking a slow toll weeks to months after their initial exposure. People infected with the coronavirus typically produce immune molecules called antibodies. Several teams have recently reported that the levels of these antibodies decline in two to three months, causing some consternation. But a drop in antibodies is perfectly normal after an acute infection subsides, said Dr. Michael Mina, an immunologist at Harvard University.

Submission + - George Lucas criticises The Force Awakens (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by RogueyWon
RogueyWon writes: While many critics have responded positively to JJ Abrams's take on Star Wars, one particular industry figure seems rather less impressed. George Lucas has criticised the "retro" tone of The Force Awakens and lamented his own lack of involvement in it. Speaking to television talk-show host and journalist Charlie Rose, Lucas quipped that he had sold his “kids to the white slavers that take these things”.

Comment Re:Real nerd news. Reminds me of me. (Score 4, Insightful) 247

All computers of that day had pseudo-random generators. Even today, the vast majority of random number generators are pseudo-random, unless they're using external entropy from the network, mouse, or even a specialized entropy generator and these are only really used for encryption. Pseudo-random doesn't mean bad, it just means that the numbers are being generated from an algorithm and not some truly random source.

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