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Comment Two simple questions. (Score 1) 162

1. Were the safety guards, which were optional, installed?

2. We know investigators are looking into the computer system, does this mean the computer can also set the switch settings?

If the answers are "no" and "no" respectively, it was likely an accidental bump.

If the answers are "yes" and "no", then one of the pilots lied.

If the answer to the second one is yes, then regardless of the answer to the first, I'd hope the investigation thoroughly checks whether the software can be triggered into doing so through faulty data or the existence of software defects.

Comment Another Nail In Supersymmetry's Coffin (Score 1) 42

Just like the subject says, supersymmetry, an elegant solution to a number of problems, in particular the best theoretical extension to the Standard Model, slides closer to oblivion with each large scale and small scale (accelerator) experiment meant to find these large supersymmetrical particles.

Comment Re:I'm impressed with their tenacity (Score 1) 229

Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.

Comment Re:But not in the US (Score 4, Insightful) 229

In fact, it is UNETHICAL to use a placebo control in any clinical trial of an investigational product for which the existing standard of care already includes a product on the market.

In plain English, it is entirely unethical to give participants a placebo to test the efficacy of a new flu vaccine when we already have existing vaccines on the market. Doing so denies participants in the study from accessing effective treatment. If you have to test against a placebo, it will be impossible to recruit participants, because nobody will take the chance to receive placebo when they could just go to the pharmacy and get vaccinated.

There are only two possible explanations for such a position: either gross ignorance of basic scientific and ethical principles for conducting medical research in humans, or deliberate malicious intent to stop all research of investigational drugs. It doesn't actually matter which one is the reason. Both are entirely unacceptable.

The fact that a huge segment of the American population does not understand even the most basic scientific principles is the reason why many people will die needlessly.

Comment Damn (Score 1) 62

My latest vaccine shots had the 6G upgrade, to take advantage of the higher-speed web access when the networks upgrade, but if they're selling those frequencies to high-power carriers, then I won't be able to walk into any area that handles AT&T or Verizon. :P

Seriously, this will totally wreck the 6G/WiFi6 specification, utterly ruin the planned 7G/WiFi7 update, and cause no end of problems to those already using WiFi6 equipment - basically, people with working gear may well find their hardware simply no longer operates, which is really NOT what no vendor or customer wants to hear. Vendors with existing gear will need to do a recall, which won't be popular, and the replacement products simply aren't going to do even a fraction as well as the customers were promised - which, again, won't go down well. And it won't be the politicians who get the blame, despite it being the politicians who are at fault.

Comment Re:Perpetual (Score 2, Interesting) 71

Having spent a whole hell of a lot of time lately on Gnome, configuring it and testing various configurations for rollout at the company I work for, all I can say is that it just works. There's a browser, and bizarrely, printers just work on Linux now in a way they just used to work on Windows, and it's now Windows, at least in an enterprise environment, where printing has become the technical equivalent of having your teeth filed down. Where work does need to be done is on accessibility, so we have one staff member who will stick with Windows 11 for now. Libreoffice's Calc is good enough for about 90% of the time, and Writer about 95%. We remain open to Windows machines for special use purposes, but most people after mucking around for a bit are able to navigate Gnome perfectly well, since once they're in the program they need to use, what's going on on the desktop is irrelevant.

On the enterprise back end, supporting global authentication has been around a long time, and if you only have admins who know how to navigate a GUI, then you have idiots. The *nix home folder is infinitely superior in every way to the hellscape that is roaming profiles, so already you're ahead of the game.

Comment Re:So, yeah for microkernels? (Score 4, Interesting) 36

That just about sums it up. Moving drivers into user land definitely reduces the attack surface. As it stands, antivirus software in most cases is essentially a rootkit, just one we approve of because that low level access allows it to intercept virus activity at the lowest level. With a microkernel, nothing gets to run at that level anyways, so microkernels are inherently more secure.

Traditionally the objection to microkernels was they were slower, since message passing has a processing cost in memory, IO bandwidth and CPU cycles. In the old days where may you had a couple of MB of RAM, or even 8 or 16mb of RAM (like my last 486), with 16 bit ISA architecture and chips that at the high end might run at 40-60mhz, a microkernel definitely was going to be a bit more sluggish, particularly where any part of that bandwidth was being taxed (i.e. running a web stack), so Windows and Linux both, while over time adopting some aspects of microkernel architecture (I believe Darwin is considered a hybrid), stuck with monolithic architecture overall because it really is far less resource intensive.

But we're in the age when 16gb of RAM on pretty high end CPUs where even USB ports have more throughput that an old ISA bus, that I suspect it may be time to revive microkernels.

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