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Comment Re:Pluto is a planet (Score 0) 65

Don't be hypnotized by the names. What is most significant (after the orbit) is the mass. And that's a pretty smooth gradation (at least on a logarithmic scale).

If you want "planet" to mean "stuff in orbit around the sun", you end up with most planets weighing micrograms...or possibly less.

N.B.: By the strict definition of "planet" used by the IAU, even Jupiter wouldn't really qualify, because it hasn't cleared it's orbit. There's a lot of small stuff and, of course, the trojans.

Comment Re:Antibiotics are going out..... (Score 1) 63

I disagree. I think it probably CAN get much faster, but I'm not sure how much cheaper it can get.

The approach I think could succeed is the "bio-chip", with lots of cells and feed lines so different wells in the chip would host different combinations of bacteriophage and sample. This would need to be screened frequently, probably by an AI, that would pick out the most successful set. I think this could, in principle, usually be done within a couple of days in a mostly automated way. But that's a pretty complex setup, and I doubt that it could be done really cheaply.

Comment Re:Do we know the geographical source? (Score 3, Interesting) 63

It's not even that. Most of the drug-resistant bacteria existed before antibiotics came out of the lab. But they weren't a very successful part of the population. Antibiotics killed off their competition, and now they're successful. Most methods of resisting antibiotics have an energy cost, so bacteria that don't use them are more successful if the antibiotics aren't around. Unfortunately, it's not usually a very high cost, so stopping the use of an antibiotic doesn't reset the population, at least not quickly.

But, yeah, bacteria mutate really rapidly to fill a new niche, so you probably literally CAN'T have an antibiotic both in wide use and remaining effective.

Comment Re:Success rate? (Score 3, Insightful) 36

The thing about ransomware is that if paying the ransom does not actually result in decrypted files no one will ever pay a ransom again.

Many of your victims won't be able to say anything even if the files aren't decrypted -- this case is a good example, since the company in question couldn't admit publicly that they were paying ransoms.

A little searching shows that scams (beyond the base "pay to decrypt") are very common. You're dealing with criminals. If you pay a ransom, they now know that you have money that you're willing to pay, and they're going to do whatever they can to get more of it.

Comment Test for disabling all video autoplay (Score 1) 123

The main things are to:
- disable all video autoplay. (not just sound, but all)

I've made a page to let you test whether you've actually disabled all video autoplay. "De finibus" has a conventional video, a conventional animated GIF, and a motion JPEG presented as a filmstrip animated with CSS. What does and doesn't play for you?

Comment Some reasons for forums' decline (Score 4, Interesting) 123

As a fellow NESdev member, I've identified several reasons why a lot of people have migrated from forums to Discord or other proprietary chat.

- Registration friction. People register for forums and never get their signup confirmation because their email provider misclassified the confirmation message as spam and dropped it without notification. Or they don't get their signup confirmation for days or weeks because the person responsible for manually approving new members is working through a backlog or on vacation.
- People feel compelled to type longer, more detailed posts in a forum than in a chat room. That's fine on a desktop or laptop computer but not so practical on the on-screen of a mobile phone.
- Notification friction. It took seven years after Chrome and Firefox added support for the Push API before Apple did. As Alex Russell put it, "progress delayed is progress denied." Email notifications run the same risk of getting mistakenly dropped as spam.
- People expect to upload and watch video related to a post. Discord allows even free users 20 MB per attachment, enough to post a short video of a game that people can watch before downloading and running it. Forums tend to impose attachment size limits that haven't been reviewed in the years since the forum was established, often on the order of 2 to 4 MB, as well as limits on what media types are usable.
- People don't want their wording mistakes publicly indexed on Google and Bing and then archived indefinitely as "receipts" for use in later cyberbullying or cancellation campaigns against them.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 150

Well, the use of AI *should* be encouraged, but that's a lousy way to do it. After graduation the students will need to live in a world where they deal with AI...but we don't know what the shape of that world will be.

OTOH, the main thing you're supposed to learn in mathematics classes is "the shape of mathematics". Learning to do the mathematics is secondary, now that calculators have advanced to AIs. (I've become nearly dependent on spell-check, but I don't really think of this as a problem.)

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