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The Military

United States Begins Flying Stealth Bombers Over South Korea 567

skade88 writes "The New York Times is reporting that the United States has started flying B-2 stealth bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the U.S. Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The U.S. military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The U.S. also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting its allies in the region. The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' mainland."

Comment Re:Game developers are lazy (Score 1) 281

Yeah, I'm really hoping the laziness on pc ports is a result of the fact that we're at the end of the console cycle, and they have enough extra power in most PCs to BE lazy. Maybe they'll actually have to optimize some code when Unreal 4 is used on the next consoles and ported over. It's possible that they'll just not bother porting until the majority of PC's catch up GPU wise. I'm getting a new Sager gaming laptop next week (I know, I know, gaming laptops, pfffftttt! My GSR position is subsidizing all the non-gaming parts, so it works out economically) and I'll be interested to gauge the performance of the next gen ports. As far as I know the Unreal 4 has been using dual top-o-the-line video cards for all its demonstrations. Googling doesn't get me to an official quote on specs, but I'm not too hopeful for my new mobile gpu (7970m) In any case, there's always the indie gaming scene...

Comment Re:Field Sobriety Test (Score 1) 608

Thanks for the link! I guess the whole "doubling the risk" was submitter-contributed, but it's sad to see numbers thrown around without so much as a hint of the true uncertainty. This paper had the odds ratio at 2.1 with a CI of 0.7 and 6.6, but that was for non-fatal. They do cite some other studies with ~ 2 odds ratio (with minimal alcohol use), but these are all not significant as well. Liked the article. Researchers do a good job of "bending over backwards" to cover the different angles. Hopefully the original quote of doubling the odds ratio was from something that was mildly statistically significant. I know it's not a magic threshold, but there's no way someone could in good conscience quote a doubling effect from the above paper, unless they just don't understand the uncertainty involved. But this paper and the one's I've found before all seem to indicate a very weak, or at least not significant effect. Kind of like when they throw around the word "carcinogenic" with marijuana. I've seen it there in a paper, but sure as shit not very strong. But hey, the paper's old, the studies it cites are older. Maybe there's newer, better data. Thanks again!
Printer

Video Meet the Robisons and Their Low-Cost RepRap Kit (Video) 67

It seems like less than an hour since Slashdot ran a Report From HOPE: The State of Community Fabrication. Now we have a video about a Massachusetts mother and son team we met at HOPE that had so much trouble with commercial RepRap machines that they designed their own and started marketing it under the name Robison Industries, a company they seem to be starting on the fly that uses their local hackerspace as its manufacturing location. Interested in RepRap? Maybe not yet, but as devotees of the concept point out, nobody outside a small circle of geeks was interested in personal computers at first, but they're ubiquitous today. Will we all have 3D printers on our desks in a few years? Good question. round us up in 2020 or 2025 at our local hackerspace and we may have an answer for you.

Comment Re:Fear Mongering (Case #674391) (Score 1) 21

Yeah, although you really do have to be practical about it. I'd trust that the review board weighed the right pros and cons. I mean, at some point you have to consider how obvious the research is, which I guess would correspond to the engineering techniques. Those techniques are probably gonna be really really in depth, since it's biotech, but it's not like the genome-comparisons of people/animal hopping viruses haven't been made before in detail... It's not my field, I left Bioengineering for Biostatistics after my Masters (I'm all bumbly in the lab), but it seems like this would just be introducing specific point mutations for cellular attachment/endocytosis? Or just switching the code for the external protein with that of a human-attacking virus? Actually I'm not sure if that's all that's needed. That's the obvious part, and I might be off. I'm really oversimplifying. Anyone doing this kind of work right now? I'm just saying, if someone came up totally out of the blue with a people-killa based on a totally fringe tech, and then decided to immediately publish it, I'd go ahead and call that irresponsible. But to publish stuff that's pretty well studied anyway and could easily happen naturally? Then again you could probably argue that even in the unforeseen tech case the collective scientific public might do a better job coming up with countermeasures than the government, and the more esoteric the tech the more difficult it is for a lone crazy to replicate it. Meh, I'll trust the board, since in this case they're probably looking to cover their butts pretty well since it's so well publicized.

Comment Re:Poor people exist (Score 1) 568

That's no past tense... It's a past-participle in the Passive-Voice!!! Though their conjugation may be equivalent in this non-irregular case... Seriously though, don't call people on stupid grammatical mistakes unless you've nazi-proofed your own (decidedly exposed) grammar-genitalia... Oh and drug is totally in the wiktionary under dialectial peculiarities. So eat it.

Comment Re:Direct sighting is only 1/2 the story (Score 1) 263

So what we need is a paintball variation so that we can go after the rarer game (read: brown-mullet-ligers). Time the shutter based on distance to target. The liger gets a welt. We get physics-dependent proof of besting the shit out of said liger... Then we make an acid paintball variant just to be dicks!!!!

Comment Re:Any minute now... (Score 1) 158

I think "one side which is no better than the other" is what was mentioned. Referring to the fact that the visa-versa inverts the good and the evil without allowing for the possibility of a disequilibrium of good and evil. Of course people that classify others as "good" or "evil" are evil. Also "visa-versa" is correct in espanol. But seriously, be a little less condescending. I'm a banana.

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