Comment It does. (Score 3, Interesting) 93
I use TurboTax for various reasons. The amount of upselling is pretty fierce. Her pointing out obvious reality doesn't seem like it should be controversial.
Comment How slow? (Score 1) 53
>Transmission speeds were extremely slow at 0.54 bits per second, but still good enough for text message and phone call encryption over a distance of 30 km (19 miles)
At half a bit per second, how is that good enough for phone call encryption?
Comment Disclose it! (Score 3, Informative) 125
Twice in his comments and writing he says something along the lines of, "There is a reason, but it's not a good one, and not one that will be publicly disclosed"
So, disclose it! Put it out there plainly so everyone can read it and has to think about it. Enough innuendo. Since YouTube won't, people in the know who aren't happy have to.
Comment There's nothing here (Score 5, Informative) 301
Did anyone read the DOJ records?
It sounds like a bunch of people followed the procedures they were given. When they left, they turned in their phones. An officer reviewed the phones to be sure there was no confidential or classified information on them. After they were reviewed they were turned in for reassignment and completely wiped (reset to factory settings) before reassignment for other people. Only later did someone (Guilliani) show up complaining they had wiped phones and "destroyed evidence". If you read the file, it's a bunch of people saying, "Um, we did what we were supposed to do. What's the problem?"
Researchers Awaken Ancient Lifeforms Exposed By Thawing Ice Caps and Permafrost (sfgate.com) 66
"Researchers in a warming Arctic are discovering organisms, frozen and presumed dead for millennia, that can bear life anew," reports the Washington Post:
These ice age zombies range from simple bacteria to multicellular animals, and their endurance is prompting scientists to revise their understanding of what it means to survive... Mosses have forged a tougher path. They desiccate when temperatures plummet, sidestepping the potential hazard of ice forming in their tissues. And if parts of the plant do sustain damage, certain cells can divide and differentiate into all the various tissue types that comprise a complete moss, similar to stem cells in human embryos... Thanks to these adaptations, mosses are more likely than other plants to survive long-term freezing, said Peter Convey, an ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey. On the heels of evolutionary biologist Catherine La Farge's Canadian moss revival, Convey's team announced it had awakened a 1,500-year-old moss buried more than three feet underground in the Antarctic permafrost...
While the elderly mosses discovered by La Farge and Convey are remarkable, the clique of ice age survivors extends well beyond this one group of plants... A microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, Tatiana Vishnivetskaya drills deep into the Siberian permafrost to map the web of single-celled organisms that flourished ice ages ago. She has coaxed million-year-old bacteria back to life on a petri dish. They look "very similar to bacteria you can find in cold environments (today)," she said. But last year, Vishnivetskaya's team announced an "accidental finding" -- one with a brain and nervous system -- that shattered scientists' understanding of extreme endurance.
As usual, the researchers were seeking singled-celled organisms, the only life-forms thought to be viable after millennia locked in the permafrost. They placed the frozen material on petri dishes in their room-temperature lab and noticed something strange. Hulking among the puny bacteria and amoebae were long, segmented worms complete with a head at one end and anus at the other -- nematodes... She estimated one nematode to be 41,000 years old -- by far the oldest living animal ever discovered. This very worm dwelled in the soil beneath Neanderthals' feet and had lived to meet modern-day humans in Vishnivetskaya's high-tech laboratory.
The article also quotes Gaetan Borgonie, a nematode researcher at Extreme Life Isyensya in Gentbrugge, Belgium, "who believes these feats of survival may portend life on other planets."
He calls the newly-discovered endurance of nematodes "very good news for the solar system."
While the elderly mosses discovered by La Farge and Convey are remarkable, the clique of ice age survivors extends well beyond this one group of plants... A microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, Tatiana Vishnivetskaya drills deep into the Siberian permafrost to map the web of single-celled organisms that flourished ice ages ago. She has coaxed million-year-old bacteria back to life on a petri dish. They look "very similar to bacteria you can find in cold environments (today)," she said. But last year, Vishnivetskaya's team announced an "accidental finding" -- one with a brain and nervous system -- that shattered scientists' understanding of extreme endurance.
As usual, the researchers were seeking singled-celled organisms, the only life-forms thought to be viable after millennia locked in the permafrost. They placed the frozen material on petri dishes in their room-temperature lab and noticed something strange. Hulking among the puny bacteria and amoebae were long, segmented worms complete with a head at one end and anus at the other -- nematodes... She estimated one nematode to be 41,000 years old -- by far the oldest living animal ever discovered. This very worm dwelled in the soil beneath Neanderthals' feet and had lived to meet modern-day humans in Vishnivetskaya's high-tech laboratory.
The article also quotes Gaetan Borgonie, a nematode researcher at Extreme Life Isyensya in Gentbrugge, Belgium, "who believes these feats of survival may portend life on other planets."
He calls the newly-discovered endurance of nematodes "very good news for the solar system."
Comment Of course they picked him... (Score 3, Funny) 116
It's Vegas! You are *supposed* to gamble on untested infrastructure.
Comment Oh really... (Score 1) 26
> Suffice it to say, mistakes like this don't typically happen in the well-to-do, perfectly manicured world of Silicon Valley startups.
Um... have you ever been to Silicon Valley? It's all seat of the pants fixes to last-minute crazy error all the time...
Comment Re:Is this just because of previous years losses? (Score 5, Informative) 468
No, the chart at the bottom of TFA shows they've made profits for several years and except last year and this year, used to pay (very small) taxes on those profits. they've just been getting better at playing the system as their profits are rising.
US Military Program Could Be Seen As a Bioweapon, Scientists Warn (phys.org) 91
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A research arm of the U.S. military is exploring the possibility of deploying insects to make plants more resilient by altering their genes. Some experts say the work may be seen as a potential biological weapon. In an opinion paper published Thursday in the journal Science, the authors say the U.S. needs to provide greater justification for the peace-time purpose of its Insect Allies project to avoid being perceived as hostile to other countries. Other experts expressed ethical and security concerns with the research, which seeks to transmit protective traits to crops already growing in the field. That would mark a departure from the current widely used procedure of genetically modifying seeds for crops such as corn and soy, before they grow into plants.
The military research agency says its goal is to protect the nation's food supply from threats like drought, crop disease and bioterrorism by using insects to infect plants with viruses that protect against such dangers. The State Department said the project is for peaceful purposes and does not violate the Biological Weapons Convention. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said its scientists are part of the research, which is being conducted in contained labs. The technology could work in different ways. In the first phase, aphids -- tiny bugs that feed by sucking sap from plants -- infected plants with a virus that temporarily brought about a trait. But researchers are also trying to see if viruses can alter the plant's genes themselves to be resistant to dangers throughout the plant's life.
The military research agency says its goal is to protect the nation's food supply from threats like drought, crop disease and bioterrorism by using insects to infect plants with viruses that protect against such dangers. The State Department said the project is for peaceful purposes and does not violate the Biological Weapons Convention. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said its scientists are part of the research, which is being conducted in contained labs. The technology could work in different ways. In the first phase, aphids -- tiny bugs that feed by sucking sap from plants -- infected plants with a virus that temporarily brought about a trait. But researchers are also trying to see if viruses can alter the plant's genes themselves to be resistant to dangers throughout the plant's life.
Comment Finally! (Score 1) 250
It is time for all biologists to pay for a century of torturing planaria! Go forth legions of wormy vengeance!
Comment So what do we do? (Score 1) 145
Reading the comments, it seems clear everyone has deep scorn for people using the Mac OSX Server.app services anyways as they can all be replicated better and faster and easier using mumble mumble for the price of a sandwich.
So, what are the details? For those of us who do in fact use the Server.app services, what specifically do you recommend?
I use:
Websites: to serve small internal websites for myself and my collaborators to share non-secret internal info.
Mail: to set up temporary email addresses that people can use to sign up for events and then are destroyed once the event happens.
Calendar: to sync all of the iCal users in my group to the group calendars.
SFTP: to let internal users send files to the group server when they are in the field.
File Sharing: for storing backing up our main file systems.
etc.
Nothing complicated; nothing that requires vast configuration. Just services that OSX Server has provided us for years on machines we already have. (We're a Mac based shop in general.)
So what should I replace these services with?
A New Zealand Company Built An AI Baby That Plays the Piano (bloomberg.com) 87
pacopico writes: A New Zealand company called Soul Machines has built a disturbingly lifelike virtual baby powered by artificial intelligence software. According to a Bloomberg story, the baby has learned to read books, play the piano and draw pictures. The work is built off the research of Mark Sagar, the company's CEO, who is on a quest to mimic human consciousness in a machine. Sagar used to work at Weta creating lifelike faces for films like King Kong and Avatar and is now building these very realistic looking virtual avatars and pumping them full of code that not only handles things like speech but that also replicates the nervous system and brain function. The baby, for example, has virtual dopamine receptors that fire when it feels joy from playing the piano. What could go wrong?
Comment Watch the teacher (Score 1) 389
You also have to be careful about who is teaching and how they are doing it. Plus how that's different from the environment where you actually use this knowledge.
Otherwise, you end up with the situation in Starman:
"I learned how to drive by watching you! Green means go, red means stop, yellow means go very fast!"
Skin deep? Robots To Wear Real Human Tissue (thememo.com) 77
Scientists are already growing muscles, bones, and mini-organs in the lab. But these tissues are generally small and simple. That's why two scientists from Oxford University are proposing that we use humanoid robots to grow engineered tissues instead. From a report: Robots dressed in human flesh would benefit people who need tissue transplants, Oxford University researchers have said this week. At present human cells are grown in stationary environments, but moving humanoids could help them develop in a far more healthier way. Robots could "wear" tissue grafts before transplantation, researchers Pierre-Alexis Mouthuy and Andrew Carr propose in the latest issue of Science Robotics. Today sheets of cells are grown in stagnant tanks, but these "fail to mimic the real mechanical environment for cells," say the scientists. The resulting tissues aren't used to moving, stretching and straining, which make them problematic for use by patients.
Japanese Spacecraft Spots Massive Gravity Wave In Venus' Atmosphere (theverge.com) 84
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Japanese probe Akatsuki has observed a massive gravity wave in the atmosphere of Venus. This is not the first time such a wave was observed on the Solar System's second planet, but it is the largest ever recorded, stretching just over 6,000 miles from end to end. Its features also suggest that the dynamics of Venus' atmosphere are more complex than previously thought. An atmospheric gravity wave is a ripple in the density of a planet's atmosphere, according to the European Space Agency. Akatsuki spotted this particular gravity wave, described in a paper published today in Nature Geoscience, when the probe arrived at the planet on December 7th, 2015. The spacecraft then lost sight of it on December 12th, 2015, because of a change in Akatsuki's orbit. When the probe returned to a position to observe the bow-shaped structure on January 15th, 2016, the bright wave had vanished. What sets the huge December wave apart from previously discovered ones is that it appeared to be stationary above a mountainous region on the planet's surface, despite the background atmospheric winds. The study's authors believe that the bright structure is the result of a gravity wave that was formed in the lower atmosphere as it flowed over the planet's mountainous terrain. It's not clear how the wave exactly propagates to the planet's upper atmosphere, where clouds rotate faster than the planets itself -- four days instead of the 243 days it takes Venus to rotate once.
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