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Comment Re:Here's the catch (Score 1) 39

Cell Division

1 cell becomes 2 cells -- which cell does it follow?

My understanding is that it can follow both. "Once a cluster of supervoxels has been identified as a cell nucleus, the computer uses that information to find the nucleus again in subsequent images." That sounds like extraordinarily cool technology. Tracking the embryonic development of cells is currently very hard. For really simple organisms, each embryonic cell can be tracked to one or more fixed descendent cells in known locations. For most organisms however, where a given embryonic cell ends up is a non-deterministic process.

Comment Re:Ugly (Score 1) 237

Yes, it's ugly.
Even fifteen years after its publication it seems that nobody at Dice Holdings has read the Cluetrain Manifesto.
Only people who think of Slashdot users as "the product" could be capable of not noticing the monstrous impedance mismatch between the beta design and actual, living classic Slashdot site.
Shame.

Comment His mansion (Score 5, Interesting) 127

Apropos of nothing at all, I was fortunate to have a client drive me past Kim Dotcoms mansion in a fashionably distant and hilly area North of Auckland a little while ago. It was, he said with evident disdain, a "rented mansion". I've no idea how true that is.

The main gate over which heavily armed special forces apparently had to pass, is barely a metre high, and surrounded by... no fence at all.

When did we start to allow police forces in Western countries start to behave like militias?

Comment Re:Things you don't hear every day (Score 5, Insightful) 173

A witty response, but really this is getting a bit tired.

I suppose people are free to keep reading the same old, self-reinforcing sources that insist that Perl is somehow a language of the past. And if they read enough of these cliches, the anti-Perl FUD may seem to be accurate, but as any developer who spends time wrestling with real-world problems in modern Perl will attest, the so-called modern Perl ecosystem is, (just like the modern Python or PHP ecosystems), a fabulous place to work in.

I work in all three.

Comment Re:Triple J? World's largest? umm.... Eurovision? (Score 1) 165

Heard of it?- yes, but only because I am from Australia. (BTW, I am highly suspicious of how some artists get airtime on this government funded station. Getting your stuff played means a lot commercially here, as the station is hugely popular and can be heard pretty much anywhere on the continent. There is no equivalent of this station in the US).

Having said all of that, there is no way that this is the "World Biggest Song Vote".

Just my $AU 0.02c worth

Comment Depending on how things turn out... (Score 2) 544

...this is either the start of the post-scarcity future so cleverly portrayed by Ian M Banks in his Culture novels. In this future we are freed from the need to work and instead choose to work, and play.

...or it's the start of a dystopian future forshadowed in Kevin Warick's "In the Mind of the Machine". Chapter 2 of that book is still the most horrible account of our near-term future I have read anywhere. In it humans are bred in conditions like contemporary chicken farms, kept for their labour, and are lucky to live past 30. Very unpleasant.

I'm hoping for the Banksian future ;-)

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