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Comment Re:On the one hand... (Score 3, Insightful) 327

The reality here is though, we don't want these. We've got plenty of contracts for Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J vaccines that are safer and more efficacious than the AZ vaccine. The FDA is dragging their feet on approving it because they don't want to approve an obviously worse vaccine.

They should just sell them to the highest bidder now while other people want it and give our population the much more effective vaccines that we have a large supply of already, and orders for plenty of doses in the next couple months. If it delays the vaccine rollout by a week or two, in the long run, I think that's still superior to giving our population a less effective vaccine.

Comment Re:Structural Unemployment for Middle Men (Score 1) 443

What they're talking about here is the use of Steam as a copy-protection system, which is completely integrated into a game, including the retail "disk" version. When one installs it from a disk, it first prompts you to either log into steam or make a steam account, and then it installs the purchased game into the Steam folder and activates it on your steam account. The first games to do this were official retail release of Valve games, but since then, many other games have implemented it due to the various advantages of using Steam in your game (good copy protection, Achievements/stats tracking integration, ease of updating, multiplayer server browser, etc). What they're trying to say, essentially, is that these "other" retail games are promoting their competitors, and they don't like it.

Comment Re:But in-game ads will always affect gameplay (Score 1) 119

In recent years, this restriction has been relaxed. The Forza Motorsport series in particular has been putting a lot of pressure on companies to allow realistic damage modelling. In Forza Motorsport 2, one could turn on simulation damage to the vehicles that modeled performance problems that would be created by, say, bumping into a wall, even though the visual damage was limited.

In Forza 3, they're also introducing rollover for the cars, which was previously prohibited by licensors, and are introducing even more realistic damage modeling (comes out this fall)

From this article: http://kotaku.com/5284706/forza-3-car-porn-in-motion

Damage modeling for the cars, all of the cars, is also carefully detailed. And in Forza 3, all 400 cars now include the ability to completely roll over in a race, something no racing game has ever tried before, Greenawalt said. Getting permission from the 50 manufacturers for this unheard of level of damage modeling was a matter of talking to each individually. "We go to a manufacturer and say we're a sim and as a sim, cars roll over," Greenawalt said.

So I think car manufacturers are getting somewhat more lenient with these things because they know that fans want to play a racing simulation. And with Forza, at least, if some manufacturer really insists on not having the damage modeling, they just get to not be in the game, and I think most know that would be terrible publicity with all their competitors in there.

Graphics

Content-Aware Image Resizing 174

An anonymous reader writes "At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego, two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, have demonstrated a new method to shrink images. The method is called 'Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing' (PDF paper here) and it figures out which parts of an image are less significant. This makes it possible to change the aspect ratio of an image without making the content look skewed or stretched out. There is a video demonstration up on YouTube."
Privacy

Submission + - Skype-Linux reads /etc/passwd and firefox profile! (skype.com)

mrcgran writes: "Users of Skype for Linux have just found out that it reads the files /etc/passwd, firefox profile, plugins, addons, etc, and many other unnecessary files in /etc. This fact was originally discovered by using AppArmor, but others have confirmed this fact using strace on versions 1.4.0.94 and 1.4.0.99. What is going on? This probably shows how important it is to use AppArmor in any closed-source application in Linux to restrict any undue access to your files."
Businesses

Submission + - Unix Admin's Unit of Production? 4

RailGunSally writes: I am a (strictly technical) member of a large *NIX systems admin team at a Fortune 150. Our new IT Management Overlord is a hardcore beancounter from Hell. We in the trenches have been tasked with providing "metrics" on absolutely everything from system utilization to paperclip recycling. Of course, measuring productivity is right up there at the top of the list. We're stumped as to a definition of the basic unit of productivity for a *nix admin. There is a school of thought in our group that holds that if the PHBs are simple enough to want to operate purely from pie charts and spreadsheets, then we should just graph some output from /dev/random and have done with it. I personally love the idea, but I feel the need for due diligence, so I put the question to the Slashdotters: How does one reasonably quantify admin productivity?
Graphics

Submission + - Content-aware image resizing (youtube.com) 2

An anonymous reader writes: At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, have demonstrated a new method to shrink images. The method called 'Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing' figures out which parts of an image are less significant. This makes it possible to change the aspect-ratio of an image without making the content look skewed or stretched out. Watch the demonstration. A pdf paper can be found here.
Biotech

Submission + - Ape-Human split moved back by millions of years (breitbart.com)

E++99 writes: "Up until now, scientific consensus has place the divergence of man from ape five to six million years ago (based on "genetic distances"). But newly discovered fossils in Ethiopia place the divergence at least twice as far back. They also largely put to rest any doubts that both man and modern apes both originally emerged in Africa. From the article:

The trail in the hunt for physical evidence of our human ancestors goes cold some six or seven million years ago. Orrorin — discovered in Kenya in 2000 and nicknamed "Millennium Man" although its sex remains unknown — goes back 5.8 to 6.1 million years, while Sahelanthropus, found a year later in Chad, is considered by most experts to extend the human family tree another one million years into the past. Beyond that, however, fossils of early humans from the Miocene period, 23 to five million years ago, disappear. Fossils of early apes especially during the critical period of 14 to eight million years ago were virtually non-existant — until now. "We know nothing about how the human line actually emerged from apes," the authors of the paper noted. But the new fossils, dubbed "Chororapithecus abyssinicus" by the team of Japanese and Ethiopian paleoanthropologists who found them, place the early ancestors of the modern day gorilla 10 to 10.5 million years in the past, suggesting that the human-ape split occurred before that.
...
The scientists leading the team that found the fossils — Gen Suwa of the University of Tokyo, and Ethiopian paleontologists Berhane Asfaw and Yonas Beyene — calculated that the human-orangutan split "could easily have been as old as 20 million years."
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Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio... described the fossils as "a critically important discovery," a view echoed by several other scientists who had read the paper or seen the artifacts.
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"This is a major breakthrough in our understanding of the origin of humanity," Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a physical anthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, told AFP.
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