A "schmear" campaign?

Easier to film in - more room.

How do you "turn off" an iPhone? That f***ker doesn't turn off.

I just do them all lowercase. Works every time. I don't think they're case sensitive.

As has been mentioned in the discussion of the recent Slashdot story about tv taking screenshots to figure out what you're watching, just buy a SCEPTRE dumb TV. Very reasonable price. You can get 'em at Walmart or directly online. May not be the best quality picture, but if you're that concerned about your privacy...

That's a nice looking turbine you got there. Shame if it was to get all "wobbly".

Nicely written.

Good question. Any new life would be under intense attack by already existing viruses, and in competition for resources from already existing microbiology, like bacteria and archaea.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...

More than a mile beneath the ocean's surface, as dark clouds of mineral-rich water billow from seafloor hot springs called hydrothermal vents, unseen armies of viruses and bacteria wage war.
Like pirates boarding a treasure-laden ship, the viruses infect bacterial cells to get the loot: tiny globules of elemental sulfur stored inside the bacterial cells. Instead of absconding with their prize, the viruses force the bacteria to burn their valuable sulfur reserves, then use the unleashed energy to replicate.

"Our findings suggest that viruses in the dark oceans indirectly access vast energy sources in the form of elemental sulfur," said University of Michigan marine microbiologist and oceanographer Gregory Dick, whose team collected DNA from deep-sea microbes in seawater samples from hydrothermal vents in the Western Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California.

"We suspect that these viruses are essentially hijacking bacterial cells and getting them to consume elemental sulfur so the viruses can propagate themselves," said Karthik Anantharaman of the University of Michigan, first author of a paper on the findings published this week in the journal Science Express.

Similar microbial interactions have been observed in shallow ocean waters between photosynthetic bacteria and the viruses that prey upon them.

But this is the first time such a relationship has been seen in a chemosynthetic system, one in which the microbes rely solely on inorganic compounds, rather than sunlight, as their energy source.

"Viruses play a cardinal role in biogeochemical processes in ocean shallows," said David Garrison, a program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research. "They may have similar importance in deep-sea thermal vent environments."

The results suggest that viruses are an important component of the thriving ecosystems--which include exotic six-foot tube worms--huddled around the vents.

"The results hint that the viruses act as agents of evolution in these chemosynthetic systems by exchanging genes with the bacteria," Dick said. "They may serve as a reservoir of genetic diversity that helps shape bacterial evolution."


Here is more: https://news.umich.edu/viruses...

In a practically infinite universe, the astronomically improbable is bound to happen. Many times over. Don't discount panspermia on the basis of improbability. On a universal timescale Slashdot is improbable. Yet, here we are.

Looks like your username was generated on that spreadsheet!

This is actual news for nerds. Tori, in dielectric 2-dimensional sheets! That's what I want to hear about. Paid sock-puppet/trolls can't find a way to make this about politics. I'm so tired of them. Can they be over, please? This used to be a cool site. About tech. That's what I come here for.

White collar criminals, thieves, to the tune of millions - or billions - of dollars are patted on the head. "Good boy."

Great. Just what we need. A trained monkey that summarizes the summarizers.

According the the article, "The generated sentences are taken from the earlier extraction phase and aren’t built from scratch, which explains why the structure is pretty repetitive and stiff."

Mohammad Saleh, co-author of the paper and a software engineer in Google AI’s team, told The Register: “The extraction phase is a bottleneck that determines which parts of the input will be fed to the abstraction stage. Ideally, we would like to pass all the input from reference documents. “Designing models and hardware that can support longer input sequences is currently an active area of research that can alleviate these limitations. We are still a very long way off from effective text summarization or generation. And while the Google Brain project is rather interesting, it would probably be unwise to use a system like this to automatically generate Wikipedia entries. For now, anyway.

Also, since it relies on the popularity of the first ten websites on the internet for any particular topic, if those sites aren’t particularly credible, the resulting handiwork probably won’t be very accurate either.

My faux outrage is entirely synthetic.

I'm sure they've heard of those technologies. I'm sure they use them.

I'm also pretty certain they don't have the resources to equip every school with signal jammers and cameras - and staff to operate them. This is the cheap option.

How cheap it is compared to the business and productivity lost is unknown : )

Reminiscent of the arguments for putting pollution filtering on fossil fuel burning power plants vs. capturing pollution from every individual personal motor vehicle.