jimworm

I wish they would just go ahead and ban it outright today, and in my naive imagination the whole country would plunge into disaster. Airliner crashes, car crashes, market crashes, the whole lot.

Unfortunately, selective enforcement of this ban will quickly turn it into a tool of tyranny, same as any other.

(Yeah I have a site that doesn't display that stupid cookie notice, but it doesn't matter because I haven't pissed off anybody powerful yet.)

A more human mode of rubber-duck debugging. Might have a detrimental effect on office politics if these cheerleaders are not changed out regularly.

They might even become programmers themselves, after absorbing a lot of experience with many programmers' trains of thought.

Alimony, or the quick modern way for man to achieve indentured servitude.

Devil's advocate: if we accept that, then in effect the ban on child pornography could either be massively proliferating child abuse, or massively proliferating the collection of child porn. Maybe both.

There are seatbelt buckles made specifically for silencing those alarms, and boy are they popular in China.

http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=43123079687

I've been working remotely for the past three years. The greatest benefit was time saved from the lack of commute. Work requiring deep concentration is a lot easier, but I found it harder to influence others in the company not within my team. There isn't an adequate replacement for chats in the kitchen during breaks, where engineers can mingle with finance/marketing/etc in a casual environment.

Pajata [1] is unweaned veal intestines, and contain a cheese-like substance. It's one possible source of cheese invention.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigatoni_con_la_Pajata

They wouldn't expect to make international news by being mentioned in a blog post from the president, that's for sure.

Famous people leach fame into others by interacting with them. The easiest way to force someone to interact with you is to hit them somewhere vulnerable. Mr Schilling either wasn't aware of his vulnerability or hoped that it wouldn't be exploited. When it did get exploited, he didn't try to hide it, leaving a gaping wound for even more famewhores to leech fame from him. It worked, because I saw their tweets and I'm not even a baseball fan.

Compare that with someone sufficiently invulnerable, Obama for instance. Or even Chuck Norris.

The other fact is that with a large audience, it'd be silly not to expect that some percentage would be murderers/rapists/other unsavoury types. Getting a dozen offensive tweets out of a million-strong audience is still only 0.000012%, orders of magnitude less than the actual threat of rape.

I learned about Arcosanti from the arcologies in SimCity 2000, and have maintained some curiosity since. How does it feel to live in Arcosanti, compared with life in a "regular" city?

Would self-owned cars have a need to know the implications of its actions? Legalities?

Will they – like humans – be able to take on small losses in order to survive? Can they be expected to uphold the law like humans are? What if they act as getaway drivers for a bank robbery? Drug mules?

Would their programmers be legally responsible for their illegal actions? Or would they, as the buyers and evaluators of the software, be responsible? Or the programmers of the evaluation software?

One might take the Kowloon Walled City as an example of organic human architecture.

It would indeed be interesting to see where architecture ends up when given a ride on a genetic algorithm, although the parameters will need to be very, very detailed, and might be compiled from inputs such as "people always get lost at these 5 intersections", "this corner smells bad on hot days", and "raw sewage comes out of my tap when more than 6 people shower at the same time".

Eve is another must-try in my book. I haven't seen them outside of New Zealand yet though.

http://www.loveapples.co.nz/new-zealand/our-apples/eve/

Not my experience with Chinese hospitals, and I've seen several (with consultation fees of 2 CNY - not the entitled rich crowd). Usually there are five or six other people pushing each other to get the doctor's attention inside the office. It's nearly impossible to be seen without some less-than-violent strategic body positioning without eye contact. No such thing as privacy, even in gynaecology.

Natural selection isn't some benevolent deity. Its MO is to drive species to extinction, it's just that when some individuals find a way around it we call that evolution.

Without knowing which traits a species "needs", the best conservationists can do is to increase numbers while preserving diversity. The "50% of all females laying rim eggs" is just a reflection of the single breeding pair's genomes. If rim eggs had been discarded, only copies of the "good" genes could have been tossed along with those eggs, and "bad" genes inadvertently selected by virtue of not being linked to the rim egg gene - which was exactly how the rim egg gene itself came to be in the last breeding pair.

Increasing numbers while preserving diversity will give the bottlenecked gene pool a chance to mix into as many combinations as possible before being released back into the wild, without natural selection driving the species to extinction. It doesn't always work, but if it doesn't work the species was done for regardless of our efforts.

The "ground contact" parameter while walking sounds functionally very close to the "proprioception + pain" parameters for animals in a hobbling situation. An animal (me, specifically) quickly discovers a hobbling strategy by experimentation and a continuous sense of pain levels.

I think that pain will become a major part of the design in learning robots of the future.

Physical effects could be used in combination with symbols.

The current trefoil is enough to warn the people of today, so that should continue to be used.

If knowledge of the trefoil is lost, however, the actual radiation would serve as a warning. Much smaller, but still dangerous quantities of waste could be stored around the world, with just enough of a barrier around it to remain confined while curious individuals exploring around it would contract radiation sickness, but survive for long enough to warn others about the danger and the associated trefoil symbol.

The main storage area should have much bigger versions of the trefoil, but not so big that a person would lose perspective and not know what they're looking at. The size should convey to anybody who knows the meaning of the symbol that this is serious business.

If the smaller quantities of waste are abundant and accessible enough, and the main storage area inaccessible enough, then it would be unlikely for anyone to come across the main storage area before learning the meaning of the symbol.

Imagine raisins inside a lump of dough expanding as it is baked into a fruit loaf.

The Antarctic, Greenland, other glaciers.

Humans have been very successful at beating evolution, if more by accident than purposeful action. Mosquitoes won't be pushovers like the dodo were, but if we eradicate one species of them they won't be the first insects we've driven extinct on purpose.

Thanks to your cue, I found a candidate gene that might fit the bill called Medea [0]. Wolbachia itself won't cause catastrophic sex-ratio imbalances, so does not cause a "White Plague" scenario.

[0] http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/bio2.0/engineering_in_th...

I've recently been thinking about the possibility of a genetic disease for mosquitoes, transmitted down male lines but killing only females of the same brood, with the intended result that a relatively small release of males can cause an extreme imbalance in the sex ratio and possibly the elimination of mosquitoes from an area.

The different mechanisms of mosquito sex determination aside, I haven't been able to work out something that might be feasible. Wondering if anybody else had similar ruminations, and if you'd share some of your thoughts?

Reverse transcriptase. mRNA, and therefore cDNA, could have things like introns excised.

Still, that's like saying "A zip file can't be copyrighted, but whoever manages to copy the contents once it's been decoded by a third party can copyright the contents." The judgement does not seem to understand that cDNA libraries could be constructed relatively trivially nowadays with hardly a creative thought, with apologies to those who earned their postgraduate degrees doing such a thing.

tl;dr: like restriction enzymes, but easily retargetable because they recognise sites using RNA.

This article made me git stash list and gee I hope I was faster doing all those things the second time round.

"they will be able to safely walk in any streets"

As adults, yes. Also maybe as children, if they don't look Chinese and never wander away from the rich neighbourhoods.

If all antibacterials were harsh chemicals like hydrogen peroxide that might be true. But check out multidrug efflux pumps, and things like triclosan.

Beta-lactamases are now pretty much everywhere, but the difference with NDM-1 is that it's not inhibited by the standard defence against beta-lactamases, clavulanic acid.

With these plasmid being traded around out in the wild, the fear is that we might soon see all beta-lactams become useless, like penicillin is now.

GMail, Google Hangouts

tmux, vim

git, Bitbucket, Github

Let's be charitable to the NSA for a minute, and imagine that they are following the plot of the God Emperor of Dune[1], where in seeing the danger posed to the Internet by the formation of cloud service giants, they became the fearsome yet benevolent tyrant, strategically planning an engineered leak, so that on their death the Internet would react by distributing its services among many providers in The Scattering, thus ensuring the safety and continued survival of the Internet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Emperor_of_Dune