domwood

I'm literally here to bitch about how fucking inflammatory this title is.

Fuck titles, man.

This has been around for quite a while, I distinctly remember it doing the rounds on Twitter. Still nice, though.

Guilty, ha. Recommend editing to: "New Evidence Supports Theory of Extraterrestrial (no, not aliens you fool) Impact"

This. This is why I love games. There's so much passion and humanity in every little pixel.

rant/

Nothing instills rage in me more than companies, knowing how essential what they sell is, slagging each other for petty, pointless money.

I hate to be dramatic, but these are disabled adults and children for christ's sake, people who need things like SfY. I just do not understand how someone at the litigating company thought "hey, let's go sue a company over some very complex and possibly unfounded patent allegations! Screw the people that rely on the products we're suing about, they won't mind". How dare they take away a person's ability to communicate? Tell me, is there any reasonable situation where it's acceptable to deny a child's ability to speak?

The humanity of it all :/

/rant

Kind of difficult to ignore being litigated. Kinda stupid too.

What if it goes wrong? There's very good reasons why drug trials take so long.

I can't reply to the five or so comments that say the same thing but I'll put it to you this way: My grandparents are both dead of cancer-related complications in the last few months, they didn't have ten years to wait for a cure. I very much can relate and empathise with those who have to wait. But it's still better late and working than never.

Well, the fact it's not causing liver failure/brain damage/bouts of pedantic arguing/etc is a good thing. Waiting another decade to see if it actually works isn't too bad either, we haven't had a vaccine for the last 10,000 years of human civilisation, so what's another 10?

Braille would be easy to implement too, both Android and iOS control fonts at the system level (well, usually on Android) so all you have to do is add a Braille font and you're done.

I can sorta do that with the ICS keyboard, the actually half decent predictive/auto-correct's what makes it possible.

The immediate benefit is that this makes, or with a little refinement (not sure how small the tactile areas can be), touch screens properly accessible to the blind without changing anything on the software interface. That is a very good thing, as it's accessibility, but layered on top of what exists. I wonder if it can do Braille? 'Cause that would just be cool.

I'm not really in to having it for standard UI, I prefer the idea of some kind of electromagnetic field providing the haptic feedback, something a bit less.. crude? Obvious? something like that.

Oh, the beautiful but saddening irony.

Upvoted a thousand percent. This sums up everything that is wrong with education.

(EDIT: spellchecking my dumb arse)

I think that we're largely missing the point here. He's worried that his fundamentally harmless research will end up powering horrific weapons of mass destruction, enabling them to attack even more precisely and with more devastation. And quite frankly, I share his concerns that if those weapons were developed, we would use them without thought or care. And apologies to my fellow American Hackers, but America's got the rep for it, what with that one time they dropped a couple of nukes on hundreds of thousands of unarmed men, women and children, killing hundreds of thousands and levelling a couple of cities.

But, I digress, he's talking about androids sneezing us to death. I'm not going near a shop mannikin ever again.

Indeed. So there's no small degree of irony in taxing people on their tax funded benefits.

Actually, most benefits count as taxable income in the UK, it's just the tax is taken before payment. And no there isn't a correlation, I'm not saying there is. I'm pointing out that, considering the tax band isn't proportionally that much higher for the more affluent, there's significant divergence in the level of maintenance in these areas, when all these areas should be maintained without discrimination.

Not where I live. I live in a largish town called Ipswich, in the UK. Now, we have a wildly diverging GDP demographic, we have people from the poorest 5% and people from the richest 5% of the population and the council tax rate only goes up to £3,200 from just over £1,000. When you're earning £70,000, £3,000 isn't a lot of money. When you're earning £16,000, £1,000 is.

It's fascinating how subtly our environment reflects our livelihoods. For example, I look out of my window and see two, make that three trees. I advance fifteen minutes up to a much more affluent district, lo and behold, many trees and well manicured verges. These same areas are maintained by the same council and the same taxes. I also had never noticed those differences before.

Nice! One of the biggest issues I have with jQuery is the fact that animations are just JS and not CSS with JS fallbacks. I suppose that's a deliberate design choice, but still.

Thanks, and the same to you, IPF isn't fun and neither is lung cancer.

That's one of the reasons something like this is important, it's a life extending drug that's from legitimate sources, which means it's thoroughly tested and isn't some weed from China. The extra time this will give to a lot of people shouldn't be overlooked.

No, it's no wonder drug, it's not a cure, it's a treatment. Yes, it probably will become redundant eventually, but as cancer's a genetic thing, it'll be on a patient by patient basis, that means even if a patient's cancer start to develop an immunity to the drug, it'll take a very long time for that immunity to be spread by reproduction, especially as people tend to get cancer after having children (it's far more common in later life after all, or don't have them after they are diagnosed. That means that it'll be useful for a long period of time for the majority of people. In the meantime, that gives science a chance to continue to develop the "next step", whatever that may be. And it's not the only drug of its kind, we've got to the point of being able to target individual cancers, so perhaps the research from this will have uses elsewhere.

P.S. I'm not going overboard, cancer has done a damned good job of rampaging through my family, so I think I'm excused a little drama ;)

As someone who's grandfather and grandmother both died of cancer-related complications (edit: in the last four months, my grandmother not even a week ago) and with a grandfather-in-law who has terminal cancer, for once I'm going to abandon cynicism, gloss over the lack of scientific details, and dare to hope.

Well put. I'm no kid, and it excites me! I think it's important we don't overlook the levelling effect stuff like this has, the same way Gutenberg took books to the masses, things like this take the ability to create with technology to the masses. It's not quite the same level of revolutionary, but it's still remarkable.

Exactly. Each device is potentially a self-contained unit of a whole, and things tend to get a damn sight more efficient if each is exclusively host to a specific tool, with the environment exclusively designed to match that specific tool. I do wonder just how efficient a cluster of Pis running a typical, but refactored for Pis, LAMP stack would be in comparison to a typical LAMP setup on a comparable server.

They're also cheap enough to make distributed computing more immediately viable in those projects. A few of these chained up could probably do quite a variety of complicated tasks. I'd bet you could make stuff like self-driving cars a lot cheaper and efficient on the computing side.

In rudimentary terms, I suppose at least it's a step in the right direction. It doesn't necessarily suggest the US government is going to immediately embrace openly disseminating its data, but it's still a step in the right direction. Third party services will most likely proliferate quite rapidly.

It's a good way of putting it. Arduinos are probably more directly rewarding and usable (if you're an Engadget reporter anyway), but if I was setting up an under 16's Comp Sci class, It'd have to be the Pi, just 'cause it's more.. educational?

I sort of agree and disagree with you on the accessibility of the command line, it's definitely a lot less difficult that it was a decade ago, what with the proliferation of the internet and therefore stuff like StackOverflow, but it's still notably daunting and somewhat steep on the learning curve. Still, stuff like this is how we make it easier and more accessible.

And doing stuff like that is going to make stuff like IT/Engineering education a hell of a lot more fun, rewarding and accessible.