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Comment Re:He might still be alive (Score 2) 102

When you mentioned "third partner" who cashed out early, I thought for a minute you were going to be talking about Ronald Wayne - what a life of bad decisions he made ;)

For those not familiar:

He got 10% of the original Apple stock (drew the first Apple Logo, made the partnership documents, wrote the Apple I manual, etc).
Twelve days later, he sold it for $800.
Okay, but he could still try to claim rights in court... nah, a year later he signed a contract with the company to forfeit any potential future claims against the company for $1500.
Okay, well, it's not like he had an opportunity to rethink... nah, Jobs and Wozniak spent two years trying to get him back, to no avail.
Okay, but he still had, like memorabilia he could hawk from the early days, like his signed contract. Nah, he sold that for $500 in 2016.
And that contract went on later to be sold for $1,6 million.
Okay, well, I'm sure he went on to do great things... nah, he ended up running a tiny postage stamp shop.
Which he ended up having to move into his Florida home because of repeated break-ins.
Which he then had to sell after an inside-job heist bankrupted him.

Comment Re:He might still be alive (Score 5, Informative) 102

Jobs committed suicide-by-woo. He didn't "turn away from traditional therapy because it can't keep up with rapidly advancing metastasis", he turned away from treatment for a perfectly treatable form of cancer for nine months to try things like a vegan diet, acupuncture and herbal remedies, and that killed him.

Steve Jobs had islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. It's much less aggressive than normal pancreatic adenocarcinoma. The five-year survival rate is 95% with surgical intervention. Jobs was specifically told that he had one of the 5% of pancreatic cancers "that can be cured", and there was no evidence at the time of his diagnosis that it had spread. Jobs instead turned to woo. Eight months later, there was signs on CT scans that his cancer had grown and possibly spread, and then he finally underwent surgery, it was confirmed that there were now secondary tumors on his liver. His odds of a five-year survival at this point were now 23%. And he did not roll that 23%.

Jobs himself regretted his decision to delay conventional medical intervention.

Comment Re: Your mouse is a microphone (Score 1) 40

I did some proof of concept tests with both Pointer Lock and PointerEvents, but both failed because you don't get *any* data if you're not moving the mouse, and only get (heavily rounded) datapoints when you do move the mouse. You'd need raw access to data coming from the mouse, before even the mouse driver, to do what they did.

You *might* be able to pull off a statistical attack, collecting noise in the fluctuations of movement positions and timing in the data you receive when the mouse *is* moving. But I can't see how that could possibly have the fidelity to recover audio, except for *maybe* really deep bass. And again, it'd only apply for when the mouse is actually moving.

Neat attack, but not really practical in the browser.

Comment Since nobody is going to mention what was found: (Score 5, Informative) 48

Past studies:

* Volatile, low-mass (100 u) nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing organic species.

* Single-ringed aromatic compounds.

* Complex, high-mass (exceeding 20 u) macromolecular fragments of insoluble organic material, featuring multiple aryl groups connected to hydrocarbon chains, along with nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing groups.

* Aryl (aromatic) and oxygen-bearing compounds in older E-ring grains.

Current study:

* Confirmed aryl and O-bearing compounds in fresh grains (ruling out that they formed due to space weathering)

* Aliphatic O-bearing compounds with carbonyl groups attached to a C2 organic, with acetaldehyde or acetic acid being likely candidates (aldehydes are interesting because they're intermediates precursors in the formation of amino acids)

* Aliphatic and cyclic esters and/or alkenes (on Earth, these are involved in the formation of fats and oils)

* Two classes of ether and/or ethyl compounds (on Earth, these are regularly found in living organisms)

* Tentative N- and O-bearing moieties. Potential candidates for these molecules include derivatives of pyrimidine, pyridine, and nitriles like acetonitrile (such molecules are involved in the reactions that form amino acids).

TL/DR: there may well be not just the atomic building blocks of life in there (CHONPS), but the molecular building blocks as well.

Comment Re:Evolution speaks (Score 1) 52

EVERY point you mentioned has a genetic component.

Menopause has a genetic component? Exactly how much are you planning to reengineer the human race?

The few times its not (environmental causes I suppose) is incredibly rare.

... says PDXNerd, responding to a post where the vast majority of cases listed are predominantly environmental.

If you want to be pedantic, you can probably "find" genetic susceptibilities to literally anything, even dying of a car accident. But you're not going to blame a person dying in a car accident on their genes. It's not even close to the proximate cause.

You literally said "genetic component" or "genetic factor" on every point

I "literally" did not.

PLEASE we do NOT need more old people having babies

Why? No, seriously, why? Because anyone over 50 grosses you out? If you're so obsessed with genes, you should be thrilled with the concept of older people having babies - the older the better! It means they've survived later into life. You should want 90-year-old grannies having as many children as they can.

The low birth rate in western countries

I can't tell if you want to fix it or not.

there's plenty of children that need fostering and adopting.

You could not possibly be more ignorant on the topic. This isn't the 1850s, with orphanages full of orphans just down the street, waiting for someone to show up and sign some papers. There's too much competition for too few children, and it's a bureaucratic nightmare. The average adoption costs $20-50k and international adoptions (most adoptions these days) take on average 2-4 years, but complications can drag them out to far longer - and all the while, the child is growing up without you. It's a massive emotional burden on any prospective parent. Actually talk to any adoptive family before spouting such nonsense.

Comment Re:All that poison people eat and smear on their s (Score 1) 171

Fun fact: the genus name for meadowsweet / mead wort (a plant of waterlogged soils that grows a lot near me), used to be "Spirea". It's a traditional flavoring herb and strewing herb, but also common in herbal medicine. Its traditional medicinal uses were confirmed in the late 1830s when salicylic acid was extracted from it. So in the late 1800s when Bayer started making "acetyl spirea" extract, they named it "aspirin".

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