I definitely see your point, and most exercises like these are just pure marketing blah. But at the same time, they could have chosen what many of their competitors have chosen, which is to ignore the whole thing and hope nobody notices for as long as possible. Their contribution is very small, but there is a momentum building across industries, which only a few years back would be unthinkable. So instead of hammering them for not doing enough, I'd rather congratulate them on doing something, ask their competitors what _they_ are doing, and encourage the whole industry to do the same thing. Asking them to commit corporate suicide for the greater good, while probably really the only adequate measure, just isn't going to work in 2020.

Yeah, that was my first thought as well. I haven't been to a physical bank in more than five years, probably more. Online-only banks are quite commonplace around the world. Though some European countries are still lagging - including some of the big ones like France, where cheques (!!!) are still in use. In my home country of Norway, that's something that was phased out in the late 80ies. I live in Switzerland now, where I no longer have any paper-based communication with my bank, nor do I ever visit its brick&mortar offices, though they do have them still.

Aaand I was too quick and missed the post you _actually_ responded to. My bad.

That's not fair to OP - OP lists alternatives of both genders clearly in his/her argument. Though I confess to having had the same knee-jerk reaction as you at first.

Realizing I'm out of my depth here, I'll only feebly respond: is that not the case if you investigate almost all academic awards handed out the last half century or so? As complexity grows progress becomes ever more incremental. Deciding exactly where the line is drawn is subjective, and it's up to the Nobel committee to make that subjective decision for their particular prize after all.

If you are curious as to why these two particular scientists won the prize instead of your long list of contributors, the source text is probably a good starting point: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nobelprize.org%2Fpri...

Generally, this is and pretty much has always been the case. Not many lone scientist without collaborators making major breakthroughs in a vacuum any more. And if you read the text, you'll see it' being awarded for a very specific experiment primarily. Not for coming up with CRISPR/cas9.

From the press release: " Together, they succeeded in recreating the bacteria’s genetic scissors in a test tube and simplifying the scissors’ molecular components so they were easier to use. In an epoch-making experiment, they then reprogrammed the genetic scissors. In their natural form, the scissors recognise DNA from viruses, but Charpentier and Doudna proved that they could be controlled so that they can cut any DNA molecule at a predetermined site. Where the DNA is cut it is then easy to rewrite the code of life."

This is not my field, and I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong.

Thank you - made my day! I'm bloody still laughing writing this!

It's a little sad really that I'm completely flabbergasted to read news on /. that makes me genuinely happy these days. Also, quite possibly a news story where we will reach over a hundred posts before this becomes a discussion about US politics. Here's hoping anyways.

Thank you sir - made my day!

I have an Oculus Rift and had a DK2, and to be honest I was skeptical of gaming in VR at the current iteration of the technology as it gets tiring in the long run and a lot of the games are more tech demos than real games.

But then I played Elite:Dangerous (space sim) and later The Unspoken (fireball-tossing wizard duels in multiplayer). These are games where that sense of presence that VR offers is used to mind-blowing effect. Especially in E:D, as VR allows a real sense of *scale*. I never thought about this before I tried E:D, but flying into a space station that is over a km long really gives you a "holy crap that this is huge"-feeling. And you really feel that you are sitting *inside* of your ship, which is oddly pleasing.

The same for The Unspoken. Using Oculus touch controllers you really feel that the hands you see in-game are your own, and the first time I saw my right hand burst into flame as I was charging up a fireball was another of those "holy crap" moments.

Once developers get a better handle on how to make VR games it's going to become a serious segment of gaming. We see early signs of this already, as E:D and Unspoken demonstrates, but there is still some way to go (and possible a couple of HW iterations) before it becomes a serious platform in terms of users and revenue. And I'm not ruling out another short-term crash/flop if the next iteration takes too long, or developers can't come up with better experiences before users' patience runs out. We're not there yet, but VR is just too much fun to go away permanently.

You're probably right, but at the risk of falling into the "everything was always better before" trap, I can't help but think that even if you used to read a right-of-center newspaper, you would get differing viewpoints, some not following general orthodoxy. A "perfect" algorithm that can with a very high degree of certainty give you what you most want to read could create the feeling that the world is *exactly* as you think. The only conclusion then, when meeting people who disagree, is that they must all be idiots...

What worries me more than social media becoming the primary source, is the idea that we should only read be interested in things we are already interested in.

We're in a period of strongly polarized opinions where the idea of political discourse seems to be that you and me sit alone on our respective mountaintops and yell at each other. It bloody important to read news that doesn't fit your existing opinions or interests, how else will you ever question them? Or get new ones?

I try to make a point of reading news sometimes from sources who's political alignment I clearly disagree with. It's annoying and refreshing (and allows me to smugly roll my eyes at the world occasionally). And just once every blue moon, I actually change my opinion or discover something interesting. In an ever more complex reality, we need more viewpoints, not fewer, and I'm worried that algorithmic filtering of news feels like a boon but is actually really detrimental to us all.

I bought one last week from here http://trimslice.com/web/

Cheap, cool (as in not hot) and fairly reasonably priced for what you get. Waiting for mine right now...