splante - Slashdot User

Comment Re:I love how headlines are written (Score 1) 30

by splante on Tuesday June 07, 2022 @11:12AM (#62600104) Attached to: Supreme Court Seeks Biden Views on WhatsApp 'Pegasus' Spyware Dispute

I agree with your position in general--too often a decision by a mid-level bureaucrat is attributed to the then-current President. But in this case, there is the Justice Department involved, as you say, and since it involves a close ally, the State Department will want to weigh in, and since it set a kind of precident on this kind of situation in general, our own intelligence agencies will have an opinion. If all those departments don't agree (which is likely), Biden will have to make the final call.

Submission + - ISS: new cracks found on the Russian module (livescience.com)

Submitted by Mr.Fork on Monday August 30, 2021 @02:36PM

Mr.Fork writes: Livescience.com is reporting that new cracks have been found on the International Space Station. Russian cosmonauts aboard the ISS discovered the fissures and there is concern that they could spread over time.

Submission + - ARM China Seizes IP, Relaunches as an 'Independent' Company (extremetech.com)

Submitted by TomGreenhaw on Monday August 30, 2021 @12:51PM

TomGreenhaw writes: This should be very concerning for tech companies that operate in the Chinese market.
"It is not clear how much pressure was put on SoftBank to form the merger, but this looks like one of the most blatant examples of IP theft that we’ve seen. The Chinese arm of a company has gone rogue and refused to obey the ruling of its own board. The head of that company is essentially treating it as a personal fiefdom, and Chinese authorities do not appear to have taken meaningful action to reign in Mr. Wu."

Submission + - Previous Covid Prevents Delta Infection Better Than Pfizer Shot (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 27, 2021 @04:19PM

An anonymous reader writes: People who recovered from a bout of Covid-19 during one of the earlier waves of the pandemic appear to have a lower risk of contracting the delta variant than those who got two doses of the vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech SE. The largest real-world analysis (PDF) comparing natural immunity — gained from an earlier infection — to the protection provided by one of the most potent vaccines currently in use showed that reinfections were much less common. The paper from researchers in Israel contrasts with earlier studies, which showed that immunizations offered better protection than an earlier infection, though those studies were not of the delta variant.

The results are good news for patients who already successfully battled Covid-19, but show the challenge of relying exclusively on immunizations to move past the pandemic. People given both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were almost six-fold more likely to contract a delta infection and seven-fold more likely to have symptomatic disease than those who recovered. The analysis also showed that protection from an earlier infection wanes with time. The risk of a vaccine-breakthrough delta case was 13-fold higher than the risk of developing a second infection when the original illness occurred during January or February 2021. That’s significantly more than the risk for people who were ill earlier in the outbreak. Giving a single shot of the vaccine to those who had been previously infected also appeared to boost their protection. The long-term benefit of a booster dose of the inoculation, which has just recently begun in Israel, is unknown.

Comment It wasn't the success that was the problem (Score 2) 85

by splante on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @07:02PM (#60608136) Attached to: Bill Gates: 'I Was Naive At Microsoft,' Didn't Realize Success Would Bring Antitrust Scrutiny

Sure, if MS hadn't been successful they'd likely have been ignored. But it wasn't because they were successful that they got antitrust scrutiny, it was the shenanigans they got up to once they became successful.

Comment Re:Ethanol is just stupid (Score 1) 894

by splante on Tuesday May 26, 2009 @02:17PM (#28098247) Attached to: The Great Ethanol Scam

"Government" funding of roads and highways comes from the state and federal fuel taxes. Essentially they are user fees, just like the fare you pay on Amtrak. The additional money the government pours into Amtrak comes from the general fund--income tax, corporate tax, borrowing, etc. So the people that use the highways pay for them, but we all (well, those of us that actually pay taxes) end up subsidizing Amtrak, whether we want to use it or not.

Comment NOT Emory (Score 1) 247

by splante on Tuesday February 17, 2009 @12:46PM (#26888523) Attached to: Drug Deletes Fearful Memories

The article has a quote attributed to, "a neuroscientist at Emory University, in Atlanta, who was not involved in the research." Further down, it says the research took place at the University of Amsterdam.

Windows Loses Ground With Developers 431

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @02:41PM from the rising-tide-lifts-all-penguins dept.

An anonymous reader notes that InfoWorld is covering a survey of North American developers that claims that Linux is gaining share as the number of developers targeting Windows fell 11 percent over the last year. Evans Data has been conducting these surveys of client, server, and Web developers since 1998. Evans Data says that the arrival of Windows Vista likely only kept the numbers from being even worse. The big gainer wasn't developing for a Web platform, but rather for Linux and "nontraditional client devices." Windows is still dominant, with 65% of developers writing code for this platform. Linux stands at almost 12%, up from 8% a year earlier. The article says that Evans Data collected information on Mac and Unix development but did not include them in this year's report.

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