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Comment Re:Several things in the image don't add up... (Score 3, Insightful) 102

1) The summary states the "UFO" was static, and the jet flew around it, so wouldn't be difficult to get it in the middle of the viewfinder. I think it also states this was the best of 6 pictures.
2) The whole picture is a bit blurry, to my eye the "UFO" looks no less blurry than the rest of the image but perhaps your vision is a bit sharper than mine.

That said, hoax is still infinitely more likely than real aliens.

Comment Re:Cancer is Cancer (Score 2) 87

Most prostate cancer progresses very slowly and is unlikely to metastasize.

It does usually progress slowly, until it doesn't, then it kills you (often painfully because it's metastasised to bone).

Very often, men with prostate cancer die of something completely unrelated.

This is what I was taught at medical school, it's also just what my dad was told 15 years ago, but the "you'll probably die of something else first" argument is just plain retarded. It's the same excuse idiots give for poor health behaviour like smoking. Medicine is getting better all the time, people aren't dying of other things so much as they used to, they are living longer and allowing these conditions to come into play. My dad was still in excellent health otherwise, in his 80s, when hormone treatment inevitably stopped working 14 years later. Treatment for prostate cancer needs to improve too, rather than just ignoring the condition.

On the other hand, operating on it can cause impotence and incontinence. If I ever get diagnosed with it, my first question to the doctor will be, "does it matter?", not a panicked question about how soon I can be scheduled for surgery

I can tell you, as a doctor, if I get diagnosed I will have surgery in the first available theatre slot. Yes there are potential side effects, significant ones (see my previous point about the need for treatment to get better), but I'm not (literally) going to sit on cancer that *will* go on kill me kill me unless I'm "lucky" enough to die of something else first.

The reason for similar outcomes in the UK of surgery or not, is likely the fact we don't have screening, something held off due to the fallacy that it's not harmful and we overtreatment. With proper screening and earlier intervention I am confident (though clearly can't prove it) that more radical treatment will be more effective when used earlier, than when it's currently identified and there are already micromets or local spread that surgery can't remove and will only be held in check for so long with hormone treatment.

Comment Re:Data Protection Act (Score 1) 35

I'm not sure it really works like that, though. Each Trust (or whatever the current form of organisation within the NHS is) has its own record system, and they pass information between them on an as-need basis.

This is the case. Many hospitals still work primarily on paper notes for inpatients, and for outpatients the clinic letters (likely just word documents) will not be stored in anything fancy. Test results are in a collection of local systems. Where is comes together is General Practice, as they are the recipient of most of those letters, and hospital discharge summaries, etc. They won't have all the detail, but will be the single most useful repository, with a summary of everything that's happened to the patient, diagnoses, medications, etc. Plus pretty much full details for primary care interactions. GPs almost all use one of about two main electronic record systems (and one of those has a much larger share than the other, and some secondary care providers also use it), which is cloud based - so that's where the primary data extraction will be.

Up to now, there has been a way to opt out of all data sharing, including anonymised stuff, which was registered via your GP. It will be very difficult for the government to refuse to honour this going forward. However, it was not widely publicised, controversial, and upset the GPs who have found themselves in the middle of this issue, resulting in many delays, registration extensions, etc.

Comment Re:Imma sue you over my CPU (Score 1) 58

Indeed - why didn't he just return it to the store as defective and get his money back? I know the US isn't so big on consumer rights, but surely returning a faulty product is still possible? I'm not sold on the argument about doing it this way to make money, as one of the buyers, but maybe he he owns the law firm that's going to handle it!

Comment But why? (Score 1, Interesting) 61

> Luke Durant, a researcher from San Jose, CA, found it after contributing a fantastic amount of compute to the GIMPS project.

> (From TFA) It is only the 52nd known Mersenne prime ever discovered, each increasingly more difficult to find.

So it's like mining bitcoin, but much less useful. At least you can sell the bitcoin for real money.

Comment Our theory? (Score 1) 26

"Our theory is that Bob had the knife, and that Nima acted in self defence," attorney Saam Zangeneh said.

Shouldn't the defence have a clear position, which they are presenting as fact? If they only have a "theory" about what happened, it makes it sounds like their client hasn't actually told them anything and they're having to make up the best story they can on their own. Or is this just odd US legal phrasing I haven't come across before?

Comment Re: Not so easy (Score 3, Insightful) 33

Cloning a key isn't that useful if the owner knows about it, and it sounds like they will likely be able to tell, as they'll quickly disable the key's access. An attacker would need to act fast and if they already have the original in their possession, they might as well just use that.

Pity can't upgrade the firmware though. Not sure why not, Infineon TPM modules can be upgraded. And how secure is their new custom library? Rolling your own crypto library is never a good idea.

Comment AI written? (Score 5, Insightful) 33

It’s not clear where most of the quotes featured in the trailer came from — with the exception of Roger Ebert’s comment, “a triumph of style over substance,” which was actually pulled from his 1989 review of “Batman,” and not about “Dracula,” as indicated in the trailer.

Sounds just like the sort of result you'd get if you asked AI to write the trailer text (and didn't bother to check it).

Comment Re:This doesn't bode well either way... (Score 1) 90

Ages ago (early 1990s as an intern), I worked for a startup where the CTO was wanting a dongle to guard their software. They didn't just want a parallel port dongle (USB wasn't around then), but something that went into an internal slot. If the software detected piracy, the dongle would dump the capacitors on it into the machine, frying it. Because of the EULA, the lawyers said the company would easily get away with it. However, thankfully this never took off, because other C-levels said that they don't want that bad PR.

Which of course wouldn't harm pirates, who wouldn't have the dongle card. It would only harm their real customers, when something went wrong and it fried their computer due to a bug. Age old story of anti-piracy harming/inconveniencing customers and doing nothing to prevent piracy.

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