Slashdot Mirror

Birds are much more dangerous and costly. We should be trying to exterminate them.

FYI The "Frog in Boiling Water" example is just silly, and has been disproven several times (for example at http://www.uga.edu/srel/ecoview11-18-02.htm ). While it's a cute analogy, it's just not true.

The frog story is a myth. I wish people would stop using it:

http://www.uga.edu/srel/ecoview11-18-02.htm

Your plan sounds good, but you didn't go far enough:

Get rid of the state sponsored crap, let people choose their own insurance providers, let people deal with the consequences of their choices, and let people live their own lives.

Should be "let people decide how to pay for their own health care".

Insurance only exists as an industry because it has government support. Think about it: if you were the only insured, you would be paying in more than the benefits you're receiving (the insurance company has to charge more than it pays out, otherwise it would go out of business).

Insurance only begins to look like a good idea when it is government-mandated, and when the pool of insured is large enough that far more healthy people are paying in than sick people pulling funds out.

As the average age in the US continues to climb, insurance premiums for the young-and-healthy will skyrocket in order to provide for the needs of the elderly. The young-and-healthy will at some point rebel; the "boiling a frog" analogy only works up to a point (and doesn't work, with a frog).

And, there is also physical evidence that insurance is a vastly profitable endeavor: the two tallest buildings in Boston are the John Hancock and the Prudential (both insurance companies). For them to be that profitable means that there are likely some unrealized efficiencies (i.e., the money could have stayed in customers' pockets).

It's a nice metaphor, although it's a myth.

The poster says, "Since California is still the only state with disclosure laws..."

Been in a cave for the last few years? See http://infosec.uga.edu/policymanagement/breachnoti ficationlaws.php for information on 34 state breach notification/disclosure laws.

University of Georgia just signed a contract with MGM to be the primary filming location for the remake of "Animal House"...

Seemed appropriate.

Who's The Illegal Alien Now Pilgrim?

There goes my karma, but I don't care. The message that the image portrays speaks for itself. My ancestors were here first. Someone should tell these guys that.

/Lives in Texas by the way...

A more appropriate comparison might be to UGA's AI Center which is quite a good program, just more oriented toward logic and AI than engineering.

Example college at GT: School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Example college at UGA: School of Poultry Science(sic)

You can't get an Engineering degree from UGA. Similarly, you can't get a Literature degree from Georgia Tech.

Time to continue ramblin'.

Frogs do jump out before the water boils and they die.
Here

This already happens, just give it some isolation, and a mix of two languages, and things start to get phonetic quickly.

For example, the Pitkern and Norfuk languages are Pidgins of English and Tahitian. Notice how the language name itself is phonetic rather than Pitcairn and Norfolk.

The same is true elsewhere, for example Computer is "Komputa" in Kiswahili because of the way the word is pronounced.

Now, in English speaking countries, this will not happen, since there is no pidgin influence, and no isolation.

It's just a myth. Even frogs aren't that stupid. OTOH, it's a great metaphor. Anyone have any ideas for a good replacement?

You can do a google search for "Great lakes" "nuclear event",

TERRESTRIAL EVIDENCE OF A NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE IN PALEOINDIAN TIMES

There seems to be a supernova event that actually managed to heat the atmosphere to 1000C, melt glaciers and possibly cook large mammals as well.

Winston Churchill once said "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." You could say the same thing about email as a collaboration tool -- it sucks, but for the average user it sucks less than every other option.

• IM? Most IM clients don't log messages by default, so things can't be easily searched or retrieved unless you know to turn on logging (assuming your client even allows that).
• Wikis? Each wiki has its own arcane markup syntax, and the average user has better things to do than learn them.
• Intranets? Somebody's gotta post stuff to the Intranet, or nobody will use it... and nobody wants to post stuff to an Intranet that nobody is using.
• Web calendars? Slooooow.
• Project management software? Using tools like Microsoft Project successfully requires a level of discipline and expertise that is beyond most people.
• And none of the specialized services that have evolved to fill this niche (Basecamp, for example) have a mental model that's as easy to grasp as e-mail.

None of these objections are so large that they can't be overcome; many people use the tools above successfully. But for the average user, who accepts defaults and isn't interested in learning a new skill just to organize a meeting, they all have flaws that outweigh the flaws of e-mail.

I hate collaboration-by-email as much as the next guy, but until we can come up with something that is an order of magnitude better for the average user right out of the box, we shouldn't be surprised if they keep shooting e-mails around. (sigh)

Hormesis in radiation is rejected by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), its U.S. counterpart, the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), the National Research Council Committees on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (the BEIR Committees), and the U.S. regulatory agencies.

As for Chernobyl casualties, Wikipedia mentions several reports - the oft cited (and criticized) UN study of only 56 counted deaths, but others like the WHO study that examined 72,000 out of 600,000 liquidators and found 212 dead due to it, and the IPPNW study that found thousands. I agree with the critics of the UN study; some of its claims are just outright batty (like the claim that 99% of those with thyroid cancer will survive).

The chernobyl deaths were not due to fire. The immediate deaths were due to a steam explosion. The rest were due to radiation.

Your "ecologically thriving" area is exposing animals to an average of 2.4 mGy/d. Ramsar's average dose to residents is 0.19mGy/d.

Funny how Microsoft say...

1. "Microsoft" is not plural. "Microsoft says..." If there were more than one Microsoft (and they all agreed), you could say "Microsofts say..."
2. Sentences don't start with predicates. "It is funny how..."

i.e. Galileo Galilei and Charles Darwin.

Here is an interesting book that is now public domain:

http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitewtc.html
A HISTORY OF THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY IN CHRISTENDOM
by ANDREW DICKSON WHITE

Aside from every major Islamic organization condemning terrorism and violence, what more do you want? Sheikh Hamza Yusuf said, "Terrorists are mass murderers, not martyrs" but I guess he wasn't deemed newsworthy. Sheikh Qaradawi, a popular TV preacher, has always been against Al-Qaeda and even said it was legitimate for Muslims to join the US in attacking the Taliban.

If you search online, you'll find photos of Muslims in anti-terror rallies. Here's two Palestinian women at a 9/11 memorial, and another of some of the Palestinian students who all observed 5 minutes of silence to remember 9/11 victims. Bangladesh anti-terrorism rally and sympathy for 9/11 victims. Palestinians held a rally against suicide bombing, but I can't find coverage in english press.

What about the mass demonstrations in Indonesia against terrorism? Heck, they had a rally calling for the execution of the Bali bombers. Indonesian Muslims were so outraged at the terrorists that they tried to storm the prison to lynch the terrorists.

Go and visit any local mosque, and they will tell you how much they are opposed to terrorism of all forms. Heck, the mosque by my house keeps sending me emails condemning the latest violence, when I know it's obvious. Still, I can understand how jittery everyone is, since a few mosques have been burned down over the last few years, and someone smashed our window.

Here. You win.

This is getting pretty offtopic. Maybe I should refrain? Nahh. ;-)

Ha! but in fact, science does tell us if war is just or not.. In fact, most every war waged this century had more to do with the scientific method than religion. Logical constructs of use-cases.

This appears quite circular to me. You're talking about using science to determine the truth or falsity of various measures of justice, but the original assertion is that science cannot provide a definition of justice.

Rather, you simply assume here...

Quantitatively weighing the human cost against the abstract political gain.
 
...what sounds like a utilitarian model of justice.

Any given "moral" issue can be socialogically deconstructed. And just like inconsistencies between quantum and reletevism, current gaps in our understanding of social moral delemmas are only a PHD thesis away.

Morality is socially deconstructible only if you believe it is. That's a philosophical assumption, a starting position that is no more, or less, rational than the assumption that morality is objective.

And frankly, I have a pretty low view of our "current... understanding of social moral [di]lemmas." The radical subjectivism characteristic of postmodern social sciences is beyond ridiculous -- and would be particularly irksome to the scientifically-minded Slashdot crowd if they ever realize that the "best" contemporary scholarship in the social sciences all begins with the assumption that truth does not exist -- not even scientific truth.

The idea that social and moral concepts will fall to the inquiry of Reason is an old one -- rooted in (of course) the Enlightenment, buoyed by the triumph of Newtonian physics. But as we know, science went on to achieve an unbroken record of success, while the sociological side is fairly a train wreck. All attempts to create Utopia have failed, despite the appearance of rigor and plausibility in their underlying theses. Marxism is the poster child, of course; but the same impulse led to that other regime that Godwin prohibits me from mentioning outright. ;-)

The essential problems of the human condition are moral ones, chronicled in literature for thousands of years, unchanged in the face of scientific advancement. Lately, from Nietzsche to Skinner to Dawkins, the fashionable response has been to blandly assert that these things are just illusions and social constructions -- a non-answer that Kant famously decried as being pretty unhelpful, even if true.

So, given that there isn't much historical reason to believe that social Progress has anything to do with scientific Progress, I can only assume that you look to the impending solution to all our moral problems as an article of faith? (Kidding, kidding. Mostly.)

--
Dum de dum.

Revenue experts like Robert G. Cross espouse partitioning products and customers into different categories to ensure the each customer and product receives the greatest profit possible.

Regardless, I think it will be interesting to see how much higher premium priced songs will drive customers into alternative lower-priced ones.

OK here's one:

Evidence

Check out PBS's offerings. There are a number of programs that tend to be quite informative, and less infotainment. Granted, some aren't strictly news in the "Film at eleven" sense of the term, but then again, if you want any kind of depth you are pretty much going to have to wait a little while.

I also read during the 2004 election, that the people that were most informed about the election were people that got their news from places like the "Daily Show"

Better than that, The Daily Show won a Peabody award. Twice. I agree, that is pretty sad statement on contemporary journalism when a self-described "fake news show" wins over real news shows.

-Ted

Just to do my bit at dispelling myths, no, he won't. He'll jump out when the water reaches a threshold of tolerance/discomfort.

• http://www.uga.edu/srel/ecoview11-18-02.htm
• http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.htm

I'm not sure sure. Google's market capet (or "mkt cap", defined here) is only 3 1/2 times smaller and they just got all the money recently. On the otherhand, Microsoft got it's money a long time ago and has spent quite a bit of it.

In any case, anthropologists tell us lots of interesting stuff about the connection between play and learning. It seems logical that as the world changes around us, the form of play is going to change. That change will then fuel more change. Some people are always afraid of change, so they attack it.

For the record, though lots of things were made legal by the book of Sport, Charles I apparently thought bowling was immoral enough to remain illegal. Isn't it shocking how our moral standards have declined?

Yeah! Try this new Periodic table. It's real simple to read and understand! Have fun!

I believe it was in last month's "Discover" magazine that a different new periodic table was discussed; this one was designed by an earth scientist and was oriented specifically toward his professional needs. There's no reason that it should replace the "standard" periodic table, but if it's better for his needs, more power to him.

The periodic table is a kind of model, and like all models, it's just one way of simplifying the real world and diagraming it for easy understanding by humans. There's no reason everyone should use one model of anything for all purposes, and if this new "galaxy" chart helps middle school kids learn and understand chemistry before moving on to the "standard" periodic table, it's a good thing.

Ah, IEFBR14. The original proof that even IBM couldn't write a one line program without having a bug in it.

Its only purpose is to return control to register 14 (BR 14), which contains the instruction to pass control back to the mainframe; so IEFBR14 did, in effect, nothing. (Also how it got it's name, for obvious reasons.) However, it sometimes passed back a nonzero return code so they had to add another two bytes to the program; an SR 15,15 to zero out the condition code register.

The SAS-L archives has one programmer's recollection. I heard the story years ago but never found the cross reference; it was always passed down from sysprog to sysprog as part of our oral tradition. :)

Sorry, but it is the female worker bees, and not the male drones, that sometimes clone themselves. AFAIK, this has only been observed in queenless colonies and has been explained as a genetic escape mechanism. Without a queen, a hive would otherwise be a reproductive dead end. When unfertilized workers lay haploid eggs in response to lack of queen pheromones, all of the eggs become male drones. Although the colony remains doomed, the drones can go out and mate with queens from other colonies and continue the genetic line. See this article for a general description of this phenomenon. So you might ask why workers don't cheat and clone themselves more often. Well, they do, but their sisters don't stand for it.

Bromelain is a proteolytic enzyme obtained from pineapple juice that has found several uses. Primarily, it is used to tenderize meat, similar to papain, the proteolytic enzyme derived from green papaya. It also chill-proofs beer, stabilizes latex paint, and tans leather. Being a protease, it can cause dermatitis on exposed skin. Several folk remedies of pineapple may stem from its bromelain content: anti-inflammatory, muscle relaxation, and the treatment of warts, abscesses, bruises, and ulcers. Pineapple workers are said to have no fingerprints due to the proteolytic action of bromelain on the skin. Juice from unripe fruit is said to be purgative, and also antihelmintic, perhaps due to the known nematicidal effects of bromelain.

I also spoke at length with a fingerprint scanner vendor when we were considering purchasing several thousand of them for a customer-facing system. He told me that about one percent of the population did not have fingerprints that could be reliably read by their scanners, and he admitted that their system was removed from the Hawaii locations because many people there work in the pineapple industry, and couldn't use their scanners.

So while neither of these sources are more than anecdotal, they do reinforce each other. I'd love to see actual published studies.

I realized this morning that to some extent I actually can do this.

Have a look at:

" Analysis of State Exposure Control to Prevent Cheating in Online Games"
Kang Li, Shanshan Ding, Doug McCreary , and Steve Webb. In ACM Nossdav 2004, Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland.

http://www.cs.uga.edu/~kangli/src/nossdav_2004.pdf

This is some of my research work at University of Georgia.

Then email my slashdot user name @uga.edu to receive final convincing.

If that's not sufficient evidence ... well, I think it will be pretty hard to convince you.

No one has died for a flag, you moron.

Some people did. I am sure there are many more in history, but I have not been able to google up any sites listing heroes that were killed fighting over a flag. I noted that www.peoplewhodiedfortheflag.com is still free.

Nope sorry, they are allowed to postpone notice as long as a court believes it is reasonable. And sneak and peak warrants have been in use by the feds since at least the 1980's. Furthermore, they have been held to be Constitutional by at least two federal circuits. All the PATRIOT Act did was codify this into the US Code. Arguably, this is a "good thing" because it means that the requirements are established by Congress instead of Judges, and they will not vary between jurisdictions.

Read this.

http://www.law.uga.edu/academics/profiles/dwilkes_ more/30convicting.html

Actually, the percentage of wrongly incarcerated prisoners is increasing. Yearly. And that's in death penalty cases alone, which stand the highest amount of scrutiny in our legal system. Approximately 1 in 75 people on death row are found to be innocent. That may be a small enough ratio for you but it's not small enough for me. With approximately 6k people executed a year in the US, that means that 80 people are executed wrongly. This number is rising, not falling. Don't go off on a tangent about something you know nothing about - it's a problem when people propogandize the internet with no knowledge of what they speak. Go sit down with a public defender, buy him or her a beer and learn something new. It'll be a horrifying experience.

My cousin Vern over at NASA in Huntsville has CB(/vert) in his Coon truck.

Before you yankees and ethnics get all hot and bothered, have a look at some old timey hunters with coons. Oh yeh, all you city slicker preservationists. Here's what you do with the coon after nailing his salty skin on a board and hanging it on the side of the barn. That's a joke son. Look here if you need a coon recipe. Nothing gets wasted. Even the scent gland which the dogs love to roll in. Besides, there's a culture that needs preserving! A culture of sensitive souls.

If don't know it by now, a coon truck is a modern tool used by present day coon hunters to haul the dogs. Coon hunting being a social sport leads to more than one truck. The favored form of communication is CB radio. Which gets me to the point.

To keep the CB 'whip' antenna from chipping the trucks paint as it 'whips' arond, Vern put a tennis ball on the end. He suggested that the ESA install something similar but they just wouldn't listen to a dumb ole redneck.

This story is blatant bullshit. Athens, Ga has had free Wi-Fi that covers the entire downtown area as well as nearly the entire campus of the University of Georgia (adjacent to downtown) for NEARLY THREE YEARS.

The Cloud at Athens

Plus, Athens has a great nightlife... local and touring bands play almost every night of the week ... tons of bars ... and lots of hot chicks everywhere. You should see the coffee shops around here: full of cute nerdy girls on Powerbooks who dig nerdy guys!

Somehow, I really don't think Dayton, Ohio compares at all.

http://www.nmi.uga.edu/mmc/inside.php?s=environmen t&p=3/

Grass uses a LOT of water. (Not surprising, since it's got a lot of surface area.) Acre for acre it takes more water than trees or pretty much any food crop. It evaporates something like six times as much water as a lake.

Keeping up with the "UGA", as well as science news, one can find that great progress has been made to alter plants, such as grass, that can use salt water. That would make fuels such as these not only very easy to grow without using salt water, but would finally put to use large streches of sand along costline. And as the water evaporating off the grass in such an instance is no different then the water that would of evaporated anyway off the ocean surface, little harm would be done.

Religious courts have been known to ignore even that. Exhibit A

But poor random numbers? Probably not.

But then again, probably yes: Random? numbers

These people have set up the experiments so that their claims will either be supported by facts or not.

A quick search on the Net shows that the experiments themselves may not have been set up correctly, that the experimenters choose their data to fit the facts, seem to skew results, have a patent that presupposes their results and that plenty of bona fide quacks treat this as "truth" which always gets skeptics (like me, who do not take such publicity at face value) jumping all over gullible posters.

Non random, random number generators

Allmost all the DMS produced in the oceans originally came from DMSP produced by algae (some corals have symbiotic algae). Some DMSP is broken down to DMS by the algae themselves, but bacteria seem to have a major role in breaking down DMSP to DMS, as well as to another compound, methanethiol, that is not released into the atmosphere in large amounts. Interestingly, the genome of a bacterium that carries out both pathways of DMSP degradation is sequenced. Hopefully this will soon allow us to find more about these two competing fates of DMSP. If you really want more information on this bacteria, you could read the discription paper.

bugbox

What's interesting is that this study does not include a very important greenhouse gas, DMS (dimethyl sulfide), which is responsible for cloud condensation among other things, and thus plays a major role in greenhouse effects. The degradation of oceanic DMSP (dimethylsulfonopropionate) to DMS is one of the major factors being studied in the two labs I work for. Actually I work for the SIMO project, which is a joint project between these two labs.

I'm sure there were other factors not incorporated into this model that would be of use to consider. Hopefully, as the average user's computer becomes more powerful, the researchers behind ClimatePrediction.net will incorporate more factors and a more complex model to help give even more likely results.

What's interesting is that this study does not include a very important greenhouse gas, DMS (dimethyl sulfide), which is responsible for cloud condensation among other things, and thus plays a major role in greenhouse effects. The degradation of oceanic DMSP (dimethylsulfonopropionate) to DMS is one of the major factors being studied in the two labs I work for. Actually I work for the SIMO project, which is a joint project between these two labs.

I'm sure there were other factors not incorporated into this model that would be of use to consider. Hopefully, as the average user's computer becomes more powerful, the researchers behind ClimatePrediction.net will incorporate more factors and a more complex model to help give even more likely results.

What's interesting is that this study does not include a very important greenhouse gas, DMS (dimethyl sulfide), which is responsible for cloud condensation among other things, and thus plays a major role in greenhouse effects. The degradation of oceanic DMSP (dimethylsulfonopropionate) to DMS is one of the major factors being studied in the two labs I work for. Actually I work for the SIMO project, which is a joint project between these two labs.

I'm sure there were other factors not incorporated into this model that would be of use to consider. Hopefully, as the average user's computer becomes more powerful, the researchers behind ClimatePrediction.net will incorporate more factors and a more complex model to help give even more likely results.

I've got an interior office and my Spathiphyllum is doing just fine. I put it by the window over the weekend and when I'll be gone on a trip for a while. Most plants will go (even in a dry office) for a week without water if you make sure they're nice and moist before you leave.

Remember that overwatering can be just as bad as underwatering. And if you get someone to water your plant for you, make sure you casually run down how often they should water it and how much! I personally just keep an eye on the soil and give a plant water "when it needs it," but most people can't tell that (a good way to check the soil moisture is to stick your finger in it; you should aim to keep the moisture at a relatively constant level) and need to be given a schedule ("every three days give it two cups of water"). Keep in mind that if you have a non-draining pot the bottom can accumulate water and drown/rot the plant.

The Idler magazine
The Idler's Companion
How To be Idle
Why work? Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery
What is a Wage Slave?
The Right To Be Lazy
In praise of Idleness
Historical Context of the Work Ethic
Anxiety Culture
Importance of Living