Domain: utoronto.ca
Stories and comments across the archive that link to utoronto.ca.
Comments · 412
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Re:Science or Religion?
How many of them were qualified? Take a look: http://uddebatt.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/ipcc-80-percent-of-its-members-where-not-climate-scientists/
The IPCC are about 14 paid staff. The preparation and peer review of the reports is done by volunteers, and they include a lot of very highly respected scientists. here is a list of the contributors to the 2007 WG1 report. (That's the working group that you would get most climate scientists working on, because it is about the scientific aspects of climate change)
... many of the other 80% would be working for the other working groups, which require expertise in development, disease, economics, engineering, and studies relevant to the subject areas of evaluating impacts and vulnerabilities, or costing and advising on amelioration techniques and technologies.
Notice how well cited these scientists studies are, especially considering that they volunteered their time to the IPCC rather than do their own work, which would better forward their careers. The top 500 generally have over 100 citations over their top 4 papers, and the top 200 look like they must be very renowned scientists, with hundreds of citations on their top papers.
I don't buy any claim that the IPCC contributors are lowly qualified. -
Re:Thinking about letters?
This actually comes really close to a pretty recent argument against brain-in-a-vat thought experiments. Envatted brain thought experiments try to illustrate that cognition resides solely in the brain. However, if you really think about the experiment carefully, an envatted brain would require something so similar to a body that it could be said to be a surrogate body. This article written by a Philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, Evan Thompson, explains this argument in much greater detail.
The take-home is that you're exactly right. Complex feedback loops between brain and body seem to play a huge functional role in cognition. So any "do X only with brain waves" not only fails to capture the fact that there is a very complicated mechanism in place to actually capture the brain waves, but it also misses the point in that doing things with just your brain is HARDER than doing it with your body, because you are deprived of the input required for those brain-body feedback loops.
If this typing experiment is implemented, you would have to put a keyboard layout on the screen or at least SOMEWHERE so it can provide feedback input. Without that keyboard (either on-screen or elsewhere) providing input for feedback, your cognitive capacities are actually severely hindered.
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Re:I'm not denying.Is this a new thing? First you claim that AGW doesn't exist. Now you claim that the scientists themselves don't exist?
Most-Cited Authors on Climate Science
This table presents some of the many hundreds of scholars working in scientific research on climate change and related fields. The list incorporates all 619 names of the contributing authors to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), working group 1: the scientific basis ('wg1'). A few names have also been tagged for other contributions to the IPCC, either to other workging groups or to prior reports (AR1-3), but I've only added a very few such cases that I've come across in passing.
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Re:The Win32 Way
In Unix if malloc returns null then the memory allocation failed and you don't have the memory. A well written program should check that. Overcommitting memory can have efficiency advantages, but things can also turn out badly. Linux has heuristics to determine how much to overcommit the memory, or it can be disabled entirely.
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/MemoryOvercommit
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/LinuxVMOvercommit
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Re:The Win32 Way
In Unix if malloc returns null then the memory allocation failed and you don't have the memory. A well written program should check that. Overcommitting memory can have efficiency advantages, but things can also turn out badly. Linux has heuristics to determine how much to overcommit the memory, or it can be disabled entirely.
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/MemoryOvercommit
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/LinuxVMOvercommit
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Laughter
There is now a good explanation of laughter:
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/as-sa/editors/origins.html
The Ontic-Epistemic Theory of the Comic developed in this new book might be summarized as follows: normal human cognition is subjective and anthropomorphic, which is to say people are all but incapable of seeing external reality without re-interpreting it according to their values, beliefs and judgments. We see the world, not through 'rose coloured glasses,' but through multi-coloured and ever-changing lenses of which we are almost always unaware - and which modify and even distort our perceptions in various ways according to what our culture teaches us to see in any given situation. So, not only is the selection of facts we perceive in external states of affairs very limited -- by various forms of filtering, selections and simplifications -- but we also add a great deal of cultural baggage to our perceptions in order to give everything in life a social significance, and a human orientation.
Perception is very nearly always directed and shaped by social considerations, yet it would be impossible even to believe in cultural values, or to live in a society based upon them, if it were obvious to everyone that such socio-cultural institutions were merely arbitrary constructs first dreamt up and later passed down and acculturated into each new generation, without really being there at all. Normal human social cognition thus also serves, as one of its most fundamental and crucial functions, to erase the distinction between the different types of entity that we collectively consider 'true' or 'real.' The physical object must never appear more credible than, or even distinct from, the mental one. A man's social status must not seem any less real than his body, and when we mentally associate concepts of status with an actual person we see, for instance, in a policeman's blue uniform, we must not view this as a disguise, because the social state of being a true officer of the law, a mere mental object, must be inseparable, and indistinguishable, from the individual policeman himself, a real biological organism.
The comic then, that which causes laughter, according to Marteinson's theory, is the perception of an 'unravelling of the seams' between external facts, intuitive notions and cultural concepts, all of which are normally levelled and rendered equivalent in anthropomorphic perception. Social being and material fact have different criteria for truth and falsehood, and this is what is revealed by the comic. Laughter, then, is an instinctive reaction to an epistemological checkmate, in particular an event which shatters and fragments perceptions into the different ontic classes of objects that normally comprise them. When this occurs, social reality as we know it momentarily ceases to have the emotional and epistemological value of being real, and the physical world in its cultural poverty is all that is left standing in perception. The cultural intensions the laughing subject had equated with his or her intuitive notions of the concrete state of affairs pass from a high degree of acceptance to a perception of falsehood. Laughter in fact serves to restore normal socio-cognitive perception and to facilitate the forgetting of the comic stimulus. Very frequently, these stimuli involve concepts of social identity, and other aspects of the perception of social roles. For this reason, this book considers laughter from the point of view of the ontology of social being.
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Re:picture of Earth
I think you might be interested in the Pale Blue Dot picture (so named by Carl Sagan). It's a picture of earth taken by Voyager 1 from 3.7 billion miles away.
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot
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Re:No More Privacy
It is not divorced from public key techniques. The technique homomorphically decrypts from one public key to another public key to keep error vector from growing (if it grows to big, data is lost = no decryption). It is public key based encryption. See http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/audio/08-09/crypto/gentry/index.html
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Re:If you need more than ten disks, go for cheap S
ZFS won't give you good performance for a large array because your random read speed is basically limited to the equivalent of one drive per raid set. That is unacceptable if you need performance:
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSRaidzReadPerformance
"...adding more disks to a ZFS raidz pool does not increase how many random reads you can do per second." -
Yay spread the love/viruses!
USB drives are great for spreading viruses so give them to all your friends and family. You should be proud if they use it because then your gift will spread to millions of people! Free Viagra emails and automatic bank logins for everyone!
Make sure you prepare the content on the USB sticks using un-patched Windows XP with no firewall or anti-virus. Perhaps some cracked games would be nice to include. The best cracks come the dodgiest looking crack sites.
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Re:Will this help?
Me neither, but I am strongly advocating for the reduction of our impact on the environment. Otherwise we will cull ourselves by famine, due to destruction of fertile land, disease, caused by pollution lack of water supply and ultimately genocide. WAIT! We are already doing that! http://www.library.utoronto.ca/pcs/eps/rwanda/rwanda1.htm
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Re:How can people expect...
On the subject of lists, check out http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/petitions.html - the rolls of the sceptical petitions are full of emeritus professors and non-climate-scientists. His list of scientists with publicly expressed views or participation in climate science is at http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/climate_authors_table.html and also makes interesting reading.
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Re:How can people expect...
On the subject of lists, check out http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/petitions.html - the rolls of the sceptical petitions are full of emeritus professors and non-climate-scientists. His list of scientists with publicly expressed views or participation in climate science is at http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/climate_authors_table.html and also makes interesting reading.
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OT: mtrr
I also have this problem, with a asus board and a ati card...
You can try this (mtrr-uncover), it might help you...
ftp://ftp.cs.utoronto.ca/pub/hugh/for me, it locks the machine when tried to remove the 0-4Gb mtrr range, but i read many success reports
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What I don't understand is
What she did seems to be illegal under existing laws, but ones that apply a whole lot more than this cyber-crime BS. There *are* rules for criminal harassment (I believe specific ones for minors), and other such things. As many have mentioned, if this were the case of a grown man and young woman, a number of anti-predator laws would also likely have been applied.
Now I have nothing against drafting a law to better address issues of this nature (personation in order to delude and cause damage to an unstable individual), but why were the crappiest laws possible used in this case?
Doesn't the US have an equivalent to Criminal harassment?
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Re:bandwidth
Something like this? http://www.noc.utoronto.ca/net-ops/performance/gatewayDetail.htm
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Fossil epitoky in arthropods?
Reminds me of the asexual "budding", a form of epitoky, that occurs in certain polychaete worms such as Nereis .
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Re:Of Course Ulysses' Not Dead!
An appropriate poem for a dieing spacecraft.
Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. -
Re:An obvious one.
TRBMs have been used in DBNs, look at Learning Multilevel Distributed Representations for High-Dimensional Sequences,
Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton, AISTATS 2007. But yeah, if you're looking for a job, Numenta are a good place to look. Of course, once you join the company you'll think Numenta's technology is the "one true path" and not even bother looking at the rest of the field ;) -
Re:An obvious one.
I think the Deep Belief Networks of Hinton et al are way ahead of Numenta.. in that they are real science with measurable results that has been reproduced by multiple implementations. The 2006 paper that started it all and Hinton's presentation on google video:
http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~ywteh/research/ebm/nc2006.pdf
http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=228784531481853811A formal analysis:
http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2007/inf_deep_net_utml.pdf
Application to natural language processing:
http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/cs81/s08/DahlLaTouche.pdf
http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2007/papers/425.pdfReproducing Hinton and extension to and evaluation in other domains:
http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2007/papers/331.pdf
Use in Computer animation of facial expressions:
http://aclab.ca/users/josh/downloads/pubs/23_Susskind_Hinton_Movellan_Anderson.pdf
Most impressive:
http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2007/aistats_multilayered.pdf
A C++ implementation (although it has much Python love):
So yeah, there's some pretty good demonstrations of how powerful DBNs are.. Numenta is lagging behind.
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Re:An obvious one.
I think the Deep Belief Networks of Hinton et al are way ahead of Numenta.. in that they are real science with measurable results that has been reproduced by multiple implementations. The 2006 paper that started it all and Hinton's presentation on google video:
http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~ywteh/research/ebm/nc2006.pdf
http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=228784531481853811A formal analysis:
http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2007/inf_deep_net_utml.pdf
Application to natural language processing:
http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/cs81/s08/DahlLaTouche.pdf
http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2007/papers/425.pdfReproducing Hinton and extension to and evaluation in other domains:
http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2007/papers/331.pdf
Use in Computer animation of facial expressions:
http://aclab.ca/users/josh/downloads/pubs/23_Susskind_Hinton_Movellan_Anderson.pdf
Most impressive:
http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2007/aistats_multilayered.pdf
A C++ implementation (although it has much Python love):
So yeah, there's some pretty good demonstrations of how powerful DBNs are.. Numenta is lagging behind.
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Re:Why NASA?
Since you seem to know what you're talking about, thought you'd be interested in some research being done at UTIAS:
Aikon-
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Re:Why NASA?
Since you seem to know what you're talking about, thought you'd be interested in some research being done at UTIAS:
Aikon-
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Re:Carefully
Couple of problems with this.. First, the internal surfaces of a divergent (subsonic) duct experience adverse pressure gradients. This means you need to very gradually increase the duct area in order to prevent flow separation. Subsequently, you would need an extremely long duct to achieve an appreciable reduction in flow velocity, all of which is subject to friction and viscous drag. All in all, not good.
The second major problem with this is that a divergent duct in supersonic flow actually increases the flow velocity. You may notice in engines that possess a throat (i.e. the exhaust stream is supersonic), the duct area increases, accelerating the flow (take rocket engines for example). In order to slow down supersonic flow, you need a converging duct.
Aside from that, a couple other points.. shockwaves don't make flow turbulent. In fact, nearly all flow through a jet engine is turbulent, as opposed to laminar. This is actually desirable in most cases, because although turbulent flow causes an increase in skin friction drag, it is highly beneficial in delaying flow separation, which is very bad in most cases.
Finally, with respect to the ramjet, there are some serious issues still to overcome, especially for slower speeds. First and foremost, it can generate no static thrust, meaning you need an alternative means for propulsion to get your bird off the ground. This adds weight and takes up volume, both of which are very bad things.
And as for how fast it goes.. The faster a ramjet travels, the higher the increase in stagnation temperature of the flow. This affects how combustion occurs, and it actually reaches a point that by adding fuel and combustion it, you are cooling off the flow, which is the opposite effect that you desire. This upper limit on speed depends a great deal on the inlet design and the materials used, but in general it is sub-hypersonic (as in hypersonic speeds are too high).
Work is being done to develop a scramjet (supersonic combusition ramjet), which is essentially the same as a ramjet except that the combustion occurs while the flow is travelling at supersonic velocities (meaning less of an increase in stagnation temperature, less pressure loss, etc.), as well as schramjets, which again are similar, however use detonation waves to ignite the fuel/air, reducing profile drag due to burners and flameholders etc.
I hope this at least answered parts of your questions..
Aikon-
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What About Learning in Motion's Knowledge Forum?The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto contracted with Learning in Motion to implement the results of some educational theories with an educational client-server database called Knowledge Forum. It was built on top of the ZooLib C++ cross-platform application framework, whose chief developer is my friend Andy Green.
I think I first learned about Knowledge Forum from Andy at a party we attended in 1997, but I think it was already by then a mature product.
(While Knowledge Forum is proprietary, ZooLib is Open Source under the MIT license, and IMHO the best thing since sliced bread.)
Well I guess the patent is already overturned, but I doubt it's the last we'll see of educational software patents, so maybe Knowledge Forum can serve as prior art for future cases.
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Re:This Reminds Me
As requested, documentation:
RE: killing the birds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_sparrow_campaign
"It was decided that all the peasants in China should bang pots and pans and run around to make the sparrows fly away in fear."
Eye witness account of Great Sparrow Campaign:
http://zonaeuropa.com/20061130_1.htm
"As I recalled, my fellow students and I climbed onto some tall trees on the side of the road and banged our gongs, drums, washbasins and anything else that can make loud noises. The sparrows were forced to keep flying until they dropped dead from fatigue."
Beijing is not right next to the Gobi Desert, but it is downwind from it when the winds shift that way in the Spring. The rest of the year, it's not. But Beijing at any other time of the year, on a windy day the atmospheric effect is like being in a dust storm.
RE: Air quality in Beijing
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:HjyJWuowpeUJ:www.usembassy-china.org.cn/sandt/estnews0915.htm+beijing+air+quality+ranking&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=21&gl=us
"Beijing ranked second-worst out of 47 Chinese cities in a 1999 SEPA air pollution ranking "
RE: Concerns with the Three Gorges:
(from 2001)
http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/sijpkes/arch374/winter2001/dbiggs/three.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam
For good measure, a couple links on deforestation in China:
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/pcs/state/chinaeco/forest.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19203227
China's government is not comprised of idiots, but their ideologically-driven policies and lack of free and open discussion in a robust civil society lead to actions and results that are adverse to their own interests at a rate greater than that in countries that do have the ability to contest government policy.
The point of my post was that in China under the CCP, there is a history of trampling the environment for the sake of, previously, Mao's mass campaigns, and now, for the sake of rampant economic development. There is also a concommitant pattern of wildly over-engineering the environment when common sense would do. It is within that context that the story about cloud-seeding resonated.
So the post was a bit of a hip-shot. The above links and many more could have been initially provided, but it's Slashdot and the tone of the post was meant to be wry and few, even on this site, want to wade through a dissertation in response to every article. Thus, the comments were couched under the term, "anecdote."
But as an East Asian studies scholar who's lived there for significant swathes of time over the past 18 years, the comments were not pulled entirely out of thin air. Even a casual visitor to Japan can observe that many products have humorous names or sayings in English on them, such as Calpis Water or Poccari Sweat. Most people do not demand academic citation upon hearing about such a thing--they accept them for what they are: anecdotes.
It was in that spirit that the stories were relayed. -
Re:2 Watts?
Yeah, a 2W PA at 60 GHz would be very impressive.
The guy has some publications. There's a conference paper called "Implementation of a Gigabit Per Second Millimetre Wave Transceiver on CMOS", but I don't have access to IEEE papers, unfortunately.
Here's a 60 GHz PA that's about 50 mW: http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~sorinv/papers/rfic_06_tyao.pdf
This one claims 23 dBm out (200 mW): http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4117364
So maybe it's some class-E deal. -
Re:Jesus Fucking Christ
No. Evolution is not a theory. Evolution is a fact. It has been scientifically observed and studied. The only theory is how much of an effect it has on who we are now. And how it caused us to end up this way. Evolution is verifiable fact. The mechanism is theory.
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Missing links
It looks like someone has forgotten the links to the referenced pdf. You can find Barry Wellman's publications including content about Networked Individualism here.
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Re:Wikipedia has more info about itIt is interesting to note that some of the design (not the neutron absorber Lithium-6) reminds me of the Canadian SLOWPOKE reactor, first built in the 1960's.
More about SLOWPOKE:
Damn those safe, smart Canadians. They might quietly run the world, or at least keep it running. -
Re:in addition, totally unnecessary
Inuktitut, the coolest looking alphabet in the world:
.
.
.
Beats Klingon.
(Slashdot just borked on Inuktitut fonts). -
Re:Interesting, but it doesn't matter
The "sleep 10" idea is pretty much a waste of your time to code unless you also limit the number of incoming connections. It would be fine in the old days with a dedicated connection to a serial port on the back of the computer, but now all an attacker has to do is open up a few hundred connections to your machine and multiplex the attack. The attacker will not care that at any instant 99.9% of his connections are in the "sleep 10" state, as long as he can find one of the connections that is ready to accept another password.
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/NetworkAuthDelays explains this issue, pointing out that all the delay does is annoy users who make typos, whilst not hurting attackers. -
Re:Inexhaustible? hardly!
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Re:Two suggestions
(a) if there are things that you find tedious (e.g. marking) or difficult (e.g. sketches, if you aren't a good artist)
You can also simulate real-world experiments so that the students can get an idea of how something works without having to set up a demo. Here is a website full of flash animations that helped me a lot when I took physics for the first time in college. -
Re:M$ won't fix the technical issues
I do not think the "UseWord95Spacing" is as big a problem as it has been made to look. Much worse are other aspects, like problems with accessibility http://atrc.utoronto.ca/index.php?option=com_cont
e nt§ionid=14&task=view&hidemainmenu=1&id=371 and problems with robustness http://www.arstdesign.com/articles/DefectiveByDesi gn.htm.The blog to follow is Rob Weir's.
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Re:Is ODF really much better?
So when do you think Microsoft, sorry Ecma, will correct the accessibility problems? You see, ODF1.0 is the ISO standard, but everybody agrees ODF1.1 is the specification to use. It corrects a few accessibility problems, unlike Microsoft.
Or perhaps you can show me a link to a open process by Microsoft which tackles that (and the zillion other problems shown e.g. in grokdoc).
Because you do know the link to the open process tackling the formula "problem".
Aren't the open processes marvellous?
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Re:Oh goodie, MS has to patch bugs on a deadline
The grokdoc misses at least the biggie at http://atrc.utoronto.ca/index.php?option=com_cont
e nt§ionid=14&task=view&hidemainmenu=1&id=371. -
Re:but.....
Finally someone with some sense! Although, don't fool yourself into thinking that illegal drugs impact driving as much or more than many prescription drugs people regularly drive on. The biggest problem is the rise in prescription drugs, and people who take them yet continue to drive a vehicle. Their driving skills are often far more impaired than the stoned driver, yet because they "have to" take drugs they continue to drive around all day under the influence. Especially people who are tired or use caffeine to stay awake so they can drive. They are the largest majority of the most impaired drivers on the road.
We need to throw all of these dangerous drivers in prison. There is no excuse for endangering human life. If they've got a serious medical condition that requires them to take drugs, then they should not be allowed to operate a motor vehicle. If they've worked all day and they're exhausted, then they definitely should not be operating a motor vehicle. Same goes if they're taking drugs(such as caffeine) to keep their body awake while their mind is actually exhausted.
We need to quit being hypocrites with this bullshit that just targets the people that nobody would ever defend. We need to step back and look at the real threat here. Vehicles are dangerous when used improperly. People should be well rested and free of any mind altering substances or distractions while driving. This isn't even taking into account all of the accidents caused by listening to music, talking to someone, or allowing their mind to wander while behind the wheel. Or even the accidents caused from inexperienced or poor driving. Those behaviors all need to be criminalized as well if we actually want to help people. Otherwise we're nothing more than hypocrites for throwing one person in jail while letting a far more dangerous criminal roam free.
There are dumbasses everywhere partaking in these reckless behaviors and endangering lives. If we want to save society from decay, we have to get rid of these problems before their actions end up killing another one of the few good citizens we have left in this country.
http://casr.adelaide.edu.au/t95/paper/s1p2.html
http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin/19990329a.asp
http://www.newstarget.com/004823.html -
Re:ODF vs. OOXMLOpen Document Format lacks some features expected from modern office applications. As a result, many applications use their own extensions. Name one. Don't be fooled to spreadsheet formulas: they all use extremely compatible stuff, see OASIS spec for that. Office Open XML has a complete feature set. Really? http://atrc.utoronto.ca/index.php?option=com_cont
e nt§ionid=14&task=view&hidemainmenu=1&id=371. I would not call that "complete". Office Open XML exactly specifies all of that. You have forgotten the "layoutLikeWord95", etc. While Open Document Format is an open standard, one usually uses the OpenOffice.org flavour. The flavour is called ODF1.1. What other flavours there are in use? Open Document Format allows easy upgrading from StarOffice/OpenOffice.org documents. Yes and no. It is equally easy for other applications too. Office Open XML allows easy upgrading from Microsoft Office documents. But makes it practically impossible for other applications.
Combining the specifications is a very silly proposal, you apparently lack the knowledge of the specifications. -
Re:I don't mind it being a standard if....
I do. Not only mind, but object, severely.
One of the reasons I object is: http://atrc.utoronto.ca/index.php?option=com_conte nt§ionid=14&task=view&hidemainmenu=1&id=371.
There are a lot of other technical problems why it should not be a standard listed in various places on the web, see e.g. http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections
BTW, I am disappointed on the disabled community for not "standing up" - as they did with ODF 1.0 (and therefore ODF 1.1 was created) http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/articl e.php?story=20070801182558375. Paid shills. -
that's backwards
Life survival vs. number of cells should be inversely proportional as radiation level rises:
Nope, it's the other way around, due to cancer - one rogue cell in a vat of bacteria is irrelevant. One rogue cell in a multicellular organism = 100% dead.
See this paper http://medbiograd.sa.utoronto.ca/pdfs/vol2num1/10. pdf for a somewhat more detailed explanation -
Why only compare these two?
Just two sites with alternatives.
http://www.utoronto.ca/atrc/reference/tech/altmous e.html
http://web.mit.edu/atic/www/tools/mice.html -
Re:How the hell...
1. "Latin would persist as the main language of diplomacy until, with the rise of the French Bourbons in the 17th century, France became the strongest monarchy in Europe." from here And I am quite certain it was widely used until the Reformation by the educated.
2. And how would they have done so? Perhaps by mystery plays? Or the carving and stain glass on the churches? The educated certainly did have access to the Bible, or do you assume Martin Luther tacked up his Thesis and the peasantry went "Uh, sure, sounds good, we'll do that." Or is it that you want to put a modern spin of "The Man" keeping "The People" down?
3. Yes, because no other political organization has ever had issues with that sort of thing. I am sure everyone that graduates Harvard does so out of ability not "their secular political influence and familial financial contributions". Please you can fill that line in for any organization through history, it hardly is a condemnation of the Church. -
Re:humanity vs capitalism
There are a lot of people inside pharma that care... but the CEOs sure don't-- they rather maximize their profits and see people die than do the right thing.
If you believe otherwise, you've been drinking too much of the company Kool-Aid. Pharma is consistently the most profitable business out there.
Their business plan is:
1. Dupe existing product, i.e. create "me-too" drug
2. Get a time limited monopoly from the government
3. Run a huge ad campaign to convince ppl their drug is better
4. Screw people that can't buy in volume, i.e. the uninsured
5. $$$ Profit $$$
You don't have to believe me... read what a bunch of Harvard people have to say about it:
"In 2002, for example, the top 10 drug companies in the United States had a median profit margin of 17%, compared with only 3.1% for all the other industries on the Fortune 500 list. Indeed, subtracting losses from gains, those 10 [pharma] companies made more in profits that year than the other 490 companies put together... [in a 'bad year' t]he industry's profits were still an extraordinary 14% of sales, well above the median of 4.6% for other industries. A business that is consistently so profitable can hardly be considered risky." [emphasis added]
As for "no more drug industry"... drugs would still be made and they might actually help the majority of people; the drugs industry has failed to deliver in many areas. Also, the drive to fleece the public through monopoly power and commericalization of university research has probably led to less development and fewer real discoveries. M. -
Re:Hypocritical to the extreme
Not in University of Toronto: http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/fileadmin/research/Int
e llectual_Property_Guide_2005.pdf (The PDF is specifically for Erindale [Mississauga] campus but I believe the main campus [St. George] uses the same policy) To sum it up in p.6, if you as a student invented something in UofT, unless covered under certain exceptions, you are allowed to keep full rights to the invention while the University gets 25% of net revenue from it. On the other hand, if you don't want to bother with dealing with the legal headaches, you can assign the invention to the University and you get a portion of the net revenue instead. -
Re:News?
And in Canada: http://www.utoronto.ca/ic/software/detail/msselec
t .html Don't American students get deals on software? -
Re:Ping
ping marsbase.com.mars.sol.milky
Now it's really future-proof
Or so you say, I wouldn't want to be the poor bloke that has to fix everything because you didn't research things thoroughly and your solution is just an stopgap measure. -
Re:Ping
ping marsbase.com.mars.sol.milky
Now it's really future-proof
Or so you say, I wouldn't want to be the poor bloke that has to fix everything because you didn't research things thoroughly and your solution is just an stopgap measure. -
Yep, him and my Dad
Dr. Dennis Smith.
Most people who have had hip replacements have benefited from my Dad's work. Including Dad himself.
We're so proud! -
Re:An Old Canard . . .
...per capita GDP of Cuba is second lowest in the Caribbean basin.
Actually, according to the CIA World Fact Book Cuba's GDP per capita is substantially higher than that of Honduras & Nicaragua, the two Caribbean basin countries I checked, particularly when considering per capita PPP, purchasing power parity, the actual buying power that folks have rather than their income expressed in nominal exchange rates. Oh, and read growth of GDP per capita in Cuba was a very robust 7.5% in 2006. This, despite the fact that they are embargoed by their nearest industrialized neighbor and natural trading partner, while the client states I mentioned are the recipients of U.S. "aid" and support.
Also, remember, many things in Cuba are FREE that most people in the rest of the Carribean basin can not begin to afford, such as high quality universal medical care and higher education. Nominal income per capita is a rather poor index of standard of living. For instance, the U.S. spends roughly twice the Cuban GDP per capita on health care alone but Cuba has roughly similar life expectancy and infant mortality rates, oh, and Cuba excels all other Latin American countries by these measurements. Likewise, in 1998 UNESCO tested students from all over Latin America and Cuba blew away all other countries, both in reading and math, so much so, that they thought there might be a problem with the testing and retested the Cubans (same result).
Also, unlike Cuba, the rest of the countries in the Carribean basin have a very unequal income distribution, so the ruling classes luxuriate in splendor while much of the actual population is destitute. But as long as the local bourgeoisie can afford to take frequent shopping flights to Miami the economies are "healthy" according to your criteria, I suppose.