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Trust in a Bottle
flosofl writes "The BBC has a report on oxytocin and its ability to skew our trust levels. 'The participants in the study played a game, in which they were split into "investors" and "trustees." The investors were then given credits and told they could chose whether to hand over zero, four, eight or 12 credits to their assigned trustee.' Some of the investors were given oxytocin via nasal spray. The results were surprising: 'Of 29 investors who were given oxytocin, 13 (45%) displayed "maximal trust" by choosing to invest highly, compared to six (21%) of the 29 investors who were given the dummy spray.' When the trustee was a computer, there was no difference between the two test groups."
it's a neat process. before i read the article i'd pictured an inkjet-esque approach. probably a good thing they didn't go that way --- can you imagine how much consumables would cost? to say nothing of issues related to poor quality drivers...
opiates lower inhibitions.
Is it possible it was a design "speculated" from spy reports from the allies? It does capture two crucial design decisions (gun assembly and plutonium core), but manages to mix them up in a single entity. Which would be an easy mistake to make if one was relying on shaky intelligence from someone close to the Manhattan project, but not too close.
The design still looks approximated though, and does not take into account the scale or space requirements of a v2-type rocket.
first avoid going QUAARELED ON brilliant plan Racist? How is
Well, over 1/3 of bombs dropped during the Warsaw Insurrection on Warsaw by Nazis didn't explode, and that was perfectly intentional. Not intentional by Nazis though - bombs manufactured in Czech factories, by people forced to work there, were frequently sabotaged to be duds. Then the rebels would take them apart and build grenades from the explosives, using them against Germans - these "home-made" grenades were the most basic weapons for that fight, as thanks to constant supply of explosives from Czech they were more far more accessible than ammunition. It seems the bombings brought more losses than profits for Germans - deep cellars and sewers of central Warsaw were quite efficient shelters against bombs that did explode, and without supply of such weaponry the insurrection would die out much faster.
He claims to have stopped the scientists from developing the bomb any further - not because he was opposed to the concept if such a weapon (he certainly wasn't). The reason was that it was clear it would need much more time than was available in order to complete the work.
What was considered feasible was the idea of an "energy producing Uranium motor" for use in vehicles, and research was switched in that direction around 1944.
Antony Beevor's excellent book on the fall of Berlin also makes it clear that the Germans' nuclear research facilities were well known to the Russian's and were a major influence on Stalin's tactical decisions regarding Berlin. He was determined to obtain the fruits of this research.
The book also makes clear that Heisenburg did not try to sabotage the programme but was eager to succeed. This view is also backed up by the famous meeting between Heisenburg and Nils Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941 and Hesinburg's views at that time.
Of course even though one new where Heisenburg was in 1941 you could never tell what direction he was taking at that time.
One thing in the article that is a bit deceptive is that the article says that one can print with details as small as one micrometer . . . the size of a single bacterium. This may technically be true, but I doubt that controlling which individual bacterium are transferred (printed) or not is possible. And the neither the technique of pipetting bacteria nor regrowing bacteria on the agarose media is likely to have a resolution of one micrometer. Though the postulated one micrometer resolution may be possible, it is for all practical purposes impossible.
This is great! There might be hope after all! Maybe in 60 years the US will find diagrams of WMD in Iraq!
I think the point is that although this method is practical for Uranium bombs (the Hiroshima bomb used it), a much more complex 'implosion lens' design is required for Plutonium (or at least the grade of plutonium potentially available to the bomb makers, which had a relatively high rate of spontaneous neutron emission from 'contaminating' Pu-240). The latter design was used in the Trinity test and Nagasaki bombs.
Incidentally, the other German bomb design in the Physics World article (the one supposedly tested) was, if correct, a early attempt to exploit both fission and tritium/deuterium fusion in a weapon. Obviously they didn't manage to achieve even the yield of a small fission bomb, let alone a hydrogen bomb, but the (apparent) fact that they were thinking this way is itself remarkable (if true).
First, if you look at the diagram...
Not your fault, but Thanks BBC. The partial picture on the news story is closer and has more detail, the enlarge picture (which BBC has linked and you link to directly) is of a lower quality, thus I can't read ANYthing on it...
Of course even though one new where Heisenburg was in 1941 you could never tell what direction he was taking at that time.
Must have to do with that damned uncertainty principle.
If you look at the diagram on this page, there seems to be what looks like a date on the upper right side. It seems to say "Halteose fur AS/12/44". Any ideas what that means?
Also, the associated article states that the bomb appears to be a hybrid fission/fusion device, which was far more advanced than the two fission-only devices used on Japan./p
The original Physics World article contains a lot more information, including a (modern) schematic of 'some sort of a nuclear device' (not the same as the drawing reproduced by the BBC, and not a full scale atomic bomb) that one of the authors claims was actually tested by the Germans in 1945, supposedly killing 'several hundred prisoners of war and concentration-camp inmates'.
I agree that genes should be left for geneticists, but when your compiler, debugger, and emmulator/simulator check for bad or even icky results, it might actually be fun to toy with genes, in an neat visual way.
At least, I have fantasies about modifying vegetables, fruits, and bugs. I expect that wasps can be reengineered to produce complete reams of laser printer paper, even with a sealed paper wrapper. I expect that ants or cockroaches could be modified to clean your house, better than they do. I expect bacteria or other small folded shapes can be reengineered to spit-out carbon nanotubes, construct simple buildings, or eat trash and grow fuel-cell cartridges.
All this hinges on us being able to effectively "file/print" DNA molecules. It's fun to watch technology accelerate, I am one excited geek.
Germany used gas to kill thousands of Jews.
It didn't happen nearly as often but it did happen./p
They do compare the advance in genetic manipulation to the difference between editing with Wite-Out and editing with a word processor, but that's what we call an analogy. They're not claiming that producing genes would be something anyone with no training can do with their home computer./p
8.6% profit on HARDWARE is spectacular. Hardware is a very low margin business.
Storagetek has had some pretty good products, but I can't see how this acquisition is going to help either company in the long term.
I used to be a big Sun supporter but they seem to be stuck in neutral lately.
A merger with EMC or Quantum would have made a lot more sense than this.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
This also gives Sun a pool of tech support people who know how to support things in a heterogenous server environment, mainly Windows, but others as well. With Sun selling servers that are Microsoft Certified (the opeteron based ones for example), look for Sun storage to be attached to more and more Windows servers. Check out the Microsoft blogger with pics of Sun storage in Redmond if you doubt that.
EMC is obviously the big hitter in the storage arena, at the enterprise level at least. But of course, trying to aquire them would have been more expensive and also would have conflicted with current resale agreements with Hitachi. Doable? Possibly. But STK & Sun probably have a closer historical relationship that has had less bumps in the road. Sun has never really competed with STK, its always resold their tape libraries.
However, I don't think it will take Google very long to respond to this now that Yahoo's solution is out there.
Oops.. now with formatting:
This reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw once that said "I'm a musician in favour of P2P". I think we need more people like this give stories. Afterall, if the ARTISTS (musicians, movie makers, whatever) come out and say they support online file sharing of this nature, then the MPAA and RIAA and such lose a lot of ground.
So no we don't assume that quality content will be made just to put on BitTorrent, but was can already safely say that all quality content will end up there, whether it's legal or not. Smart content producers will try to tap into this, it's an enourmous audience after all. I expect we'll see more of the same from the MPAA though, instead of trying to adapt to the new technology they'll just continue to sue everyone instead. What a waste of money.
Kedora lets you subscribe to a number of shows (including MS's Channel 9) and you're alerted by RSS whenever a new show comes out. You then click the link in the RSS and it downloads the show via bittorrent. If somebody could create a totally integrated solution with an iTunes style frontend (I'm thining in the playlists sidebar have all the subscribed shows) and then release good shows on it in decent quality without DRM then I would actually pay good money for a subscription to this service in the same was as people subscribe to cable and sattelite TV./p
So... this guy gets modded up as funny (which it is I guess), but the comments talking about statistical significance and which are therefore directly relevent to the topic have a lower rating..
?!
It would be nice if there was a feature in the interface to turn off allegedly funny comments rather than it being limited to your session.
Believe with me, my saplings.
They did not handle the shift to smaller, faster x86 based servers. They did not handle the shift to open source enterprise software, even though much of it was written in their very own Java language.
I think this is an accurate assessment. When Linux and Open Source started to become a real market force, there were a lot of geeks and engineers within Sun that were very pro-Linux. We could see that Linux was the future. Then, there were management types that only saw Linux in the same close-minded view that Microsoft does, as a competitor that should be crushed. The problem is that although there are pockets within Sun that are very pro open source, they get drowned out by the groupthink that permeates from the top down. The groupthink that says "Linux bad, closed source good..."
It has gotten to the point where if you're a Sun employee, it could be dangerous to your career to be too much pro-Linux. For example, I had workers on my team snicker at me and say comments like "kid's OS" whenever I'd discuss something about Linux.
Think of it like this: If you're a Microsoft employee, when you're sitting around with your co-workers at lunch, are you going to tell them you spent the weekend at home setting up an Asterisk server running Linux? Not if you value your job you're not.
This culture permeates the company, and stifles innovation.
This is how I would fix Sun:
- If you manage a team of less than 10 people, you're out, period. There are many middle-managers that only have 4-5 direct reports and pull in 6 digit income. They came on-board during the dot-com boom and play political games to ensure they never get laid off. They would be the first to go. I'm sorry, I don't care how good you are, if your only job is to sit around and tell 4 or 5 people "work harder", you're not needed.
- Fire Scott Mcnealy. Really, I don't see how he's lasted this long.
- Get new executive level management that has a clue.
I think the first solution alone would probably cut 1000 head count and bring Sun to profitability immediately.
Anyway, what do I know, I'm just a former SSE that worked for a Sun partner.
I do like system administration on Sun though. I also like Linux. There's no reason those two platforms can't co-exist. The right tool for the job is what I always say...
you will believe this study...
He was intrigued with the idea of scrapping the keyboard. The fact that most computers used a QWERTY keyboard was a mere fluke, he thought. Steve thought that a more natural method of input would take hold, like handwriting or speech.
Handwriting: vastly slower than typing, even for crummy typists like me.
Speech: unusable except in private.
Does anyone see anything replacing keyboards anytime soon?
pDoes anyone see anything replacing keyboards anytime soon?
:)
Datajack.
And I love it. I print rather than write with it, and I find the accuracy is great. I also have Grafitti installed on it, but I hardly ever use it.
I've used Palms and PocketPC's, but go back to the Newton for it's simple and elegant interface, which makes we actually want to use it, and keep my calendar and contacts up to date.
Although the HWR gets all the attention whenever someone writes about the Newton, the one aspect I would have loved to see advanced and developed was the Assist button. Tap on it, enter something like "Have lunch with Bob on Tuesday", and it will search your contact list, automatically create a meeting on Tuesday for you.
Aren't we supposed to give her the Spanish Fly first? Beavis, you dumbass.
If you've been avoiding KDE because of who owns their stock, then you're a jackass. I'll bet some rather unsavory people own stock in lots of other companies you actually spend money with, so where does this bizarro unreachable standard for Trolltech come from?/p
How much did they pay their CEO, President, and all VP's? If they were not there, would that have made the company profitable?
Suprisingly, this is how most CEO's think about the workforce. Look at motorola when they laid off 11,000 workers. Then the board decided to reward the CEO with a multi million dollar bonus for his hard work.
Does SCO really need all those executives? I don't think so. If you ask me, it is the workers that are responsible for building a company, not the executives. There should be worker protection laws./p
Sadly, the company I work for still has a handful of SCO servers in our server room (fortunately I'm not responsible for any of them). We've been replacing what we could, but it's quite the project to migrate our legacy mission-critical systems (which have been running fine) to Linux.
At least from us, they are still getting something. But it's getting less and less with every passing quarter, I would think. The main reason to migrate off the platform, ethical issues aside, is the concern about the future of SCO and continued availability of support for these systems.
That 60% number sounds impressive, until you realize that something like 90% of the wealth in the us belongs that same 2%- proportionally they are being taxed less than the rest of us.
To call Joi Ito just a Japanese entrepreneur is to slight his credibility. Joi is not just an entrepreneur, but also a venture capitalist. He is also on the board of directors of ICANN and Creative Commons, among other organizations. His blog is ranked in the top 100 on technorati, although personally I have always been a bit suspicious since he funded that company also.
There are companies; including Wal-Mart and possibly McDonald's, that still use SCO Unix. I would imagine that SCO is making money by selling upgrades and support contracts to these existing customers.
As if sockets aren't enough, there's now two video card standards AGP and SLI (card: PCI-E) which caught me by surprise. I had to change my order before shipping as I didn't realise I could not use an AGP card with the new SLI/PCI-E configuration. Better? I don't need to spend $$$, my existing video card works fine, I just wanted to upgrade the mobo and CPU./p
"Doggie Fizzle writes[...]" No, Jason Kohrs wrote it. "Doggie Fizzle" copied and pasted it. I think the /. editors need to change their format a bit so as not to mislead readers about who writes these "summaries".
(And thanks in advance for moderating me "Troll" or "Offtopic" for pointing this out.)
Easy. There is no honor among theives.
I read the dead tree version on Tuesday and was not that impressed. There was no technical merit in how they caught them (except for the tap) basically they got an informer on the inside and got a tap on their website.
I'm all for catching these guys, but I wonder about publicizing the details at this time. Is this supposed to make us feel better about the Patriot Act -- "look here! See how we can bust the bad guys with the 'right' tools!" -- or are we just supposed to be happy that something was done about this gang of thieves? I don't expect everything to be about freedom and democracy, but it is too easy anymore to question why authorities give us this information, rather than look at the information for information sake...if that makes any sense.
I agree that the iPod battery life was misrepresented by Apple... but what about cell phones? Aren't their battery lifetimes inflated MUCH more than that of the iPod? And don't they have at least as short of a lifespan?
I get $50 in Apple credit, and the lawyers get up to $2,768,000. I really don't know who to cheer for here. I wish my iPod's battery would have lasted a bit longer (it's 1G, holds about 3hrs worth of charge), but I also wish the legal system wasn't so screwed up that the only people really profiting from this aren't injured parties.
Only in America...
Is it just me, or are there a LOT of posts in this that clearly belong with other topics.
I'm seeing posts on other slashdot stories subjects all over the place here right in the middle of threads.
I droped down to read at -1 thinking maybe just a couple people STARTED talking about these subjects through some sort of connection that got modded down but it only showed up more post that belong in other topics, some clearly replies to someone else, yet not to thier parent post.
So is this some new form of trolling/crapflooding or is slashdot broken?
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
It seems if it were a C8H10N4O2 molecule it would switch much faster.
This sounds like a good way to study computational properties of bacterial colonies. By printing them like this, perhaps they would be able to get them to behave in ways that would perform useful information processing. It might also end up acting as some sort of "interface" to DNA computation.
Whether we'd be able to get them to behave in reproducible ways would be the question.
Here are some links. The first has some interesting photos of bacterial colonies-- similar to cellular automata, because hey! They are! And the second is a link to an article on bacterial colony computation. Or maybe they're both to Goatse. You won't know until you click.
http://alnk.org/dankwish/a
Germany used gas to kill thousands of Jews.
It didn't happen nearly as often but it did happen./p
My physics professor at the University of Nevada Reno, the late Samuel Goudsmit (best known as co-discoverer of the electron's spin), was technical lead on the ALSOS project immediately after World War II. His team went into Berlin and certain other areas shortly after the Allies captured them, in order to sieze any Nazi nuclear material and atom bomb research. They found lots of stuff, then spent a few months studying it closely.
As described in the Wikipedia article (and in Goudsmit's 1947 book, ALSOS: The failure of German science), the Germans never got even remotely close to developing an A-bomb. Their approach to the physics was fundamentally mistaken and would never have led to anything workable. Good news for civilization, bad news for alternate-history writers and sensationalist journalists, but in any case conclusively settled. Goudsmit was a smart guy and knew his stuff.
If you look at the diagram on this page, there seems to be what looks like a date on the upper right side. It seems to say "Halteose fur AS/12/44". Any ideas what that means?
Also, the associated article states that the bomb appears to be a hybrid fission/fusion device, which was far more advanced than the two fission-only devices used on Japan./p