How do you track reliably who is clicking on an ad? Unless the person is forced to sign in (emit a personal cookie) on every browser, on every computer, there's no way to know his/her clicking habits on other machines. If the person cleans cookies periodically, there's no way to know what ads led to the sale.
They're only sewing the seeds of their own destruction...
I hate to needle, or to pick a knit, but I think you lost the thread of that saying's meaning. It seams weave got to point these stitches out, krewel though it may be. Otherwise the serge in warping will have our past in tattersall around us as folks embroider old sayings or even make them up of whole cloth.
It's not designed to hide anything, only to make reading files and transversing the file system simple.
That doesn't really hold water. If the motivation for the funny names and the hidden directory was simply to make traversing the file system simple, then why would they bother preventing drag-outs from the iPod in iTunes? Newer versions of iTunes won't let you copy music back out of your iPod into your computer; it is now necessary to dive into the hidden directory.
The directory may have originally been intended as you describe, but then they took advantage of the happy side effect of obfuscation, as part of a trend of increasing evil/stupidity.
Clearly, the iPhone was designed to be completely locked up -- unlike the iPod, it doesn't get mounted as a file system when you plug it in.:-(
1)Real-time or high-performance applications Check. No discussion necessary,...
Actually, this is pretty Wrong. "Real-time" just means "fast enough", and for many, many real-time tasks Perl is plenty fast enough. Precompiled Perl is pretty effing fast at midsized computing tasks. Precompiled Perl with inline C (check out the Inline module at CPAN) or even PDL (check out the PDL module at CPAN) r0xx0rs for many things. We're using Perl to run the flight software for a sounding rocket payload, for exactly that reason -- it runs very quickly and is much more readily developed and debugged than a low-level language such as C.
It was for a one-off scientific render. Run time was long (measured in hours) to render the desired scene, but run + devel was exceedingly short (measured in days).
... because it was a one-off scientific visualization, and writing in Perl Data Language minimized coding time. Sure, it took two hours to render a scene of the solar corona as seen from a spacecraft flying through it, while an implementation in C might have taken a few hundred milliseconds -- but it only took me a week to code up and debug, and if I were writing in C it would have taken at least a month.
...what is to stop someone from publishing using my data and not having me as an author at all?
Nothing! On the other hand, it would be a pretty foolish person who tried to do that -- if you made the data you're likely the only one who truly understands it. Other threads in this discussion talk about that problem in the context of elementary particles. For solar observations it is similar -- there are plenty of "gotchas" in every data set, and you'd better be working with the instrument team if you want to make a fool of yourself.
Another angle: if you really do deserve tenure, then your problem is probably the opposite: you've got too many interesting ideas to explore and data sets to analyze, and you're likely never to get around to doing some of the necessary-but-more-tedious analyses of your back data. If you hold on to the data, it will never get analyzed by anyone.
I will be extremely unlikely to put any dataset on google until I am certain I have extracted all of the publishable findings from it
That's so twentieth century. The scarce resource these days is not data, it is mindshare in the science community. In the 1990s, many of the SOHO instruments experimented with opening up their data sets to all comers immediately, and those instrument teams have generated about an order of magnitude more publications than their less-forward-thinking cohorts.
You should be so lucky that someone tries to get into your data and publish stuff from it.
It seems pretty well established that the K/T boundary is the sudden result of a giant impact, but TFA makes a good case that insects and disease were already causing the dinosaurs to decline gradually but severely in the period leading up to the K/T impact.
At first blush, the plague model makes me wonder about concurrent evolution. It's not really in the interest of any plague to actually kill its victims -- the virulent strains of bubonic plague, for example, are actually not very successful compared to influenza rhinovirus.
The giant asteroid model has some good things going for it, in particular the presence of charcoal fragments in and just above the K/T iridium layer in samples taken from many locations around the world. That seems to support the idea (advanced by Durda, Kring, et al. a few years ago) that heat of re-entry from the giant impact caused a worldwide holocaust (in the literal sense). The animal species that survived fit a pattern that they either could survive in deep water or could hide in holes.
Durda & Kring showed that a Chixculub-sized impact (and, more importantly, re-entry of fragments thrown up into space by the impact) would heat practically the entire outer atmosphere to incandescence for a few days. Under those conditions, the great outdoors would closely approximate the conditions in an electric oven set to "broil".
That seems more plausible than gradually killing them off over time -- I would think that after a few generations, the dinosaurs would become much more resistant and the bugs less virulent.
I think you're confusing spatial and angular location. The eye contains a lens, which converts incident angle (at the aperture) to lateral position (at the retina). All the laser light entering the eye is coming from a single well-collimated direction - toward the aperture of the laser! So the image that is focused on the retina contains a single point of light that represents the laser.
Similarly, starlight is very much not collimated -- most stars emit in all directions! -- but the beam of starlight that enters your eye from a particular star is extremely well collimated. That's why the star appears as a point in the night sky.
The bug that I described in the eye's irising mechanism has to do with the logarithmic (and saturatable) response of the retina to light: an extremely bright light landing on a small piece of retina stimulates the iris less than a much fainter light spread oer more of the retina. All of this is a way of saying it's not inconceivable that a handheld laser could burn holes in the retina of a night-adapted pilot's eye. During the final stages of an eclipse, the incident intensity from the Sun is only about 1 Watt per square meter, so that about 0.1 milliwatts lands on the eye -- but that is enough to burn small holes in the retina if well focused.
No, actually, a pinpoint of light won't constrict the iris, due to a bug in the wetware that came with your eyes! That is what makes viewing of partial solar eclipses so dangerous - normally, your iris constricts all the way when you look at the Sun, and (funny coincidence) that reduces the light enough to NOT damage your retina. But during a partial eclipse, the iris stays open and each retinal cell gets much more light on it than it otherwise would, potentialy killing it!
A well-collimated laser source should have the same property: it will appear as a bright pinpoint of light and trigger the same bug.
Gold is pretty cheap, even at current prices of $800/oz -- a gram of the stuff is only $30. You probably want to compare to a metal that is actually precious, like (say) rhodium at $240/gram.
As a result, as long as you can get a lungful of air everywhere in the world for free, the "market" will never succesfully charge you a cost for breathing.
Ah, that would explain why nobody buys bottled water at $1.50/bottle.
Those heavy transuranics are the most rare, and by some measures most valuable, elements in the universe. The only place they're made in quantity is in supernovae, and then only in relatively small amounts. You don't want to get rid of that stuff just because it's a little inconvenient to handle.
Many, many tons of plutonium have already been distributed around the planet by above-ground nuclear testing.
People protested the Cassini launch for about the same thing you are talking about: Cassini carried more than the LD-50 of Plutonium for 5 billion people, so (in principle) it the RTGs were distributed suitably among the population, they could kill about half the people on Earth.
The thing is, each and every teenage boy generates enough semen weekly to impregnate nearly half of Earth's population -- but that hardly every happens, mostly because such careful distribution would be difficult. In practice, both the plutonium's and the semen's effectiveness is reduced by many (perhaps nine) orders of magnitude, because they don't get distributed appropriately to cause damage.
If you read the League of Women Voters' Nuclear Waste Primer (a bit long in the tooth now, but an excellent introduction to population health physics, and free from the partisanship in most such books) you'll find a lot of good stuff on the relative risk of nuclear waste and other types of poisonous material.
Those experiments with dangling wires from the shuttle are a step in the right direction.
Those experiments simply indicate that we can turn rocket fuel into electricity in a rather inefficient way. Making electricity with orbital space tethers induces a drag force on those tethers. That uses up some of the orbital kinetic energy of the tether and host spacecraft. How did that orbital kinetic energy get there? Oh yeah, someone had to burn humongous amounts of rocket fuel to get it.
Making electricity with orbital tethers is like making ice water by putting ice in the microwave -- interesting but not efficient.
In the early 1990s I had the privilege of talking with Don Norman, a psychologist who was a pioneer of computer usability studies (and who later went on to guide development of many products at Apple). Among other things, he opined that there wouldn't be any PCs in about 20-30 years (from then). I was pretty astonished, but he pointed out that in the 1950s-1970s you could buy an electric motor for you kitchen, and they were all the rage. You'd have one installed in your counter, and attach various things to it. By the 1990s you couldn't anymore -- motors were small enough and cheap enough that they were just embedded in any appliance (like a mixer) you might use.
He asserted that computers were going the same way -- you might end up with dozens of powerful computers in your house, but you wouldn't call them that. You'd call them a "newspad" or a "TV" or a "reader" or whatever. They'd be invisible, with specialized interfaces for whatever task was at hand.
The payload (SUNRISE) is designed to carry a 1-meter telescope with a full complement of scientific instruments. This flight had a small (30 cm) stand-in telescope, to test the active pointing system, and a camera with a small array of narrowband filters, to see what wavelengths are visible from the flight altitude.
Strangely enough, some the components of sunlight at 120,000 feet altitude are not well known. Some interesting ultraviolet lines (the "h" and "k" lines from Magnesium) are thought to be visible there, that are not visible on the ground -- but nobody has yet characterized the ultraviolet absorption spectrum from the very upper layers of the stratosphere and from the mesosphere. Most telescopes that have flown so high were rocketing through on their way to space, rather than floating under a balloon. So this first flight was both to test the pointing (and other flight control) systems, and to double check that some desired wavelengths are present and usable at the target altitude.
Even the test flight of SUNRISE was a real accomplishment: it is far from the ideal of small, cheap, lightweight, quick-and-dirty payloads under scientific balloons, and is run more like a space mission both in terms of payload complexity and in terms of team management. The team is multinational and the payload is subject to rigorous engineering and testing.
The balloon flight environment is in some ways more harsh than the vacuum of space: payloads are subjected to wild temperature swings on climbout, and the thermal environment is not nearly as controllable as it is in empty space. On the other hand, launch and flight are very gentle compared to unmanned space shots.
Unfortunately, space travel isn't subject to Moore's Law. Spaceborne stuff is going to remain much, much more expensive until space access is routine -- and even then it will remain very (rather than insanely) expensive so long as we are using chemical rockets and not reusable fusion drives or some other science fiction gizmo.
It's not clear to me why they chose the image they did -- but the imager does much better (and appears to perform as well as the headline claims) in the M13 core -- check out the sample images at "http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~nlaw/lamp_pics/".
Postmodernism was a kind of philosophical disintegration in which philosophers and lit majors realized that they could reinterpret texts to mean practically anything. Unfortunately, many, many folks would like that slipperiness to extend to all knowledge.
Science is the effort to determine facts -- the subset of truths about the world around us that hold regardless of belief or mental state. Scientific facts are not subject to consensus, they are only subject to disproof by experiment (or ridicule by folks who point out that they are not even wrong).
Scientists speak of "scientific consensus" almost interchangeably with "fact", but strictly speaking they aren't the same -- consensus among qualified researchers who trust one anothers' opinion is an indicator that research results might be becoming trustworthy as facts. But that consensus is only a tool - a sort of yardstick - for the working scientist or the outside user of knowledge, not something that is subject to open debate as in the political process. For a political leader, a political party, or a vested interest (like an otherwise uninformed oil executive) to call for a voice in the scientific consensus is folly.
One might as well say: "Hey, before deciding whether there's a waterfall ahead on the river, we should consider the ramifications and effort required to portage our canoes around one." Well, that's one way to view the world -- but the waterfall is going to be there (or not) regardless of how hard it is to portage one's stuff. A conscientious guide should call out his best opinion on whether there is a waterfall or not, regardless of sentiments in the party he is guiding.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you track reliably who is clicking on an ad? Unless the person is forced to sign in (emit a personal cookie) on every browser, on every computer, there's no way to know his/her clicking habits on other machines. If the person cleans cookies periodically, there's no way to know what ads led to the sale.
This seems to me like yet another boondoggle...
I hate to needle, or to pick a knit, but I think you lost the thread of that saying's meaning. It seams weave got to point these stitches out, krewel though it may be. Otherwise the serge in warping will have our past in tattersall around us as folks embroider old sayings or even make them up of whole cloth.
That doesn't really hold water. If the motivation for the funny names and the hidden directory was simply to make traversing the file system simple, then why would they bother preventing drag-outs from the iPod in iTunes? Newer versions of iTunes won't let you copy music back out of your iPod into your computer; it is now necessary to dive into the hidden directory.
The directory may have originally been intended as you describe, but then they took advantage of the happy side effect of obfuscation, as part of a trend of increasing evil/stupidity.
Clearly, the iPhone was designed to be completely locked up -- unlike the iPod, it doesn't get mounted as a file system when you plug it in.
Actually, this is pretty Wrong. "Real-time" just means "fast enough", and for many, many real-time tasks Perl is plenty fast enough. Precompiled Perl is pretty effing fast at midsized computing tasks. Precompiled Perl with inline C (check out the Inline module at CPAN) or even PDL (check out the PDL module at CPAN) r0xx0rs for many things. We're using Perl to run the flight software for a sounding rocket payload, for exactly that reason -- it runs very quickly and is much more readily developed and debugged than a low-level language such as C.
It was for a one-off scientific render. Run time was long (measured in hours) to render the desired scene, but run + devel was exceedingly short (measured in days).
... because it was a one-off scientific visualization, and writing in Perl Data Language minimized coding time. Sure, it took two hours to render a scene of the solar corona as seen from a spacecraft flying through it, while an implementation in C might have taken a few hundred milliseconds -- but it only took me a week to code up and debug, and if I were writing in C it would have taken at least a month.
Hmmm, I seem to have omitted an embarrassing "don't", as in "if you don't want to make a fool of yourself.".
Nothing! On the other hand, it would be a pretty foolish person who tried to do that -- if you made the data you're likely the only one who truly understands it. Other threads in this discussion talk about that problem in the context of elementary particles. For solar observations it is similar -- there are plenty of "gotchas" in every data set, and you'd better be working with the instrument team if you want to make a fool of yourself.
Another angle: if you really do deserve tenure, then your problem is probably the opposite: you've got too many interesting ideas to explore and data sets to analyze, and you're likely never to get around to doing some of the necessary-but-more-tedious analyses of your back data. If you hold on to the data, it will never get analyzed by anyone.
That's so twentieth century. The scarce resource these days is not data, it is mindshare in the science community. In the 1990s, many of the SOHO instruments experimented with opening up their data sets to all comers immediately, and those instrument teams have generated about an order of magnitude more publications than their less-forward-thinking cohorts.
You should be so lucky that someone tries to get into your data and publish stuff from it.
Why, I made three terabytes in just 15 hours of solar observing last summer.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory, due to launch into geosynchronous orbit next summer, is a three petabyte mission.
It seems pretty well established that the K/T boundary is the sudden result of a giant impact, but TFA makes a good case that insects and disease were already causing the dinosaurs to decline gradually but severely in the period leading up to the K/T impact.
At first blush, the plague model makes me wonder about concurrent evolution. It's not really in the interest of any plague to actually kill its victims -- the virulent strains of bubonic plague, for example, are actually not very successful compared to influenza rhinovirus.
The giant asteroid model has some good things going for it, in particular the presence of charcoal fragments in and just above the K/T iridium layer in samples taken from many locations around the world. That seems to support the idea (advanced by Durda, Kring, et al. a few years ago) that heat of re-entry from the giant impact caused a worldwide holocaust (in the literal sense). The animal species that survived fit a pattern that they either could survive in deep water or could hide in holes.
Durda & Kring showed that a Chixculub-sized impact (and, more importantly, re-entry of fragments thrown up into space by the impact) would heat practically the entire outer atmosphere to incandescence for a few days. Under those conditions, the great outdoors would closely approximate the conditions in an electric oven set to "broil".
That seems more plausible than gradually killing them off over time -- I would think that after a few generations, the dinosaurs would become much more resistant and the bugs less virulent.
I think you're confusing spatial and angular location. The eye contains a lens, which converts incident angle (at the aperture) to lateral position (at the retina). All the laser light entering the eye is coming from a single well-collimated direction - toward the aperture of the laser! So the image that is focused on the retina contains a single point of light that represents the laser.
Similarly, starlight is very much not collimated -- most stars emit in all directions! -- but the beam of starlight that enters your eye from a particular star is extremely well collimated. That's why the star appears as a point in the night sky.
The bug that I described in the eye's irising mechanism has to do with the logarithmic (and saturatable) response of the retina to light: an extremely bright light landing on a small piece of retina stimulates the iris less than a much fainter light spread oer more of the retina. All of this is a way of saying it's not inconceivable that a handheld laser could burn holes in the retina of a night-adapted pilot's eye. During the final stages of an eclipse, the incident intensity from the Sun is only about 1 Watt per square meter, so that about 0.1 milliwatts lands on the eye -- but that is enough to burn small holes in the retina if well focused.
No, actually, a pinpoint of light won't constrict the iris, due to a bug in the wetware that came with your eyes! That is what makes viewing of partial solar eclipses so dangerous - normally, your iris constricts all the way when you look at the Sun, and (funny coincidence) that reduces the light enough to NOT damage your retina. But during a partial eclipse, the iris stays open and each retinal cell gets much more light on it than it otherwise would, potentialy killing it!
A well-collimated laser source should have the same property: it will appear as a bright pinpoint of light and trigger the same bug.
Gold is pretty cheap, even at current prices of $800/oz -- a gram of the stuff is only $30. You probably want to compare to a metal that is actually precious, like (say) rhodium at $240/gram.
Ah, that would explain why nobody buys bottled water at $1.50/bottle.
Those heavy transuranics are the most rare, and by some measures most valuable, elements in the universe. The only place they're made in quantity is in supernovae, and then only in relatively small amounts. You don't want to get rid of that stuff just because it's a little inconvenient to handle.
Many, many tons of plutonium have already been distributed around the planet by above-ground nuclear testing.
People protested the Cassini launch for about the same thing you are talking about: Cassini carried more than the LD-50 of Plutonium for 5 billion people, so (in principle) it the RTGs were distributed suitably among the population, they could kill about half the people on Earth.
The thing is, each and every teenage boy generates enough semen weekly to impregnate nearly half of Earth's population -- but that hardly every happens, mostly because such careful distribution would be difficult. In practice, both the plutonium's and the semen's effectiveness is reduced by many (perhaps nine) orders of magnitude, because they don't get distributed appropriately to cause damage.
If you read the League of Women Voters' Nuclear Waste Primer (a bit long in the tooth now, but an excellent introduction to population health physics, and free from the partisanship in most such books) you'll find a lot of good stuff on the relative risk of nuclear waste and other types of poisonous material.
Those experiments simply indicate that we can turn rocket fuel into electricity in a rather inefficient way. Making electricity with orbital space tethers induces a drag force on those tethers. That uses up some of the orbital kinetic energy of the tether and host spacecraft. How did that orbital kinetic energy get there? Oh yeah, someone had to burn humongous amounts of rocket fuel to get it.
Making electricity with orbital tethers is like making ice water by putting ice in the microwave -- interesting but not efficient.
In the early 1990s I had the privilege of talking with Don Norman, a psychologist who was a pioneer of computer usability studies (and who later went on to guide development of many products at Apple). Among other things, he opined that there wouldn't be any PCs in about 20-30 years (from then). I was pretty astonished, but he pointed out that in the 1950s-1970s you could buy an electric motor for you kitchen, and they were all the rage. You'd have one installed in your counter, and attach various things to it. By the 1990s you couldn't anymore -- motors were small enough and cheap enough that they were just embedded in any appliance (like a mixer) you might use.
He asserted that computers were going the same way -- you might end up with dozens of powerful computers in your house, but you wouldn't call them that. You'd call them a "newspad" or a "TV" or a "reader" or whatever. They'd be invisible, with specialized interfaces for whatever task was at hand.
So far, his prediction appears to be on track.
The payload (SUNRISE) is designed to carry a 1-meter telescope with a full complement of scientific instruments. This flight had a small (30 cm) stand-in telescope, to test the active pointing system, and a camera with a small array of narrowband filters, to see what wavelengths are visible from the flight altitude.
Strangely enough, some the components of sunlight at 120,000 feet altitude are not well known. Some interesting ultraviolet lines (the "h" and "k" lines from Magnesium) are thought to be visible there, that are not visible on the ground -- but nobody has yet characterized the ultraviolet absorption spectrum from the very upper layers of the stratosphere and from the mesosphere. Most telescopes that have flown so high were rocketing through on their way to space, rather than floating under a balloon. So this first flight was both to test the pointing (and other flight control) systems, and to double check that some desired wavelengths are present and usable at the target altitude.
Even the test flight of SUNRISE was a real accomplishment: it is far from the ideal of small, cheap, lightweight, quick-and-dirty payloads under scientific balloons, and is run more like a space mission both in terms of payload complexity and in terms of team management. The team is multinational and the payload is subject to rigorous engineering and testing.
The balloon flight environment is in some ways more harsh than the vacuum of space: payloads are subjected to wild temperature swings on climbout, and the thermal environment is not nearly as controllable as it is in empty space. On the other hand, launch and flight are very gentle compared to unmanned space shots.
Unfortunately, space travel isn't subject to Moore's Law. Spaceborne stuff is going to remain much, much more expensive until space access is routine -- and even then it will remain very (rather than insanely) expensive so long as we are using chemical rockets and not reusable fusion drives or some other science fiction gizmo.
It's not clear to me why they chose the image they did -- but the imager does much better (and appears to perform as well as the headline claims) in the M13 core -- check out the sample images at "http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~nlaw/lamp_pics/".
It appears that they simply picked a bad demo image. The Caltech site has a much more compelling sample at http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~nlaw/lamp_pics/.
Postmodernism was a kind of philosophical disintegration in which philosophers and lit majors realized that they could reinterpret texts to mean practically anything. Unfortunately, many, many folks would like that slipperiness to extend to all knowledge.
Science is the effort to determine facts -- the subset of truths about the world around us that hold regardless of belief or mental state. Scientific facts are not subject to consensus, they are only subject to disproof by experiment (or ridicule by folks who point out that they are not even wrong).
Scientists speak of "scientific consensus" almost interchangeably with "fact", but strictly speaking they aren't the same -- consensus among qualified researchers who trust one anothers' opinion is an indicator that research results might be becoming trustworthy as facts. But that consensus is only a tool - a sort of yardstick - for the working scientist or the outside user of knowledge, not something that is subject to open debate as in the political process. For a political leader, a political party, or a vested interest (like an otherwise uninformed oil executive) to call for a voice in the scientific consensus is folly.
One might as well say: "Hey, before deciding whether there's a waterfall ahead on the river, we should consider the ramifications and effort required to portage our canoes around one." Well, that's one way to view the world -- but the waterfall is going to be there (or not) regardless of how hard it is to portage one's stuff. A conscientious guide should call out his best opinion on whether there is a waterfall or not, regardless of sentiments in the party he is guiding.
Nah, watch the movie. The lines don't move like Moire patterns would -- they are clearly affixed to the surface...