I said a CT scan, not an x-ray. A CT scan (7 mSv on the chart) is made from a few hundred "normal" x-ray images, composited on a computer. This kid's getting about 6.5 mSv/year from his house. The 1mSv/year exposure limit is for a "member of the public", meaning that if an average person had more than that amount of exposure, it's abnormal and should be investigated (as it is here), because there might be a dangerous radiation source nearby. A malfunctioning x-ray machine in a doctor's office that turns itself on every night and continuously irradiates a neighboring house would be dangerous. A small amount of radioactive contamination in concrete is probably not.
And why is it obvious that a growing trend decays exponentially, and that that's a good indicator of when a term should be cached? I see many instances where a decay function is used to show when to remove something from cache, but not much for when to add to the cache.
I do try to be consistent, though I should perhaps note that given the choice between two identical apartments, with all other things being exactly equal except their yearly radiation dose, I would of course choose the one with lower radiation, because a minimal risk is still risk, and with no cost to eliminate it, I would.
Yes. Disagreement among scientists is about the range of problems connected to the range of radiation doses received. Below a given dose, nobody except crackpots thinks radiation causes problems. Above a certain dose, nobody except crackpots thinks radiation's safe. These crackpot thresholds apply to almost any risk. There's a certain height above which a fall is deadly. There's a certain amount of water that can be in the lungs without any problem. There's a certain amount of traffic that can go through an intersection before it will work better with a stoplight.
The non-idiots recognize that some things aren't known perfectly, so they learn the crackpot thresholds and just try to stay on the safe sides, without worrying too much. They don't need to know exactly how much radiation causes what problems, just that a little bit has almost no risk. The idiots are the ones who see "radiation" and immediately assume it's an absolutely-deadly dose, and that the child in TFS is now doomed to die of cancer at 20.
Yes. I also drive a car to work, which is far more dangerous. I also use a laptop on my lap, stand near the microwave, and have a slippery shower floor. I'm a risky person. Please don't tell my insurance agent.
I did indeed. Although, through exchanging ideas, socialization does occur.
The church also does tend to lean left politically (due to the preference for letting people do and think what they want, rather than what some authoritative government/corporation/book tells them to), so socialism is often discussed, too...
Those are all good questions, which should be answered by the thorough investigation that I hope will follow. If and only if the investigation reveals an actual danger, we should be worried.
From the same chart, 18 years of that (117 mSv), if it were absorbed in only one year, would still be only marginally higher than the lowest dose clearly linked to an increased risk of cancer (100 mSv/year). Since it's being absorbed over 18 years, the body has a much better chance of repairing any damage, so health is most likely not affected.
The human body can take a surprising amount of radiation and do just fine when compared to detectable levels. A report of "radiation found!" really means very little in terms of overall health. Much more concerning is that the contaminated materials were used at all, implying that the construction controls aren't right. Finding some low levels of contamination should lead to an inspection of all buildings recently built by the same company, to see where else (potentially more) radioactive materials have been used, and to assess if there's any real danger.
No. The non-obvious part is the formula. If you don't use that formula (or trivial alterations of it), you aren't affected by the patent. The general concept of "cache based on predictions" is not patented (at least, not by this one).
While the use of contaminated materials is something to be concerned about, let's not forget how much radiation this actually is. It's roughly the equivalent of one chest CT scan per year.
"Something like this" is not covered by the patent. One particular implementation of a trend-prediction system is covered, down to the exact formula used to determine the need for a cache of a particular term's results. Something else, like using a moving average, would not be covered, and may work well enough to do the job.
The patent as written claims the use of a particular formula (Which I read as "N'=N/Df^((T'-T)/Ti)") to predict trends.
It is not a patent on prediction in general, or prediction with computers, or caching, or caching based on predictions. It is a very specific design of a non-obvious system, applied in a specific way. Implement the system differently, and you're not violating the patent. The MLK mention is an example, which in no way affects the actual claims. In fact, it's a trivial example, as well. Here's an excerpt containing all references to MLK from the patent itself:
Short-term trends are, however, important to consider, as they are often the result of external activities dominating the time of day and date, as well as current events. For example, during the days preceding and following a space shuttle launch there may be many searches relating to "space shuttles," "NASA," "space," and similar terms. Right around the Martin Luther King Holiday, there may be many searches about "Martin Luther King." If a celebrity was just arrested for drunk driving and assaulting a police officer, it is reasonable to expect a significant increase in queries involving the name of that celebrity. Thus, it would be useful to have better methods of detecting short term trends for the purposes of caching search results to making them more readily available to users.
Sorry, but the typical Slashdot patent hate is yet again unjustified, and the reference to MLK is likely unintentional, as the patent was filed in December of 2006 and granted in December of 2011. It looks like the submitter just search for "Martin Luther King patents" and wrote a story around the results. Well done, sensationalist headline!
It meets the US government's criteria for a religion, which as I understand, means it has defined rituals. There a thing with water every year that symbolizes community.
Given that the first principle is to respect everyone's worth and dignity as an individual, they'll likely put up with you for quite a while, as long as you'll put up with them as well. My church has quite a few outspoken "devout atheists", who will complain about any use of religious texts in the services. One in particular has been a member for 30 years, and doesn't look like he'll be kicked out anytime soon.
Until someone comes up with a religion that says it is OK to believe in "all the gods", your statement is nonsensical.
Unitarian Universalism, to which I'm a recent (agnostic) convert. One of the main tenets of the religion is that everybody can hold whatever beliefs they want. In my particular church, one of the ministers is Buddhist, one is Catholic, and one is agnostic. They have some very interesting sermons, usually focusing on some aspect of being a better person when interacting with society, rather than promoting devotion to any chosen deity. After the service, there's a coffee hour with socialization and open discussion, so the most sacred item in the church is the probably the coffeepot. Banjo help you if you take our coffee!
As mentioned elsewhere, the scammers sell books and gain fame, which they use to sell more books and get on talk shows.
Distrusting a biological chemical because it was once manufactured by a biochemical company who makes some particularly nasty products is as ludicrous as trusting a product because its company has made a few good products lately. Do you think they somehow encode pure evil into the molecule, and it's somehow never noticed by the myriad safety studies?
iPads suck for slash dot. I will cease my rant now...
I'm afraid not. There is no conclusive link between aspartame and MS within the scientific community. Such claims are often repeated by doctors-turned-authors, scam artists, and conspiracy theorists, though.
Moving on, I do wish this madness with stem cells would end. They have their own soul as much as my feces (mostly dead blood cells and bacteria) do.
DirectX rules the gaming world, and doesn't need to add `vital features` as it already has them.
That's my point. There's nothing new that's really useful, so there's no real reason to upgrade to DX 10 or 11, which leads back to my original claim that Microsoft hasn't been really innovative in about 10 years.
Multi-platform releases have always been important.
Except from the mid-90's to mid 2000's, where new games were available almost exclusively for Windows. Mac versions were much rarer, and were hardly ever seen in major retailers. If you had a mac and wanted to play a game, mail-order was the best chance you had to get it. Barring that, Mac users were often left out, and to a large extent they still are today. Steam (and a set of its most popular games) was released for Windows in 2003, but not on OS X until 2010.
iOS, like Android, is a fine platform for beginner game developers and budget games, but I feel we're some way off it being comparable with PC/PS3/Xbox type games.
iOS is nothing like a full console, of course, but that's not my point. My statement was in response to the shill:
Microsoft is mostly interested in providing a platform, and they do it very well. Neither Linux or OS X go that extra mile.
Apple is effectively sidestepping all competition with Microsoft by dominating the mobile market with the iOS devices. They're convenient, and have a key feature that Google doesn't care about, and Microsoft has been chasing for years without achieving. All iOS devices look and act exactly the same as every other one, and that's very close to how OS X looks and acts. They have a complete platform with an enormous userbase, and they don't have to fight hard for it. That "extra mile" race was finished with the utter failure of the Zune.
DirectX 9 was released 9 years ago, and hasn't been replaced because of the stagnation of Windows. OpenGL is cross-platform, and with OS X's adoption, sees growing use. New versions of DirectX do not add any vital features over old versions, so Microsoft still has no clear advantage in that field.
Windows does currently hold the gaming market, but OS X is gaining ground, with the porting of Steam and generally-growing user base. A multi-platform release is now an important goal for new games, just as it was in the early 90's.
Apple is also providing a platform, for which Microsoft has yet to provide a comparable answer. They call it iOS, and it's now the hip new place for budding programmers to make their debut into professional development.
I know replying to myself is bad form, but after posting I looked up the stock growth for Microsoft and its competitors. Over the past 10 years, Microsoft is more stagnant than Slashdot (the site, not Geeknet as a company).
For the past decade, Microsoft has been where it is now: equal or worse. Internet Explorer shares the browser market with Chrome. Windows 7 shares the desktop market with XP and OS X. XBox shares the console market with PS3 and Wii.
Being as good as your competitors means that when something bad does happen, like a new zero-day exploit in the wild that makes the headlines, the company drops back to second place. Regardless of its current improved security, Microsoft will never regain lost reputation until they produce a series of spectacular products that are consistently better than any competitor. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
From the experiences of other volunteers I've worked with (including a few from Kenya), most places in Africa have roughly the same problems, differing primarily in how open they are about their problems. Ghana's (and Kenya's, and South Africa's, to name a few) problems are mostly hidden behind a facade of "we can work just as well as the West", but under the surface, the dynamics are more similar to other African countries than to anything in the West.
Slashdot Mirror
I said a CT scan, not an x-ray. A CT scan (7 mSv on the chart) is made from a few hundred "normal" x-ray images, composited on a computer. This kid's getting about 6.5 mSv/year from his house. The 1mSv/year exposure limit is for a "member of the public", meaning that if an average person had more than that amount of exposure, it's abnormal and should be investigated (as it is here), because there might be a dangerous radiation source nearby. A malfunctioning x-ray machine in a doctor's office that turns itself on every night and continuously irradiates a neighboring house would be dangerous. A small amount of radioactive contamination in concrete is probably not.
"Far more serious" perhaps, but at these levels it's still nowhere near serious enough to actually be worried.
And why is it obvious that a growing trend decays exponentially, and that that's a good indicator of when a term should be cached? I see many instances where a decay function is used to show when to remove something from cache, but not much for when to add to the cache.
I do try to be consistent, though I should perhaps note that given the choice between two identical apartments, with all other things being exactly equal except their yearly radiation dose, I would of course choose the one with lower radiation, because a minimal risk is still risk, and with no cost to eliminate it, I would.
Yes. Disagreement among scientists is about the range of problems connected to the range of radiation doses received. Below a given dose, nobody except crackpots thinks radiation causes problems. Above a certain dose, nobody except crackpots thinks radiation's safe. These crackpot thresholds apply to almost any risk. There's a certain height above which a fall is deadly. There's a certain amount of water that can be in the lungs without any problem. There's a certain amount of traffic that can go through an intersection before it will work better with a stoplight.
The non-idiots recognize that some things aren't known perfectly, so they learn the crackpot thresholds and just try to stay on the safe sides, without worrying too much. They don't need to know exactly how much radiation causes what problems, just that a little bit has almost no risk. The idiots are the ones who see "radiation" and immediately assume it's an absolutely-deadly dose, and that the child in TFS is now doomed to die of cancer at 20.
Yes. I also drive a car to work, which is far more dangerous. I also use a laptop on my lap, stand near the microwave, and have a slippery shower floor. I'm a risky person. Please don't tell my insurance agent.
I did indeed. Although, through exchanging ideas, socialization does occur.
The church also does tend to lean left politically (due to the preference for letting people do and think what they want, rather than what some authoritative government/corporation/book tells them to), so socialism is often discussed, too...
Those are all good questions, which should be answered by the thorough investigation that I hope will follow. If and only if the investigation reveals an actual danger, we should be worried.
Yes, I did know that. I'm not concerned about terrorism, either, but I do worry about my wife being late coming back from work.
From the same chart, 18 years of that (117 mSv), if it were absorbed in only one year, would still be only marginally higher than the lowest dose clearly linked to an increased risk of cancer (100 mSv/year). Since it's being absorbed over 18 years, the body has a much better chance of repairing any damage, so health is most likely not affected.
The human body can take a surprising amount of radiation and do just fine when compared to detectable levels. A report of "radiation found!" really means very little in terms of overall health. Much more concerning is that the contaminated materials were used at all, implying that the construction controls aren't right. Finding some low levels of contamination should lead to an inspection of all buildings recently built by the same company, to see where else (potentially more) radioactive materials have been used, and to assess if there's any real danger.
No. The non-obvious part is the formula. If you don't use that formula (or trivial alterations of it), you aren't affected by the patent. The general concept of "cache based on predictions" is not patented (at least, not by this one).
While the use of contaminated materials is something to be concerned about, let's not forget how much radiation this actually is. It's roughly the equivalent of one chest CT scan per year.
"Something like this" is not covered by the patent. One particular implementation of a trend-prediction system is covered, down to the exact formula used to determine the need for a cache of a particular term's results. Something else, like using a moving average, would not be covered, and may work well enough to do the job.
The patent as written claims the use of a particular formula (Which I read as "N'=N/Df^((T'-T)/Ti)") to predict trends.
It is not a patent on prediction in general, or prediction with computers, or caching, or caching based on predictions. It is a very specific design of a non-obvious system, applied in a specific way. Implement the system differently, and you're not violating the patent. The MLK mention is an example, which in no way affects the actual claims. In fact, it's a trivial example, as well. Here's an excerpt containing all references to MLK from the patent itself:
Short-term trends are, however, important to consider, as they are often the result of external activities dominating the time of day and date, as well as current events. For example, during the days preceding and following a space shuttle launch there may be many searches relating to "space shuttles," "NASA," "space," and similar terms. Right around the Martin Luther King Holiday, there may be many searches about "Martin Luther King." If a celebrity was just arrested for drunk driving and assaulting a police officer, it is reasonable to expect a significant increase in queries involving the name of that celebrity. Thus, it would be useful to have better methods of detecting short term trends for the purposes of caching search results to making them more readily available to users.
Sorry, but the typical Slashdot patent hate is yet again unjustified, and the reference to MLK is likely unintentional, as the patent was filed in December of 2006 and granted in December of 2011. It looks like the submitter just search for "Martin Luther King patents" and wrote a story around the results. Well done, sensationalist headline!
Of course as soon as I hit submit, I remember the phrase my now-wife used to describe it: It's religion without dogma.
It meets the US government's criteria for a religion, which as I understand, means it has defined rituals. There a thing with water every year that symbolizes community.
Given that the first principle is to respect everyone's worth and dignity as an individual, they'll likely put up with you for quite a while, as long as you'll put up with them as well. My church has quite a few outspoken "devout atheists", who will complain about any use of religious texts in the services. One in particular has been a member for 30 years, and doesn't look like he'll be kicked out anytime soon.
Until someone comes up with a religion that says it is OK to believe in "all the gods", your statement is nonsensical.
Unitarian Universalism, to which I'm a recent (agnostic) convert. One of the main tenets of the religion is that everybody can hold whatever beliefs they want. In my particular church, one of the ministers is Buddhist, one is Catholic, and one is agnostic. They have some very interesting sermons, usually focusing on some aspect of being a better person when interacting with society, rather than promoting devotion to any chosen deity. After the service, there's a coffee hour with socialization and open discussion, so the most sacred item in the church is the probably the coffeepot. Banjo help you if you take our coffee!
As mentioned elsewhere, the scammers sell books and gain fame, which they use to sell more books and get on talk shows.
Distrusting a biological chemical because it was once manufactured by a biochemical company who makes some particularly nasty products is as ludicrous as trusting a product because its company has made a few good products lately. Do you think they somehow encode pure evil into the molecule, and it's somehow never noticed by the myriad safety studies?
iPads suck for slash dot. I will cease my rant now...
I'm afraid not. There is no conclusive link between aspartame and MS within the scientific community. Such claims are often repeated by doctors-turned-authors, scam artists, and conspiracy theorists, though.
Moving on, I do wish this madness with stem cells would end. They have their own soul as much as my feces (mostly dead blood cells and bacteria) do.
DirectX rules the gaming world, and doesn't need to add `vital features` as it already has them.
That's my point. There's nothing new that's really useful, so there's no real reason to upgrade to DX 10 or 11, which leads back to my original claim that Microsoft hasn't been really innovative in about 10 years.
Multi-platform releases have always been important.
Except from the mid-90's to mid 2000's, where new games were available almost exclusively for Windows. Mac versions were much rarer, and were hardly ever seen in major retailers. If you had a mac and wanted to play a game, mail-order was the best chance you had to get it. Barring that, Mac users were often left out, and to a large extent they still are today. Steam (and a set of its most popular games) was released for Windows in 2003, but not on OS X until 2010.
iOS, like Android, is a fine platform for beginner game developers and budget games, but I feel we're some way off it being comparable with PC/PS3/Xbox type games.
iOS is nothing like a full console, of course, but that's not my point. My statement was in response to the shill:
Microsoft is mostly interested in providing a platform, and they do it very well. Neither Linux or OS X go that extra mile.
Apple is effectively sidestepping all competition with Microsoft by dominating the mobile market with the iOS devices. They're convenient, and have a key feature that Google doesn't care about, and Microsoft has been chasing for years without achieving. All iOS devices look and act exactly the same as every other one, and that's very close to how OS X looks and acts. They have a complete platform with an enormous userbase, and they don't have to fight hard for it. That "extra mile" race was finished with the utter failure of the Zune.
DirectX 9 was released 9 years ago, and hasn't been replaced because of the stagnation of Windows. OpenGL is cross-platform, and with OS X's adoption, sees growing use. New versions of DirectX do not add any vital features over old versions, so Microsoft still has no clear advantage in that field.
Windows does currently hold the gaming market, but OS X is gaining ground, with the porting of Steam and generally-growing user base. A multi-platform release is now an important goal for new games, just as it was in the early 90's.
Apple is also providing a platform, for which Microsoft has yet to provide a comparable answer. They call it iOS, and it's now the hip new place for budding programmers to make their debut into professional development.
I know replying to myself is bad form, but after posting I looked up the stock growth for Microsoft and its competitors. Over the past 10 years, Microsoft is more stagnant than Slashdot (the site, not Geeknet as a company).
For the past decade, Microsoft has been where it is now: equal or worse. Internet Explorer shares the browser market with Chrome. Windows 7 shares the desktop market with XP and OS X. XBox shares the console market with PS3 and Wii.
Being as good as your competitors means that when something bad does happen, like a new zero-day exploit in the wild that makes the headlines, the company drops back to second place. Regardless of its current improved security, Microsoft will never regain lost reputation until they produce a series of spectacular products that are consistently better than any competitor. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
From the experiences of other volunteers I've worked with (including a few from Kenya), most places in Africa have roughly the same problems, differing primarily in how open they are about their problems. Ghana's (and Kenya's, and South Africa's, to name a few) problems are mostly hidden behind a facade of "we can work just as well as the West", but under the surface, the dynamics are more similar to other African countries than to anything in the West.
All the more reason not to jump to any conclusions, and instead investigate the matter looking for evidence of intent.