As someone who ventured down that path I can tell you that almost without fail it ends disastrously. It doesn't matter how much you have in common with that other person or how solid you think the relationship is. Something most likely will go wrong, at least in part due to the abnormal amount of time you're spending together. And when it goes wrong it will likely go very, very, wrong.
If you want to do research (rather than psychotherapy) you might want to consider a degree in neuroscience, which often comes with a stipend for the student. Then you wouldn't have to try to moonlight to avoid taking on school-related debt - which a lot of programs frown on anyways.
Freely available doesn't mean that there's no cost involved
That is a valid point, though I did not claim anything to the contrary. As consumers of scientific publications, though, slashdot readers notice when they can - or cannot - download a published paper for free.
The authors paid the publisher (PLoS ONE) to have their article produced and published.
The vast majority of academic journals have charges for the authors, regardless of whether or not the articles are available for free to view and download. You would be hard pressed to find a journal in the biological sciences in particular that doesn't charge for review and publication.
PLoS submissions fees for US authors are $1350.
Which is on par with most biomedical journals. The only ones that are significantly less than that are the "Hindawi" journals, which have such marginal impact that they aren't even indexed by pubmed.
It is worth noting that both the PLoS and the BMC (BioMedCentral) journals also have "membership" setups where institutions - via their libraries - can become members and have the review / publication charges reduced drastically or waived entirely. For that matter, they also have a mechanism by which you can submit and ask to have the fee waived or reduced, if you find it is beyond what you can pay.
The Republicans are more sticking to their grounds based on the 2010 election cycle in which their electorate wanted them to do so.
I presume you are referring to house republicans here, and not just republicans in general, as the senate republicans have been pretty well absent from the budget process. That said, the house does not represent all Americans, rather each representative is supposed to represent their own constituents. So whether or not what they are doing is what "their electorate wanted them to do" is a matter open to discussion. Not many people vote for representation to prevent passing of legislation and to avoid compromise at all costs.
No, I'm not saying that the Republicans are without blame
Really? Your own message suggests you believe otherwise.
only pointing out that they have actually done more in terms of budgets then the Democrats.
That is also a matter open for discussion. Sure, they proposed a budget. However they have also plainly declared multiple times that they are not interested in any changes to it in any shape or form. This is not a good way to try for any sort of consensus within an elected body.
Typically the House and Senate would each pass a budget, and then if they don't agree do a reconciliation.
That part is correct.
However, the Senate hasn't passed anything for the reconciliation step to even kick in
What would be the point? The house GOP have stated repeatedly that they have no interest in reconciliation anyways. Why even try to hold a meeting with someone who is less flexible than Mount McKinley? The republicans have completely dug in their heels and demonstrated that they will not, under any circumstances, compromise. That has been their strategy for some time now.
But as you said, the Democrats want to hide the costs of what they wanted done
No, I did not say that. I never suggested they want to hide anything. Nor is there any proof of such a thing. You are inserting that notion to protect the hard line GOP who are refusing to allow anything resembling a compromise to even be considered.
(e.g. ObamaCare)
This has nothing to do with the massive health insurance company bailout that your conservative friends wrote and passed off to the vote without ample time for revision. The budget for it has been written and reviewed and does not require additional funds. Just because fox news tells you otherwise doesn't make it so.
so they're really not interested in passing a budget.
Funny, earlier you said that you are
not saying that the Republicans are without blame
Yet here you just went and placed all the blame on the democrats. Or are you doing some fancy math where 110% of the blame goes to the democrats and then some other imaginary (or negative, but still counted) fraction goes to the republicans?
Notice that you can download this entire article, in html or pdf at your choice, for free from anywhere. No paywall or restrictions. You can even post it to your website, redistribute it freely, etc. You can do pretty much whatever you want with this article, short of claiming it to be your own work (if you're not an author).
The Public Library of Science is helping to make more research results publicly accessible through this journal. No, I don't work for them, though I do have an article in PLoS ONE myself.
So, FYI, it's not the Republicans who are standing in the way of a Federal Budget over the last few years.
The democrats are cowards who are unwilling to put out a budget that reflects what they want, and have a discussion on it.
The republicans are thoroughly entrenched in their ideology and unwilling to negotiate on anything, which makes it pointless for the democrats to propose a budget or try to negotiate a republican-proposed budget.
So if you are trying to claim that the republicans are somehow without blame in the situation, you are dead fucking wrong. If you want to say instead that they do not own 100% of the blame, there is some truth to that argument.
I have everything I need in LInux now. Openoffice (or libre office is you prefer) is mature enough to handle all my word processing / spreadsheet / presentation needs. GIMP and Inkscape do all my graphics. Flash finally works (and even better might finally go away).
The times I need Windows are so rare as to be almost unimportant. It has been so long since I booted windows I might need to do a password recovery next time just to log in to my own system.
That's great if the carpet can tell when grandma is about to fall, it improves the chances of getting help to her on time. The hard part though is getting it to prevent grandma from falling in the first place. If the carpet could convince her to sit down for a while (without making her think she's just lost her mind) that could go a long way on it's own. A lot of falls are preventable by getting the person who is at risk to sit down for a moment.
If the car was fully automated (self-driving), why would it need to store information on where the owner (or occupant) is? It's basically just personalized mass transit at that point - buses and subways don't report the names of their passengers so why should an automated car?
The Concorde was not profitable because Boeing got the mission it was designed for (Europe to Las Angeles) shut down by buying themselves a law.
A few months ago on this very site there was a story that mentioned the Concorde burned more fuel just getting off the ground than a 707 would burn on an entire trip from London to Amsterdam. Couple that to the fact that the Concorde sat very few people and you realize the fuel cost per passenger was enormous.
Having a mandatory crew of three didn't help much either.
I don't see that being a very popular option. Although if it is as expensive to fly as the Concorde was, there won't be a cattle class for us 99%'ers so maybe everyone will just have two seats (for the price of 20!)?
Most of the time - at least from my experience - the attacks are coming either from systems that are in foreign countries that don't give a shit about you and your system, or they are distributed attacks that would require you to contact dozens (or more) of ISPs.
The one exception I make is if it comes from an American IP address. Most American ISPs do a pretty good job of tracking who is using what IP address and can do something about it. Generally, they won't do much - and they seldom tell you what they do - but they'll at least look at it. And of course if it is from a university in the US, they'll usually track it to a college freshman who either thinks he's clever or is running a compromised windows PC.
But in general, your complaints will fall on deaf ears. Just keep checking your logs periodically to make sure nobody succeeds and that you are making the right responses to new methods. You could set up a tarpit if you like...
Don't forget though that patch clamping is useful to a lot of biological sciences beyond neuroscience. Pretty well every cell in a higher eukaryote uses voltage-gated channels for something; I've seen cardiology research groups use it to monitor Na+ ion currents for one but it goes much further than that. As someone already pointed out a big part of what restricts the adoption of patch clamping in other disciplines isn't that it doesn't have an application but rather that it is so immensely difficult to master. If it can be automated that not only makes it available for more types of work but it also increases the confidence on the measurements by making it easier to do a lot of them.
I frequently bash the slahdot editors for terrible choices in front page articles (Timothy for one pro-republican posting after another, samzenpus for conservative spin that makes me want to vomit, etc), this time I'd like to extend a big thank-you to "Unknown Lamer" for his postings. Recently he posted the article on NEMS mass spec as well, so it is nice to see some science coverage on the front page. Heck, "Unknown Lamer" even posted some actual computer hardware stories recently, too - what a concept!
So thank you, Unknown Lamer. It's nice to see something that actually is news for nerds and not just politics as usual on the front page.
I thought so too, for the same reasons you give, but right now Romney and Obama are neck and neck in the polls, even in the "battleground states". I fear you may be wrong. God help our country! We have the choice between being stabbed with an ice pick, or buttraped with a hot soldering iron.
There are a lot of states at play - including Ohio which the GOP successfully suppressed voting in for the 2004 to the benefit of GWB. I still don't see Romney pulling this off, though. Once the independents hear a little more from Ryan it will be all over.
That said, yes, it is painful no matter what. We have a choice between re-electing the most conservative president our country has ever had and electing a new guy whose VP candidate makes our current conservative look like Santa Claus. One will keep us on the current path of ever-more-conservative legislation of our country, the other will hop in and stand on the gas pedal. It would be nice to have a real choice but I will vote for the one who will hurt me less, just to hopefully prevent the election of the one who will hurt me a lot more.
Cut the money off at the source: the spammers' clients.
That's one place. Don't forget the spammers pay bills, too. I've seen times when the spammers (usually under pseudonyms) will register the spamvertised domain name, too. There is almost always a morally-impaired registrar (and ISP) on the take in the process.
Get rid of those, get everyone on Linux, BSD or OS X and the bot nets go away.
As much as I would love to bear witness to the end of MS Windows, I don't think that will happen. And even if this afternoon was the end of Windows, it wouldn't be the end of botnets. You would still have lazy system managers who would be running those under root and all times, which would become easy infection targets. Still others would be so terribly insecure that they'd be compromised quickly.
In other words, an OS that starts out secure does not automatically remain secure. And the botnet masters will find the insecure boxes.
The Republican leadership is banking on increased Republican turnout surpassing the losses from Independents and increased Democratic turnout.
That's the problem he has now, though. Remember in 2008, McCain was considered "not conservative enough" - even after doing the whole conservative song and dance all through the campaign - and yet the GOP base still came out to vote for him. Romney is no less conservative than McCain, and this time the conservatives are also rallied around their undying hatred of Obama.
Hell, they could have run Joe Lieberman, Charlie Crist, or Zell Miller and they would have gotten all of the base to come out and vote just because they want Obama out so badly. Romney could have picked any of them, or even one of his own sons, and done just fine with the base.
However, they won't get the independents back to their side. They may have been able to pick up some of them had they chosen a moderate VP candidate, but they went the other way. It's Christmas in August a the White House right now...
Yes, but it's Obama's election to lose.
True, but even an Al Gore sized failure wouldn't be enough to drive the independents away and into the far-far-far-right that Paul Ryan represents. A huge failure might cause some people to sit out the election, but it won't push them to the other side.
(For instance, you can bet that, outside of New Orleans, nobody is more worried about the levies than Obama's election manager.)
If New Orleans floods again, Obama just needs to show up to do a better job than GWB. It is nearly impossible to fail more miserably on it than what we saw 7 years ago.
You might be the first person who has ever asked this question when I have pointed out this dilemma here on slashdot. Most other people respond by advocating murdering the spammers in some way, shape, or form instead.
The money can be stopped a few different ways. A few years ago a group at Georgia Tech (IIRC) found that the majority of all financial transactions executed on spamvertised sites were processed through a very short list of processing centers. Getting those guys to clean up their act would be a big step in the right direction.
Another is to find where the spammers themselves are receiving payment (as the above method goes after the people paying the spammer instead). Following the money isn't that hard if you initiate a transaction (to track it from one end) and get useful records of who really owns the domain for the spamvertised site (which is often registered in some way to the spammer).
I thank you for asking the question.
(2) And why should we bother?
The biggest argument for doing something about spam lies in the fact that spam makes the internet more expensive for everyone. Being as a large portion of all traffic is spam, it means that legitimate traffic is delayed as a result. And of course the spam also takes up space on hard drives (sometimes in replicate as it traverses from a server to a user's computer) and CPU time. Any company that is running a spam filter - be it software, hardware, or some of each - is also devoting resources to the problem that someone has to pay for.
Spam is no more offensive than the spam I hear on the radio or TV.
I would argue that to be an incorrect analogy for the reasons I stated above. You can turn off your radio or TV and you won't hear your local car dealer screaming at you to come buy a new car. However if you turn off your computer you are still paying your ISP to move spam around. Even worse you are paying for your ISP to build up its network infrastructure so they can deliver the bandwidth the promised you while also dealing with the avalanche of spam coming to their network every moment.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who ventured down that path I can tell you that almost without fail it ends disastrously. It doesn't matter how much you have in common with that other person or how solid you think the relationship is. Something most likely will go wrong, at least in part due to the abnormal amount of time you're spending together. And when it goes wrong it will likely go very, very, wrong.
Just. Don't. Do. It.
If you are that clumsy that you tend to drop your fragile smart phone, maybe you should consider one that isn't so easily broken.
If you want to do research (rather than psychotherapy) you might want to consider a degree in neuroscience, which often comes with a stipend for the student. Then you wouldn't have to try to moonlight to avoid taking on school-related debt - which a lot of programs frown on anyways.
Freely available doesn't mean that there's no cost involved
That is a valid point, though I did not claim anything to the contrary. As consumers of scientific publications, though, slashdot readers notice when they can - or cannot - download a published paper for free.
The authors paid the publisher (PLoS ONE) to have their article produced and published.
The vast majority of academic journals have charges for the authors, regardless of whether or not the articles are available for free to view and download. You would be hard pressed to find a journal in the biological sciences in particular that doesn't charge for review and publication.
PLoS submissions fees for US authors are $1350.
Which is on par with most biomedical journals. The only ones that are significantly less than that are the "Hindawi" journals, which have such marginal impact that they aren't even indexed by pubmed.
It is worth noting that both the PLoS and the BMC (BioMedCentral) journals also have "membership" setups where institutions - via their libraries - can become members and have the review / publication charges reduced drastically or waived entirely. For that matter, they also have a mechanism by which you can submit and ask to have the fee waived or reduced, if you find it is beyond what you can pay.
The Republicans are more sticking to their grounds based on the 2010 election cycle in which their electorate wanted them to do so.
I presume you are referring to house republicans here, and not just republicans in general, as the senate republicans have been pretty well absent from the budget process. That said, the house does not represent all Americans, rather each representative is supposed to represent their own constituents. So whether or not what they are doing is what "their electorate wanted them to do" is a matter open to discussion. Not many people vote for representation to prevent passing of legislation and to avoid compromise at all costs.
No, I'm not saying that the Republicans are without blame
Really? Your own message suggests you believe otherwise.
only pointing out that they have actually done more in terms of budgets then the Democrats.
That is also a matter open for discussion. Sure, they proposed a budget. However they have also plainly declared multiple times that they are not interested in any changes to it in any shape or form. This is not a good way to try for any sort of consensus within an elected body.
Typically the House and Senate would each pass a budget, and then if they don't agree do a reconciliation.
That part is correct.
However, the Senate hasn't passed anything for the reconciliation step to even kick in
What would be the point? The house GOP have stated repeatedly that they have no interest in reconciliation anyways. Why even try to hold a meeting with someone who is less flexible than Mount McKinley? The republicans have completely dug in their heels and demonstrated that they will not, under any circumstances, compromise. That has been their strategy for some time now.
But as you said, the Democrats want to hide the costs of what they wanted done
No, I did not say that. I never suggested they want to hide anything. Nor is there any proof of such a thing. You are inserting that notion to protect the hard line GOP who are refusing to allow anything resembling a compromise to even be considered.
(e.g. ObamaCare)
This has nothing to do with the massive health insurance company bailout that your conservative friends wrote and passed off to the vote without ample time for revision. The budget for it has been written and reviewed and does not require additional funds. Just because fox news tells you otherwise doesn't make it so.
so they're really not interested in passing a budget.
Funny, earlier you said that you are
not saying that the Republicans are without blame
Yet here you just went and placed all the blame on the democrats. Or are you doing some fancy math where 110% of the blame goes to the democrats and then some other imaginary (or negative, but still counted) fraction goes to the republicans?
Notice that you can download this entire article, in html or pdf at your choice, for free from anywhere. No paywall or restrictions. You can even post it to your website, redistribute it freely, etc. You can do pretty much whatever you want with this article, short of claiming it to be your own work (if you're not an author).
The Public Library of Science is helping to make more research results publicly accessible through this journal. No, I don't work for them, though I do have an article in PLoS ONE myself.
So, FYI, it's not the Republicans who are standing in the way of a Federal Budget over the last few years.
The democrats are cowards who are unwilling to put out a budget that reflects what they want, and have a discussion on it.
The republicans are thoroughly entrenched in their ideology and unwilling to negotiate on anything, which makes it pointless for the democrats to propose a budget or try to negotiate a republican-proposed budget.
So if you are trying to claim that the republicans are somehow without blame in the situation, you are dead fucking wrong. If you want to say instead that they do not own 100% of the blame, there is some truth to that argument.
Fox news tells me that Romney will win 59 states and sweep Obama and his extreme socialism away forever.
Meanwhile, 13 out of 10 slashdotters are supporting Ron Paul, so clearly he is the only possible winner.
I have everything I need in LInux now. Openoffice (or libre office is you prefer) is mature enough to handle all my word processing / spreadsheet / presentation needs. GIMP and Inkscape do all my graphics. Flash finally works (and even better might finally go away).
The times I need Windows are so rare as to be almost unimportant. It has been so long since I booted windows I might need to do a password recovery next time just to log in to my own system.
That's great if the carpet can tell when grandma is about to fall, it improves the chances of getting help to her on time. The hard part though is getting it to prevent grandma from falling in the first place. If the carpet could convince her to sit down for a while (without making her think she's just lost her mind) that could go a long way on it's own. A lot of falls are preventable by getting the person who is at risk to sit down for a moment.
If the car was fully automated (self-driving), why would it need to store information on where the owner (or occupant) is? It's basically just personalized mass transit at that point - buses and subways don't report the names of their passengers so why should an automated car?
Considering half the drivers there don't seem to be paying attention to their driving, self-driving cars would probably be a huge improvement.
The Concorde was not profitable because Boeing got the mission it was designed for (Europe to Las Angeles) shut down by buying themselves a law.
A few months ago on this very site there was a story that mentioned the Concorde burned more fuel just getting off the ground than a 707 would burn on an entire trip from London to Amsterdam. Couple that to the fact that the Concorde sat very few people and you realize the fuel cost per passenger was enormous.
Having a mandatory crew of three didn't help much either.
just have the chairs swivel too. so at takeoff/landing you have 4 rows of 20 people, and during supsersonic part it is 20 rows of 4 people.
That is a nice idea, but you don't honestly believe that the FAA would ever approve a swivelling chair for commercial air service, do you?
And of course, if its only 80 passengers the fare would be absurdly high just to try to break even.
I don't see that being a very popular option. Although if it is as expensive to fly as the Concorde was, there won't be a cattle class for us 99%'ers so maybe everyone will just have two seats (for the price of 20!)?
They really don't think of the Xbox as hardware?
Most of the time - at least from my experience - the attacks are coming either from systems that are in foreign countries that don't give a shit about you and your system, or they are distributed attacks that would require you to contact dozens (or more) of ISPs.
The one exception I make is if it comes from an American IP address. Most American ISPs do a pretty good job of tracking who is using what IP address and can do something about it. Generally, they won't do much - and they seldom tell you what they do - but they'll at least look at it. And of course if it is from a university in the US, they'll usually track it to a college freshman who either thinks he's clever or is running a compromised windows PC.
But in general, your complaints will fall on deaf ears. Just keep checking your logs periodically to make sure nobody succeeds and that you are making the right responses to new methods. You could set up a tarpit if you like...
The term "cloud" is not the greatest choice. Surely something more tangible and meaningful could have been selected somewhere along the way.
Don't forget though that patch clamping is useful to a lot of biological sciences beyond neuroscience. Pretty well every cell in a higher eukaryote uses voltage-gated channels for something; I've seen cardiology research groups use it to monitor Na+ ion currents for one but it goes much further than that. As someone already pointed out a big part of what restricts the adoption of patch clamping in other disciplines isn't that it doesn't have an application but rather that it is so immensely difficult to master. If it can be automated that not only makes it available for more types of work but it also increases the confidence on the measurements by making it easier to do a lot of them.
I frequently bash the slahdot editors for terrible choices in front page articles (Timothy for one pro-republican posting after another, samzenpus for conservative spin that makes me want to vomit, etc), this time I'd like to extend a big thank-you to "Unknown Lamer" for his postings. Recently he posted the article on NEMS mass spec as well, so it is nice to see some science coverage on the front page. Heck, "Unknown Lamer" even posted some actual computer hardware stories recently, too - what a concept!
So thank you, Unknown Lamer. It's nice to see something that actually is news for nerds and not just politics as usual on the front page.
Technically, that is what you want from something like this - parallelized sensors to weigh a population of molecules.
Romney has already lost this election.
I thought so too, for the same reasons you give, but right now Romney and Obama are neck and neck in the polls, even in the "battleground states". I fear you may be wrong. God help our country! We have the choice between being stabbed with an ice pick, or buttraped with a hot soldering iron.
There are a lot of states at play - including Ohio which the GOP successfully suppressed voting in for the 2004 to the benefit of GWB. I still don't see Romney pulling this off, though. Once the independents hear a little more from Ryan it will be all over.
That said, yes, it is painful no matter what. We have a choice between re-electing the most conservative president our country has ever had and electing a new guy whose VP candidate makes our current conservative look like Santa Claus. One will keep us on the current path of ever-more-conservative legislation of our country, the other will hop in and stand on the gas pedal. It would be nice to have a real choice but I will vote for the one who will hurt me less, just to hopefully prevent the election of the one who will hurt me a lot more.
Cut the money off at the source: the spammers' clients.
That's one place. Don't forget the spammers pay bills, too. I've seen times when the spammers (usually under pseudonyms) will register the spamvertised domain name, too. There is almost always a morally-impaired registrar (and ISP) on the take in the process.
Get rid of those, get everyone on Linux, BSD or OS X and the bot nets go away.
As much as I would love to bear witness to the end of MS Windows, I don't think that will happen. And even if this afternoon was the end of Windows, it wouldn't be the end of botnets. You would still have lazy system managers who would be running those under root and all times, which would become easy infection targets. Still others would be so terribly insecure that they'd be compromised quickly.
In other words, an OS that starts out secure does not automatically remain secure. And the botnet masters will find the insecure boxes.
The Republican leadership is banking on increased Republican turnout surpassing the losses from Independents and increased Democratic turnout.
That's the problem he has now, though. Remember in 2008, McCain was considered "not conservative enough" - even after doing the whole conservative song and dance all through the campaign - and yet the GOP base still came out to vote for him. Romney is no less conservative than McCain, and this time the conservatives are also rallied around their undying hatred of Obama.
Hell, they could have run Joe Lieberman, Charlie Crist, or Zell Miller and they would have gotten all of the base to come out and vote just because they want Obama out so badly. Romney could have picked any of them, or even one of his own sons, and done just fine with the base.
However, they won't get the independents back to their side. They may have been able to pick up some of them had they chosen a moderate VP candidate, but they went the other way. It's Christmas in August a the White House right now...
Yes, but it's Obama's election to lose.
True, but even an Al Gore sized failure wouldn't be enough to drive the independents away and into the far-far-far-right that Paul Ryan represents. A huge failure might cause some people to sit out the election, but it won't push them to the other side.
(For instance, you can bet that, outside of New Orleans, nobody is more worried about the levies than Obama's election manager.)
If New Orleans floods again, Obama just needs to show up to do a better job than GWB. It is nearly impossible to fail more miserably on it than what we saw 7 years ago.
(1) How do we stop the money?
You might be the first person who has ever asked this question when I have pointed out this dilemma here on slashdot. Most other people respond by advocating murdering the spammers in some way, shape, or form instead.
The money can be stopped a few different ways. A few years ago a group at Georgia Tech (IIRC) found that the majority of all financial transactions executed on spamvertised sites were processed through a very short list of processing centers. Getting those guys to clean up their act would be a big step in the right direction.
Another is to find where the spammers themselves are receiving payment (as the above method goes after the people paying the spammer instead). Following the money isn't that hard if you initiate a transaction (to track it from one end) and get useful records of who really owns the domain for the spamvertised site (which is often registered in some way to the spammer).
I thank you for asking the question.
(2) And why should we bother?
The biggest argument for doing something about spam lies in the fact that spam makes the internet more expensive for everyone. Being as a large portion of all traffic is spam, it means that legitimate traffic is delayed as a result. And of course the spam also takes up space on hard drives (sometimes in replicate as it traverses from a server to a user's computer) and CPU time. Any company that is running a spam filter - be it software, hardware, or some of each - is also devoting resources to the problem that someone has to pay for.
Spam is no more offensive than the spam I hear on the radio or TV.
I would argue that to be an incorrect analogy for the reasons I stated above. You can turn off your radio or TV and you won't hear your local car dealer screaming at you to come buy a new car. However if you turn off your computer you are still paying your ISP to move spam around. Even worse you are paying for your ISP to build up its network infrastructure so they can deliver the bandwidth the promised you while also dealing with the avalanche of spam coming to their network every moment.