They have no clue how many of these things there are, (other than there is more than one but fewer than enough to pave the whole island), but if course they're automatically "endangered" or "under threat" or whatever
Hispaniola is not a very large island in terms of area. Considering this critter doesn't seem to be running through the cities, and the cities are expanding, it doesn't seem to be a very large leap to declare it endangered.
Is rather vague. Would it kill the editors to read the first line of the article itself to see
The 90-minute flight by a Continental Boeing 737-800 went better than expected, a spokesperson said.
Considering how poorly many of the carriers are doing in terms of finances and customer satisfaction (not to mention customer service) it could be useful to know which one is trying the biofuel, even if it was a short test.
I had lunch last week with a former colleague who is now working for a company that does setup and support for data centers all over the country. The conversation of course at one point went to "green computing".
He told me that the most common application for "green computing" that companies request is to help with heat management. In particular companies in climates that need regular heating are moving their datacenters to the lowest floor possible to try to re-use the heat from the servers on higher floors.
In short, a big part of "green computing" right now comes down to (moving) hot air.
Which of course many of us IT guys have been good at for many, many year already.
not purchase a 17" laptop which would be way too big to open on a plane
Definitely agreed.
consider that the rigors of travel add sufficient stress that the idea of doing more than 8 hours of actually productive work is lunacy
I would say that is a conditional statement. If you are spending an entire working day traveling for work, your employer might or might not have expectations that you will actually do work during said travel time.
a much cheaper video iPod would be a superior solution in the Mac stable for video/music entertainment if entertainment is the goal rather than work
If the goal is indeed entertainment, then I agree there are better options than a 17-inch notebook (or likely a notebook of any size really). I for one, however, do not remember the last time I used my notebook purely for entertainment. Sure it has a DVD drive but I don't even have DVD playing software on it right now. And unless you count the games that came with Windows XP or KUbuntu Linux, I don't have any games on my laptop, either.
But people have told me I am a little odd...
not purchase this device, and instead purchase any of the countless other devices in the world with a replaceable battery.
That would be my choice.
However, if Apple sells a fair number of these, I would expect that they would soon start implementing the non-replaceable battery in their smaller notebooks as well with the same justification.
And if the non-replaceable battery really does yield the battery life improvement that they are claiming, then I wouldn't be surprised if other manufacturers later followed suit as well.
I find the concepts of "road warrior" and 17" laptop to be less than ideally compatible
I definitely agree with that statement. I use a 14-point-something inch laptop myself, which I find to be a nearly perfect size for doing actual work on the road (or on a plane as it may be).
However, doesn't Apple have a tendency to do trickle-down technology through their lines? I would suspect that if they sell enough of these 17 inch laptops with built-in batteries, they will use that as justification for doing the same on smaller units as well.
people on 8+ hour flights who need to use their laptop the entire time
For one thing, it is worth noting that "8 hour batteries" often get 8 hours when you're playing solitaire or typing a word document. If you are doing anything that is intensive in a computational or storage manner, you are generally lucky to get half the expected battery life.
and don't use airlines with power in the seats
Power in the seats? If I had the option I would take it. I don't think I've been on a plane in the last 4 years that had that as an option. It is not unusual for me to fly over 10,000 miles per year, and not a single mile of the last 4 years has been on a plane that had power available in any seats (minus perhaps in the cockpit).
If you're home and/or destination airport isn't regularly served by large aircraft with power in the seats, then you are just SOL in that regard.
something to get worked up about.
Worked up? Not really. I'm just saying that if they are really concerned about real road warriors they've missed the mark. There are plenty of people for whom an expensive laptop like this is a great way to go, but there are plenty of people who would still be better served by a removable battery.
Sure, some people can get the nonstop flight from LA to NYC, and survive on a single battery. But not everyone is that lucky. Many of us have to go through one or more layovers to get from where we work to where we are having a meeting. And as the airlines consolidate, and hubs lose their hub status, the layover will become more and more commonplace for travelers.
Add to that the lack of available wall outlets at so many airports - as well as the lack of any sort of outlet on most planes - and you'll see that it is not unusual for a single trip to require more than 8 hours of battery power.
A trip I took recently that was just less than 1,000 miles "as the crow flies" took me over 8 hours of real time. And I'm sure I'm not the only person with a laptop who has experienced this.
You are not going to be using your laptop the entire time anyway since people have to eat, get up and use the toilet and potentially take a nap.
It recently took me 8 hours (with connection delays) to fly from upstate New York to Minnesota. The airport where my delays were didn't have any outlets available for charging my laptop, and neither of the planes I flew on could do that, either. If I hadn't had the second battery with me for my thinkpad I would not have been able to work during the layover delay and into the second flight.
Sure there are plenty of people who travel on long single flights but a lot of us are also traveling through connections and short hops also. One battery is just not enough for all of us.
The use of short reads for de novo assembly only makes sense if you want a rough draft of a genome, not the complete thing. There are way too many transposable elements, repeats, variation, etc. to accurately reconstruct even a bacterial genome with short reads.
At the conference "Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology" (ISMB) this year there was a discussion on exactly that. I can't say that there was an absolute consensus on how to do it, but there was fair acceptance of actually doing a hybrid approach:
Random short reads (illumina method) for cheap coverage of most of a genome
Directed sequencing via the 454 method for difficult regions (like the ones you described)
Basically, the 454 method, while costing significantly less per base pair than the older sanger method (and much, much faster than the yet-even-cheaper method of having [grad] students read bases off agarose gels), is still more expensive in terms of cost-per-base than illumina.
And of course in some cases the interest may be entirely in the "coding" region of a genome, such that the rest may not be worth its additional cost anyways.
Using 454 sequencing you get average read lenghts of ~400-500 bp
I suspect someone had confused 454 with the other popular next-gen sequencing technique from Illumina, which does give very short reads.
Read lenghts around 20 bp would be pretty much useless. At least for de novo sequencing..
Not necessarily. If you can drive the cost/base down far enough, you can make short reads worthwhile if you use a shotgun approach and try for large-scale coverage. Especially if you can produce the short reads at a lower rate of time/base.
Oh, wait, they are actually opposing the ICANN's terrible idea?
And it's December, so this can't be an April fool's joke. Can someone explain what is going on here? Since when did the government actually step in to oppose bad ideas?
Is it really personal spamming? I've seen spam posing as bank notices for a long time. Generally, first you see them (posing to be) from the largest banks, and then over time you start seeing them (posing to be) from regional and local banks as well.
And considering how many people use online banking, it is pretty reasonable for many people to expect to see an email from their bank on occasion.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think flash is a protocol. And considering how terrible flash has been in Linux for some time, I could see this as being a major hang-up for schools.
Don't get me wrong - I despise Flash far, far, more than most people - but remember that a lot of sites have critical components (if not the entire damned site) written in flash. And having flash work "most of the way" just isn't going to cut it when it comes to a large hardware roll-out.
I'm rather sick of people assuming eeepc's aren't real laptops, they're just as capable as any other laptop
I did not intend to discard the EEE PCs as inferior. I for one am rather impressed by them and have been considering one for myself. However, I think they would be a hard sell for 7 years worth of school children.
I'm sure there were reasons. Hopefully more than just the "because they're pretty" reasons.
Two reasons come to mind quickly:
Academic discounts
Compatibility with pretty well everything on the web
While the EEE PCs are certainly per-seat cheaper than MacBooks, how good is the flash support on those? On the other end of the spectrum, you can get excellent flash support on low-end laptops from Dell or other PC companies, but they probably still won't go as low on academic volume pricing as Apple.
I don't know exactly how restrictive Mac OS X is for "regular" (ie, no sudo access) users, but why not just start them there? That would be simple to set up, everyone would have the same access, and it would reflect on what they would likely encounter in the real world when they eventually have jobs.
As for filtering, that is a whole different matter. Perhaps the PTA should be consulted for guidelines for what web material is appropriate at each grade level? I would suspect many parents would support different controls for a 6th grader than for a high school senior.
Where there's money changing hands, there's a trail you can follow. The problem is seemingly that no one wants to follow that trail.
The problem with the trail has more problems than that. You can probe the trail yourself for any piece of spam you receive. Check the following for the next spam email you get:
The IP address of the last mail server to relay it to your inbox
The registration of the domain that is being spamvertised
The identity of the registrar that sold the spamvertised domain
The IP address for the webserver for said spamvertised domain
You'll probably find people and companies in at least 2, if not 3 or 4, countries in that list.
And getting them to care about CAN-SPAM - when likely at least one doesn't speak fluent English - will be near impossible.
Doesn't the question "What went wrong?" imply that there was something right to begin with? There was almost nothing right in this bill. Though the most obvious problems include:
A massive loophole for most spam
No good enforcement mechanism for any but the most egregious offenses
And probably the most important:
It is a US law for an international problem.
Sure, the US is the originating point for a lot of spam,but there is plenty of spam that starts elsewhere. And if the offense is somehow tied to people in another country then good luck getting any enforcement.
Slashdot Mirror
They have no clue how many of these things there are, (other than there is more than one but fewer than enough to pave the whole island), but if course they're automatically "endangered" or "under threat" or whatever
Hispaniola is not a very large island in terms of area. Considering this critter doesn't seem to be running through the cities, and the cities are expanding, it doesn't seem to be a very large leap to declare it endangered.
A US airline carrier
Is rather vague. Would it kill the editors to read the first line of the article itself to see
The 90-minute flight by a Continental Boeing 737-800 went better than expected, a spokesperson said.
Considering how poorly many of the carriers are doing in terms of finances and customer satisfaction (not to mention customer service) it could be useful to know which one is trying the biofuel, even if it was a short test.
What does this have to do with Fiat? Is everyone in Vietnam going to be driving Cinquecentos soon?
I had lunch last week with a former colleague who is now working for a company that does setup and support for data centers all over the country. The conversation of course at one point went to "green computing".
He told me that the most common application for "green computing" that companies request is to help with heat management. In particular companies in climates that need regular heating are moving their datacenters to the lowest floor possible to try to re-use the heat from the servers on higher floors.
In short, a big part of "green computing" right now comes down to (moving) hot air.
Which of course many of us IT guys have been good at for many, many year already.
not purchase a 17" laptop which would be way too big to open on a plane
Definitely agreed.
consider that the rigors of travel add sufficient stress that the idea of doing more than 8 hours of actually productive work is lunacy
I would say that is a conditional statement. If you are spending an entire working day traveling for work, your employer might or might not have expectations that you will actually do work during said travel time.
a much cheaper video iPod would be a superior solution in the Mac stable for video/music entertainment if entertainment is the goal rather than work
If the goal is indeed entertainment, then I agree there are better options than a 17-inch notebook (or likely a notebook of any size really). I for one, however, do not remember the last time I used my notebook purely for entertainment. Sure it has a DVD drive but I don't even have DVD playing software on it right now. And unless you count the games that came with Windows XP or KUbuntu Linux, I don't have any games on my laptop, either.
But people have told me I am a little odd...
not purchase this device, and instead purchase any of the countless other devices in the world with a replaceable battery.
That would be my choice.
However, if Apple sells a fair number of these, I would expect that they would soon start implementing the non-replaceable battery in their smaller notebooks as well with the same justification.
And if the non-replaceable battery really does yield the battery life improvement that they are claiming, then I wouldn't be surprised if other manufacturers later followed suit as well.
I find the concepts of "road warrior" and 17" laptop to be less than ideally compatible
I definitely agree with that statement. I use a 14-point-something inch laptop myself, which I find to be a nearly perfect size for doing actual work on the road (or on a plane as it may be).
However, doesn't Apple have a tendency to do trickle-down technology through their lines? I would suspect that if they sell enough of these 17 inch laptops with built-in batteries, they will use that as justification for doing the same on smaller units as well.
people on 8+ hour flights who need to use their laptop the entire time
For one thing, it is worth noting that "8 hour batteries" often get 8 hours when you're playing solitaire or typing a word document. If you are doing anything that is intensive in a computational or storage manner, you are generally lucky to get half the expected battery life.
and don't use airlines with power in the seats
Power in the seats? If I had the option I would take it. I don't think I've been on a plane in the last 4 years that had that as an option. It is not unusual for me to fly over 10,000 miles per year, and not a single mile of the last 4 years has been on a plane that had power available in any seats (minus perhaps in the cockpit).
If you're home and/or destination airport isn't regularly served by large aircraft with power in the seats, then you are just SOL in that regard.
something to get worked up about.
Worked up? Not really. I'm just saying that if they are really concerned about real road warriors they've missed the mark. There are plenty of people for whom an expensive laptop like this is a great way to go, but there are plenty of people who would still be better served by a removable battery.
Sure, some people can get the nonstop flight from LA to NYC, and survive on a single battery. But not everyone is that lucky. Many of us have to go through one or more layovers to get from where we work to where we are having a meeting. And as the airlines consolidate, and hubs lose their hub status, the layover will become more and more commonplace for travelers.
Add to that the lack of available wall outlets at so many airports - as well as the lack of any sort of outlet on most planes - and you'll see that it is not unusual for a single trip to require more than 8 hours of battery power.
A trip I took recently that was just less than 1,000 miles "as the crow flies" took me over 8 hours of real time. And I'm sure I'm not the only person with a laptop who has experienced this.
You are not going to be using your laptop the entire time anyway since people have to eat, get up and use the toilet and potentially take a nap.
It recently took me 8 hours (with connection delays) to fly from upstate New York to Minnesota. The airport where my delays were didn't have any outlets available for charging my laptop, and neither of the planes I flew on could do that, either. If I hadn't had the second battery with me for my thinkpad I would not have been able to work during the layover delay and into the second flight.
Sure there are plenty of people who travel on long single flights but a lot of us are also traveling through connections and short hops also. One battery is just not enough for all of us.
The use of short reads for de novo assembly only makes sense if you want a rough draft of a genome, not the complete thing. There are way too many transposable elements, repeats, variation, etc. to accurately reconstruct even a bacterial genome with short reads.
At the conference "Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology" (ISMB) this year there was a discussion on exactly that. I can't say that there was an absolute consensus on how to do it, but there was fair acceptance of actually doing a hybrid approach:
Basically, the 454 method, while costing significantly less per base pair than the older sanger method (and much, much faster than the yet-even-cheaper method of having [grad] students read bases off agarose gels), is still more expensive in terms of cost-per-base than illumina.
And of course in some cases the interest may be entirely in the "coding" region of a genome, such that the rest may not be worth its additional cost anyways.
Using 454 sequencing you get average read lenghts of ~400-500 bp
I suspect someone had confused 454 with the other popular next-gen sequencing technique from Illumina, which does give very short reads.
Read lenghts around 20 bp would be pretty much useless. At least for de novo sequencing..
Not necessarily. If you can drive the cost/base down far enough, you can make short reads worthwhile if you use a shotgun approach and try for large-scale coverage. Especially if you can produce the short reads at a lower rate of time/base.
Since this technique should be a shoe-in for the Archon X Prize.
Was to stack the questions to prefer those who make you look good.
Of course, if you get caught then it might not look so great for you.
That should be AirTran, not AirTrans.
How dare they do such a thing!
Oh, wait, they are actually opposing the ICANN's terrible idea?
And it's December, so this can't be an April fool's joke. Can someone explain what is going on here? Since when did the government actually step in to oppose bad ideas?
some might call this vaporware
Kudos to the people who thought to apply that tag to this story - easily the best use of this term I've seen yet.
... the energy expenditure of putting the water into the air?
Unless he has a carbon-neutral method of doing that, too...
I don't find this suprising in perspective of what people in the service sector usually have for themselves.
After all, what kind of car does your mechanic drive? Do you know when your mechanic last did an oil change on their own car?
Hint - the mechanic's car is usually fixed last, if ever.
In similar light I knew a cardiologist a few years back who died of heart failure.
It isn't easy to find time to maintain for yourself the same kind of equipment that you are paid to keep up for others.
Is it really personal spamming? I've seen spam posing as bank notices for a long time. Generally, first you see them (posing to be) from the largest banks, and then over time you start seeing them (posing to be) from regional and local banks as well.
And considering how many people use online banking, it is pretty reasonable for many people to expect to see an email from their bank on occasion.
both have excellent support for any web protocol
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think flash is a protocol. And considering how terrible flash has been in Linux for some time, I could see this as being a major hang-up for schools.
Don't get me wrong - I despise Flash far, far, more than most people - but remember that a lot of sites have critical components (if not the entire damned site) written in flash. And having flash work "most of the way" just isn't going to cut it when it comes to a large hardware roll-out.
I'm rather sick of people assuming eeepc's aren't real laptops, they're just as capable as any other laptop
I did not intend to discard the EEE PCs as inferior. I for one am rather impressed by them and have been considering one for myself. However, I think they would be a hard sell for 7 years worth of school children.
It looks like the $42 million does not include the booster rockets that you need to actually launch the shuttle into orbit or higher.
Which means that if you really wanted to buy it and fly it, you would end up spending quite a bit more.
I'm sure there were reasons. Hopefully more than just the "because they're pretty" reasons.
Two reasons come to mind quickly:
While the EEE PCs are certainly per-seat cheaper than MacBooks, how good is the flash support on those? On the other end of the spectrum, you can get excellent flash support on low-end laptops from Dell or other PC companies, but they probably still won't go as low on academic volume pricing as Apple.
I don't know exactly how restrictive Mac OS X is for "regular" (ie, no sudo access) users, but why not just start them there? That would be simple to set up, everyone would have the same access, and it would reflect on what they would likely encounter in the real world when they eventually have jobs.
As for filtering, that is a whole different matter. Perhaps the PTA should be consulted for guidelines for what web material is appropriate at each grade level? I would suspect many parents would support different controls for a 6th grader than for a high school senior.
Where there's money changing hands, there's a trail you can follow. The problem is seemingly that no one wants to follow that trail.
The problem with the trail has more problems than that. You can probe the trail yourself for any piece of spam you receive. Check the following for the next spam email you get:
You'll probably find people and companies in at least 2, if not 3 or 4, countries in that list.
And getting them to care about CAN-SPAM - when likely at least one doesn't speak fluent English - will be near impossible.
And probably the most important:
Sure, the US is the originating point for a lot of spam,but there is plenty of spam that starts elsewhere. And if the offense is somehow tied to people in another country then good luck getting any enforcement.