I like the part of the TOS that says you can't use it in North Korea, Syria, or other major/minor axis-of-evil participants. Good luck given the rollout has been so small that I can't use FIOS in San Francisco or Silicon Valley of all places.
Before people worry about the results of their last disease test, I want to point out that people who develop validated lab tests also understand statistics. Thus, if a test as a 99% accuracy rate, it's run in triplicate. Thus, the probability of a false-positive in three tests is lower and in a test of a population of 1 million people you'd get 2 positive, the real one, and the one false positive. That's also why most positives are then retested in a different format to be really sure. Because lab testing companies know you're statistically more likely to get sued by the statistically ignorant and they'll win, thus stack it in your favor of not making a mistake in the first place.
Ah, eutopia, when grind-tastic games have their user base slowly replaced by bots. Imagine the day when pretty much every WoW account is being run by a bot and the users of said bots are out frollicing in the sun, meeting people in the real world, finding new hobbies, playing with their children, and maybe even paying attention to politics long enough to not vote for the same weirdo time and again (oh wait, we likely already have bots voting for us behind the scenes, but you get the picture).
It's even mroe nuanced than that. Scientists rarely ever completely redo another's experiment, though it does happen, and in this case likely will. Often when you look at one lab's results, you can see that their results predict that other things should be true. In the case of a mathematical explanation for this phenomenon, the math will also predict that other phenonmenon should also happen. Experiments will be designed to test those predictions. If they work out, then there's more evidence that the effect is real and the understanding of the effect is real. Iterations will then continue in such fashion to evolve the technology.
Could just be me but was anyone else amused that they shot a laser through a container of kerosene?
Because you still have to hook it to a steam turbine (again, the battery analogy fails badly). I suppose you could build a home-sized steam turbine generator but so much could go wrong with such a thing and you'd have to maintain it. Industrial sized turbine generators are more efficient than a home generator could be, and this could hook into existing power grids. Besides, if you bought a personal one you're also going to have to pay, personally, for the waste disposal. And lots of single-family-sized reactors will produce way more waste (because of the casing) over time than single units powering more homes. One hotub sized units or 25,000 walnut sized ones?
What's really strange is that the original version doesn't say anything that would negate a creationists argument, and the creationist version doesn't say anything that would negate evolution. What I find bizarre is that they dubbed over it with a new track and edited the sequencing. The result is that they look like idiots because they get some information wrong, and the guy doing the narration says, "Uh," a lot and stammers his way through it. It's like the edited the original video and gave him one pass to explain what was happening and it was moving too fast. There was NO reason to dub over it.
What's worse than peddling religion in the name of science? Doing it badly! Come on, at least believe strongly enough in your own message to articulate it clearly.
Regarding tracking, totally possible. Each voter in the roster had an ID number and I noticed them punch it in before scanning a SIM card they handed to me to go over to the vote machine. The pathway is there.
Regarding scrapping votes in case the printout was wrong there was a way to do that. You had the chance to evaluate the tape before accepting it and closing out the voting session. I didn't try it so don't know if it wiped it out somehow. Of course, the tapes could be accurate and the stored data not. There's just no way to tell.
"The ability to demonstrate efficient high performance throughput using commercial off the shelf hardware and applications, standard Internet packet sizes supported throughput today's networks, and requiring modifications to the ubiquitous TCP protocol only at the data sender, is an important achievement."
They didn't buy anything special and used the existing internet as is to send signals over 10,000 km. The only difference in the protocol is at the sender's end. Nothing else needs to be done.
Plus, the internet is due for an upgrade:
The congestion control algorithm of the current Internet was designed in 1988 when the Internet could barely carry a single uncompressed voice call. The problem today is that this algorithm cannot scale to anticipated future needs, when the networks will be compelled to carry millions of uncompressed voice calls on a single path or support major science experiments that require the on-demand rapid transport of gigabyte to terabyte data sets drawn from multi-petabyte data stores. This protocol problem has prompted several interim remedies, such as using nonstandard packet sizes or aggressive algorithms that can monopolize network resources to the detriment of other users. Despite years of effort, these measures have proved to be ineffective or difficult to deploy.
I retract my comment about the Spam (except that it is a wonderful utopian vision when every e-mail you get is actually of interest to you). I had read articles a while about about 40-90% of all internet e-mail traffic being spam, and didn't properly recall they were referring explicitly to e-mail traffic only. I also suspect it's higher than one would think based on your own inbox. I've recieved e-mails where the CC-list contained my e-mail address and hundreds of variations on it. Clearly a program was iterating in the hopes that some of the addresses would be valid. Sigh.
A while back I read about different options for internet communications protocols that were much more efficient than the current protocols. I think the early research showed you could get a HUGE scale-up in data transmission rates using conventional hardware if the protocol was altered. That was several years ago and the same protocols are still being used. Getting a large number of vendors/users/software/etc. to change off of an inefficient protocol for a better one is very difficult, but maybe it's less expensive than upgrading the worldwide internet?
I wonder how much bandwidth we'd get back if spam was stopped somehow. Hmm.
Where I vote, in Silicon Valley, our electronic voting machines have a paper printer on them under glass. When you are done voting it prints up your votes and srolls them in front of the glass so you can see that it accurately recorded what you voted. It also then prints a 2D barcode, which I suppose is for easy scanning, though of course there's no way to tell if the barcode matches the votes. As a voter I found that satisfying. ..until. ..
I saw Hacking America. They tried to get copies of the official paper tapes from several elections and met a lot of problems and frustration getting it. In one case everything they requested under a FOIA request was found to be thrown in the garbage and they retrieved it all.
The problem I noticed watching this is the low brain power being exhibited by a lot of election officials and the like. Handling this stuff, electronic or not, is seriously complex work to keep track of that much material in that many places/warehouses and it's not being managed by people, at least in some areas, and likely the areas most in conflict, who have the skills to really deal wtih this. I don't know the solution, but think having smarter people at all levels of this process is required. Oh yeah, and counting software that can't be fooled by modifying a text file that is open to any user of the PC it's on. Come on, don't layer it on Windows, write your own damned voting OS to make it a touch harder to crack.
Google obviously advertises and describes their approach to search and their data centers more than other search giants do, but I would imagine most to all search engines and very large databases have to do this as well. If they win are they going after Microsoft, Yahoo, and all the others while they're at it? The history of science is full of examples of people discovering or inventing the same thing right about the same time. ..it's kinda cool really. But ideas like this are in a way so obvious that patents should really go to people who got it working in the first place. But something like this is so fundamental one wonders if it should have even been granted a patent. Isn't this rather similar to distributed computing, paralleization, etc.? Maybe early parallel supercomputer inventors should sue him for infringing on their ideas.
Before critiquing and industry at one of its own conferences it would be good to do your research. The easiest to address is his point about opportunity loss of a drug that fails the clinical trials: It costs a ton of money to even get a drug to trials and companies don't throw it down a hole. Since a number of you are criticizing erectile dysfunction drugs, do your research:
Viagra was developed to combat hypertension and certain types of heart problems, which are serious diseases in need of new medicines. During the clinical trial it was noticed it had no effect in its intended indication, BUT seemed to cause erections. More studies and development and the drug was launched as Viagra.
Companies also often have several indications in mind for a particular chemical entity, but you can only progress the trials for the indications one at a time.
Many think his analogy of medicine to tech products inept. I say, run with it, but consider the consequences in the same light. Microsoft got blasted for taking so long to develop Vista, and still took criticism that there were compatibility issues with it and some hardware configurations (yeah, computer systems vary a lot, kinda like people). How long do you think it would've taken Microsoft to release Vista if a driver incompatibility resulted in a user's death? There could be thousands, maybe tens of thousands, dead already, the product would've been withdrawn, people put back on XP (the standard of care, which is unfortunate given the security issues, er., side effects), and Microsoft sued for billions in losses by individual and class action lawsuits, and subjected to a full FDA review.
The magnitude of a mistake, the number of different diseases needing addressing, and tradeoff's in what's studied given the severity of disease, how common it is, how much improvement could be gained (to be honest people, a lot of pharmas are stopping work on new anti-depressants because the ones out there are about as good as it's going to get in the near term and it's too hard to create a differentiated antidepressant at this point), means some things don't get as much attention as others.
A good part of the answer lies in better partnering between pharma and academia. ..the two aren't rivals. Making a drug is hard enough that pharmas can't invent heavily in defining the etiology of diseases, though they do some. Academics are VERY well suited to that pursuit. HOwever, the perception that Pharmas are failing is driving more academics into the pursuit of their own drug design programs, that are failing miserably in terms of creating drugs you could actually ever hope to put into people. Cooperation and encouraging academics to work on more applicable value driven problems would be a good step towards finding more treatments.
Yes, they do teach chemistry here and I have a degree in it as well. Lithium METAL and lithium IONS are different chemical entities. When lithium metal loses one electron (that vigorous process you noted when the metal explodes on contact with water) the resulting ion is relatively harmless (it's the same lithium used in lithium salts used to treat mania and dipression).
There is no lithium metal (that would be reactive to water) in a lithium ion battery. Lithium is the electrolyte that shuttles between the anode and cathode which are generally made from a cobalt salt that is oxidized and reduced during charging/discharging.
I can imagine one reason they'd want this is that sometimes you get to the gate and find out you're on the no-fly list or suspect list, and your plans are screwed. Or, and I think it's idiotic, is the idea that for international flight the manifest gets sent AFTER the plane takes off and gets redirected if anyone is on board who is also on the list. Let's inconvenience 400 people and associated friend/relatives/business people for a clerical error. Checking what the airlines have in advance could help remedy that.
But why not take it further. I'm not advocating personal info violation, but since they're already doing it anyway, why not make it more efficient. How about the check is performed as part of the ticketing procedure. While the website checks your credit card, it might as well check if you're on the no fly list. I have a friend whose first, middle, and last names exactly match that of someone on the no-fly list and he has all kinds of problems traveling. WHy not have that checked out earlier.
Of course, better privacy protections are in place, but why make the inconvenience worse.
Probably nothing. It doesn't contain lithium metal,which is quite explosive on contact with water. The 'ion' in Lithium ion means it's in it's +1 state and would dissolve in the water like a salt
Sony has believed this for some time as was seen by their weird self-checkout software. My Dad, a Sony fanboi, bought a Vaio and one of Sony's MP3 players and ripped a bunch of CDs. The MP3 player software worked by 'checking out' the tracks to the mp3 player. They wouldn't play on the computer while they were licensed to the mp3 player. You had to reconnect the device, and transfer the license back to the computer. Seems like a 'one license per purchase' model of working was in effect a long time ago. The solution was easy, return the thing and buy a different device and software.
I thought there was a tax on CD-R and such thing to 'compensate' for the loss of revenue of copying and distributing music that way. I guess it's not enough for them anymore?
As an undergrad the version of Excel that was common at that time (ca. 1996) had a serious flaw in the linear regression. The line fit to data was good, but the formula it output has nothing to do with the line it drew. The intercepts were wrong, slope was wrong, it was like it spit out random numbers. I almost failed p-chem lab because the final calculations relied on the fit to the data and those were wrong. Redid them in an ancient version of kaleidagraph on an ancient mac (then) and got the right numbers and the grade changed. Don't trust Excel!
It keeps happening that vendors roll out Windows Only services (like Netflix's option to view some movies directly). Obviosully we all know that Windows OS has the dominant market share, but has anyone broken this out by home vs. buisness, or are the stats aggregated?
For example: My group at work has 10 windows licenses for office desktops and laptops. However, 8 of us have Macs at home, and the other two don't have computers at home. We can't use our office computers to watch TV, but we could use our Macs. Expanding, globally my company must have 100,000 or more Windows OS licenses, but not a one of them is for entertainment purposes. I know I haven't included Linux here but nobody I work with uses it at home, but again, that's probably also a signficiant entertainment market share.
In general, Mac users are more entertainment focussed (lots of exceptions on both sides, I know) so I'm wondering if excluding them from something like this actually cuts off a larger share of the downloading market, both in terms of numbers of users and amount of downloading each user does, than apparent when one looks at what percentage of all computers using one OS vs. another.
His analysis may be skewed depending on how he's reading the papers. In general, a results section is observations and raw analysis without much interpretation (e.g. according to data in figure 2, X phenomenon requires three times more frequently than Y). If they got that wrong due to statistical issues, a reviewer or another scientist can spot it. HOWEVER, if you're reading the discussion section and it says, "We suggest that because X is more common than Y, that by 2002 the world will eventually spin off axis and fall into the sun." Ok, this is misinterpretation, or as my boss called it: hand waving. This part of the paper is not based on purely observed phenonmenon, but is speculation as to what it all means, and usually points at what the next experiments are going to be. It's an important part of the paper because it's meant to encourage discussion in the community, and well, people have won Nobel Prizes for speculating somethign that was proven later by someone else.
There are aspects of discussion sections that are likely wrong, or at least a little incorrect, in almost all papers. But that's becuase you're stating your next HYPOTHESIS, which is not fact. Unfortuantely, discussions are more easily read than methods/results and are likely what the popular press, and perhpas this guy, latch onto.
That said, an examination of how science gets done may be in order. He faults the community for not reproducing other people's work enough. This can often require specialized materials or equipment that few other labs might have. Taking on the task of your own research combined with playing "results police" for the community could place a burden. In grad school we did our best to provide our unique materials to everyone who asked, but it did get really really expensive to make all that material and a less well funded lab simply couldn't have done it.
Also, how does it help my career to spend months to years (yes, some science takes years to do a single experiment properly) to reproduce someone elses' work. I can't write a paper that says, "Yeah, Smith et. al., got the right answer." The REALITY of it is sometime you rely on a previous result to do the next step, and if their work was flat out wrong you get stopped and can't proceed. Then you clean it up.
I also have to fault this study because the information gets cleaned up in other ways besides outright retractions. The results can appear in other papers, or as part of other papers without specifcially calling attention to it. In grad school I used someone elses' results as a launchign point for an experiment that was part of a much larger study. When it didn't work we looked into it and the original work was messed up by seriously flawed design, controls, and materials. I redid that study and found the correct answer, and used that to carry on with the experiment I wanted to do. All of that work appeared in a single figure in a 7 figure paper, and we didn't say, "So and so et. al., made up their paper and we've corrected it in figure 4, panel A." We just simply made those new controls and kept going. Those steeped in the field know what happened, but this situation wouldn't be noticed if you were only couting retraction.
It's all too complicated for these reductionist studies. That said, we can do better. Paper reviews are often too cursory. I've reviewed papers with serious issues, either rejected or asked for revisions, and then seen the paper appear in the journal a couple months later anyway without those revisions. Scientists are part of the equation, the journals and their staff are another!
When a large company refuses to put an exact limit on something, there's often a more complex reason behind it that they're afraid to explain to the general public because they think it will create confusion. They likely won't just set a cap because the cap is moving. Patterns in network usage are shifting. Before YouTube, iTunes, Bittorrents, etc., network traffic was much slower. As things got faster and more content became available, the average user is downloading more and more data. 7 years ago 5 GB/month was probably technically 'unlimted' and now a lot of people would cruise right past that in week.
Comcast is certainly monitoring network usage statistics and comparing trends in usage with its capbabilities and what they need to do to upgrade their networks to stay ahead of the ever increasing usage. I bet they also track it by geographical area. For example, I bet the 'average' user in Silicon Valley uses quite a bit more bandwidth than people living in a more manufacturing based town with fewer technical residents. "Unlimited" needs to be higher in the first place than the second one.
They're probably noting statistics, trends, etc., and finding certain 6-sigma users who are placing undo load on the system. It is too bad they advertise it as unlimited, but a reasonable customer doesn't buy into advertising hype but actually thinks about what the reality of the situation is. Of course you're not allowed to open the pipe full blast and leave it running constantly.
So, based on their statistics they probably figure that 100 GB is pretty generous based on the usage of the population, minus a very few users who are pulling down the network. But in time, 100 GB might be totally normal (who knows, we might be watching HDTV streamed through IPV6, anythign is possible) and then 'resonable' might be 500 GB. It does say in the comcast contract somewhere that you won't run a server out of your residential connection so people who have major servers maintaining bit-torrents or somethign would appear to be in violation of the protocol too and could be subject to termination.
But they can't put the results of their dynamic quotas based on continuous statistical analysis in an advertisement.
Except that it doesn't matter if it varies or not. Standard Temperature and Pressure (STP) is well defined as 25 degrees C and 1 atmosphere of pressure. There can be precisely controlled. But people who work in the standards groups will always want a solid physical reference that doesn't (or at least shouldn't) vary. The guy overeacted when he said, "Oh no, this could have ramifications for everything including such things as power generation). I doubt a powerstation has any mass measuring system that is precise to 50 ug out of and object weighing 1000000000 ug. Except for the instruments at places like the national institute of standards, very little else has this kind of precision so until it loses something like a whole gram it isn't going ot have a practical consequence.
Depending on how you want to approach your stargazing there are computer/scope combos where you align the scope, hook it to a laptop, select the feature you want to look at (if it's visible from your location) and it will hone in on it, show it on the screen, let you look through the viewfinder, and take pictures. I haven't seen an advert for it recently so I don't remember its name, but for a starter with some cash it could teach you how to identify constelations, pinpoint planets, etc. Some will think it's a copout to use a digital library and motorized mount to find what you're looking for, but used right it could be a good way to learn fast.
Forwarding to voicemail with an iPhone is tricky cuz' the phone downloads voicemail and you can't turn that off unless you do airplane mode or shut it off. That'll cost you some roaming-data too.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the part of the TOS that says you can't use it in North Korea, Syria, or other major/minor axis-of-evil participants. Good luck given the rollout has been so small that I can't use FIOS in San Francisco or Silicon Valley of all places.
Before people worry about the results of their last disease test, I want to point out that people who develop validated lab tests also understand statistics. Thus, if a test as a 99% accuracy rate, it's run in triplicate. Thus, the probability of a false-positive in three tests is lower and in a test of a population of 1 million people you'd get 2 positive, the real one, and the one false positive. That's also why most positives are then retested in a different format to be really sure. Because lab testing companies know you're statistically more likely to get sued by the statistically ignorant and they'll win, thus stack it in your favor of not making a mistake in the first place.
Ah, eutopia, when grind-tastic games have their user base slowly replaced by bots. Imagine the day when pretty much every WoW account is being run by a bot and the users of said bots are out frollicing in the sun, meeting people in the real world, finding new hobbies, playing with their children, and maybe even paying attention to politics long enough to not vote for the same weirdo time and again (oh wait, we likely already have bots voting for us behind the scenes, but you get the picture).
Could just be me but was anyone else amused that they shot a laser through a container of kerosene?
Because you still have to hook it to a steam turbine (again, the battery analogy fails badly). I suppose you could build a home-sized steam turbine generator but so much could go wrong with such a thing and you'd have to maintain it. Industrial sized turbine generators are more efficient than a home generator could be, and this could hook into existing power grids. Besides, if you bought a personal one you're also going to have to pay, personally, for the waste disposal. And lots of single-family-sized reactors will produce way more waste (because of the casing) over time than single units powering more homes. One hotub sized units or 25,000 walnut sized ones?
What's worse than peddling religion in the name of science? Doing it badly! Come on, at least believe strongly enough in your own message to articulate it clearly.
Regarding scrapping votes in case the printout was wrong there was a way to do that. You had the chance to evaluate the tape before accepting it and closing out the voting session. I didn't try it so don't know if it wiped it out somehow. Of course, the tapes could be accurate and the stored data not. There's just no way to tell.
"The ability to demonstrate efficient high performance throughput using commercial off the shelf hardware and applications, standard Internet packet sizes supported throughput today's networks, and requiring modifications to the ubiquitous TCP protocol only at the data sender, is an important achievement."
They didn't buy anything special and used the existing internet as is to send signals over 10,000 km. The only difference in the protocol is at the sender's end. Nothing else needs to be done.
Plus, the internet is due for an upgrade:
The congestion control algorithm of the current Internet was designed in 1988 when the Internet could barely carry a single uncompressed voice call. The problem today is that this algorithm cannot scale to anticipated future needs, when the networks will be compelled to carry millions of uncompressed voice calls on a single path or support major science experiments that require the on-demand rapid transport of gigabyte to terabyte data sets drawn from multi-petabyte data stores. This protocol problem has prompted several interim remedies, such as using nonstandard packet sizes or aggressive algorithms that can monopolize network resources to the detriment of other users. Despite years of effort, these measures have proved to be ineffective or difficult to deploy.
Please sir, can I have some more (bandwidth).
A while back I read about different options for internet communications protocols that were much more efficient than the current protocols. I think the early research showed you could get a HUGE scale-up in data transmission rates using conventional hardware if the protocol was altered. That was several years ago and the same protocols are still being used. Getting a large number of vendors/users/software/etc. to change off of an inefficient protocol for a better one is very difficult, but maybe it's less expensive than upgrading the worldwide internet? I wonder how much bandwidth we'd get back if spam was stopped somehow. Hmm.
I saw Hacking America. They tried to get copies of the official paper tapes from several elections and met a lot of problems and frustration getting it. In one case everything they requested under a FOIA request was found to be thrown in the garbage and they retrieved it all.
The problem I noticed watching this is the low brain power being exhibited by a lot of election officials and the like. Handling this stuff, electronic or not, is seriously complex work to keep track of that much material in that many places/warehouses and it's not being managed by people, at least in some areas, and likely the areas most in conflict, who have the skills to really deal wtih this. I don't know the solution, but think having smarter people at all levels of this process is required. Oh yeah, and counting software that can't be fooled by modifying a text file that is open to any user of the PC it's on. Come on, don't layer it on Windows, write your own damned voting OS to make it a touch harder to crack.
Google obviously advertises and describes their approach to search and their data centers more than other search giants do, but I would imagine most to all search engines and very large databases have to do this as well. If they win are they going after Microsoft, Yahoo, and all the others while they're at it? The history of science is full of examples of people discovering or inventing the same thing right about the same time. . .it's kinda cool really. But ideas like this are in a way so obvious that patents should really go to people who got it working in the first place. But something like this is so fundamental one wonders if it should have even been granted a patent. Isn't this rather similar to distributed computing, paralleization, etc.? Maybe early parallel supercomputer inventors should sue him for infringing on their ideas.
Viagra was developed to combat hypertension and certain types of heart problems, which are serious diseases in need of new medicines. During the clinical trial it was noticed it had no effect in its intended indication, BUT seemed to cause erections. More studies and development and the drug was launched as Viagra.
Companies also often have several indications in mind for a particular chemical entity, but you can only progress the trials for the indications one at a time.
Many think his analogy of medicine to tech products inept. I say, run with it, but consider the consequences in the same light. Microsoft got blasted for taking so long to develop Vista, and still took criticism that there were compatibility issues with it and some hardware configurations (yeah, computer systems vary a lot, kinda like people). How long do you think it would've taken Microsoft to release Vista if a driver incompatibility resulted in a user's death? There could be thousands, maybe tens of thousands, dead already, the product would've been withdrawn, people put back on XP (the standard of care, which is unfortunate given the security issues, er., side effects), and Microsoft sued for billions in losses by individual and class action lawsuits, and subjected to a full FDA review. The magnitude of a mistake, the number of different diseases needing addressing, and tradeoff's in what's studied given the severity of disease, how common it is, how much improvement could be gained (to be honest people, a lot of pharmas are stopping work on new anti-depressants because the ones out there are about as good as it's going to get in the near term and it's too hard to create a differentiated antidepressant at this point), means some things don't get as much attention as others.
A good part of the answer lies in better partnering between pharma and academia. . .the two aren't rivals. Making a drug is hard enough that pharmas can't invent heavily in defining the etiology of diseases, though they do some. Academics are VERY well suited to that pursuit. HOwever, the perception that Pharmas are failing is driving more academics into the pursuit of their own drug design programs, that are failing miserably in terms of creating drugs you could actually ever hope to put into people. Cooperation and encouraging academics to work on more applicable value driven problems would be a good step towards finding more treatments.
There is no lithium metal (that would be reactive to water) in a lithium ion battery. Lithium is the electrolyte that shuttles between the anode and cathode which are generally made from a cobalt salt that is oxidized and reduced during charging/discharging.
But why not take it further. I'm not advocating personal info violation, but since they're already doing it anyway, why not make it more efficient. How about the check is performed as part of the ticketing procedure. While the website checks your credit card, it might as well check if you're on the no fly list. I have a friend whose first, middle, and last names exactly match that of someone on the no-fly list and he has all kinds of problems traveling. WHy not have that checked out earlier.
Of course, better privacy protections are in place, but why make the inconvenience worse.
Probably nothing. It doesn't contain lithium metal,which is quite explosive on contact with water. The 'ion' in Lithium ion means it's in it's +1 state and would dissolve in the water like a salt
What makes you think they're system doesn't do it for around $1 per ticket and the service charge is just a 1000% markup?
I thought there was a tax on CD-R and such thing to 'compensate' for the loss of revenue of copying and distributing music that way. I guess it's not enough for them anymore?
As an undergrad the version of Excel that was common at that time (ca. 1996) had a serious flaw in the linear regression. The line fit to data was good, but the formula it output has nothing to do with the line it drew. The intercepts were wrong, slope was wrong, it was like it spit out random numbers. I almost failed p-chem lab because the final calculations relied on the fit to the data and those were wrong. Redid them in an ancient version of kaleidagraph on an ancient mac (then) and got the right numbers and the grade changed. Don't trust Excel!
For example: My group at work has 10 windows licenses for office desktops and laptops. However, 8 of us have Macs at home, and the other two don't have computers at home. We can't use our office computers to watch TV, but we could use our Macs. Expanding, globally my company must have 100,000 or more Windows OS licenses, but not a one of them is for entertainment purposes. I know I haven't included Linux here but nobody I work with uses it at home, but again, that's probably also a signficiant entertainment market share.
In general, Mac users are more entertainment focussed (lots of exceptions on both sides, I know) so I'm wondering if excluding them from something like this actually cuts off a larger share of the downloading market, both in terms of numbers of users and amount of downloading each user does, than apparent when one looks at what percentage of all computers using one OS vs. another.
There are aspects of discussion sections that are likely wrong, or at least a little incorrect, in almost all papers. But that's becuase you're stating your next HYPOTHESIS, which is not fact. Unfortuantely, discussions are more easily read than methods/results and are likely what the popular press, and perhpas this guy, latch onto.
That said, an examination of how science gets done may be in order. He faults the community for not reproducing other people's work enough. This can often require specialized materials or equipment that few other labs might have. Taking on the task of your own research combined with playing "results police" for the community could place a burden. In grad school we did our best to provide our unique materials to everyone who asked, but it did get really really expensive to make all that material and a less well funded lab simply couldn't have done it.
Also, how does it help my career to spend months to years (yes, some science takes years to do a single experiment properly) to reproduce someone elses' work. I can't write a paper that says, "Yeah, Smith et. al., got the right answer." The REALITY of it is sometime you rely on a previous result to do the next step, and if their work was flat out wrong you get stopped and can't proceed. Then you clean it up.
I also have to fault this study because the information gets cleaned up in other ways besides outright retractions. The results can appear in other papers, or as part of other papers without specifcially calling attention to it. In grad school I used someone elses' results as a launchign point for an experiment that was part of a much larger study. When it didn't work we looked into it and the original work was messed up by seriously flawed design, controls, and materials. I redid that study and found the correct answer, and used that to carry on with the experiment I wanted to do. All of that work appeared in a single figure in a 7 figure paper, and we didn't say, "So and so et. al., made up their paper and we've corrected it in figure 4, panel A." We just simply made those new controls and kept going. Those steeped in the field know what happened, but this situation wouldn't be noticed if you were only couting retraction.
It's all too complicated for these reductionist studies. That said, we can do better. Paper reviews are often too cursory. I've reviewed papers with serious issues, either rejected or asked for revisions, and then seen the paper appear in the journal a couple months later anyway without those revisions. Scientists are part of the equation, the journals and their staff are another!
Comcast is certainly monitoring network usage statistics and comparing trends in usage with its capbabilities and what they need to do to upgrade their networks to stay ahead of the ever increasing usage. I bet they also track it by geographical area. For example, I bet the 'average' user in Silicon Valley uses quite a bit more bandwidth than people living in a more manufacturing based town with fewer technical residents. "Unlimited" needs to be higher in the first place than the second one.
They're probably noting statistics, trends, etc., and finding certain 6-sigma users who are placing undo load on the system. It is too bad they advertise it as unlimited, but a reasonable customer doesn't buy into advertising hype but actually thinks about what the reality of the situation is. Of course you're not allowed to open the pipe full blast and leave it running constantly.
So, based on their statistics they probably figure that 100 GB is pretty generous based on the usage of the population, minus a very few users who are pulling down the network. But in time, 100 GB might be totally normal (who knows, we might be watching HDTV streamed through IPV6, anythign is possible) and then 'resonable' might be 500 GB. It does say in the comcast contract somewhere that you won't run a server out of your residential connection so people who have major servers maintaining bit-torrents or somethign would appear to be in violation of the protocol too and could be subject to termination.
But they can't put the results of their dynamic quotas based on continuous statistical analysis in an advertisement.
Except that it doesn't matter if it varies or not. Standard Temperature and Pressure (STP) is well defined as 25 degrees C and 1 atmosphere of pressure. There can be precisely controlled. But people who work in the standards groups will always want a solid physical reference that doesn't (or at least shouldn't) vary. The guy overeacted when he said, "Oh no, this could have ramifications for everything including such things as power generation). I doubt a powerstation has any mass measuring system that is precise to 50 ug out of and object weighing 1000000000 ug. Except for the instruments at places like the national institute of standards, very little else has this kind of precision so until it loses something like a whole gram it isn't going ot have a practical consequence.
Depending on how you want to approach your stargazing there are computer/scope combos where you align the scope, hook it to a laptop, select the feature you want to look at (if it's visible from your location) and it will hone in on it, show it on the screen, let you look through the viewfinder, and take pictures. I haven't seen an advert for it recently so I don't remember its name, but for a starter with some cash it could teach you how to identify constelations, pinpoint planets, etc. Some will think it's a copout to use a digital library and motorized mount to find what you're looking for, but used right it could be a good way to learn fast.
Forwarding to voicemail with an iPhone is tricky cuz' the phone downloads voicemail and you can't turn that off unless you do airplane mode or shut it off. That'll cost you some roaming-data too.