Oh, and stiction is basically a thing of the past except possibly in a few server-grade hard drives. AFAIK, all modern non-server hard drives (and most server hard drives) use a parking ramp to ensure that the heads are not situated above the media when the drive spins down.
Reading numbers is more error prone. With the bar code, there are presumably lots of check digits and other such loveliness encoded into it.
As for folding it, what happens? Probably nothing. There are usually CRCs (or similar) and lots of other stuff in those 2D bar codes. This particular scheme, Data Matrix, is apparently highly redundant, allowing full recovery of the data even if (up to) 30% of the bar code is destroyed.
Clinton didn't care about the Iraqi people or what Saddam had done or would do. That's clear from the evidence of him doing virtually nothing. But we can only guess what Gore would have done. i voted for both of them, but would have been disappointed in him if he let Saddam stay in power.
Why? He was a neutered dictator at that point, unable to commit the acts of genocide that he committed in the past. Thus, he wasn't significantly worse than most of the other leaders in that region.
To be pedantic, if you're a mile south of that interchange, I'm pretty sure you're well outside Cupertino and well into the unincorporated community of Monta Vista. It might be addressed in Cupertino, but I'm pretty sure it's not within the city limits. IIRC, the Cupertino city limits basically run parallel to 85 about a block south....
Yes, I do see rather nasty dead spots in both of the places that you described. What this tells me is that AT&T needs to crank up the gain on their cell sites. There's simply no excuse for not having any signal a mere 2 miles from a tower in flat terrain.... Try contacting AT&T from a land line phone in that area and complaining about it. Given the terrain, one of their network engineers should be able to solve it with a few keystrokes if you can actually reach an engineer....
There's a really detailed coverage map of AT&T's good and bad spots from CNet. In general, if you can see at least a 30% signal outdoors, you should be able to fairly reliably hold calls even inside most concrete/metal buildings. Much below that and you have problems.
Either you're mistaking 3G coverage for total coverage, you're lying, or your phone is massively broken. As in the antenna must be missing entirely. I'm only aware of one dead spot in that general area, and that's a weak spot for a few hundred feet causing a problematic tower changeover on De Anza Blvd just south of Fremont. Even sunk down below the ground on Central, 280, etc. I get completely solid coverage. There are a couple of glitchy spots, mind you (880 just north of 85, 101 somewhere around the airport, and Lawrence expressway at the 101 offramp), but those are just spots where the tower handoff can cause the occasional call to drop while driving. When stationary, you should never have any real problems with coverage in your area.
Further, I think that there's actually an AT&T cellular tower on TOP of one the Apple campus buildings. Unless there's something seriously wrong with your phone, you shouldn't be able to get anything less than perfect signal strength near there. In fact, you should just about be able to crack the thing open, cut and tear the antenna's trace entirely off the circuit board starting right where it goes into the GSM chip, and still have enough signal to place a call successfully in Apple's parking lot.... I've gotten 3-4 bars inside concrete elevator shafts and other solid concrete structures in that area.
Seriously, if you're having connection problems within five miles of Apple, throw your phone in the trash and get a new one. There's something very, very seriously wrong. AT&T's coverage around here is quite solid and has been for many years.
So it isn't legal to kill him, or have him killed. (So don't try this kids.)
I'm suddenly feeling like this thread has turned into a Mafia conversation. "Yes. Please don't hire a hit man. Please don't call Freddy at 555-0129. That's Freddy at 555-0129. His services cost $5,000 per hit plus expenses, so he is quite affordable, but again, I repeat, do *not* call Freddy at 555-0129. After all, that would be illegal. That's Freddy at 555-0129. Don't call him today."
Further, I had no trouble finding plentyofcitations that agree with me; a study is considered a blind study if either the participants are unaware of the study/hypothesis or are unaware of what group they are in. I maintain my original assertion that a study in which the children are unaware of the experiment and the researchers are unaware of which participants are in which group would be considered a double-blind study even by a strict definition of the term.
As I said elsewhere, informed consent is absurd for minors, as they are not legally able to consent even if informed. Informed parental consent is required, not informed consent by the minors themselves.
Even if you could do such a study, it still would not be double-blind, by definition. "Double-blind study" isn't just a buzzword, it's a specific set of protocols.
No, it's not a specific set of protocols. Almost every study ever done has its own set of protocols tailored to the particular study. A double-blind protocol is any protocol in which A. the researcher is blinded as to which people are in which group (easily done), and B. the subjects are blinded as to which group they are in. The specific means for blinding is generally specific to the experiment unless you are talking about double-blind protocols within a specific field of study (e.g. pharmaceutical research). A double-blind protocol in pharmaceuticals is necessarily different than a double-blind protocol in other areas (e.g. surgical intervention) simply because the degree to which you can blind the study participant can vary significantly. They're still considered double-blind studies even if the blinding cannot be perfect due to the nature of the experiment. Part of designing a double-blind protocol is trying to come up with the best way to blind the test subjects.
Ethical arguments aside, I fail to see why you feel that blinding the subjects to the fact that they're part of a study is not an efficacious means of blinding them to whether they are in a particular study group. In much the same way that the placebo effect cannot occur in animal studies, the placebo effect similarly cannot occur in human studies who are unaware of the nature or existence of the experiment, and the placebo effect is what the blinding of the subjects is supposed to guard against. Therefore, I would argue that hiding the existence of the experiment is a valid form of blinding the participants, ethical arguments aside.
I would consider it to also be a double-blind study if the participants do not know that they are being studied, but merely are introduced to one or the other type of game deliberately (and at random) in a neutral setting (e.g. school). The purpose of making the test subject be blind to whether they are in the control group or the experimental group is so that they don't act in ways that they think the researcher wants them to act. Hiding the fact that they are involved in a study at all serves the same purpose, and more to the point, technically meets the criteria, as the subject cannot know he/she is part of a particular group in a study that he/she does not know is going on.
Nothing other than a double-blind study with random selection of test subjects can truly be considered "conclusive", IMHO. All studies that I've seen thus far are hopelessly thwarted by selection bias.
I consider anyone in favor of massive deregulation to be pro-big-business. A completely free market almost invariably degrades to monopoly given enough time.
But how can you be sure that bacteria are truly harmless? C. diff. was considered harmless until about the 1970s....
The way I see it, you have two choices: wipe them *all* out or introduce a highly diverse culture of bacteria so that no single strain gains control. The folks advocating probiotics kind of have the right idea except that they usually add only one or two kinds of bacteria instead of several.
I've said for years that we should be doing mass UV sterilization of entire hospital rooms between patients. And if you want to treat someone with a bad bacterial infection, UV sterilization of blood can be effective, too, at least for sepsis.
"In 2008, HP conducted 129 supplier site audits...Ninety-nine of our 2008 audits were follow-up audits to measure progress in reducing nonconformances found during initial reviews..."
And this is why it's obvious to me that HP doesn't really care about these violations. If they were serious, then 99 of those audits would be follow-up audits to verify that all compliance problems had been corrected. If they were serious, any problems found to be uncorrected during a re-audit would result in immediate contract termination.
Without that level of teeth, Chinese suppliers will simply continue to do what they always do---ignore your code of conduct, lie to you about their compliance, and if/when they get caught, pretend that it was a misunderstanding due to the language barrier, promise to improve things, make a few very visible changes to create the appearance of compliance for the two days while your compliance person is there, and revert to SOP the very next day.
I know multiple people who regularly deal with Chinese manufacturers directly, so what sounds like cynicism in this comment is based on actual experiences. After hearing the tales they tell, I wouldn't trust any Chinese manufacturer as far as I could throw them. Unless you've either dealt with Chinese companies directly or know someone who has, you can't imagine just how untrustworthy many of these companies can be. Some of the things I've seen include:
Agreeing to an order, then when you go to pay for it, revealing that they've licensed that technology out exclusively to another company and can't fulfill the order.
Sometimes fulfilling the order anyway.
Agreeing to take an order, then suddenly changing their minds without warning after another company they supply puts pressure on them.
Manufacturing a device for you and claiming that they designed it to your schematics when it's really just an off-the-shelf circuit that they designed fro someone else a couple of years earlier (who rejected it due to severe problems and >50% initial defect rate).
Failing to test said devices and delivering them overseas with a >50% initial defect rate.
Using poor manufacturing processes to build a ribbon mic, resulting in a >50% rate of stretched ribbons.
Claiming that a product comes with 12AT7 tubes, then putting cheap Chinese 12AX7 tubes in and grinding off the markings.
Using junk pieces of scrap metal welded together for the core of a toroidal power transformer, resulting in massive EMI problems and having to basically scrap an entire lot of equipment.
Substituting Chinese electrolytic capacitors (instead of the Japanese caps specified) with a typical life expectancy of a year.
Substituting fake name-brand NPN transistors randomly in place of PNP transistors (which, of course, results in nonfunctional hardware, which they claimed to have tested before it left the factory on a ship bound for the U.S. a month before). I think I might even have some of these fake parts lying around my house....
Flagrant patent violations.
Failing to tighten screws down, resulting in nuts bouncing around loose inside equipment.
Dropping extra washers inside equipment and leaving them there through the assembly process.
I could go on for a while like that, and that's just the crap that I or people I know *personally* have encountered. And I'm talking about some fairly sizable companies here. I'd hate to think how bad the smaller companies might be. The cost of all this deception is built into the cost of the products you buy, of course, but given the outright fraud I've seen from Chinese companies, I'd imagine most of these companies wipe their asses with copies of U.S. companies' codes of conduct.... The only way you don't get completely screwed dealing with Chinese manufacturing is to audit *everything*, audit it *regularly*, and be ruthless in enforcing codes of conduct. Anything less is a token gesture that will be summarily ignored.
Whether she was innocently infringing or not isn't really the point because it's fairly obvious that no teenager on the planet who pirates music doesn't know that it's illegal.
Actually, by my reading of the Audio Home Recording Act is that, while uploading is illegal, downloading is completely legal as long as you burn it to an audio CD (a CD with royalties paid as part of its sale price). So an affirmative defense would be simply to produce such a piece of plastic and tell the RIAA lawyers to get bent.
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Probably the giant rare earth magnets I stored in the next box over.
You're welcome. :-D
Oh, and stiction is basically a thing of the past except possibly in a few server-grade hard drives. AFAIK, all modern non-server hard drives (and most server hard drives) use a parking ramp to ensure that the heads are not situated above the media when the drive spins down.
Stiction problems weren't limited to Seagate. Pretty much every HD manufacturer has had a round of it at one time or another, AFAIK.
Reading numbers is more error prone. With the bar code, there are presumably lots of check digits and other such loveliness encoded into it.
As for folding it, what happens? Probably nothing. There are usually CRCs (or similar) and lots of other stuff in those 2D bar codes. This particular scheme, Data Matrix, is apparently highly redundant, allowing full recovery of the data even if (up to) 30% of the bar code is destroyed.
http://www.tlashford.com/TLA/pages/Basic_sym/Symbol_overview.htm#DATAMATRIX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_matrix_(computer)
Well, the obvious joke would be... "Communist country, communist OS."
Sorry. Couldn't resist. Some jokes are just too easy.
I clicked, half expecting Kermit doing goatse, but it's legit. Mod parent up.
Why? He was a neutered dictator at that point, unable to commit the acts of genocide that he committed in the past. Thus, he wasn't significantly worse than most of the other leaders in that region.
To be pedantic, if you're a mile south of that interchange, I'm pretty sure you're well outside Cupertino and well into the unincorporated community of Monta Vista. It might be addressed in Cupertino, but I'm pretty sure it's not within the city limits. IIRC, the Cupertino city limits basically run parallel to 85 about a block south....
Yes, I do see rather nasty dead spots in both of the places that you described. What this tells me is that AT&T needs to crank up the gain on their cell sites. There's simply no excuse for not having any signal a mere 2 miles from a tower in flat terrain.... Try contacting AT&T from a land line phone in that area and complaining about it. Given the terrain, one of their network engineers should be able to solve it with a few keystrokes if you can actually reach an engineer....
There's a really detailed coverage map of AT&T's good and bad spots from CNet. In general, if you can see at least a 30% signal outdoors, you should be able to fairly reliably hold calls even inside most concrete/metal buildings. Much below that and you have problems.
Either you're mistaking 3G coverage for total coverage, you're lying, or your phone is massively broken. As in the antenna must be missing entirely. I'm only aware of one dead spot in that general area, and that's a weak spot for a few hundred feet causing a problematic tower changeover on De Anza Blvd just south of Fremont. Even sunk down below the ground on Central, 280, etc. I get completely solid coverage. There are a couple of glitchy spots, mind you (880 just north of 85, 101 somewhere around the airport, and Lawrence expressway at the 101 offramp), but those are just spots where the tower handoff can cause the occasional call to drop while driving. When stationary, you should never have any real problems with coverage in your area.
Further, I think that there's actually an AT&T cellular tower on TOP of one the Apple campus buildings. Unless there's something seriously wrong with your phone, you shouldn't be able to get anything less than perfect signal strength near there. In fact, you should just about be able to crack the thing open, cut and tear the antenna's trace entirely off the circuit board starting right where it goes into the GSM chip, and still have enough signal to place a call successfully in Apple's parking lot.... I've gotten 3-4 bars inside concrete elevator shafts and other solid concrete structures in that area.
Seriously, if you're having connection problems within five miles of Apple, throw your phone in the trash and get a new one. There's something very, very seriously wrong. AT&T's coverage around here is quite solid and has been for many years.
I'm suddenly feeling like this thread has turned into a Mafia conversation. "Yes. Please don't hire a hit man. Please don't call Freddy at 555-0129. That's Freddy at 555-0129. His services cost $5,000 per hit plus expenses, so he is quite affordable, but again, I repeat, do *not* call Freddy at 555-0129. After all, that would be illegal. That's Freddy at 555-0129. Don't call him today."
I can see on the double-tap, just not on an orientation state change. Is that all encompassed in a single patent?
It's synthehol, not synthahol.
I'm actually not sure how translation applies here. Rotation and scaling are both specific translations. What additional translation is involved?
Further, I had no trouble finding plenty of citations that agree with me; a study is considered a blind study if either the participants are unaware of the study/hypothesis or are unaware of what group they are in. I maintain my original assertion that a study in which the children are unaware of the experiment and the researchers are unaware of which participants are in which group would be considered a double-blind study even by a strict definition of the term.
As I said elsewhere, informed consent is absurd for minors, as they are not legally able to consent even if informed. Informed parental consent is required, not informed consent by the minors themselves.
No, it's not a specific set of protocols. Almost every study ever done has its own set of protocols tailored to the particular study. A double-blind protocol is any protocol in which A. the researcher is blinded as to which people are in which group (easily done), and B. the subjects are blinded as to which group they are in. The specific means for blinding is generally specific to the experiment unless you are talking about double-blind protocols within a specific field of study (e.g. pharmaceutical research). A double-blind protocol in pharmaceuticals is necessarily different than a double-blind protocol in other areas (e.g. surgical intervention) simply because the degree to which you can blind the study participant can vary significantly. They're still considered double-blind studies even if the blinding cannot be perfect due to the nature of the experiment. Part of designing a double-blind protocol is trying to come up with the best way to blind the test subjects.
Ethical arguments aside, I fail to see why you feel that blinding the subjects to the fact that they're part of a study is not an efficacious means of blinding them to whether they are in a particular study group. In much the same way that the placebo effect cannot occur in animal studies, the placebo effect similarly cannot occur in human studies who are unaware of the nature or existence of the experiment, and the placebo effect is what the blinding of the subjects is supposed to guard against. Therefore, I would argue that hiding the existence of the experiment is a valid form of blinding the participants, ethical arguments aside.
I half expected the last line to be:
RT @sexxysela: For the last time, we have telephones. Stop using your service rifle to get my attention.
via TweetDeck
I would consider it to also be a double-blind study if the participants do not know that they are being studied, but merely are introduced to one or the other type of game deliberately (and at random) in a neutral setting (e.g. school). The purpose of making the test subject be blind to whether they are in the control group or the experimental group is so that they don't act in ways that they think the researcher wants them to act. Hiding the fact that they are involved in a study at all serves the same purpose, and more to the point, technically meets the criteria, as the subject cannot know he/she is part of a particular group in a study that he/she does not know is going on.
Don't inform the kids that they're part of a study. The parents must be informed (legally), but not the kids.
Nothing other than a double-blind study with random selection of test subjects can truly be considered "conclusive", IMHO. All studies that I've seen thus far are hopelessly thwarted by selection bias.
Sounds like open-and-shut breach of contract, and Activision will get their asses handed to them if this fan site can find a good lawyer.
I consider anyone in favor of massive deregulation to be pro-big-business. A completely free market almost invariably degrades to monopoly given enough time.
But how can you be sure that bacteria are truly harmless? C. diff. was considered harmless until about the 1970s....
The way I see it, you have two choices: wipe them *all* out or introduce a highly diverse culture of bacteria so that no single strain gains control. The folks advocating probiotics kind of have the right idea except that they usually add only one or two kinds of bacteria instead of several.
I've said for years that we should be doing mass UV sterilization of entire hospital rooms between patients. And if you want to treat someone with a bad bacterial infection, UV sterilization of blood can be effective, too, at least for sepsis.
And this is why it's obvious to me that HP doesn't really care about these violations. If they were serious, then 99 of those audits would be follow-up audits to verify that all compliance problems had been corrected. If they were serious, any problems found to be uncorrected during a re-audit would result in immediate contract termination.
Without that level of teeth, Chinese suppliers will simply continue to do what they always do---ignore your code of conduct, lie to you about their compliance, and if/when they get caught, pretend that it was a misunderstanding due to the language barrier, promise to improve things, make a few very visible changes to create the appearance of compliance for the two days while your compliance person is there, and revert to SOP the very next day.
I know multiple people who regularly deal with Chinese manufacturers directly, so what sounds like cynicism in this comment is based on actual experiences. After hearing the tales they tell, I wouldn't trust any Chinese manufacturer as far as I could throw them. Unless you've either dealt with Chinese companies directly or know someone who has, you can't imagine just how untrustworthy many of these companies can be. Some of the things I've seen include:
I could go on for a while like that, and that's just the crap that I or people I know *personally* have encountered. And I'm talking about some fairly sizable companies here. I'd hate to think how bad the smaller companies might be. The cost of all this deception is built into the cost of the products you buy, of course, but given the outright fraud I've seen from Chinese companies, I'd imagine most of these companies wipe their asses with copies of U.S. companies' codes of conduct.... The only way you don't get completely screwed dealing with Chinese manufacturing is to audit *everything*, audit it *regularly*, and be ruthless in enforcing codes of conduct. Anything less is a token gesture that will be summarily ignored.
Actually, by my reading of the Audio Home Recording Act is that, while uploading is illegal, downloading is completely legal as long as you burn it to an audio CD (a CD with royalties paid as part of its sale price). So an affirmative defense would be simply to produce such a piece of plastic and tell the RIAA lawyers to get bent.