With money, your supply and demand get translated by "the market" into monetary values,
More important than that to the end-user is that using money decouples in time the supply you can generate, and the demand your needs create.
If I need toilet paper at 9pm on a Sunday night, I can go to the local drugstore and buy it with the cash I earned some nebulous time earlier when it was more convenient and efficient for me to generate. Who knows if I'll have a spare half dozen eggs the next time the toilet paper runs out, and if the store owner will need eggs at that point. Decoupling those two parts of the transaction makes the economy vastly more efficient.
We deploy a new instrument and are puzzled and amazed at the results. This is incredibly wonderful, but shows how little we know about the universe. It seems to happen every time we deploy a new instrument. So much to know! So much to learn!
I know database concepts are difficult for some people, but it's by no means magic.
Sorry, I beg to differ. You select a DB. Turns out that's just the interface, and you have to *then* select the actual DB engine. Some engines / databases allow checking for and repair of corruption on-line, some don't. There's locking. Line level, table level, database level. Oh, wait, you didn't know about tables vs databases? What do you do when your query takes too long? Didn't you know about connecting before making a querry, persistent connections, and how to interpret obscure error messages? What do you do when there is a corruption? Binary replication? Non-binary replication? I can export a table to CSV only when there is write access to the filesystem on the remote host? And don't get me started on the query syntax.
This is all black magic to non-DBAs. It is arcane. When I use a file system for storing blobs -- as simple files -- I don't need a DBA. Back in the early years of modern computers, you needed a file system administrator, for more-or-less the same reasons that you need a DBA now: file systems were fragile. Now, file systems are one of the most reliable parts of computer systems: they Just Work. Until databases evolve to the point that they Just Work, and don't require hiring a specialist, there will be arcana.
You mean working with a file system and not using a DB at all, not needing to pay a DBA, not dealing with corrupted databases, not using arcane tools, etc.?
I jest, but not entirely. Clearly there are purposes for which databases are the right toold for the job. I'm most definitely not convinced that big blob storage is one of them.
CFL's DO NOT DIM. Period! Even the so called dimable ones simply drop in output maybe 30-40% then flicker and go out.
I'd wager you're generalizing from limited experience with low-quality bulbs, or bulbs with the wrong kind of dimmer. I have dimmable CFL bulbs in my kitchen and livingroom that dim perfectly all the way down to off. I also bought the manufacturer-recommended kind of dimmer for them. Before getting the right kind of dimmer, they behaved as you described.
When I've put LED bulbs into a dimmer circuit, they have not fared as well, although I haven't tried different dimmers yet.
The real issue for LEDs for me is that all of the ones I've tried thus far flicker at either 60 or 120 Hz, and flicker quite strongly. Does anyone know if that problem has been solved in the newest generation?
Why we need doctors to tell us this? Isn't it pretty obvious that if you get hit in the head a lot, it will cause brain damage?
Because the NFL has been pretty proactive about rules regarding helmets and head injury. Also, because there's vast amounts of money involved. But most importantly, the growing evidence is not that repeated concussions that rise to the clinical level are bad -- which we can rightfully assume is true, just as repeatedly getting a bad bruise on one's thigh is unlikely to be good long-term -- but that less severe head impacts have a cumulative effect. That's what the NFL is most afraid of, and rightfully so, because it would mean elimination of the sport as we know it, and the potential liability would be enormous.
Because of the vast sums of money involved, it will take solid, iron-clad, repeated and verified medical evidence to make the necessary changes to protect the health of the NFL players. Or, an acceptance by the players and NFL that long-term health impact is expected, with appropriate supportive care provided for the lifetime of the players.
I'm thinking that a memory card being hidden in someone'ss underpants would be sufficient motivation for an investigator to give the contents some pretty serious scrutiny. Memory cards are innocuous and ubiquitous. There are millions-to-billions of them in circulation given that there's one in many cell phones, and one in most cameras. If one of them was hidden, then there's got to be a good reason. To make the card less suspicious this fellow should have shot a video of his (or someone's) kids doing somethig mundane like having a birthday party, done the steganography on that, and left the card in a well-worn point-and-shoot camera in his bag. Steganography works best when it's in plain view.
On the other hand, given that this card was found in the suspect's underpants means he was strip-searched, and so was under some pretty serious scrutiny already. Swallowing the card in a capsule might have been his only hope of transporting it undetected.
Heck, installing Linux from scratch on random hardware can be far easier than doing the same with either Windows or OS X
True, this. Installing Windows XP on a blank system to the point that it's fully updated and has all drivers loaded is a right royal pain in the butt. In my experience, most network interfaces aren't supported by the distribution disc, so I have to plug in my lone and highly valuable Intel card to gain access to the net. Then eons spent downloading the right drivers for that particular motherboard (and a dose of good luck). Then Windows Update, reboot. Update, reboot. Update, reboot, etc. I think I counted 11 reboots once. Uninstall network card. Reboot. Somewhere along the line validate the installation. Avoid Windows Genuine Advantage through all of that, too. Then install favorite anti-virus, answer inane questions about MSIE configuration, install MS Office. Update, update, update. Run AV to check that everything's OK. Defrag disk. Easily most of an afternoon. Maybe versions after XP are better, but I've not touched them, yet.
Doing the same for Fedora is much, much easier, as it involves one reboot, and a single, if large, update. Maybe an hour total, and far fewer interactions required by the operator.
There is indeed a huge difference between the Google TOS and the others. A few important words in the Google TOS are pretty ominous -- "publicly perform", "publicly display", and "promoting".
You give a document to Google, say one that contains sensitive information like your passwords, tax returns, or bank account numbers, and they can take a full-page advertisement in the New York Times showing the content of your document. They might not, but they can under these terms.
Or, you store an MP3 your band recorded with them, say one that's destined to be a barn-burner of a single, and they can use it in their television ads, for free. They might not, but again, "publicly perform" and "promoting" are dangerously broad terms.
I read the article pointed to in the summary (which is a summary of the scholarly article). The study authors seem to have confused the idea that finding a single population that behaves this way (not arranging piles of oranges linearly along a line according to the number of oranges in a pile) with determining true innate human behavior. Find another dozen isolated groups, and then maybe. Find groups that have been only recently isolated and it will be more impressive.
4) Place a third sheet of polaroid between the slits and the detector screen, oriented half-way between the two other filters (if one sheet is vertically oriented and the other horizontally, this sheet will be oriented at 45 degrees)
* The interference pattern is back? WTF? You took the tag away, so that you couldn't know which slit a photon passed through. You "erased" the which-path information so each photon went through both slits, instead of just one of them.
What happens as you rotate the 3rd sheet? Does the interference pattern get stronger and weaker, peaking at the midpoint between the orientations of the filters in front of each slit?
Really? They really broke military-grade encryption?
I mean, with only open-source stuff, I'm able to keep my sensitive log files secure enough that you'd need access to more computational power on the planet for a few years to read them even with physical access. Thanks to Rivest et al, it just isn't that hard to make pragmatically unbreakable encryption. I don't have any direct evidence for it, but it's widely assumed that the US military has access to even better encryption than people like me who look up recipes on the web. So was the encryption really broken or is this propaganda?
Actually, it's quite rather the opposite: there's not enough money, so competition for scant funding is intense. Two days ago I saw a presentation by Dr. Francis Collins, head of the NIH, who was really trying very hard to put a positive spin on resarch and the source that it provides for economic recovery. He was trying really, really hard. Why? Because if you look at the inflation-adjusted budget of the NIH, it's been going down ever since 1978, and is currently closing in to about 20% off the peak. In the meantime, the number of applications has skyrocketed to the point that fewer than 25% of applications are being funded. In my subfield, that number is closer to between 7 and 9%. When competition is that fierce, the temptation to fudge data is huge.
But his arguments were solid: there has been rarely a better ROI on governmental programs than the NIH budget with a factor of at least 2x overall (each $1 in NIH budget results in $2 in GDP), and individual cases that are well over 100x (like the Human Genome Project). Research, nationally funded research, is one of the basic means for seeding long-term economic growth. If you are in biomedical science or its related basic fields, you should contact your congressmen and insist that the NIH and NSF budgets be increased: we need another doubling, like we saw during the Clinton administration.
Or more elaborately, everyone who can hear uses auditory cues to navigate in addition to other cues. Electric cars are highly unusual in that they make much less noise than their internal combustion engine counterparts. Until silent electric cars are commonplace enough that the public is aware that the normal sensitivity of audition may be insufficient to navigate as a pedestrian, adding sound would seem to be a good idea on the whole. Of course, the flip side is that people who are spending their time buried in their hand-held devices and don't look up when crossing the road are more likely to be weeded from the gene pool by silent cars, and some might consider that a plus. Getting to the point above, though, there are many people -- millions in the US alone -- with low vision or blindnes for whom automobile sounds are critical in warning of impending danger. Adding a modest sound to quiet electric cars definitely seems a good idea for them.
But if you really want to cut down on urban noise pollution, as your post implies, address trucks, buses, and construction crews. Non-electric cars just aren't that loud and motorcycles aren't that frequent. Try to talk on a mobile phone as a truck or bus drives past, though: it's impossible.
How many babies were hospitalized or died because of the pertussis vaccination during the same period?
Personally I am not afraid of vaccines for me or my children. A clear comparison in health issues and risks between vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated children should (hopefully) clear the whole controversy.
Except that the vaccination issue plays on parental fears of unknown risk of harm to their child. You cannot overcome emotion with numbers.
This interview gets my vote for the most informative posting on Slashdot this year. The questions were good and insightful, and the answers pitched at exactly the right level. Thanks, MIT Fusion Guys!
I'm a perfect example of this supposition. I work in a highly standardized environment that services a large number of employees (well over 10,000) where although not all have their own computer, nearly all are computer users at some point during the day. My office group has elected not to use the standard-issue systems and software, and roll our own instead. The IT people are reasonably undertanding folk, especially when I tell them we're using Linux and willing to self-support on *all* issues, except those involving network connectivity (which we, like everyone else at our institution, pay for on a per-call basis).
Absolutely correct. The arrival time is the time the airplane gets to the gate. This allows planning for appropriate amounts of time between flights for connecting itineraries. You can have what are called legal marriages between connecting flights, with sufficient time that passengers can be reasonably expected to get from one flight to the next, or illegal ones where there is insufficient time, where the threshold is determined based on which airport, which terminals are involved, whether it is international or domestic travel, and other factors. Normally reservation systems don't allow illegal marriages, but there are ways around it if you have experience to suggest shorter connect times are possible, and the intestinal fortitute to risk it. Typical minimum connect time for a legal marriage between US domestic flights on the same carrier is 30 minutes (to the nit pickers, please note that I wrote "typcial" and that obviously there are a myriad of exceptions).
Any decent conference makes the proceedings available to attendees, so the notes that you need to take will not be the content of the various lectures.
Two false suppositions in the same statement, I'm afraid. Most conferences don't provide proper proceedings, even very good ones (I run a *very* good conference, and we don't provide a proper proceedings). You're luck if you get a set of abstracts. Abstracts are not full presentations. Proper proceedings, which have fleshed out papers, won't have all of the presentations; hardly ever, at least. Each paper is never a complete encapsulation of the presentation, either since scientists are more likely to say something in a presentation that's an early conclusion, or speculation, or hints of results, than to do the same in a paper as concrete solid results in published work is the rule. Moreover, since the proceedings will invariably be published many months after the conference, you'll have forgotten about the presentations and your questions and thoughts by the time the proceedings comes out.
That said, I agree wholeheartedly that making contacts and networking are very, very important at conferences. Those are the *real* reasons to go.
Finally, to answer the OP's question, pen and paper for note taking.
Slashdot Mirror
With money, your supply and demand get translated by "the market" into monetary values,
More important than that to the end-user is that using money decouples in time the supply you can generate, and the demand your needs create.
If I need toilet paper at 9pm on a Sunday night, I can go to the local drugstore and buy it with the cash I earned some nebulous time earlier when it was more convenient and efficient for me to generate. Who knows if I'll have a spare half dozen eggs the next time the toilet paper runs out, and if the store owner will need eggs at that point. Decoupling those two parts of the transaction makes the economy vastly more efficient.
We deploy a new instrument and are puzzled and amazed at the results. This is incredibly wonderful, but shows how little we know about the universe. It seems to happen every time we deploy a new instrument. So much to know! So much to learn!
And opening themselves up to anti-competitive legal action.
not using arcane tools
I know database concepts are difficult for some people, but it's by no means magic.
Sorry, I beg to differ. You select a DB. Turns out that's just the interface, and you have to *then* select the actual DB engine. Some engines / databases allow checking for and repair of corruption on-line, some don't. There's locking. Line level, table level, database level. Oh, wait, you didn't know about tables vs databases? What do you do when your query takes too long? Didn't you know about connecting before making a querry, persistent connections, and how to interpret obscure error messages? What do you do when there is a corruption? Binary replication? Non-binary replication? I can export a table to CSV only when there is write access to the filesystem on the remote host? And don't get me started on the query syntax.
This is all black magic to non-DBAs. It is arcane. When I use a file system for storing blobs -- as simple files -- I don't need a DBA. Back in the early years of modern computers, you needed a file system administrator, for more-or-less the same reasons that you need a DBA now: file systems were fragile. Now, file systems are one of the most reliable parts of computer systems: they Just Work. Until databases evolve to the point that they Just Work, and don't require hiring a specialist, there will be arcana.
... the joy of schemaless DBs.
You mean working with a file system and not using a DB at all, not needing to pay a DBA, not dealing with corrupted databases, not using arcane tools, etc.?
I jest, but not entirely. Clearly there are purposes for which databases are the right toold for the job. I'm most definitely not convinced that big blob storage is one of them.
And better to put the thrust axis in-line with the center of mass while you're at it.
Perhaps you're just not hacker enough :-)
Well, I don't have a neckbeard, thankfully.
Neither do I, but I'm old enough to remember everyone calling them VAXen. It was such a widespread colloquialism that it approached standard usage.
CFL's DO NOT DIM. Period! Even the so called dimable ones simply drop in output maybe 30-40% then flicker and go out.
I'd wager you're generalizing from limited experience with low-quality bulbs, or bulbs with the wrong kind of dimmer. I have dimmable CFL bulbs in my kitchen and livingroom that dim perfectly all the way down to off. I also bought the manufacturer-recommended kind of dimmer for them. Before getting the right kind of dimmer, they behaved as you described.
When I've put LED bulbs into a dimmer circuit, they have not fared as well, although I haven't tried different dimmers yet.
The real issue for LEDs for me is that all of the ones I've tried thus far flicker at either 60 or 120 Hz, and flicker quite strongly. Does anyone know if that problem has been solved in the newest generation?
Why we need doctors to tell us this? Isn't it pretty obvious that if you get hit in the head a lot, it will cause brain damage?
Because the NFL has been pretty proactive about rules regarding helmets and head injury. Also, because there's vast amounts of money involved. But most importantly, the growing evidence is not that repeated concussions that rise to the clinical level are bad -- which we can rightfully assume is true, just as repeatedly getting a bad bruise on one's thigh is unlikely to be good long-term -- but that less severe head impacts have a cumulative effect. That's what the NFL is most afraid of, and rightfully so, because it would mean elimination of the sport as we know it, and the potential liability would be enormous.
Because of the vast sums of money involved, it will take solid, iron-clad, repeated and verified medical evidence to make the necessary changes to protect the health of the NFL players. Or, an acceptance by the players and NFL that long-term health impact is expected, with appropriate supportive care provided for the lifetime of the players.
I'm thinking that a memory card being hidden in someone'ss underpants would be sufficient motivation for an investigator to give the contents some pretty serious scrutiny. Memory cards are innocuous and ubiquitous. There are millions-to-billions of them in circulation given that there's one in many cell phones, and one in most cameras. If one of them was hidden, then there's got to be a good reason. To make the card less suspicious this fellow should have shot a video of his (or someone's) kids doing somethig mundane like having a birthday party, done the steganography on that, and left the card in a well-worn point-and-shoot camera in his bag. Steganography works best when it's in plain view.
On the other hand, given that this card was found in the suspect's underpants means he was strip-searched, and so was under some pretty serious scrutiny already. Swallowing the card in a capsule might have been his only hope of transporting it undetected.
Heck, installing Linux from scratch on random hardware can be far easier than
doing the same with either Windows or OS X
True, this. Installing Windows XP on a blank system to the point that it's fully updated and has all drivers loaded is a right royal pain in the butt. In my experience, most network interfaces aren't supported by the distribution disc, so I have to plug in my lone and highly valuable Intel card to gain access to the net. Then eons spent downloading the right drivers for that particular motherboard (and a dose of good luck). Then Windows Update, reboot. Update, reboot. Update, reboot, etc. I think I counted 11 reboots once. Uninstall network card. Reboot. Somewhere along the line validate the installation. Avoid Windows Genuine Advantage through all of that, too. Then install favorite anti-virus, answer inane questions about MSIE configuration, install MS Office. Update, update, update. Run AV to check that everything's OK. Defrag disk. Easily most of an afternoon. Maybe versions after XP are better, but I've not touched them, yet.
Doing the same for Fedora is much, much easier, as it involves one reboot, and a single, if large, update. Maybe an hour total, and far fewer interactions required by the operator.
Coal makes smog and dumps carbon.
You forgot that coal creates acid rain that generally kills off wildlife and not-so-slowly dissolves buildings away.
There is indeed a huge difference between the Google TOS and the others. A few important words in the Google TOS are pretty ominous -- "publicly perform", "publicly display", and "promoting".
You give a document to Google, say one that contains sensitive information like your passwords, tax returns, or bank account numbers, and they can take a full-page advertisement in the New York Times showing the content of your document. They might not, but they can under these terms.
Or, you store an MP3 your band recorded with them, say one that's destined to be a barn-burner of a single, and they can use it in their television ads, for free. They might not, but again, "publicly perform" and "promoting" are dangerously broad terms.
No thank you.
I read the article pointed to in the summary (which is a summary of the scholarly article). The study authors seem to have confused the idea that finding a single population that behaves this way (not arranging piles of oranges linearly along a line according to the number of oranges in a pile) with determining true innate human behavior. Find another dozen isolated groups, and then maybe. Find groups that have been only recently isolated and it will be more impressive.
4) Place a third sheet of polaroid between the slits and the detector screen, oriented half-way between the two other filters (if one sheet is vertically oriented and the other horizontally, this sheet will be oriented at 45 degrees)
* The interference pattern is back? WTF? You took the tag away, so that you couldn't know which slit a photon passed through. You "erased" the which-path information so each photon went through both slits, instead of just one of them.
What happens as you rotate the 3rd sheet? Does the interference pattern get stronger and weaker, peaking at the midpoint between the orientations of the filters in front of each slit?
Really? They really broke military-grade encryption?
I mean, with only open-source stuff, I'm able to keep my sensitive log files secure enough that you'd need access to more computational power on the planet for a few years to read them even with physical access. Thanks to Rivest et al, it just isn't that hard to make pragmatically unbreakable encryption. I don't have any direct evidence for it, but it's widely assumed that the US military has access to even better encryption than people like me who look up recipes on the web. So was the encryption really broken or is this propaganda?
There's more money in it now.
Actually, it's quite rather the opposite: there's not enough money, so competition for scant funding is intense. Two days ago I saw a presentation by Dr. Francis Collins, head of the NIH, who was really trying very hard to put a positive spin on resarch and the source that it provides for economic recovery. He was trying really, really hard. Why? Because if you look at the inflation-adjusted budget of the NIH, it's been going down ever since 1978, and is currently closing in to about 20% off the peak. In the meantime, the number of applications has skyrocketed to the point that fewer than 25% of applications are being funded. In my subfield, that number is closer to between 7 and 9%. When competition is that fierce, the temptation to fudge data is huge.
But his arguments were solid: there has been rarely a better ROI on governmental programs than the NIH budget with a factor of at least 2x overall (each $1 in NIH budget results in $2 in GDP), and individual cases that are well over 100x (like the Human Genome Project). Research, nationally funded research, is one of the basic means for seeding long-term economic growth. If you are in biomedical science or its related basic fields, you should contact your congressmen and insist that the NIH and NSF budgets be increased: we need another doubling, like we saw during the Clinton administration.
Two words: blind people.
Or more elaborately, everyone who can hear uses auditory cues to navigate in addition to other cues. Electric cars are highly unusual in that they make much less noise than their internal combustion engine counterparts. Until silent electric cars are commonplace enough that the public is aware that the normal sensitivity of audition may be insufficient to navigate as a pedestrian, adding sound would seem to be a good idea on the whole. Of course, the flip side is that people who are spending their time buried in their hand-held devices and don't look up when crossing the road are more likely to be weeded from the gene pool by silent cars, and some might consider that a plus. Getting to the point above, though, there are many people -- millions in the US alone -- with low vision or blindnes for whom automobile sounds are critical in warning of impending danger. Adding a modest sound to quiet electric cars definitely seems a good idea for them.
But if you really want to cut down on urban noise pollution, as your post implies, address trucks, buses, and construction crews. Non-electric cars just aren't that loud and motorcycles aren't that frequent. Try to talk on a mobile phone as a truck or bus drives past, though: it's impossible.
How many babies were hospitalized or died because of the pertussis vaccination during the same period?
Personally I am not afraid of vaccines for me or my children. A clear comparison in health issues and risks between vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated children should (hopefully) clear the whole controversy.
Except that the vaccination issue plays on parental fears of unknown risk of harm to their child. You cannot overcome emotion with numbers.
This interview gets my vote for the most informative posting on Slashdot this year. The questions were good and insightful, and the answers pitched at exactly the right level. Thanks, MIT Fusion Guys!
A big screen like that is going to be too much of a temptation for baseball-bat wielding ne'er-do-wells.
You forgot to add gratuitous, incorrect quotation marks for icing on the cake.
I'm a perfect example of this supposition. I work in a highly standardized environment that services a large number of employees (well over 10,000) where although not all have their own computer, nearly all are computer users at some point during the day. My office group has elected not to use the standard-issue systems and software, and roll our own instead. The IT people are reasonably undertanding folk, especially when I tell them we're using Linux and willing to self-support on *all* issues, except those involving network connectivity (which we, like everyone else at our institution, pay for on a per-call basis).
Absolutely correct. The arrival time is the time the airplane gets to the gate. This allows planning for appropriate amounts of time between flights for connecting itineraries. You can have what are called legal marriages between connecting flights, with sufficient time that passengers can be reasonably expected to get from one flight to the next, or illegal ones where there is insufficient time, where the threshold is determined based on which airport, which terminals are involved, whether it is international or domestic travel, and other factors. Normally reservation systems don't allow illegal marriages, but there are ways around it if you have experience to suggest shorter connect times are possible, and the intestinal fortitute to risk it. Typical minimum connect time for a legal marriage between US domestic flights on the same carrier is 30 minutes (to the nit pickers, please note that I wrote "typcial" and that obviously there are a myriad of exceptions).
Any decent conference makes the proceedings available to attendees, so the notes that you need to take will not be the content of the various lectures.
Two false suppositions in the same statement, I'm afraid. Most conferences don't provide proper proceedings, even very good ones (I run a *very* good conference, and we don't provide a proper proceedings). You're luck if you get a set of abstracts. Abstracts are not full presentations. Proper proceedings, which have fleshed out papers, won't have all of the presentations; hardly ever, at least. Each paper is never a complete encapsulation of the presentation, either since scientists are more likely to say something in a presentation that's an early conclusion, or speculation, or hints of results, than to do the same in a paper as concrete solid results in published work is the rule. Moreover, since the proceedings will invariably be published many months after the conference, you'll have forgotten about the presentations and your questions and thoughts by the time the proceedings comes out.
That said, I agree wholeheartedly that making contacts and networking are very, very important at conferences. Those are the *real* reasons to go.
Finally, to answer the OP's question, pen and paper for note taking.