Phrases like "2 out of every 5" implies quantizing to 20%. If they were consistently quantizing to 10% they'd have said 4 of 10, but then that's not different enough sounding from 46%.
This report is based on the findings of a survey on Americans' use of the Internet. The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from January 20 to February 19, 2012, among a sample of 2,253 adults, age 18 and older. Telephone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish by landline (1,352) and cell phone (901, including 440 without a landline phone). For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points. For results based Internet users (n=1,729), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
So 41% (conveniently rounded down to "two in five") is 5 percentage points below 46% (conveniently rounded up to "nearly half" when it would have also been rounded down to "two in five" if a consistent quantum of 20% had been used). Five percentage points is *just* above the sampling error of 4.6. Yes, statistics mavens who know more than me, that means significance obtained at p < 0.05, but it also means that the actual values could just as easily have been 43% and 44%, which isn't a very big difference.
My read: about 40% of the adults have an old-style phone; slightly more have a new-style phone. But what do the remaining nearly 20% have?
Did he just call me a fungible mass material, like pork bellies and orange juice?
No, you have misread the article. The comment was directed at the manufacturers of small video camera, referring to their product --- that being small, ubiquitous cameras. He's saying, please change the way you view your market and think of it as amenable to the well-known schemes used by large personal care items manufacturers.
(This is an excellent example of needing a -1 incorrect moderation.)
If a cop is telling you that you have to leave only because he doesnt want you to witness his activities...
And that would be an unlawful dispersal order. That's why the parent post specifically said, "... it is possible for police to issue a lawful dispersal order..." (emphasis added) in order to specifically speak to the point in question. Your example is clearly outside that purview, making your post merely argumentative rather than constructive.
If you believe an order to be unlawful, you are free to ignore it, and suffer the consequences until such time that the judicial system agrees with you or not. I have done so, and, fortunately for me, the consequences were not grave. A friend of mine did the same, at a different time, was subsequently arrested, but was later found to have been within his rights. The enlightened reader will understand that when the enforcement arm of our society issues a directive, not abiding by that directive has potentially serious implications, completely independent of the lawfulness of the directive.
Let's put it simply: someone carrying a badge and a gun tells you to move. You don't. There's a very real possibility that you will get shot. Yes, it would be illegal for that to happen, but the reality is that you're still bleeding, and bleeding as a result of your choice to ignore the command. Or perhaps you're not bleeding, but you've been beaten about the head, or been arrested. Eventually the judicial system might catch up and rule in your favor, but that won't change the fact that you've been injured or detained.
I use LibreOffice frequently. The one misfeature that is beyond annoying is subscripts. They, subscripts, happen pretty frequently in my field, and there's a long-standing bug with LibreOffice / OpenOffice saving documents that have subscripts as DOC formatted files. LibreOffice / OpenOffice gets it wrong, just plain wrong. Sure, those folks did a pretty good job at reverse-engineering the file format, but holy dotted I, Batman it's enough to make the ganglia twitch on that one bug. Save the file as ODT, no problems. Save it as DOC, and the subscript formatting information gets thoroughly wonked, and. there. is. no. work-around., I. have. tried. frelling. everything. Since my documents are often collaborative efforts with other people who use MS Word, saving to anything other than DOC (or DOCX) is not a viable option. And that's one of the many reasons I have two computers on my desk: one runs Windows for a small handful of programs that only run properly under Windows, and one runs Linux for everything else.
2001 has to be viewed in the context of its time when, specifically, the public's attention span was longer than 30 seconds. Moreover, much of the movie is trying to depict not story, but lack of story. The savanah scenes are there to show the apparently interminable stasis that existed for millenia prior to being shattered in the minutest of ways by the arrival of the obelisk, the tipping point of the evolution of primate toward man. How do you show stasis? Through scenes that, from today's generation used to sound bites and twitterisms, are interminable. How do you depict the incredible ennui of long-term space travel? Through scenes that depict seemingly vain attempts to occupy time. 30 seconds of Poole jogging would show how they exercise on the craft; you show him jogging and jogging and jogging, and the scenes carry deeper meaning, revealing more about life on Discovery One. A mark of great movie making is where the story is shown, not told.
That said, I still think the movie would be improved by editing down the star gate sequence from 20 minutes of psychedelia to perhaps 5 to 7 without losing the primary visual impact and while also retaning the key element of the story.
Also, while the movie stands on its own, it is one of the few that, being adapted from a novel rather than the other way around, enriched by reading the book.
I realize that these ideas are anathema to the current generation that needs to have continual, immediate sensory feedback, but, really, being able to pay attention for a full two hours to something and experience the intricacies and rich patterns over longer scales is a valuable skill that repays greatly.
The article suggests that that particular case (one involving child pornography observed on a laptop at a routne border check) would be more like: a cop walks past your open garage door and sees something that looks very much like a dead body. By the time he returns with a search warrant, the garage is closed and locked. The government has the testimony of a police officer that you have a dead body in your garage, but the physical evidence would make it a much stronger case.
So the government knows that something very illegal exists in your garage (or on your laptop), but doesn't know the details and doesn't have the physical evidence to present at trial. The ruling is that under such circumstances, you can be compelled to unlock your garage (or decrypt your laptop).
That's how I see it. Sure would be nice if someone with a J.D. could chime in.
For people who are not used to siestas, and visit a more civilized country where they are practiced, there's a wonderful, and powerful psychological effect that is especially valuable when, say, the visit is for a vacation: one's body thinks there are twice as many days!
While it would not surprise me that discarded cell phones form a significant waste stream, saying...
There is of course actually one other source of rare earth metals in the USA — recycled cell phones.
suggests that there isn't any other source. More-or-less all electronics consumer goods have rare-earth materials in them, from TVs to computers, to stereos, to MP3 players, to microwave ovens, and so forth. Essentially anything that's going to have a circuit board in it is going to have rare-earth materials that might be re-processed. And we have all of those lovely landfills just waiting to be mined, too.
In the same vein, the summary suggests that cell phones are the only reason to think rare earths important when, again, every segment of the electronics manufacturing industry is wondering where they're going to get tantalum capacitors in the coming years.
>all that needs to be done is to tow the vehicle to a charger
Another claim was that the vehicles cannot be towed.
What car can't be towed by a flat-bed truck?
The answer: none.
Service from flat-bed tow trucks is generally more expensive (because they're much, much easier on your car since the car is riding entirely on the truck), but can be procured nearly everywhere. Flat-bed trucks are used to tow vehicles that are either nice enough that the owner is willing to pay the premium, or in bad enough shape that they cannot roll on two wheels with a wheel-lift / sling style truck. If I had a car as expesive as a Tesla, I'd sure as heck want it to be towed on a flat-bed.
Yes. They are hardened against the normal background radiation that is ubiquitous. That's why there's more-or-less a minimum amount of energy that's required to change a single storage bit, otherwise it gets flipped too easily by a stray alpha decay from the chip's packaging. We entered the era where packaging is made from low-radiation materials some time ago to help with this, but it only helps, since existenace here on Earth is bathed in a certain level of radiation.
That isn't to say normal chips are hardened against abnormal levels of radiation, but they most certainly are designed with a given level of anticipated background.
I do this all the time (at least, I use a spreadsheet program to open a CSV database). Why?
1. The spreadsheet is in CSV (read: ASCII), so when, not if, there are problems, I can fix them in two seconds in an editor.
2. A spreadsheet program is relatively fast compared to a database program.
3. A spreadsheet allows me to view all of my data in a relatively compact way.
4. The output of a database program is going to be a spreadsheet-friendly table anyway, except you have to cut-and-paste it into a spreadsheet to use it.
So, what are the advantages of using a DB? Only one: being able to specify a highly particular set of constraints to pick out a small subset of the records (using an arcane syntax that means the query is more likely than not to be incorrect). How often do I do that? Nearly never. Far more often I'm interested in sorting by a particular column, and spreadsheets do that just fine.
For a small business, using a CSV file as a database and a spreadsheet program as the interface works quite well.
and try to get them to transfer $1 billion worth of wealth in exchange for a $1 billion U.S. treasury bond
My guess is that they'd try to get them to transfer some lesser amount to make the deal more attractive, say $500 million worth of assets. What despot isn't desparate for more cash?
Having a single person take care of support issues is a great idea. There are lots of reasons I'd find that appealing, as a business customer (who are the majority of buyers getting HP Elite products).
The most appealing reason, though, would be that I'd communicate with one single person through a given service interaction -- which can often span multiple calls or emails. One of the most frustrating aspects of lowest-cost CS is that every interaction is handled by a different drone, so you end up answering the same question over and over and over again. This has the potential to quickly lead to very poor CS from the customer's viewpoint.
So, even assigning a given ticket to one drone for the life of the ticket would be a huge step forward. Huge. (And speaking with someone who claims their name is Bob, Richard, or Jane but is clearly from Bangalore because I can't frikken' understand a word they say... well, that's also very poor CS. Maybe Elite product customers would also get a CS rep local to their country? That would be fantastic.)
You've never had your carry-on bags searched after being x-rayed and put back through even though there was absolutely nothing suspicious in them? I fly enough that it happens to me... not very often, but it definitely happens. I had wondered about that until I saw the presentation on false alarms, and then it made sense.
Same with the metal detector you walk through. There's undoubtedly an intentional level of uncertainty built in where it will beep at a certain rate no matter what the readings actually are, just to keep the agents moving around and alert. I have no direct evidence for that, however, and these days I'm always opting-out of the backscatter so get the extra-special-and-personal treatment no matter what the metal detector gate says.
Moreover, any plastic or (especially) glass lens you wear in a pair of frames will filter some-to-most of the UV even if the lens isn't specifically marketed to do that. Regular old glass filters out about 80% of UV. For polycarbonate (a/k/a CR-39, the standard eyeglass lens material), blocks nearly all of UVC, most of UVB, but passes much of UVA (blocks about 60%). Polycarbonate is often coated or treated with a UV-opaque dye for lenses that are marketed as UV-blocking.
Normally, the anterior anatomy of the eye, including the crystalline lens, blocks most of UVA, so having an artificial lens implanted and then not wearing glasses would make one sensitive to UVA, and possibly UVB. Given that it would be stimulating the S (short wavelength) pigments, it probably would look intensely blue, but I'd have to check the spectra of the L (long) and M (medium) pigments to be certain... might just appear whiteish.
I swear they have a "beep anyway" button though, just to annoy you.
I've seen a presentation by a perceptual scientist who was doing a study for the TSA on false alarm rates (both false positive where they detect something that shouldn't have been detected, and false negatives where they miss something that should have been seen). It turns out that boredom in agents watching the scanner monitors is a serious problem and that if there aren't enough items to detect, the agents become complacent and the false negative rate goes up. False negatives result in serious security breaches, like guns getting on planes. Say what you like about the TSA, false negatives are a problem. So, according to this presentation, x-ray scanners have a mechanism to insert fictitious objects into the images to keep the agents sharp. That's why you get asked to go through your hand luggage every now and then even though there's absolutely nothing that could be considered suspicious: the false positive rate is raised so that the false negative rate can be reduced to near zero.
And, to bring this back to the quote above, this is, essentially, a "beep anyway" button, only it isn't under direct TSA staff control.
As pointed out, a 1% increase is not keeping pace with inflation, and is therefore a decrease in real dollars. The baked-in numbers for a typical grant allow approximately 3% year-to-year inflation, so 1% more money means every funded grant will see a reduction of 2% in buying power, on average (how would you feel about taking a 2% pay cut next year?). Also, since government agencies have already encumbered budgets for the most part (that is, most of their budget goes toward funding existing grants) a decrease in real dollars means it will become even HARDER to get a new grant in the future. It's already hit insane levels of difficulty to get an award: a given project can go from being evaluated near the top of the heap to don't-even-bother-us levels from one year to the next through the random, capricious nature of the review process (and I speak from hard experience on this). When only a few percent of grant applications are being funded, each selection is no longer purely a meritocratic decision. That is neither good for the US, nor for Science.
The idea of appearance creep happened when the US car manufacturers figured out that they could make boatloads of money by taking the same old mechanicals and putting a new body on top each year (back before unibody designs, when it was a trivial amount of engineering and manufacturing adjustments to create new body panels compared with making a completely new car design; nowadays with the body being an integral part of the structural scaffold, changing the appearance is not quite as easy). It happened in the 1950s, the age of prosperity and upward mobility, when the US middle class was created and the need to keep up with Jones firmly established in the national psyche. We, Americans, were told that we needed to buy, buy, buy and having the latest and greatest was always best.
I don't understand the problem. The status quo is maintained with the gay marriage too.
I've talked to a number of people about this, as parts of my family are against same-sex marriage. Me, I don't care. But the people who do claim that allowing same-sex marriage dilutes the meaning of marriage, something that was heretofore only allowed between heterosexual couples. While I understand the argument in a strict technical sense, given that a far greater threat to the meaning of marriage comes from the rampant divorce rate, I don't see the reason to get all huffed about it. Especially since, ultimately, the blessing by some large institution, be it the state or a religious order, has no real bearing on whether the two members of couple are committed to each other or not.
So, to re-iterate, people who are against gay marriage (at least some of them) think that expanding the definition of marriage is not maintaining the status quo because it changes the idea.
If you want to get your head all twisted, though, have a look at Sharia marriage law. Nothing like the Western stuff we're talking about here, and a much deeper challenge to the status quo.
Slashdot Mirror
Phrases like "2 out of every 5" implies quantizing to 20%. If they were consistently quantizing to 10% they'd have said 4 of 10, but then that's not different enough sounding from 46%.
In other words, it's a snow job.
From the article ...
About the Survey
This report is based on the findings of a survey on Americans' use of the Internet. The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from January 20 to February 19, 2012, among a sample of 2,253 adults, age 18 and older. Telephone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish by landline (1,352) and cell phone (901, including 440 without a landline phone). For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points. For results based Internet users (n=1,729), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
So 41% (conveniently rounded down to "two in five") is 5 percentage points below 46% (conveniently rounded up to "nearly half" when it would have also been rounded down to "two in five" if a consistent quantum of 20% had been used). Five percentage points is *just* above the sampling error of 4.6. Yes, statistics mavens who know more than me, that means significance obtained at p < 0.05, but it also means that the actual values could just as easily have been 43% and 44%, which isn't a very big difference.
My read: about 40% of the adults have an old-style phone; slightly more have a new-style phone. But what do the remaining nearly 20% have?
Why is this article here?
Does it include neato new technology?
Does it review some new CPU or video card?
Does it discuss a new or old computer game?
Does it include high-energy physics or cosmology?
Does it include something about programming languages?
Does it include cryptography or security breaches?
Does it include anything at all about computers?
Hell, does it talk about Bitcoin?
Might as well just post scans from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue that's out right now.
Did he just call me a fungible mass material, like pork bellies and orange juice?
No, you have misread the article. The comment was directed at the manufacturers of small video camera, referring to their product --- that being small, ubiquitous cameras. He's saying, please change the way you view your market and think of it as amenable to the well-known schemes used by large personal care items manufacturers.
(This is an excellent example of needing a -1 incorrect moderation.)
If this is our biggest barrier to developing one tomorrow, then why don't we have these already? I mean besides NASA budget cuts...
Well, there is that whole problem with creating a bubble of negative energy, something we've not quite figured out how to do (or even what it means).
If a cop is telling you that you have to leave only because he doesnt want you to witness his activities ...
And that would be an unlawful dispersal order. That's why the parent post specifically said, "... it is possible for police to issue a lawful dispersal order ..." (emphasis added) in order to specifically speak to the point in question. Your example is clearly outside that purview, making your post merely argumentative rather than constructive.
If you believe an order to be unlawful, you are free to ignore it, and suffer the consequences until such time that the judicial system agrees with you or not. I have done so, and, fortunately for me, the consequences were not grave. A friend of mine did the same, at a different time, was subsequently arrested, but was later found to have been within his rights. The enlightened reader will understand that when the enforcement arm of our society issues a directive, not abiding by that directive has potentially serious implications, completely independent of the lawfulness of the directive.
Let's put it simply: someone carrying a badge and a gun tells you to move. You don't. There's a very real possibility that you will get shot. Yes, it would be illegal for that to happen, but the reality is that you're still bleeding, and bleeding as a result of your choice to ignore the command. Or perhaps you're not bleeding, but you've been beaten about the head, or been arrested. Eventually the judicial system might catch up and rule in your favor, but that won't change the fact that you've been injured or detained.
Today is Feb 29, a leap day, that's why it's relevant. Tomorrow, it will be far less so.
I use LibreOffice frequently. The one misfeature that is beyond annoying is subscripts. They, subscripts, happen pretty frequently in my field, and there's a long-standing bug with LibreOffice / OpenOffice saving documents that have subscripts as DOC formatted files. LibreOffice / OpenOffice gets it wrong, just plain wrong. Sure, those folks did a pretty good job at reverse-engineering the file format, but holy dotted I, Batman it's enough to make the ganglia twitch on that one bug. Save the file as ODT, no problems. Save it as DOC, and the subscript formatting information gets thoroughly wonked, and. there. is. no. work-around., I. have. tried. frelling. everything. Since my documents are often collaborative efforts with other people who use MS Word, saving to anything other than DOC (or DOCX) is not a viable option. And that's one of the many reasons I have two computers on my desk: one runs Windows for a small handful of programs that only run properly under Windows, and one runs Linux for everything else.
And how many does say a ISP like comcast have doing that same thing?
For those who had an incredibly hard time parsing that sentence, what with it missing key pronouns and punctuation, here's a translated version:
And how many [staff members] does, say, a[n] ISP like [C]omcast have [responding to law enforcement requests]?
2001 has to be viewed in the context of its time when, specifically, the public's attention span was longer than 30 seconds. Moreover, much of the movie is trying to depict not story, but lack of story. The savanah scenes are there to show the apparently interminable stasis that existed for millenia prior to being shattered in the minutest of ways by the arrival of the obelisk, the tipping point of the evolution of primate toward man. How do you show stasis? Through scenes that, from today's generation used to sound bites and twitterisms, are interminable. How do you depict the incredible ennui of long-term space travel? Through scenes that depict seemingly vain attempts to occupy time. 30 seconds of Poole jogging would show how they exercise on the craft; you show him jogging and jogging and jogging, and the scenes carry deeper meaning, revealing more about life on Discovery One. A mark of great movie making is where the story is shown, not told.
That said, I still think the movie would be improved by editing down the star gate sequence from 20 minutes of psychedelia to perhaps 5 to 7 without losing the primary visual impact and while also retaning the key element of the story.
Also, while the movie stands on its own, it is one of the few that, being adapted from a novel rather than the other way around, enriched by reading the book.
I realize that these ideas are anathema to the current generation that needs to have continual, immediate sensory feedback, but, really, being able to pay attention for a full two hours to something and experience the intricacies and rich patterns over longer scales is a valuable skill that repays greatly.
The article suggests that that particular case (one involving child pornography observed on a laptop at a routne border check) would be more like: a cop walks past your open garage door and sees something that looks very much like a dead body. By the time he returns with a search warrant, the garage is closed and locked. The government has the testimony of a police officer that you have a dead body in your garage, but the physical evidence would make it a much stronger case.
So the government knows that something very illegal exists in your garage (or on your laptop), but doesn't know the details and doesn't have the physical evidence to present at trial. The ruling is that under such circumstances, you can be compelled to unlock your garage (or decrypt your laptop).
That's how I see it. Sure would be nice if someone with a J.D. could chime in.
For people who are not used to siestas, and visit a more civilized country where they are practiced, there's a wonderful, and powerful psychological effect that is especially valuable when, say, the visit is for a vacation: one's body thinks there are twice as many days!
While it would not surprise me that discarded cell phones form a significant waste stream, saying ...
There is of course actually one other source of rare earth metals in the USA — recycled cell phones.
suggests that there isn't any other source. More-or-less all electronics consumer goods have rare-earth materials in them, from TVs to computers, to stereos, to MP3 players, to microwave ovens, and so forth. Essentially anything that's going to have a circuit board in it is going to have rare-earth materials that might be re-processed. And we have all of those lovely landfills just waiting to be mined, too.
In the same vein, the summary suggests that cell phones are the only reason to think rare earths important when, again, every segment of the electronics manufacturing industry is wondering where they're going to get tantalum capacitors in the coming years.
>all that needs to be done is to tow the vehicle to a charger
Another claim was that the vehicles cannot be towed.
What car can't be towed by a flat-bed truck?
The answer: none.
Service from flat-bed tow trucks is generally more expensive (because they're much, much easier on your car since the car is riding entirely on the truck), but can be procured nearly everywhere. Flat-bed trucks are used to tow vehicles that are either nice enough that the owner is willing to pay the premium, or in bad enough shape that they cannot roll on two wheels with a wheel-lift / sling style truck. If I had a car as expesive as a Tesla, I'd sure as heck want it to be towed on a flat-bed.
Are normal computers radiation hardened?
Yes. They are hardened against the normal background radiation that is ubiquitous. That's why there's more-or-less a minimum amount of energy that's required to change a single storage bit, otherwise it gets flipped too easily by a stray alpha decay from the chip's packaging. We entered the era where packaging is made from low-radiation materials some time ago to help with this, but it only helps, since existenace here on Earth is bathed in a certain level of radiation.
That isn't to say normal chips are hardened against abnormal levels of radiation, but they most certainly are designed with a given level of anticipated background.
I do this all the time (at least, I use a spreadsheet program to open a CSV database). Why?
1. The spreadsheet is in CSV (read: ASCII), so when, not if, there are problems, I can fix them in two seconds in an editor.
2. A spreadsheet program is relatively fast compared to a database program.
3. A spreadsheet allows me to view all of my data in a relatively compact way.
4. The output of a database program is going to be a spreadsheet-friendly table anyway, except you have to cut-and-paste it into a spreadsheet to use it.
So, what are the advantages of using a DB? Only one: being able to specify a highly particular set of constraints to pick out a small subset of the records (using an arcane syntax that means the query is more likely than not to be incorrect). How often do I do that? Nearly never. Far more often I'm interested in sorting by a particular column, and spreadsheets do that just fine.
For a small business, using a CSV file as a database and a spreadsheet program as the interface works quite well.
and try to get them to transfer $1 billion worth of wealth in exchange for a $1 billion U.S. treasury bond
My guess is that they'd try to get them to transfer some lesser amount to make the deal more attractive, say $500 million worth of assets. What despot isn't desparate for more cash?
Having a single person take care of support issues is a great idea. There are lots of reasons I'd find that appealing, as a business customer (who are the majority of buyers getting HP Elite products).
The most appealing reason, though, would be that I'd communicate with one single person through a given service interaction -- which can often span multiple calls or emails. One of the most frustrating aspects of lowest-cost CS is that every interaction is handled by a different drone, so you end up answering the same question over and over and over again. This has the potential to quickly lead to very poor CS from the customer's viewpoint.
So, even assigning a given ticket to one drone for the life of the ticket would be a huge step forward. Huge. (And speaking with someone who claims their name is Bob, Richard, or Jane but is clearly from Bangalore because I can't frikken' understand a word they say ... well, that's also very poor CS. Maybe Elite product customers would also get a CS rep local to their country? That would be fantastic.)
We stopped getting bitcoin articles when Taco left.
Yeah, yeah, correlation is not causation ... but it sure is sufficient cause to suspect causation.
You've never had your carry-on bags searched after being x-rayed and put back through even though there was absolutely nothing suspicious in them? I fly enough that it happens to me ... not very often, but it definitely happens. I had wondered about that until I saw the presentation on false alarms, and then it made sense.
Same with the metal detector you walk through. There's undoubtedly an intentional level of uncertainty built in where it will beep at a certain rate no matter what the readings actually are, just to keep the agents moving around and alert. I have no direct evidence for that, however, and these days I'm always opting-out of the backscatter so get the extra-special-and-personal treatment no matter what the metal detector gate says.
Moreover, any plastic or (especially) glass lens you wear in a pair of frames will filter some-to-most of the UV even if the lens isn't specifically marketed to do that. Regular old glass filters out about 80% of UV. For polycarbonate (a/k/a CR-39, the standard eyeglass lens material), blocks nearly all of UVC, most of UVB, but passes much of UVA (blocks about 60%). Polycarbonate is often coated or treated with a UV-opaque dye for lenses that are marketed as UV-blocking.
Normally, the anterior anatomy of the eye, including the crystalline lens, blocks most of UVA, so having an artificial lens implanted and then not wearing glasses would make one sensitive to UVA, and possibly UVB. Given that it would be stimulating the S (short wavelength) pigments, it probably would look intensely blue, but I'd have to check the spectra of the L (long) and M (medium) pigments to be certain ... might just appear whiteish.
I swear they have a "beep anyway" button though, just to annoy you.
I've seen a presentation by a perceptual scientist who was doing a study for the TSA on false alarm rates (both false positive where they detect something that shouldn't have been detected, and false negatives where they miss something that should have been seen). It turns out that boredom in agents watching the scanner monitors is a serious problem and that if there aren't enough items to detect, the agents become complacent and the false negative rate goes up. False negatives result in serious security breaches, like guns getting on planes. Say what you like about the TSA, false negatives are a problem. So, according to this presentation, x-ray scanners have a mechanism to insert fictitious objects into the images to keep the agents sharp. That's why you get asked to go through your hand luggage every now and then even though there's absolutely nothing that could be considered suspicious: the false positive rate is raised so that the false negative rate can be reduced to near zero.
And, to bring this back to the quote above, this is, essentially, a "beep anyway" button, only it isn't under direct TSA staff control.
As pointed out, a 1% increase is not keeping pace with inflation, and is therefore a decrease in real dollars. The baked-in numbers for a typical grant allow approximately 3% year-to-year inflation, so 1% more money means every funded grant will see a reduction of 2% in buying power, on average (how would you feel about taking a 2% pay cut next year?). Also, since government agencies have already encumbered budgets for the most part (that is, most of their budget goes toward funding existing grants) a decrease in real dollars means it will become even HARDER to get a new grant in the future. It's already hit insane levels of difficulty to get an award: a given project can go from being evaluated near the top of the heap to don't-even-bother-us levels from one year to the next through the random, capricious nature of the review process (and I speak from hard experience on this). When only a few percent of grant applications are being funded, each selection is no longer purely a meritocratic decision. That is neither good for the US, nor for Science.
The idea of appearance creep happened when the US car manufacturers figured out that they could make boatloads of money by taking the same old mechanicals and putting a new body on top each year (back before unibody designs, when it was a trivial amount of engineering and manufacturing adjustments to create new body panels compared with making a completely new car design; nowadays with the body being an integral part of the structural scaffold, changing the appearance is not quite as easy). It happened in the 1950s, the age of prosperity and upward mobility, when the US middle class was created and the need to keep up with Jones firmly established in the national psyche. We, Americans, were told that we needed to buy, buy, buy and having the latest and greatest was always best.
I don't understand the problem. The status quo is maintained with the gay marriage too.
I've talked to a number of people about this, as parts of my family are against same-sex marriage. Me, I don't care. But the people who do claim that allowing same-sex marriage dilutes the meaning of marriage, something that was heretofore only allowed between heterosexual couples. While I understand the argument in a strict technical sense, given that a far greater threat to the meaning of marriage comes from the rampant divorce rate, I don't see the reason to get all huffed about it. Especially since, ultimately, the blessing by some large institution, be it the state or a religious order, has no real bearing on whether the two members of couple are committed to each other or not.
So, to re-iterate, people who are against gay marriage (at least some of them) think that expanding the definition of marriage is not maintaining the status quo because it changes the idea.
If you want to get your head all twisted, though, have a look at Sharia marriage law. Nothing like the Western stuff we're talking about here, and a much deeper challenge to the status quo.