Interesting idea that by providing a cutoff of any kind that involves subjective judgement, you're enabling unwarranted discrimination. We actually do want a certain kind of discimination here, so that those under the legal age are not served alcohol, but, if I understand the argument, you're suggesting that because the person behind the bar must decide on subjective grounds whom to ask for identification, there's potential for abuse. Perhaps valid, but I don't think it explains the incrementalism that's happened over the last 20 years.
They blanket ban these things because they don't trust their employees to be intelligent enough to recognize the difference between a dangerous weapon and a bottle of shampoo or Coke.
Yes, and we see the same thing with the incremental proof of age at bars. First, it was left up to the judgement of the bartender. Then, policies were enacted that anyone who looked under 30 were blanket carded. Then 40. Now, at the airport bar at IAD owned by a large chain brewery, I happened to visit last week, they proudly announce that they require proof from everyone.
I am at present old enough that a hypothetical offspring of mine, born when I first became eligible to legally consume alcohol in the US, also would be above the legal age to drink. No one in their right mind would think I might be under 21. And yet because this congolmerate does not trust its employees (or, perhaps more accurately, does not pay its employees enough to be able to hire trustworthy ones), it annoys and alienates a certain fraction of its clientele. People are no longer required or expected to take personal responsibility for their actions, and it saddens me, for it surely is a harbinger of the decline of Western Civilization.
Why should bitcoin be labelled as the most dangerous project ever, especially by someone as normally even-headed as Taco?
Here is a brief list of far more dangerous projects, where the danger is either to political stability or human life, in no particular order:
1. nuclear weaponry (two smallish bombs caused the unconditional surrender of a decent sized country, and has caused the rest of the world to spend trillions upon trillions of dollars to maintain parity since then)
2. biological weaponry (the appropriate dispersal of appropriate agents, like smallpox or Spanish Influenza, could decimate the world population)
3. chemical weaponry (the appropriate dispersal of appropriate agents could kill an entire city, and thus easily lead to the collapse of a government)
4. rockets (a basis for nearly all modern warfare)
5. inertial guidance systems (ditto)
6. GPS (ditto)
7. hydrocarbon-fueled turbine engines (ditto)
Notice a pattern there? They're all implements of warfare. Those are dangerous things. Those are things that kill people.
That said, I've read a number of pundits who are now suggesting that the large WikiLeaks document release ultimately triggered the pan-Arab unrest we are currently seeing. That's a heapload of powerful mojo.
Every molecule has a unique absorption frequency. So long as you can identify what absorbption bands are present - very very accurately - you're 99% of the way there.
I worked on a system like this for determining the concentrations of various pollutants in an exhaust stream from industrial smoke stacks. Even though we work only looking for a very small handful of gasses, it was a very hard problem and our solution never really worked very well.
It suffered because of the problem that while every molecule has a unique spectrum of absorption frequencies (saying it is only one frequency is highly over-simplified), unless you have molecules in near isolation (ie, in highly rareified gasses) and the molecules are nice and small, the absorption spectra are quite broad. Now throw in the fact that in a living creature, you have gazillions of different molecules, many of which will be unknown, and the problem becomes intractable because it's underconstrained.
As a 34 year old dealing with the health issues and the ridiculous costs that let me breathe, digest my food, and not be knocked on my butt by blood sugar spikes, I'm excited by this. Goes to show that sometimes we just need some fresh thought at a new problem - the traditional, mega-millions research methods may not be the answer. (similar to Space-X:: NASA)
Uhm, this kid -- talented though he may be -- was doing a summer project in a regular old lab (run by Dr. Christine Bear, at the Hospital for Sick Children's Research Institute, according to the article) that was, according to their web site, funded by Canadian and US governments and private foundations. More importantly, it would appear to be the very essence of incremental research to think that one might try combining two effective drugs together to see if the combination works better. That's not what I would call a ground-breaking, radical new idea; combination therapy is so common that we have a nifty term for it (that is, "combination therapy"). This is traditional, and effective, research.
I've mentored a few of projects like these in my lab, and, when I was younger, participated in a couple myself. Sometimes the students are really smart and do a lot of independent work, and sometimes they are spoon fed the entire way. But, again in my experience, all of the major ideas are entirely provided to them. High school students really don't have enough experience to understand what the big questions are; that's the role of a lab head. Kudos to this kid, for sure, but saying that it's a new fresh perspective, or some non-traditional methodology, is probably off the mark.
Although people seem amazed about this, it's not the first time that this has happened.
Back in '98, I worked on a network where it was against Government regulations to connect it in any way to the Internet, and an 'air gap' was required between the two. I was one of a very small team that wrote a system (using Zip disks for storage) that pulled data from a mail server on our secure network and pushed it to a mail server on the Internet, and vice versa. It had very high latency - people were assigned to do the mail drop only twice a day - but it worked well.
My understanding is that in Victorian England, the Royal Mail made hourly deliveries daily to The City (the central-most part of London), and it was entirely possible to carry on a conversation through the day via post, rather like we do today via email. The point here is that nominally the latency in a conversation is not always dominated by the delivery method, but rather the delays associated with being away from one's desk for meetings, coffee, lunch, events, seminars, errands, flirting with the cute receptionist downstairs, etc., performing work unrelated to reading email, in addition to the time it takes to compose replies to received messages. How often do you manage to get 3 or more back-and-forth cycles on an email thread with someone in one day? Yes, it happens, but probably not that often for most correspondence. It was readily possible in London over 100 years ago!
He could gain a large amount of storage volume (and make one wall easier to move) if he ripped all of this CDs and DVDs. Since storage in such a small apartment is going to be at a substantial premium, I'm a little surprised that he didn't do that yet.
Hmm... You've heard of this invention from the early 1900s called Television? It defines the idea of a one-way data stream and despite your implications that it would be a limited marked, managed to make heaping metric tons of money.
Mostly- or only-consumption devices are not just a good marketing idea, they will continue to be the *biggest* marketing idea. One- or few-to-many will forever be the largest market. The Internet took a while to start swinging in that direction, but it's definitely heading that way.
Automobile emission control systems (and, broadly interpreted, that includes the drivetrain) have an EPA-mandated 10 year / 100,000 mile warranty in the USA. That would mean the car you bought 9 years 11 months and 30 days ago still makes you a current customer.
Owning something that will be supported or last for only 2 years? I try to avoid that if possible.
When I heard about the treasure trove of intelligence recovered it instantly struck me: that's the real reason there was a raid with boots on the ground rather than a bomb. DNA can be recovered from a bombed site with sufficient effort. Intelligence in the form of computerized or printed records is not so readily recoverable.
I don't keep medical bills or documents, because I trust my doctors to keep an accurate medical record. And even if they fail to do so, I don't see a strong reason to care about that.
Seriously, are you trolling, or being intentionally thick? Not everything can be entirely characterized by the current state, including many diseases. Your current weight, for example, is insufficient to diagnose cancer, but a recent weight loss is a strong indicator if you can objectively quantify it. You've started jogging recently and feel chest pains; without understanding that you've made similar complaints 10 years ago, your PCP would order up a large battery of unnecessary tests. You're a woman and your second pregnancy blood tests indicate unusual thyroid hormone levels. Not knowing that the same pattern appeared in your first pregnancy without additional causation, your new endocrinologist might unnecessarily radioablate your throid requiring you to take hormone replacements for the remainder of your life. Your childhood medical records indicate a minor allergic reaction to certain antibiotics, but you forgot about the episode they document, your current PCP does not have your records from that long ago, and now you get an infection. Since your immune system was sensitized so many years ago, it now reacts to the same antibiotics in a life-threatening way. Should I continue? Your health is not based solely on your body's instantaneous state, and treatments definitely should not be.
Your doctor may or may not keep accurate records, and may or may not keep them for as long as you would like, and may or may not communicate these records to your next PCP. Your next PCP may or may not keep them. Does your current PCP have your entire medical history? You certain about that?
Pull up your pants, realize that you have a vested interest in the job, and buy more memory. Taking a couple of guesses as to the hardware, you'll probably spend something like $80 to get 2GB new, or $20-$30 used. Just be certain you spec out which memory your box takes and buy exactly the right one.
If you can get reimbursed for the memory purchase, great, otherwise deduct it on your taxes as an unreimbursed employee expense. If you buy used memory, that's about as much as beer on a cheap night out, so don't whine about the expense if it's going to make your job easier.
Hmm. Interesting that you would say so. Positives were routinely retouched and then shot onto internegatives that were then re-shot onto a print. For a properly shot interneg, you cannot tell that it was not a shot of the original image (as opposed to a dupe).
So, is it then the socially responsible thing to provide free access to my other basic services, too? Is the EFF suggesting that I need to provide a series of power outlets outside my house, so that people can share that? And a sink and toilet as well? Should I be sharing my heating/cooling too?
Please. Get a grip. I pay for the services just mentioned, just like I pay for internet access. If someone wants the same services, then they have to figure out how to pay for them themselves.
One of my parents is a clinical school psychologist. The IQ test in its various forms is used exactly as the parent post describes: to assess development and learning ability, and, importantly, to help identify problems. There is a relatively large battery of test and they are extremely well studied. The frequent and fashionable aspersions we see cast against the IQ are fun, but they come from a short-sighted vantage point that ignores the tremendous utility they present. No single test is a perfect measure of behavior, which is why there are many, many of them, each with a battery of questions and tasks. Measuring behavior is an inherently difficult problem beacuse humans are so unpredictable: Psychologists as a whole understand this.
Ultimately the problem with IQ is the public perception of it, rather than the scientific utility. The latter cannot be argued against, no matter what any single individual might have anecdotally experienced. The arguments with the public perception will rage on unabated until the scientific field takes great pains to re-educate the masses, something that nearly every field utterly fails at.
The devices are installed by vendors that typically receive about 40 percent of the payout on each ticket
In this neck of the woods, that would be called a conflict of interest. If I were caught in such a situation in my professional work, it would be grounds for dismissal without recourse.
It's great that the Phillies sponsored a Science Day at the ballpark.
And the robot is a pretty cool part of that -- but given that the pitch didn't get even close to being over the plate, I wonder if the students working on the project ran out of time to get things working well for the demo?
An excess concentration of sugar outside the cell wall creates a deficit in the partial pressure of water that will want to be equalized by the water inside the cell wall. This force generates a dehydrating action that, if the concentration of sugar is high enough, can be very powerful. That's why jams, jellies, and syrups don't go bad in just a day or two unlike, say, chicken soup. Any living organism that lands on the surface of sugar preserves is dessicated sufficiently that it dies.
But that's not the mechanism of toxicity postulated in the original posting which, if I understand the argument, ultimately is that the large sudden load of fructose generated by soft drinks is not handled well by the liver.
The user ID "jddorian" is a fictional character on the US TV program Scrubs.
No head of department at any hospital or university I have been associated with would have had the time in their career to be more than passingly conversant on computer IT issues, forget know about ports. Heads of departments get to those positions only because they do nothing else with their lives.
A head of department would know better than to set up something themselves. They wouldn't also have the time to do something like that. They would be familiar with the idea that the hospital IT infrastructure is far more highly managed than normal corporate IT structures.
And, unless this is a seriously podunk hospital, they likely already run Microsoft Exchange for email, and so have electronic calenders.
Interestingly enough, some experts say terrorists are much more likely to avoid confrontations with authorities, saying an al-Qaeda training manual instructs members to blend in."
No kidding. As someone trying to evade detection in a crowd I could (a) do something that draws attention, or (b) try to be as unremarkable as possible and take steps to make any interaction dull and quickly forgotten. The first is more likely to bring the authorities my way, and the second is less likely. So... let's see... I'm going to... wait, wait, don't tell me... I'll pick... um...
(Warning, this post contains high concentrations of sarcasm. Use with appropriate caution.)
I also notice much of my latency is due to DNS lookup. I've never understood why DNS lookups aren't locally cached by default. Even a cache with a 10-minute timeout would speed things up a lot (and, really, how often does any web site change their IP address?).
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting idea that by providing a cutoff of any kind that involves subjective judgement, you're enabling unwarranted discrimination. We actually do want a certain kind of discimination here, so that those under the legal age are not served alcohol, but, if I understand the argument, you're suggesting that because the person behind the bar must decide on subjective grounds whom to ask for identification, there's potential for abuse. Perhaps valid, but I don't think it explains the incrementalism that's happened over the last 20 years.
They blanket ban these things because they don't trust their employees to be intelligent enough to recognize the difference between a dangerous weapon and a bottle of shampoo or Coke.
Yes, and we see the same thing with the incremental proof of age at bars. First, it was left up to the judgement of the bartender. Then, policies were enacted that anyone who looked under 30 were blanket carded. Then 40. Now, at the airport bar at IAD owned by a large chain brewery, I happened to visit last week, they proudly announce that they require proof from everyone.
I am at present old enough that a hypothetical offspring of mine, born when I first became eligible to legally consume alcohol in the US, also would be above the legal age to drink. No one in their right mind would think I might be under 21. And yet because this congolmerate does not trust its employees (or, perhaps more accurately, does not pay its employees enough to be able to hire trustworthy ones), it annoys and alienates a certain fraction of its clientele. People are no longer required or expected to take personal responsibility for their actions, and it saddens me, for it surely is a harbinger of the decline of Western Civilization.
Why should bitcoin be labelled as the most dangerous project ever, especially by someone as normally even-headed as Taco?
Here is a brief list of far more dangerous projects, where the danger is either to political stability or human life, in no particular order:
1. nuclear weaponry (two smallish bombs caused the unconditional surrender of a decent sized country, and has caused the rest of the world to spend trillions upon trillions of dollars to maintain parity since then)
2. biological weaponry (the appropriate dispersal of appropriate agents, like smallpox or Spanish Influenza, could decimate the world population)
3. chemical weaponry (the appropriate dispersal of appropriate agents could kill an entire city, and thus easily lead to the collapse of a government)
4. rockets (a basis for nearly all modern warfare)
5. inertial guidance systems (ditto)
6. GPS (ditto)
7. hydrocarbon-fueled turbine engines (ditto)
Notice a pattern there? They're all implements of warfare. Those are dangerous things. Those are things that kill people.
That said, I've read a number of pundits who are now suggesting that the large WikiLeaks document release ultimately triggered the pan-Arab unrest we are currently seeing. That's a heapload of powerful mojo.
Every molecule has a unique absorption frequency. So long as you can identify what absorbption bands are present - very very accurately - you're 99% of the way there.
I worked on a system like this for determining the concentrations of various pollutants in an exhaust stream from industrial smoke stacks. Even though we work only looking for a very small handful of gasses, it was a very hard problem and our solution never really worked very well.
It suffered because of the problem that while every molecule has a unique spectrum of absorption frequencies (saying it is only one frequency is highly over-simplified), unless you have molecules in near isolation (ie, in highly rareified gasses) and the molecules are nice and small, the absorption spectra are quite broad. Now throw in the fact that in a living creature, you have gazillions of different molecules, many of which will be unknown, and the problem becomes intractable because it's underconstrained.
As a 34 year old dealing with the health issues and the ridiculous costs that let me breathe, digest my food, and not be knocked on my butt by blood sugar spikes, I'm excited by this. Goes to show that sometimes we just need some fresh thought at a new problem - the traditional, mega-millions research methods may not be the answer. (similar to Space-X :: NASA)
Uhm, this kid -- talented though he may be -- was doing a summer project in a regular old lab (run by Dr. Christine Bear, at the Hospital for Sick Children's Research Institute, according to the article) that was, according to their web site, funded by Canadian and US governments and private foundations. More importantly, it would appear to be the very essence of incremental research to think that one might try combining two effective drugs together to see if the combination works better. That's not what I would call a ground-breaking, radical new idea; combination therapy is so common that we have a nifty term for it (that is, "combination therapy"). This is traditional, and effective, research.
I've mentored a few of projects like these in my lab, and, when I was younger, participated in a couple myself. Sometimes the students are really smart and do a lot of independent work, and sometimes they are spoon fed the entire way. But, again in my experience, all of the major ideas are entirely provided to them. High school students really don't have enough experience to understand what the big questions are; that's the role of a lab head. Kudos to this kid, for sure, but saying that it's a new fresh perspective, or some non-traditional methodology, is probably off the mark.
Although people seem amazed about this, it's not the first time that this has happened.
Back in '98, I worked on a network where it was against Government regulations to connect it in any way to the Internet, and an 'air gap' was required between the two. I was one of a very small team that wrote a system (using Zip disks for storage) that pulled data from a mail server on our secure network and pushed it to a mail server on the Internet, and vice versa. It had very high latency - people were assigned to do the mail drop only twice a day - but it worked well.
My understanding is that in Victorian England, the Royal Mail made hourly deliveries daily to The City (the central-most part of London), and it was entirely possible to carry on a conversation through the day via post, rather like we do today via email. The point here is that nominally the latency in a conversation is not always dominated by the delivery method, but rather the delays associated with being away from one's desk for meetings, coffee, lunch, events, seminars, errands, flirting with the cute receptionist downstairs, etc., performing work unrelated to reading email, in addition to the time it takes to compose replies to received messages. How often do you manage to get 3 or more back-and-forth cycles on an email thread with someone in one day? Yes, it happens, but probably not that often for most correspondence. It was readily possible in London over 100 years ago!
He could gain a large amount of storage volume (and make one wall easier to move) if he ripped all of this CDs and DVDs. Since storage in such a small apartment is going to be at a substantial premium, I'm a little surprised that he didn't do that yet.
Hmm... You've heard of this invention from the early 1900s called Television? It defines the idea of a one-way data stream and despite your implications that it would be a limited marked, managed to make heaping metric tons of money.
Mostly- or only-consumption devices are not just a good marketing idea, they will continue to be the *biggest* marketing idea. One- or few-to-many will forever be the largest market. The Internet took a while to start swinging in that direction, but it's definitely heading that way.
Depends on the warranty, no?
Automobile emission control systems (and, broadly interpreted, that includes the drivetrain) have an EPA-mandated 10 year / 100,000 mile warranty in the USA. That would mean the car you bought 9 years 11 months and 30 days ago still makes you a current customer.
Owning something that will be supported or last for only 2 years? I try to avoid that if possible.
When I heard about the treasure trove of intelligence recovered it instantly struck me: that's the real reason there was a raid with boots on the ground rather than a bomb. DNA can be recovered from a bombed site with sufficient effort. Intelligence in the form of computerized or printed records is not so readily recoverable.
I don't keep medical bills or documents, because I trust my doctors to keep an accurate medical record. And even if they fail to do so, I don't see a strong reason to care about that.
Seriously, are you trolling, or being intentionally thick? Not everything can be entirely characterized by the current state, including many diseases. Your current weight, for example, is insufficient to diagnose cancer, but a recent weight loss is a strong indicator if you can objectively quantify it. You've started jogging recently and feel chest pains; without understanding that you've made similar complaints 10 years ago, your PCP would order up a large battery of unnecessary tests. You're a woman and your second pregnancy blood tests indicate unusual thyroid hormone levels. Not knowing that the same pattern appeared in your first pregnancy without additional causation, your new endocrinologist might unnecessarily radioablate your throid requiring you to take hormone replacements for the remainder of your life. Your childhood medical records indicate a minor allergic reaction to certain antibiotics, but you forgot about the episode they document, your current PCP does not have your records from that long ago, and now you get an infection. Since your immune system was sensitized so many years ago, it now reacts to the same antibiotics in a life-threatening way. Should I continue? Your health is not based solely on your body's instantaneous state, and treatments definitely should not be.
Your doctor may or may not keep accurate records, and may or may not keep them for as long as you would like, and may or may not communicate these records to your next PCP. Your next PCP may or may not keep them. Does your current PCP have your entire medical history? You certain about that?
Pull up your pants, realize that you have a vested interest in the job, and buy more memory. Taking a couple of guesses as to the hardware, you'll probably spend something like $80 to get 2GB new, or $20-$30 used. Just be certain you spec out which memory your box takes and buy exactly the right one.
If you can get reimbursed for the memory purchase, great, otherwise deduct it on your taxes as an unreimbursed employee expense. If you buy used memory, that's about as much as beer on a cheap night out, so don't whine about the expense if it's going to make your job easier.
Hmm. Interesting that you would say so. Positives were routinely retouched and then shot onto internegatives that were then re-shot onto a print. For a properly shot interneg, you cannot tell that it was not a shot of the original image (as opposed to a dupe).
So, is it then the socially responsible thing to provide free access to my other basic services, too? Is the EFF suggesting that I need to provide a series of power outlets outside my house, so that people can share that? And a sink and toilet as well? Should I be sharing my heating/cooling too?
Please. Get a grip. I pay for the services just mentioned, just like I pay for internet access. If someone wants the same services, then they have to figure out how to pay for them themselves.
One of my parents is a clinical school psychologist. The IQ test in its various forms is used exactly as the parent post describes: to assess development and learning ability, and, importantly, to help identify problems. There is a relatively large battery of test and they are extremely well studied. The frequent and fashionable aspersions we see cast against the IQ are fun, but they come from a short-sighted vantage point that ignores the tremendous utility they present. No single test is a perfect measure of behavior, which is why there are many, many of them, each with a battery of questions and tasks. Measuring behavior is an inherently difficult problem beacuse humans are so unpredictable: Psychologists as a whole understand this.
Ultimately the problem with IQ is the public perception of it, rather than the scientific utility. The latter cannot be argued against, no matter what any single individual might have anecdotally experienced. The arguments with the public perception will rage on unabated until the scientific field takes great pains to re-educate the masses, something that nearly every field utterly fails at.
The devices are installed by vendors that typically receive about 40 percent of the payout on each ticket
In this neck of the woods, that would be called a conflict of interest. If I were caught in such a situation in my professional work, it would be grounds for dismissal without recourse.
It's great that the Phillies sponsored a Science Day at the ballpark.
And the robot is a pretty cool part of that -- but given that the pitch didn't get even close to being over the plate, I wonder if the students working on the project ran out of time to get things working well for the demo?
This is just an expensive toy
An expensive and dangerous toy! But so much fun!
I really do hate having to sell stuff, even my own work!
By relying on AdSense for income, you are selling your own work. Thinking otherwise is allowing yourself a convenient illusion.
An excess concentration of sugar outside the cell wall creates a deficit in the partial pressure of water that will want to be equalized by the water inside the cell wall. This force generates a dehydrating action that, if the concentration of sugar is high enough, can be very powerful. That's why jams, jellies, and syrups don't go bad in just a day or two unlike, say, chicken soup. Any living organism that lands on the surface of sugar preserves is dessicated sufficiently that it dies.
But that's not the mechanism of toxicity postulated in the original posting which, if I understand the argument, ultimately is that the large sudden load of fructose generated by soft drinks is not handled well by the liver.
The OP is a troll.
The user ID "jddorian" is a fictional character on the US TV program Scrubs.
No head of department at any hospital or university I have been associated with would have had the time in their career to be more than passingly conversant on computer IT issues, forget know about ports. Heads of departments get to those positions only because they do nothing else with their lives.
A head of department would know better than to set up something themselves. They wouldn't also have the time to do something like that. They would be familiar with the idea that the hospital IT infrastructure is far more highly managed than normal corporate IT structures.
And, unless this is a seriously podunk hospital, they likely already run Microsoft Exchange for email, and so have electronic calenders.
Troll. It's a troll.
I love stories like that that make you think, "holy frick, those people are good at what they do!"
Interestingly enough, some experts say terrorists are much more likely to avoid confrontations with authorities, saying an al-Qaeda training manual instructs members to blend in."
No kidding. As someone trying to evade detection in a crowd I could (a) do something that draws attention, or (b) try to be as unremarkable as possible and take steps to make any interaction dull and quickly forgotten. The first is more likely to bring the authorities my way, and the second is less likely. So ... let's see ... I'm going to ... wait, wait, don't tell me ... I'll pick ... um ...
(Warning, this post contains high concentrations of sarcasm. Use with appropriate caution.)
I also notice much of my latency is due to DNS lookup. I've never understood why DNS lookups aren't locally cached by default. Even a cache with a 10-minute timeout would speed things up a lot (and, really, how often does any web site change their IP address?).
I believe that 12 mSv is 0.012 Sv, not 0.12 Sv as stated.