I would sooner believe this is just a palatable compromise to some govt officials. Plenty of people in the US govt know about proxies, since we, um, use them ourselves. But perhaps members of congress don't realize how easy it is to circumvent, so it sounds pretty good to them. So we get to look like we're taking a hard line against Iran, without actually having to take a hard line.
Proxies are a difficult concept. Taking your laptop to a different location (home, cafe, friend's work) is easy since, I'd wager, most people with laptops already do it. While laptops might not be quite as ubiquitous in Middle Eastern governments than in the US government, I'd expect to see enough of them to effectively neuter this restriction. And that's for the naive politicians who have never heard of a proxy. Motivated IT folks are another matter entirely.
I was in Istanbul (technically not the Middle East, but close enough for the current argument) about ten years ago, and, at the local market there, was able to purchase pre-release versions of all of the latest western-authored software for the equivalent of USD 1 per CD (USD 2 per DVD, if memory serves). Not the current released versions (those were available too), but alpha and beta versions of unreleased packages from Adobe, AutoDesk, Microsoft, etc. This is from young Turkish kids motivated only by pocket money. I'd expect even more from a professional Iranian governmental IT staff motivated by their superiors.
So, now I'm leaning even further away from naivete and toward propaganda.
This is either astonishingly naive, or propaganda. I can't quite figure out which.
From the US Government, I would believe naivete, given any of a large collection of equivalent moves that are demonstrably idiotic.
From Google, I have a hard time accepting that they aren't smart enough to understand the very many ways that IP-based restrictions can be circumvented by anyone more talented than a sixth -- no, wait -- fourth grader. This is Google we're talking about who have brought us a large number of amazing things that require lots and lots of smarts to implement, and "Hey Muhammed, go to the internet cafe around the corner with this laptop and download Google Earth, please, the US pigs have blocked our government IP address," is something that will occur to the people there. So, Google must be doing this with a wink in order to either further some political agenda, or increase their customer base. Since I am not aware of any political agenda, I'm leaning toward greed. Propaganda either way.
So naivite from the US, and propaganda from Google. Anyone have evidence to the contrary?
After 50-odd years of people taping new releases off the radio, they've finally got their heads around the idea that releasing them for sale at the same time means that people will buy singles while they still like them. Now they just need to realise that people don't really buy singles any more...
Hmm. Someone ought to tell the folks over at iTunes that their business model isn't actually working, despite record profits because people don't buy singles.
Ok, sarcasm off. I think the deeper message here is that with Google, you can *measure* the actual demand, rather than guess. Turns out the classic guess of 6 weeks is wrong -- or, it may have been right back when the business process of setting up a single was invented -- and they know this only because there are good tools to measure what seems like a reasonable proxy for purchasing demand. That's an impressive step forward in progress, I'd say, and a huge win for Google. I'd like to know how much Sony paid for that information, because it is highly valuable to them.
But, if the idea of allowing interest to build up is an inherently good one (and the article does not cover that), then it would seem like the best time to release a single for purchase would be when the interest is just before or at its peak. So why release immediately, rather than after 10 to 14 days when the interest is highest?
When most people say the word, "glass," they mean something that's usually clear, usually brittle, usually an electrical insulator, has poor thermal conductivity, and is mostly impervious to solvents. Stuff like what's used to make windowpanes and drinking glasses. The main material in these is silicon dioxide (SiO2), and the "glass" refers to the fact that it is not a crystal, but an unordered solid. SiO2 crystals are called quartz. Note that most glass, using the vernacular meaning, is not microcrystalline, but truly unordered. This is what gives SiO2 glass, using the scientific meaning, some of its interesting properties, like the lack of a fixed melting point. Wax can often (not always, but often) be thought of as a hydrocarbon glass. Many plastics are also glasssy because they are amorphous at the molecular level as well.
The glass referred to in the article is a metallic glass, and is not transparent. The reason glassy metals are interesting is because of their unusual mechanical properties. The reason they are difficult to make is that when metal cools, it really, really, really likes to form crystals. The only way to get metals to form unordered glassy substances is to cool them extraordinarily quickly, essentially freezing each atom in its location from the liquid modality. Recent research, such as used in the linked article, has developed alloys that don't require extraordinary cooling rates, but still result in an unordered solid.
Nearly all audio hardware is AC coupled at interfaces, that is, there are DC blocking capacitors in serial with the output. Writing 0xFF will not produce V_max for an indefinite time but only for the period allowed by the filter characteristics of the final stage. Low-frequency cutoffs are typically in the range of 0.1 to 10 Hz.
The reason DC blocking capacitors are used is, among other things, to limit the output current since many loads are fundamentally resistive at low frequencies, and to limit the heat buildup in voice coils.
I think their idea of driving one of the audio channels at 22Khz, and converting that to DC for (a tiny amount of) power, is darned clever! This is "Hacking" in it's purest form! You are working completely within the parameters of the existing hardware, and yet doing stuff the original designers never intended. Bravo for creativity and inventiveness!
To borrow from Mr Spock; "Fascinating."
Clever, yes, but pretty standard stuff. There are lots of ICs that are so-called 2-wire: one wire is ground, and the other is power *and* bi-directional communication. Mostly the idea is that when sending a command to the remote IC, you end up toggling the data line enough times that it can provide crude power on the receiving side by rectification and capacitive filtering of the incoming signal in addition to digital decoding of the command. The power typically lasts just long enough for the remote IC to send the appropriate reply.
But then, to bring it a couple of generations back, old-style whisker AM radios work the same way: the power to drive the ear piece is actually coming from the radio signal.
That this is more of a "make-work" project than anything else. Last shuttle flight is coming up, then everyone goes home. What better way to give them all a 3 month bonus than to find some previously-undiscovered issue.
These aerospace materials are extensively tested, analyzed and inspected. Paperwork with melt number, lot number and names of everyone that ever touched the material are kept.
Decide for yourself...
And the wife of the fellow who is scheduled to fly the final mission just got shot in the head very publicly by an American terrorist. Personally, I'm OK with NASA stretching out their schedule 3 months, if that's all this is, in order to allow the captain to fly as planned.
Then people there should be working for meager salaries (to extend the non-profitable period), and lots of stock options.
The soon-to-be-ex-employees are working for salary only, not stock options. Didn't you read the summary?
Didn't you read my posting? See the first two sentences in that paragraph? The gist was pretty clearly two hypothetical assertions and a conclusion. The implication, to spell it out for you, is that things need to change in his company. They also need to be earning *less* since they're currently earning industry standard wages, or did you miss that part, too?
Seriously, don't make accusations about not reading if you haven't brushed up on your own reading comprehension skills.
I have to say, the most impressive/innovative tweak, to me, was the re-ordering of required functions in the compiled binary. Doing so allowed them to reduce load time, by making it that only two blocks had to be demand-read off the flash filesystem, instead of four.
That's some crazy, use-the-drum-spin-as-timing, innovative thinking right there. Serious kudos.
Most assuredly!
I realized these guys were serious when they talked about the bandwidth reading from flash vs. the bandwidth of boot image decompression. Kudos, indeed.
How do 10 to 11 hour days compare with the number of hours you are working now? How serious are you about your job?
In my field (academia), if you aren't putting in 12 hour days during the week, and 4 to 8 hour days on the weekends, you aren't going to make it to the top. Burn out? If you do, you will be leaving academia.
I've been tangentially associated with two startups, and have observed many started by my colleagues who decided to leave academia. They have similar work patterns, except that they also get ownership stakes; in academia, the rewards are mostly intangible.
Both of those examples (me, and the folks I've know from startups) are for people that are serious about their work. The startups I'm familiar with are all worth at least USD 50 million (one is in the Fortune 300... that one was started by my father and his friends -- I hear stories of how hard they worked, and growing up I saw how my father was in his lab on weekends, every weekend).
So, do you want your startup to be successful? Does it realistically have a chance? Then people there should be working for meager salaries (to extend the non-profitable period), and lots of stock options.
after several generations you'd have a new species
For large values of several.
Idiot.
Actually the number isn't that large before selective breeding can induce substantial changes (about 10 to domesticate wild foxes), and we've seen recent results that suggest the Lamarckian ideas of acquired traits is not without merit (if you hadn't been keeping up, the basic idea is that while DNA determines most of the inherited traits, the epigenetic stuff -- the molecules that surround the DNA and determine things like which genes are activated can be modified by parental experience and passed to the offspring -- has an influence as well). Since low gravity is a huge change in environment, it would not surprise me to see that 3rd or 4th generation humans bred on Mars would be really, really different from their Terrestrial ancestors. They certainly would have different skeletons. It also, for the same reasons, wouldn't surprise me if the lifetime for native-borns changed as well, heart disease was completely different, cancer rates were different, etc.
So, based on just the actions of the program, it has only a 45/207 = 22% success rate. Still not what I would call stellar, nor something that would be expected to survive a budget tightening.
And, it would seem, the 800,000 missing children figure is an inflated number that is used for its ability to induce fear. Note that 800,000 children per year is about 0.3% (rounding) of the US population. My home town has 25,000 people in it; that would mean there are 75 missing children per year in that town. Assuming the demographic profile of that town is nominal, and therefore about 25% of the population is 18 or under (6250 children total), that means 12% of all children go missing every year. That's very hard to believe.
Yeah seriously, wtf is wrong with betterunixthanunix? That's many lives saved and helped and all he does is complain. At least someone is actually doing something, unlike him.
I too was surprised at the low success rate. That's not even 0.1%. In what other field would such an abyssmal rate be considered successful? Are there perhaps better ways we, as a society, could be spending that money? No, I don't have any ideas, as I've only just now learned how ineffective the program is. Yes, 525 is better than zero, but why isn't that 525,000? What's the limiting factor?
My day job got me a cell phone. It is cheaper than the landline I used to have, and it's much more useful, as it also lets me keep up on email and meetings.
Cheaper than your retail landline at home, sure. But cheaper than the landline you had at your office which was probably at bulk commercial rates? Really?
I think the deeper answer is that the State of California no longer wants to subsidise the personal calls of its employees after hours.
But socking away every extra dollar? That will put you firmly into the camps of those who will be *screwed* first by the economic tidal wave.
Only if you aren't putting your money in safe places. With unemployment at nearly 10% in the US and worse in some European countries, the risk of losing one's job is high. Secure, liquid savings are the way to go at present.
I'll reply to you to address all the "save the $" and "6 mo CD" comments.
I've already set aside >2x the amount I'm willing to spend on this "treat", plus payed some debt down.
This exercise is trying to maximize the remaining bang-for-the-buck.
Then pay the rest of your debt down (from your phrasing, you've implied that there is more). Unless you have debt that's at nearly zero interest rate, you should FIRST BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE pay down debt. You will almost never get a better interest rate in savings / secure investment than the interest rate on your debt (there are exceptions naturally, but in general this is true). Therefore, putting money into savings instead of paying off debt is a guaranteed way to lose money. Pay off debt first. Then put money into savings.
I would would not slice more than 1/10th off the bonus to buy something fun. Besides, paying off debt will make you feel much, much better than any toy, and the feeling lasts longer.
1. If you already have an IRA, put it there. 2. If you don't already have an IRA, open one with your bonus. 3. If you are allergic to IRAs (or live outside the US), put your bonus in the highest yield savings / checking account you can find (yeah, I know the yields are terrible, but something is definitely better than nothing). 4. If the bonus is big enough to slice of a small amount to have a nice treat, only then buy something as ephemeral as a tablet.
The economy still is in serious recovery mode. You should be saving and investing right now.
The gorilla illusion is not the same. That's an illusion based on the limitations of our attention; it is not a change illusion.
Fair point about reading the paper. I've downloaded and done a quick first read-through. If you look at Figure 1, they show the results for the four different kinds of change they tested, hue, luminance, size, and shape. The first two are more readily interpreted as apparent motion when the changes are slow. Their results show that the first two illusions are more susceptible to interference from the rocking motion. Watching all four movies shows that the first two (hue and luminance) have a definite apparent motion component with clockwise rotation, that the other two illusions lack. At least to my viewing.
They've done a very good job, and I would have believed the paper more if I hadn't seen the illusion. They've measured a definite interference between real motion and something, but the something has been confounded by apparent motion.
IAAVN (I am a Visual Neuroscientist). It's a compelling illusion. I have not read the original paper, but will speculate nevertheless in true Slashdot fashion. The change that's perceived before the ring rotates is not so much due to the colors changing -- if you pay close attention -- but something that's called apparent motion. The classic example of apparent motion is the sequencing of lights around a movie marquis -- they appear to move, although the lights themselves are not actually moving. In the same way, the static ring has internal apparent motion as the colors change, because your brain is interpreting, for example, one dot turning yellow next to a dot that was previously yellow, as motion of a yellow dot, even though the underlying dots do not move. While apparent motion can be very strong, it is not the same as true motion.
Then, when the ring starts to rock back and forth, there is a true motion signal that swamps the apparent motion. If you pay attention to a given dot while holding your gaze still fixed at the central white point (not as hard as it sounds), you can clearly still see the colors changing.
So without having read the paper, I reserve some skepticism that they have not actually measured what they think they have. Change is still perceptible, but it would seem that real motion interferes with apparent motion.
Although you purport to be a neuroscientist, you clearly indicate that you have no idea how the vaccines were/are administered.
Ah, the magic of Slashdot where people, even those with UIDs nearly an order of magnitude larger than mine, feel free to be insulting.
You mis-read my post. I never said that preservatives were not necessary, but that there was no explanation given as to, "why thimerosal (the mercury presevative used in vaccines) was used as opposed to the raft of other potential presevatives." See that last part?
Paraphrasing your post, while you purport to understand what I wrote, you clearly indicate your reading comprehension skills are woefully inadequate.
Mercury's not good for you, heavy metals aren't good for you, but it's rather incomprehensible it would cause autism.
Agreed, but as continued research has shown for lead, for example, there are quantifiable effects to subclinical exposure. There are definite personality changes that go along with lead levels that are lower than those that cause traditional lead poisoning. Current, although perhaps still controversial, thought is that this is what causes many elderly individuals to become disagreeable: lead and other heavy metals are deposited in the bones, and as the bones de-ossify during the later stages of life those deposits are released into the bloodstream at low levels. It is also implicated in macular degeneration. Here are two references: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=838447 and http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=22174578
The levels necessary for this kind of shift are much lower than normally thought of for heavy metal poisoning, and since exposure accumulates, it seems prudent to avoid any unnecessary ingestion of mercury, lead, or other heavy metals. The amount of mercury in an injection does seem too small to cause autism, but that does not mean it should be thought of as benign.
Seems to me that not taking a mercury-based substance is a good outcome, regardless of the other shenanigans.
Indeed. Although I've asked many, many health professionals, none could tell me why thimerosal (the mercury presevative used in vaccines) was used as opposed to the raft of other potential presevatives. Thimerosal is toxic in general to humans; it rapidly releases the bound mercury that then concentrates in the central nervous system and kidneys. Mercury, like other heavy metals, is a very serious neurotoxin.
Given that any exposure above zero to lead has slowly become recognized as hazardous, it baffles me why we should consciously be injecting a known neurotoxin into our bodies, or why so many health professionals (including my child's now former pediatrician) see thimerosal as benign.
For the nay-sayers, no, I don't eat tuna or other high-mercury fish, either, for the same reason. And, IAAN (I am a neuroscientist).
Far more likely its based on stolen US plans. This has previously happened several times in the past. The Russians are very well known for stealing US aircraft plans and making it their own.
Like the Soviet version of the US Space Shuttle with more than a passing similarity. Side-by-side you can see the differences but in isolation, without the CCCP insignia and red flag, most people would think the Buran was the Space Shutte.
Slashdot Mirror
I would sooner believe this is just a palatable compromise to some govt officials. Plenty of people in the US govt know about proxies, since we, um, use them ourselves. But perhaps members of congress don't realize how easy it is to circumvent, so it sounds pretty good to them. So we get to look like we're taking a hard line against Iran, without actually having to take a hard line.
Proxies are a difficult concept. Taking your laptop to a different location (home, cafe, friend's work) is easy since, I'd wager, most people with laptops already do it. While laptops might not be quite as ubiquitous in Middle Eastern governments than in the US government, I'd expect to see enough of them to effectively neuter this restriction. And that's for the naive politicians who have never heard of a proxy. Motivated IT folks are another matter entirely.
I was in Istanbul (technically not the Middle East, but close enough for the current argument) about ten years ago, and, at the local market there, was able to purchase pre-release versions of all of the latest western-authored software for the equivalent of USD 1 per CD (USD 2 per DVD, if memory serves). Not the current released versions (those were available too), but alpha and beta versions of unreleased packages from Adobe, AutoDesk, Microsoft, etc. This is from young Turkish kids motivated only by pocket money. I'd expect even more from a professional Iranian governmental IT staff motivated by their superiors.
So, now I'm leaning even further away from naivete and toward propaganda.
This is either astonishingly naive, or propaganda. I can't quite figure out which.
From the US Government, I would believe naivete, given any of a large collection of equivalent moves that are demonstrably idiotic.
From Google, I have a hard time accepting that they aren't smart enough to understand the very many ways that IP-based restrictions can be circumvented by anyone more talented than a sixth -- no, wait -- fourth grader. This is Google we're talking about who have brought us a large number of amazing things that require lots and lots of smarts to implement, and "Hey Muhammed, go to the internet cafe around the corner with this laptop and download Google Earth, please, the US pigs have blocked our government IP address," is something that will occur to the people there. So, Google must be doing this with a wink in order to either further some political agenda, or increase their customer base. Since I am not aware of any political agenda, I'm leaning toward greed. Propaganda either way.
So naivite from the US, and propaganda from Google. Anyone have evidence to the contrary?
After 50-odd years of people taping new releases off the radio, they've finally got their heads around the idea that releasing them for sale at the same time means that people will buy singles while they still like them. Now they just need to realise that people don't really buy singles any more...
Hmm. Someone ought to tell the folks over at iTunes that their business model isn't actually working, despite record profits because people don't buy singles.
Ok, sarcasm off. I think the deeper message here is that with Google, you can *measure* the actual demand, rather than guess. Turns out the classic guess of 6 weeks is wrong -- or, it may have been right back when the business process of setting up a single was invented -- and they know this only because there are good tools to measure what seems like a reasonable proxy for purchasing demand. That's an impressive step forward in progress, I'd say, and a huge win for Google. I'd like to know how much Sony paid for that information, because it is highly valuable to them.
But, if the idea of allowing interest to build up is an inherently good one (and the article does not cover that), then it would seem like the best time to release a single for purchase would be when the interest is just before or at its peak. So why release immediately, rather than after 10 to 14 days when the interest is highest?
When most people say the word, "glass," they mean something that's usually clear, usually brittle, usually an electrical insulator, has poor thermal conductivity, and is mostly impervious to solvents. Stuff like what's used to make windowpanes and drinking glasses. The main material in these is silicon dioxide (SiO2), and the "glass" refers to the fact that it is not a crystal, but an unordered solid. SiO2 crystals are called quartz. Note that most glass, using the vernacular meaning, is not microcrystalline, but truly unordered. This is what gives SiO2 glass, using the scientific meaning, some of its interesting properties, like the lack of a fixed melting point. Wax can often (not always, but often) be thought of as a hydrocarbon glass. Many plastics are also glasssy because they are amorphous at the molecular level as well.
The glass referred to in the article is a metallic glass, and is not transparent. The reason glassy metals are interesting is because of their unusual mechanical properties. The reason they are difficult to make is that when metal cools, it really, really, really likes to form crystals. The only way to get metals to form unordered glassy substances is to cool them extraordinarily quickly, essentially freezing each atom in its location from the liquid modality. Recent research, such as used in the linked article, has developed alloys that don't require extraordinary cooling rates, but still result in an unordered solid.
Nearly all audio hardware is AC coupled at interfaces, that is, there are DC blocking capacitors in serial with the output. Writing 0xFF will not produce V_max for an indefinite time but only for the period allowed by the filter characteristics of the final stage. Low-frequency cutoffs are typically in the range of 0.1 to 10 Hz.
The reason DC blocking capacitors are used is, among other things, to limit the output current since many loads are fundamentally resistive at low frequencies, and to limit the heat buildup in voice coils.
I think their idea of driving one of the audio channels at 22Khz, and converting that to DC for (a tiny amount of) power, is darned clever! This is "Hacking" in it's purest form! You are working completely within the parameters of the existing hardware, and yet doing stuff the original designers never intended. Bravo for creativity and inventiveness!
To borrow from Mr Spock; "Fascinating."
Clever, yes, but pretty standard stuff. There are lots of ICs that are so-called 2-wire: one wire is ground, and the other is power *and* bi-directional communication. Mostly the idea is that when sending a command to the remote IC, you end up toggling the data line enough times that it can provide crude power on the receiving side by rectification and capacitive filtering of the incoming signal in addition to digital decoding of the command. The power typically lasts just long enough for the remote IC to send the appropriate reply.
But then, to bring it a couple of generations back, old-style whisker AM radios work the same way: the power to drive the ear piece is actually coming from the radio signal.
That this is more of a "make-work" project than anything else. Last shuttle flight is coming up, then everyone goes home. What better way to give them all a 3 month bonus than to find some previously-undiscovered issue.
These aerospace materials are extensively tested, analyzed and inspected. Paperwork with melt number, lot number and names of everyone that ever touched the material are kept.
Decide for yourself...
And the wife of the fellow who is scheduled to fly the final mission just got shot in the head very publicly by an American terrorist. Personally, I'm OK with NASA stretching out their schedule 3 months, if that's all this is, in order to allow the captain to fly as planned.
The soon-to-be-ex-employees are working for salary only, not stock options. Didn't you read the summary?
Didn't you read my posting? See the first two sentences in that paragraph? The gist was pretty clearly two hypothetical assertions and a conclusion. The implication, to spell it out for you, is that things need to change in his company. They also need to be earning *less* since they're currently earning industry standard wages, or did you miss that part, too?
Seriously, don't make accusations about not reading if you haven't brushed up on your own reading comprehension skills.
I have to say, the most impressive/innovative tweak, to me, was the re-ordering of required functions in the compiled binary. Doing so allowed them to reduce load time, by making it that only two blocks had to be demand-read off the flash filesystem, instead of four.
That's some crazy, use-the-drum-spin-as-timing, innovative thinking right there. Serious kudos.
Most assuredly!
I realized these guys were serious when they talked about the bandwidth reading from flash vs. the bandwidth of boot image decompression. Kudos, indeed.
How do 10 to 11 hour days compare with the number of hours you are working now? How serious are you about your job?
In my field (academia), if you aren't putting in 12 hour days during the week, and 4 to 8 hour days on the weekends, you aren't going to make it to the top. Burn out? If you do, you will be leaving academia.
I've been tangentially associated with two startups, and have observed many started by my colleagues who decided to leave academia. They have similar work patterns, except that they also get ownership stakes; in academia, the rewards are mostly intangible.
Both of those examples (me, and the folks I've know from startups) are for people that are serious about their work. The startups I'm familiar with are all worth at least USD 50 million (one is in the Fortune 300 ... that one was started by my father and his friends -- I hear stories of how hard they worked, and growing up I saw how my father was in his lab on weekends, every weekend).
So, do you want your startup to be successful? Does it realistically have a chance? Then people there should be working for meager salaries (to extend the non-profitable period), and lots of stock options.
Yes. There's a nice answer to essentially the same question that someone (not me) wrote about 6 months ago here:
http://superuser.com/questions/163567/why-does-the-heat-production-increase-as-the-clockrate-of-a-cpu-increases/163570#163570
after several generations you'd have a new species
For large values of several.
Idiot.
Actually the number isn't that large before selective breeding can induce substantial changes (about 10 to domesticate wild foxes), and we've seen recent results that suggest the Lamarckian ideas of acquired traits is not without merit (if you hadn't been keeping up, the basic idea is that while DNA determines most of the inherited traits, the epigenetic stuff -- the molecules that surround the DNA and determine things like which genes are activated can be modified by parental experience and passed to the offspring -- has an influence as well). Since low gravity is a huge change in environment, it would not surprise me to see that 3rd or 4th generation humans bred on Mars would be really, really different from their Terrestrial ancestors. They certainly would have different skeletons. It also, for the same reasons, wouldn't surprise me if the lifetime for native-borns changed as well, heart disease was completely different, cancer rates were different, etc.
So, based on just the actions of the program, it has only a 45/207 = 22% success rate. Still not what I would call stellar, nor something that would be expected to survive a budget tightening.
And, it would seem, the 800,000 missing children figure is an inflated number that is used for its ability to induce fear. Note that 800,000 children per year is about 0.3% (rounding) of the US population. My home town has 25,000 people in it; that would mean there are 75 missing children per year in that town. Assuming the demographic profile of that town is nominal, and therefore about 25% of the population is 18 or under (6250 children total), that means 12% of all children go missing every year. That's very hard to believe.
But calls from 7pm to 7am and on weekends are basically free so that doesn't make sense.
That varies highly with cell phone contract. Many contracts do not offer discounted evenings and/or weekends.
Yeah seriously, wtf is wrong with betterunixthanunix? That's many lives saved and helped and all he does is complain. At least someone is actually doing something, unlike him.
I too was surprised at the low success rate. That's not even 0.1%. In what other field would such an abyssmal rate be considered successful? Are there perhaps better ways we, as a society, could be spending that money? No, I don't have any ideas, as I've only just now learned how ineffective the program is. Yes, 525 is better than zero, but why isn't that 525,000? What's the limiting factor?
My day job got me a cell phone. It is cheaper than the landline I used to have, and it's much more useful, as it also lets me keep up on email and meetings.
Cheaper than your retail landline at home, sure. But cheaper than the landline you had at your office which was probably at bulk commercial rates? Really?
I think the deeper answer is that the State of California no longer wants to subsidise the personal calls of its employees after hours.
But socking away every extra dollar? That will put you firmly into the camps of those who will be *screwed* first by the economic tidal wave.
Only if you aren't putting your money in safe places. With unemployment at nearly 10% in the US and worse in some European countries, the risk of losing one's job is high. Secure, liquid savings are the way to go at present.
I'll reply to you to address all the "save the $" and "6 mo CD" comments.
I've already set aside >2x the amount I'm willing to spend on this "treat", plus payed some debt down.
This exercise is trying to maximize the remaining bang-for-the-buck.
Then pay the rest of your debt down (from your phrasing, you've implied that there is more). Unless you have debt that's at nearly zero interest rate, you should FIRST BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE pay down debt. You will almost never get a better interest rate in savings / secure investment than the interest rate on your debt (there are exceptions naturally, but in general this is true). Therefore, putting money into savings instead of paying off debt is a guaranteed way to lose money. Pay off debt first. Then put money into savings.
I would would not slice more than 1/10th off the bonus to buy something fun. Besides, paying off debt will make you feel much, much better than any toy, and the feeling lasts longer.
1. If you already have an IRA, put it there.
2. If you don't already have an IRA, open one with your bonus.
3. If you are allergic to IRAs (or live outside the US), put your bonus in the highest yield savings / checking account you can find (yeah, I know the yields are terrible, but something is definitely better than nothing).
4. If the bonus is big enough to slice of a small amount to have a nice treat, only then buy something as ephemeral as a tablet.
The economy still is in serious recovery mode. You should be saving and investing right now.
The gorilla illusion is not the same. That's an illusion based on the limitations of our attention; it is not a change illusion.
Fair point about reading the paper. I've downloaded and done a quick first read-through. If you look at Figure 1, they show the results for the four different kinds of change they tested, hue, luminance, size, and shape. The first two are more readily interpreted as apparent motion when the changes are slow. Their results show that the first two illusions are more susceptible to interference from the rocking motion. Watching all four movies shows that the first two (hue and luminance) have a definite apparent motion component with clockwise rotation, that the other two illusions lack. At least to my viewing.
They've done a very good job, and I would have believed the paper more if I hadn't seen the illusion. They've measured a definite interference between real motion and something, but the something has been confounded by apparent motion.
IAAVN (I am a Visual Neuroscientist). It's a compelling illusion. I have not read the original paper, but will speculate nevertheless in true Slashdot fashion. The change that's perceived before the ring rotates is not so much due to the colors changing -- if you pay close attention -- but something that's called apparent motion. The classic example of apparent motion is the sequencing of lights around a movie marquis -- they appear to move, although the lights themselves are not actually moving. In the same way, the static ring has internal apparent motion as the colors change, because your brain is interpreting, for example, one dot turning yellow next to a dot that was previously yellow, as motion of a yellow dot, even though the underlying dots do not move. While apparent motion can be very strong, it is not the same as true motion.
Then, when the ring starts to rock back and forth, there is a true motion signal that swamps the apparent motion. If you pay attention to a given dot while holding your gaze still fixed at the central white point (not as hard as it sounds), you can clearly still see the colors changing.
So without having read the paper, I reserve some skepticism that they have not actually measured what they think they have. Change is still perceptible, but it would seem that real motion interferes with apparent motion.
Although you purport to be a neuroscientist, you clearly indicate that you have no idea how the vaccines were/are administered.
Ah, the magic of Slashdot where people, even those with UIDs nearly an order of magnitude larger than mine, feel free to be insulting.
You mis-read my post. I never said that preservatives were not necessary, but that there was no explanation given as to, "why thimerosal (the mercury presevative used in vaccines) was used as opposed to the raft of other potential presevatives." See that last part?
Paraphrasing your post, while you purport to understand what I wrote, you clearly indicate your reading comprehension skills are woefully inadequate.
Mercury's not good for you, heavy metals aren't good for you, but it's rather incomprehensible it would cause autism.
Agreed, but as continued research has shown for lead, for example, there are quantifiable effects to subclinical exposure. There are definite personality changes that go along with lead levels that are lower than those that cause traditional lead poisoning. Current, although perhaps still controversial, thought is that this is what causes many elderly individuals to become disagreeable: lead and other heavy metals are deposited in the bones, and as the bones de-ossify during the later stages of life those deposits are released into the bloodstream at low levels. It is also implicated in macular degeneration. Here are two references: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=838447 and http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=22174578
The levels necessary for this kind of shift are much lower than normally thought of for heavy metal poisoning, and since exposure accumulates, it seems prudent to avoid any unnecessary ingestion of mercury, lead, or other heavy metals. The amount of mercury in an injection does seem too small to cause autism, but that does not mean it should be thought of as benign.
Seems to me that not taking a mercury-based substance is a good outcome, regardless of the other shenanigans.
Indeed. Although I've asked many, many health professionals, none could tell me why thimerosal (the mercury presevative used in vaccines) was used as opposed to the raft of other potential presevatives. Thimerosal is toxic in general to humans; it rapidly releases the bound mercury that then concentrates in the central nervous system and kidneys. Mercury, like other heavy metals, is a very serious neurotoxin.
Given that any exposure above zero to lead has slowly become recognized as hazardous, it baffles me why we should consciously be injecting a known neurotoxin into our bodies, or why so many health professionals (including my child's now former pediatrician) see thimerosal as benign.
For the nay-sayers, no, I don't eat tuna or other high-mercury fish, either, for the same reason. And, IAAN (I am a neuroscientist).
Far more likely its based on stolen US plans. This has previously happened several times in the past. The Russians are very well known for stealing US aircraft plans and making it their own.
Like the Soviet version of the US Space Shuttle with more than a passing similarity. Side-by-side you can see the differences but in isolation, without the CCCP insignia and red flag, most people would think the Buran was the Space Shutte.