Yes, for causing spyware to be installed. Electronic trespassing. Theft of HIPPA-regulated information. Stalking.
b) The woman for opening it and infecting the computer?
Yes, for abject stupidity.
c) Yahoo for not blocking it?
Probably not.
d) The hospital for not only allowing internet access from a computer with personally identifiable information, but for also allowing the spyware to get installed.
Yes, for IT incompetence. But they are also liable for some serious charges for violation of HIPPA regulations. It's entirely possible they will lose all Federal support. Breaching HIPPA is a big deal.
I wonder how it came to be that one would be permitted to check web-based email in the hospital's pediatric cardiac surgery department?
This incident could very well be the least of their problems for all they know.
The fact that it was able to install and send screenshots willy-nilly to Graham and who-knows-where-else is a HIPAA nightmare.
Indeed, it gives one great pause since that computer *should* have been running anti-virus software to check each download and executable as it was opened, and, presumably, would have caught this installation. Through professional contacts, I'm passingly familiar with the IT environment in a Big University Hospital and the hoops that my colleagues have to jump through to put a PC on the hospital network are near onerous. Those machines are sterile, or as close to sterile as humanly possible.
Given this transgression and their draconian nicotine policy (which surely must be illegal), the moral of the story is clear: do not, under any circumstances, seek treatment at Akron Children's Hospital.
There has got to be an ulterior motive to this proposal.
Why?
There's no need to GPS track a vehicle to know how many miles it covers each year. There's this nifty thing called an ODOMETER that already tracks that information, and the numbers already get written down in the annual / biennal inspections. And it's already a serious crime to screw with odometers, and there's already a legal mechanism in place to take care of when you need to replace a broken odometer.
I don't know where the push for this bill is coming from, but it fails a deep, fundamental common-sense test, making me highly suspicious.
No matter how clear and comprehensive the template, there will still be people who do things outside the intended structure of the document. With 80+ authors, there will always be an editorial need to correct submissions.
You required your submissions to be in PDF and then you spent time fiddling with non-PDF submissions?
If you're NICE you send an e-mail back telling the submitter to RTFInstructions. Otherwise you just hit delete.
A PDF prepared with Pages is just the same as one prepared with Word.
No, all submissions were required to be in PDF, but were generated on various platforms, using various formatting tools (Word, OO, LaTeX, Pages). I needed to adjust some minor things in some cases, so had to delve into the PDFs using Acrobat Professional. All PDFs are not created equal, and the two made with Pages were the worst. I had to, eventually, request the source (.DOC) for these submissions, which was even more of a mess. That didn't work so had to request the figures as separate images. Still not a good solution. Finally, I re-created the submissions by hand using the supplied figures. Total pain in the ass. Unfortunately, for these two submissions, rejection was not an option.
For the future, though, documents created with Pages will not be accepted.
This is what you expected: Not-supported hardware, for which there is an experimental driver at best, to magically work.
No, wrong. You didn't read his post carefully (or perhaps beyond the first sentence). He took the time to deal with his non-supported hardware, and then did an update. A normal thing to do. Updating software should --- SHOULD --- first, like people in the medical profession, do no harm. If a user has a particular configuration file tweaked, THE CONFIGURATION SHOULD NOT BE RESET TO DEFAULT. That's just stupid at best, and abusive at worst. He didn't expect magic, he expected reasonable behavior. I experienced the same thing on one of my laptops. I stopped updating after having to fix the configurations for my hardware the third time.
Look at it this way, if you perform a system update, do you expect your personal files to get wiped out and be given a clean home directory just because the filesystem driver got updated? Who would tolerate that?
This raises the question: what made you dump an open source app you were using?
Fonts. The default fonts for OpenOffice look awful. With Pages (word processor on my Mac), my documents look beautiful with no fuss. I don't require a thousand different features, either.
Pages output looks great until you have to pull it into another word processing system (either Windows or Linux) to manipulate, and then all hell breaks loose.
I organize a biennial conference that has attendee-contributed abstracts. After the fiasco last year dealing with a mere two Pages submissions (out of 60 total) that took up 1/2 of my time, I will not be accepting such submissions in the future. No exceptions. MS Word, LaTeX, OO, sure, but Pages submissions will be returned as unacceptable. And all of our submissions were required to be in PDF!
Then, if I need to preserve Linux file settings I'll zip, tar, or cpio and store them on the stick that way.
Good idea, but a pain in the neck if you need to moved files often, as I do. My solution for two machines in particular (one Fedora, one WinXP) was to install an ext2 driver on the Windows box --- http://www.fs-driver.org/ --- and use ext2 on the USB key. Permissions are retained.
umm, the defaults (fat32 formatted keys) work just fine in every distro automatically. Gnome and KDE are great at giving a way to automount in their file managers. What's the problem?
Yes, you can read and write FAT32 perfectly well, but all of the file permissions get set to executable when they eventually get copied back to a Linux system. That's fine for directories, but why should all of your regular files be tagged executable? Since I often have one or two files in a directory that are executable, along with a couple of subdirectories, this is a total pain in the neck. A simple solution like "chmod -x *" is too aggressive.
My solution, which is not a good one, is to have an entry in my makefile specifically for removing the executable flag from non-directory files, and then add it back explicitly to each non-directory file that is supposed to be executable, and recurse on all directories. Not a good solution at all, but one that works.
My car is all metric. I just have to go back to the old system when communicating with others.
I have and use both imperial English and metric and don't have a problem with either. I've even used 16p and 8p but no metric nails.
Falcon
Call me biased. Even call me bigoted, but I will stand by this assertion: American, UK, Oz, and Kiwi scientists and engineers, who have grown up around TWO systems of measurement, Imperial and Metric, are far more adept at scale conversion and at thinking in arbitrary units than European scientists who have been coddled into laziness and complacency because they only have one.
Remember this, people: the metric system, while reasonably well thought-out, is just an arbitrary set of scales. Totally, completely arbitrary. While it might be easier to reason about 10mm vs 13mm than about 25/64" vs 1/2", there is nothing, nothing inherently superior to basing distance scales on 1cm vs 1in. It's just a scale. Degrees F is just as easy to reason about as degrees C. It's just an arbitrary scale. The more people, scientists and engineers in particular, have an ability to reason fluently in both systems, the better off we will be as a race.
Look at this this way: two engineers could just as easily have exactly the same conversation in metric as in Imperial or Sumarian units. It would be the same conversation modulo a conversion for scaling. Two GOOD engineers should be able to shift units as fluidly as two musicians shift scales.
Gimp and Inkscape can import the native formats of Photoshop and Illustrator, respectively. There are many alternatives to Nvu, it's just the one I've used. However, I usually just write the HTML myself, for which Kate is very useful and user-friendly, supporting syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript and so on (at the same time, if necessary).
I use both Photoshop (under Windows) and GIMP (under Fedora). I use each program for a different reason, and under different circumstances. But this is clear: Photoshop is a serious tool, while GIMP is a not-so-serious tool. Anything that requires more than a cursory manipulation is best done with Photoshop, along with absolutely anything that requires color manipulation, 16 bit depth, or CMYK, no matter how simple.
In other words, while they have overlapping utility, GIMP is not a replacement for Photoshop. Not by a long shot.
Sheesh, kdawson, could you please *try* to edit the summary copy a little, y'know, like an *editor* would? Three instances of complicate in one paragraph are two too many.
Here's the thing, Open source or not, taking it directly from his employer was a bad idea. If you modify a piece of software for in house use and don't distribute it outside, you don't have to distribute the source. If he wanted open source software, i know of a few places where he might find copies. (no links because you should know about google and source forge by now). So, if the source code HAD to have been taken from GS's servers, then it probably had proprietary in house changes which may not be re-licensed under the gpl (the gpl is a distribution license and kicks into effect as soon as GS starts distributing). That might still be theft of in house IP, which is bad.
Anywho, in summary, weak sauce excuses are weak sauce.
Agreed. It might well be argued that knowing which open source packages were used is in itself proprietary, and therefore the mere copying of the packages from his employer, demonstrating a clear and discerning knowledge of valuable operational information, is sufficient for prosecution. Assuming he is just stupid and is not lying, he should just have waited until he was at his new job to grab the code from the original distributor (SourceForge, or wherever).
I'm disinclined to believe that the copying was innocent. A number of my friends, and my spouse, work in the financial industry, and nearly every action taken in life is scrutinized. Exiting a position, doubly so. Everyone knows this, and there is a good reason: when salaries are in the 7-digit range, people's motivations become rightfully suspect.
In my home town, they eliminated parking meters altogether. You get ticketed if you park more than a legislated period of time (two hours, if I recall) without moving your car. The fees collected from the meters weren't worthwhile, especially given the extra cost required to collect and process the coins and keep the meters in operating condition.
But, how do you tell if a car has moved or not? The old-fashioned way is to mark the tires of the parked cars with chalk and have the meter maids walk their beat every so often. Cars that have the right colored chalk in the right place (or wrong chalk in the wrong place) have been there too long and get a ticket. Granted, it's not foolproof, but it works very well. Improving on this system with high-tech stuff that records license plate numbers is left as an exercise to the reader.
(Note that systems like this do not prove that your car has been there too long; but neither does an expired parking meter.)
It kills me that the moon has better bandwidth than my house.
I know that Taco's trying to be funny here, but, seriously, the moon should most certainly have better bandwidth. That is to say, a research project that is able to afford a custom solution to a highly specialized problem with plenty of money to throw at had damned well better have better performance than what is available to commodity markets. I expect this to be true just as nearly every other bit of the hardware they send up will be better, faster, stronger, lighter, and more able to withstand ionizing radiation than the equivalent, when available, from K-Mart. There's a good reason these projects cost hundreds of millions of dollars for a probe to be sent somewhere. The Mars rovers, as another example, are using a 256 kbps channel -- deployed five years ago when DSL was still considered fast -- over a distance that ranges 55 to 400 million miles. Now *that's* performance.
It actually rather amazes me that Taco's or anyone else's house has close to the bandwidth available from the moon.
I imagine if you tested currency for benzodiazepines (valium and the like) or SSRIs (Prozac and the like) or beta blockers or digitalis or any commonly prescribed drug, you'd find near 100% contamination as well.
Why? Is Prozac routinely crushed up and snorted?
No, but effectively everything you ingest is detectable in your excreta, including sweat, and, therefore, should be present on nearly everything you touch.
But they don't typically snort other drugs through a rolled-up bill. Hence, I'd be surprised to find the SSRI content of folding money to be as high as the cocaine content.
Seriously, other than in the movies how many people really snort coke through a rolled-up bill? In a previous life, I witnessed a fair bit of cocaine ingestion and only rarely was a bill used. The ick factor alone was difficult to overcome unless the bills were very, very fresh. A gutted Bic pen was the instrument of choice back in the day.
But you don't need to snort coke through a rolled-up bill to contaminate all of the money in the immediate vicinity of a cutting surface laden with cocaine when you're talking about nanograms. All it takes is a tiny little bit on your fingers when you next touch the money in your wallet. And that tiny little bit will come from contact with your nose, if not wiping the chopping surface or blade or bindle. The snorting mythology is overblown, I think.
There are so many sources of cocaine and like substances in our society that it's no wonder it can be found everywhere (looking at currency is more sexy than say, doorknobs, and I'd imagine the same level of contamination), legal and otherwise. Benzocaine, for example, is a common numbing agent for oral use that is in the same chemical family. So is novacaine. They just don't have the popular cachet, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if the testing used could distinguished between them. I imagine if you tested currency for benzodiazepines (valium and the like) or SSRIs (Prozac and the like) or beta blockers or digitalis or any commonly prescribed drug, you'd find near 100% contamination as well. BFD. People use cocaine and other drugs both medically and recreationally. News at 11.
I'd be much, much more interested to know how much of the currency showed evidence of, say, uranium or plutonium. Those are supposed to be scarce, really, really scarce.
Right, right, right. But every geophysicist I've spoken with on the subject says that it's the molten iron outer core that is convecting and therefore inducing the field.
The outer core is a conductor. It's metal. Why should charge be distributed anyway other than evenly? There's no net imbalance of charge, which means, it can at most be a somewhat local imbalance. Assuming the worst, where the convecting charge-carrying material is actually an insulator, and the distributed charge was reduced to two point charges on opposite ends of the convection path, one negative, one positive, the two moving fields would cancel each other out, right? There's an electric current flowing from the negative charge moving about it's path, but an equal and opposite current from the positive charge. But that was the worst possible case, so the local charge imbalance can't be that bad, and the convecting material is actually metal (or so it's thought) so it's hard to support any charge imbalance at all over geological timescales. I'm missing *something*, but I'm not sure what it is.
If you take a solid sphere of copper and rotate it, it's not going to produce a magnetic field. If you take a sphere of mercury with a heat source at the middle making the mercury convect, it isn't going to create a B field either. They're conductors. Any charge imbalance gets very very quickly evened out. What's different about a planet-sized glob of stuff with an outer core of molten iron?
Example. Electromagnetism. My 8th grade grandson (yup I'm an old geezer who cut my teeth on vacuum toobs and RTL) learned a lot about the interplay between electric and magnetics fields just today. I suspended a magnet on a string, over an aluminum plate, and just left it there for him to find, and play around with. After he had done so, he asked why when the plate was present the pendulum swiftly assumed a stable position, whereas when the plate was absent the pendulum assumed a rather chaotic motion... even though the magnet was obviously not attracted to aluminum.
Y'know, I'd have expected to have run into this experiment somewhere along the way, given my background, but it's the first I've heard of it. IT'S FRELLING BRILLIANT!! What a fantastic way to explore magnetism and electricity, and to encourage exactly the right sort of curiosity.
Now, if I can only figure out why a convecting conductive volume creates a magnetic field (like the dynamo that everyone says powers the earth's magnetic field; it must be true since so many smart people think it is, but I just cannot get my head around the idea since there's zero net charge moving in convecting metal) . . .
Back in the early 1980s -- yes, nearly 30 years ago -- MIT allowed students to refuse to have their SS numbers as their Institute ID numbers. In those cases, and also for foreign students who nominally don't have SS numbers, they issued numbers that passed the SS check, but were from an otherwise unallocated block. They cleverly encoded your class year into the number to boot. For a long time I gave my MIT ID number when non-finance-related institutions requested an SS. Worked fine.
I haven't had an active MIT ID for a long while, so don't know what they do now.
I think a lot of issues come to how it tags formatting to the end-of-paragraph marker. If you delete the paragraph break by hitting delete from a previous paragraph, it will reformat your previous paragraph to be whatever the next paragraph is. That's just confusing and never what I want.
EXACTLY. That's what makes me scream: the default behavior is NEVER what I want or would expect it to be, and the reasons for the behavior always seem impenetrable.
To paraphrase what I wrote above, the difference between Word and Photoshop is that when using Word, the software clearly is the limiting factor in the generation of final product, whereas with Photoshop, the talent of the user is the limiting factor. Word gets in the way; Photoshop does not. Tools should never get in the way.
If we just obtained the most detail picture evar, why do they show an artist's impression?
The question is put better why did they lead with the artist's impression, rather than the actual data, and why didn't they ask an astronomer about the image -- star surfaces are not anywhere near that bumpy, except, I imagine, when there's something catastrophic going on. Celestial objects, especially big ones, are exceedingly smooth.
Slashdot Mirror
a) The man for emailing the spyware?
Yes, for causing spyware to be installed. Electronic trespassing. Theft of HIPPA-regulated information. Stalking.
b) The woman for opening it and infecting the computer?
Yes, for abject stupidity.
c) Yahoo for not blocking it?
Probably not.
d) The hospital for not only allowing internet access from a computer with personally identifiable information, but for also allowing the spyware to get installed.
Yes, for IT incompetence. But they are also liable for some serious charges for violation of HIPPA regulations. It's entirely possible they will lose all Federal support. Breaching HIPPA is a big deal.
I wonder how it came to be that one would be permitted to check web-based email in the hospital's pediatric cardiac surgery department?
This incident could very well be the least of their problems for all they know.
The fact that it was able to install and send screenshots willy-nilly to Graham and who-knows-where-else is a HIPAA nightmare.
Indeed, it gives one great pause since that computer *should* have been running anti-virus software to check each download and executable as it was opened, and, presumably, would have caught this installation. Through professional contacts, I'm passingly familiar with the IT environment in a Big University Hospital and the hoops that my colleagues have to jump through to put a PC on the hospital network are near onerous. Those machines are sterile, or as close to sterile as humanly possible.
Given this transgression and their draconian nicotine policy (which surely must be illegal), the moral of the story is clear: do not, under any circumstances, seek treatment at Akron Children's Hospital.
There has got to be an ulterior motive to this proposal.
Why?
There's no need to GPS track a vehicle to know how many miles it covers each year. There's this nifty thing called an ODOMETER that already tracks that information, and the numbers already get written down in the annual / biennal inspections. And it's already a serious crime to screw with odometers, and there's already a legal mechanism in place to take care of when you need to replace a broken odometer.
I don't know where the push for this bill is coming from, but it fails a deep, fundamental common-sense test, making me highly suspicious.
No matter how clear and comprehensive the template, there will still be people who do things outside the intended structure of the document. With 80+ authors, there will always be an editorial need to correct submissions.
You required your submissions to be in PDF and then you spent time fiddling with non-PDF submissions?
If you're NICE you send an e-mail back telling the submitter to RTFInstructions. Otherwise you just hit delete.
A PDF prepared with Pages is just the same as one prepared with Word.
No, all submissions were required to be in PDF, but were generated on various platforms, using various formatting tools (Word, OO, LaTeX, Pages). I needed to adjust some minor things in some cases, so had to delve into the PDFs using Acrobat Professional. All PDFs are not created equal, and the two made with Pages were the worst. I had to, eventually, request the source (.DOC) for these submissions, which was even more of a mess. That didn't work so had to request the figures as separate images. Still not a good solution. Finally, I re-created the submissions by hand using the supplied figures. Total pain in the ass. Unfortunately, for these two submissions, rejection was not an option.
For the future, though, documents created with Pages will not be accepted.
This is what you expected: Not-supported hardware, for which there is an experimental driver at best, to magically work.
No, wrong. You didn't read his post carefully (or perhaps beyond the first sentence). He took the time to deal with his non-supported hardware, and then did an update. A normal thing to do. Updating software should --- SHOULD --- first, like people in the medical profession, do no harm. If a user has a particular configuration file tweaked, THE CONFIGURATION SHOULD NOT BE RESET TO DEFAULT. That's just stupid at best, and abusive at worst. He didn't expect magic, he expected reasonable behavior. I experienced the same thing on one of my laptops. I stopped updating after having to fix the configurations for my hardware the third time.
Look at it this way, if you perform a system update, do you expect your personal files to get wiped out and be given a clean home directory just because the filesystem driver got updated? Who would tolerate that?
Fonts. The default fonts for OpenOffice look awful. With Pages (word processor on my Mac), my documents look beautiful with no fuss. I don't require a thousand different features, either.
Pages output looks great until you have to pull it into another word processing system (either Windows or Linux) to manipulate, and then all hell breaks loose.
I organize a biennial conference that has attendee-contributed abstracts. After the fiasco last year dealing with a mere two Pages submissions (out of 60 total) that took up 1/2 of my time, I will not be accepting such submissions in the future. No exceptions. MS Word, LaTeX, OO, sure, but Pages submissions will be returned as unacceptable. And all of our submissions were required to be in PDF!
Then, if I need to preserve Linux file settings I'll zip, tar, or cpio and store them on the stick that way.
Good idea, but a pain in the neck if you need to moved files often, as I do. My solution for two machines in particular (one Fedora, one WinXP) was to install an ext2 driver on the Windows box --- http://www.fs-driver.org/ --- and use ext2 on the USB key. Permissions are retained.
umm, the defaults (fat32 formatted keys) work just fine in every distro automatically. Gnome and KDE are great at giving a way to automount in their file managers. What's the problem?
Yes, you can read and write FAT32 perfectly well, but all of the file permissions get set to executable when they eventually get copied back to a Linux system. That's fine for directories, but why should all of your regular files be tagged executable? Since I often have one or two files in a directory that are executable, along with a couple of subdirectories, this is a total pain in the neck. A simple solution like "chmod -x *" is too aggressive.
My solution, which is not a good one, is to have an entry in my makefile specifically for removing the executable flag from non-directory files, and then add it back explicitly to each non-directory file that is supposed to be executable, and recurse on all directories. Not a good solution at all, but one that works.
How is this in any way appropriate for a technology news site?!?!?!?
Haven't you noticed the increased number of child-themed posts recently? The editors are getting to the age where they are married and having kids.
My car is all metric. I just have to go back to the old system when communicating with others.
I have and use both imperial English and metric and don't have a problem with either. I've even used 16p and 8p but no metric nails.
Falcon
Call me biased. Even call me bigoted, but I will stand by this assertion: American, UK, Oz, and Kiwi scientists and engineers, who have grown up around TWO systems of measurement, Imperial and Metric, are far more adept at scale conversion and at thinking in arbitrary units than European scientists who have been coddled into laziness and complacency because they only have one.
Remember this, people: the metric system, while reasonably well thought-out, is just an arbitrary set of scales. Totally, completely arbitrary. While it might be easier to reason about 10mm vs 13mm than about 25/64" vs 1/2", there is nothing, nothing inherently superior to basing distance scales on 1cm vs 1in. It's just a scale. Degrees F is just as easy to reason about as degrees C. It's just an arbitrary scale. The more people, scientists and engineers in particular, have an ability to reason fluently in both systems, the better off we will be as a race.
Look at this this way: two engineers could just as easily have exactly the same conversation in metric as in Imperial or Sumarian units. It would be the same conversation modulo a conversion for scaling. Two GOOD engineers should be able to shift units as fluidly as two musicians shift scales.
Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus*, Nvu.
*I haven't actually used Scribus myself.
Gimp and Inkscape can import the native formats of Photoshop and Illustrator, respectively. There are many alternatives to Nvu, it's just the one I've used. However, I usually just write the HTML myself, for which Kate is very useful and user-friendly, supporting syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript and so on (at the same time, if necessary).
I use both Photoshop (under Windows) and GIMP (under Fedora). I use each program for a different reason, and under different circumstances. But this is clear: Photoshop is a serious tool, while GIMP is a not-so-serious tool. Anything that requires more than a cursory manipulation is best done with Photoshop, along with absolutely anything that requires color manipulation, 16 bit depth, or CMYK, no matter how simple.
In other words, while they have overlapping utility, GIMP is not a replacement for Photoshop. Not by a long shot.
Sheesh, kdawson, could you please *try* to edit the summary copy a little, y'know, like an *editor* would? Three instances of complicate in one paragraph are two too many.
Here's the thing, Open source or not, taking it directly from his employer was a bad idea. If you modify a piece of software for in house use and don't distribute it outside, you don't have to distribute the source. If he wanted open source software, i know of a few places where he might find copies. (no links because you should know about google and source forge by now). So, if the source code HAD to have been taken from GS's servers, then it probably had proprietary in house changes which may not be re-licensed under the gpl (the gpl is a distribution license and kicks into effect as soon as GS starts distributing). That might still be theft of in house IP, which is bad.
Anywho, in summary, weak sauce excuses are weak sauce.
Agreed. It might well be argued that knowing which open source packages were used is in itself proprietary, and therefore the mere copying of the packages from his employer, demonstrating a clear and discerning knowledge of valuable operational information, is sufficient for prosecution. Assuming he is just stupid and is not lying, he should just have waited until he was at his new job to grab the code from the original distributor (SourceForge, or wherever).
I'm disinclined to believe that the copying was innocent. A number of my friends, and my spouse, work in the financial industry, and nearly every action taken in life is scrutinized. Exiting a position, doubly so. Everyone knows this, and there is a good reason: when salaries are in the 7-digit range, people's motivations become rightfully suspect.
In my home town, they eliminated parking meters altogether. You get ticketed if you park more than a legislated period of time (two hours, if I recall) without moving your car. The fees collected from the meters weren't worthwhile, especially given the extra cost required to collect and process the coins and keep the meters in operating condition.
But, how do you tell if a car has moved or not? The old-fashioned way is to mark the tires of the parked cars with chalk and have the meter maids walk their beat every so often. Cars that have the right colored chalk in the right place (or wrong chalk in the wrong place) have been there too long and get a ticket. Granted, it's not foolproof, but it works very well. Improving on this system with high-tech stuff that records license plate numbers is left as an exercise to the reader.
(Note that systems like this do not prove that your car has been there too long; but neither does an expired parking meter.)
CmdTaco comments in the original posting:
It kills me that the moon has better bandwidth than my house.
I know that Taco's trying to be funny here, but, seriously, the moon should most certainly have better bandwidth. That is to say, a research project that is able to afford a custom solution to a highly specialized problem with plenty of money to throw at had damned well better have better performance than what is available to commodity markets. I expect this to be true just as nearly every other bit of the hardware they send up will be better, faster, stronger, lighter, and more able to withstand ionizing radiation than the equivalent, when available, from K-Mart. There's a good reason these projects cost hundreds of millions of dollars for a probe to be sent somewhere. The Mars rovers, as another example, are using a 256 kbps channel -- deployed five years ago when DSL was still considered fast -- over a distance that ranges 55 to 400 million miles. Now *that's* performance.
It actually rather amazes me that Taco's or anyone else's house has close to the bandwidth available from the moon.
I imagine if you tested currency for benzodiazepines (valium and the like) or SSRIs (Prozac and the like) or beta blockers or digitalis or any commonly prescribed drug, you'd find near 100% contamination as well.
Why? Is Prozac routinely crushed up and snorted?
No, but effectively everything you ingest is detectable in your excreta, including sweat, and, therefore, should be present on nearly everything you touch.
But they don't typically snort other drugs through a rolled-up bill. Hence, I'd be surprised to find the SSRI content of folding money to be as high as the cocaine content.
Seriously, other than in the movies how many people really snort coke through a rolled-up bill? In a previous life, I witnessed a fair bit of cocaine ingestion and only rarely was a bill used. The ick factor alone was difficult to overcome unless the bills were very, very fresh. A gutted Bic pen was the instrument of choice back in the day.
But you don't need to snort coke through a rolled-up bill to contaminate all of the money in the immediate vicinity of a cutting surface laden with cocaine when you're talking about nanograms. All it takes is a tiny little bit on your fingers when you next touch the money in your wallet. And that tiny little bit will come from contact with your nose, if not wiping the chopping surface or blade or bindle. The snorting mythology is overblown, I think.
Boy do I wish they gave out digitalis as a commonly prescribed drug. And cyanide.
It is a commonly prescribed drug, albeit one with some serious potential side-effects:
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4537
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=118
There are so many sources of cocaine and like substances in our society that it's no wonder it can be found everywhere (looking at currency is more sexy than say, doorknobs, and I'd imagine the same level of contamination), legal and otherwise. Benzocaine, for example, is a common numbing agent for oral use that is in the same chemical family. So is novacaine. They just don't have the popular cachet, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if the testing used could distinguished between them. I imagine if you tested currency for benzodiazepines (valium and the like) or SSRIs (Prozac and the like) or beta blockers or digitalis or any commonly prescribed drug, you'd find near 100% contamination as well. BFD. People use cocaine and other drugs both medically and recreationally. News at 11.
I'd be much, much more interested to know how much of the currency showed evidence of, say, uranium or plutonium. Those are supposed to be scarce, really, really scarce.
Right, right, right. But every geophysicist I've spoken with on the subject says that it's the molten iron outer core that is convecting and therefore inducing the field.
The outer core is a conductor. It's metal. Why should charge be distributed anyway other than evenly? There's no net imbalance of charge, which means, it can at most be a somewhat local imbalance. Assuming the worst, where the convecting charge-carrying material is actually an insulator, and the distributed charge was reduced to two point charges on opposite ends of the convection path, one negative, one positive, the two moving fields would cancel each other out, right? There's an electric current flowing from the negative charge moving about it's path, but an equal and opposite current from the positive charge. But that was the worst possible case, so the local charge imbalance can't be that bad, and the convecting material is actually metal (or so it's thought) so it's hard to support any charge imbalance at all over geological timescales. I'm missing *something*, but I'm not sure what it is.
If you take a solid sphere of copper and rotate it, it's not going to produce a magnetic field. If you take a sphere of mercury with a heat source at the middle making the mercury convect, it isn't going to create a B field either. They're conductors. Any charge imbalance gets very very quickly evened out. What's different about a planet-sized glob of stuff with an outer core of molten iron?
Example. Electromagnetism. My 8th grade grandson (yup I'm an old geezer who cut my teeth on vacuum toobs and RTL) learned a lot about the interplay between electric and magnetics fields just today. I suspended a magnet on a string, over an aluminum plate, and just left it there for him to find, and play around with. After he had done so, he asked why when the plate was present the pendulum swiftly assumed a stable position, whereas when the plate was absent the pendulum assumed a rather chaotic motion... even though the magnet was obviously not attracted to aluminum.
Y'know, I'd have expected to have run into this experiment somewhere along the way, given my background, but it's the first I've heard of it. IT'S FRELLING BRILLIANT!! What a fantastic way to explore magnetism and electricity, and to encourage exactly the right sort of curiosity.
Now, if I can only figure out why a convecting conductive volume creates a magnetic field (like the dynamo that everyone says powers the earth's magnetic field; it must be true since so many smart people think it is, but I just cannot get my head around the idea since there's zero net charge moving in convecting metal) . . .
Back in the early 1980s -- yes, nearly 30 years ago -- MIT allowed students to refuse to have their SS numbers as their Institute ID numbers. In those cases, and also for foreign students who nominally don't have SS numbers, they issued numbers that passed the SS check, but were from an otherwise unallocated block. They cleverly encoded your class year into the number to boot. For a long time I gave my MIT ID number when non-finance-related institutions requested an SS. Worked fine.
I haven't had an active MIT ID for a long while, so don't know what they do now.
I think a lot of issues come to how it tags formatting to the end-of-paragraph marker. If you delete the paragraph break by hitting delete from a previous paragraph, it will reformat your previous paragraph to be whatever the next paragraph is. That's just confusing and never what I want.
EXACTLY. That's what makes me scream: the default behavior is NEVER what I want or would expect it to be, and the reasons for the behavior always seem impenetrable.
To paraphrase what I wrote above, the difference between Word and Photoshop is that when using Word, the software clearly is the limiting factor in the generation of final product, whereas with Photoshop, the talent of the user is the limiting factor. Word gets in the way; Photoshop does not. Tools should never get in the way.
If we just obtained the most detail picture evar, why do they show an artist's impression?
The question is put better why did they lead with the artist's impression, rather than the actual data, and why didn't they ask an astronomer about the image -- star surfaces are not anywhere near that bumpy, except, I imagine, when there's something catastrophic going on. Celestial objects, especially big ones, are exceedingly smooth.