Not to mention ADSL modem, there's no such fucking thing. Modem = Modulator/Demodulator, a simple AD-converter. There's no AD-converting in ADSL. ADSL is solely digital.
Um, almost, but not quite correct. Actually, not even close, but it's a nice day out today. ADSL (asynchronous digital subscriber line) modems do, in fact, exist. Lots of them. Every single ADSL drop is going to have a modem. Now a modem is indeed a modulator / demodulator, but that's a general-purpose term. And, in DSL signalling, there is, in fact, an analog carrier. The digital signals are being modulated into carrier tones. DSL does not create a baseband digital line sending low and high digital voltages between your computer and the remote processing (DSLAM) -- it sends a modulated signal pushed up out of baseband. It is most definitely analog, and there is most definitely mod/demod activity. So despite modem being something you might think of as being only an old-school term, it really still applies. (Even to cable TV/internet interfaces; those are also very highly analog devices at the front end.)
But, more to the point here, a mod/demod pair is not a simple A-to-D converter. And there most certainly is a ton of analog-to-digital conversion going on in ADSL, in both directions.
When it comes down to it, the only place there are strictly digital signals are in strictly local communications (with some exceptions like RS-232 and related and derived standards like RS-242, USB, SATA, that can run over longer distances) that exist primarily as point-to-point connections between individual ICs. And even then, when you actually look at what's being signalled on the line, the distinction between digital and analog gets harder and harder to make over the years.
what makes you think this is any different than in a typical town in (insert state/country you live in)?
Maybe because of what one of the researchers on the study said, as quoted from the article: "Mar Viana, another researcher who worked on the project, said the levels [in Madrid and Barcelona] were far higher than those found in similar studies in Europe."
The article then goes on to cite another study in Italy where the highest concentration of cocaine found was 100 pg/m3 -- whereas in the Spanish study, the maximum found was 850 pg/m3. That's almost an order of magnitude difference between Spain and Italy. While there are many, many reasons this might be true, certainly it would appear that Madrid and Barcelona have much higher concentrations of drugs in the air than other cities.
Despite the overwhelming behavior to the contrary, it really is often worth reading the linked articles before expressing an opinion.
I don't want to sound ungrateful or anything but is $100K really all that much considering how expensive it must be to do this kind of research?
I feel somewhat qualified to answer this accurately as I've been in the throes of grant proposal writing over the past six months, and have put together 4 large proposals, along with 6 smaller ones, all with budgets. I would not refuse $100k if someone were to offer the sum; far from it, as I would accept $100k with grateful humility. However, that does not mean it's a very large amount of money.
$100k of direct costs gets you almost nothing. It's a pittance. It will cover the salary of one researcher for one year (with benefits) and have just enough left over to cover nominal laboratory costs (paper, pens, reagents, supplies, etc.) without any large equipment purchases to speak of. Often a given grant-writing researcher gets their salary paid off of more than one grant, so $100k might be stretched to 2 years of support if there is another source for salary.
Now, normally the institution where the researcher works charges what is called overhead or indirect costs on a grant. This is a form of taxation that allows the institution to fund the infrastructure, keep the janitorial staff paid, the lights on, the phones on, the internet service on, the administration paid, etc. It typically runs 60-75% -- so when you talk about a $100k grant, the granting agency actually pays $170k to the institution, the institution takes $70k for overhead, and the researcher gets $100k to spend. Some foundations limit the overhead rate (also called F&A or Facilities and Administration) to 5% or 10%. I'm not familiar with what the Gates Foundation pays. But, quite often when a granting agency wants to boast about how big a grant is, they include the overhead costs. That probably isn't the case here, but if it is, $100k is even smaller in terms of what makes it to the researcher.
Seriously, $100k in direct costs is an amount barely worth applying for given that granting rates are around 5-10% these days, and it takes at least 2 weeks, more likely 4 or 6, to generate a proper application. If it takes 4 weeks per application, and you spend one year doing nothing but applying for grants, the expected value needs to be well above enough to pay for 1 year of effort since you'll need to write more grants and have new results on which to base the new grant applications. If as a researcher, you are doing nothing but writing grants, you'll probably get 10 applications out the door per year. At a 10% success rate, that's one funded grant per year. That one needs to be enough money so you can take enough time off from writing grants to perform some research to get results before starting the grant writing cycle again while still having enough time to pay your salary while playing the 10% success rate game.
Everyone in academic science hopes that things are going to get better under the Obama administration, we're all holding our collective breath actually, but the recent past has been the absolute worst time to be a researcher in the last 100 years.
Taco et al, WTF? This is change for the sake of change without regard to impact and usability, and clearly without sufficiently extensive testing.
No AJAX please. The pull-new-stories-at-the-botom-of-the-page experience IS TERRIBLE, especially on a slower connection where I have been more than once convinced that my browser has gone crazy and unecessarily closed it. Great IU design, guys. No, let me write without sarcasm, because that comes through so poorly: THIS IS A HORRIBLE CHOICE IN IU -- IT CAUSES ME TO THINK THE ENCLOSING PROGRAM HAS ENCOUNTERED AN UNRECOVERABLE ERROR. Other than actually causing an unrecoverable error, that's about as bad as you can get.
The TFA doesn't say they love rap. What it says is that the 2007 and 2008 crickets had "hipper tastes" (i.e. weren't as deterred by heavy-metal music as the 2006 crickets were). Apparently samzenpus mis-read "hipper" as "hip-hop" and assumed they love rap.
Le Sigh.
Also means the residents of Tuscarora might be applying selective pressure on the cricket population by playing loud rock music.
The moral of the story, then, is that no amount of even well-organized information can compensate for a break in the continuity of care. The allergist tossed this guy to the wolves with a post-it note stuck to his forehead. The current system couldn't cope with that, and it's hard to imagine any system that could, because the hospital et. al. can't morally or legally just follow the instructions on the post-it note; they have to start from scratch.
The allergist had to know this, but dropped the ball anyway. Find a new allergist.
I read the article too, and my reaction was similar to yours, but came much sooner: the incompetence was already chest-deep in the allergist's clinic. Rightly or wrongly, they were not using the computerized record system there, and, if the article is to be believed, made some grossly negligent decisions on providing care.
For example, I cannot fathom that 90 minutes in a clinic bed without intensive care waiting for for horizontal transport in an ambulance on a trip that at 1.5 miles should take 10 minutes is less risky than a trip without medical supervision in a seated position that can happen immediately. After all, the patient/author arrived at the clinic by such means. The stress of waiting for an hour-and-a-half was likely more deleterious to his well being than the marginal benefit from lower risk associated with horizontal transport. Bad call on the physician's part. And bad call on the patient/author's part. The conversation should have gone something like this:
Doctor: "you need to be taken to a hospital." Patient: "ok, I'll have my wife drive me." Doctor: "no, you need to go by ambulance." Patient: "oh, I see, you think my condition is serious. How long will it take for the ambulance?" Doctor: "I'll let you know as soon as we call the service." [ 10 minutes later, patient rings buzzer because doctor has gone AWOL ] Patient: "how long will it take for the ambulance to arrive?" Doctor: "well, you aren't in arrest, so it may be a while." Patient: "how long?" Doctor: "hard to say." Patient: "an hour?" Doctor: "maybe." Patient: "OK, my wife will drive me. The hospital is only ten minutes away."
Remember boys and girls, when you are sick, you are the only one that's going to die if something goes wrong. You are the only one that has your best interest in mind. Every one else, except your family, has their own lives, jobs, torrid affairs with the hot nurses, addictions to pain medications, etc, that come first. Ultimately, if the ambulance comes 3 hours from now and as a result of the delayed care, the worst that can happen to you is that you will die. The worst that can happen to the doctor, as long as he has properly documented placing an order for an ambulance, is that he'll have to talk to some lawyers. Who has more at stake?
I'm also suspicious about the patient having to repeatedly request medication in the hospital ICU and his reliance on one herioc ICU nurse. Were the doctors suspicious of drug-seeking behavior? Where was the patient's wife who drove him to the clinic in the first place? Why was she not following the doctors to their stations to watch them enter orders? Why was she not advocating for him? Surely after the third or fourth forgotten promise, she should have started yelling. While it appears like this system was not working very well, the patient and his family have much of the responsibility for not recognizing the pattern after the first few hours of it (he was in hospital care for about 36 hours if the chronological chart is accurate) and responding appropriately.
(The chart in the article, by the way, is a beautiful example of how to present complex data clearly and understandably. Looks to be in the the Tufte school of data presentation.)
I've bought thousands of dollars of cable. Full disclosure, it has been BNC cable, and not ethernet, but I think my experience is likely germane. This cable has been used to construct installations of scientific equipment that gets reconfigured pretty frequently (and I've been the primary user on most of this equipment). I have never, ever had a single cable-related failure using ITT/Pomona cables. My peers, on the other hand, use hand-made cables and are constantly debugging their setups.
I spend my time doing my job (collecting data), while other people in my lab spend their time fixing problems. (Really full disclosure, I'm the only one with an EE degree.)
Good cables can be found inexpensively. These are the ones you want. Cheap cables can be found for less money, but these are the ones you do not want. Custom cables, unless you have high-quality crimping tools (the $39.99 variety don't cut it) and a proper means for doing testing, which means TDR and bandwidth testing in your case, just are not worth it for general-purpose use.
Look at it this way: how long does it take you to generate a qualified cable? Not how long does it take you to make one cable, but how long does it take you to make one cable that you will use, including all of the failed crimps, cables that were cut too short, too long, were miswired, or must be discarded, for some other reason. How many cables will you be making? Total that up and use 1/2 of the time to search for low prices on high-quality cable instead. You will be ahead in the end.
I'm as surprised as he. I still can't believe it. It won't be real for me until Taco posts the dupe here on/.
I know that was made as a joke, but how can someone who should have their head screwed on as well as Ballmer, at least when it comes to IT business, not have suspected that Oracle would be in play for Sun?
I mean, when I heard the news on the radio the other day, I said to my wife-to-be (yes, true, I have a fiancee; I'm an atypical nerd that has managed to develop a few social skills), "I saw *that* coming." Who else would be big enough to buy Sun, and an appropriate fit? You can count the number of companies in that class on two hands, tops. If Ballmer didn't have his corporate spies working on it, then he's lost his touch.
Or... maybe it's disinformation from MS.
Oracle buying Sun -- the question is not whether this is a surprise, but why it didn't happen long before now. And, importantly, if the FTC will block it on the grounds that it would create too close to a monopoly in the DB market.
The timing is definitely off, and with the timing of each "instrument" a little off, they're not in sync with each other. It's close enough that you can tell what it should sound like, but it doesn't actually sound like that.
For example, the rhythm of "easy come, easy go" starting at 0:36 is clearly wrong. The bass part starting around 1:30 isn't bad by itself, but it's not in sync with the other parts. 3:09 to 3:31 is pretty bad too.
I suspect it was easier to get the timing right with some "instruments" than others. The bass part, by itself, seems very rhythmically solid, particularly from 3:29 all the way through to the end, it's just that the other parts aren't in sync with that.
Overall, a brilliant piece of work. If these minor timing details could be cleaned up, it would be awesome.
The OP neglected to take into account (or neglected to do a good enough job taking into account) the latency for each command to each instrument. This is especially evident with the scanner: it has a long startup time, but, once running, does well. When it first starts up after a period of silence, it's horribly late, but if it is just changing pitch, it's snappy. The same is true, but to a lesser extent, with the floppy drive -- but it also is producing a louder tone for the initial few hundreds of milliseconds and then quiets down.
In all, I concur: a very good start at something that could well be brilliant, if a little more time had been spent obsessing.
One of the things that makes the original a phenomenal performance is the non-robotic timing (the grace notes, for example, are not performed the way they appear on the score; the rising lead guitar arpeggios accelerate, as another example). A serious job would have tracked down not only all of the latency idiosyncrasies of the hardware, but also the subtle timing variations. And it might have mixed the recording a little better, too.
The best coding environment: one without any distractions whatsoever, no temptations, and all of the necessary information and tools at hand.
And completely alone.
Now, interestingly, for me, at times high-productivity solitude means sitting in my office with both inner and outer doors closed very late on a weekend night, and at times it means sitting in a busy bar with lots of hubbub, or on a plane, or on a train, or in an isolation booth at a library. The common thread is that I am expected to have essentially zero interaction with anyone else.
I have a hard time seeing how something larger and more powerful than most of Goddard's devices can be called a "model". Amateur-built, sure. But not a "model".
sPh
Did you bother to click to the article? It's a model of a Saturn V. A real Saturn V is ten times taller. So, yes, it's a 1:10 scale model of a frelling HUGE rocket, and is therefore quite large on an absolute scale, but it is still a model.
Robotic signature machines have been around for decades. Some of my colleagues at MIT worked on the first modern ones based on plotter technology in the late 1980s/early 1990s which were quickly bought by places like the US White House to sign letters.
A 5-second search on Google for "signature machine" comes up with 8 thousand hits. There's an autopen entry on Wikipedia indicating that mechanical signature machines have been around since the early 1800s (yes 1800s), and lists three current manufacturers of the devices.
So, this is news? Just because someone hooked up the recording part and the writing part across an internet connection and made them work in real time? That makes it to the front page? Is that really the first time it was ever done? Lots of other things have been done telerobotically already.
"Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."
All of the MS bashing is missing the real point here. Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft compared Vista to Linux.
Do I need to spell that out? If the OP is accurate, an executive officer of Microsoft, the largest software company around, and one of the richest companies in the world is worried enough about competition from Linux to make comparisons with their flagship OS.
He didn't mention BSD, right? Didn't mention SunOS. Or Unix. Or OS/2. Or OS9 (personal fave). Or any one of three dozen other smaller OSes. But he did mention Linux. This isn't some marketing drone. This isn't a throwaway statement from a salesman. This is the Chief Operating Officer. This is a Big Deal. No, strike that, this is a Huge Deal.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Linux has arrived. It is on the big stage now. Let's not blow it.
"We do not understand how to build structures to resist corrosion and weathering on millenial time scales"
Of course we know! And we knew it 4000 years ago too. Here goes the synopsis: * Avoid geographical places known to suffer natural disasters * In order to avoid corrosion, put it on dry weather. * In order not to decay avoid mobile parts * In order to avoid weathering, build it big enough so erosion won't take apart a sensible percentage or its mass.
You are aware that the Great Pyramid of Giza is about 4500 year old, aren't you?
Um, yes. And the temples on the Acropolis date to ca. 500 BC. Neither is in really good shape. Neither is a working complex mechanism. Both just sit there and yet, neither are all that pristine. None of those technologies could be used to create the mechanisms in a clock that would last 10,000 years. I stand by my statement, especially the original one regarding political power, which caused more damage to the Acropolis structures than any weathering mechanism (although with the advent of anthropogenic sulfur and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere around Athens, weathering has taken a serious toll).
And I'm not convinced at all that we have superior materials now than we did 2000 years ago for this purpose.
What about this mechanism? If it had been built of modern corrosion-resistant alloys it would still be working today.
Steel? Won't last. Stainless alloys? Corrosion still builds up over long time scales,
Iron meteorites are a natural stainless steel and last millions of years. Although iron meteorites are only about 6% of the total that fall on earth, about 90% of collected meteorites are iron, they are so much more durable than stone meteorites.
I'm not familiar with meteorite dating: do we have evidence for ones that fell millions of years ago? My understanding, which is admittedly meager, is that we only have historical dating on meteroites. And that although stainless, they do corrode. The outside isn't shiny, after all.
I mean, you realize that calling it stainless steel doesn't necessarily mean it is 100% corrosion-free, right? I have stainless trays in my lab that have rust rings from going through the autoclave with a flask sitting on them. They probably aren't going to last 1000 years.
We do not understand how to build structures to resist corrosion and weathering on millenial time scales -- that does not mean we shouldn't try, just that we aren't good at it, yet.
We *didn't* understand that thousands of years ago. Today we have much better materials. Nickel, for instance, is much harder and more resistant to corrosion than the bronze that was used in ancient Greece. Marble and sandstone will show significant wear in a few decades if used in stairsteps, no wonder those old buildings are so worn out.
You're proposing to build stairs out of nickel? The Ancient Greeks were actually really good architects and civil engineers. Quite very good, if you take the time to study their techniques. There are buildings that are largely intact and have not moved, one stone relative to another, more than 1cm or so, over 3000 years (the Mycenean behive tombs), but they are rare among the buildings that still remain. These are just the buildings, I'm talking about, walls, floor, sometimes roofs. Forget complicated, moving mechanisms.
We are currently building few, if any, structures that are intended to last at the century scale. Most built form is intended to last at the decadal scale. We utterly lack expertise at the millennial scale -- although, as stated above, that does not mean we should not TRY. Just that it's hard.
And I'm not convinced at all that we have superior materials now than we did 2000 years ago for this purpose. Steel? Won't last. Stainless alloys? Corrosion still builds up over long time scales, and it's too valuable. Nickel? Valuable. Aluminum alloys? Still corrode. Valuable. Etc.
The only materials that won't oxidize at those time scales are those that are already oxidized. SiO2 (quartz, glass). CaCO3 (marble). FeOx (oxidized iron, but it's structurally worthless).
That's why one of the design considerations is avoiding valuable materials. This is nontrivial -- materials with good corrosion and wear resistance tend to be pricey. Obviously the clock won't be made of anything as low value as stone, but it is a consideration.
It's a big problem: build something pretty, and it becomes an object of desire, even to have a small part, and people will take. Build something that will last a long time, and it needs to be resistant to weathering, and therefore valuable, and people will take. Build something that has a function, it will be a source of political power to control it, and people who do not control it will try to destroy it. The engineering is only one part of the problem.
The other thing I worry about is that the design tolerances are going to be difficult to maintain. Anything that will last 10,000 years will experience seismic activity, no matter where you put it. Few large structures can withstand being shaken while retaining high tolerances. I've spent a fair bit of my youth around buildings that were only 2500-3000 years old (in Greece), and by and large, they were not in very good condition, even when not scavanged for building materials. We do not understand how to build structures to resist corrosion and weathering on millenial time scales -- that does not mean we shouldn't try, just that we aren't good at it, yet.
I once had to write cryptographic software on a laptop without a display, using the keyboard LEDs to output morse code, all while the villains had me trapped in a cell.
Lemme guess, the laptop had no battery, and the power cord was too short so you had to sit at the edge of your bunk, leaning over slightly the entire time?... and, eventually you got the girl AND the gold?
As an ex-librarian, I can give you a professional's answer. You need a professional.
... if's [sic] available online (and I mean in a proper source not a dissapearing link)...
Personally, he sounds like a hoarder, so he will probably resist both suggestions.
So, as an ex-librarian, your position is that the only people who are qualified to keep libraries are librarians? Libraries are repositories of knowledge. There's nothing at all that requires a professional librarian in the collection and maintenance of knowledge. Perhaps you'd care to reconsider and rephrase your opinions?
Some references are only available online in a tenuous fashion. Some are not at all. Circumstances change: relying on your university to always have a subscription to a lesser journal is foolhardy. Relying on being at the same university for your entire career, or that all universities you might work for have the same electronic journal subscriptions, is naive. Speaking personally, some of my most important references are photocopied from rare, dusty journals that are unlikely to ever be available online, and in no possible future am I going to give up the paper copy because recreating it should the electronic version I've created fail would be far, far too costly. How much space does a researcher's library actually take up? A dozen shelf-feet? Two? Advising someone to get rid of the paper copies of their knowledge base -- copies that if treated even half-reasonably will last many decades -- and rely exclusively on an electronic version that requires substantial, active maintenance, monetary outlay and personnel to last the same time, is idiotic.
Scan, yes. Index, yes. Possibly archive paper versions to well-marked boxes, yes. Spend a lot of effort doing so, yes. Throw away the originals? A clear mistake based on misguided principles. That strategy can work if the originals are not that important, are inherently not relevant after a brief while (like bills), but for academic papers, it does not apply.
'These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.'
He may be a lawyer, but he doesn't understand who the consumers are in the newspaper model.
Newspapers, like much of modern media, sell audiences to advertisers. So asking the news media to think of their readers, is meaningless. They never do, except as a product to sell to the advertisers.
This is ultimately an Advertiser business.
In the US, yes. In other countries, not as much. My family is from a southern European country; the newspapers there often have an extremely high fraction of editorial content (ie, printed word) as opposed to advertising content. The big difference is that whereas the newspaper where I live in the US costs $0.75 for a daily copy, where my parents are from, it costs $3.00. And, frankly, the paper there is better written and has better reporting than the paper here.
I, personally, would much, much rather pay for a smaller amount of high-quality content than get for almost free a larger amount of ad-supported low-quality content, even when the cost ratio is different by an order of magnitude.
But that's just me. Unfortunately, the world doesn't agree, and, as a result, one of the two papers where I live is in a death spiral where each step they take makes them actively spin faster around the drain. The other paper isn't far behind, either.
The most common scam on Craigslist I've seen is that someone responds to a for-sale listing with a request to ship the item because they are indisposed in another country / on business / on assignment, and want to buy the item for their sister / nephew / cousin, and they will send you a substantial extra amount of money for your trouble to ship the item, if you give them your PayPal information.
I get these scam offers at least once for every item posted.
honestly, I can't get my head around what the difference here is between reviewing a pirated movie and a pre-release screening that the reporter had been invited to.
One is legal, one is not. One is with permission, one is without permission. The distinction is pretty obvious, so you must be deliberately overlooking it to make your point.
I wasn't being clear enough, so let me elaborate: if you have an experience -- no matter if that experience was legally or illegally enjoyed -- writing about it is no different. This reporter wrote a review about his experience viewing a movie. Whether he obtained that experience legally or otherwise is irrelevant as to whether he should or should not be able to voice that opinion. While I believe that his employer has the right to decide whether said writing is fit for publication under the imprimatur of the company, that is a purely political decision, and neither a merit-based nor a legally-based one.
The argument that "one is legal, one is not," does not apply here. Allow me to create a few analogies on point. It is not illegal to write about your experiences hanging out with members of a drug cartel where you witness lots of illegal activity. It is not illegal to write about the trading of stolen property. It is not illegal to write about what it feels like to fire a gun at someone. It is not illegal to write about either the observation of or commission of a crime; it is the commission of the crime that is illegal. While the writer might or might not have obtained the experience of viewing this movie legally, and while possession of the movie might or might not constitute possession of stolen goods, writing about it is not illegal.
So there isn't that much difference between writing about a potentially illicitly obtained movie, and writing about a movie that you were invited to by the company producing the company, as far as the writing goes.
These people, intentionally or not, want to destroy this.
Close. These people, being the people in power, want to control it, not destroy it.
Murdoch, if he weren't so short-sighted, would have promoted the reporter for fueling the buzz about one of his movies and conveniently ignored the fact that the movie was pre-release (honestly, I can't get my head around what the difference here is between reviewing a pirated movie and a pre-release screening that the reporter had been invited to). Despite my opinion on this particular instance, and despite what you might read on Slashdot, we know that Murdoch is not an idiot. You don't get to be in a position of power like he is without being remarkably astute along some dimension, if not necessarily all. He must have balanced the potential good the pre-release review might have done for the movie against the potential bad not having ultimate control over the distribution channel would do for his companies. Murdoch is, as we have seen time and time again, is motivated by profit, not the benefit of humanity.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, almost, but not quite correct. Actually, not even close, but it's a nice day out today. ADSL (asynchronous digital subscriber line)
Replying to, and correcting myself, here. Apparently I need more coffee this morning: The A in ADSL is asymmetric not asynchronous. Sorry about that.
Not to mention ADSL modem, there's no such fucking thing. Modem = Modulator/Demodulator, a simple AD-converter. There's no AD-converting in ADSL. ADSL is solely digital.
Um, almost, but not quite correct. Actually, not even close, but it's a nice day out today. ADSL (asynchronous digital subscriber line) modems do, in fact, exist. Lots of them. Every single ADSL drop is going to have a modem. Now a modem is indeed a modulator / demodulator, but that's a general-purpose term. And, in DSL signalling, there is, in fact, an analog carrier. The digital signals are being modulated into carrier tones. DSL does not create a baseband digital line sending low and high digital voltages between your computer and the remote processing (DSLAM) -- it sends a modulated signal pushed up out of baseband. It is most definitely analog, and there is most definitely mod/demod activity. So despite modem being something you might think of as being only an old-school term, it really still applies. (Even to cable TV/internet interfaces; those are also very highly analog devices at the front end.)
See, eg, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_Digital_Subscriber_Line for a decent overview.
But, more to the point here, a mod/demod pair is not a simple A-to-D converter. And there most certainly is a ton of analog-to-digital conversion going on in ADSL, in both directions.
When it comes down to it, the only place there are strictly digital signals are in strictly local communications (with some exceptions like RS-232 and related and derived standards like RS-242, USB, SATA, that can run over longer distances) that exist primarily as point-to-point connections between individual ICs. And even then, when you actually look at what's being signalled on the line, the distinction between digital and analog gets harder and harder to make over the years.
what makes you think this is any different than in a typical town in (insert state/country you live in)?
Maybe because of what one of the researchers on the study said, as quoted from the article: "Mar Viana, another researcher who worked on the project, said the levels [in Madrid and Barcelona] were far higher than those found in similar studies in Europe."
The article then goes on to cite another study in Italy where the highest concentration of cocaine found was 100 pg/m3 -- whereas in the Spanish study, the maximum found was 850 pg/m3. That's almost an order of magnitude difference between Spain and Italy. While there are many, many reasons this might be true, certainly it would appear that Madrid and Barcelona have much higher concentrations of drugs in the air than other cities.
Despite the overwhelming behavior to the contrary, it really is often worth reading the linked articles before expressing an opinion.
I don't want to sound ungrateful or anything but is $100K really all that much considering how expensive it must be to do this kind of research?
I feel somewhat qualified to answer this accurately as I've been in the throes of grant proposal writing over the past six months, and have put together 4 large proposals, along with 6 smaller ones, all with budgets. I would not refuse $100k if someone were to offer the sum; far from it, as I would accept $100k with grateful humility. However, that does not mean it's a very large amount of money.
$100k of direct costs gets you almost nothing. It's a pittance. It will cover the salary of one researcher for one year (with benefits) and have just enough left over to cover nominal laboratory costs (paper, pens, reagents, supplies, etc.) without any large equipment purchases to speak of. Often a given grant-writing researcher gets their salary paid off of more than one grant, so $100k might be stretched to 2 years of support if there is another source for salary.
Now, normally the institution where the researcher works charges what is called overhead or indirect costs on a grant. This is a form of taxation that allows the institution to fund the infrastructure, keep the janitorial staff paid, the lights on, the phones on, the internet service on, the administration paid, etc. It typically runs 60-75% -- so when you talk about a $100k grant, the granting agency actually pays $170k to the institution, the institution takes $70k for overhead, and the researcher gets $100k to spend. Some foundations limit the overhead rate (also called F&A or Facilities and Administration) to 5% or 10%. I'm not familiar with what the Gates Foundation pays. But, quite often when a granting agency wants to boast about how big a grant is, they include the overhead costs. That probably isn't the case here, but if it is, $100k is even smaller in terms of what makes it to the researcher.
Seriously, $100k in direct costs is an amount barely worth applying for given that granting rates are around 5-10% these days, and it takes at least 2 weeks, more likely 4 or 6, to generate a proper application. If it takes 4 weeks per application, and you spend one year doing nothing but applying for grants, the expected value needs to be well above enough to pay for 1 year of effort since you'll need to write more grants and have new results on which to base the new grant applications. If as a researcher, you are doing nothing but writing grants, you'll probably get 10 applications out the door per year. At a 10% success rate, that's one funded grant per year. That one needs to be enough money so you can take enough time off from writing grants to perform some research to get results before starting the grant writing cycle again while still having enough time to pay your salary while playing the 10% success rate game.
Everyone in academic science hopes that things are going to get better under the Obama administration, we're all holding our collective breath actually, but the recent past has been the absolute worst time to be a researcher in the last 100 years.
Same thing here, exactly.
Taco et al, WTF? This is change for the sake of change without regard to impact and usability, and clearly without sufficiently extensive testing.
No AJAX please. The pull-new-stories-at-the-botom-of-the-page experience IS TERRIBLE, especially on a slower connection where I have been more than once convinced that my browser has gone crazy and unecessarily closed it. Great IU design, guys. No, let me write without sarcasm, because that comes through so poorly: THIS IS A HORRIBLE CHOICE IN IU -- IT CAUSES ME TO THINK THE ENCLOSING PROGRAM HAS ENCOUNTERED AN UNRECOVERABLE ERROR. Other than actually causing an unrecoverable error, that's about as bad as you can get.
He's got some good points. He does express them in a way that's unnecessarily offensive and combative. But that doesn't make him an asshole.
Sorry, being unnecessarily offensive and combative is the very definition of an asshole. The term fits.
The TFA doesn't say they love rap. What it says is that the 2007 and 2008 crickets had "hipper tastes" (i.e. weren't as deterred by heavy-metal music as the 2006 crickets were). Apparently samzenpus mis-read "hipper" as "hip-hop" and assumed they love rap.
Le Sigh.
Also means the residents of Tuscarora might be applying selective pressure on the cricket population by playing loud rock music.
The moral of the story, then, is that no amount of even well-organized information can compensate for a break in the continuity of care. The allergist tossed this guy to the wolves with a post-it note stuck to his forehead. The current system couldn't cope with that, and it's hard to imagine any system that could, because the hospital et. al. can't morally or legally just follow the instructions on the post-it note; they have to start from scratch.
The allergist had to know this, but dropped the ball anyway. Find a new allergist.
I read the article too, and my reaction was similar to yours, but came much sooner: the incompetence was already chest-deep in the allergist's clinic. Rightly or wrongly, they were not using the computerized record system there, and, if the article is to be believed, made some grossly negligent decisions on providing care.
For example, I cannot fathom that 90 minutes in a clinic bed without intensive care waiting for for horizontal transport in an ambulance on a trip that at 1.5 miles should take 10 minutes is less risky than a trip without medical supervision in a seated position that can happen immediately. After all, the patient/author arrived at the clinic by such means. The stress of waiting for an hour-and-a-half was likely more deleterious to his well being than the marginal benefit from lower risk associated with horizontal transport. Bad call on the physician's part. And bad call on the patient/author's part. The conversation should have gone something like this:
Doctor: "you need to be taken to a hospital."
Patient: "ok, I'll have my wife drive me."
Doctor: "no, you need to go by ambulance."
Patient: "oh, I see, you think my condition is serious. How long will it take for the ambulance?"
Doctor: "I'll let you know as soon as we call the service."
[ 10 minutes later, patient rings buzzer because doctor has gone AWOL ]
Patient: "how long will it take for the ambulance to arrive?"
Doctor: "well, you aren't in arrest, so it may be a while."
Patient: "how long?"
Doctor: "hard to say."
Patient: "an hour?"
Doctor: "maybe."
Patient: "OK, my wife will drive me. The hospital is only ten minutes away."
Remember boys and girls, when you are sick, you are the only one that's going to die if something goes wrong. You are the only one that has your best interest in mind. Every one else, except your family, has their own lives, jobs, torrid affairs with the hot nurses, addictions to pain medications, etc, that come first. Ultimately, if the ambulance comes 3 hours from now and as a result of the delayed care, the worst that can happen to you is that you will die. The worst that can happen to the doctor, as long as he has properly documented placing an order for an ambulance, is that he'll have to talk to some lawyers. Who has more at stake?
I'm also suspicious about the patient having to repeatedly request medication in the hospital ICU and his reliance on one herioc ICU nurse. Were the doctors suspicious of drug-seeking behavior? Where was the patient's wife who drove him to the clinic in the first place? Why was she not following the doctors to their stations to watch them enter orders? Why was she not advocating for him? Surely after the third or fourth forgotten promise, she should have started yelling. While it appears like this system was not working very well, the patient and his family have much of the responsibility for not recognizing the pattern after the first few hours of it (he was in hospital care for about 36 hours if the chronological chart is accurate) and responding appropriately.
(The chart in the article, by the way, is a beautiful example of how to present complex data clearly and understandably. Looks to be in the the Tufte school of data presentation.)
I've bought thousands of dollars of cable. Full disclosure, it has been BNC cable, and not ethernet, but I think my experience is likely germane. This cable has been used to construct installations of scientific equipment that gets reconfigured pretty frequently (and I've been the primary user on most of this equipment). I have never, ever had a single cable-related failure using ITT/Pomona cables. My peers, on the other hand, use hand-made cables and are constantly debugging their setups.
I spend my time doing my job (collecting data), while other people in my lab spend their time fixing problems. (Really full disclosure, I'm the only one with an EE degree.)
Good cables can be found inexpensively. These are the ones you want. Cheap cables can be found for less money, but these are the ones you do not want. Custom cables, unless you have high-quality crimping tools (the $39.99 variety don't cut it) and a proper means for doing testing, which means TDR and bandwidth testing in your case, just are not worth it for general-purpose use.
Look at it this way: how long does it take you to generate a qualified cable? Not how long does it take you to make one cable, but how long does it take you to make one cable that you will use, including all of the failed crimps, cables that were cut too short, too long, were miswired, or must be discarded, for some other reason. How many cables will you be making? Total that up and use 1/2 of the time to search for low prices on high-quality cable instead. You will be ahead in the end.
I'm as surprised as he. I still can't believe it. It won't be real for me until Taco posts the dupe here on /.
I know that was made as a joke, but how can someone who should have their head screwed on as well as Ballmer, at least when it comes to IT business, not have suspected that Oracle would be in play for Sun?
I mean, when I heard the news on the radio the other day, I said to my wife-to-be (yes, true, I have a fiancee; I'm an atypical nerd that has managed to develop a few social skills), "I saw *that* coming." Who else would be big enough to buy Sun, and an appropriate fit? You can count the number of companies in that class on two hands, tops. If Ballmer didn't have his corporate spies working on it, then he's lost his touch.
Or ... maybe it's disinformation from MS.
Oracle buying Sun -- the question is not whether this is a surprise, but why it didn't happen long before now. And, importantly, if the FTC will block it on the grounds that it would create too close to a monopoly in the DB market.
The timing is definitely off, and with the timing of each "instrument" a little off, they're not in sync with each other. It's close enough that you can tell what it should sound like, but it doesn't actually sound like that.
For example, the rhythm of "easy come, easy go" starting at 0:36 is clearly wrong. The bass part starting around 1:30 isn't bad by itself, but it's not in sync with the other parts. 3:09 to 3:31 is pretty bad too.
I suspect it was easier to get the timing right with some "instruments" than others. The bass part, by itself, seems very rhythmically solid, particularly from 3:29 all the way through to the end, it's just that the other parts aren't in sync with that.
Overall, a brilliant piece of work. If these minor timing details could be cleaned up, it would be awesome.
The OP neglected to take into account (or neglected to do a good enough job taking into account) the latency for each command to each instrument. This is especially evident with the scanner: it has a long startup time, but, once running, does well. When it first starts up after a period of silence, it's horribly late, but if it is just changing pitch, it's snappy. The same is true, but to a lesser extent, with the floppy drive -- but it also is producing a louder tone for the initial few hundreds of milliseconds and then quiets down.
In all, I concur: a very good start at something that could well be brilliant, if a little more time had been spent obsessing.
One of the things that makes the original a phenomenal performance is the non-robotic timing (the grace notes, for example, are not performed the way they appear on the score; the rising lead guitar arpeggios accelerate, as another example). A serious job would have tracked down not only all of the latency idiosyncrasies of the hardware, but also the subtle timing variations. And it might have mixed the recording a little better, too.
Good start, though.
The best coding environment: one without any distractions whatsoever, no temptations, and all of the necessary information and tools at hand.
And completely alone.
Now, interestingly, for me, at times high-productivity solitude means sitting in my office with both inner and outer doors closed very late on a weekend night, and at times it means sitting in a busy bar with lots of hubbub, or on a plane, or on a train, or in an isolation booth at a library. The common thread is that I am expected to have essentially zero interaction with anyone else.
I have a hard time seeing how something larger and more powerful than most of Goddard's devices can be called a "model". Amateur-built, sure. But not a "model".
sPh
Did you bother to click to the article? It's a model of a Saturn V. A real Saturn V is ten times taller. So, yes, it's a 1:10 scale model of a frelling HUGE rocket, and is therefore quite large on an absolute scale, but it is still a model.
Robotic signature machines have been around for decades. Some of my colleagues at MIT worked on the first modern ones based on plotter technology in the late 1980s/early 1990s which were quickly bought by places like the US White House to sign letters.
A 5-second search on Google for "signature machine" comes up with 8 thousand hits. There's an autopen entry on Wikipedia indicating that mechanical signature machines have been around since the early 1800s (yes 1800s), and lists three current manufacturers of the devices.
So, this is news? Just because someone hooked up the recording part and the writing part across an internet connection and made them work in real time? That makes it to the front page? Is that really the first time it was ever done? Lots of other things have been done telerobotically already.
"Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."
All of the MS bashing is missing the real point here. Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft compared Vista to Linux.
Do I need to spell that out? If the OP is accurate, an executive officer of Microsoft, the largest software company around, and one of the richest companies in the world is worried enough about competition from Linux to make comparisons with their flagship OS.
He didn't mention BSD, right? Didn't mention SunOS. Or Unix. Or OS/2. Or OS9 (personal fave). Or any one of three dozen other smaller OSes. But he did mention Linux. This isn't some marketing drone. This isn't a throwaway statement from a salesman. This is the Chief Operating Officer. This is a Big Deal. No, strike that, this is a Huge Deal.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Linux has arrived. It is on the big stage now. Let's not blow it.
"We do not understand how to build structures to resist corrosion and weathering on millenial time scales"
Of course we know! And we knew it 4000 years ago too. Here goes the synopsis:
* Avoid geographical places known to suffer natural disasters
* In order to avoid corrosion, put it on dry weather.
* In order not to decay avoid mobile parts
* In order to avoid weathering, build it big enough so erosion won't take apart a sensible percentage or its mass.
You are aware that the Great Pyramid of Giza is about 4500 year old, aren't you?
Um, yes. And the temples on the Acropolis date to ca. 500 BC. Neither is in really good shape. Neither is a working complex mechanism. Both just sit there and yet, neither are all that pristine. None of those technologies could be used to create the mechanisms in a clock that would last 10,000 years. I stand by my statement, especially the original one regarding political power, which caused more damage to the Acropolis structures than any weathering mechanism (although with the advent of anthropogenic sulfur and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere around Athens, weathering has taken a serious toll).
What about this mechanism? If it had been built of modern corrosion-resistant alloys it would still be working today.
Iron meteorites are a natural stainless steel and last millions of years. Although iron meteorites are only about 6% of the total that fall on earth, about 90% of collected meteorites are iron, they are so much more durable than stone meteorites.
I'm not familiar with meteorite dating: do we have evidence for ones that fell millions of years ago? My understanding, which is admittedly meager, is that we only have historical dating on meteroites. And that although stainless, they do corrode. The outside isn't shiny, after all.
I mean, you realize that calling it stainless steel doesn't necessarily mean it is 100% corrosion-free, right? I have stainless trays in my lab that have rust rings from going through the autoclave with a flask sitting on them. They probably aren't going to last 1000 years.
We *didn't* understand that thousands of years ago. Today we have much better materials. Nickel, for instance, is much harder and more resistant to corrosion than the bronze that was used in ancient Greece. Marble and sandstone will show significant wear in a few decades if used in stairsteps, no wonder those old buildings are so worn out.
You're proposing to build stairs out of nickel? The Ancient Greeks were actually really good architects and civil engineers. Quite very good, if you take the time to study their techniques. There are buildings that are largely intact and have not moved, one stone relative to another, more than 1cm or so, over 3000 years (the Mycenean behive tombs), but they are rare among the buildings that still remain. These are just the buildings, I'm talking about, walls, floor, sometimes roofs. Forget complicated, moving mechanisms.
We are currently building few, if any, structures that are intended to last at the century scale. Most built form is intended to last at the decadal scale. We utterly lack expertise at the millennial scale -- although, as stated above, that does not mean we should not TRY. Just that it's hard.
And I'm not convinced at all that we have superior materials now than we did 2000 years ago for this purpose. Steel? Won't last. Stainless alloys? Corrosion still builds up over long time scales, and it's too valuable. Nickel? Valuable. Aluminum alloys? Still corrode. Valuable. Etc.
The only materials that won't oxidize at those time scales are those that are already oxidized. SiO2 (quartz, glass). CaCO3 (marble). FeOx (oxidized iron, but it's structurally worthless).
That's why one of the design considerations is avoiding valuable materials. This is nontrivial -- materials with good corrosion and wear resistance tend to be pricey. Obviously the clock won't be made of anything as low value as stone, but it is a consideration.
It's a big problem: build something pretty, and it becomes an object of desire, even to have a small part, and people will take. Build something that will last a long time, and it needs to be resistant to weathering, and therefore valuable, and people will take. Build something that has a function, it will be a source of political power to control it, and people who do not control it will try to destroy it. The engineering is only one part of the problem.
The other thing I worry about is that the design tolerances are going to be difficult to maintain. Anything that will last 10,000 years will experience seismic activity, no matter where you put it. Few large structures can withstand being shaken while retaining high tolerances. I've spent a fair bit of my youth around buildings that were only 2500-3000 years old (in Greece), and by and large, they were not in very good condition, even when not scavanged for building materials. We do not understand how to build structures to resist corrosion and weathering on millenial time scales -- that does not mean we shouldn't try, just that we aren't good at it, yet.
I once had to write cryptographic software on a laptop without a display, using the keyboard LEDs to output morse code, all while the villains had me trapped in a cell.
Lemme guess, the laptop had no battery, and the power cord was too short so you had to sit at the edge of your bunk, leaning over slightly the entire time? ... and, eventually you got the girl AND the gold?
Yeah, that happened to me, too.
As an ex-librarian, I can give you a professional's answer. You need a professional.
Personally, he sounds like a hoarder, so he will probably resist both suggestions.
So, as an ex-librarian, your position is that the only people who are qualified to keep libraries are librarians? Libraries are repositories of knowledge. There's nothing at all that requires a professional librarian in the collection and maintenance of knowledge. Perhaps you'd care to reconsider and rephrase your opinions?
Some references are only available online in a tenuous fashion. Some are not at all. Circumstances change: relying on your university to always have a subscription to a lesser journal is foolhardy. Relying on being at the same university for your entire career, or that all universities you might work for have the same electronic journal subscriptions, is naive. Speaking personally, some of my most important references are photocopied from rare, dusty journals that are unlikely to ever be available online, and in no possible future am I going to give up the paper copy because recreating it should the electronic version I've created fail would be far, far too costly. How much space does a researcher's library actually take up? A dozen shelf-feet? Two? Advising someone to get rid of the paper copies of their knowledge base -- copies that if treated even half-reasonably will last many decades -- and rely exclusively on an electronic version that requires substantial, active maintenance, monetary outlay and personnel to last the same time, is idiotic.
Scan, yes. Index, yes. Possibly archive paper versions to well-marked boxes, yes. Spend a lot of effort doing so, yes. Throw away the originals? A clear mistake based on misguided principles. That strategy can work if the originals are not that important, are inherently not relevant after a brief while (like bills), but for academic papers, it does not apply.
'These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.'
He may be a lawyer, but he doesn't understand who the consumers are in the newspaper model.
Newspapers, like much of modern media, sell audiences to advertisers.
So asking the news media to think of their readers, is meaningless. They never do, except as a product to sell to the advertisers.
This is ultimately an Advertiser business.
In the US, yes. In other countries, not as much. My family is from a southern European country; the newspapers there often have an extremely high fraction of editorial content (ie, printed word) as opposed to advertising content. The big difference is that whereas the newspaper where I live in the US costs $0.75 for a daily copy, where my parents are from, it costs $3.00. And, frankly, the paper there is better written and has better reporting than the paper here.
I, personally, would much, much rather pay for a smaller amount of high-quality content than get for almost free a larger amount of ad-supported low-quality content, even when the cost ratio is different by an order of magnitude.
But that's just me. Unfortunately, the world doesn't agree, and, as a result, one of the two papers where I live is in a death spiral where each step they take makes them actively spin faster around the drain. The other paper isn't far behind, either.
The most common scam on Craigslist I've seen is that someone responds to a for-sale listing with a request to ship the item because they are indisposed in another country / on business / on assignment, and want to buy the item for their sister / nephew / cousin, and they will send you a substantial extra amount of money for your trouble to ship the item, if you give them your PayPal information.
I get these scam offers at least once for every item posted.
honestly, I can't get my head around what the difference here is between reviewing a pirated movie and a pre-release screening that the reporter had been invited to.
One is legal, one is not. One is with permission, one is without permission. The distinction is pretty obvious, so you must be deliberately overlooking it to make your point.
I wasn't being clear enough, so let me elaborate: if you have an experience -- no matter if that experience was legally or illegally enjoyed -- writing about it is no different. This reporter wrote a review about his experience viewing a movie. Whether he obtained that experience legally or otherwise is irrelevant as to whether he should or should not be able to voice that opinion. While I believe that his employer has the right to decide whether said writing is fit for publication under the imprimatur of the company, that is a purely political decision, and neither a merit-based nor a legally-based one.
The argument that "one is legal, one is not," does not apply here. Allow me to create a few analogies on point. It is not illegal to write about your experiences hanging out with members of a drug cartel where you witness lots of illegal activity. It is not illegal to write about the trading of stolen property. It is not illegal to write about what it feels like to fire a gun at someone. It is not illegal to write about either the observation of or commission of a crime; it is the commission of the crime that is illegal. While the writer might or might not have obtained the experience of viewing this movie legally, and while possession of the movie might or might not constitute possession of stolen goods, writing about it is not illegal.
So there isn't that much difference between writing about a potentially illicitly obtained movie, and writing about a movie that you were invited to by the company producing the company, as far as the writing goes.
These people, intentionally or not, want to destroy this.
Close. These people, being the people in power, want to control it, not destroy it.
Murdoch, if he weren't so short-sighted, would have promoted the reporter for fueling the buzz about one of his movies and conveniently ignored the fact that the movie was pre-release (honestly, I can't get my head around what the difference here is between reviewing a pirated movie and a pre-release screening that the reporter had been invited to). Despite my opinion on this particular instance, and despite what you might read on Slashdot, we know that Murdoch is not an idiot. You don't get to be in a position of power like he is without being remarkably astute along some dimension, if not necessarily all. He must have balanced the potential good the pre-release review might have done for the movie against the potential bad not having ultimate control over the distribution channel would do for his companies. Murdoch is, as we have seen time and time again, is motivated by profit, not the benefit of humanity.