We've seen over and over again that the staff editors on Slashdot are not as technically versed as many of the readership. We see factual errors that, given sometimes only the tiniest bit of engineering or scientific background should have been readily caught. The current headline is an example. It is not possible in the current age that natural air temperatures would get above 100 C. Not anywhere near that. It's an absurdity to think that a maximum new temperature of 129C had been recorded. It shows ignorance or ineptitude. So, the editors aren't as sharp in many cases as the readers. Let's accept that as an empirically demonstrated fact.
We have wonderful tools to provide feedback on posts through the moderation and meta-moderation system. They work to keep the discussion largely civil and interesting.
But why don't we have an ability to submit timely corrections to egregious errors, be they typographic, grammatical, or factual, in the headline and summary? Why? It wasn't necessary back in the Rob Malda days because the editors were sharp, and the focus of the site much narrower. Now, as Slashdot approaches a combination of Popular Mechanics, Byte, Wired and Computer Shopper, the readership needs a means to provide meanningful corrective feedback that can be acted upon in a timely fashion. Moderation of the editors, as it were.
I read the linked article, but it does not show the primary report, nor does it appear to have a link to it (if someone finds it, please help me out).
There's an important issue within human experimentation, and this study most certainly falls within that rubric: if you plan on publishing the results of the study, it is considered human research, and there are a host of regulations and ethical standards that we, as a society, have agreed must be met. First, there needs to be oversight by an Institutional Review Board. Where is that? Next there needs to be a statement of which articles of human rights during experimentation are being adhered to (nominally, it's the Helsinki Declaration). Where is that? Finally, there needs to be informed consent by the participants, even when, as in this work, it is purely anonymous and observational. The EULA does not count. Informed consent documents are short, simple documents that are written such that an 8 year old can understand them, and must be administered individually. Nominally, they require a signature (written consent), although for minimal risk studies, presumably like this one, oral consent is usually sufficient -- but in that case there still needs to be an experimenter administering consent. Individual administration clearly did not happen here.
Usually when companies do stuff like this, internal research, the fine details of ethics issues go out the door, which is usually OK for minimal risk studies (like Google playing with different color links to see which are most effective), as long as the results are not to be published. If they are going to be published, then no reputable journal would accept them without the fine ethical details taken care of. If the work is for internal use only, and will not be published, then the requirements do not apply.
At least that's the way it works in my world, and I do these sorts of experiments for a living.
But, in fact, the real issue is that the venerable 2-by-4 and 3/4 inch ply have been slowly shrinking. It would be fine if there were some standard sizes that one could rely on, like in plumbing where a 1/4 inch tapered pipe thread (NPT) has precious little to do with 1/4 inch and has a wacky conical shape, but will fit any 1/4 inch pipe thread made in the last 100 years. But there aren't standards in lumber. The big retail lumber vendors keep shrinking the actual dimensions to make an extra buck. Pain in the patootie, it is.
There is at least one very good reason to recognize test conditions: predictability of test results.
As a company, you perform in-house testing to understand the characteristics of a device prior to sending it out for official review. You don't want any surprises. The test conditions are public, and known (as they should be). So, rather than rely on the competence of the official testers (or lack thereof), you make your device recognize the test conditions, and put it into a standard configuration. That way, if the testers were playing with the brightness, loudness, color balance, whatever, to examine the item prior to testing, your product won't get an erroneous assessment because they forgot to reset it from, for example, eye-bleed-level back to normal brightness. It makes sense.
Same goes for the VW case, and for the cases from the other auto manufacturers: the test conditions are most certainly not a standard use-case and must --- in the case of automobiles -- be recognized as such to avoid treating the highly anomalous conditions as an emergency situation, e.g. front wheels at driving power while rear wheels are not rotating. Again, perforce the item must recognize a test to reset to a standard configuration in order to ensure predictable, repeatable testing results.
Now, if you accept this premise that there should be a standard configuration for testing, and the device (be it car, TV, whathaveyou) should be able to recognize the testing conditions and reset to that standard configuration, we can now take a step forward. Cheating is not resetting to that standard condition. Cheating is selecting a standard condition that deviates significantly from either default conditions, or from normal operating conditions as selected by real-life users.
So, resetting to a baseline is not prima facia evidence of cheating. What's really happening here, in this case? From the summary, it sounds like perhaps commonly used modes are not the ones selected during the testing, which might be evidence of cheating.
I'd have not anticipated that a chess site would become that popular. Yes, it's easy to say that it's an obvious bug, but one has to select a variable size during development. Not everything can be stored in a 64 or 128-bit integer, because that would mean a lot of wasted space. So, would YOU have thought it reasonable to use an unsigned 32-bit integer for the number of chess games? I bet many developers would have.
The real problem, though, is no one remembered about that choice once the number of chess games crossed some really obvious threshold, like 1 billion. THAT event should have triggered some developer to think, "holy cow, can we even handle that many? What's the limit? Are we in danger of a Y2K problem?"
But chess games? Two BILLION of them? I'd have thought that would be plenty. Color me very pleasantly surprised.
I have to imagine that the leader of the free world has better things to do with his time than use the internet, at any point whatsoever.
Whereas mere peons like you and me need to grovel through information on the web to discover something we're looking to find, POTUS says, "give me a 2 page memo on the Migratory Patterns of the European Swallow," and he has a top-notch report in his hands in an hour that is far better than anything you could find. Far more efficient to staff that sort of thing out.
And if he has time to surf the web for fun, well, then I could use some help over in my lab, 'cause I'm short-staffed and maybe he could use his downtime to lend a hand? None of my people have time for Twitter. (And yes, I get the irony of me posting on Slashdot; do you get the hyperbole in my message?)
What happened is the tech industry moved to Boston, around Route 128. From there we had technology giants like DEC, Polaroid, Thermo Electron, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Raytheon, Wang, Honeywell, MITRE, Analog Devices, etc.
The missing mass was radiated away as waves in the gravitational field of the black holes. Think of it this way: when a black hole is static (relative to the total mean gravitational field of the rest of the observable universe) nothing much happens. If, somehow, a black hole were to start vibrating back and forth, it would be tugging at EVERYTHING, and moving EVERYTHING, back and forth. So the movement of the black hole is radiated out into movement of the universe, through dilations in space-time.
Now, every mass that moves does the same thing, but most masses are small enough that they don't much affect anything beyond a small distance. Black holes are big enough that they do have a measurable effect, even at enormous distances.
Think of the energy that gets released by an earthquake: it gets turned into shaking of big, massive things. That energy eventually turns into heat, but during the release: low-frequency shaking of things with great mass, mostly through semi-rigid coupling (which, ultimately, mostly means through electric fields). The same is happening with two black holes as they merge: they shed energy in the form of shaking everything else as they spiral inward.
At least that's as much as my non-physics-PhD head has been able to understand. I hope that someone who actually knows will be able to correct it.
I worked as a dev for a pretty big social network company. We were a not-quite also-ran, peaking at Alexa 108 globally, and for a while we were beating the pants off of Facebook. This was in the pre-AWS days when startups still ran their own servers. Early on, we had apparent power failures on two successive Saturday nights. Right when our database scrubbing processes started.
I suggested to our sysadmins that *maybe* it was because all of the disk heads were starting to move at once, and *maybe* it would go away if we staggered the processes across servers.
Yep, problem solved. Our power feeds were rated for average power draw, not peak power draw on all servers in a rack, and peak power came when all of the disks started seeking simultaneously.
It seems the same thing happened at BA, except no one thought to stagger-start the servers. For us, this was the first big system we ever built, so, OK, chalk it up to growing pains (and the problem never, ever happened again). But BA? Shame on them.
I fear the AC has mis-read my comments. I'm suggesting that there is no cogent argument for Chrome's wasteful use of resources. The straw-man is that Chrome wants to provide the very fastest experience for its users, so is wasteful and inefficient with space to speed execution. Except that modern CPUs are really very fast, well fast enough for web pages, so the incremental performance benefit to Chrome's spatially inefficient ways is not worth the performance decrease to every other aspect of the system because Chrome is hogging all the memory.
Or, to rewrite my post more explicitly: There is no cogent argument for Chrome's inefficient use of memory resources when modern CPUs are more than fast enough to do things like view web pages.
Put simply, resources of your computer that are not used are just that... not used. Having a browser that leaves a whole metric ton of free RAM around benefits no one.
Except that modern OSes do a very nice job of utilizing all of that spare RAM as disk cache, and when the cache gets allocated away to greedy applications, everything else on the machine appears to slow down.
There is no cogent argument against efficient use of resources when modern CPUs are more than fast enough to do things like view web pages.
The idea of interpreted versus compiled languages is a fundamentally broken one. Any language (above machine code) can be implemented either as an interpreted or as a compiled version. There is no special characteristic that makes a language one way or the other in an immutable sense. The bias is set by the choices made for the initial implementation, usually, and builds this into an unwarranted reputation. C is considered a compiled language because C interpreters didn't appear for decades after the compiler. Lisp is considered an interpreted language because a compiler didn't appear for a very long time (and an interpreter is so easy to implement). Pascal, Algol, APL, Java, Javascript, Python, PHP, Perl, you name it, all the same. The only thing that has changed is that the distinction between compilation and interpretation has slowly faded as most interpreted languages these days use just-in-time compilation.
It used to be standard practice to write the algorithm in C then run the C parser to output the code directly to the assembly it was going to generate and then hand-tweak the assembly! That we don't need to do THAT anymore is a testament to the hardware and less to the languages used.
Actually, it's more a testament to compiler technology that it's no longer possible (in most cases) to produce hand-optimized code that's better than a fully optimized automatic output. But I agree that it's certainly less to do with the language design.
When freezing someone, they're already declared dead, to my understanding. The oversight approval isn't so far-fetched to imaging obtaining.
But, as you pointed out, the intent to re-animate that has very serious potential adverse results is not something that is going to be taken lightly by an oversight board.
In the US, doing anything that involves human experimentation -- and this is clearly experimentation -- requires approval from an institutional review board (IRB), otherwise no funding agency support the work, and no journal is going to accept the results for publication.
This fellow's plans don't come close to passing the sniff test, let alone IRB-level rigorous examination. And let me tell you from personal experience, getting IRB approval is not a walk in the park.
Who is paying for this work? Why are any of the cryobanks going to allow him access to their... um... residents?
Uh, no. If what you asserted were the case, then things like cortical visual prostheses would not be a possibility. I suggest you look them up. While they are still under development, they most certainly do intend on creating fine-grained control over neural activity. Same for cortical somatosensory prostheses. On the flip side, we can definitely read-out fine-grained information about neural activity, such as is used for motor system prostheses, ranging from limb prostheses to vocal chord prostheses.
On both the read-out (decoding) side, and the driving (encoding) side, we have the ability to receive and transmit information on an individual basis. Yes, there is a lot of variability, but that is part and parcel of the challenge. Just as individual variation in foot size and shape does not preclude the creation of shoes because there is an underlying structure, so individual variation in brain morphology and wiring is unlikely to preclude creation of brain/machine interfaces because again there is an underlying structure.
Any time you hear someone say it is impossible to do something, it's likely they are just not thinking in advanced enough terms to overcome whatever barrier they perceive. I myself am guilty of such mistaken proclamations.
The irony is deep here. The pedantic eschewing of the standard usage of he as a neutral pronoun in English is, well, lessened by not understanding the significantly more important usage of italics when incorporating words from a foreign language. The neutral pronoun in French is on (OHN, pronounced more like the start of unknown than onomopoetic).
If you are going to be pedantic about things, then get it right, please. The submitter and, more substantially, the editor have embarrassed themselves here.
Vastly more important to the community here, what the heck is this doing on Slashdot? What remote relevance does this have to do with anything technical? Is there a CPU involved? Any transistors, even? A neato new technology? Some keen new technical observation? A fantastic scientific discovery? An impressive use of technology? This morning's news feed (on another site) describes how a common laborer's face from Medieval times has been recently reconstructed, who, to my eye, looks startlingly familiar and modern. Why is that not on Slashdot, as cool use of technology, instead of this SJW puffery?
The people who would be flying supersonic would undoubtedly have Global Entry, and with dedicated security lines, would not spend 3 hours at the airport prior to departure.
Heck, I travel often enough that I rarely get there 1 hour before departure time on domestic or international itineraries, and usually have enough time to have a quick beverage at the lounge before boarding. For most travellers, 2-3 hours is required because they fundamentally don't know what to do, so are figuring out the system and often have unreasonable expectations or incorrect assumptions that require extra time to handle.
In contrast, a seasoned frequent traveller will have carry-on only, be GE (and thus Pre-Check), be an elite FF, will know exactly where each gate is, and, depending on the airport, could easily get from curbside to gate in 15 minutes. Those are the people who would be flying on this service.
Also, inflation-adjusted fuel cost has dropped considerably since when the Concorde was flying.
I have an uncle who flew the Concorde from NYC to London frequently. It was entirely worth the extra money to his company to have him there and back in one day. When he would make trips like this, it was to talk to investment banks and the like, and the stock price would take a non-trivial tick upward as a result. The six-hour-plus savings in his time was entirely worth the cost. Moreover, not having to sleep on a plane and have a shitty night's sleep rendering him less effective the next day was even better.
Now, there aren't many people who are like that, but the number is also not zero. Given the large collection of companies in the northeast with insane valuations (e.g., Big Pharma), I'd wager that there is still a market for supersonic travel to London at what amounts to business-class prices.
Boston Public Schools Map Switch Aims To Amend 500 Years of Distortion
... by adding even greater distortion that is entirely motivated by a petty political agenda, rather than scientific accuracy. I read the article, and the quoted motivations are not well-founded (Europe, for example, is not in the center of the maps used in the US, the United States is). The distortion in the propsed map (which, gallingly, is "an internal decision that will not be put up to public approval" or some words to that effect that make the person behind them sound more like a petty dictator who will shout down any dissenting view) is far worse than the traditional Mercator projection. You can see it: South America and Africa look stretched vertically (because they are).
There are so many, many projections that are scientifically superior. The only reason to select this one is political. Shame on those educators.
And I had such hope with the momentum building up behind the STEM movement.
There are lots of comments above that range from what amounts to victim-blaming (Don't like the result? Then change the laws.) to tax education (Apple merely collects the VAT for the government, but the customer is considered to have paid it.) to hysterical outrage (kill them kill them kill them... oh, wait, maybe that was a different thread).
In my country (USA), we have non-profit and for-profit entities, as they are commonly called. The non-profits include entities that can have considerable land wealth, like universities. Two of our most famous universities, MIT and Harvard, jointly own over half of the land in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city where they are located. Neither of them are legally required to pay state property tax, because of their non-profit status (let's overlook for the moment that state and federal tax exempt status are related but technically separate things). But they also both benefit greatly from the surrounding city and its services, so they BOTH pay tens of millions of dollars to the city; such that are called "payment in lieu of tax" so that they retain their non-profit status. I don't know if they are paying the same amount as they would if they had for-profit status.
There is no legal requirement for them to do so. Indeed, there is a clear legal position that has been created, the not-for-profit status, in order to provide them a clear and explicit means to NOT pay, as their mission is considered important to the well-being of society. But they make payments ANYWAY. It is a moral obligation. It is also not entirely altruistic, as without these payments, the social environment around the universities would deteriorate significantly. You want nice things like infrastructure, emergency services, primary and secondary education, democracy? You gotta pay for them.
There is no fundamental reason that Apple, despite there being a legal path to avoid taxes no matter how complicated, could not make contributions to each and every country in which they sell products while still making embarrassingly immense profits. I bet some sharp-penciled tax attorneys would even find a way to make such contributions tax deductable. Apple would rid themselves of the negative press, get a nice write-off, and the countries (here, NZ) would benefit as well.
Slashdot Mirror
We've seen over and over again that the staff editors on Slashdot are not as technically versed as many of the readership. We see factual errors that, given sometimes only the tiniest bit of engineering or scientific background should have been readily caught. The current headline is an example. It is not possible in the current age that natural air temperatures would get above 100 C. Not anywhere near that. It's an absurdity to think that a maximum new temperature of 129C had been recorded. It shows ignorance or ineptitude. So, the editors aren't as sharp in many cases as the readers. Let's accept that as an empirically demonstrated fact.
We have wonderful tools to provide feedback on posts through the moderation and meta-moderation system. They work to keep the discussion largely civil and interesting.
But why don't we have an ability to submit timely corrections to egregious errors, be they typographic, grammatical, or factual, in the headline and summary? Why? It wasn't necessary back in the Rob Malda days because the editors were sharp, and the focus of the site much narrower. Now, as Slashdot approaches a combination of Popular Mechanics, Byte, Wired and Computer Shopper, the readership needs a means to provide meanningful corrective feedback that can be acted upon in a timely fashion. Moderation of the editors, as it were.
Please, Slashdot, give us those tools!
You can use stainless rebar for lifespans over 50 years. Increases costs, yes, but it is possible.
http://stainlessrebar.com/
I read the linked article, but it does not show the primary report, nor does it appear to have a link to it (if someone finds it, please help me out).
There's an important issue within human experimentation, and this study most certainly falls within that rubric: if you plan on publishing the results of the study, it is considered human research, and there are a host of regulations and ethical standards that we, as a society, have agreed must be met. First, there needs to be oversight by an Institutional Review Board. Where is that? Next there needs to be a statement of which articles of human rights during experimentation are being adhered to (nominally, it's the Helsinki Declaration). Where is that? Finally, there needs to be informed consent by the participants, even when, as in this work, it is purely anonymous and observational. The EULA does not count. Informed consent documents are short, simple documents that are written such that an 8 year old can understand them, and must be administered individually. Nominally, they require a signature (written consent), although for minimal risk studies, presumably like this one, oral consent is usually sufficient -- but in that case there still needs to be an experimenter administering consent. Individual administration clearly did not happen here.
Usually when companies do stuff like this, internal research, the fine details of ethics issues go out the door, which is usually OK for minimal risk studies (like Google playing with different color links to see which are most effective), as long as the results are not to be published. If they are going to be published, then no reputable journal would accept them without the fine ethical details taken care of. If the work is for internal use only, and will not be published, then the requirements do not apply.
At least that's the way it works in my world, and I do these sorts of experiments for a living.
But, in fact, the real issue is that the venerable 2-by-4 and 3/4 inch ply have been slowly shrinking. It would be fine if there were some standard sizes that one could rely on, like in plumbing where a 1/4 inch tapered pipe thread (NPT) has precious little to do with 1/4 inch and has a wacky conical shape, but will fit any 1/4 inch pipe thread made in the last 100 years. But there aren't standards in lumber. The big retail lumber vendors keep shrinking the actual dimensions to make an extra buck. Pain in the patootie, it is.
There is at least one very good reason to recognize test conditions: predictability of test results.
As a company, you perform in-house testing to understand the characteristics of a device prior to sending it out for official review. You don't want any surprises. The test conditions are public, and known (as they should be). So, rather than rely on the competence of the official testers (or lack thereof), you make your device recognize the test conditions, and put it into a standard configuration. That way, if the testers were playing with the brightness, loudness, color balance, whatever, to examine the item prior to testing, your product won't get an erroneous assessment because they forgot to reset it from, for example, eye-bleed-level back to normal brightness. It makes sense.
Same goes for the VW case, and for the cases from the other auto manufacturers: the test conditions are most certainly not a standard use-case and must --- in the case of automobiles -- be recognized as such to avoid treating the highly anomalous conditions as an emergency situation, e.g. front wheels at driving power while rear wheels are not rotating. Again, perforce the item must recognize a test to reset to a standard configuration in order to ensure predictable, repeatable testing results.
Now, if you accept this premise that there should be a standard configuration for testing, and the device (be it car, TV, whathaveyou) should be able to recognize the testing conditions and reset to that standard configuration, we can now take a step forward. Cheating is not resetting to that standard condition. Cheating is selecting a standard condition that deviates significantly from either default conditions, or from normal operating conditions as selected by real-life users.
So, resetting to a baseline is not prima facia evidence of cheating. What's really happening here, in this case? From the summary, it sounds like perhaps commonly used modes are not the ones selected during the testing, which might be evidence of cheating.
Two BILLION chess games?
I'd have not anticipated that a chess site would become that popular. Yes, it's easy to say that it's an obvious bug, but one has to select a variable size during development. Not everything can be stored in a 64 or 128-bit integer, because that would mean a lot of wasted space. So, would YOU have thought it reasonable to use an unsigned 32-bit integer for the number of chess games? I bet many developers would have.
The real problem, though, is no one remembered about that choice once the number of chess games crossed some really obvious threshold, like 1 billion. THAT event should have triggered some developer to think, "holy cow, can we even handle that many? What's the limit? Are we in danger of a Y2K problem?"
But chess games? Two BILLION of them? I'd have thought that would be plenty. Color me very pleasantly surprised.
I have to imagine that the leader of the free world has better things to do with his time than use the internet, at any point whatsoever.
Whereas mere peons like you and me need to grovel through information on the web to discover something we're looking to find, POTUS says, "give me a 2 page memo on the Migratory Patterns of the European Swallow," and he has a top-notch report in his hands in an hour that is far better than anything you could find. Far more efficient to staff that sort of thing out.
And if he has time to surf the web for fun, well, then I could use some help over in my lab, 'cause I'm short-staffed and maybe he could use his downtime to lend a hand? None of my people have time for Twitter. (And yes, I get the irony of me posting on Slashdot; do you get the hyperbole in my message?)
What happened is the tech industry moved to Boston, around Route 128. From there we had technology giants like DEC, Polaroid, Thermo Electron, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Raytheon, Wang, Honeywell, MITRE, Analog Devices, etc.
The missing mass was radiated away as waves in the gravitational field of the black holes. Think of it this way: when a black hole is static (relative to the total mean gravitational field of the rest of the observable universe) nothing much happens. If, somehow, a black hole were to start vibrating back and forth, it would be tugging at EVERYTHING, and moving EVERYTHING, back and forth. So the movement of the black hole is radiated out into movement of the universe, through dilations in space-time.
Now, every mass that moves does the same thing, but most masses are small enough that they don't much affect anything beyond a small distance. Black holes are big enough that they do have a measurable effect, even at enormous distances.
Think of the energy that gets released by an earthquake: it gets turned into shaking of big, massive things. That energy eventually turns into heat, but during the release: low-frequency shaking of things with great mass, mostly through semi-rigid coupling (which, ultimately, mostly means through electric fields). The same is happening with two black holes as they merge: they shed energy in the form of shaking everything else as they spiral inward.
At least that's as much as my non-physics-PhD head has been able to understand. I hope that someone who actually knows will be able to correct it.
I worked as a dev for a pretty big social network company. We were a not-quite also-ran, peaking at Alexa 108 globally, and for a while we were beating the pants off of Facebook. This was in the pre-AWS days when startups still ran their own servers. Early on, we had apparent power failures on two successive Saturday nights. Right when our database scrubbing processes started.
I suggested to our sysadmins that *maybe* it was because all of the disk heads were starting to move at once, and *maybe* it would go away if we staggered the processes across servers.
Yep, problem solved. Our power feeds were rated for average power draw, not peak power draw on all servers in a rack, and peak power came when all of the disks started seeking simultaneously.
It seems the same thing happened at BA, except no one thought to stagger-start the servers. For us, this was the first big system we ever built, so, OK, chalk it up to growing pains (and the problem never, ever happened again). But BA? Shame on them.
I have seen a UID as low as 54. I personally know the person as well. I haven't seen anything below that.
I fear the AC has mis-read my comments. I'm suggesting that there is no cogent argument for Chrome's wasteful use of resources. The straw-man is that Chrome wants to provide the very fastest experience for its users, so is wasteful and inefficient with space to speed execution. Except that modern CPUs are really very fast, well fast enough for web pages, so the incremental performance benefit to Chrome's spatially inefficient ways is not worth the performance decrease to every other aspect of the system because Chrome is hogging all the memory.
Or, to rewrite my post more explicitly: There is no cogent argument for Chrome's inefficient use of memory resources when modern CPUs are more than fast enough to do things like view web pages.
Put simply, resources of your computer that are not used are just that... not used. Having a browser that leaves a whole metric ton of free RAM around benefits no one.
Except that modern OSes do a very nice job of utilizing all of that spare RAM as disk cache, and when the cache gets allocated away to greedy applications, everything else on the machine appears to slow down.
There is no cogent argument against efficient use of resources when modern CPUs are more than fast enough to do things like view web pages.
The idea of interpreted versus compiled languages is a fundamentally broken one. Any language (above machine code) can be implemented either as an interpreted or as a compiled version. There is no special characteristic that makes a language one way or the other in an immutable sense. The bias is set by the choices made for the initial implementation, usually, and builds this into an unwarranted reputation. C is considered a compiled language because C interpreters didn't appear for decades after the compiler. Lisp is considered an interpreted language because a compiler didn't appear for a very long time (and an interpreter is so easy to implement). Pascal, Algol, APL, Java, Javascript, Python, PHP, Perl, you name it, all the same. The only thing that has changed is that the distinction between compilation and interpretation has slowly faded as most interpreted languages these days use just-in-time compilation.
It used to be standard practice to write the algorithm in C then run the C parser to output the code directly to the assembly it was going to generate and then hand-tweak the assembly! That we don't need to do THAT anymore is a testament to the hardware and less to the languages used.
Actually, it's more a testament to compiler technology that it's no longer possible (in most cases) to produce hand-optimized code that's better than a fully optimized automatic output. But I agree that it's certainly less to do with the language design.
When freezing someone, they're already declared dead, to my understanding. The oversight approval isn't so far-fetched to imaging obtaining.
But, as you pointed out, the intent to re-animate that has very serious potential adverse results is not something that is going to be taken lightly by an oversight board.
In the US, doing anything that involves human experimentation -- and this is clearly experimentation -- requires approval from an institutional review board (IRB), otherwise no funding agency support the work, and no journal is going to accept the results for publication.
This fellow's plans don't come close to passing the sniff test, let alone IRB-level rigorous examination. And let me tell you from personal experience, getting IRB approval is not a walk in the park.
Who is paying for this work? Why are any of the cryobanks going to allow him access to their ... um ... residents?
Uh, no. If what you asserted were the case, then things like cortical visual prostheses would not be a possibility. I suggest you look them up. While they are still under development, they most certainly do intend on creating fine-grained control over neural activity. Same for cortical somatosensory prostheses. On the flip side, we can definitely read-out fine-grained information about neural activity, such as is used for motor system prostheses, ranging from limb prostheses to vocal chord prostheses.
On both the read-out (decoding) side, and the driving (encoding) side, we have the ability to receive and transmit information on an individual basis. Yes, there is a lot of variability, but that is part and parcel of the challenge. Just as individual variation in foot size and shape does not preclude the creation of shoes because there is an underlying structure, so individual variation in brain morphology and wiring is unlikely to preclude creation of brain/machine interfaces because again there is an underlying structure.
Any time you hear someone say it is impossible to do something, it's likely they are just not thinking in advanced enough terms to overcome whatever barrier they perceive. I myself am guilty of such mistaken proclamations.
Please see the table of recent sales at ...
https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/11...
While there certainly is variability, the iOS market share nowhere is "immense," as the summary suggests. Only in Japan is it even a majority.
Does Apple make immense amounts of money? Yes, certainly. Are its sales immense? Quite so. Is its market share immense? On a percentage basis, no.
What killed Flash was Apple's decision not to support it on iOS, combined with iOS's immense popularity and the lucrative demographics of iOS users.
Um, iOS is barely at 10-20% market penetration. The hypothetical immense popularity contest went to Android a long time ago.
The irony is deep here. The pedantic eschewing of the standard usage of he as a neutral pronoun in English is, well, lessened by not understanding the significantly more important usage of italics when incorporating words from a foreign language. The neutral pronoun in French is on (OHN, pronounced more like the start of unknown than onomopoetic).
If you are going to be pedantic about things, then get it right, please. The submitter and, more substantially, the editor have embarrassed themselves here.
Vastly more important to the community here, what the heck is this doing on Slashdot? What remote relevance does this have to do with anything technical? Is there a CPU involved? Any transistors, even? A neato new technology? Some keen new technical observation? A fantastic scientific discovery? An impressive use of technology? This morning's news feed (on another site) describes how a common laborer's face from Medieval times has been recently reconstructed, who, to my eye, looks startlingly familiar and modern. Why is that not on Slashdot, as cool use of technology, instead of this SJW puffery?
The people who would be flying supersonic would undoubtedly have Global Entry, and with dedicated security lines, would not spend 3 hours at the airport prior to departure.
Heck, I travel often enough that I rarely get there 1 hour before departure time on domestic or international itineraries, and usually have enough time to have a quick beverage at the lounge before boarding. For most travellers, 2-3 hours is required because they fundamentally don't know what to do, so are figuring out the system and often have unreasonable expectations or incorrect assumptions that require extra time to handle.
In contrast, a seasoned frequent traveller will have carry-on only, be GE (and thus Pre-Check), be an elite FF, will know exactly where each gate is, and, depending on the airport, could easily get from curbside to gate in 15 minutes. Those are the people who would be flying on this service.
Also, inflation-adjusted fuel cost has dropped considerably since when the Concorde was flying.
I have an uncle who flew the Concorde from NYC to London frequently. It was entirely worth the extra money to his company to have him there and back in one day. When he would make trips like this, it was to talk to investment banks and the like, and the stock price would take a non-trivial tick upward as a result. The six-hour-plus savings in his time was entirely worth the cost. Moreover, not having to sleep on a plane and have a shitty night's sleep rendering him less effective the next day was even better.
Now, there aren't many people who are like that, but the number is also not zero. Given the large collection of companies in the northeast with insane valuations (e.g., Big Pharma), I'd wager that there is still a market for supersonic travel to London at what amounts to business-class prices.
Boston Public Schools Map Switch Aims To Amend 500 Years of Distortion
... by adding even greater distortion that is entirely motivated by a petty political agenda, rather than scientific accuracy. I read the article, and the quoted motivations are not well-founded (Europe, for example, is not in the center of the maps used in the US, the United States is). The distortion in the propsed map (which, gallingly, is "an internal decision that will not be put up to public approval" or some words to that effect that make the person behind them sound more like a petty dictator who will shout down any dissenting view) is far worse than the traditional Mercator projection. You can see it: South America and Africa look stretched vertically (because they are).
There are so many, many projections that are scientifically superior. The only reason to select this one is political. Shame on those educators.
And I had such hope with the momentum building up behind the STEM movement.
There are lots of comments above that range from what amounts to victim-blaming (Don't like the result? Then change the laws.) to tax education (Apple merely collects the VAT for the government, but the customer is considered to have paid it.) to hysterical outrage (kill them kill them kill them ... oh, wait, maybe that was a different thread).
In my country (USA), we have non-profit and for-profit entities, as they are commonly called. The non-profits include entities that can have considerable land wealth, like universities. Two of our most famous universities, MIT and Harvard, jointly own over half of the land in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city where they are located. Neither of them are legally required to pay state property tax, because of their non-profit status (let's overlook for the moment that state and federal tax exempt status are related but technically separate things). But they also both benefit greatly from the surrounding city and its services, so they BOTH pay tens of millions of dollars to the city; such that are called "payment in lieu of tax" so that they retain their non-profit status. I don't know if they are paying the same amount as they would if they had for-profit status.
There is no legal requirement for them to do so. Indeed, there is a clear legal position that has been created, the not-for-profit status, in order to provide them a clear and explicit means to NOT pay, as their mission is considered important to the well-being of society. But they make payments ANYWAY. It is a moral obligation. It is also not entirely altruistic, as without these payments, the social environment around the universities would deteriorate significantly. You want nice things like infrastructure, emergency services, primary and secondary education, democracy? You gotta pay for them.
There is no fundamental reason that Apple, despite there being a legal path to avoid taxes no matter how complicated, could not make contributions to each and every country in which they sell products while still making embarrassingly immense profits. I bet some sharp-penciled tax attorneys would even find a way to make such contributions tax deductable. Apple would rid themselves of the negative press, get a nice write-off, and the countries (here, NZ) would benefit as well.