The article overstates the difference in angle -- not due west, you mean adjust west of due South.
If you are in the northern hemisphere, there is an optimal angle depending on latitude. If you want to shift to later in the day, that is Southwest. If you live in Australia, that would be Northwest.
At least he didn't create systemd, gnome3, or the Windows 8 UI.
Actually, systemd, gnome3 and the Windows 8 UI all have something in common -- they have all made lots of people want to introduce the authors to god, personally.
IBM desperately needs a CEO who tries to build a real business (writing software, building hardware) as opposed to financial "engineering" (and I use that term loosely). The bottom line is, for a company that has developed so many innovations, IBM has ditched all that in favor of etherial nonsense. Hopefully Watson can fire the CEO and fix all that!
In a global world, everyone gets confused what time it is somewhere else. So we should simply all use GMT. If we want winter hours to be different, we change starting hours. That way, my school opens at 13:00 GMT, and in the winter at 12:00GMT, and that's it -- anyone the world over can call and not get confused.
Of course, now we have email, so who cares anyway? We all work from home.
Makes me wonder if we can try to control the damage by shielding the drainage areas. Covering the whole ice sheet with mylar is obviously planetary engineering, but on a smaller scale, can you cover the lakes and get them to re-freeze? The lake has a lower albedo even than dirty snow, presumably.
If you could re-freeze the water before it percolates down through the glacier, what would that do to the whole process?
This sort of comment is both unfair and ill-informed. There is a well-documented, strong effect due to hostility, lack of role models, and just being unusual. There is a strong incentive for women to leave STEM fields because they are outliers. It is perfectly fine for women and minorities to choose to not to enter CS because they don't want to, but that is not the only reality.
We would all love to see a radical uptick in high school students excelling in CS. But expecting a one year initiative to have a dramatic effect on an advanced course is irrational. Hour of code teaches extremely rudimentary material. If students get support at school and take it a little further, and if their schools start offering advanced placement CS, then it will eventually have an impact. Obviously, doing hour of code is not going to create AP computer science classes where none existed before.
We would all love to see a silver bullet, but education is a hard problem, and thus far no one appears to have "solved" it.
What about !@!& paper? The police ought to be able to file these things by paper within 24 hours. Electronically, it should get there in 5 minutes.
An expedited form on paper is at the least, a requirement in the event of a blackout. Who are the idiots who came up with this "system" anyway?
All the NRC needs to do is define 100% leakage as acceptable and nuclear reactors can be kept in operation for thousands of years.
They have been loosening the standards of acceptable valve leakage for some time, this is simply one more step.
Forget the ethics of constructing the brains. That's just the first step, so they can declare then untermenschen and start torturing them.
Putting the "party" back in Nazi.
putting the blue screen of death on the cloud
on
Windows 8 Roundup
·
· Score: 1
Used to be, windows would only take down your machine. Now, when word crashes, it can take down a whole cluster. Ain't progress grand?
... and only fools will use it.
What we really need are more programmers that can't handle programming languages. Hell, most of the people I've dealt with over the years clearly majored in beer.
Just because you can use genetic optimization to modify the tax code doesn't make it optimal to do so.
If you want to reform the tax system, reform it. Don't simply take the current mess and reduce complexity slightly. Because if you do, all those accountants out there would have to study the new system. There would be huge mistakes. Remember that in any given year, the tax code doesn't change that much. To suddenly release a computer-generated 5000 page tax code would be a huge, expensive shock to the system.
No, a radical change to the tax code must be a radical simplification, or you can't afford to do it.
I agree with the common sentiment (@bryan1945) that taxes should be drastically simplified. But there is a definite reason for deductions. It isn't fair to tax you on money you don't have, and for example, a company may take in lots of cash but have to spend money on R&D. The travesty is that companies are far better able to deduct than people. If Intel gets to deduct for R&D, the notion that people don't get to deduct for a degree program is absurd. And of course, there is all sorts of special one-off legislation protects specific kinds of companies and individuals. But the notion that deductions are somehow evil is not really a good idea.
The mortgage deduction has been criticized for simply encouraging too much home ownership. It is in the interest of the government to promote home ownership because it makes for stable prospering communities. On the other hand, an unlimited home deduction supports ever-bigger houses. However, in the current housing climate, no one wants to kick housing, because it's unclear just how much further prices might fall as a result, and we have enough problems in that sector already. The mortgage deduction is hugely skewed in favor of the rich of course -- the more your house is worth, the greater your deduction. One idea is to cap the mortgage deduction, so you only encourage minimal home buying.
Another proposal from a couple of congressmen caps deductions to 2%. I don't know about the percentage, but it's a reasonable idea. You have a basic standard deduction, and if you exceed that, you can itemize, but only claim up to a fixed percentage. That would force people to take the best deductions -- want to install solar to your house? You can, if that's the best economic course this year, but you can't deduct for something else at the same time. It would force you to pick and choose (or pay for it yourself).
The fundamental unfairness is that corporations play by completely different rules. But it's not trivial to clear that up. Should Intel, or drug companies, be taxed on their gross when they spend billions in R&D? It's not fair, because in a business like grocery stores, there is no R&D. Why shouldn't they be allowed to deduct their legitimate expenses? But the minute you agree that makes sense, definition of "legitimate" gets hazy. The system starts getting abused, which is why we have million dollar parties for the sales staff, the chairman flying in a private jet after retirement, all the abuses that we hear about. I don't have a solution, but it isn't a simple problem.
And Bryan, if you only spend 4 hours a year on your taxes, you're very, very lucky.
There are towns outside the radius that were getting 70 - 80 uSievert/hr. That's 1.6 mSievert/day. Saying they are worried that they will exceed 20mSievert a year is a joke, they exceeded that in the first 12 days once the radiation spiked. By my count that's the equivalent of a CT-scan every 3 days or so. Presumably indoors is not as bad, but the people have to eat and drink something, so that's not their only radiological load.
http://www.mext.go.jp/component/english/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2011/04/12/1304852_041119_1.pdf
And the readings have been climbing. As of April 11, there are now hotspots outside the 20km ring that are getting 100uSieverts/hr. I haven't superimposed their map of readings on the map showing population centers, so hopefully most of the hotspots are relatively uninhabited.
If John can deliver x pizzas in a week, Jimmy can deliver 2x pizzas, and Marge can deliver 3x+1 pizzas, while John's pay is p, Jimmy's pay = pkx^2while Marge's gets 8*px^1.2, how long before all three jobs are outsourced to China?
I realized xkcd is the master of sarcasm and irony, and fear over nuclear radiation is great target, but he's way overstating his case.
It's nice to throw in the bananna, I did it too in my analysis.
There are definite medical estimates of cancer causing from smaller amounts of radiation than 100mSieverts. This is radically oversimplified and optimistic.
I have some different figures, from different wikipedia articles (CT scan) and papers in medical journals (no cites handy at this location, sorry)
For an adult, estimated increased risk of cancer from an abdominal CT scan: +0.018%
Estimated lifetime risk of cancer to a 1 year old from a single abdominal CT-scan: +0.1%
head scan: +0.07%
Given that there are hotspots 19 miles away reported in the times (can't find the interactive NY Times map. at 171uSievert/hour, it's not that many days before you have a CT-scan worth. So any babies at that location, outside the evacuation radius, have a growing, and measurable risk. Down's syndrome spiked to double the incidence in Europe from babies conceived around the time the cloud from Chernobyl passed over, so obviously genetic damage is measurable, and that implies many deaths, even if we're not so good at measuring it. Estimates vary from thousands (International Health Organization, which seems biased by a relationship with IAE) to hundreds of thousands (various Russian and Ukranian doctor's groups). Anecdotal evidence from visitors to Ukraine reports a LOT of people with cancers in their 40s and 50s, and with severe genetic damage, which is certainly going to shorten their lives. How do you quantify someone who dies at 50 instead of 70 because of radiation? I would say, you define the number of person-years of life lost as a result of an accident, and on that basis, Fukushima is not a joke.
I'm going to go out on a limb, and guess this will end up as a minimum of 1 million person-years, and it could easily be far higher when the cancers are all in 50-60 years from now. Just because it's a slow-motion disaster doesn't mean it's less serious than the tsunami, it's just a lot less obvious.
The New York Times had an article on dosages: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/14health.html?scp=5&sq=japan%20dosage%20map&st=cse
The worst complacency of this graph is that it implies that these are the dosages from Fukushima when in fact the accident is anything but contained. And the more radioactive the site gets, the harder it gets to do any work on it at all. This isn't three mile island. It may not be Chernobyl either , but there's a lot more material there to be dispersed. We can only hope that work to contain the situation is successful.
... then it's old enough to be OUT OF COPYRIGHT, in which case give it out and spare us the nonsense about DRM.
It's time for congress to limit copyright to a reasonable period, like patents, so that things can reasonably move into the public domain. Take that, mickey!
What, you bought it in a 2d format?
on
Beginning Blender
·
· Score: 0
PDF does not have a single 3D primitive. I would hold out for the blender implementation of the book, or at least a C++/OpenGL hacker version.
Ok, our operating system and applications may suck, but stop buying Apple products or we'll sterilize your nuts!
How many Apple fanboys would choose their Mac over their testicles? I'll bet the number is quite high....
This is a major technical innovation, enabling people out of the jurisdiction to do the surgery and avoid the consequences if they kill the patient. With blind signature, we can even ensure that the surgeon is completely anonymous! The stream controlling your surgery could be an Indian doctor, a 6 year old girl in Thailand, a robot in china, or just a pipeline of numbers from random.com
Slashdot Mirror
The article overstates the difference in angle -- not due west, you mean adjust west of due South. If you are in the northern hemisphere, there is an optimal angle depending on latitude. If you want to shift to later in the day, that is Southwest. If you live in Australia, that would be Northwest.
At least he didn't create systemd, gnome3, or the Windows 8 UI.
Actually, systemd, gnome3 and the Windows 8 UI all have something in common -- they have all made lots of people want to introduce the authors to god, personally.
IBM desperately needs a CEO who tries to build a real business (writing software, building hardware) as opposed to financial "engineering" (and I use that term loosely). The bottom line is, for a company that has developed so many innovations, IBM has ditched all that in favor of etherial nonsense. Hopefully Watson can fire the CEO and fix all that!
In a global world, everyone gets confused what time it is somewhere else. So we should simply all use GMT. If we want winter hours to be different, we change starting hours. That way, my school opens at 13:00 GMT, and in the winter at 12:00GMT, and that's it -- anyone the world over can call and not get confused. Of course, now we have email, so who cares anyway? We all work from home.
Makes me wonder if we can try to control the damage by shielding the drainage areas. Covering the whole ice sheet with mylar is obviously planetary engineering, but on a smaller scale, can you cover the lakes and get them to re-freeze? The lake has a lower albedo even than dirty snow, presumably. If you could re-freeze the water before it percolates down through the glacier, what would that do to the whole process?
This sort of comment is both unfair and ill-informed. There is a well-documented, strong effect due to hostility, lack of role models, and just being unusual. There is a strong incentive for women to leave STEM fields because they are outliers. It is perfectly fine for women and minorities to choose to not to enter CS because they don't want to, but that is not the only reality.
We would all love to see a radical uptick in high school students excelling in CS. But expecting a one year initiative to have a dramatic effect on an advanced course is irrational. Hour of code teaches extremely rudimentary material. If students get support at school and take it a little further, and if their schools start offering advanced placement CS, then it will eventually have an impact. Obviously, doing hour of code is not going to create AP computer science classes where none existed before. We would all love to see a silver bullet, but education is a hard problem, and thus far no one appears to have "solved" it.
What about !@!& paper? The police ought to be able to file these things by paper within 24 hours. Electronically, it should get there in 5 minutes. An expedited form on paper is at the least, a requirement in the event of a blackout. Who are the idiots who came up with this "system" anyway?
It's called Octave my friend...
All the NRC needs to do is define 100% leakage as acceptable and nuclear reactors can be kept in operation for thousands of years. They have been loosening the standards of acceptable valve leakage for some time, this is simply one more step.
... Considering that 1.5 out of 30 is 5%, not 3.5%
Forget the ethics of constructing the brains. That's just the first step, so they can declare then untermenschen and start torturing them. Putting the "party" back in Nazi.
Used to be, windows would only take down your machine. Now, when word crashes, it can take down a whole cluster. Ain't progress grand?
... and only fools will use it. What we really need are more programmers that can't handle programming languages. Hell, most of the people I've dealt with over the years clearly majored in beer.
Just because you can use genetic optimization to modify the tax code doesn't make it optimal to do so. If you want to reform the tax system, reform it. Don't simply take the current mess and reduce complexity slightly. Because if you do, all those accountants out there would have to study the new system. There would be huge mistakes. Remember that in any given year, the tax code doesn't change that much. To suddenly release a computer-generated 5000 page tax code would be a huge, expensive shock to the system.
No, a radical change to the tax code must be a radical simplification, or you can't afford to do it.
I agree with the common sentiment (@bryan1945) that taxes should be drastically simplified. But there is a definite reason for deductions. It isn't fair to tax you on money you don't have, and for example, a company may take in lots of cash but have to spend money on R&D. The travesty is that companies are far better able to deduct than people. If Intel gets to deduct for R&D, the notion that people don't get to deduct for a degree program is absurd. And of course, there is all sorts of special one-off legislation protects specific kinds of companies and individuals. But the notion that deductions are somehow evil is not really a good idea.
The mortgage deduction has been criticized for simply encouraging too much home ownership. It is in the interest of the government to promote home ownership because it makes for stable prospering communities. On the other hand, an unlimited home deduction supports ever-bigger houses. However, in the current housing climate, no one wants to kick housing, because it's unclear just how much further prices might fall as a result, and we have enough problems in that sector already. The mortgage deduction is hugely skewed in favor of the rich of course -- the more your house is worth, the greater your deduction. One idea is to cap the mortgage deduction, so you only encourage minimal home buying.
Another proposal from a couple of congressmen caps deductions to 2%. I don't know about the percentage, but it's a reasonable idea. You have a basic standard deduction, and if you exceed that, you can itemize, but only claim up to a fixed percentage. That would force people to take the best deductions -- want to install solar to your house? You can, if that's the best economic course this year, but you can't deduct for something else at the same time. It would force you to pick and choose (or pay for it yourself).
The fundamental unfairness is that corporations play by completely different rules. But it's not trivial to clear that up. Should Intel, or drug companies, be taxed on their gross when they spend billions in R&D? It's not fair, because in a business like grocery stores, there is no R&D. Why shouldn't they be allowed to deduct their legitimate expenses? But the minute you agree that makes sense, definition of "legitimate" gets hazy. The system starts getting abused, which is why we have million dollar parties for the sales staff, the chairman flying in a private jet after retirement, all the abuses that we hear about. I don't have a solution, but it isn't a simple problem.
And Bryan, if you only spend 4 hours a year on your taxes, you're very, very lucky.
Take a look at the map
There are towns outside the radius that were getting 70 - 80 uSievert/hr. That's 1.6 mSievert/day. Saying they are worried that they will exceed 20mSievert a year is a joke, they exceeded that in the first 12 days once the radiation spiked. By my count that's the equivalent of a CT-scan every 3 days or so. Presumably indoors is not as bad, but the people have to eat and drink something, so that's not their only radiological load. http://www.mext.go.jp/component/english/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2011/04/12/1304852_041119_1.pdf And the readings have been climbing. As of April 11, there are now hotspots outside the 20km ring that are getting 100uSieverts/hr. I haven't superimposed their map of readings on the map showing population centers, so hopefully most of the hotspots are relatively uninhabited.
If John can deliver x pizzas in a week, Jimmy can deliver 2x pizzas, and Marge can deliver 3x+1 pizzas, while John's pay is p, Jimmy's pay = pkx^2while Marge's gets 8*px^1.2, how long before all three jobs are outsourced to China?
Leading economists to conclude that the US is !@*ed
I realized xkcd is the master of sarcasm and irony, and fear over nuclear radiation is great target, but he's way overstating his case. It's nice to throw in the bananna, I did it too in my analysis. There are definite medical estimates of cancer causing from smaller amounts of radiation than 100mSieverts. This is radically oversimplified and optimistic. I have some different figures, from different wikipedia articles (CT scan) and papers in medical journals (no cites handy at this location, sorry) For an adult, estimated increased risk of cancer from an abdominal CT scan: +0.018% Estimated lifetime risk of cancer to a 1 year old from a single abdominal CT-scan: +0.1% head scan: +0.07% Given that there are hotspots 19 miles away reported in the times (can't find the interactive NY Times map. at 171uSievert/hour, it's not that many days before you have a CT-scan worth. So any babies at that location, outside the evacuation radius, have a growing, and measurable risk. Down's syndrome spiked to double the incidence in Europe from babies conceived around the time the cloud from Chernobyl passed over, so obviously genetic damage is measurable, and that implies many deaths, even if we're not so good at measuring it. Estimates vary from thousands (International Health Organization, which seems biased by a relationship with IAE) to hundreds of thousands (various Russian and Ukranian doctor's groups). Anecdotal evidence from visitors to Ukraine reports a LOT of people with cancers in their 40s and 50s, and with severe genetic damage, which is certainly going to shorten their lives. How do you quantify someone who dies at 50 instead of 70 because of radiation? I would say, you define the number of person-years of life lost as a result of an accident, and on that basis, Fukushima is not a joke. I'm going to go out on a limb, and guess this will end up as a minimum of 1 million person-years, and it could easily be far higher when the cancers are all in 50-60 years from now. Just because it's a slow-motion disaster doesn't mean it's less serious than the tsunami, it's just a lot less obvious. The New York Times had an article on dosages: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/14health.html?scp=5&sq=japan%20dosage%20map&st=cse The worst complacency of this graph is that it implies that these are the dosages from Fukushima when in fact the accident is anything but contained. And the more radioactive the site gets, the harder it gets to do any work on it at all. This isn't three mile island. It may not be Chernobyl either , but there's a lot more material there to be dispersed. We can only hope that work to contain the situation is successful.
... then it's old enough to be OUT OF COPYRIGHT, in which case give it out and spare us the nonsense about DRM. It's time for congress to limit copyright to a reasonable period, like patents, so that things can reasonably move into the public domain. Take that, mickey!
PDF does not have a single 3D primitive. I would hold out for the blender implementation of the book, or at least a C++/OpenGL hacker version.
Most gestures seem to result in Poland being overrun....
Ok, our operating system and applications may suck, but stop buying Apple products or we'll sterilize your nuts! How many Apple fanboys would choose their Mac over their testicles? I'll bet the number is quite high....
This is a major technical innovation, enabling people out of the jurisdiction to do the surgery and avoid the consequences if they kill the patient. With blind signature, we can even ensure that the surgeon is completely anonymous! The stream controlling your surgery could be an Indian doctor, a 6 year old girl in Thailand, a robot in china, or just a pipeline of numbers from random.com