A password book or password safe on your home computer is really only vulnerable to a directed, personal attack. You are vulnerable to these, and they're essentially impossible to completely defend against. They're also very low yield for the attacker.
A corporation/website is (probably) a harder target, but orders of magnitude higher yield. Realistically, you are much more likely to have personal information or passwords compromised by the Anthem, OPM, or Target hacks than by a keylogger or similar attack surreptitiously installed on your computer. (I'm fairly confident betting that you have already received free credit monitoring as the result of a large scale data breach) Hand-written passwords encourage you to use weaker passwords than computer-generated random character strings. Hand written passwords encourage password re-use, so your vulnerability to counterparty failure is greatly magnified.
A cloud-based password keeper has all the disadvantages of aggregating passwords, and all the disadvantages of trusting a high-yield counterparty to keep your secrets.
According to some sources, there are over a million English words. Some arent suitable to be used, but let's assume that at least 500000 are usable.
Not even great Scrabble players have 500,000 word vocabularies. Fewer than 200,000 of those words are in current use. Most of us live with 20,000 or so words we'll recognize as words and actually use only 1000-2000. 1000^3 is almost exactly 256^5
It also turns out that humans are bad at random, and will tend to choose nouns when asked for words. So, much like "choose an 8 character password with mixed case and at least one non-letter," "choose three random words" sounds like a lot of randomness until you bring humans into the process. "Sociogenetic earleen shaef" is not nearly as memorable as "correct horse battery."
So, in short what works well to separate breeds of dogs (which are bred in very controlled manners and you can somewhat keep something like a breed more or less pure) absolutely doesn't work with human that fuck around a lot.
"Race" in humans mostly identifies groups that spent a lot of time isolated from each other. You can absolutely identify genetic markers that are more concentrated in Africa than in Asia, for example. Even today, many people have generations of family or tribal history with very little change in geography and consequently very little genetic mixing. (not so much in the Americas, but they're a special case)
In the past 1000 years or so, humans have broken a lot of the geographic and language barriers that used to separate us, with the not-so-surprising result that the inbred markers that represent "Italian," "Jewish," or "Japanese" become more widely distributed. "Race" is essentially a word for "extended family," and the visible phenotype little different from saying "you have your mother's eyes."
Any threat to security and intellectual property that is posed by PEDs is also posed by eyeballs & ears
You don't get a Manning or Snowden-scale breach from people memorizing documents. Hiring trustworthy people is key, but there's no reason to make it easy for people to walk out with the crown jewels when you (inevitably) make a mistake of trust.
I used to have a great deal of interest in my computers, but after Windows 8, OSX, Gnome 3 and Unity, I really don't like computers any more, so I just do what's necessary to pay the bills.
I think this reflects exactly UI fatigue that comes from constant, pointless upgrades. Lots of us 'grew up' with computers. Discovering how to make the computer your own. The tweaks and barely-documented features that make you more efficient. Learning the keyboard alternatives to tedious menu trees. When you're new to the system, you expect to have to put some time in, and it's rewarding to learn the semi-secrets.
Then someone comes in and changes it all. Moves the menus around; revises the shortcuts; renames the control panel widgets. It makes you think you've learned all that stuff in vain, because someone is just going to come around and change it all in 3 years. Why bother, then, learning any but the most common features. UI fatigue turns power users into PlaySkool users, but that's ok, because the UI is built for PlaySkool users.
Standard deduction, single: $6300
Standard deduction, married filing jointly: $12600
The only tax break you get is if your wife is a stay-at-home mom where you can double your tax deduction. Of course, then she runs the risk of losing all her credits etc from having no income.
You forgot:
Single 15% tax threshold: $9226
Married 15% tax threshold: $18450
Single 39.6% tax threshold: $413200
Married 39.6% tax threshold: $46850 Double the deduction and lower rates at every income level up the chain. Most advantageous to the single-earner family, but if you believe that "Two can live as cheaply as one," it's still a distinct advantage for two-earner families.
While my initial point of puzzlement is why you would ever click on an ad, the core issue you're bringing up seems flawed: I'm not quite sure why the product is the responsibility of the carrier. A newspaper isn't responsible for the food in a restaurant that advertises in them, nor is PBS responsible for what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does -- even though they namecheck them as sponsors quite often.
A newspaper may have no liability for the food in an advertised restaurant, but they do have the discretion to run or not run a particular ad. If they regularly run ads for fraudulent businesses, they damage the value of their ads. Similarly with web businesses: the better they tailor their advertising to their readership, the more useful those ads and the less distracting. When I see an ad for MSI on Newegg, or Ars, it's consistent with the content. New product announcements in such ads even get clicks sometimes. Ads for beard trimmers on fibre2fashion or food.com? Irrelevant and jarring. Even at PBS, there's a lot of self-filtering: you won't see them accept funding from nor namecheck NAMBLA or the KKK.
The lack of continuity is probably the worst aspect of 'advertising networks' If you're just getting random, or even tracking-based shit from doubleclick or servedby, then the ads are out of context. Visit a shoe site then a car site and see shoe ads all over the cars. It demonstrates a lack of editorial concern by the website publisher, and implies that their primary interest is selling ads. (which it may be - it's just poor taste to demonstrate it to your nominal audience)
Still, you only buy something if you believe it is worth the money. No ad holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a purchase. They only suggest that something is worth purchasing or that their brand is better than the competition... you ultimately make the decision what to buy, and most importantly, whether to buy it in the first place.
Very few consumers are rational. Pet rocks were an actual thing. People buy stuff because they think it's worth the money, or because they think everyone else has one, or because they're bored.
Have you ever seen a kid when ice cream truck music starts playing? Those kids don't want a popsicle from the freezer - they want the exact same popsicle from the ice cream truck at three times the price. Adults get a little better at suppressing that kind of irrational act, but we're still susceptible to it. Even people who believe they make purchases only after coldly tabulating the marginal enjoyment of one more M&M against the penny it costs.
In a tunnel, air friction becomes really important. Trains (or hyperloops) fit close in the tunnel, and there's a lot of air has to move from in front of the train to behind the train, squeezing through that narrow space. Evacuating the tunnel (ie, hyperloop) is a huge benefit. So is running your train on Mars, where the atmosphere is already a -14.6 psi/ -0.994 bar vacuum.
My home has several outlets outside, if someone needed to use one for 20 min to charge their phone or run a fan, I couldn't care less.
Now imagine your outlets are in a room filled with 500 people all day long. Still willing to let passers-by plug in?
My guess is, no, and that you would turn off those circuits to prevent 60 W * 200 people * 8 hours...call it 100 kWh/day loss. And that's what the rail company should do. If they don't mean for their outlets to be used by passengers, then they should not energize them. Give cleaning crews or the engineer keys to the breaker box, and only energize the outlets when they're needed. Signage and verbal warning maybe a second best. Signage and arrest? ridiculous.
its fantasy... i dont to this day think about real life when watching fantasy.
Then you are uniquely incapable of appreciating metaphor. You see, many writers build their stories around symbolism in order to convey a message that may not be explicitly stated. This makes those stories richer and more meaningful for an audience not simply waiting for the next explosion. Aesop's fables are an extreme where the moral is explicitly stated by fantasty talking animals at the end. These metaphors depend on fictional or fantasy elements within the story bearing recognizable similarity to real world people or structures, and stereotypical caricatures are a millenia-old mechanism for that. Star Wars, Wizard of Oz, The Tempest or Adam and Eve: if you can't see that these stories say more than what is on screen, then you are missing the fucking point.
those who do IMO are wasting their time because whats the point of fantasy if you are going to do nothing but complain about how its close to X, if you squint real hard and spin around 3 times, it could be taken as racist
It's an effect of sensitization. If you wake up every day and someone calls you a lazy moke, you get much better at recognizing subtle comments. It's the reason it's ok for Peyton Manning to slap Marvin Harrison on the ass, but not ok to slap cheerleaders. Stereotypes, like the one about autistic computer geeks unable to recognize metaphor, are propagated by repetition.
He was caught trespassing on an old industrial site scavenging for toxic chemicals. That doesn't make you the brightest bulb in the lamp.
Mercury can be purchased online without hassle.
Sure. You can spend $120 for a teaspoon of mercury and then try to blow it into a glass tube in your basement, or you can go over to the mill that shut down 10 years ago and pry a "mercury switch" (commonly known as "thermostat") out of the wall.
I can't say I RTFA, but when the police shut down the street and show up at your front door with the bomb squad, most people don't realize they have the right to ask for a warrant.
People always have the right to *ask* for a warrant, but the police don't always need one.
Our paramilitary police forces make increasing use of "no knock warrants." It is very difficult to ask to see a warrant when your ears are ringing from the flash-bang and very difficult to be rational when your baby's face is on fire
They brought in a device to measure the mercury vapor level in the room and the room was declared a hazard after taking the air measurements. The room became a suit-up, limited exposure-time environment while they figured out what to do.
If the readings were that bad, does that mean that they were overreacting?
It depends on what the "readings" and "hazard" meant. Frequently, "hazard" means that the concentrations are above an OSHA or EPA environmental threshold. That is, they're above a level where long term, chronic exposure results in no measurable risk of dysfunction, birth defects, or cancer.
It's a very different question to ask whether it's safe to walk into a room long enough to sweep the spilled mercury into a dustpan, or whether it's safe to eat, sleep, and play banjo in that room. In fact, it's even different to ask whether it's safe for the high school chemistry teacher to make a one-time trip into the room to clean up the Hg, or whether it's safe for the mercury specialist, who spends his whole day cleaning up broken thermometers across town, to make yet another trip into another mercury room.
But why, why, why don't we have more engineers in America. It's because this generation is stupid and lazy....
A few years back, a kid at Georgia Tech, Georgia's main engineering school, was arrested and jailed on terrorism charges for throwing dry ice "bombs" out his dorm window.
It's not just computers. Plastic measuring cups have their sizes in raised plastic numbers, almost impossible to see.
But the meaning of numbers stamped on a measuring cup is intuitively obvious, and the stamped/molded numbers will last as long as the cup. Painted numbers flake off and add a whole extra step to the manufacturing process, dramatically increasing the cost. Stamped numbers on a measuring cup is a valid decision based on manufacturing constraints. Choosing grey-on-grey, or blue-on-blue (hello, microsoft) for icons and text is 100% arbitrary. It's just as easy to use yellow-on-purple, black-on-white, or red-on-green. Some choices are pretty, some are ugly, some are visible, and some are not. You choose among them only for cosmetic and usability reasons, and grey-on-grey sacrifices usability to cosmesis.
Anyone without cognitive impairment or severe physical limitations can use most common user interfaces
TFA isn't arguing about whether it's possible for people to use these interfaces, it claims that the use obscure metaphors and confusing design to the point that many users feel it's just not worth the bother.
Software/UI authors may believe that their app is the best thing in the world. They may think they've got a great system for getting all 32,767 functions within 3 clicks of the landing page, but this may only be true for people with 60+ hours experience using the software. Here's your first hint: a grey-on-grey list of star, clipboard, privates' stripe, arrow, and doghouse could either be a status display of several inactive features, all disabled, or it could an iconic menu. It's exactly as usable as a list of "M B P D H," meaning useful only as a mnemonic after you know what each button does.
There are a stunning number of "modern" GUIs that are exactly as usable as Emacs. Seriously: 3 horizontal lines - WTF is someone supposed to know that means the same as down-caret (unless the down-caret just toggles between horizontal caret) or as "solar eclipse" (unless "solar eclipse" means run calculations)?
Modern GUIs are more about fashion than function, and if you haven't been following the fashion, then you may not realize that "Menu" has changed from a set of nested horizontal lines to just three identical horizontal lines. You may not realize that last year's "Wrench" for options has changed to this year's "Gear" for the same function. It's not about age - a lot of users are going to upgrade, this year, from Windows XP and IE8 to Windows 10 and Chrome - skipping 10 years of fashion changes. It's culture shock.
The German and French banks gave loans although they knew Greece couldn't pay back.
That's what banks do. They guess at an organization's ability to repay a loan and set the interest level so that the (likely) sum of interest on good debts is greater than the sum of defaults. If the bank can't do that, it's supposed to fail. We're all sitting here making reasons why, now that Greece can't pay its creditors, they should be loaned more money by new creditors to pay off the old creditors. How are the new terms, on much higher risk debt, supposed to be any easier to meet?
Banks wrote the terms of the current Greek debt, and it seems Greece will not meet those terms. Default, let the banks collect whatever collateral they are due or whatever the default clause allows them, and let's get on with the capitalism. Capitalism only works if bad decisions carry a death penalty.
Maybe losing a wheel. I'm sure you've seen videos (seems like they're always Russian) of some car driving down the road with one wheel missing. You can route around that kind of damage by balancing cargo to unload the missing wheel. Once you've lost 2 wheels on a 4 wheel car, no amount of routing is going to get you running again.
and they are researching into making 3d printing CHEAPER than injection molding, and they are already getting pretty darn close!
That will never happen for any kind of quantity because of the time required to melt and freeze (or UV activate or whatever other technology) the printed part. It's easy to get an injection molder to produce 1000 parts/hour. This is the point: 3D printing is great if you need a small run of a unique shape, or if you can't adopt a commodity shape. Or if the shape you want is no longer being manufactured. That mostly means toys, art, and legacy repairs. If you're doing anything "real," meaning 1,000 or 100,000 pieces, you'll use a manufacturing process with higher start-up time and lower piece time.
I take the existence of this story to mean that Zuckerberg's campaign contributions aren't meeting Her Majesty's expectations.
Who is "her"? Hillary Clinton? She's not a current government official, has no actual power, is not even her party's nominee for an election that's still 16 months away, and you've already crowned her Queen? WTF is wrong with you?
The story author is Rupert Neate, a (male) British journalist covering US business and politics. Liberal, but without any obvious ties to any particular candidate.
The/. submission by theodp, a user almost as visible as BennetHaselton, though with less tendency to ramble, generally doing diversity-in-tech kinds of submissions. I don't know the gender, or whether it's "The ODP," like office depot, or "Theo DP," which would suggest a male.
So, I don't know who's the "her majesty" you're referring to, and you are almost certainly being too cynical
The intent of it however is clear, do you think the people who voted it in or the president who signed it thought that the subsidies were only suppose to be for the state exchanges, not the federal ones?
Honestly, I can see where the subsidies, which amount to the transfer of hundreds of millions of federal dollars into the state economies, could be seen as an enormous enticement for the states to set up their own exchanges. What rational state government, offered $300M+ per year, just for setting up an exchange, would refuse to do so?
CMU is a research university. So every dollar they save is another than can be spent on research.
Research universities don't generally spend their own money on research. They recruit faculty who then find other agencies to pay for research.
Every hour that a professor saves by not regurgitating the exact same material that he taught last year, is another hour dedicated to research.
Likewise, every hour that Elton John spends rehashing the same songs he's been playing for thirty years is an hour he could dedicate to producing new music. I don't see anyone begging him to stop performing, though.
If you consider students to be faceless vessels waiting to be filled with information, then yes, teaching can be automated. Filling willing vessels with new facts and techniques can be accomplished by film strips with an enthusiastic narrator. In my experience, good teachers do much more than present information. They do more than synthesize the information in a digestible form. In my experience, good teachers form a two-directional rapport with students that is different with every student. I can't tell you the number of stories I've heard along the lines of "I always thought I hated [chemistry], until [Dr. Smith's] class: after that, I just got the bug and I expect to defend my PhD thesis next month." Good teachers are social workers as much as founts of information.
Video classes (which have been around for at least 40 years, by the way) are fine for self-motivated students. Those people probably need university only to provide focus or direction for their intrinsic search for knowledge. But 40 years of failed video classes, and 100 years of failed correspondence classes seem like pretty good evidence that you can't substitute direct human contact for knowledge transmission.
Slashdot Mirror
A password book or password safe on your home computer is really only vulnerable to a directed, personal attack. You are vulnerable to these, and they're essentially impossible to completely defend against. They're also very low yield for the attacker.
A corporation/website is (probably) a harder target, but orders of magnitude higher yield. Realistically, you are much more likely to have personal information or passwords compromised by the Anthem, OPM, or Target hacks than by a keylogger or similar attack surreptitiously installed on your computer. (I'm fairly confident betting that you have already received free credit monitoring as the result of a large scale data breach) Hand-written passwords encourage you to use weaker passwords than computer-generated random character strings. Hand written passwords encourage password re-use, so your vulnerability to counterparty failure is greatly magnified.
A cloud-based password keeper has all the disadvantages of aggregating passwords, and all the disadvantages of trusting a high-yield counterparty to keep your secrets.
According to some sources, there are over a million English words. Some arent suitable to be used, but let's assume that at least 500000 are usable.
Not even great Scrabble players have 500,000 word vocabularies. Fewer than 200,000 of those words are in current use. Most of us live with 20,000 or so words we'll recognize as words and actually use only 1000-2000. 1000^3 is almost exactly 256^5
It also turns out that humans are bad at random, and will tend to choose nouns when asked for words. So, much like "choose an 8 character password with mixed case and at least one non-letter," "choose three random words" sounds like a lot of randomness until you bring humans into the process. "Sociogenetic earleen shaef" is not nearly as memorable as "correct horse battery."
So, in short what works well to separate breeds of dogs (which are bred in very controlled manners and you can somewhat keep something like a breed more or less pure) absolutely doesn't work with human that fuck around a lot.
"Race" in humans mostly identifies groups that spent a lot of time isolated from each other. You can absolutely identify genetic markers that are more concentrated in Africa than in Asia, for example. Even today, many people have generations of family or tribal history with very little change in geography and consequently very little genetic mixing. (not so much in the Americas, but they're a special case)
In the past 1000 years or so, humans have broken a lot of the geographic and language barriers that used to separate us, with the not-so-surprising result that the inbred markers that represent "Italian," "Jewish," or "Japanese" become more widely distributed. "Race" is essentially a word for "extended family," and the visible phenotype little different from saying "you have your mother's eyes."
Any threat to security and intellectual property that is posed by PEDs is also posed by eyeballs & ears
You don't get a Manning or Snowden-scale breach from people memorizing documents. Hiring trustworthy people is key, but there's no reason to make it easy for people to walk out with the crown jewels when you (inevitably) make a mistake of trust.
I used to have a great deal of interest in my computers, but after Windows 8, OSX, Gnome 3 and Unity, I really don't like computers any more, so I just do what's necessary to pay the bills.
I think this reflects exactly UI fatigue that comes from constant, pointless upgrades. Lots of us 'grew up' with computers. Discovering how to make the computer your own. The tweaks and barely-documented features that make you more efficient. Learning the keyboard alternatives to tedious menu trees. When you're new to the system, you expect to have to put some time in, and it's rewarding to learn the semi-secrets.
Then someone comes in and changes it all. Moves the menus around; revises the shortcuts; renames the control panel widgets. It makes you think you've learned all that stuff in vain, because someone is just going to come around and change it all in 3 years. Why bother, then, learning any but the most common features. UI fatigue turns power users into PlaySkool users, but that's ok, because the UI is built for PlaySkool users.
Standard deduction, single: $6300
Standard deduction, married filing jointly: $12600
The only tax break you get is if your wife is a stay-at-home mom where you can double your tax deduction. Of course, then she runs the risk of losing all her credits etc from having no income.
You forgot:
Single 15% tax threshold: $9226
Married 15% tax threshold: $18450
Single 39.6% tax threshold: $413200
Married 39.6% tax threshold: $46850
Double the deduction and lower rates at every income level up the chain. Most advantageous to the single-earner family, but if you believe that "Two can live as cheaply as one," it's still a distinct advantage for two-earner families.
While my initial point of puzzlement is why you would ever click on an ad, the core issue you're bringing up seems flawed: I'm not quite sure why the product is the responsibility of the carrier. A newspaper isn't responsible for the food in a restaurant that advertises in them, nor is PBS responsible for what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does -- even though they namecheck them as sponsors quite often.
A newspaper may have no liability for the food in an advertised restaurant, but they do have the discretion to run or not run a particular ad. If they regularly run ads for fraudulent businesses, they damage the value of their ads. Similarly with web businesses: the better they tailor their advertising to their readership, the more useful those ads and the less distracting. When I see an ad for MSI on Newegg, or Ars, it's consistent with the content. New product announcements in such ads even get clicks sometimes. Ads for beard trimmers on fibre2fashion or food.com? Irrelevant and jarring. Even at PBS, there's a lot of self-filtering: you won't see them accept funding from nor namecheck NAMBLA or the KKK.
The lack of continuity is probably the worst aspect of 'advertising networks' If you're just getting random, or even tracking-based shit from doubleclick or servedby, then the ads are out of context. Visit a shoe site then a car site and see shoe ads all over the cars. It demonstrates a lack of editorial concern by the website publisher, and implies that their primary interest is selling ads. (which it may be - it's just poor taste to demonstrate it to your nominal audience)
Still, you only buy something if you believe it is worth the money. No ad holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a purchase. They only suggest that something is worth purchasing or that their brand is better than the competition... you ultimately make the decision what to buy, and most importantly, whether to buy it in the first place.
Very few consumers are rational. Pet rocks were an actual thing. People buy stuff because they think it's worth the money, or because they think everyone else has one, or because they're bored.
Have you ever seen a kid when ice cream truck music starts playing? Those kids don't want a popsicle from the freezer - they want the exact same popsicle from the ice cream truck at three times the price. Adults get a little better at suppressing that kind of irrational act, but we're still susceptible to it. Even people who believe they make purchases only after coldly tabulating the marginal enjoyment of one more M&M against the penny it costs.
In a tunnel, air friction becomes really important. Trains (or hyperloops) fit close in the tunnel, and there's a lot of air has to move from in front of the train to behind the train, squeezing through that narrow space. Evacuating the tunnel (ie, hyperloop) is a huge benefit. So is running your train on Mars, where the atmosphere is already a -14.6 psi/ -0.994 bar vacuum.
My home has several outlets outside, if someone needed to use one for 20 min to charge their phone or run a fan, I couldn't care less.
Now imagine your outlets are in a room filled with 500 people all day long. Still willing to let passers-by plug in?
My guess is, no, and that you would turn off those circuits to prevent 60 W * 200 people * 8 hours...call it 100 kWh/day loss. And that's what the rail company should do. If they don't mean for their outlets to be used by passengers, then they should not energize them. Give cleaning crews or the engineer keys to the breaker box, and only energize the outlets when they're needed. Signage and verbal warning maybe a second best. Signage and arrest? ridiculous.
its fantasy... i dont to this day think about real life when watching fantasy.
Then you are uniquely incapable of appreciating metaphor. You see, many writers build their stories around symbolism in order to convey a message that may not be explicitly stated. This makes those stories richer and more meaningful for an audience not simply waiting for the next explosion. Aesop's fables are an extreme where the moral is explicitly stated by fantasty talking animals at the end. These metaphors depend on fictional or fantasy elements within the story bearing recognizable similarity to real world people or structures, and stereotypical caricatures are a millenia-old mechanism for that. Star Wars, Wizard of Oz, The Tempest or Adam and Eve: if you can't see that these stories say more than what is on screen, then you are missing the fucking point.
those who do IMO are wasting their time because whats the point of fantasy if you are going to do nothing but complain about how its close to X, if you squint real hard and spin around 3 times, it could be taken as racist
It's an effect of sensitization. If you wake up every day and someone calls you a lazy moke, you get much better at recognizing subtle comments. It's the reason it's ok for Peyton Manning to slap Marvin Harrison on the ass, but not ok to slap cheerleaders. Stereotypes, like the one about autistic computer geeks unable to recognize metaphor, are propagated by repetition.
He was caught trespassing on an old industrial site scavenging for toxic chemicals. That doesn't make you the brightest bulb in the lamp.
Mercury can be purchased online without hassle.
Sure. You can spend $120 for a teaspoon of mercury and then try to blow it into a glass tube in your basement, or you can go over to the mill that shut down 10 years ago and pry a "mercury switch" (commonly known as "thermostat") out of the wall.
1 cubic foot of methane -> 28.3 litres -> 18.6g (at 25 C, 1 atmosphere) -> 1.16 mole -> 1.03 MJ combustion energy (at 890 kJ/mol).
4 sticks dynamite -> 0.744 kg -> 3.72MJ (at 5MJ/kg, 186g sticks)
So it is more like a cubic foot of methane = 1 stick of dynamite -- still much more than I expected.
1 MJ is only slightly more energy than a Snickers bar. (215 kCal = 900 kJ) It's not so much the energy as how quickly it can be released.
I can't say I RTFA, but when the police shut down the street and show up at your front door with the bomb squad, most people don't realize they have the right to ask for a warrant.
People always have the right to *ask* for a warrant, but the police don't always need one.
Our paramilitary police forces make increasing use of "no knock warrants." It is very difficult to ask to see a warrant when your ears are ringing from the flash-bang and very difficult to be rational when your baby's face is on fire
They brought in a device to measure the mercury vapor level in the room and the room was declared a hazard after taking the air measurements. The room became a suit-up, limited exposure-time environment while they figured out what to do.
If the readings were that bad, does that mean that they were overreacting?
It depends on what the "readings" and "hazard" meant. Frequently, "hazard" means that the concentrations are above an OSHA or EPA environmental threshold. That is, they're above a level where long term, chronic exposure results in no measurable risk of dysfunction, birth defects, or cancer.
It's a very different question to ask whether it's safe to walk into a room long enough to sweep the spilled mercury into a dustpan, or whether it's safe to eat, sleep, and play banjo in that room. In fact, it's even different to ask whether it's safe for the high school chemistry teacher to make a one-time trip into the room to clean up the Hg, or whether it's safe for the mercury specialist, who spends his whole day cleaning up broken thermometers across town, to make yet another trip into another mercury room.
But why, why, why don't we have more engineers in America. It's because this generation is stupid and lazy....
A few years back, a kid at Georgia Tech, Georgia's main engineering school, was arrested and jailed on terrorism charges for throwing dry ice "bombs" out his dorm window.
Georgians like their authoritarians
It's not just computers. Plastic measuring cups have their sizes in raised plastic numbers, almost impossible to see.
But the meaning of numbers stamped on a measuring cup is intuitively obvious, and the stamped/molded numbers will last as long as the cup. Painted numbers flake off and add a whole extra step to the manufacturing process, dramatically increasing the cost. Stamped numbers on a measuring cup is a valid decision based on manufacturing constraints. Choosing grey-on-grey, or blue-on-blue (hello, microsoft) for icons and text is 100% arbitrary. It's just as easy to use yellow-on-purple, black-on-white, or red-on-green. Some choices are pretty, some are ugly, some are visible, and some are not. You choose among them only for cosmetic and usability reasons, and grey-on-grey sacrifices usability to cosmesis.
Anyone without cognitive impairment or severe physical limitations can use most common user interfaces
TFA isn't arguing about whether it's possible for people to use these interfaces, it claims that the use obscure metaphors and confusing design to the point that many users feel it's just not worth the bother.
Software/UI authors may believe that their app is the best thing in the world. They may think they've got a great system for getting all 32,767 functions within 3 clicks of the landing page, but this may only be true for people with 60+ hours experience using the software. Here's your first hint: a grey-on-grey list of star, clipboard, privates' stripe, arrow, and doghouse could either be a status display of several inactive features, all disabled, or it could an iconic menu. It's exactly as usable as a list of "M B P D H," meaning useful only as a mnemonic after you know what each button does.
There are a stunning number of "modern" GUIs that are exactly as usable as Emacs. Seriously: 3 horizontal lines - WTF is someone supposed to know that means the same as down-caret (unless the down-caret just toggles between horizontal caret) or as "solar eclipse" (unless "solar eclipse" means run calculations)?
Modern GUIs are more about fashion than function, and if you haven't been following the fashion, then you may not realize that "Menu" has changed from a set of nested horizontal lines to just three identical horizontal lines. You may not realize that last year's "Wrench" for options has changed to this year's "Gear" for the same function. It's not about age - a lot of users are going to upgrade, this year, from Windows XP and IE8 to Windows 10 and Chrome - skipping 10 years of fashion changes. It's culture shock.
The German and French banks gave loans although they knew Greece couldn't pay back.
That's what banks do. They guess at an organization's ability to repay a loan and set the interest level so that the (likely) sum of interest on good debts is greater than the sum of defaults. If the bank can't do that, it's supposed to fail. We're all sitting here making reasons why, now that Greece can't pay its creditors, they should be loaned more money by new creditors to pay off the old creditors. How are the new terms, on much higher risk debt, supposed to be any easier to meet?
Banks wrote the terms of the current Greek debt, and it seems Greece will not meet those terms. Default, let the banks collect whatever collateral they are due or whatever the default clause allows them, and let's get on with the capitalism. Capitalism only works if bad decisions carry a death penalty.
Maybe losing a wheel. I'm sure you've seen videos (seems like they're always Russian) of some car driving down the road with one wheel missing. You can route around that kind of damage by balancing cargo to unload the missing wheel. Once you've lost 2 wheels on a 4 wheel car, no amount of routing is going to get you running again.
and they are researching into making 3d printing CHEAPER than injection molding, and they are already getting pretty darn close!
That will never happen for any kind of quantity because of the time required to melt and freeze (or UV activate or whatever other technology) the printed part. It's easy to get an injection molder to produce 1000 parts/hour. This is the point: 3D printing is great if you need a small run of a unique shape, or if you can't adopt a commodity shape. Or if the shape you want is no longer being manufactured. That mostly means toys, art, and legacy repairs. If you're doing anything "real," meaning 1,000 or 100,000 pieces, you'll use a manufacturing process with higher start-up time and lower piece time.
I take the existence of this story to mean that Zuckerberg's campaign contributions aren't meeting Her Majesty's expectations.
Who is "her"? Hillary Clinton? She's not a current government official, has no actual power, is not even her party's nominee for an election that's still 16 months away, and you've already crowned her Queen? WTF is wrong with you?
The story author is Rupert Neate, a (male) British journalist covering US business and politics. Liberal, but without any obvious ties to any particular candidate.
The /. submission by theodp, a user almost as visible as BennetHaselton, though with less tendency to ramble, generally doing diversity-in-tech kinds of submissions. I don't know the gender, or whether it's "The ODP," like office depot, or "Theo DP," which would suggest a male.
So, I don't know who's the "her majesty" you're referring to, and you are almost certainly being too cynical
The intent of it however is clear, do you think the people who voted it in or the president who signed it thought that the subsidies were only suppose to be for the state exchanges, not the federal ones?
Honestly, I can see where the subsidies, which amount to the transfer of hundreds of millions of federal dollars into the state economies, could be seen as an enormous enticement for the states to set up their own exchanges. What rational state government, offered $300M+ per year, just for setting up an exchange, would refuse to do so?
Any state with a republican governor.
Being culpable and being guilty of a specifically defined crime, such as "First degree murder" are two different things.
CMU is a research university. So every dollar they save is another than can be spent on research.
Research universities don't generally spend their own money on research. They recruit faculty who then find other agencies to pay for research.
Every hour that a professor saves by not regurgitating the exact same material that he taught last year, is another hour dedicated to research.
Likewise, every hour that Elton John spends rehashing the same songs he's been playing for thirty years is an hour he could dedicate to producing new music. I don't see anyone begging him to stop performing, though.
If you consider students to be faceless vessels waiting to be filled with information, then yes, teaching can be automated. Filling willing vessels with new facts and techniques can be accomplished by film strips with an enthusiastic narrator. In my experience, good teachers do much more than present information. They do more than synthesize the information in a digestible form. In my experience, good teachers form a two-directional rapport with students that is different with every student. I can't tell you the number of stories I've heard along the lines of "I always thought I hated [chemistry], until [Dr. Smith's] class: after that, I just got the bug and I expect to defend my PhD thesis next month." Good teachers are social workers as much as founts of information.
Video classes (which have been around for at least 40 years, by the way) are fine for self-motivated students. Those people probably need university only to provide focus or direction for their intrinsic search for knowledge. But 40 years of failed video classes, and 100 years of failed correspondence classes seem like pretty good evidence that you can't substitute direct human contact for knowledge transmission.