The first difference between a clinostat and zero G is shear force. In a clinostat, the cells, or embryos, or whatever, are perpetually falling through the liquid medium. They don't settle because the viscous fluid forces counter the gravitational force.
The second difference is that the cells, or embryos, or whatever, never get to adhere to a surface. For most cells, adhesion forces are 100-1000x gravitational forces and really important. Non-adherent cells undergo anoikis.
Clinostat is a good model of zero-G for certain situations, but like all experimental models, you have to understand the differences between your model and the real thing
The voting booth is separate from the machine. The "voting booth" itself is nothing more than a plastic stand with a privacy screen and a supply of felt-tipped markers. The machine itself is in plain view of the election inspectors and everybody else who happens to be in the polling place.
You do realize that you're vehemently defending a system which is not the AVC Advantage DRE system and the subject of this thread, right? To claim that election fraud in general is not possible because of specific details of the paper-trail complete New York State system is ridiculous. You might as well claim that DRE systems are perfect because you can always go back and look at the punched card.
Many districts do use DRE systems with no paper trail. These people also believe that tamper seals and obscurity of the systems provide complete security. The UCSD/Princeton team has demonstrated that tamper seals are inadequate and that they can reverse engineer a legally purchased device sufficiently to alter results.
Kudos to NYS for including a paper trail. Hopefully this work is one more piece of evidence to drive the rest of districts that use electronic systems to find one that incorporates a physical audit trail.
Get a degree in something useful if you want a job. It's really as simple as that
This is exactly the theory under which community colleges like Monroe name their degrees. This gal has a 2-year associate's degree called "Bachelor of Business Administration" Compare that with a degree in "Computer Technology" or "Industrial Engineering Technology." The names are very similar to four year degrees. A naive 20 year old is susceptible to the line that you can get the skills employers want to work in [impressive field] with salaries up to $50,000, in a business-friendly environment; that by cutting out extraneous classes like English and History, you can graduate in just 2 years rather than 4. If they don't have someone there to point out that "Engineering Technology" is different than "Engineering" or that "Bachelor of Business Administration in Computer Information" is different than "Bachelor of Science in Business Administration," they can end up buying something very different than what they expected.
CC can be a good option. An AS or AA can definitely be a step towards a better career, and can provide a useful skill set, but it's a different route than a four year degree, and I don't think that distinction is always made clear to potential students.
With grade inflation, a "C" student is probably in the lower third of graduates. Probably in the lower quarter.
Monroe is a community college, and her degree in "business administration" is a 2 year associate degree.
There are a lot of community colleges, especially private community colleges that seem to actively mislead their applicants. They prey on unemployed people hoping that a little education will be a quick path to the gravy train.
He degree says "Bachelor of Business Administration in Information Technology" not "Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration." The latter has a specific meaning and its use monitored by various accrediting agencies. The former is meaningless, but it looks a lot like a respectable degree. Likewise, there are a number of 2-year programs in "[X] engineering technology" that look a lot like degrees in "electrical engineering" or "computer engineering" without actually having the content of a four year degree. Employers do actually know the difference, especially if they're recruiting at the community college. Prospective students often don't know the difference, and a clever recruiter, like a clever 411 scammer, can mislead people, often without actually lying.
Flavour enhancers override our senses and let us eat beyond what we need as sustenance. From personal experience I know that I eat less the more unprocessed ingredients are used in food preparation.
So, what you're saying is, you eat less of food that tastes bad. Or maybe 'unprocessed ingredients' make eating an ordeal you put up with in order to survive. Not very compelling arguments for use of organic/natural methods, unless you're one of those people who thrives discomfort and bristles against pleasure. Enjoy your cod liver oil, I'll take chocolate.
Its kind of a big deal when the U.S. military can't keep its data secure.
But what are the consequences of that failure? Katrina crippled a 200 mile stretch of coastline, displaced millions of people - many for months, shut down 25% of US oil and gas production for weeks, and resulted in billions in direct costs and who knows how much in indirect costs and lost productivity. What's the scenario where cyber warfare does something on the same scale? Or what's the scenario where a cyber attack sinks 18 warships?
I can understand where a cyber attack could black out the northeast for a few hours. Even a day or two. I can imagine, at just about the limit of my imagination, where a cyber attack might take over drones in the air long enough to deploy their ordnance inappropriately (although I don't think that's what people discussing "cyberterrorism" are talking about), but I can't imagine that happening for a second shift, as the first incident would certainly ground the entire drone fleet.
Big scary words. "Cyber-Katrina" "Virtual Perl Harbor" I've never seen an actual scenario on that scale, and I don't think I will.
In the U.K., under the NICE system, they set a price limit on every condition. If they can save a year of life for about $50,000, they will do it. If it costs more than that, NICE recommends against it, but if people complain about it, the government usually gives in and pays for it anyway.
So, not many $400,000 liver transplants being done then? Granted, the US only averages around 1/year/50,000 population...yeah, I see the UK averages around 1/100,000 population. Per capita, the US transplant list is 300x longer, with many more people "allowed" to get liver than there are livers available. That's the availability of healthcare, or the expectation of "rationing" that many in the US have: if a new liver might help you, you can get one, limited only by the number of people willing to give one up.
Really, I suspect that countries with socialized care don't even notice that their care is being restricted - CAT scan for an asymptomatic bump on the head? I think not. And I suspect that people in the US don't realize that much of their care is unnecessary. If the level of care in the US were actually productive, let alone necessary, our outcomes measures would be well above Canada, UK, Sweden, etc and they're not. Every unnecessary test is still margin for the hospital and reason for the insurance company to hike premiums. It's a very easy game, then, for the insurance companies, drug companies, and for-profit hospitals to play: to frighten people by implying that they won't be able to get an aspirin anymore without a form filed in triplicate at a grungy office downtown.
Should Madoff be banned from operating a company? Sure.
You know, it's interesting: I came from a hiring/interviewing seminar recently where they explained that one of the things you're not allowed to ask about is criminal record. So, unless his sentence specifically states "never operate a company," the law apparently thinks that past, massive fraud ought not prevent you from being placed in a second position of trust. Once you've done your time, you're supposed to get a clean slate.
If I (the royal 'I' here), am not being paid for my time or more code, then "users" should just be glad that 'I' have decided to make the fruits of my labor available to them, too.
Perhaps the "users," in sending 'you' UI and feature suggestions are saying how grateful they are to have the fruits of 'your' labor, how great it is now, but also how a couple of tweaks could really move it to the next level. If they weren't grateful, didn't think the result was good, they'd just move on to the next similar project. My experience has been that everything I do benefits from constructive criticism, though it's sometimes difficult to accept criticism as constructive. If I'm going to put my time into a project, I want it to be the best thing possible, whether it's a short story, a chair, or a computer widget. What I do myself is locked in my own head, and it's only when someone else points out their different interpretation or sense of my work that I can see where I've been accommodating to my own idiosyncrasies.
If you're releasing code because it's something you wrote to solve a particular problem and you think it might be useful to some other schmuck in a similar situation, that's good. That's one of the neat things that can happen with FOSS and it can make people's life much easier. But it's not "Developing." Development implies a commitment to the code and the project and a willingness to improve. If someone sent you corrections to a core algorithm, you'd care about that - why not usability? Make the users grateful for your thoughtfulness and not resentful of your user-antagonistic interface.
In the USA and some other countries, rights are spelled out in a constitutional document, which makes many people believe that they are permanent and unenfringeable.
You don't have rights in the US because they're spelled out in the Constitution. This was made explicit in the 9th amendment
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The enumeration of rights is supposed to make it explicitly difficult to infringe on things that were of particular importance in 1789. To specially enshrine particular aspects of the social contract that the founders held most dear, probably because they had been most trampled during colonialism.
More importantly, the constitution, of any country, describes the philosophy of the social contract that establishes the country, and that philosophy can take many forms and it can change over time. The US contract, for example, started without any particular concept of gender equality, and the term "people" only really referred to white males. Eventually, we figured out that these were not tenable beliefs. Many parts of the world today still hold values that the US discarded 50-100 years ago, and it's appropriate that we let those countries' social philosophy develop at its own pace. We can hope that the examples of freedom of thought and respect for others with be attractive to those people and accelerate their development towards a system with similar values to our own. What people are doing with tor and twitter and the like are excellent examples of that encouragement, but ultimately, it has to be the people themselves who change their social contract.
Of course your implication that taxes (not the maximum tax rate) were higher in 1939 is still probably false.
The wikipedia article does not spell out at what income level that 80% kicked in. Nor how it compares to the average income of the time.
According to the IRS that 1939 79% tax rate was for folks over $5m. Of course, they also claim that the 1951-1963 top tax bracket of 90% started at income of $400k. According to the census bureau, in 1967, an income of $19k would put you in the top 5% of households, equivalent to $180k today. By wild extrapolation, you might imagine the 90% tax rate to start around $3.6-4m today.
In today's terms, if income tax rate topped out at 80% but only for incomes larger than 100 million then it would have practically no impact at all and certainly wouldn't end up accounting for more than a very small fraction of all taxes collected.
And how much benefit does a $200m earner gain from that second $100m? One often hears the argument that high salaries are required in order to recruit the best talent to extremely difficult, stressful, or unpleasant jobs: is the guy working for $200m really going to refuse to work for $100m, or is he motivated by other than money? Meanwhile, $100m is all the budget cuts Obama has ordered. It's the sum total of the US investment in a smart electrical grid. It's 50 NIH grants. It's the tax paid by nearly 12,000 median-income earners.
Don't get me wrong: people with extraordinary skills ought to reap extraordinary benefits. Surely there's a point where money extra money becomes more or less meaningless.
Now you've decided to share that two-way communication with a hidden third party,
I did no such thing. I placed a link in my page to the third party. Your web browser, running on your computer, executed the link to the 3rd party and provided the data.
This is splitting hairs. By placing a google analytics web bug on your page, Google becomes your agent from the user perspective. They go to Your page, they expect, and accept, everything there as Yours. If you have a privacy policy that says you don't share any information with 3rd parties, you may feel secure with the legal nicety that you don't actively send any information to google, but your visitors will be confused as to how a 3rd party comes to know all about their visit to your site.
If I can use a/.-standard physical world analogy, imagine Borders tells you your purchases are private, but then dresses FBI agents up in Borders outfits & nametags and lets them take surreptitious photos of every book you look at. Technically, they've never told the FBI you were looking at "How to beat drug tests" "Koran" and "Anarchists Cookbook" but do you feel comfortable with the distinction?
Respect for the danger would be a good idea. Hypokalemia can cause arrhythmia. And hyperkalemia can also cause... you guessed it, arrhythmia. And arrhythmia can cause death, with little warning.
Yes...respect for the danger. Let's see, the scientific paper upon which the popular press drama is based, was a review of five individual case reports since 1994. That's right: in the whole of the medical literature, there are five reported cases of hypokalaemia linked to excessive consumption of cola. The outcome in all of those cases was "uneventful recovery," so the known risk of death due to cola-mediated caffeine intoxication is zero. There was exactly one case of "profound paralysis," with other symptoms being "mild weakness" and "mild arrhythmia." In the health-risk scale, the problem of hypokalaemia due to cola consumption is an order of magnitude smaller than the problem of lightning strikes (about 1 in 700,000 annually; 10% fatal).
How do you make life not suck so much? Seriously -- is it better pay? Free sex? More leisure time?
These things always seem to come to people's mind first when thinking about what they want, but they're symptoms of happiness, not the cause of happiness. Happiness comes by reaching goals through difficult challenges, so the first key to happiness is to learn to set lofty goals for yourself. The second key to happiness is to commit yourself to achieving those goals.
Seriously: what do you do with the 4/7 days you don't work? "Relax?" "Spend time with family?" When you look at those days, of what are you proud?
Doesn't really matter, it's all about the GPA. If you've got that you get the money, both after your degree and while earning it.
GPA is a measure that your first employer can use to distinguish you from the hundred other job applicants. After that, the money is based on your skill.
I live in florida and there's basically 2 classes of people here. The model students who all seem to get the same test scores and GPAs and get almost all the resources and scholarships and then the rest of us mere mortals with GPAs in the mid to upper 3 range (out of a perfect 4.0).
Have you considered the possibility that the model students are just smarter, harder working, or more effective than "mere mortals?"
I disagree. I think understanding and applying the scientific method is the foundation of science, which is just one method of critical thought. Any particular facts a person knows or does not know may be reflective of their opinions about science, or it may be reflective of their particular interests and cultural influences.
My university is pushing that idea. The notion that we should be teaching people to think, and evaluating their ability to do so, in some way completely abstracted from any factual knowledge. Every thing they describe as "thinking" really boils down to the ability to manipulate facts and observations in some kind of logically consistent fashion, so the absence of factual knowledge precludes critical or scientific thinking in the same way that the absence of premises precludes logical argument.
It used to be that primary education focused itself on instilling the basic facts, language, and rules that people need to form a foundation for further and more abstract learning. Recently, it's become popular to try to teach students the process of thinking without giving them anything to think about. I agree that, to a large extent, the abstract thinking processes are similar for any specific topic, so it should be possible to abstract or generalize them from the context, but you can't actually teach thinking, or learning, or whatever the fashionable buzzword of the year is, without a set of basic factual tokens to manipulate.
If we really are a culture that admires "science," then we ought to expect that as many people know how much water is on the planet as know who won American Idol last year. That this is not true implies that we're a culture that romanticizes science, but would really rather have a chocolate milkshake.
I sure as hell am not going to go through 10 years of schooling and assloads of debt just to make a wage I could have made with 4 years of school.
M.D.s get 4 years undergrad, 4 years med school, and a few years residency. They follow the standard of practice as they learned it with starting salaries around $100k/year.
Ph.D.s get 4 years undergrad, 5-6 years grad school, and a few years postdoc. They advance the state of art, train the physicians, and the engineers, and everyone else, with starting salaries around $60k.
Money is not the only motivator, and if you make it the major motivator, they you're not going to attract talented, well-educated people. You're going to attract people who are motivated by money.
According to the Nielsen Ratings Company, only 5% of households are not ready. So we postponed this switch for a measly 5% of the nation. Pathetic.
Unfortunately, none of the people who are ready called their congresscritters to encourage the switch. Facts don't matter in congress, only lobbying. On one hand, you've got fat-cat broadcasters anxious to shut down their old, expensive analog machinery; on the other you have downtrodden constituents declaring they can't possibly arrange to get an all-but-free converter box during the 12 months conversion media blitz.
This bill does effectively nothing but switch the focus of Feb 18 complaints from congress (for imposing the rule) to broadcasters (for switching the analog off before it was absolutely required).
Really, though, the conversion to digital TV has been much faster and more effective than the conversion to the metric system.
He talks about freedom, but wants to dictate how I, as a developer, can market or sell the product of my effort.
Point is, either we decide original developers of software get to define policy or we frown on letting anyone define policy and let people do what they want with it. Many in the opensource community favour some form of the latter
RMS is opposed to the latter. The whole point of GPL is to allow the FSF to define the policy by which people release software. Specifically, GPL demands that if you write code that borrows even one little bit of a GPL'd source, then you can only release your software under GPL. You can't release it under BSD, you can't refuse to release the source, and you must take special care to know where each line of your software came from.
It's fine if developers want to use the GPL. I think it's a great idea to make share-and-share-alike a condition of using code, the same way I think compensation of $40 is a fine condition of using code. GPL has created a great library of accessible and reusable code and a great service to the community. But GPL'd software is only "free" as in speech if you never tell anyone what you've done with your freedom.
Then I tell them to imagine having to go to the DMV, and like with the above...wait often for hours in long lines with govt. workers who are drones that dont' give a shit, and yet have them in control of dispensing your medical care...what Dr. to see...what prescription to fill, etc.
The US alternative to apathetic government drones seems to be actively antagonistic insurance claims adjusters with financial motivation to deny care in as many cases as possible. The DMV may not be motivated to move me quickly through the lines, but at least they are not rewarded for refusing me a license
Even in countries with truly socialized medicine, there remains a market for special services. You can almost always pay a premium for extra attention, extra fast service, or whatever else. You will, almost certainly, still be able to save up for that liver transplant, or buy catastrophic coverage to pay for it. Universal coverage means you don't have a financial motive to forgo minor treatment, and you catch small problems before they turn into catastrophes.
His conclusions are not original, and their is much he is missing, including the problems of identity matching that are at the forefront of much research in the area.
His conclusions aren't original, but somehow, even after five years of people saying, loudly, what totally irrelevant theater the TSA is, the TSA still has a budget of more than $5 billion. That's half as much as the government spends on "general science" research and twice what they spend on "energy" research. I suspect he'll shut up about TSA as soon as we stop wasting so much money on them.
For example, you still seem to be missing his entire point. Solving "the problems of identity matching" won't make TSA any more effective because TSA is not the effective part of airline security. The effective part of airline security is that passengers will no longer be compliant participants and that the cockpit is no longer accessible to hijackers.
To make a home security analogy: reinforcing the cockpit door is equivalent to locking the front door of your house; changing passenger attitude is equivalent to posting a guard at that door; expanding TSA search policies, data mining, and screening procedures is equivalent to planting a "Brinks" sign in your front yard. It cost a few hundred million to reinforce the doors. The attitude change was priceless in terms of the lives lost to cause it, but $0. The TSA is $5 billion/year in direct costs plus the uncountable costs of passenger frustration and inconvenience.
By using a self-incrimination defence it's effectively admitting, yeah you've got some data that's evidence locked up but you're not handing it over.
I'm not sure about the UK's current system. It used to be that it was perfectly ok for judges and juries to make exactly that inference. ie: to claim that a defendant would only choose not to speak in order to obscure his true guilt. The US 5th amendment ([no person] shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself) allows you to be silent whether your statements would be incriminating or exculpatory and requires that your decision to be silent not be interpreted in any way. The right to silence is, in general, only useful if it applies, and the defendant exercises it under both conditions. This is a big part of the reason lawyers will always tell you to exercise your right to remain silent.
my locking/hiding the door to my dungeon where I keep my daughter is to stop me incrimincating myself by her being found
Someone finding your imprisoned daughter is not you incriminating yourself. It's physical evidence incriminating you. The part of that situation where you incriminate yourself is where you show the investigator the cleverly hidden door. The protection against self-incrimination means they can't force you to reveal where you've buried the bodies, but the power of lawful search means they can look.
Encryption frustrates investigators because it's like taking a full page ad out saying "I buried the bodies on the moon." It gives them the impression that they know exactly where the incriminating evidence is, but they just can't get to it. Technically, encrypting data is no more than hiding data in random numbers. It's very much like hiding your drugs under a loose floorboard. They can't make you tell them which floorboard hides the drugs and they can't make you tell them which of the random bits contain data. Except, apparently, in the UK.
If I can be ordered to hand over my swiss bank account number (just a number for a service) then so can I be ordered to hand over the key to my encrypted files
Actually, you can't be forced to reveal the Swiss bank account number. Investigators can obtain a warrant to search your personal effects, wherein they may discover the number; they can subpoena the records of financial institutions they believe you to do business with, wherein they may discover the number; but they can not force you to reveal the number.
The point of the story is that companies publish the successful trials on a drug, but don't publish failed trials on that same drug - i.e. they cherry-pick the results.
This (almost certainly) has nothing to do with drug companies cherry-picking results. It's extremely difficult to get negative results through peer review, and as a result there are very few studies of any sort that report "X doesn't have an effect" or "Y is not involved in Z."
Part of this is because of the statistical modeling associated with these studies. It's relatively easy to be certain, and to prove, that the observations from two groups are different: this is the type I error everyone loves. We've all agreed that we're willing to accept a 1-5% probability that we're wrong, so once you hit that statistical threshold, you satisfy reviewers.
To prove that two groups are identical is essentially impossible. The only thing you can formally test is whether the difference between two groups is smaller than some pre-defined margin, but there's no established formalism for choosing how big that margin is. Even worse, there's no established criterion for how frequently you're willing to make a type II error. Some folks design their studies with 10% margin, but this number has a huge influence on the required sample size, and folks often use 20% as a desired power. Worse, many studies get started with no formal statistical design at all, and this more-or-less prevents them from making any meaningful statement of "sameness" between groups.
It's a shame, because it almost certainly means that a lot of scientists spend a lot of time reproducing experiments that other people already know aren't going to produce any meaningful differences. Even if there were great statistical models for sameness, it would still be tough to be intuitively confident that lack of differences reflect the actual world and not just crappy assays, and it's likely that we're just stuck with negative results being unpublishable.
Slashdot Mirror
The first difference between a clinostat and zero G is shear force. In a clinostat, the cells, or embryos, or whatever, are perpetually falling through the liquid medium. They don't settle because the viscous fluid forces counter the gravitational force.
The second difference is that the cells, or embryos, or whatever, never get to adhere to a surface. For most cells, adhesion forces are 100-1000x gravitational forces and really important. Non-adherent cells undergo anoikis.
Clinostat is a good model of zero-G for certain situations, but like all experimental models, you have to understand the differences between your model and the real thing
The voting booth is separate from the machine. The "voting booth" itself is nothing more than a plastic stand with a privacy screen and a supply of felt-tipped markers. The machine itself is in plain view of the election inspectors and everybody else who happens to be in the polling place.
You do realize that you're vehemently defending a system which is not the AVC Advantage DRE system and the subject of this thread, right? To claim that election fraud in general is not possible because of specific details of the paper-trail complete New York State system is ridiculous. You might as well claim that DRE systems are perfect because you can always go back and look at the punched card.
Many districts do use DRE systems with no paper trail. These people also believe that tamper seals and obscurity of the systems provide complete security. The UCSD/Princeton team has demonstrated that tamper seals are inadequate and that they can reverse engineer a legally purchased device sufficiently to alter results.
Kudos to NYS for including a paper trail. Hopefully this work is one more piece of evidence to drive the rest of districts that use electronic systems to find one that incorporates a physical audit trail.
Get a degree in something useful if you want a job. It's really as simple as that
This is exactly the theory under which community colleges like Monroe name their degrees. This gal has a 2-year associate's degree called "Bachelor of Business Administration" Compare that with a degree in "Computer Technology" or "Industrial Engineering Technology." The names are very similar to four year degrees. A naive 20 year old is susceptible to the line that you can get the skills employers want to work in [impressive field] with salaries up to $50,000, in a business-friendly environment; that by cutting out extraneous classes like English and History, you can graduate in just 2 years rather than 4. If they don't have someone there to point out that "Engineering Technology" is different than "Engineering" or that "Bachelor of Business Administration in Computer Information" is different than "Bachelor of Science in Business Administration," they can end up buying something very different than what they expected.
CC can be a good option. An AS or AA can definitely be a step towards a better career, and can provide a useful skill set, but it's a different route than a four year degree, and I don't think that distinction is always made clear to potential students.
With grade inflation, a "C" student is probably in the lower third of graduates. Probably in the lower quarter. Monroe is a community college, and her degree in "business administration" is a 2 year associate degree. There are a lot of community colleges, especially private community colleges that seem to actively mislead their applicants. They prey on unemployed people hoping that a little education will be a quick path to the gravy train. He degree says "Bachelor of Business Administration in Information Technology" not "Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration." The latter has a specific meaning and its use monitored by various accrediting agencies. The former is meaningless, but it looks a lot like a respectable degree. Likewise, there are a number of 2-year programs in "[X] engineering technology" that look a lot like degrees in "electrical engineering" or "computer engineering" without actually having the content of a four year degree. Employers do actually know the difference, especially if they're recruiting at the community college. Prospective students often don't know the difference, and a clever recruiter, like a clever 411 scammer, can mislead people, often without actually lying.
Flavour enhancers override our senses and let us eat beyond what we need as sustenance. From personal experience I know that I eat less the more unprocessed ingredients are used in food preparation.
So, what you're saying is, you eat less of food that tastes bad. Or maybe 'unprocessed ingredients' make eating an ordeal you put up with in order to survive. Not very compelling arguments for use of organic/natural methods, unless you're one of those people who thrives discomfort and bristles against pleasure. Enjoy your cod liver oil, I'll take chocolate.
Its kind of a big deal when the U.S. military can't keep its data secure.
But what are the consequences of that failure? Katrina crippled a 200 mile stretch of coastline, displaced millions of people - many for months, shut down 25% of US oil and gas production for weeks, and resulted in billions in direct costs and who knows how much in indirect costs and lost productivity. What's the scenario where cyber warfare does something on the same scale? Or what's the scenario where a cyber attack sinks 18 warships?
I can understand where a cyber attack could black out the northeast for a few hours. Even a day or two. I can imagine, at just about the limit of my imagination, where a cyber attack might take over drones in the air long enough to deploy their ordnance inappropriately (although I don't think that's what people discussing "cyberterrorism" are talking about), but I can't imagine that happening for a second shift, as the first incident would certainly ground the entire drone fleet.
Big scary words. "Cyber-Katrina" "Virtual Perl Harbor" I've never seen an actual scenario on that scale, and I don't think I will.
In the U.K., under the NICE system, they set a price limit on every condition. If they can save a year of life for about $50,000, they will do it. If it costs more than that, NICE recommends against it, but if people complain about it, the government usually gives in and pays for it anyway.
So, not many $400,000 liver transplants being done then? Granted, the US only averages around 1/year/50,000 population...yeah, I see the UK averages around 1/100,000 population. Per capita, the US transplant list is 300x longer, with many more people "allowed" to get liver than there are livers available. That's the availability of healthcare, or the expectation of "rationing" that many in the US have: if a new liver might help you, you can get one, limited only by the number of people willing to give one up.
Really, I suspect that countries with socialized care don't even notice that their care is being restricted - CAT scan for an asymptomatic bump on the head? I think not. And I suspect that people in the US don't realize that much of their care is unnecessary. If the level of care in the US were actually productive, let alone necessary, our outcomes measures would be well above Canada, UK, Sweden, etc and they're not. Every unnecessary test is still margin for the hospital and reason for the insurance company to hike premiums. It's a very easy game, then, for the insurance companies, drug companies, and for-profit hospitals to play: to frighten people by implying that they won't be able to get an aspirin anymore without a form filed in triplicate at a grungy office downtown.
Should Madoff be banned from operating a company? Sure.
You know, it's interesting: I came from a hiring/interviewing seminar recently where they explained that one of the things you're not allowed to ask about is criminal record. So, unless his sentence specifically states "never operate a company," the law apparently thinks that past, massive fraud ought not prevent you from being placed in a second position of trust. Once you've done your time, you're supposed to get a clean slate.
If I (the royal 'I' here), am not being paid for my time or more code, then "users" should just be glad that 'I' have decided to make the fruits of my labor available to them, too.
Perhaps the "users," in sending 'you' UI and feature suggestions are saying how grateful they are to have the fruits of 'your' labor, how great it is now, but also how a couple of tweaks could really move it to the next level. If they weren't grateful, didn't think the result was good, they'd just move on to the next similar project. My experience has been that everything I do benefits from constructive criticism, though it's sometimes difficult to accept criticism as constructive. If I'm going to put my time into a project, I want it to be the best thing possible, whether it's a short story, a chair, or a computer widget. What I do myself is locked in my own head, and it's only when someone else points out their different interpretation or sense of my work that I can see where I've been accommodating to my own idiosyncrasies.
If you're releasing code because it's something you wrote to solve a particular problem and you think it might be useful to some other schmuck in a similar situation, that's good. That's one of the neat things that can happen with FOSS and it can make people's life much easier. But it's not "Developing." Development implies a commitment to the code and the project and a willingness to improve. If someone sent you corrections to a core algorithm, you'd care about that - why not usability? Make the users grateful for your thoughtfulness and not resentful of your user-antagonistic interface.
In the USA and some other countries, rights are spelled out in a constitutional document, which makes many people believe that they are permanent and unenfringeable.
You don't have rights in the US because they're spelled out in the Constitution. This was made explicit in the 9th amendment
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The enumeration of rights is supposed to make it explicitly difficult to infringe on things that were of particular importance in 1789. To specially enshrine particular aspects of the social contract that the founders held most dear, probably because they had been most trampled during colonialism.
More importantly, the constitution, of any country, describes the philosophy of the social contract that establishes the country, and that philosophy can take many forms and it can change over time. The US contract, for example, started without any particular concept of gender equality, and the term "people" only really referred to white males. Eventually, we figured out that these were not tenable beliefs. Many parts of the world today still hold values that the US discarded 50-100 years ago, and it's appropriate that we let those countries' social philosophy develop at its own pace. We can hope that the examples of freedom of thought and respect for others with be attractive to those people and accelerate their development towards a system with similar values to our own. What people are doing with tor and twitter and the like are excellent examples of that encouragement, but ultimately, it has to be the people themselves who change their social contract.
Of course your implication that taxes (not the maximum tax rate) were higher in 1939 is still probably false.
The wikipedia article does not spell out at what income level that 80% kicked in. Nor how it compares to the average income of the time.
According to the IRS that 1939 79% tax rate was for folks over $5m. Of course, they also claim that the 1951-1963 top tax bracket of 90% started at income of $400k. According to the census bureau, in 1967, an income of $19k would put you in the top 5% of households, equivalent to $180k today. By wild extrapolation, you might imagine the 90% tax rate to start around $3.6-4m today.
In today's terms, if income tax rate topped out at 80% but only for incomes larger than 100 million then it would have practically no impact at all and certainly wouldn't end up accounting for more than a very small fraction of all taxes collected.
And how much benefit does a $200m earner gain from that second $100m? One often hears the argument that high salaries are required in order to recruit the best talent to extremely difficult, stressful, or unpleasant jobs: is the guy working for $200m really going to refuse to work for $100m, or is he motivated by other than money? Meanwhile, $100m is all the budget cuts Obama has ordered. It's the sum total of the US investment in a smart electrical grid. It's 50 NIH grants. It's the tax paid by nearly 12,000 median-income earners.
Don't get me wrong: people with extraordinary skills ought to reap extraordinary benefits. Surely there's a point where money extra money becomes more or less meaningless.
Now you've decided to share that two-way communication with a hidden third party,
I did no such thing. I placed a link in my page to the third party. Your web browser, running on your computer, executed the link to the 3rd party and provided the data.
This is splitting hairs. By placing a google analytics web bug on your page, Google becomes your agent from the user perspective. They go to Your page, they expect, and accept, everything there as Yours. If you have a privacy policy that says you don't share any information with 3rd parties, you may feel secure with the legal nicety that you don't actively send any information to google, but your visitors will be confused as to how a 3rd party comes to know all about their visit to your site.
If I can use a /.-standard physical world analogy, imagine Borders tells you your purchases are private, but then dresses FBI agents up in Borders outfits & nametags and lets them take surreptitious photos of every book you look at. Technically, they've never told the FBI you were looking at "How to beat drug tests" "Koran" and "Anarchists Cookbook" but do you feel comfortable with the distinction?
Respect for the danger would be a good idea. Hypokalemia can cause arrhythmia. And hyperkalemia can also cause ... you guessed it, arrhythmia. And arrhythmia can cause death, with little warning.
Yes...respect for the danger. Let's see, the scientific paper upon which the popular press drama is based, was a review of five individual case reports since 1994. That's right: in the whole of the medical literature, there are five reported cases of hypokalaemia linked to excessive consumption of cola. The outcome in all of those cases was "uneventful recovery," so the known risk of death due to cola-mediated caffeine intoxication is zero. There was exactly one case of "profound paralysis," with other symptoms being "mild weakness" and "mild arrhythmia." In the health-risk scale, the problem of hypokalaemia due to cola consumption is an order of magnitude smaller than the problem of lightning strikes (about 1 in 700,000 annually; 10% fatal).
How do you make life not suck so much? Seriously -- is it better pay? Free sex? More leisure time?
These things always seem to come to people's mind first when thinking about what they want, but they're symptoms of happiness, not the cause of happiness. Happiness comes by reaching goals through difficult challenges, so the first key to happiness is to learn to set lofty goals for yourself. The second key to happiness is to commit yourself to achieving those goals.
Seriously: what do you do with the 4/7 days you don't work? "Relax?" "Spend time with family?" When you look at those days, of what are you proud?
Doesn't really matter, it's all about the GPA. If you've got that you get the money, both after your degree and while earning it.
GPA is a measure that your first employer can use to distinguish you from the hundred other job applicants. After that, the money is based on your skill.
I live in florida and there's basically 2 classes of people here. The model students who all seem to get the same test scores and GPAs and get almost all the resources and scholarships and then the rest of us mere mortals with GPAs in the mid to upper 3 range (out of a perfect 4.0).
Have you considered the possibility that the model students are just smarter, harder working, or more effective than "mere mortals?"
What I cannot understand, though is why, in these cash-strapped times, they did not auction the name off? Could have raised some much-needed funds.
I imagine that's just what Blagojevich said to his advisers just before putting Obama's senate seat up for auction.
I disagree. I think understanding and applying the scientific method is the foundation of science, which is just one method of critical thought. Any particular facts a person knows or does not know may be reflective of their opinions about science, or it may be reflective of their particular interests and cultural influences.
My university is pushing that idea. The notion that we should be teaching people to think, and evaluating their ability to do so, in some way completely abstracted from any factual knowledge. Every thing they describe as "thinking" really boils down to the ability to manipulate facts and observations in some kind of logically consistent fashion, so the absence of factual knowledge precludes critical or scientific thinking in the same way that the absence of premises precludes logical argument.
It used to be that primary education focused itself on instilling the basic facts, language, and rules that people need to form a foundation for further and more abstract learning. Recently, it's become popular to try to teach students the process of thinking without giving them anything to think about. I agree that, to a large extent, the abstract thinking processes are similar for any specific topic, so it should be possible to abstract or generalize them from the context, but you can't actually teach thinking, or learning, or whatever the fashionable buzzword of the year is, without a set of basic factual tokens to manipulate.
If we really are a culture that admires "science," then we ought to expect that as many people know how much water is on the planet as know who won American Idol last year. That this is not true implies that we're a culture that romanticizes science, but would really rather have a chocolate milkshake.
I sure as hell am not going to go through 10 years of schooling and assloads of debt just to make a wage I could have made with 4 years of school.
M.D.s get 4 years undergrad, 4 years med school, and a few years residency. They follow the standard of practice as they learned it with starting salaries around $100k/year.
Ph.D.s get 4 years undergrad, 5-6 years grad school, and a few years postdoc. They advance the state of art, train the physicians, and the engineers, and everyone else, with starting salaries around $60k.
Money is not the only motivator, and if you make it the major motivator, they you're not going to attract talented, well-educated people. You're going to attract people who are motivated by money.
According to the Nielsen Ratings Company, only 5% of households are not ready. So we postponed this switch for a measly 5% of the nation. Pathetic.
Unfortunately, none of the people who are ready called their congresscritters to encourage the switch. Facts don't matter in congress, only lobbying. On one hand, you've got fat-cat broadcasters anxious to shut down their old, expensive analog machinery; on the other you have downtrodden constituents declaring they can't possibly arrange to get an all-but-free converter box during the 12 months conversion media blitz.
This bill does effectively nothing but switch the focus of Feb 18 complaints from congress (for imposing the rule) to broadcasters (for switching the analog off before it was absolutely required).
Really, though, the conversion to digital TV has been much faster and more effective than the conversion to the metric system.
He talks about freedom, but wants to dictate how I, as a developer, can market or sell the product of my effort.
Point is, either we decide original developers of software get to define policy or we frown on letting anyone define policy and let people do what they want with it. Many in the opensource community favour some form of the latter
RMS is opposed to the latter. The whole point of GPL is to allow the FSF to define the policy by which people release software. Specifically, GPL demands that if you write code that borrows even one little bit of a GPL'd source, then you can only release your software under GPL. You can't release it under BSD, you can't refuse to release the source, and you must take special care to know where each line of your software came from.
It's fine if developers want to use the GPL. I think it's a great idea to make share-and-share-alike a condition of using code, the same way I think compensation of $40 is a fine condition of using code. GPL has created a great library of accessible and reusable code and a great service to the community. But GPL'd software is only "free" as in speech if you never tell anyone what you've done with your freedom.
Then I tell them to imagine having to go to the DMV, and like with the above...wait often for hours in long lines with govt. workers who are drones that dont' give a shit, and yet have them in control of dispensing your medical care...what Dr. to see...what prescription to fill, etc.
The US alternative to apathetic government drones seems to be actively antagonistic insurance claims adjusters with financial motivation to deny care in as many cases as possible. The DMV may not be motivated to move me quickly through the lines, but at least they are not rewarded for refusing me a license
Even in countries with truly socialized medicine, there remains a market for special services. You can almost always pay a premium for extra attention, extra fast service, or whatever else. You will, almost certainly, still be able to save up for that liver transplant, or buy catastrophic coverage to pay for it. Universal coverage means you don't have a financial motive to forgo minor treatment, and you catch small problems before they turn into catastrophes.
His conclusions are not original, and their is much he is missing, including the problems of identity matching that are at the forefront of much research in the area.
His conclusions aren't original, but somehow, even after five years of people saying, loudly, what totally irrelevant theater the TSA is, the TSA still has a budget of more than $5 billion. That's half as much as the government spends on "general science" research and twice what they spend on "energy" research. I suspect he'll shut up about TSA as soon as we stop wasting so much money on them.
For example, you still seem to be missing his entire point. Solving "the problems of identity matching" won't make TSA any more effective because TSA is not the effective part of airline security. The effective part of airline security is that passengers will no longer be compliant participants and that the cockpit is no longer accessible to hijackers.
To make a home security analogy: reinforcing the cockpit door is equivalent to locking the front door of your house; changing passenger attitude is equivalent to posting a guard at that door; expanding TSA search policies, data mining, and screening procedures is equivalent to planting a "Brinks" sign in your front yard. It cost a few hundred million to reinforce the doors. The attitude change was priceless in terms of the lives lost to cause it, but $0. The TSA is $5 billion/year in direct costs plus the uncountable costs of passenger frustration and inconvenience.
By using a self-incrimination defence it's effectively admitting, yeah you've got some data that's evidence locked up but you're not handing it over.
I'm not sure about the UK's current system. It used to be that it was perfectly ok for judges and juries to make exactly that inference. ie: to claim that a defendant would only choose not to speak in order to obscure his true guilt. The US 5th amendment ([no person] shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself) allows you to be silent whether your statements would be incriminating or exculpatory and requires that your decision to be silent not be interpreted in any way. The right to silence is, in general, only useful if it applies, and the defendant exercises it under both conditions. This is a big part of the reason lawyers will always tell you to exercise your right to remain silent.
my locking/hiding the door to my dungeon where I keep my daughter is to stop me incrimincating myself by her being found
Someone finding your imprisoned daughter is not you incriminating yourself. It's physical evidence incriminating you. The part of that situation where you incriminate yourself is where you show the investigator the cleverly hidden door. The protection against self-incrimination means they can't force you to reveal where you've buried the bodies, but the power of lawful search means they can look. Encryption frustrates investigators because it's like taking a full page ad out saying "I buried the bodies on the moon." It gives them the impression that they know exactly where the incriminating evidence is, but they just can't get to it. Technically, encrypting data is no more than hiding data in random numbers. It's very much like hiding your drugs under a loose floorboard. They can't make you tell them which floorboard hides the drugs and they can't make you tell them which of the random bits contain data. Except, apparently, in the UK.
If I can be ordered to hand over my swiss bank account number (just a number for a service) then so can I be ordered to hand over the key to my encrypted files
Actually, you can't be forced to reveal the Swiss bank account number. Investigators can obtain a warrant to search your personal effects, wherein they may discover the number; they can subpoena the records of financial institutions they believe you to do business with, wherein they may discover the number; but they can not force you to reveal the number.
The point of the story is that companies publish the successful trials on a drug, but don't publish failed trials on that same drug - i.e. they cherry-pick the results.
This (almost certainly) has nothing to do with drug companies cherry-picking results. It's extremely difficult to get negative results through peer review, and as a result there are very few studies of any sort that report "X doesn't have an effect" or "Y is not involved in Z."
Part of this is because of the statistical modeling associated with these studies. It's relatively easy to be certain, and to prove, that the observations from two groups are different: this is the type I error everyone loves. We've all agreed that we're willing to accept a 1-5% probability that we're wrong, so once you hit that statistical threshold, you satisfy reviewers.
To prove that two groups are identical is essentially impossible. The only thing you can formally test is whether the difference between two groups is smaller than some pre-defined margin, but there's no established formalism for choosing how big that margin is. Even worse, there's no established criterion for how frequently you're willing to make a type II error. Some folks design their studies with 10% margin, but this number has a huge influence on the required sample size, and folks often use 20% as a desired power. Worse, many studies get started with no formal statistical design at all, and this more-or-less prevents them from making any meaningful statement of "sameness" between groups.
It's a shame, because it almost certainly means that a lot of scientists spend a lot of time reproducing experiments that other people already know aren't going to produce any meaningful differences. Even if there were great statistical models for sameness, it would still be tough to be intuitively confident that lack of differences reflect the actual world and not just crappy assays, and it's likely that we're just stuck with negative results being unpublishable.