I am increasingly suspicious that PETA is run by a bunch of trolls whose true goal is to get attention, so that crazy vegan chicks will sleep with them.
I also have a HP Touchsmart (TM2-2200), with most of my notes in OneNote2007. I mostly use the keyboard for notes, with the touchscreen for drawing the occasional diagram, or marking up a picture.
A couple of problems though. First, OneNote 2007's "Print To" driver does not work correctly under Windows-64, and apparently never will. There are work-arounds such as the print-via-XPS hack, but they introduce problems such as not being able to search the original document's text. Of course, this is a problem with any Windows-64 system, not just Touchsmarts. At some point I'll probably upgrade to Office 2010 to take care of the problem (but not willing to spend the money right now, just to squash one bug).
Specifically regarding Touchsmarts, I have a lot of complaints regarding the hardware quality. I've already had to fix a problem with the battery charging erratically (required motherboard replacement by HP); the touchscreen becoming non-responsive (fixed myself by re-seating a cable behind the LCD); and am currently trying to troubleshoot an intermittent issue with the system locking-up after waking from Sleep/Hibernate (no luck yet finding the cause).
The LCD also has a fairly limited set of viewing angles (It's not an IPS panel apparently), and altogether too much glare for a tablet screen. It's a decent tablet PC if you can get it cheap, but otherwise I'd consider looking elsewhere. Maybe one of Lenovo's tablet PCs -- apparently you can get Matte IPS panels as upgrades on them.
Not sure... but wouldn't it require not being in the desert for there to be water to evapourate to form the lines?
Not necessarily. Chinese have been producing salt from underground brine deposits for millenia. They even invented the Percussive Drilling Rig for this purpose, reaching depths that the rest of the world would not match until modern times.
Like a lot of cleaners, I started out in public health, running DNA analyses in a forensic laboratory. That was ten years ago, when the meat trade was at its height. We were processing ten thousand samples a day. Most were fakes. 'Princess Di' for instance, was originally a basal cell cancer excised from a fifty-eight-year-old Albanian woman, but it didn't stop the meatleggers moving twenty tonnes of product. Then fans started doing their own DNA analyses, and growing their own supplies. Once someone has started a cloned cell line, anyone with an incubator, access to a few common biochemicals, and basic knowledge about cell culture can keep it going indefinitely. By the time I joined one of the vat-busting teams, most of the meat we were chasing was one hundred per cent genuine cloned celebrity. As soon as anyone managed to get a viable scrap of tissue, that was it. The meat was out there. The only way to stop it was to bust the places where it was grown.
Zaphod's attention however was elsewhere. His attention was riveted on the ship standing next to Hotblack Desiato's limo. His mouths hung open.
"That," he said, "that... is really bad for the eyes..."
Ford looked. He too stood astonished. It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it.
"It's so... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape... light just seems to fall into it!"
Zaphod said nothing. He had simply fallen in love. The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it.
"Your eyes just slide off it..." said Ford in wonder. It was an emotional moment. He bit his lip.
If you read the TFA, the report is from China's Environment Ministry. If the (central) government wants to cover up, why would they release such a report.
Faction fight. China actually does have a decent set of laws. However, the Environmental Ministry is dwarfed in power by more business-friendly factions, so they rarely manage to enforce anything. One of the groups that supposedly does get policed heavily is foreign multinationals -- it gives the government a way to show who's boss, while giving an advantage to indigenous Chinese companies.
There is no rotating mirror, this particular display technique uses a completely different operating principle. The image appears floating above a flat surface, which you can put your hand on. In some of the posted videos, the presenter takes off the cover, showing the projector array beneath.
K5 archives go that far back? I've been wondering, what happened to all the slashdot archives from way back, a while ago all the old stuff disappeared. Is there anyway to access it?
Following up, I'd recommend the following book, which contains an account of the disaster in Chapter 3: The river dragon has come! by D. Qing, J. Thibodeau, & P. B. Williams.
Regarding the 1975 Dam catastrophe... Wikipedia is entirely too polite on the Chinese government's culpability in the disaster, and what happened to hydrologist Chen Xing, who warned that the dam's design was inadequate, recommending 12 sluice gates instead of the 5 implemented.
For his criticism, he was over-ridden by party officials and exiled to the western provinces.
Your link shows no evidence that "AFP is a crummy screening test". Were you hoping that nobody clicked the link, and just took your word that it was correct?
My impression is that ColdWetDog was hoping whoever clicked the link would follow Wikipedia's explanation of how the statistics of screening tests work, and using that explanation, understand the logic of why AFP is not used as a general cancer screen by filling in the blanks themselves.
But that's ok, maybe you didn't understand him, so let me elaborate a bit in steps. The "Specificity" of the AFP test is the percentage of True Negatives (patients without cancer), divided by Reported Negatives (AFP tested negative). Now, the specificity of the AFP assay varies with the laboratory, cut-off criteria used, and particular cancer -- but something like 90% is reasonable for an AFP test (better for some cancers, worse for others, not applicable for many). That sounds good, right?
Well, next step is figuring out your Positive Predictive Value. The interesting thing about this parameter, is it varies with Prevalence. If you define your tested population as a group in which you already have reason to suspect cancer, you can get a pretty decent PPV. Now, elevated AFPs are rare in the healthy general population. Thing is -- while it might not seem that way emotionally -- statistically, cancer is also considered a rare health condition (from an epidemiological standpoint). The net result is most tumor biomarkers applied to the general population, end up with low PPVs -- even tests with specificities of 90+% can end up with PPVs in the single digits or less.
From an epidemiological viewpoint, I would say "Quite possibly". You really are setting up an artificial definition where "Causes" means "exclusive cause of" (although it would be clearer still to say "major cause of"). Lung cancer is a disease where very strong support for Hill's Criteria for causality has been demonstrated -- when such evidence has not been demonstrated, then I would limit myself to "associated with increased risk of".
if only 1 in 3 people with HIV developed AIDS, HIV most likely would NOT be considered the cause of AIDS.
Only 1 in 1 in 1,000,000 people with measles develop subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. However, we have no issues with stating that measles is the cause of SSPE. You've got your logic completely backwards -- "if only 1 in 3 people with AIDS harbored HIV" -- then we would have a problem with questioning HIV as the cause of AIDS (but, it doesn't rule it out, but I don't have time to go into it right now).
"While drug cartels in Mexico are disemboweling people they accuse of blogging about drug violence, Anonymous busies itself taking down Mexican government websites. With all the problems facing people in Mexico right now, including drug cartels extorting teachers for 50% of their pay and killing schoolchildren (thus shutting down the school system), Mexico's biggest oil field in terminal decline and drug cartels kidnapping busloads of people and forcing them into gladiator-style contests to the death, Anonymous' actions appear particularly petty."
There have been plenty of posts along similar lines -- that if Anonymous had any guts they'd be going after the real bad guys. Kind of makes Soulskill's story the one that looks petty, doesn't it?
I think Netflix completely ignored the value of DVDs-by-mail in serving as a strategic defense against the media companies. If the media companies decide not to license content for streaming, Netflix is screwed.
On the other hand, should companies refuse to sell DVDs to them, Netflix could purchase them through alternate channels. Redbox rentals was in a similar situation where studios refused to sell to them (correctly identifying them as a threat to DVD sales) -- they circumvented the studio embargo by getting their DVDs from Walmart instead. It's not an ideal situation (Using Walmart was logistically cumbersome, and required waiting until the retail release date), but it allowed them to continue deliver service regardless of what studios said.
Banks have to charge a spread on interest at least equal to the rate of inflation, which is 6-8% right now. Otherwise, the principal deflates with time and the bank loses money.
That being said, I'm one of those folks that believes changes in measurement methodology over time have led to a systematic under-estimation of inflation: http://www.shadowstats.com/
If they have more bodies available to work, then the economy will pick up. Baby steps.
Following the end of the Chinese Civil war, this was Mao's stance on population growth -- that people were a resource, so they should encourage lots of population growth. This stance (combined with social and economic mis-management) resulted in the famines that contributed to China's current restrictive policies.
Similarly, Romania's Ceausescu had a similar stance, which produced chaos instead of the expected benefits. So while it's true that people are an economic resource, there is a fine balance between economic development and population growth.
The UI is completely multitouch and worn on the shoulder, which will turn any surface you are pointing at into a usable workspace by the combination of a projector and a 3D modeling device similar to the Kinect.
The FCC sold of spectrum to Lightsquared without understanding its effect on GPS receivers.
Well, sort of. They originally sold the spectrum to LightSquared for use in a satellite-based service, which would have been ok. Then LightSquared changed their plans, and got permission from the FCC to use the spectrum for a terrestrial-based network (which the FCC stupidly OK'ed, not realizing the consquences).
Our curent situation is a direct consequence of the inverse-square law. For a broadcasting satellite, everyone is (for practical purposes) equally far away, and receives a nice low-power signal that wouldn't interfere with GPS. A terrestrially based-station can't achieve this kind of even power distribution -- you'll always have an uneven power distribution concentrated around each tower, thanks to the inverse-square law.
I live in Huntsville, AL and our sprint coverage has actually been getting worse.
If coverage for you is really that bad, you can try seeing if Sprint will give you an Airave (femtocell). Some customers with poor reception have gotten them for free.
I'd be interested to know some statistics regarding MMO accounts.
Like bank and money-transfer accounts, game accounts can be converted into cash. Sometimes quite a bit of cash -- prime accounts on some MMOs can be liquidated for hundreds or even thousands of dollars sometimes. But unlike "real money" services, law enforcement has little interest -- in either the criminal or the MMO company -- since in their eyes, it's just a game.
Often, the operating company itself has little interest. As an example, consider Final Fantasy XI. When reports of hackings in FFXI started, they were initially ignored by SquareEnix. Then, the company played "blame the victim", insisting account owners must have executed 3rd party cheats or visited dodgy websites -- no account recovery of any sort was possible. RMT ran amuck, and stolen accounts were all over the servers. If you were still being billed for service, sometimes your only option to stop things was to initiate a chargeback.
Things only changed once it started hitting them in the pocketbook. As FFXI aged, fewer new accounts signed on to offset the bleeding playerbase, while disputes with credit card companies soared (resulting in SE's current problems accepting credit cards -- they've been blacklisted by credit card processors). Now we've got online security that's better than most banks (like a two-factor dongle). Sure took them a while to learn the lesson, though.
While tech articles are frequently ok, I've noticed life-science and physics stories especially have this problem. Often they feature sensationalist pieces trying to fluff up absolute garbage. The editors and story-submitters seem to have just enough background in the field to recognize the buzzwords and take the bait; not enough to render good judgement or comment in the header insightfully (in other words, too incompetent to realize how incompetent they are).
Firehose/moderation doesn't help as much as one might think -- from the comments it's clear this site is full of sharp comp/tech folks, but doesn't quite have nearly enough experienced bio/physics people to balance the discussion.
What happened to all the old stories and posts anyway? I tried looking up something from a few years back, was everything purged? Granted, I realize such old content is infrequently accessed, but it was a great resource to have.
Slashdot Mirror
vegan female friends
I am increasingly suspicious that PETA is run by a bunch of trolls whose true goal is to get attention, so that crazy vegan chicks will sleep with them.
I also have a HP Touchsmart (TM2-2200), with most of my notes in OneNote2007. I mostly use the keyboard for notes, with the touchscreen for drawing the occasional diagram, or marking up a picture.
A couple of problems though. First, OneNote 2007's "Print To" driver does not work correctly under Windows-64, and apparently never will. There are work-arounds such as the print-via-XPS hack, but they introduce problems such as not being able to search the original document's text. Of course, this is a problem with any Windows-64 system, not just Touchsmarts. At some point I'll probably upgrade to Office 2010 to take care of the problem (but not willing to spend the money right now, just to squash one bug).
Specifically regarding Touchsmarts, I have a lot of complaints regarding the hardware quality. I've already had to fix a problem with the battery charging erratically (required motherboard replacement by HP); the touchscreen becoming non-responsive (fixed myself by re-seating a cable behind the LCD); and am currently trying to troubleshoot an intermittent issue with the system locking-up after waking from Sleep/Hibernate (no luck yet finding the cause).
The LCD also has a fairly limited set of viewing angles (It's not an IPS panel apparently), and altogether too much glare for a tablet screen. It's a decent tablet PC if you can get it cheap, but otherwise I'd consider looking elsewhere. Maybe one of Lenovo's tablet PCs -- apparently you can get Matte IPS panels as upgrades on them.
Not sure... but wouldn't it require not being in the desert for there to be water to evapourate to form the lines?
Not necessarily. Chinese have been producing salt from underground brine deposits for millenia. They even invented the Percussive Drilling Rig for this purpose, reaching depths that the rest of the world would not match until modern times.
A short story about a future trade in cloned Celebrity Meat:
http://www.omegacom.demon.co.uk/meat.htm
Like a lot of cleaners, I started out in public health, running DNA analyses in a forensic laboratory. That was ten years ago, when the meat trade was at its height. We were processing ten thousand samples a day. Most were fakes. 'Princess Di' for instance, was originally a basal cell cancer excised from a fifty-eight-year-old Albanian woman, but it didn't stop the meatleggers moving twenty tonnes of product. Then fans started doing their own DNA analyses, and growing their own supplies. Once someone has started a cloned cell line, anyone with an incubator, access to a few common biochemicals, and basic knowledge about cell culture can keep it going indefinitely. By the time I joined one of the vat-busting teams, most of the meat we were chasing was one hundred per cent genuine cloned celebrity. As soon as anyone managed to get a viable scrap of tissue, that was it. The meat was out there. The only way to stop it was to bust the places where it was grown.
I don't think you've been in a position of authority enough times then.
15 mod points here, buddy. YEEE-HAH! :P
Internet access is almost an auxiliary brain for most people.
Obligatory XKCD:
http://xkcd.com/903
Zaphod's attention however was elsewhere. His attention was riveted on the ship standing next to Hotblack Desiato's limo. His mouths hung open.
"That," he said, "that ... is really bad for the eyes ..."
Ford looked. He too stood astonished.
It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it.
"It's so ... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape ... light just seems to fall into it!"
Zaphod said nothing. He had simply fallen in love.
The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it.
"Your eyes just slide off it ..." said Ford in wonder. It was an emotional moment. He bit his lip.
If you read the TFA, the report is from China's Environment Ministry. If the (central) government wants to cover up, why would they release such a report.
Faction fight. China actually does have a decent set of laws. However, the Environmental Ministry is dwarfed in power by more business-friendly factions, so they rarely manage to enforce anything. One of the groups that supposedly does get policed heavily is foreign multinationals -- it gives the government a way to show who's boss, while giving an advantage to indigenous Chinese companies.
Again, a rotating mirror at 6000 RPM
There is no rotating mirror, this particular display technique uses a completely different operating principle. The image appears floating above a flat surface, which you can put your hand on. In some of the posted videos, the presenter takes off the cover, showing the projector array beneath.
fVisiOn light field projector demo, using animated Hatsune Miku. Check out the part where the mirror is placed behind her:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1E_LgLaiRE
K5 diary entry from 2005
K5 archives go that far back? I've been wondering, what happened to all the slashdot archives from way back, a while ago all the old stuff disappeared. Is there anyway to access it?
Following up, I'd recommend the following book, which contains an account of the disaster in Chapter 3:
The river dragon has come! by D. Qing, J. Thibodeau, & P. B. Williams.
Regarding the 1975 Dam catastrophe... Wikipedia is entirely too polite on the Chinese government's culpability in the disaster, and what happened to hydrologist Chen Xing, who warned that the dam's design was inadequate, recommending 12 sluice gates instead of the 5 implemented.
For his criticism, he was over-ridden by party officials and exiled to the western provinces.
Your link shows no evidence that "AFP is a crummy screening test". Were you hoping that nobody clicked the link, and just took your word that it was correct?
My impression is that ColdWetDog was hoping whoever clicked the link would follow Wikipedia's explanation of how the statistics of screening tests work, and using that explanation, understand the logic of why AFP is not used as a general cancer screen by filling in the blanks themselves.
But that's ok, maybe you didn't understand him, so let me elaborate a bit in steps. The "Specificity" of the AFP test is the percentage of True Negatives (patients without cancer), divided by Reported Negatives (AFP tested negative). Now, the specificity of the AFP assay varies with the laboratory, cut-off criteria used, and particular cancer -- but something like 90% is reasonable for an AFP test (better for some cancers, worse for others, not applicable for many). That sounds good, right?
Well, next step is figuring out your Positive Predictive Value. The interesting thing about this parameter, is it varies with Prevalence. If you define your tested population as a group in which you already have reason to suspect cancer, you can get a pretty decent PPV. Now, elevated AFPs are rare in the healthy general population. Thing is -- while it might not seem that way emotionally -- statistically, cancer is also considered a rare health condition (from an epidemiological standpoint). The net result is most tumor biomarkers applied to the general population, end up with low PPVs -- even tests with specificities of 90+% can end up with PPVs in the single digits or less.
While I don't have a specific link for AFP, the general state of population-wide cancer biomarker screening is not good: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110323/full/471428a.html
but perhaps you are a genuine "shill" for one of the big pharmaceutical companies.
Oh, you were just shitposting. Carry on then.
If you think I am playing semantic games
From an epidemiological viewpoint, I would say "Quite possibly". You really are setting up an artificial definition where "Causes" means "exclusive cause of" (although it would be clearer still to say "major cause of"). Lung cancer is a disease where very strong support for Hill's Criteria for causality has been demonstrated -- when such evidence has not been demonstrated, then I would limit myself to "associated with increased risk of".
if only 1 in 3 people with HIV developed AIDS, HIV most likely would NOT be considered the cause of AIDS.
Only 1 in 1 in 1,000,000 people with measles develop subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. However, we have no issues with stating that measles is the cause of SSPE. You've got your logic completely backwards -- "if only 1 in 3 people with AIDS harbored HIV" -- then we would have a problem with questioning HIV as the cause of AIDS (but, it doesn't rule it out, but I don't have time to go into it right now).
Remember this previous Slashdot Story from 9/16? "Anonymous Kills Websites, Cartels Kill Bloggers". The header opened with the following statement:
"While drug cartels in Mexico are disemboweling people they accuse of blogging about drug violence, Anonymous busies itself taking down Mexican government websites. With all the problems facing people in Mexico right now, including drug cartels extorting teachers for 50% of their pay and killing schoolchildren (thus shutting down the school system), Mexico's biggest oil field in terminal decline and drug cartels kidnapping busloads of people and forcing them into gladiator-style contests to the death, Anonymous' actions appear particularly petty."
There have been plenty of posts along similar lines -- that if Anonymous had any guts they'd be going after the real bad guys. Kind of makes Soulskill's story the one that looks petty, doesn't it?
I think Netflix completely ignored the value of DVDs-by-mail in serving as a strategic defense against the media companies. If the media companies decide not to license content for streaming, Netflix is screwed.
On the other hand, should companies refuse to sell DVDs to them, Netflix could purchase them through alternate channels. Redbox rentals was in a similar situation where studios refused to sell to them (correctly identifying them as a threat to DVD sales) -- they circumvented the studio embargo by getting their DVDs from Walmart instead. It's not an ideal situation (Using Walmart was logistically cumbersome, and required waiting until the retail release date), but it allowed them to continue deliver service regardless of what studios said.
Banks have to charge a spread on interest at least equal to the rate of inflation, which is 6-8% right now. Otherwise, the principal deflates with time and the bank loses money.
In the U.S., "official" inflation has been considerably lower than that for the past decade and more, around 1-4%.
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/currentinflation.asp
That being said, I'm one of those folks that believes changes in measurement methodology over time have led to a systematic under-estimation of inflation:
http://www.shadowstats.com/
If they have more bodies available to work, then the economy will pick up. Baby steps.
Following the end of the Chinese Civil war, this was Mao's stance on population growth -- that people were a resource, so they should encourage lots of population growth. This stance (combined with social and economic mis-management) resulted in the famines that contributed to China's current restrictive policies.
Similarly, Romania's Ceausescu had a similar stance, which produced chaos instead of the expected benefits. So while it's true that people are an economic resource, there is a fine balance between economic development and population growth.
The UI is completely multitouch and worn on the shoulder, which will turn any surface you are pointing at into a usable workspace by the combination of a projector and a 3D modeling device similar to the Kinect.
Please let me set the default cursor to three little red dots.
The FCC sold of spectrum to Lightsquared without understanding its effect on GPS receivers.
Well, sort of. They originally sold the spectrum to LightSquared for use in a satellite-based service, which would have been ok. Then LightSquared changed their plans, and got permission from the FCC to use the spectrum for a terrestrial-based network (which the FCC stupidly OK'ed, not realizing the consquences).
Our curent situation is a direct consequence of the inverse-square law. For a broadcasting satellite, everyone is (for practical purposes) equally far away, and receives a nice low-power signal that wouldn't interfere with GPS. A terrestrially based-station can't achieve this kind of even power distribution -- you'll always have an uneven power distribution concentrated around each tower, thanks to the inverse-square law.
I live in Huntsville, AL and our sprint coverage has actually been getting worse.
If coverage for you is really that bad, you can try seeing if Sprint will give you an Airave (femtocell). Some customers with poor reception have gotten them for free.
I'd be interested to know some statistics regarding MMO accounts.
Like bank and money-transfer accounts, game accounts can be converted into cash. Sometimes quite a bit of cash -- prime accounts on some MMOs can be liquidated for hundreds or even thousands of dollars sometimes. But unlike "real money" services, law enforcement has little interest -- in either the criminal or the MMO company -- since in their eyes, it's just a game.
Often, the operating company itself has little interest. As an example, consider Final Fantasy XI. When reports of hackings in FFXI started, they were initially ignored by SquareEnix. Then, the company played "blame the victim", insisting account owners must have executed 3rd party cheats or visited dodgy websites -- no account recovery of any sort was possible. RMT ran amuck, and stolen accounts were all over the servers. If you were still being billed for service, sometimes your only option to stop things was to initiate a chargeback.
Things only changed once it started hitting them in the pocketbook. As FFXI aged, fewer new accounts signed on to offset the bleeding playerbase, while disputes with credit card companies soared (resulting in SE's current problems accepting credit cards -- they've been blacklisted by credit card processors). Now we've got online security that's better than most banks (like a two-factor dongle). Sure took them a while to learn the lesson, though.
While tech articles are frequently ok, I've noticed life-science and physics stories especially have this problem. Often they feature sensationalist pieces trying to fluff up absolute garbage. The editors and story-submitters seem to have just enough background in the field to recognize the buzzwords and take the bait; not enough to render good judgement or comment in the header insightfully (in other words, too incompetent to realize how incompetent they are).
Firehose /moderation doesn't help as much as one might think -- from the comments it's clear this site is full of sharp comp/tech folks, but doesn't quite have nearly enough experienced bio/physics people to balance the discussion.
What happened to all the old stories and posts anyway? I tried looking up something from a few years back, was everything purged? Granted, I realize such old content is infrequently accessed, but it was a great resource to have.