Seriously, I can travel to the Moon with no fuel if I start in the right position with the right momentum. TFA doesn't tell us much unless the secrets are hidden in the video I'm blocking on the bottom of the page.
Hey, I got modded down for simply stating recent, widely known history in which Apple directly hurt every ebook customer on the planet. But I have karma to burn and an interest in fighting the RDF, so check I'll bring it up again and this time link to one of the many times we've discussed this on Slashdot: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/2251220/apple-raises-e-book-prices-for-everyone
If any late mods come upon this, please mod it up. We shouldn't ever forget what Apple did.
Money is only wasted if you throw it in a pile and burn it. If it gets spent on something, regardless of how silly, then it stays in circulation; somebody will be using it to buy groceries, pay the mortgage, take his kids to the doctor, etc. A bunch of people will be employed on this project, and a bunch of companies will be selling goods and services. This is exactly the kind of stuff we want rich people to be doing with their money.
Someone's going to bring up the fact that you just described the broken window fallacy, so I'll preempt it:
1) It looks like you've fallen afoul of the broken window fallacy, but 2) the broken window fallacy only has meaning if the money would otherwise have been spent on something more meaningful than fixing your metaphorical broken window. Considering that this is reality, not Metaphorland, the broken window fallacy hardly ever has bearing on any situation.
DRM free and all that is great, but they're still asking $7.99 for the kindle version on Amazon vs. $8.79 for the paperback version. It does not cost them eight bucks to send me a 300kb file...
Thank Apple. When they brought book sales to iTunes they and the publishers managed to contractually force Amazon to raise ebook prices by >50% in most cases.
it will take authors of her stature to claw back some author's rights back from apple and the publishers
That's a ridiculous statement. What rights have authors lost specifically to Apple? All available evidence indicated Apple would prefer that DRM be removed from media.
They lost the right to sell the books at a reasonable price. People on Slashdot keep forgetting that the iBookstore or whatever it's called came along with negotiations that contractually forced Amazon to raise ebook prices by >50%.
When total energy required on the order of TWatts, you want to boast about 18GWatt being more than EVERYTHING already out there, hydro-wise?
No. Really. The ecological damage for that pittance of power just isn't worth it.
You're doing it wrong. You need to look at opportunity cost and give more than a vague comparison. The correct question from an environmental perspective is, "How does the environmental impact of 18 GW of micro-hydro compare to the environmental impact of the 18 GW of power that will be generated through other means in its absence?"
You fall into the trap of thinking any solution that isn't a silver bullet is useless. Sadly, this is how most decision making is done. Hell, your comment is probably better reasoned than most energy decisions made by governments in the form of legislation or about governments in the form of voting.
Hmm, is it purely the voltage that causes this? If so then great. However the articles say nothing about currents on/in these proposed innovations. How can you safely produce these voltages on gloves for instance? One of the comments mentioned "textured prophylactics". I'm not sure I'd want to be among the first to vigorously test that product!
I'm in the field, though I haven't read the paper. I suspect the answer to your question is near zero current and the problem is extremely slow transitions. That's what the state has been for awhile, though usually people are pushing nanometer sized dynamic features rather than the giant features described here.
This. The obesity epidemic in western countries is a far greater problem (in terms of both number of people effected, and the severity of health effects) than anorexia is.
The immediate severity of the health effects of anorexia are much worse than obesity. You're much more likely to die in the next 5 years if you're anorexic than if you're 100 pounds overweight. They're both real problems and they're both incited by glamorization of unhealthy body types.
Yet most of us are fat. Anybody else see a contradiction?
Glamorizing unhealthy body types has been pretty heavily linked to unhealthy eating, both overeating and undereating. There's no contradiction. It's a related problem.
Outliers in both directions, but in the present case, not to the same extent.
The outliers in weight clearly favor the heavy side, and its a far tougher nut to crack that the anorexic who looked at a magazine. I suggest the researchers come up with a believable way to control the tendency towards overweight by changing pictures in a magazine. Then they would have something of true value.
One could even make the case that removing the skinny side of normal from the cultural images may push the tendency towards acceptance of more obesity. This would have a far greater effect on health care costs than anorexia.
One half of one percent of women go thru a period of anorexia. Of these only 5 – 10% die of their disorder within 10 years. Yet 35.7% of Americans suffer from obesity. Medical costs for obesity on average were $1,429 higher per person per year.
So the outliers aren't significant on the skinny side, but they are devastating on the fat side.
Comprehensive anorexia treatment costs about $120k/year, and the numbers I've read in recent papers show closer to 20% fatality rates, though when I've looked into the methodology used to create that number I saw a ton of guessing. I'm not saying anorexia is a bigger problem than obesity, but I am saying it's a huge, and expensive problem. It's certainly orders of magnitude more deadly than, for instance, terrorism. Glamorizing unhealthy body types has been linked to increased obesity as well as anorexia, too.
Again, I'm not advocating an action, just urging kneejerk posters on Slashdot to recognize that anorexia is an increasingly terrible problem faced by hundreds of thousands of women and some smaller number of men.
Several hundred thousand women in the United States suffer from anorexia and ~20% of them will die of anorexia-related symptoms. Being 30 pounds underweight is a lot worse than being 30 pounds overweight, or even 100 pounds overweight. Comprehensive anorexia treatment has rather low success rates and costs around $10k/month, and your health insurance premiums are funding it.
The data might not mean there is an outright shortage of S&E workers; it could indicate a combination of factors related to such things as the recession and offshoring.
This suprises anyone?
Given the high unemployment among S&E workers the conclusion is rather obvious: the qualified employees are there but the jobs aren't. Last year I interviewed three PhDs, one with 25 years experience running a research group with a dozen other PhDs under him, hoping to get a contractor position that required an associate's degree and paid accordingly. Also in the running for this one opening were ten people with less impressive but still solid backgrounds. Most had been in divisions of their previous companies that had been slashed in half or completely eliminated.
To repeat: we have a glut of talented, motivated S&E workers looking for jobs. We need more R&D positions created. We don't need to find ways to solve the imaginary problem of a paucity of scientists.
The gun works by listening in with a directional microphone, and then, after a short delay of around 0.2 seconds, playing it back with a directional speaker. This triggers an effect that psychologists call Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF), which has long been known to interrupt your speech (you might’ve experienced the same effect if you’ve ever heard your own voice echoing through Skype or another voice comms program). According to the researchers, DAF doesn’t cause physical discomfort, but the fact that you’re unable to talk is obviously quite stressful.
What's to prevent someone from simply speaking louder to talk over the "jammer"? Why wouldn't this be the target's first reaction? Wouldn't a delay of 0.2 seconds sound just like an echo?
There's also the fact that this is highly targeted (no shutting up entire audiences) and doesn't actually create "silence", just cacophony.
It's annoying, but that's about it in my experience. When an iPhone user calls my home phone, she gets a ~0.3-0.5s delayed echo back. When I've been the person on the iPhone it was a fatiguing experience that made it difficult to hold a real conversation. On the other hand, one can learn to ignore the echo with a little willpower. For some reason only iPhones seem to have this problem.
In my field, the papers and article's authors' were the people who actually researched and wrote them. They were not treated as tribute to your academic master. I find the very idea of treating my work as some form of academic kickback repulsive. And I have little respect for anyone who would even THINK of demanding this of one of their students.
In most sciences the writing of the paper is seen as a chore and the authorship of the paper is based largely on 1) who did the work and 2) who came up with the key ideas. In the vast majority of graduate student work, the advisor played heavily into #2, usually through periodic discussions with the student. Most advisors choose to have their names listed last to place the focus on the student as the first author and the follow custom - the final author usually got the funding or laid the foundation for the project. I see no problem with this in fields where work is highly collaborative.
There are rumours that certain >20 yo Mercedes cars have engines that are supposedly able to reach 500,000 km without major problems, as opposed to the newer "turbo" engines. I do not know if that is true, but I have personally seen such cars, and they had no noticeable rust anywhere on their body.
I think you'd have trouble finding a 30 year old Mercedes turbodiesel with 500 Mm that's had an engine problem.
The key with CAPTCHAs is diversification, just like the key to avoiding disease in biological specimens is avoiding a monoculture. If there were 15000 different CAPTCHA methods, it wouldn't be profitable to create CAPTCHA tools that would each only work on some small subset. There are a lot of low population sites I use that check whether I'm a human with some unique set of hoops through which I must jump. The effectiveness of those hoops comes from the fact that they're often unique to that site, not a lump of code used by thousands of different sites. Diverse CAPTCHA breaking might require something like Watson, which isn't going to be available to spammy types in the near future.
I'm asking an honest question here... can anyone elaborate on how a social networking site (not the users of such sites) have "exploited their users' habits"?
The blurb is making it sound like Anne Frank was discovered because she posted on Facebook. I'm just looking for justification of how bad the submitter makes this out to be. For me the closest I've ever felt to "exploited" on any of these sites is a random ad for something I'm a fan of/group member of.
Oh noes! Teh evil Facebook is raping me because I shared my interest in Pink Floyd with them! Someone call the police!
Remember way back to earlier this week, when a Saudi expat tweeted something and is now going to be executed for it?
On the other hand, people on Facebook are encouraged to play Farmville, which is another type of punishment.
Some customers I work with have grown so dependent on social software that they cannot tolerate even a minute of downtime. Social business is, in many ways, the wave of the future, and to criticize companies for trying to get on the bandwagon and realize the benefits for themselves is not something I'm prepared to do.
I think that corporate dependence on "social software" is kind of like dependence on crack: it's hard to go a minute without it but that's not because it's providing real benefits.
Yes, in some cases social tools are useful, but in most implementations I've heard about the users become dependent on it because it's their only option, not because it was the best option.
Another analogy: if the New York Fire Department switched from fire engines to wagons pulled by donkeys because other cities were doing it and donkey stock was through the roof, they'd use the donkeys all the time and dread donkey downtime, but that wouldn't indicate that donkeys were a better choice than engines.
If you really want a tablet for professionals and business people, make one with a responsive enough stylus with no parallax error.
Hi, I used to be a complete skeptic when it came to tablets (not just iPads). Then, recently, I saw someone with an iPad + stylus + Notes plus in a meeting, just happily jotting down his hand-written notes on the iPad. And just watching the ease with which he could do that might just have sold me a tablet.
To elaborate a little: I dislike typing for note-taking, so I stick to the pen-and-paper approach but this means my notes are scattered across a number of notebooks (depending on which were lying around when I grabbed one for wherever the next meeting was). Being able to take hand-written notes that all end up on the same device, nicely browsable and printable - yeah, that can win me over.
Is there any trouble caused by the rest of the user's hand resting on the touch screen?
we could easily fix it by eating less beef -- at least beef that wasn't grass-fed.
Not sure if that was a typo, but the researchers came to the opposite conclusion.
From the first article:
Another way to shrink our water footprint is to change our eating habits, Postel says. In particular, people can opt to eat less meat or to switch from grain-fed beef -- which, again, requires about 5300 liters of water for each dollar's worth of grain fed to a cow -- to grass-fed beef, which typically requires only the rainwater falling on a pasture. "Not all burgers are created equal," she says.
His grammar was confusing, but that's what he meant. To summarize: grass fed good (and tastier), grain fed bad.
It's quite memorable when people expect the status quo to remain relatively static and instead see it change suddenly. We all go back and point to the people who expected things to say the same and talk about how short sighted they were. However, just because that happens occasionally doesn't mean that an industry leader's expectation of no shakeup implies in any way that a shakeup is more likely. The shakeups just stick out in our minds when we reminisce.
If Apple says "we're going to release a smart taco, the iTaco" and Mexican food experts say it's stupid, I'm sure we'll have Slashdotters pointing out old quotes about the iPod and acting like success is inevitable.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, I can travel to the Moon with no fuel if I start in the right position with the right momentum. TFA doesn't tell us much unless the secrets are hidden in the video I'm blocking on the bottom of the page.
Hey, I got modded down for simply stating recent, widely known history in which Apple directly hurt every ebook customer on the planet. But I have karma to burn and an interest in fighting the RDF, so check I'll bring it up again and this time link to one of the many times we've discussed this on Slashdot: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/2251220/apple-raises-e-book-prices-for-everyone
If any late mods come upon this, please mod it up. We shouldn't ever forget what Apple did.
As has been pointed out, that's bullshit.
Of course I was modded flamebait and of course some AC who asserted that factual, recent history is a myth was modded up. However, that doesn't change the fact that I'm right. Here's one of many links to related stories: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/2251220/apple-raises-e-book-prices-for-everyone
I'm amazed at how quickly people forget that Apple screwed over all ebook buyers as part of their entry into the market.
Money is only wasted if you throw it in a pile and burn it. If it gets spent on something, regardless of how silly, then it stays in circulation; somebody will be using it to buy groceries, pay the mortgage, take his kids to the doctor, etc. A bunch of people will be employed on this project, and a bunch of companies will be selling goods and services. This is exactly the kind of stuff we want rich people to be doing with their money.
Someone's going to bring up the fact that you just described the broken window fallacy, so I'll preempt it:
1) It looks like you've fallen afoul of the broken window fallacy, but
2) the broken window fallacy only has meaning if the money would otherwise have been spent on something more meaningful than fixing your metaphorical broken window. Considering that this is reality, not Metaphorland, the broken window fallacy hardly ever has bearing on any situation.
In conclusion, I think you're exactly right.
DRM free and all that is great, but they're still asking $7.99 for the kindle version on Amazon vs. $8.79 for the paperback version. It does not cost them eight bucks to send me a 300kb file...
Thank Apple. When they brought book sales to iTunes they and the publishers managed to contractually force Amazon to raise ebook prices by >50% in most cases.
it will take authors of her stature to claw back some author's rights back from apple and the publishers
That's a ridiculous statement. What rights have authors lost specifically to Apple? All available evidence indicated Apple would prefer that DRM be removed from media.
They lost the right to sell the books at a reasonable price. People on Slashdot keep forgetting that the iBookstore or whatever it's called came along with negotiations that contractually forced Amazon to raise ebook prices by >50%.
When total energy required on the order of TWatts, you want to boast about 18GWatt being more than EVERYTHING already out there, hydro-wise?
No. Really. The ecological damage for that pittance of power just isn't worth it.
You're doing it wrong. You need to look at opportunity cost and give more than a vague comparison. The correct question from an environmental perspective is, "How does the environmental impact of 18 GW of micro-hydro compare to the environmental impact of the 18 GW of power that will be generated through other means in its absence?"
You fall into the trap of thinking any solution that isn't a silver bullet is useless. Sadly, this is how most decision making is done. Hell, your comment is probably better reasoned than most energy decisions made by governments in the form of legislation or about governments in the form of voting.
Hmm, is it purely the voltage that causes this? If so then great. However the articles say nothing about currents on/in these proposed innovations. How can you safely produce these voltages on gloves for instance? One of the comments mentioned "textured prophylactics". I'm not sure I'd want to be among the first to vigorously test that product!
I'm in the field, though I haven't read the paper. I suspect the answer to your question is near zero current and the problem is extremely slow transitions. That's what the state has been for awhile, though usually people are pushing nanometer sized dynamic features rather than the giant features described here.
This. The obesity epidemic in western countries is a far greater problem (in terms of both number of people effected, and the severity of health effects) than anorexia is.
The immediate severity of the health effects of anorexia are much worse than obesity. You're much more likely to die in the next 5 years if you're anorexic than if you're 100 pounds overweight. They're both real problems and they're both incited by glamorization of unhealthy body types.
Yet most of us are fat. Anybody else see a contradiction?
Glamorizing unhealthy body types has been pretty heavily linked to unhealthy eating, both overeating and undereating. There's no contradiction. It's a related problem.
Outliers in both directions, but in the present case, not to the same extent.
The outliers in weight clearly favor the heavy side, and its a far tougher nut to crack that the anorexic who looked at a magazine. I suggest the researchers come up with a believable way to control the tendency towards overweight by changing pictures in a magazine. Then they would have something of true value.
One could even make the case that removing the skinny side of normal from the cultural images may push the tendency towards acceptance of more obesity. This would have a far greater effect on health care costs than anorexia.
One half of one percent of women go thru a period of anorexia. Of these only 5 – 10% die of their disorder within 10 years. Yet 35.7% of Americans suffer from obesity. Medical costs for obesity on average were $1,429 higher per person per year.
So the outliers aren't significant on the skinny side, but they are devastating on the fat side.
Comprehensive anorexia treatment costs about $120k/year, and the numbers I've read in recent papers show closer to 20% fatality rates, though when I've looked into the methodology used to create that number I saw a ton of guessing. I'm not saying anorexia is a bigger problem than obesity, but I am saying it's a huge, and expensive problem. It's certainly orders of magnitude more deadly than, for instance, terrorism. Glamorizing unhealthy body types has been linked to increased obesity as well as anorexia, too.
Again, I'm not advocating an action, just urging kneejerk posters on Slashdot to recognize that anorexia is an increasingly terrible problem faced by hundreds of thousands of women and some smaller number of men.
Several hundred thousand women in the United States suffer from anorexia and ~20% of them will die of anorexia-related symptoms. Being 30 pounds underweight is a lot worse than being 30 pounds overweight, or even 100 pounds overweight. Comprehensive anorexia treatment has rather low success rates and costs around $10k/month, and your health insurance premiums are funding it.
FTA:
The data might not mean there is an outright shortage of S&E workers; it could indicate a combination of factors related to such things as the recession and offshoring.
This suprises anyone?
Given the high unemployment among S&E workers the conclusion is rather obvious: the qualified employees are there but the jobs aren't. Last year I interviewed three PhDs, one with 25 years experience running a research group with a dozen other PhDs under him, hoping to get a contractor position that required an associate's degree and paid accordingly. Also in the running for this one opening were ten people with less impressive but still solid backgrounds. Most had been in divisions of their previous companies that had been slashed in half or completely eliminated.
To repeat: we have a glut of talented, motivated S&E workers looking for jobs. We need more R&D positions created. We don't need to find ways to solve the imaginary problem of a paucity of scientists.
So, here's the technical implementation:
The gun works by listening in with a directional microphone, and then, after a short delay of around 0.2 seconds, playing it back with a directional speaker. This triggers an effect that psychologists call Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF), which has long been known to interrupt your speech (you might’ve experienced the same effect if you’ve ever heard your own voice echoing through Skype or another voice comms program). According to the researchers, DAF doesn’t cause physical discomfort, but the fact that you’re unable to talk is obviously quite stressful.
What's to prevent someone from simply speaking louder to talk over the "jammer"? Why wouldn't this be the target's first reaction? Wouldn't a delay of 0.2 seconds sound just like an echo?
There's also the fact that this is highly targeted (no shutting up entire audiences) and doesn't actually create "silence", just cacophony.
It's annoying, but that's about it in my experience. When an iPhone user calls my home phone, she gets a ~0.3-0.5s delayed echo back. When I've been the person on the iPhone it was a fatiguing experience that made it difficult to hold a real conversation. On the other hand, one can learn to ignore the echo with a little willpower. For some reason only iPhones seem to have this problem.
...how does a production shortfall of less than 50% result in a price hike of *over 300%*??
This curve should explain it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
In my field, the papers and article's authors' were the people who actually researched and wrote them. They were not treated as tribute to your academic master. I find the very idea of treating my work as some form of academic kickback repulsive. And I have little respect for anyone who would even THINK of demanding this of one of their students.
In most sciences the writing of the paper is seen as a chore and the authorship of the paper is based largely on 1) who did the work and 2) who came up with the key ideas. In the vast majority of graduate student work, the advisor played heavily into #2, usually through periodic discussions with the student. Most advisors choose to have their names listed last to place the focus on the student as the first author and the follow custom - the final author usually got the funding or laid the foundation for the project. I see no problem with this in fields where work is highly collaborative.
There are rumours that certain >20 yo Mercedes cars have engines that are supposedly able to reach 500,000 km without major problems, as opposed to the newer "turbo" engines. I do not know if that is true, but I have personally seen such cars, and they had no noticeable rust anywhere on their body.
I think you'd have trouble finding a 30 year old Mercedes turbodiesel with 500 Mm that's had an engine problem.
The key with CAPTCHAs is diversification, just like the key to avoiding disease in biological specimens is avoiding a monoculture. If there were 15000 different CAPTCHA methods, it wouldn't be profitable to create CAPTCHA tools that would each only work on some small subset. There are a lot of low population sites I use that check whether I'm a human with some unique set of hoops through which I must jump. The effectiveness of those hoops comes from the fact that they're often unique to that site, not a lump of code used by thousands of different sites. Diverse CAPTCHA breaking might require something like Watson, which isn't going to be available to spammy types in the near future.
I'm asking an honest question here... can anyone elaborate on how a social networking site (not the users of such sites) have "exploited their users' habits"?
The blurb is making it sound like Anne Frank was discovered because she posted on Facebook. I'm just looking for justification of how bad the submitter makes this out to be. For me the closest I've ever felt to "exploited" on any of these sites is a random ad for something I'm a fan of/group member of.
Oh noes! Teh evil Facebook is raping me because I shared my interest in Pink Floyd with them! Someone call the police!
Remember way back to earlier this week, when a Saudi expat tweeted something and is now going to be executed for it?
On the other hand, people on Facebook are encouraged to play Farmville, which is another type of punishment.
Some customers I work with have grown so dependent on social software that they cannot tolerate even a minute of downtime. Social business is, in many ways, the wave of the future, and to criticize companies for trying to get on the bandwagon and realize the benefits for themselves is not something I'm prepared to do.
I think that corporate dependence on "social software" is kind of like dependence on crack: it's hard to go a minute without it but that's not because it's providing real benefits.
Yes, in some cases social tools are useful, but in most implementations I've heard about the users become dependent on it because it's their only option, not because it was the best option.
Another analogy: if the New York Fire Department switched from fire engines to wagons pulled by donkeys because other cities were doing it and donkey stock was through the roof, they'd use the donkeys all the time and dread donkey downtime, but that wouldn't indicate that donkeys were a better choice than engines.
Hi, I used to be a complete skeptic when it came to tablets (not just iPads). Then, recently, I saw someone with an iPad + stylus + Notes plus in a meeting, just happily jotting down his hand-written notes on the iPad. And just watching the ease with which he could do that might just have sold me a tablet.
To elaborate a little: I dislike typing for note-taking, so I stick to the pen-and-paper approach but this means my notes are scattered across a number of notebooks (depending on which were lying around when I grabbed one for wherever the next meeting was). Being able to take hand-written notes that all end up on the same device, nicely browsable and printable - yeah, that can win me over.
Is there any trouble caused by the rest of the user's hand resting on the touch screen?
Not sure if that was a typo, but the researchers came to the opposite conclusion.
From the first article:
His grammar was confusing, but that's what he meant. To summarize: grass fed good (and tastier), grain fed bad.
In the final episode of TNG we saw that life began in some sort of pond or tidal pool, not deep under the surface of the ocean.
It's quite memorable when people expect the status quo to remain relatively static and instead see it change suddenly. We all go back and point to the people who expected things to say the same and talk about how short sighted they were. However, just because that happens occasionally doesn't mean that an industry leader's expectation of no shakeup implies in any way that a shakeup is more likely. The shakeups just stick out in our minds when we reminisce.
If Apple says "we're going to release a smart taco, the iTaco" and Mexican food experts say it's stupid, I'm sure we'll have Slashdotters pointing out old quotes about the iPod and acting like success is inevitable.
It works. People like it. Redesigns are expensive.
Maybe they'd change it to avoid getting sued by Samsung for copying the Samsung Digital Photo Frame design: http://www.letsgodigital.org/images/artikelen/47/samsung_digital_photo_frame.gif