Two years only happens in extenuating circumstances (say, a woman kills her rapist after the fact; it's murder, but it's really hard to apply a tough sentence). Murder is rarely punished with a mere two years. That said, sentencing guidelines are fscked up, because it's always easier to appear "tough on crime" than it is to establish just guidelines.
It's converting infrared to visible light, it isn't a light amplification system (where headlights would cause blinding glare). If people are running headlights, then the front end of their car will be slightly warmer, that's all. You want the heat from the cars themselves to show up; enough morons forget to turn on their lights that being able to see them regardless of lighting is a good thing. TFA is light on details, but I suspect it would overlay infrared hot spots on the regular light being let through. Applying a logarithmic progression to the conversion would prevent *really* hot things from blinding you. So anything well lit will be visible, anything hot will be visible (in the infrared overlay), and anything both well lit and hot will look funky. I'm sure there's a joke in "anything both well lit and hot will look funky," but I'll leave that up to another/.-er.
That bothered me. Because I suspect the writers were really trying to draw a correlation between nuclear fusion and the "fusion" of the Doc's device to his spine. Clearly the fact that we use the same word for both indicates that one can cause the other... Sigh.
And for the record, it's been a hell of a lot longer than 20 years that fusion power has been 10 or 20 years away. I think the first promises of that sort appeared around 1950.
Nah. Fusion power is supposed to be perpetually 10 or 20 years away. They made a big mistake with that deadline; with a mere two year timeline, people will actually remember what was promised when the deadline passes.
Okay, no, nothing will likely go wrong (at least, nothing dangerous to anyone more than a few hundred yards from the event in the worst case scenario). But damn if this doesn't sound like the opening to the plot of a disaster movie.
Or, you know, civic minded types that didn't *want* to get out of jury duty. I would have loved to serve when I was last called, but got rejected at the last second by a peremptory challenge (not sure whether it was from prosecution or defense, since they made their challenges while we were out the room). Of course, while I would have loved to serve on that particular trial (it was expected to run a few days, a week at the outside), the Childs's trial is a whole different kettle of fish. Four months is too much for me, even though my company would have paid me for the whole period.
Risk is hard to quantify in dollar terms until it bites you in the ass. Really big companies factor it in, because they get bit by it often enough that ignoring it isn't an option, but smaller companies often ignore it until it bites them. After all, why spend money on something that doesn't show up on the quarterly reports as anything but an expense? They think "We've got virus scanners and firewalls, so what's the problem?" I never said these companies weren't shortsighted.
If you have fifty of these webapps for different business processes, and the specific quirk isn't trivial or is widely scattered in the code, or you bought some ancient product for which you lack the source or a dedicated support contract, yeah, it can really cost in the millions. A million dollars isn't as much as it seems; a team of 10-20 programmers working for a year can cost that much by themselves (remember, even if you hire them straight out of college and pay them $50K or so, which is fairly typical, you still need to pay for matching FICA taxes, health insurance costs, floor space, and computers). Remember, these are your business critical processes, so you need them thoroughly tested before rollout; you can't just swap them out and hope.
Well, if they're using implementation quirks of IE6 which were not 100% faithfully replicated in IE7/IE8's compatibility mode (possibly due to security concerns), that would be one reason. And ActiveX, while still supported, is much more restricted in IE7/IE8; they may be assuming that the failure to work with a default configuration in IE7/IE8 means it isn't supported, rather than restricted by default but configurable.
You're going to have to be outraged about a lot of stuff then. Because *every* office, private sector or public is going to have this going on to some extent. Yes, the people involve should be fired or at the very least warned and monitored, but there is waste wherever you go. The government is going to have some office workers taking non-productive breaks, it's a cost of doing business, because they employ people, not mythical puritanical civil servants that do nothing but work for the benefit of the taxpayer every hour of every day. As long as these people were doing their jobs most of the time, you were getting what you paid for; office workers *never* work 100% of the time, and the fact that this was porn vs. a brief break to surf/. doesn't change the "wastefulness" of the situation, it just adds a level of dubious judgment to the equation.
As of 2007, the SEC employed 3798 people. They found 33 cases of apparently habitual porn surfing (I get the impression a single visit didn't count, but visiting a few times a week would get noticed). Is it actually news that ~1% of *any* organization consisting primarily of office workers with internet connections would surf for porn? Finding 1% of any given population with no damn common sense or self control is trivial. I'm not sure how it's any different because the SEC numbers are known.
Brain cancer, and brain diseases in general, are likely the last to be cured. Because on top of the whole "finding a cure for cancer in the first place", you need to be able to deliver the cure to the brain, and many drugs and chemicals will not pass the blood-brain barrier. And cancers of the brain are a tiny fraction of cancers; 1.4% overall, and 2.4% of deaths, so the priority is lower. So while I expect a few cancers to be effectively cured in that time frame, if any remain, brain cancer is likely to be one of them. Beyond that, the study could produce preliminary results well before the 30 years are up that may be useful; dismissing it due to the slow return on investment is ignoring the usefulness of the ongoing results.
Using pre-1980 numbers for control won't work. Many forms of cancer have been increasing in prevalence over the years. The exact causes aren't known, but it's likely from a combination of reasons. Environmental contamination is one possibility; e.g. BPA and other hormone mimicking chemicals may affect the rates, as could other dietary changes like the increasing prevalence of salt, transfats and HFCS. Some or all of those may be harmless as far as cancer goes, but if any of them do matter, your control is worthless. More importantly, detection methods, particularly for brain cancer are *much* better. Traditional x-rays are useless for detecting most tumors, and the tests prior to 1970 were invasive and dangerous; not used unless there was an urgent need. Commercial CT scans weren't introduced until 1972, and they didn't spread quickly until the 80s. MRI, which is by far the best non-invasive detection method available at present, didn't even enter human trials until 1977. Sure, some cancer would be detected by the invasive, dangerous methods, or post-mortem at autopsy, but you're still going to have numbers that aren't remotely useful for this study.
The presence of so many confounding factors makes it nigh unto impossible to attribute any effect to cell phones without a real study. For instance, CT scanners, which both detect brain cancer and deliver a dose of ionizing radiation, thereby increasing the risk of getting cancer in the first place, spread at roughly the same time wireless technology was taking off (maybe a decade or two before the cell phone craze, but in line with the spread of thousands of other wireless technologies that should be just as dangerous as a cell phone, assuming cell phone radiation is a threat). Same goes for the increased use of plastics (containing BPA) and HFCS as a sugar replacement. You'll never be able to separate out a specific cause, because too many potential cause all arose and spread in a similar time frame.
I do agree that there won't be a proper control and test group with rigorous sorting (I said as much half an hour before you posted); they'll simply monitor minutes and look for patterns in heavy users vs. light users. But your suggestions to simulate a control group using historical data are flawed; the results of a study making such a comparison might get trumpeted in the media, but any decent medical journal would laugh them out of the room.
That said, for a smaller scale study, it might be possible to pay individuals to use or not use a cell phone; if you pick from city dwellers or farm workers for both control and test (as opposed to suburban commuters), they'll have access to a phone when they need it 95% of the time anyway and might be willing to give it up for compensation. Or provide the control group with a cellphone with the builtin speaker and mic disabled, but with a wired handsfree device, so the radiation from the cell phone would be a few feet from the head; the inverse square law would mean they're getting a massively lower dose of radiation to the brain.
This is why I prefer my subway commute to any of my driving commutes; spending a half hour driving is a half hour wasted, but I can read on the subway. I liked my walking commute best of all, but I can't always live within two miles of work. I don't have a problem with cell phones (Note to NYC: Never let anyone wire your subways for cell phones), only morons who need to play their music so loud that even using headphones, it is clearly audible to people at the other end of the car.
Of course, in both cases the problem can be partially solved with earplugs. And for Amtrak, as well as a few other train lines, there is usually a quiet car where cell phone use is prohibited. Man I love those cars.
Actually, I doubt there will be a strict dividing line between control and test. They'll use their cell phone records to determine how many minutes they are on the phone per month (possibly taking into account self reported use of hands free devices). You can't tell thousands of people that they may not buy a cell phone for the next 30 years, but you can track usage, and determine if the people talking for half an hour per month have more or less cancer than the people talking for three hours a day.
Because MBR partition tables only support up to 2 TB. And 99% of users have no idea what MBR is, or how to use the alternatives that do support disks over 2 TB in size (dynamic volumes and GPT volumes, but you can't boot GPT disks without EFI support and a 64-bit system, the former of which most home computers don't have; dynamic drives have their own quirks). Point is, 99% of users, if sold a 3 TB drive, either won't be able to use it at all, or will end up only using 2 TB of it. So there's no strong incentive to move beyond it until computer hardware supports EFI and OSes move to GPT disks by default.
I'm curious, why do you think that? I can definitely see an argument for a reduced eco-system, but unless Apple's dominance prevented the rise of the PC gaming industry entirely, we'd still have consumer level demand for powerful hardware. Enterprise demand would be high regardless; even if Apple is locked down, Linux is still an option for people in need of number crunching. Scientists, financial firms, etc., would all be demanding faster chips.
The one problem I can see is that Apple's single source hardware tendencies might reduce competition; AMD vs. Intel and ATI vs. nVidia might not have produced results if Apple could crown one party as king and thereby relegate the competition to the enterprise sector. On the other hand, this assumes Apple is able to maintain that sort of vertical integration when it has a monopoly position. "Biz-Apple World" presumably features antitrust laws as well, and that sort of control by Apple might have led to a repeat of the AT&T split up.
Of course, you also have to remember that Microsoft won partially because it tried to support a lot of hardware (particularly early on), so their software showed up on lots of different machines at many different price points, and you had a competition on hardware costs between vendors. Apple, faced with a world without Microsoft, may have eventually been forced to broaden their hardware support to avoid leaving huge openings for competitors to undercut them on price.
If he's talking about what they can do in a vague sense (that is, Apple platform lockdown reduced versatility in some hard to define way), then yeah, it's meaningless. Of course, if all he's talking about is hardware power (as roughly measured by transistor density), then he might be claiming that Apple would have ended or slowed Moore's Law. By removing the exponential growth in "power" (or maybe just reducing the rate of doubling by a substantial amount), the "Biz-Apple World" would feature machines that are "exponentially" less powerful.
That said, I'm playing semantic games because I enjoy playing devil's advocate. If you hadn't posted, I would have been annoyed by the way "exponentially" was used to mean "a lot," in the same way I'm annoyed by "literally" being used as a meaningless emphasis word by half the population.
It's a meme? That's the first I've heard of it. Maybe because this is the first time someone modded it interesting (I bump up Interesting and Informative by a point for the filter). I suppose people do it for the same reason the like inserting false facts into Wikipedia, trolling for giggles, but I'll admit this is an unusually odd manifestation. Choosing Meatloaf (over any other public figure) has the advantage of getting Google really confused; it doesn't know the difference between the person and the food, since Linux has nothing to do with either. I'd be curious to know the origin myself.
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Two years only happens in extenuating circumstances (say, a woman kills her rapist after the fact; it's murder, but it's really hard to apply a tough sentence). Murder is rarely punished with a mere two years. That said, sentencing guidelines are fscked up, because it's always easier to appear "tough on crime" than it is to establish just guidelines.
It's converting infrared to visible light, it isn't a light amplification system (where headlights would cause blinding glare). If people are running headlights, then the front end of their car will be slightly warmer, that's all. You want the heat from the cars themselves to show up; enough morons forget to turn on their lights that being able to see them regardless of lighting is a good thing. TFA is light on details, but I suspect it would overlay infrared hot spots on the regular light being let through. Applying a logarithmic progression to the conversion would prevent *really* hot things from blinding you. So anything well lit will be visible, anything hot will be visible (in the infrared overlay), and anything both well lit and hot will look funky. I'm sure there's a joke in "anything both well lit and hot will look funky," but I'll leave that up to another /.-er.
but it's expensive technology that few drivers can afford,
but at $4,000 for the system without a display, it's a pricey upgrade.
Is it so hard to actually read the summary before posting it? They're right next to each other for crying out loud.
I didn't say the fusion issue was the *only* thing that bothered me. :-)
That bothered me. Because I suspect the writers were really trying to draw a correlation between nuclear fusion and the "fusion" of the Doc's device to his spine. Clearly the fact that we use the same word for both indicates that one can cause the other... Sigh.
And for the record, it's been a hell of a lot longer than 20 years that fusion power has been 10 or 20 years away. I think the first promises of that sort appeared around 1950.
Nah. Fusion power is supposed to be perpetually 10 or 20 years away. They made a big mistake with that deadline; with a mere two year timeline, people will actually remember what was promised when the deadline passes.
Okay, no, nothing will likely go wrong (at least, nothing dangerous to anyone more than a few hundred yards from the event in the worst case scenario). But damn if this doesn't sound like the opening to the plot of a disaster movie.
Or, you know, civic minded types that didn't *want* to get out of jury duty. I would have loved to serve when I was last called, but got rejected at the last second by a peremptory challenge (not sure whether it was from prosecution or defense, since they made their challenges while we were out the room). Of course, while I would have loved to serve on that particular trial (it was expected to run a few days, a week at the outside), the Childs's trial is a whole different kettle of fish. Four months is too much for me, even though my company would have paid me for the whole period.
Risk is hard to quantify in dollar terms until it bites you in the ass. Really big companies factor it in, because they get bit by it often enough that ignoring it isn't an option, but smaller companies often ignore it until it bites them. After all, why spend money on something that doesn't show up on the quarterly reports as anything but an expense? They think "We've got virus scanners and firewalls, so what's the problem?" I never said these companies weren't shortsighted.
I'm tagging as !spoilerfree and spoilerlight. Might help others avoid making a mistake.
If you have fifty of these webapps for different business processes, and the specific quirk isn't trivial or is widely scattered in the code, or you bought some ancient product for which you lack the source or a dedicated support contract, yeah, it can really cost in the millions. A million dollars isn't as much as it seems; a team of 10-20 programmers working for a year can cost that much by themselves (remember, even if you hire them straight out of college and pay them $50K or so, which is fairly typical, you still need to pay for matching FICA taxes, health insurance costs, floor space, and computers). Remember, these are your business critical processes, so you need them thoroughly tested before rollout; you can't just swap them out and hope.
Well, if they're using implementation quirks of IE6 which were not 100% faithfully replicated in IE7/IE8's compatibility mode (possibly due to security concerns), that would be one reason. And ActiveX, while still supported, is much more restricted in IE7/IE8; they may be assuming that the failure to work with a default configuration in IE7/IE8 means it isn't supported, rather than restricted by default but configurable.
You're going to have to be outraged about a lot of stuff then. Because *every* office, private sector or public is going to have this going on to some extent. Yes, the people involve should be fired or at the very least warned and monitored, but there is waste wherever you go. The government is going to have some office workers taking non-productive breaks, it's a cost of doing business, because they employ people, not mythical puritanical civil servants that do nothing but work for the benefit of the taxpayer every hour of every day. As long as these people were doing their jobs most of the time, you were getting what you paid for; office workers *never* work 100% of the time, and the fact that this was porn vs. a brief break to surf /. doesn't change the "wastefulness" of the situation, it just adds a level of dubious judgment to the equation.
As of 2007, the SEC employed 3798 people. They found 33 cases of apparently habitual porn surfing (I get the impression a single visit didn't count, but visiting a few times a week would get noticed). Is it actually news that ~1% of *any* organization consisting primarily of office workers with internet connections would surf for porn? Finding 1% of any given population with no damn common sense or self control is trivial. I'm not sure how it's any different because the SEC numbers are known.
Brain cancer, and brain diseases in general, are likely the last to be cured. Because on top of the whole "finding a cure for cancer in the first place", you need to be able to deliver the cure to the brain, and many drugs and chemicals will not pass the blood-brain barrier. And cancers of the brain are a tiny fraction of cancers; 1.4% overall, and 2.4% of deaths, so the priority is lower. So while I expect a few cancers to be effectively cured in that time frame, if any remain, brain cancer is likely to be one of them. Beyond that, the study could produce preliminary results well before the 30 years are up that may be useful; dismissing it due to the slow return on investment is ignoring the usefulness of the ongoing results.
Using pre-1980 numbers for control won't work. Many forms of cancer have been increasing in prevalence over the years. The exact causes aren't known, but it's likely from a combination of reasons. Environmental contamination is one possibility; e.g. BPA and other hormone mimicking chemicals may affect the rates, as could other dietary changes like the increasing prevalence of salt, transfats and HFCS. Some or all of those may be harmless as far as cancer goes, but if any of them do matter, your control is worthless. More importantly, detection methods, particularly for brain cancer are *much* better. Traditional x-rays are useless for detecting most tumors, and the tests prior to 1970 were invasive and dangerous; not used unless there was an urgent need. Commercial CT scans weren't introduced until 1972, and they didn't spread quickly until the 80s. MRI, which is by far the best non-invasive detection method available at present, didn't even enter human trials until 1977. Sure, some cancer would be detected by the invasive, dangerous methods, or post-mortem at autopsy, but you're still going to have numbers that aren't remotely useful for this study.
The presence of so many confounding factors makes it nigh unto impossible to attribute any effect to cell phones without a real study. For instance, CT scanners, which both detect brain cancer and deliver a dose of ionizing radiation, thereby increasing the risk of getting cancer in the first place, spread at roughly the same time wireless technology was taking off (maybe a decade or two before the cell phone craze, but in line with the spread of thousands of other wireless technologies that should be just as dangerous as a cell phone, assuming cell phone radiation is a threat). Same goes for the increased use of plastics (containing BPA) and HFCS as a sugar replacement. You'll never be able to separate out a specific cause, because too many potential cause all arose and spread in a similar time frame.
I do agree that there won't be a proper control and test group with rigorous sorting (I said as much half an hour before you posted); they'll simply monitor minutes and look for patterns in heavy users vs. light users. But your suggestions to simulate a control group using historical data are flawed; the results of a study making such a comparison might get trumpeted in the media, but any decent medical journal would laugh them out of the room.
That said, for a smaller scale study, it might be possible to pay individuals to use or not use a cell phone; if you pick from city dwellers or farm workers for both control and test (as opposed to suburban commuters), they'll have access to a phone when they need it 95% of the time anyway and might be willing to give it up for compensation. Or provide the control group with a cellphone with the builtin speaker and mic disabled, but with a wired handsfree device, so the radiation from the cell phone would be a few feet from the head; the inverse square law would mean they're getting a massively lower dose of radiation to the brain.
This is why I prefer my subway commute to any of my driving commutes; spending a half hour driving is a half hour wasted, but I can read on the subway. I liked my walking commute best of all, but I can't always live within two miles of work. I don't have a problem with cell phones (Note to NYC: Never let anyone wire your subways for cell phones), only morons who need to play their music so loud that even using headphones, it is clearly audible to people at the other end of the car.
Of course, in both cases the problem can be partially solved with earplugs. And for Amtrak, as well as a few other train lines, there is usually a quiet car where cell phone use is prohibited. Man I love those cars.
Actually, I doubt there will be a strict dividing line between control and test. They'll use their cell phone records to determine how many minutes they are on the phone per month (possibly taking into account self reported use of hands free devices). You can't tell thousands of people that they may not buy a cell phone for the next 30 years, but you can track usage, and determine if the people talking for half an hour per month have more or less cancer than the people talking for three hours a day.
Yeah, cause I'll be way happier getting hit by one of these same morons making calls while they're driving?
Because MBR partition tables only support up to 2 TB. And 99% of users have no idea what MBR is, or how to use the alternatives that do support disks over 2 TB in size (dynamic volumes and GPT volumes, but you can't boot GPT disks without EFI support and a 64-bit system, the former of which most home computers don't have; dynamic drives have their own quirks). Point is, 99% of users, if sold a 3 TB drive, either won't be able to use it at all, or will end up only using 2 TB of it. So there's no strong incentive to move beyond it until computer hardware supports EFI and OSes move to GPT disks by default.
I'm curious, why do you think that? I can definitely see an argument for a reduced eco-system, but unless Apple's dominance prevented the rise of the PC gaming industry entirely, we'd still have consumer level demand for powerful hardware. Enterprise demand would be high regardless; even if Apple is locked down, Linux is still an option for people in need of number crunching. Scientists, financial firms, etc., would all be demanding faster chips.
The one problem I can see is that Apple's single source hardware tendencies might reduce competition; AMD vs. Intel and ATI vs. nVidia might not have produced results if Apple could crown one party as king and thereby relegate the competition to the enterprise sector. On the other hand, this assumes Apple is able to maintain that sort of vertical integration when it has a monopoly position. "Biz-Apple World" presumably features antitrust laws as well, and that sort of control by Apple might have led to a repeat of the AT&T split up.
Of course, you also have to remember that Microsoft won partially because it tried to support a lot of hardware (particularly early on), so their software showed up on lots of different machines at many different price points, and you had a competition on hardware costs between vendors. Apple, faced with a world without Microsoft, may have eventually been forced to broaden their hardware support to avoid leaving huge openings for competitors to undercut them on price.
If he's talking about what they can do in a vague sense (that is, Apple platform lockdown reduced versatility in some hard to define way), then yeah, it's meaningless. Of course, if all he's talking about is hardware power (as roughly measured by transistor density), then he might be claiming that Apple would have ended or slowed Moore's Law. By removing the exponential growth in "power" (or maybe just reducing the rate of doubling by a substantial amount), the "Biz-Apple World" would feature machines that are "exponentially" less powerful.
That said, I'm playing semantic games because I enjoy playing devil's advocate. If you hadn't posted, I would have been annoyed by the way "exponentially" was used to mean "a lot," in the same way I'm annoyed by "literally" being used as a meaningless emphasis word by half the population.
It's a meme? That's the first I've heard of it. Maybe because this is the first time someone modded it interesting (I bump up Interesting and Informative by a point for the filter). I suppose people do it for the same reason the like inserting false facts into Wikipedia, trolling for giggles, but I'll admit this is an unusually odd manifestation. Choosing Meatloaf (over any other public figure) has the advantage of getting Google really confused; it doesn't know the difference between the person and the food, since Linux has nothing to do with either. I'd be curious to know the origin myself.
It's horrible phrasing to be sure, but exponents can be fractional. 2^(1/4), 2^(1/8), etc.