There's not that much power to be had in your pocket. Even self-winding watches rely on the swinging of your arms to generate power, and they're doing a hell of a lot less with it. The generation machinery itself would also take up space and add weight; you'd be better off increasing the size of the battery.
The profit for the retailer and the amount going to returns and discounts is a percentage of the price, so for a lower base price item, they'll be commensurately lower. The cost of manufacturing and shipping, as well as the profit for the publisher, is higher per unit because they sell less units. While the best selling Xbox 360 game and best selling movie (Halo 3 and Spiderman) are close in sales volume (8.1 million vs. 12.7 million), by the time you reach even the tenth spot on the list (Marvel: Ultimate Alliance vs. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), the game is only selling 2.1 million copies, while the movie is at 7.9 million (and I suspect a lot of popular movies sold similar numbers). Keep in mind, little additional work is needed to make the DVD; the costs are often recouped during theatrical release, so the DVD profit is just a bonus. The game needs to make its entire profit on sales to consumers.
Of course, that's only worthwhile if the study sample wasn't flawed from the get go. If it was, they'll be devoting resources to research that, by definition, won't produce useful results.
Ignoring the obvious response that consoles profit based on game sales, while taking a loss on the hardware, I still wouldn't say the games are too expensive. Going back to the early 90s, games usually cost $50-60. 15 years later, they cost roughly the same. And the dollar is worth roughly slightly more than half of what it was worth back then. The console prices have increased with inflation; they were already taking a loss and couldn't afford to lose more. But the games have remained a decent value.
Unfortunately, as the article notes, the sample groups may themselves be problematic. A previous study of another vaccine that was found to *increase* infection rates may not have been dangerous; they just neglected to control for circumcision and intravenous drug use. Given this study dates back to before the end of the previous study, their samples may be skewed the opposite direction. Circumcision has been found to reduce the risk of infection by 40-70%. IV drug use is insanely dangerous (I don't know the exact multiplier, but it is rather high). If the test group had a couple hundred extra circumcised individuals, or a dozen or so IV drug users, it could easily skew the results.
Of course, this is still overlooking another problem with the vaccine. It's not one injection, or even one plus a booster or two. It's a two vaccine regimen, with six injections of each component, for twelve total shots (they may eventually be combined, but that all depends on whether the components react with each other outside the body). And the duration of the protective effect is unknown, and likely short (since the vaccine doesn't seem to trigger the production of antibodies). Even if it was incredibly cheap, it's hard to get people to follow up for a second MMR shot, or keep up to date on their tetanus, both of which protect against diseases which are easier to catch without engaging in risky behavior. Can you imagine asking people to pay a few hundred dollars (a guess based on the cost of Gardasil), and visit the doctor half a dozen times to get such a relatively small benefit (reducing risk by about a third, with only two years of testing)?
Even if we assume the samples are good, this is only a first step, and a very short one at that.
In response to the PP: I suspect the confidence level is 95%. Most published studies require that level of precision, and no one likes to hamstring themselves by demanding greater confidence; after all, they spent a lot of money and rejecting the drug would waste it. Of course, if you've ever played D&D, you know how often you get fumbles or critical successes. 95% means the odds of it being insignificant could be as high as the odds of fumbling a roll.
Well, technically, they may be right. It does lead to more attack surface, and many plugins have permissions the browser doesn't allow itself. And Microsoft product security has increased, to the point where I'm fairly confident that the security risks of their Javascript interpreter are comparable with other major browsers. And unless Google *forces* updates to the plugin, security patches will never be applied; few people run Windows Update, but even fewer update non-MS products.
Of course, those arguments mostly argue for rejecting the *plugin*. *Replacing* IE8 with Chrome (or your browser of choice) means you have only one program's attack surface to worry about again. I'm guessing this is the unspoken part of MS's argument.
Most of them kidnapped by family, usually as a result of a custody dispute. And the first thing they'd do is remove the tracking watch in a non-forceful manner.
Slashdot really needs to have some sort of comment editing system. I'd be happy with an "append-only" system (to avoid trolls making posts, drawing replies, then editing them to make the repliers look stupid). That way, when you make one single mistake, people who read the comment will see the correction.
Compare to the current system: a single, obvious mistype draws *four* nitpick remarks over 15 minutes after a correction reply was posted. Seriously, does anyone actually read replies to a post to see if the comment has already been made? I'd be fine with it if the replies were funny, but half were really weak jokes, and the other half were in earnest. Good lord people!
360 watts, not kilowatts. While incorrect, I would hope the three orders of magnitude difference would make the typo obvious and ignorable, particularly since it doesn't affect any of the other calculations, but apparently not.
Adding to the PP: The overhead and redundant hardware involved in dozens of networked machines would also mean that, to achieve equivalent performance, you'd likely be using twice the power if not more (you might save a little if you rack them with a single PSU for the whole rack, but it's still going to use a substantially greater amount of power).
My home PC (a state of the art gaming PC as of January 2007), discounting the monitor, uses around 360 kilowatts at peak load (running one CPU and one GPU copy of Folding@Home while copying between the various disks to keep them spun up). Of that, only around 60-70 watts is the CPU, call it an even 80 once you add the memory. The GPU, motherboard, hard disks, and power supply losses eat up a lot of the rest.
If you need 80 cores worth of processing power with frequent interprocess communication, you'll need an 80 core machine, or 100-200 cores split across multiple machines. If we assume eight cores per machine, and 16 machines, if they have even half the power overhead of my machine that's going to run an additional 140 watts per box, or an additional cost of 2240 watts. Over the course of one month, that's roughly 1600 kilowatt/hours of overhead, or about $250-350 dollars of power. Every month. For the entire life of the machine (assume 10 years for a corporate or research box), that's around $36000 (remember, that's on top of the cost of the single box super computer). And that's before you factor in the cost of *cooling* the additional heat produced by the additional machines.
Don't get me wrong, there are advantages to the networked supercomputer design (redundancy and failover, the cheaper components mentioned, etc.). But there is also a place for the all-in-one super computer.
I suspect he means "on your PC." Consoles have mostly caught up, and the PC games market has diminished, but for a long time if you wanted to play the "coolest" games, you needed a PC, and you needed Windows.
I go through Delaware regularly on my way between NYC and D.C., and visit for the lack of sales tax when I'm out in Ocean City. I'm sorry, but Delaware is not "right in the middle of" anything aside from chicken farms.
Off topic, while the above comment seems to have posted, it lagged for several minutes while posting (in FF3.5) before I eventually reloaded the page fresh. Despite appearing here, it doesn't appear in my personal comments history (then again, I expected the forced reload to eat the comment, so I suppose something is better than nothing). Still very odd. Something going funky with the comments JS?
Every position above janitor in Redmond comes with either:
A) A paid for move, arranged for you, including having all your stuff packed and unpacked, and a hotel to stay in for a month while house hunting
or
B) A lump sum cash payout to do it yourself (mostly attractive to fresh out of college types with little to move)
I suspect they already had a similar program for retail. It's not a new benefit.
People and data centers have a different idea of what the ideal coastline is. Most people want it shallow and sandy: all the better to swim and surf in. A data center wants it deep and rocky, so it can access extremely cold water without picking up too much debris. The lack of overlap would contribute to lower prices for real estate.
I agree, but for different reasons. The primary flaw in a computer's security is the user. It doesn't matter how many embedded devices use Linux; it won't be an attractive platform for malware writers until it succeeds on the desktop; aka the place where morons are a bigger security risk than buffer overruns.
Generally speaking, humans are not believed to have the capacity to directly affect the global climate on any significant scale. We can only affect it indirectly by altering the amount of heat received from the Sun and the amount emitted back into space. While the heat emitted by these projects may have localized effects, it's highly unlikely to produce any global climate effects. I suppose there is a tiny chance of disrupting ocean currents, but that's indirect, and only redistributes heat, it doesn't affect the global average. Global warming also redistributes heat, but the global average also climbs, it's not zero sum (within the Earth's atmosphere; everything is zero sum eventually).
One clarification: The 120 figure is for abducted by strangers. Many more are abducted by family and to a lesser extent, friends of family. But in the far more frequent abduction case, it can be assumed that the abductor is aware of the watch and will therefore remove it non-forcefully.
Because, in the U.S., maybe 120 children are abducted in any given year (out of 35-80 millionish, depending on how you define children). The risk of drowning in a pool is an order of magnitude greater. And paying $240 per child (rough conversion from 150 pound list price) to stave off an infinitesimal risk is stupid. And the watch can be removed without force (look at the picture). And the odds of the watch being removed for a other reasons (sports, catching on a branch, etc.) are high, meaning most of the time the alert is for nothing, but costs time (and sometimes police resources) to respond to for no reason.
In short, if we "protected" every child in the US, as a nation we'd spend a ten billion+ dollars up front, plus billions more in pointless police responses, and it wouldn't have a significant effect on the safety of any given child. In fact, the more people who use the watch, the less effective it would be, since kidnappers would know to look for and remove it carefully.
It costs 150 pounds ($240-250 USD). I think I can think of things more valuable to a growing child than an overpriced watch/GPS combo.
Of course, remembering how I treated watches as a child, I think the GPS functionality might come in handy more often than you suspect. No, your child isn't going to be kidnapped, but he *will* lose his watch. Except this time you have a chance to find it. If this happens 10-20 times, it will pay for itself (vs. the cost of a visually identical non-GPS watch). If my parents hadn't stopped buying me watches after I lost the fourth one, I definitely would have come out ahead on this.
But Hebrew doesn't have a true cursive form, so the point is moot. (Yes, there is a shorthand form of each letter that is called cursive, but they don't connect together, so it has little to none of the "advantages" of cursive, particularly with respect to fountain pens)
I think bulk breeding and crushing of roaches would likely be a fairly effective means of building these compounds in bulk (assuming, of course, that roaches have a decent amount of these chemicals in them). Paraphrasing and condensing from Wikipedia: In favorable conditions, one female roach can, in her one year lifespan, produce 300-400 offspring, and she only needs to be impregnated once to do so (though the eggs are only laid in groups of ~40 at a time). Aside from one or two commonly available nutrients, their gut bacteria synthesize all other nutrients required to live from whatever they eat, from wood to postage stamp glue to corn oil, so you can feed them otherwise worthless semi-edible plant matter as a form of accelerated composting.
Besides, I think we can safely say that no matter how much of a threat we pose to the survival of other species (say, most of the world's fish stock), we're in no danger of running out of roaches. And aside from PETA, not a whole lot of people are going to protest a roach crushing facility that enables them to repel roaches. Just don't build it too close to people, or you'll get a whole NIMBY movement going.
Slashdot Mirror
There's not that much power to be had in your pocket. Even self-winding watches rely on the swinging of your arms to generate power, and they're doing a hell of a lot less with it. The generation machinery itself would also take up space and add weight; you'd be better off increasing the size of the battery.
The profit for the retailer and the amount going to returns and discounts is a percentage of the price, so for a lower base price item, they'll be commensurately lower. The cost of manufacturing and shipping, as well as the profit for the publisher, is higher per unit because they sell less units. While the best selling Xbox 360 game and best selling movie (Halo 3 and Spiderman) are close in sales volume (8.1 million vs. 12.7 million), by the time you reach even the tenth spot on the list (Marvel: Ultimate Alliance vs. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), the game is only selling 2.1 million copies, while the movie is at 7.9 million (and I suspect a lot of popular movies sold similar numbers). Keep in mind, little additional work is needed to make the DVD; the costs are often recouped during theatrical release, so the DVD profit is just a bonus. The game needs to make its entire profit on sales to consumers.
Of course, that's only worthwhile if the study sample wasn't flawed from the get go. If it was, they'll be devoting resources to research that, by definition, won't produce useful results.
Ignoring the obvious response that consoles profit based on game sales, while taking a loss on the hardware, I still wouldn't say the games are too expensive. Going back to the early 90s, games usually cost $50-60. 15 years later, they cost roughly the same. And the dollar is worth roughly slightly more than half of what it was worth back then. The console prices have increased with inflation; they were already taking a loss and couldn't afford to lose more. But the games have remained a decent value.
Unfortunately, as the article notes, the sample groups may themselves be problematic. A previous study of another vaccine that was found to *increase* infection rates may not have been dangerous; they just neglected to control for circumcision and intravenous drug use. Given this study dates back to before the end of the previous study, their samples may be skewed the opposite direction. Circumcision has been found to reduce the risk of infection by 40-70%. IV drug use is insanely dangerous (I don't know the exact multiplier, but it is rather high). If the test group had a couple hundred extra circumcised individuals, or a dozen or so IV drug users, it could easily skew the results.
Of course, this is still overlooking another problem with the vaccine. It's not one injection, or even one plus a booster or two. It's a two vaccine regimen, with six injections of each component, for twelve total shots (they may eventually be combined, but that all depends on whether the components react with each other outside the body). And the duration of the protective effect is unknown, and likely short (since the vaccine doesn't seem to trigger the production of antibodies). Even if it was incredibly cheap, it's hard to get people to follow up for a second MMR shot, or keep up to date on their tetanus, both of which protect against diseases which are easier to catch without engaging in risky behavior. Can you imagine asking people to pay a few hundred dollars (a guess based on the cost of Gardasil), and visit the doctor half a dozen times to get such a relatively small benefit (reducing risk by about a third, with only two years of testing)?
Even if we assume the samples are good, this is only a first step, and a very short one at that.
In response to the PP: I suspect the confidence level is 95%. Most published studies require that level of precision, and no one likes to hamstring themselves by demanding greater confidence; after all, they spent a lot of money and rejecting the drug would waste it. Of course, if you've ever played D&D, you know how often you get fumbles or critical successes. 95% means the odds of it being insignificant could be as high as the odds of fumbling a roll.
Well, technically, they may be right. It does lead to more attack surface, and many plugins have permissions the browser doesn't allow itself. And Microsoft product security has increased, to the point where I'm fairly confident that the security risks of their Javascript interpreter are comparable with other major browsers. And unless Google *forces* updates to the plugin, security patches will never be applied; few people run Windows Update, but even fewer update non-MS products.
Of course, those arguments mostly argue for rejecting the *plugin*. *Replacing* IE8 with Chrome (or your browser of choice) means you have only one program's attack surface to worry about again. I'm guessing this is the unspoken part of MS's argument.
Most of them kidnapped by family, usually as a result of a custody dispute. And the first thing they'd do is remove the tracking watch in a non-forceful manner.
Slashdot really needs to have some sort of comment editing system. I'd be happy with an "append-only" system (to avoid trolls making posts, drawing replies, then editing them to make the repliers look stupid). That way, when you make one single mistake, people who read the comment will see the correction.
Compare to the current system: a single, obvious mistype draws *four* nitpick remarks over 15 minutes after a correction reply was posted. Seriously, does anyone actually read replies to a post to see if the comment has already been made? I'd be fine with it if the replies were funny, but half were really weak jokes, and the other half were in earnest. Good lord people!
360 watts, not kilowatts. While incorrect, I would hope the three orders of magnitude difference would make the typo obvious and ignorable, particularly since it doesn't affect any of the other calculations, but apparently not.
Sigh. Yes, that was a typo. 360 watts.
Adding to the PP: The overhead and redundant hardware involved in dozens of networked machines would also mean that, to achieve equivalent performance, you'd likely be using twice the power if not more (you might save a little if you rack them with a single PSU for the whole rack, but it's still going to use a substantially greater amount of power).
My home PC (a state of the art gaming PC as of January 2007), discounting the monitor, uses around 360 kilowatts at peak load (running one CPU and one GPU copy of Folding@Home while copying between the various disks to keep them spun up). Of that, only around 60-70 watts is the CPU, call it an even 80 once you add the memory. The GPU, motherboard, hard disks, and power supply losses eat up a lot of the rest.
If you need 80 cores worth of processing power with frequent interprocess communication, you'll need an 80 core machine, or 100-200 cores split across multiple machines. If we assume eight cores per machine, and 16 machines, if they have even half the power overhead of my machine that's going to run an additional 140 watts per box, or an additional cost of 2240 watts. Over the course of one month, that's roughly 1600 kilowatt/hours of overhead, or about $250-350 dollars of power. Every month. For the entire life of the machine (assume 10 years for a corporate or research box), that's around $36000 (remember, that's on top of the cost of the single box super computer). And that's before you factor in the cost of *cooling* the additional heat produced by the additional machines.
Don't get me wrong, there are advantages to the networked supercomputer design (redundancy and failover, the cheaper components mentioned, etc.). But there is also a place for the all-in-one super computer.
I suspect he means "on your PC." Consoles have mostly caught up, and the PC games market has diminished, but for a long time if you wanted to play the "coolest" games, you needed a PC, and you needed Windows.
Troll? That was damn funny. Apparently some mods haven't heard of hyperbole.
I go through Delaware regularly on my way between NYC and D.C., and visit for the lack of sales tax when I'm out in Ocean City. I'm sorry, but Delaware is not "right in the middle of" anything aside from chicken farms.
Off topic, while the above comment seems to have posted, it lagged for several minutes while posting (in FF3.5) before I eventually reloaded the page fresh. Despite appearing here, it doesn't appear in my personal comments history (then again, I expected the forced reload to eat the comment, so I suppose something is better than nothing). Still very odd. Something going funky with the comments JS?
Every position above janitor in Redmond comes with either:
A) A paid for move, arranged for you, including having all your stuff packed and unpacked, and a hotel to stay in for a month while house hunting
or
B) A lump sum cash payout to do it yourself (mostly attractive to fresh out of college types with little to move)
I suspect they already had a similar program for retail. It's not a new benefit.
People and data centers have a different idea of what the ideal coastline is. Most people want it shallow and sandy: all the better to swim and surf in. A data center wants it deep and rocky, so it can access extremely cold water without picking up too much debris. The lack of overlap would contribute to lower prices for real estate.
the above statement is fantastically ignorant.
I agree, but for different reasons. The primary flaw in a computer's security is the user. It doesn't matter how many embedded devices use Linux; it won't be an attractive platform for malware writers until it succeeds on the desktop; aka the place where morons are a bigger security risk than buffer overruns.
Generally speaking, humans are not believed to have the capacity to directly affect the global climate on any significant scale. We can only affect it indirectly by altering the amount of heat received from the Sun and the amount emitted back into space. While the heat emitted by these projects may have localized effects, it's highly unlikely to produce any global climate effects. I suppose there is a tiny chance of disrupting ocean currents, but that's indirect, and only redistributes heat, it doesn't affect the global average. Global warming also redistributes heat, but the global average also climbs, it's not zero sum (within the Earth's atmosphere; everything is zero sum eventually).
One clarification: The 120 figure is for abducted by strangers. Many more are abducted by family and to a lesser extent, friends of family. But in the far more frequent abduction case, it can be assumed that the abductor is aware of the watch and will therefore remove it non-forcefully.
Because, in the U.S., maybe 120 children are abducted in any given year (out of 35-80 millionish, depending on how you define children). The risk of drowning in a pool is an order of magnitude greater. And paying $240 per child (rough conversion from 150 pound list price) to stave off an infinitesimal risk is stupid. And the watch can be removed without force (look at the picture). And the odds of the watch being removed for a other reasons (sports, catching on a branch, etc.) are high, meaning most of the time the alert is for nothing, but costs time (and sometimes police resources) to respond to for no reason.
In short, if we "protected" every child in the US, as a nation we'd spend a ten billion+ dollars up front, plus billions more in pointless police responses, and it wouldn't have a significant effect on the safety of any given child. In fact, the more people who use the watch, the less effective it would be, since kidnappers would know to look for and remove it carefully.
It costs 150 pounds ($240-250 USD). I think I can think of things more valuable to a growing child than an overpriced watch/GPS combo.
Of course, remembering how I treated watches as a child, I think the GPS functionality might come in handy more often than you suspect. No, your child isn't going to be kidnapped, but he *will* lose his watch. Except this time you have a chance to find it. If this happens 10-20 times, it will pay for itself (vs. the cost of a visually identical non-GPS watch). If my parents hadn't stopped buying me watches after I lost the fourth one, I definitely would have come out ahead on this.
But Hebrew doesn't have a true cursive form, so the point is moot. (Yes, there is a shorthand form of each letter that is called cursive, but they don't connect together, so it has little to none of the "advantages" of cursive, particularly with respect to fountain pens)
Roaches have lived among humans for long enough that their natural eviroment is our home.
Only a few types (maybe half a dozen to a dozen out of thousands or more species worldwide). Most roaches are still nature lovers.
I think bulk breeding and crushing of roaches would likely be a fairly effective means of building these compounds in bulk (assuming, of course, that roaches have a decent amount of these chemicals in them). Paraphrasing and condensing from Wikipedia: In favorable conditions, one female roach can, in her one year lifespan, produce 300-400 offspring, and she only needs to be impregnated once to do so (though the eggs are only laid in groups of ~40 at a time). Aside from one or two commonly available nutrients, their gut bacteria synthesize all other nutrients required to live from whatever they eat, from wood to postage stamp glue to corn oil, so you can feed them otherwise worthless semi-edible plant matter as a form of accelerated composting.
Besides, I think we can safely say that no matter how much of a threat we pose to the survival of other species (say, most of the world's fish stock), we're in no danger of running out of roaches. And aside from PETA, not a whole lot of people are going to protest a roach crushing facility that enables them to repel roaches. Just don't build it too close to people, or you'll get a whole NIMBY movement going.