The antioxidant story is one of the most ubiquitous health claims of the nutritionists. Antioxidants mop up free radicals, so in theory, looking at metabolism flow charts in biochemistry textbooks, having more of them might be beneficial to health. High blood levels of antioxidants were associated, in the 1980s, with longer life. Fruit and vegetables have lots of antioxidants, and fruit and veg really are good for you. So it all made sense.
But when you do compare people taking antioxidant supplement tablets with people on placebo, there's no benefit; if anything, the antioxidant pills are harmful. Fruit and veg are still good for you, but as you can see, it looks as if it's complicated and it might not just be about the extra antioxidants. It's a surprising finding, but that's science all over: the results are often counterintuitive.
in which case they would be accused of cherry picking and quoting out of context. This is a very very clear example of a situation where the only way to truely show someones fucked up opinions is to quote what they published in full and unedited.
Right. It's nice how you showed that scalpers help the band since "Promoters may need ticket sales months in advance in order to supply the cash flow to finance the concert" and by buying up tickets early they provide that early cash flow which otherwise the promoters would not have had at that stage. They also stabalize the income of promoters since they increase the sales of tickets to less popular concerts and since they want to sell the tickets they've bought for unpopular shows also have an interest in increasing the demand so that they can sell what they've bought.
What I find amusing is how many people in this topic are deluded that this is a good thing.
Sure people hate scalpers but all this will mean is that ticketmaster will do what the scalpers used to do but screw you far harder. They'll follow the airlines and just charge 10 times as much for a ticket shortly before the show vs the price 6 months before. They'll up the prices based on how many hits their website gets for that concert. And finally they won't ever give you a refund or (and this is where they become worse than the scalpers) let you sell the ticket if you find yourself unable to go.
you'll play just as much money to get the tickets as you ever paid to a scalper but the middlemen at ticketmaster will be getting all the cash.(clap your hands and believe, believe real hard if you want the band to get any of the extra income)
I'm with you on the smaller gigs thing. better atmosphere, better music, better prices.
Hell yes! Playing with liquid nitrogen at the local university open day was fantastic! Sure I was already a science kid but there's something about a liquid nitrogen which is so charming, dangerous and not at the same time... it can freeze something solid in a few seconds yet you can chase bubbles of it around a table with your finger.
since when have voters really payed much attention to how their money is spent? They're generally too concernend that it will be spent on whatever the demon of the month is.
I indeed have something similar. (although it's awkward enough, it doesn't keep a balance but rather each prepay number you buy is seperate and expires fast, if you want to transfer credit from one card to another there's a fee of a couple of euro which isn't much but that and the fee when buying it mounts up)
The anoying thing is that the credit card companies here seem to be gradually phasing it out since they like people to get into debt rather than spending responsibly.
Can't even buy the credit around here any more.
None of the ones listed match the simplicity of a prepay phone.
What I take from that is that there's a gap in the market for a payment system convenient for teenagers without credit cards. If you could get something creditcard-like which you could top up and use as easily as a prepay phone that would have been handy for me when I was a teen. Specifically like a prepay phone so that you couldn't run up any kind of debt, only run out of credit.
They should have declared that any crimes committed while *not* wearing a red mask (including travel to the location of the crime) will turn it into a felony.
Now of course that will drop but I think you're being more than a little optimistic assuming it will reach 1% of that price any time soon. Perhaps if someone builds a space elevator(or similar).
The reason I mention Asimov is that he had a bit of a thing for humanoid robots. Old romantic really. And it is true that if you want people to interact with machines naturally then humanoid would be good but really if you want the machines to be able to use off the shelf tools then a pair of humanlike hands is all you really need- a humanoid torso, legs and head don't do very much for you unless you also want your robot to take part in a sci-fi movie.
Ah you're correct of course. Silly mistake on my part. So it goes years 1-100 first century.(the first 100 years AD) years 101-200 second century.(the second 100 years AD) years 201-300 third century. . . . years 1901-2000 twentieth century. years 2001-2100 twenty-first century.
years 0-99 first century.(the first 100 years AD) years 100-199 second century.(the second 100 years AD) years 200-299 third century. . . . years 1800-1899 nineteenth century. years 1900-1999 twentieth century. years 2000-2099 twenty-first century.
surprisingly it does not refer to the most significant digits of the date. it's perfectly logical if you give it a moments thought.
Some people have this idea that bankers and investors have an almost godlike knowledge of the world and the future. On forums which attract financial types I'll see people dismissing stocks on the basis that "of course if they were really more valuable the traders would have snapped then up". It's as if they don't realize that the traders are operating on almost no information in some cases. living across the street from a company and being able to count the trucks going in and out will often put you ahead of the traders in terms of real information.
because a design built around a calcium based skeleton, which has to include the business end of a Von Neumann machine and a circulatory system and digestive system + protection for all of the above is stupid to emulate when what you're building isn't a Von Neumann machine, can use metal rather than calcium carbonate for it's frame and has no need for a circulatory or digestive system.
something more spiderlike makes vastly more sense for unknown hazardous terrain. If you really really want it to be backwards compatible because apparently you think engineers like putting hand grips on things rather than bolt holes then just stick a human style arm or 2 on the top. It's not like it needs to fit in a space suit.
You may have dismissed my point about inkjets out of hand on the basis of not wanting to be challenged but the fact is that the human tech you so want to be backwards compatible isn't very good. If you have a machines precision and control you can do a hell of a lot better with specialized tools.
Lastly the cost of putting things into orbit is huge. you're going to want to customise most of what you send up if only to save weight. It costs 10,000 bucks per pound to get stuff to geosynchronous orbit so if you spend 5000 bucks getting a custom tool to cut a pound off the weight(say by replacing hand grips with bolt holes and using lighter materials) then you've just saved 5000 bucks.
By any chance did you read Asimov a lot when you were younger?
They have no reason to care as long as it's quiet enough to not draw attention to the college. Sneakernets are safe because there's no logging, no proof that sharing has taken place.
like how specialized printheads are wasteful for machines to use when humans have been using perfectly good,cheap paint brushes for thousands of years.
We should just design machines with hands similar to human hands that can use paint brushes and ignore costly tech like injet technology.
America doesn't need so much oil so the US doesn't prop up pro-US tinpot dictators in oil rich countries. The people in those countries then don't get shit on so much by the US and so are less likely to be pissed off and violent towards the US.
The cost of that still becomes prohibative over a long period. How about this: after a law is passed it expires 5 years later. If it is re-passed it takes 10 years to expire. If after 10 more years it gets passed again then it lasts 20 years. then 40 etc etc
that way laws like "no stabbing people" wouldn't have to be reviewed too often. Laws which often fail would have to be reviewed a lot(as they should since that would imply they're not popular).
when my laptop was having a really wierd intermittent error. spent a while on the phone with him going through his checklist, he tried a few things I hadn't thought of, then arranged for a replacement. His accent was a bit thick and the line was terrible but the guy in question was helpful and polite.
I'm still waiting for them to create a new law that committing a felony with eyebrows or while not wearing a yellow shirt is a mandatory death sentence.
It'll cheer up all the people who love to justify silly "X while committing a fellony" laws on the basis that it lets the cops charge them with extra crimes when they get caught.
And anyone spotted walking around without eyebrows and wearing a yellow shirt could be watched extra carefully.
Patents are supposed to be on inventions not ideas.
I see only a barrier to the company doing something productive by trying to build a machine to do the task- especially since the method patent owners wouldn't likely be happy to invite competition and are perfectly free to tell the real productive company to fuck off and not compete with them and the method they charge people a lot of money to do by hand and turning it into a faster and easier test with a machine would only drive down the percieved value.
This is literally patenting making sandwitches rather than patenting sandwitch making machines.(I seem to remember an old slashdot story where much outrage was had until someone pointed out that McDonalds had patented the latter, not the former)
With a machine what it does generally isn't patentable, merely how it does it. What you want to do is patent the "what" which is absurd.
If you find the gene responsible for some disease is there any possible way for someone to innovate around your patent if they want to test for the gene causing that disease?
If machines are not capable of doing something and you want a patent on it then get off your arse and design a machine which can. Until then it should be no more patentable than a cake recipe.
The line? easy. Novel, non-obvious inventions.
not vague ideas, not spreadsheets, not cake recipes.
Ideas are easy.
I actually have little problem with software patents as long as they include full unobfusticated source code.
If done right any such legislation would have no such requirement but if they're intent on taking control they'll just stick it into some legislation on phone lines or at the back of something aimed at the postoffice but phrased broadly enough to give them control over the net and other forms of communcation as well.
Slashdot Mirror
actually the antioxidants thing is a scam.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/feb/12/advertising.food
The antioxidant story is one of the most ubiquitous health claims of the nutritionists. Antioxidants mop up free radicals, so in theory, looking at metabolism flow charts in biochemistry textbooks, having more of them might be beneficial to health. High blood levels of antioxidants were associated, in the 1980s, with longer life. Fruit and vegetables have lots of antioxidants, and fruit and veg really are good for you. So it all made sense.
But when you do compare people taking antioxidant supplement tablets with people on placebo, there's no benefit; if anything, the antioxidant pills are harmful. Fruit and veg are still good for you, but as you can see, it looks as if it's complicated and it might not just be about the extra antioxidants. It's a surprising finding, but that's science all over: the results are often counterintuitive.
in which case they would be accused of cherry picking and quoting out of context.
This is a very very clear example of a situation where the only way to truely show someones fucked up opinions is to quote what they published in full and unedited.
Right.
It's nice how you showed that scalpers help the band since "Promoters may need ticket sales months in advance in order to supply the cash flow to finance the concert" and by buying up tickets early they provide that early cash flow which otherwise the promoters would not have had at that stage.
They also stabalize the income of promoters since they increase the sales of tickets to less popular concerts and since they want to sell the tickets they've bought for unpopular shows also have an interest in increasing the demand so that they can sell what they've bought.
What I find amusing is how many people in this topic are deluded that this is a good thing.
Sure people hate scalpers but all this will mean is that ticketmaster will do what the scalpers used to do but screw you far harder.
They'll follow the airlines and just charge 10 times as much for a ticket shortly before the show vs the price 6 months before.
They'll up the prices based on how many hits their website gets for that concert.
And finally they won't ever give you a refund or (and this is where they become worse than the scalpers) let you sell the ticket if you find yourself unable to go.
you'll play just as much money to get the tickets as you ever paid to a scalper but the middlemen at ticketmaster will be getting all the cash.(clap your hands and believe, believe real hard if you want the band to get any of the extra income)
I'm with you on the smaller gigs thing.
better atmosphere, better music, better prices.
Hell yes!
Playing with liquid nitrogen at the local university open day was fantastic!
Sure I was already a science kid but there's something about a liquid nitrogen which is so charming, dangerous and not at the same time... it can freeze something solid in a few seconds yet you can chase bubbles of it around a table with your finger.
10,000 bucks per pound to GEO.
shave 1 pound off the weight of an item(say a 5 pound item goes to 4)
cost before change to get standard cheapy human tech item to geo: 50,000
Cost with change: 40,000 + 5000 for a custom tool.
so no.
In that scenario you would be saving money.
since when have voters really payed much attention to how their money is spent?
They're generally too concernend that it will be spent on whatever the demon of the month is.
I indeed have something similar. (although it's awkward enough, it doesn't keep a balance but rather each prepay number you buy is seperate and expires fast, if you want to transfer credit from one card to another there's a fee of a couple of euro which isn't much but that and the fee when buying it mounts up)
The anoying thing is that the credit card companies here seem to be gradually phasing it out since they like people to get into debt rather than spending responsibly.
Can't even buy the credit around here any more.
None of the ones listed match the simplicity of a prepay phone.
What I take from that is that there's a gap in the market for a payment system convenient for teenagers without credit cards.
If you could get something creditcard-like which you could top up and use as easily as a prepay phone that would have been handy for me when I was a teen.
Specifically like a prepay phone so that you couldn't run up any kind of debt, only run out of credit.
no no.
That's the wrong way round!
They should have declared that any crimes committed while *not* wearing a red mask (including travel to the location of the crime) will turn it into a felony.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=301
have a look at "GEOSYNCHRONOUS TRANSFER ORBIT"
Now of course that will drop but I think you're being more than a little optimistic assuming it will reach 1% of that price any time soon.
Perhaps if someone builds a space elevator(or similar).
The reason I mention Asimov is that he had a bit of a thing for humanoid robots. Old romantic really. And it is true that if you want people to interact with machines naturally then humanoid would be good but really if you want the machines to be able to use off the shelf tools then a pair of humanlike hands is all you really need- a humanoid torso, legs and head don't do very much for you unless you also want your robot to take part in a sci-fi movie.
Ah you're correct of course.
Silly mistake on my part.
So it goes
years 1-100 first century.(the first 100 years AD)
years 101-200 second century.(the second 100 years AD)
years 201-300 third century.
.
.
.
years 1901-2000 twentieth century.
years 2001-2100 twenty-first century.
years 0-99 first century.(the first 100 years AD)
years 100-199 second century.(the second 100 years AD)
years 200-299 third century.
.
.
.
years 1800-1899 nineteenth century.
years 1900-1999 twentieth century.
years 2000-2099 twenty-first century.
surprisingly it does not refer to the most significant digits of the date.
it's perfectly logical if you give it a moments thought.
Some people have this idea that bankers and investors have an almost godlike knowledge of the world and the future.
On forums which attract financial types I'll see people dismissing stocks on the basis that "of course if they were really more valuable the traders would have snapped then up".
It's as if they don't realize that the traders are operating on almost no information in some cases. living across the street from a company and being able to count the trucks going in and out will often put you ahead of the traders in terms of real information.
because a design built around a calcium based skeleton, which has to include the business end of a Von Neumann machine and a circulatory system and digestive system + protection for all of the above is stupid to emulate when what you're building isn't a Von Neumann machine, can use metal rather than calcium carbonate for it's frame and has no need for a circulatory or digestive system.
something more spiderlike makes vastly more sense for unknown hazardous terrain.
If you really really want it to be backwards compatible because apparently you think engineers like putting hand grips on things rather than bolt holes then just stick a human style arm or 2 on the top. It's not like it needs to fit in a space suit.
You may have dismissed my point about inkjets out of hand on the basis of not wanting to be challenged but the fact is that the human tech you so want to be backwards compatible isn't very good.
If you have a machines precision and control you can do a hell of a lot better with specialized tools.
Lastly the cost of putting things into orbit is huge.
you're going to want to customise most of what you send up if only to save weight.
It costs 10,000 bucks per pound to get stuff to geosynchronous orbit so if you spend 5000 bucks getting a custom tool to cut a pound off the weight(say by replacing hand grips with bolt holes and using lighter materials) then you've just saved 5000 bucks.
By any chance did you read Asimov a lot when you were younger?
not really.
Humanoid simply isn't a particularly good design for a lot of things.
They have no reason to care as long as it's quiet enough to not draw attention to the college.
Sneakernets are safe because there's no logging, no proof that sharing has taken place.
like how specialized printheads are wasteful for machines to use when humans have been using perfectly good,cheap paint brushes for thousands of years.
We should just design machines with hands similar to human hands that can use paint brushes and ignore costly tech like injet technology.
America doesn't need so much oil so the US doesn't prop up pro-US tinpot dictators in oil rich countries.
The people in those countries then don't get shit on so much by the US and so are less likely to be pissed off and violent towards the US.
The cost of that still becomes prohibative over a long period.
How about this: after a law is passed it expires 5 years later.
If it is re-passed it takes 10 years to expire.
If after 10 more years it gets passed again then it lasts 20 years.
then 40
etc etc
that way laws like "no stabbing people" wouldn't have to be reviewed too often.
Laws which often fail would have to be reviewed a lot(as they should since that would imply they're not popular).
There's a charming video of him giving a talk at nasa about how really rocket science isn't as hard as people claim.
when my laptop was having a really wierd intermittent error.
spent a while on the phone with him going through his checklist, he tried a few things I hadn't thought of, then arranged for a replacement.
His accent was a bit thick and the line was terrible but the guy in question was helpful and polite.
I'm still waiting for them to create a new law that committing a felony with eyebrows or while not wearing a yellow shirt is a mandatory death sentence.
It'll cheer up all the people who love to justify silly "X while committing a fellony" laws on the basis that it lets the cops charge them with extra crimes when they get caught.
And anyone spotted walking around without eyebrows and wearing a yellow shirt could be watched extra carefully.
Patents are supposed to be on inventions not ideas.
I see only a barrier to the company doing something productive by trying to build a machine to do the task- especially since the method patent owners wouldn't likely be happy to invite competition and are perfectly free to tell the real productive company to fuck off and not compete with them and the method they charge people a lot of money to do by hand and turning it into a faster and easier test with a machine would only drive down the percieved value.
This is literally patenting making sandwitches rather than patenting sandwitch making machines.(I seem to remember an old slashdot story where much outrage was had until someone pointed out that McDonalds had patented the latter, not the former)
With a machine what it does generally isn't patentable, merely how it does it.
What you want to do is patent the "what" which is absurd.
If you find the gene responsible for some disease is there any possible way for someone to innovate around your patent if they want to test for the gene causing that disease?
If machines are not capable of doing something and you want a patent on it then get off your arse and design a machine which can.
Until then it should be no more patentable than a cake recipe.
The line?
easy.
Novel, non-obvious inventions.
not vague ideas, not spreadsheets, not cake recipes.
Ideas are easy.
I actually have little problem with software patents as long as they include full unobfusticated source code.
why would they need net neutrality legislation?
If done right any such legislation would have no such requirement but if they're intent on taking control they'll just stick it into some legislation on phone lines or at the back of something aimed at the postoffice but phrased broadly enough to give them control over the net and other forms of communcation as well.
there's nothing wrong with actual net neutrality.