It should be entirely possible to have a near 0 energy footprint on a desalination plant.
Here's how.
Desalination plants require access to a large reservoir of saline water; typically an ocean. Pressurizing this water is often a non-trivial task involving the use of pumps. However, we can pressurize this water for free* with a very simple setup.
In a nut shell, we just use the changes in tide to iteratively fill then trap sea water. At high tide, water flows in over the top of a retaining wall. At low tide, the water cannot escape, and becomes pressurized for free*. We just allow the water a means of escape via some pipes. We can reasonably get several PSI of pressure this way completely pump-free. We can also make use of this pressure to get the energy needed to drive compressed air to forcibly evaporate the water through misting it in a forced air tunnel, then condensing it with a submerged condenser coil. (5 meters down, ocean temps are DAMN cold.)
This produces salt crystals and thermal pollution near the coast. that's it. Compare that with the pollution footprint of an electrically driven desalinator.
Just spray the damned water in a wind tunnel, use a baffle filter to catch salt crystals, then re-condense using a venturi.
Evaporation is a factor of ambient temperature, pressure, and surface area. Meddle with any one of those three and you alter the vapor point of any liquid.
This is not hard, but people like to act like it is.
(For the imaginatively impaired, here's what you do:)
1) spray the raw sea water through a tiny misting nozzel inside a wind tunnel that blows up a vertical shaft with textured baffles inside.
The misting process radically increases the surface area of the water by turning it into suspended droplets in the air. This radically increase the amount of evaporation that happens at the ambient temperature, causing a marked reduction in local air temperature as energy is transferred to water molecules to create vapor. this leaves tiny salt crystals in the air. The active agitation caused by the forced air in the wind tunnel further enhances the evaporation of the water.
The baffles capture what remaining moisture droplets are still suspended on the air currents, wetting the textured surfaces, and creating a "Sticky" surface for the salt crystals to adhere to. several such baffles capture the majority of these airborne salt crystals. these surface accrete the salt, which rapidly grows a thick rind on their surfaces.
the tall stack of the vertical wind tunnel helps ensure that only the tiniest microparticulates of salt crystals can remain airborne at the top of the stack, as gravity pulls down on the heavier crystals, making them favor being lower down in the stack.
2) The air is pulled into the "inlet" port on a venturi, which is driven by an outside air source. The sharp reduction in pressure radically reduces the vapor point of any still persistent water droplets, ensuring evaporation.
3) The resulting water vapor + air mixture is run through a chilled condensator, which precipitates the now clean water out.
(Hint, if you put the condensator coil about 5 meters below the surface of the ocean, the ambient sea temperature is sufficient to get this effect for free. Especially with cold-as-fuck california sea water.)
There is more than enough thermal energy in ordinary summer air to fully evaporate a whole lot of water. Or is running some flipping fans and a pressure pump on the seawater just too much effort?
"forcefields" have been a staple of pulp scifi and space opera since space opera was first born. Try something like flash gordon, AC.
Personally though, I suspect that getting a magnetic feild itself to behave as a metamaterial would be very effective in blocking coherent light beams, and probably with less power. It is important to note that magnetic field lines are themselves propagated using the same force carrier as the coherent light beam, since both are manifestations of electromagnetic energy.
You dont need to block the incoming light beam, you just need to alter the beam frequency spread so that it stops being coherent and thus disperse it before it can come into contact with the outer surface of the ship. if the shield is projected far enough out away from the craft, this would result in a radical power reduction to square centimeter of ship surface, negating the ability of the laser to in any way damage the hull of said ship. Abusing magnetic fields into acting like metamaterials has been the subject of many interesting papers already.
It would also solve the issue of being unable to see out of the cockpit.
The more likely explanation (at least I think so anyway) is that exclusively male hormones with no female hormones present, coupled with the fact that nearly all mammals conserve these olfactory signals, means that the same olfactory signals in a "Strongly competitive" mouse colony (reproductively competitive that is) are being expressed by the preponderantly male research scientists, which increases stress hormone levels in the mice, which chemically inhibits pain receptivity.
This makes sense, as a strongly competitive colonial environment is likely to cause injury to both male and female mice under the circumstances in question. Females get bullied for sex, males get attacked/killed to weed out competition.
as the two types of hormones approach equilibrium, there is less competition for sexual partners, and the risks of physical injury by other mice decreases.
Human males are just releasing the chemical cocktails that trigger the stress response in the mice.
This just means another layer of experimental control is needed when using mice in experiments where pain tolerance or mitigation is being researched, and the human researchers are male. For example, spraying female olfactory hormones to counteract the effect, or ensuring that male to female ratios in research teams directly handling the animals is always 1:1, or favors female handlers.
The idea here was NOT that the central object needs to be hot.
The idea was that if it is metal rich, then the chances of rocky bodies that are much smaller/less dense than it can be tidally heated, and with that tidal heating, be able to support life. (say, chemotrophic microbes.)
Spectroscopic analysis of the object will only reveal its atmospheric composition. Lensing analysis (from a transit) would better refine mass estimates, which could help refine the internal composition, but much like our own gas giants much closer by, we can only speculate as to what is deep below the clouds.
Detecting orbiting bodies in this system is a non-starter with current technology, because the parent object is too dim to do effective transit light dimming measurements. The whole system would have to transit a very bright and distant system, and then if there are any large transiting objects in that distant system, interval periodicity will be suspect/difficult to refine.
I still hold that systems like this one should be of considerable interest, and not passively written off as "too cold."
If this were an object that coalesced away from any (other) protostellar discs, it may conceivably have small objects orbiting it. Since there wouldnt have been a "fusion event" to blow away the remaining gas and dust of the original cloud it formed from, any objects that coalesced near to the central sub-brown dwarf would not have been pushed out by the radiation pressure.
This means that gravitationally bound satellites close enough to be quite warm indeed just from tidal heating could be possible with "object systems" like this. (With small objects orbiting large ones at close distances, the odds of the objects being tidally locked increases greatly. However, without the sudden application of solar wind gusting through the accretion disc, the number of small rocky bodies would be much higher, meaning orbital resonances could help prevent this tide locking, should a sufficient number of such objects be at work-- planetoids with lots of "comparitively large moons" tugging on the planetoid's centers of mass, preventing tide locking.)
The compact size of this dense object may suggest that the object is metal rich. That would indicate a reasonable probability for rocky terrestrial type objects orbiting it.
Discounting the system as being too cold for life as we know it is premature. Tidally heated satellites with liquid oceans are possible, even with this very dark "star" overhead. (EG, look at Io around jupiter. Despite being waaay more than 1AU from the sun, the surface is totally motlen rock. Jupiter is smaller/lighter than this object.)
Being a non-fusing object, this object can theoretically last for hundreds of billions of years-- much longer than our sun will live. If I were a member of an interstellar capable species looking for a "Long term solution", I would be very interested in systems like this one, and in red dwarf systems for this very reason. Artificial biospheres powered by thermal energy equilibrium (which itself is generated by gravitational tidal forces and radio-isotope decay) exploitation would be just as comfy for energy hungry lifeforms as a sunny planet like earth-- and be far more abundant for possible building sites.
I find it highly foolish to just write off systems like this one as being "too cold for life".
This way, whole ICs and other active components could be completely embedded in the ABS plastic. It would also allow structural designs not attainable with flat, 2D PCBs. (Say, wrapped around a cylinder, or inside a sphere.)
example applications: fully waterproofed electronics, devices in novel shapes, devices with large wirewound active antennae, (say, to exploit getting low voltage power from AM radio signals with electronically tunable coils) or simply just embedding copper filaments inside 3D printed objects for enhanced stability. Also, ability to print device and enclosure simultaneously.
Being able to print with essentially two different polymer heads is interesting, but not really all that impressive.
I would be substantially more impressed with a combination of a polymer extruder head, a copper wire feed apparatus that can slowly meter out and cut thin copper wire (non-lacquered), a non-heated extruder filled with silver solder paste, a strong IR lightsource that can flow the solder paste, and a pick and place arm.
To get clean copper traces embedded in the ABS plastic substrate, you just print channels and "wrap" bosses, anchor the wire at one end, spool it out while taught and sinch it up against the printed plastic bosses, then anchor at the other end, then cut.
One could print multiple layers of ABS substrate, embed multiple layers of wire traces, (MADE OF SOLID WIRE, not high resistance silicone) then paint, pick and place components, and IR beam between layers.
I really don't see why such a thing would be at all impossible to make. the 3d printer people need to up their game.
Sure. Heat it up past the critical point in the presence of oxygen.
Graphene is carbon, and the thermal decomposition of carbon as a fuel source has been documented for many many centuries.
A complex designed to thermally decompose the graphene (and any organic substrates it may be bound to), followed by acid and alkaline recovery washes to reclaim the doping agents from the ashes could effectively handle graphene ewaste.
The issue with silicon, is that the thermal decomposition temperature is very excessive, and difficult to contend with. It likes to form this stuff called "glass", instead of decomposing into an easily separable substance, like CO2.
There are other high-temperature materials besides ceramic that can be used as the outer casing.
Graphene is an organic molecule, which will have thermal expansion properties more closely related to those of other organic molecules containing aromatic ring structures, because of the bond energies and bond angles involved.
Say, something like aramid.
The only issue with aramid that I can think of is that it cannot be melted. (It has no melting point. It thermally decomposes before melting.) To "mold" aramid, the molecules have to be dissolved in a very strong acid. This would greatly complicate chip casing manufacture.
There are other aromatic ring structure based polymers though.
I place a quantum singularity inside a special magic box. The gravitational pull of the singularity is so strong that no force in the universe can overcome its attraction with the bottom of the box. No force in the universe can lift the singularity out of the box.
I can however, lift the singularity.
I can lift the box containing it, if I exert enough energy, and in so doing, lift the singularity.
If we replace "Magic box" with "The whole damned universe", the trick still applies-- We are then just left with a real headscratcher, "Through what, did the universe get lifted?"
Questions like the above "paradox" don't really prove or solve anything. They just demonstrate that there is ignorance that needs to be overcome.
The pedant will argue that "but being unable to lift the singularity out of the box means he is not omnipotent!" or some similar nonsense.
To that, I direct you at the paradox of time's arrow. There really isnt a compelling reason for time to only flow in one direction. Reversal of time would cause the singularity to be impossible to contain inside the magic box. An omnipotent god can thus retain the rules that gravitational force is based on the inverse square of the distances between the centers of mass, and where one of the masses exerts infinite spacial curviture-- and still move the singularity out of the box-- from his perspective.
The notion of "Cant do something" is always based on the idea of something infallible. At best, using it as a defense against an infallible god, is just substitution.
No, Not an idiot. I simply used a rule in logic to demonstrate how your statement is ill-devised, and not conclusive. Specifically, if you can demonstrate how a foundational axiom in a statement can be false, you can falsify all logic predicated upon that axiom.
This principle is a foundational precept in applied logic. It helps logicians recognize when they are wasting their time with a question. Being such a simple test, I applied it to your inquiry, and found that inquiry to be lacking. Call it pedantry if you want to, but it wasn't without purpose that I did this.
God does not have to be physically inside THIS universe to *exist*. (as such, any presupposition that he MUST be constrainable by the rules of this universe is pure hubris unfounded by evidence.) There is a growing body of evidence that there are other universes besides our own, and that their very existences have subtle influences upon our own. It is one of the possible explanations for why the various massive particles in the standard model have the masses that they do, in fact. (Not the only one, and probably not the leading one, but that does not make stop making it be one of them regardless.)
Similar to how a turing machine can simulate any other turing maching given sufficient memory and time, a being that observes time differently from the way we do can use even a tiny and subtle form of influence to completely control our universe, because they can fully calculate all the outcomes, and always be able to influence the outcomes of all interactions. (EG, they know exactly where and how to nudge.) This subtle interaction is indistinguishable from random chance to observers from within our universe, so it cant be proven this agency is at work. This does not discount that it is possible, however.
Do I imagine some strawman like "angels strumming harps surrounding some dude in a toga floating on a cloud" when I contemplate 'god'? No. I contemplate something so alien from anything we know of or can conceive of that it defies attempts to imagine it. By definition, all it requires is agency by which to make decisions, ability to see all possible outcomes statically (Sees the universe as one giant markov chain, essentially), and a means by which to influence said universe, however subtle. If those conditions are met, the entity will be both omnipresent and omnipotent, as seen from our universe. AKA, 'god'
what it looks like, why it chooses what it does, or even how it thinks are moot, and the sole venue of philosophers and theists. Those things are inconsequential to "existence", which is what the hard atheist and the theist dispute.
So, I will return your question-- Are YOU an idiot, making presumptions of other people that are unfounded, and then running off with those presumptions as if they were truth?
Specifically, it implies gravity, and that god is bound to the rules of physical reality. If so, then naturally god cannot be omnipotent, as you are implying-- however, if god is not bound by the laws of physical reality, then god can make a boulder that is impossible to lift, yet still lift it.
Your argument relies on there being something infallible that is "underneath" god. (both figuratively, and literally,.) An unliftable object would be a quantum singularity-- You need an impossible surface to support having such a thing sitting on it, waiting to be lifted-- It also presupposes that god is limited by physical reality, rather than what religion implies, which is the inverse. (Physical reality is dependent upon god.) The axioms by which logic and physics are underpinned are based on the constancy of the physical universe, and if that constancy isnt constant after all -- but instead based on the influence of an omnipotent god-- then it does not follow to use it as a means to refute the existence of that god.
With all the implied fallacies in place, you simply become redundant in asserting that god cannot exist within the confines of the physical universe. That's fine and dandy. Physics says that too:
Something like god would represent unlimited energy potential, and thus have unlimited mass energy. Unless god was also of an infinite volume, he would rapidly create the universe's single most extreme black hole in very short order. Since this is not observed to be the case, god clearly does not exist in our universe.
As such, it is illogical to attempt to use logical foundations predicated on this presumption to disprove the existence of such an entity.
The assertion that there are no alternatives to the physical universe we see and interact with does not meet up with recent findings and theory.
So, rather than some infallible truth being presented, all I see is a poorly framed argument that reduces to redundancy, while disproving nothing of consequence.
Just add an aftermarket wifi access point to the ethernet connection, then you can attach any number of local network X clients to the X server. Tablets, laptops, et al.
Slap that bitch inside the dash or something. They usually eat 12v DC anyway, so it shouldnt be hard to wire in.
Just make sure you aren't a total retard. Put the broadcast power on the access point to the absolute minimum needed to service the vehicle's interior, and use WPA2. Also, set access restrictions on the SSH, Telnet, and other vulnerable services so that digital signature checking is in force.
Running a minimalist GUI on the X server would allow the vehicle to do all manner of interesting things during the day. It could even run as a node on Folding@home if you really wanted. I was thinking more along the lines of encrypted email clients with GPG and something like clawsmail though.
This is a quality over quantity, and price valuation problem.
Advert company wants: Enormous quantity of inexpensive advert impressions for products they have exclusive contracts to advertise for, and comprehensive metrics about those impressions.
Content Producer wants: Enough operating capital to make a steady profit while producing engaging content that users like,
End User wants: Engaging content from the content producer.
The content producer sells the end user's eyeballs to the advertising company.
The advertising company pays the content producer for those eyeballs.
The user gets content paid for by the resale of their eyeballs.
Here's the rub:
All three parties seek to maximize their goals. This exchange only works when there is equity in the exchange. As any one party starts to leverage advantage, the arrangement becomes unstable.
Scenario 1: Content provider demands too much money from advertisers for ad placements.
Advertisers cut off the producer, or, (if the advertiser cannot find other producers) goes out of business as they stop making profits. Producer stops making content as the money dries up, user stops getting content. All parties fail.
Scenario 2: Advertising company pays too little for adverts. (current reality)
Content producers have to oversell the eyeballs viewing their content, resulting in end users going elsewhere to get that content, (Piracy, other sites, other networks, et al.) and to find technological measures to sanitize the content if alternative channels cannot be secured. Content producers do not get paid enough by the advert stream, stop producing content, advert company stops getting eyeballs, user stops getting content. All parties fail.
Scenario 3:
Users simply won't watch the adverts, period.
Users simply refuse any and all adverts. Content producers cannot secure a revenue stream from advert companies, and have to charge for content directly. This limits the available form and expression of the content to what end user is willing to directly pay for. This stifles the creativity of the producer, limits the variety of content consumed by the end user, and kills advertiser completely, reducing the ability to spread awareness of new products and offerings. All parties fail.
The ONLY WAY, and I mean THE ONLY WAY that advert supported services *CAN* work in the long term, is if there is across the board equity.
Advertisers *MUST* pay what the advert impression is REALLY worth.
Content producers MUST provide quality content with emphasis on content, not advertisement.
End users MUST watch the advertisements.
The problem, is that NONE of these actors are acting equitably, starting with the advertisers.
The advertisers found that they could leverage more profit by using mass-tracking analytics to evaluate how best to make payouts, to maximize their profit margins, pretending that this was in some fashion sustainable, creating an unreasonable stockholder expectation which they now must uphold. This is a technological advance that upset the equity.
Advertisers now pay less to the content producers.
To make up for the loss, content producers have to display more ads, further degrading the quality of the impressions received, and degrading the prices paid out, thanks to the analytics.
The end user says "Fuck that shit, I am going to block your BS adverts! They cover the whole damned screen!", and installs adblocking software.
The advert company screams to the content producer that the quality of their impressions has reached all time lows, and that they wont pay enough to keep the site running.
The content producer says that end users are blocking the adverts, resulting in a reduction in the number of unique impressions.
End user blames the content producer, saying they are now consuming a solid diet of advertisements if they dont use the adblock software.
The content producer blames the advertiser, saying they arent paying enough to keep the content in production.
Problem: Advertiser does not pay enough to sustain equity, by seeking to maximize its own profits in an unsustainable fashion.
The user wants the CONTENT to have focus, as that is what they go there to get.
The advertisers want the ADVERTISEMENTS to have focus, so they have "Impact."
That is why advertisements are obnoxious, obtrusive, cover 80 to 90% of the display, hoover around, make blaring noises, flash rapidly enough to induce epileptic seizures in those vulnerable, and overall make users reach for adblock software.
The solution? Advertisers need to pay more for less obtrusive ads.
If a site can get enough revenue to operate on just a simple hyperlinking rotating image banner, they wont need full page flash plague competing with their content.
But advertisers want eyeballs. ALL of the user's eyeballs. If advertisers had their way, people would spend 80 to 90% of their time watching adverts-- both on the internet and on television.
Allowing advertisements to become ubiquitous to the point of requiring brain bleach to control is NOT the answer, and only further increases the "Need" to inject yet more adverts to secure a workable revenue stream for the site/channel operators. Basically, they are saturating the market for adverts, and the price paid out per advert served drops. To make up for that, they have to display more adverts. Works GREAT for advertising companies, but is poison for content producers. It has a double-edge, in that as the percentage of time spent viewing adverts goes up, the number of viewers watching the site goes down.
It should not be any bit at all hard to determine where the two trends meet, especially with the INSANE amounts of analytics going on with advert tracking, and page viewing.
The problem is that the advert companies dont want to pay what the adverts are actually worth, and are driving the price paid per impression into the ground, while making a killing doing so. Users dont want to actually pay a fee to use the internet's various webpage services, which have traditionally always been free. (with a few exceptions.)
The real solution is to keep content as the primary focus, put a fucking ball gag and super glue in the mouths of the advertisers, and cut off the flow of gravy by refusing to plaster wall to wall adverts all over the internet, thus making the internet advert real-estate space a premium commodity, commanding a high price through encouraging scarcity.
Users would easily handle a 30% advert (max), 70% content (min) mix. They will walk away from, or start using adblock to circumvent anything above where the curves meet.
carp DO taste nasty when not properly prepared. So do catfish. (if you cook it wrong, it's horrendous) The issue with carp is that they are a very bony fish as well, which makes processing them difficult, and even when cooked correctly, makes eating said fish very hard.
But all that is unimportant; You guys are not looking at this as an economic opportunity. Many products are made from fish that are not intended for human consumption, but which still require many tons of fish per hour to manufacture industrially.
Such as fish emulsion fertilizer and the like. There are also a few dubiously useful suppliments that humans injest but never actually taste, such as fish oil capsules, that could be mass manufactured.
A business can be made out of "over harvesting" said asian carp in that area.
It is a photo enantiomer, meaning that it has a left handed, and right handed isomer that will bend light one way, or another, when in solution.
The right handed isomer is an effective sedative, while the left handed one is a tetragenic compound.
The problem is that even if highly refined so that only R isomer is administered, the pH of the patient's blood will racemize the isomers again.
It could be entirely possible for thalidomide to be safe, if administered with a chaparone to prevent racemization.
At the time, the preparations of thalidomide were a heterogenous mix of both isomers, as there was no research into possible side effects from the mixed sample, and the prospect of birth defects wasnt considered, as the intended use was not for treating morning sickness. As an anti-cancer treatment for non-pregnant people, it is still a useful compound.
Thalidomide was originally developed as a sedative/hypnotic compound, and not as a treatment for nausea. (This would be similar to say, scopolamine, which is used to treat motion sickness. This is not meant to imply that the comounds are related. They arent. However, scopolamine is ALSO useful for treating some forms of nausea. Fancy that.) The use as treatment for nausea is what heralded the use of the product to treat morning sickness, and the subsequent epidemic of infant mortality and deformity that swept the world. It isn't that thalidomide is a bad drug: it was, and is still being shown to be a VERY useful drug. The problem is that thalidomide was not used properly, and was provided OTC, which strongly exacerbated the problem. To pick on poor scopolamine again, it too had a stint as an OTC motion sickness medicine and sleep aid, which ended up causing all manner of problems when certain... shall we say, "Degenerate" people discovered that it made an excellent date rape drug when dissolved in alcoholic beverages.
It isn't that either drug is "bad". It is that the lust for profits from the sale of the drugs can lead to very bad decisions in marketing and distribution of those drugs. Drugs developed for a certain purpose should be extensively and thuroughtly tested for efficacy before being used in alternative manners; such as for instance, Minoxadil. It is the primary ingredient in Rogaine, a male hairloss treatment with FDA approval. It was originally a prescription heart medicine for treating hypertension. It took quite some time for minoxadil to recieve FDA approval for treating alopecia. That is a good thing, as the testing helped establish what the ideal dosages are, and that the concentration must be different for treating women than for treating men. If minoxadil had been rushed to market as a treatment for alopecia, there could have been very dangerous results, since it *IS* a blood pressure medication! This is one of the reasons why rogaine is a topically applied preparation, and not a preparation for internal consumption. (The regrowth of hair was a common side effect of orally administered minoxadil for treating hypertension. Oral administration of the compound would be effective for regrowing hair, but the concentrations needed would make taking the drug dangerous to a patient's cardiac health. Topically applied minoxadil allows high concentrations at the site of interest, with a slow overall rate of absorption, making it ineffective at lowering blood pressure. If rushed to market, it is quite concievable that minoxadil tablets would have been seen for treating alopecia, and that there would have been class action suits as bald people all over started dieing.)
The FDA's insistence on efficacy studies is to prevent dangerous drug use, and to ensure that a drug actually does what it says it does. The long term drug study requirements are intended to catch things like thalidomide birth defects, as it would have shown up with thalidomide being used as a sedative/hypnotic as a
While obviously, I do not have access to the feedback provided to slash media, and instead must attempt to grep the summation of that feedback from the postings of others over the past 2 two days, the predominant opinion has been that the fundamental design of the beta, with its white theme, and more graphical (vs textual) presentation methodology is in and of itself something that is not seen as being desirable by a considerable proportion of the community.
Many use mobile connections with the useragent string set to desktop mode, or use a tethered mobile connection to view the site, being technology industrial professionals who are busy and on the go. As such, they have a vested interest to disable the loading of images, as these can burn into the data allowance their broadband providers have established, and can result in nasty overage charges or worse. Because of this, and for some, simply for personal preference reasons, the more graphical nature of the beta is seen as simply undesirable in any fashion. Given the prevailing and powerful nature of this opinion, and how well represented it has been in discussions of this topic I have observed, I must conclude that a goodly portion of the feedback provided has expressed this opinion. As far as I can tell, it would take a radical rethinking of the beta's design to accommodate this feedback. Given the nature of the opinion, I find it difficult to believe that it has not been presented in the feedback over the past 5 months in copious abundance. This is why I asked the question the way I did.
Personally, I do like that images directly related to the story are included, but feel these images should be very small thumbnails, (possibly text-wrapped in the top-right corner of the story summary body) and not large, flashy ones. I too view slashdot with a mobile device with the useragent string modified, and can speak with personal conviction that these images should never exceed 200px wide, at the largest. I could begrudge a compromise for using a more intelligent query for page assets to be determined by either a preferences setting, (for people who may be browsing while tethered, for instance, who would otherwise possibly benefit from having larger UI assets displayed for visibility reasons) or by evaluating the current display window size, before actually initiating any HTTP GET operations, for persons like myself who prefer to avoid using the mobile version of the site's content layout. (The excessive javascript of the mobile version often crashes the stock browser of my device.)
I eagerly await any answers you may receive from the design team concerning these queries, and fully appreciate that these kinds of questions are outside of your department.
So far, however, the impression I have been made to hold concerning the reasons and motivations for the kinds and implementations of recent slashdot upgrades has been that the design team has been implementing changes based upon their own personal preferences, (eg, "the old design looks like something from the 90s", or "gah, that's so clunky looking!") Rather than from any supportably technical or objective position. I would very much like to hear that this is not the case, and to be made aware of the reasons behind the decision to update layout in this fashion, and behind the choices in its implementation.
If however, you are forced to confirm the position I have been made to hold concerning such choices (that they are arbitrary, and capriciously chosen and enacted) then I would ask that you be honest in reporting this to the community. I would also like for you to continue to ask questions on our behalf, inquiring why the personal aesthetic preferences of the design team trumps that of the preferences of thousands of registered users.
I really do appreciate that you and Soulskill did at least break the silence that up until now has been deafening, but really, the nature of your reply does not fill me with confidence, and with the replies I am reading by other users, it looks as if that feeling is well represented, and that I am not alone.
I just want you to know that I am listening to you as well.
With that in mind, I have some difficult questions for you.
You say that you have been reading and contemplating our feedback. It is clear that you have been at least observing the fallout that has occured over the past few days here in the comments sections of some very promising and nice looking stories, as the quality of the community provided content dropped to levels that would make even/b/ look intelligent. Your colleague Soulskill even made some well received commentary recently, and we've eagerly awaited this public level of ice-breaking on the discussion. For this I, and clearly many others are greatful.
However, since you claim to have been receiving valuable feedback about the beta experiment since at least 5 months ago, why is it that the nature of the beta has not radically changed to accommodate that feedback? Why did you allow this situation to come to a head like this, if you have been observing and seriously considering the feedback provided?
I see in your announcement that you and slashmedia believe it is time for a change in the site's layout. What factors does slashmedia use to make these determinations, and why do you believe that a radical change instead of a refinement and polish of the current system is in order?
Can you please elaborate on some of the design choices that slashmedia has taken in the beta, ans why they felt these were good decisions, and why they have apparently completely ignored 5 months of user feedback about the beta?
I understand that nobody really profits from continuing the public protest, or from relentless, mindless trolling. That's why we need to have a real, and valuable discussion here about this, and why a show of good will about our feedback actually being considered, and how it is considered, in detail, is clearly needed for our community to resolve its differences with slashmedia's choices in performing its services as the community's host.
I am sure it would mean a great deal to all of us if the dialog did not end here. We, as a community need answers to these questions if we are going to stay and continue to contribute to what makes slashdot great.
I hate to say it, but ignoring us and leaving these kinds of questions unanswered is likely to be seen as a worse slap in the face than hearing only silence was. Please continue this dialog.
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Only if there is a process for the cell to do so. Like a computer, a cell isn't magical. This is why amyloid plaque buildup in neural tissues is a fatal degenerative disease. There is no mechanism for the cells to flush the defective products they are synthesizing from the broken synthesis chain.
The real world KEEPS the defective biproduct, and simulates its impact on the rest of the system. A computer based simulation of that process that aims to be accurate, must also do so.
The issue is that the "zombies", in this case, defective H proteins, stay in the cell and are NOT really dealt with. They become a new, undefined input in the system that must be accounted for when simulating other cellular processes being performed in parallel inside the cell.
This can lead to a very extensive chain ot unexpected executions and transformations. Dealing with that programmatically is going to make any computer currently in operation attempting it cry to the ghost of Alan Turing and beg for mercy.
If the goal is accurate simulation, then a (try),(catch),(finally) isn't going to work properly.
Slashdot Mirror
It should be entirely possible to have a near 0 energy footprint on a desalination plant.
Here's how.
Desalination plants require access to a large reservoir of saline water; typically an ocean. Pressurizing this water is often a non-trivial task involving the use of pumps. However, we can pressurize this water for free* with a very simple setup.
In a nut shell, we just use the changes in tide to iteratively fill then trap sea water. At high tide, water flows in over the top of a retaining wall. At low tide, the water cannot escape, and becomes pressurized for free*. We just allow the water a means of escape via some pipes. We can reasonably get several PSI of pressure this way completely pump-free. We can also make use of this pressure to get the energy needed to drive compressed air to forcibly evaporate the water through misting it in a forced air tunnel, then condensing it with a submerged condenser coil. (5 meters down, ocean temps are DAMN cold.)
This produces salt crystals and thermal pollution near the coast. that's it. Compare that with the pollution footprint of an electrically driven desalinator.
By using thermal energy in the ambient environment, by exploiting heat of evaporation.
Duh. The air being pulled in with the water isnt at 0 kelvins you know.
There's a shitton of thermal energy you can get for fucking free.
For goodness sake;
Just spray the damned water in a wind tunnel, use a baffle filter to catch salt crystals, then re-condense using a venturi.
Evaporation is a factor of ambient temperature, pressure, and surface area. Meddle with any one of those three and you alter the vapor point of any liquid.
This is not hard, but people like to act like it is.
(For the imaginatively impaired, here's what you do:)
1) spray the raw sea water through a tiny misting nozzel inside a wind tunnel that blows up a vertical shaft with textured baffles inside.
The misting process radically increases the surface area of the water by turning it into suspended droplets in the air. This radically increase the amount of evaporation that happens at the ambient temperature, causing a marked reduction in local air temperature as energy is transferred to water molecules to create vapor. this leaves tiny salt crystals in the air. The active agitation caused by the forced air in the wind tunnel further enhances the evaporation of the water.
The baffles capture what remaining moisture droplets are still suspended on the air currents, wetting the textured surfaces, and creating a "Sticky" surface for the salt crystals to adhere to. several such baffles capture the majority of these airborne salt crystals. these surface accrete the salt, which rapidly grows a thick rind on their surfaces.
the tall stack of the vertical wind tunnel helps ensure that only the tiniest microparticulates of salt crystals can remain airborne at the top of the stack, as gravity pulls down on the heavier crystals, making them favor being lower down in the stack.
2) The air is pulled into the "inlet" port on a venturi, which is driven by an outside air source. The sharp reduction in pressure radically reduces the vapor point of any still persistent water droplets, ensuring evaporation.
3) The resulting water vapor + air mixture is run through a chilled condensator, which precipitates the now clean water out.
(Hint, if you put the condensator coil about 5 meters below the surface of the ocean, the ambient sea temperature is sufficient to get this effect for free. Especially with cold-as-fuck california sea water.)
There is more than enough thermal energy in ordinary summer air to fully evaporate a whole lot of water. Or is running some flipping fans and a pressure pump on the seawater just too much effort?
No, "deflectors" are definately mentioned in A New Hope.
"red leader" specifically-- "bring your rear deflectors on; double front"
source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
lol, obvious troll is obvious.
"forcefields" have been a staple of pulp scifi and space opera since space opera was first born. Try something like flash gordon, AC.
Personally though, I suspect that getting a magnetic feild itself to behave as a metamaterial would be very effective in blocking coherent light beams, and probably with less power. It is important to note that magnetic field lines are themselves propagated using the same force carrier as the coherent light beam, since both are manifestations of electromagnetic energy.
You dont need to block the incoming light beam, you just need to alter the beam frequency spread so that it stops being coherent and thus disperse it before it can come into contact with the outer surface of the ship. if the shield is projected far enough out away from the craft, this would result in a radical power reduction to square centimeter of ship surface, negating the ability of the laser to in any way damage the hull of said ship. Abusing magnetic fields into acting like metamaterials has been the subject of many interesting papers already.
It would also solve the issue of being unable to see out of the cockpit.
The more likely explanation (at least I think so anyway) is that exclusively male hormones with no female hormones present, coupled with the fact that nearly all mammals conserve these olfactory signals, means that the same olfactory signals in a "Strongly competitive" mouse colony (reproductively competitive that is) are being expressed by the preponderantly male research scientists, which increases stress hormone levels in the mice, which chemically inhibits pain receptivity.
This makes sense, as a strongly competitive colonial environment is likely to cause injury to both male and female mice under the circumstances in question. Females get bullied for sex, males get attacked/killed to weed out competition.
as the two types of hormones approach equilibrium, there is less competition for sexual partners, and the risks of physical injury by other mice decreases.
Human males are just releasing the chemical cocktails that trigger the stress response in the mice.
This just means another layer of experimental control is needed when using mice in experiments where pain tolerance or mitigation is being researched, and the human researchers are male. For example, spraying female olfactory hormones to counteract the effect, or ensuring that male to female ratios in research teams directly handling the animals is always 1:1, or favors female handlers.
The idea here was NOT that the central object needs to be hot.
The idea was that if it is metal rich, then the chances of rocky bodies that are much smaller/less dense than it can be tidally heated, and with that tidal heating, be able to support life. (say, chemotrophic microbes.)
Spectroscopic analysis of the object will only reveal its atmospheric composition. Lensing analysis (from a transit) would better refine mass estimates, which could help refine the internal composition, but much like our own gas giants much closer by, we can only speculate as to what is deep below the clouds.
Detecting orbiting bodies in this system is a non-starter with current technology, because the parent object is too dim to do effective transit light dimming measurements. The whole system would have to transit a very bright and distant system, and then if there are any large transiting objects in that distant system, interval periodicity will be suspect/difficult to refine.
I still hold that systems like this one should be of considerable interest, and not passively written off as "too cold."
If this were an object that coalesced away from any (other) protostellar discs, it may conceivably have small objects orbiting it. Since there wouldnt have been a "fusion event" to blow away the remaining gas and dust of the original cloud it formed from, any objects that coalesced near to the central sub-brown dwarf would not have been pushed out by the radiation pressure.
This means that gravitationally bound satellites close enough to be quite warm indeed just from tidal heating could be possible with "object systems" like this. (With small objects orbiting large ones at close distances, the odds of the objects being tidally locked increases greatly. However, without the sudden application of solar wind gusting through the accretion disc, the number of small rocky bodies would be much higher, meaning orbital resonances could help prevent this tide locking, should a sufficient number of such objects be at work-- planetoids with lots of "comparitively large moons" tugging on the planetoid's centers of mass, preventing tide locking.)
The compact size of this dense object may suggest that the object is metal rich. That would indicate a reasonable probability for rocky terrestrial type objects orbiting it.
Discounting the system as being too cold for life as we know it is premature. Tidally heated satellites with liquid oceans are possible, even with this very dark "star" overhead. (EG, look at Io around jupiter. Despite being waaay more than 1AU from the sun, the surface is totally motlen rock. Jupiter is smaller/lighter than this object.)
Being a non-fusing object, this object can theoretically last for hundreds of billions of years-- much longer than our sun will live. If I were a member of an interstellar capable species looking for a "Long term solution", I would be very interested in systems like this one, and in red dwarf systems for this very reason. Artificial biospheres powered by thermal energy equilibrium (which itself is generated by gravitational tidal forces and radio-isotope decay) exploitation would be just as comfy for energy hungry lifeforms as a sunny planet like earth-- and be far more abundant for possible building sites.
I find it highly foolish to just write off systems like this one as being "too cold for life".
This way, whole ICs and other active components could be completely embedded in the ABS plastic. It would also allow structural designs not attainable with flat, 2D PCBs. (Say, wrapped around a cylinder, or inside a sphere.)
example applications: fully waterproofed electronics, devices in novel shapes, devices with large wirewound active antennae, (say, to exploit getting low voltage power from AM radio signals with electronically tunable coils) or simply just embedding copper filaments inside 3D printed objects for enhanced stability. Also, ability to print device and enclosure simultaneously.
Being able to print with essentially two different polymer heads is interesting, but not really all that impressive.
I would be substantially more impressed with a combination of a polymer extruder head, a copper wire feed apparatus that can slowly meter out and cut thin copper wire (non-lacquered), a non-heated extruder filled with silver solder paste, a strong IR lightsource that can flow the solder paste, and a pick and place arm.
To get clean copper traces embedded in the ABS plastic substrate, you just print channels and "wrap" bosses, anchor the wire at one end, spool it out while taught and sinch it up against the printed plastic bosses, then anchor at the other end, then cut.
One could print multiple layers of ABS substrate, embed multiple layers of wire traces, (MADE OF SOLID WIRE, not high resistance silicone) then paint, pick and place components, and IR beam between layers.
I really don't see why such a thing would be at all impossible to make. the 3d printer people need to up their game.
Sure. Heat it up past the critical point in the presence of oxygen.
Graphene is carbon, and the thermal decomposition of carbon as a fuel source has been documented for many many centuries.
A complex designed to thermally decompose the graphene (and any organic substrates it may be bound to), followed by acid and alkaline recovery washes to reclaim the doping agents from the ashes could effectively handle graphene ewaste.
The issue with silicon, is that the thermal decomposition temperature is very excessive, and difficult to contend with. It likes to form this stuff called "glass", instead of decomposing into an easily separable substance, like CO2.
There are other high-temperature materials besides ceramic that can be used as the outer casing.
Graphene is an organic molecule, which will have thermal expansion properties more closely related to those of other organic molecules containing aromatic ring structures, because of the bond energies and bond angles involved.
Say, something like aramid.
The only issue with aramid that I can think of is that it cannot be melted. (It has no melting point. It thermally decomposes before melting.) To "mold" aramid, the molecules have to be dissolved in a very strong acid. This would greatly complicate chip casing manufacture.
There are other aromatic ring structure based polymers though.
Here, Let me help you.
I place a quantum singularity inside a special magic box. The gravitational pull of the singularity is so strong that no force in the universe can overcome its attraction with the bottom of the box. No force in the universe can lift the singularity out of the box.
I can however, lift the singularity.
I can lift the box containing it, if I exert enough energy, and in so doing, lift the singularity.
If we replace "Magic box" with "The whole damned universe", the trick still applies-- We are then just left with a real headscratcher, "Through what, did the universe get lifted?"
Questions like the above "paradox" don't really prove or solve anything. They just demonstrate that there is ignorance that needs to be overcome.
The pedant will argue that "but being unable to lift the singularity out of the box means he is not omnipotent!" or some similar nonsense.
To that, I direct you at the paradox of time's arrow. There really isnt a compelling reason for time to only flow in one direction. Reversal of time would cause the singularity to be impossible to contain inside the magic box. An omnipotent god can thus retain the rules that gravitational force is based on the inverse square of the distances between the centers of mass, and where one of the masses exerts infinite spacial curviture-- and still move the singularity out of the box-- from his perspective.
The notion of "Cant do something" is always based on the idea of something infallible. At best, using it as a defense against an infallible god, is just substitution.
No, Not an idiot. I simply used a rule in logic to demonstrate how your statement is ill-devised, and not conclusive. Specifically, if you can demonstrate how a foundational axiom in a statement can be false, you can falsify all logic predicated upon that axiom.
This principle is a foundational precept in applied logic. It helps logicians recognize when they are wasting their time with a question. Being such a simple test, I applied it to your inquiry, and found that inquiry to be lacking. Call it pedantry if you want to, but it wasn't without purpose that I did this.
God does not have to be physically inside THIS universe to *exist*. (as such, any presupposition that he MUST be constrainable by the rules of this universe is pure hubris unfounded by evidence.) There is a growing body of evidence that there are other universes besides our own, and that their very existences have subtle influences upon our own. It is one of the possible explanations for why the various massive particles in the standard model have the masses that they do, in fact. (Not the only one, and probably not the leading one, but that does not make stop making it be one of them regardless.)
Similar to how a turing machine can simulate any other turing maching given sufficient memory and time, a being that observes time differently from the way we do can use even a tiny and subtle form of influence to completely control our universe, because they can fully calculate all the outcomes, and always be able to influence the outcomes of all interactions. (EG, they know exactly where and how to nudge.) This subtle interaction is indistinguishable from random chance to observers from within our universe, so it cant be proven this agency is at work. This does not discount that it is possible, however.
Do I imagine some strawman like "angels strumming harps surrounding some dude in a toga floating on a cloud" when I contemplate 'god'? No. I contemplate something so alien from anything we know of or can conceive of that it defies attempts to imagine it. By definition, all it requires is agency by which to make decisions, ability to see all possible outcomes statically (Sees the universe as one giant markov chain, essentially), and a means by which to influence said universe, however subtle. If those conditions are met, the entity will be both omnipresent and omnipotent, as seen from our universe. AKA, 'god'
what it looks like, why it chooses what it does, or even how it thinks are moot, and the sole venue of philosophers and theists. Those things are inconsequential to "existence", which is what the hard atheist and the theist dispute.
So, I will return your question-- Are YOU an idiot, making presumptions of other people that are unfounded, and then running off with those presumptions as if they were truth?
No, that still has problems with implied factors.
Specifically, it implies gravity, and that god is bound to the rules of physical reality. If so, then naturally god cannot be omnipotent, as you are implying-- however, if god is not bound by the laws of physical reality, then god can make a boulder that is impossible to lift, yet still lift it.
Your argument relies on there being something infallible that is "underneath" god. (both figuratively, and literally,.) An unliftable object would be a quantum singularity-- You need an impossible surface to support having such a thing sitting on it, waiting to be lifted-- It also presupposes that god is limited by physical reality, rather than what religion implies, which is the inverse. (Physical reality is dependent upon god.) The axioms by which logic and physics are underpinned are based on the constancy of the physical universe, and if that constancy isnt constant after all -- but instead based on the influence of an omnipotent god-- then it does not follow to use it as a means to refute the existence of that god.
With all the implied fallacies in place, you simply become redundant in asserting that god cannot exist within the confines of the physical universe. That's fine and dandy. Physics says that too:
Something like god would represent unlimited energy potential, and thus have unlimited mass energy. Unless god was also of an infinite volume, he would rapidly create the universe's single most extreme black hole in very short order. Since this is not observed to be the case, god clearly does not exist in our universe.
As such, it is illogical to attempt to use logical foundations predicated on this presumption to disprove the existence of such an entity.
The assertion that there are no alternatives to the physical universe we see and interact with does not meet up with recent findings and theory.
So, rather than some infallible truth being presented, all I see is a poorly framed argument that reduces to redundancy, while disproving nothing of consequence.
*Agnostic, in case you were interested.
Just add an aftermarket wifi access point to the ethernet connection, then you can attach any number of local network X clients to the X server. Tablets, laptops, et al.
Slap that bitch inside the dash or something. They usually eat 12v DC anyway, so it shouldnt be hard to wire in.
Just make sure you aren't a total retard. Put the broadcast power on the access point to the absolute minimum needed to service the vehicle's interior, and use WPA2. Also, set access restrictions on the SSH, Telnet, and other vulnerable services so that digital signature checking is in force.
Running a minimalist GUI on the X server would allow the vehicle to do all manner of interesting things during the day. It could even run as a node on Folding@home if you really wanted. I was thinking more along the lines of encrypted email clients with GPG and something like clawsmail though.
Yes and no.
This is a quality over quantity, and price valuation problem.
Advert company wants: Enormous quantity of inexpensive advert impressions for products they have exclusive contracts to advertise for, and comprehensive metrics about those impressions.
Content Producer wants: Enough operating capital to make a steady profit while producing engaging content that users like,
End User wants: Engaging content from the content producer.
The content producer sells the end user's eyeballs to the advertising company.
The advertising company pays the content producer for those eyeballs.
The user gets content paid for by the resale of their eyeballs.
Here's the rub:
All three parties seek to maximize their goals. This exchange only works when there is equity in the exchange. As any one party starts to leverage advantage, the arrangement becomes unstable.
Scenario 1:
Content provider demands too much money from advertisers for ad placements.
Advertisers cut off the producer, or, (if the advertiser cannot find other producers) goes out of business as they stop making profits. Producer stops making content as the money dries up, user stops getting content. All parties fail.
Scenario 2:
Advertising company pays too little for adverts. (current reality)
Content producers have to oversell the eyeballs viewing their content, resulting in end users going elsewhere to get that content, (Piracy, other sites, other networks, et al.) and to find technological measures to sanitize the content if alternative channels cannot be secured. Content producers do not get paid enough by the advert stream, stop producing content, advert company stops getting eyeballs, user stops getting content. All parties fail.
Scenario 3:
Users simply won't watch the adverts, period.
Users simply refuse any and all adverts. Content producers cannot secure a revenue stream from advert companies, and have to charge for content directly. This limits the available form and expression of the content to what end user is willing to directly pay for. This stifles the creativity of the producer, limits the variety of content consumed by the end user, and kills advertiser completely, reducing the ability to spread awareness of new products and offerings. All parties fail.
The ONLY WAY, and I mean THE ONLY WAY that advert supported services *CAN* work in the long term, is if there is across the board equity.
Advertisers *MUST* pay what the advert impression is REALLY worth.
Content producers MUST provide quality content with emphasis on content, not advertisement.
End users MUST watch the advertisements.
The problem, is that NONE of these actors are acting equitably, starting with the advertisers.
The advertisers found that they could leverage more profit by using mass-tracking analytics to evaluate how best to make payouts, to maximize their profit margins, pretending that this was in some fashion sustainable, creating an unreasonable stockholder expectation which they now must uphold. This is a technological advance that upset the equity.
Advertisers now pay less to the content producers.
To make up for the loss, content producers have to display more ads, further degrading the quality of the impressions received, and degrading the prices paid out, thanks to the analytics.
The end user says "Fuck that shit, I am going to block your BS adverts! They cover the whole damned screen!", and installs adblocking software.
The advert company screams to the content producer that the quality of their impressions has reached all time lows, and that they wont pay enough to keep the site running.
The content producer says that end users are blocking the adverts, resulting in a reduction in the number of unique impressions.
End user blames the content producer, saying they are now consuming a solid diet of advertisements if they dont use the adblock software.
The content producer blames the advertiser, saying they arent paying enough to keep the content in production.
Problem: Advertiser does not pay enough to sustain equity, by seeking to maximize its own profits in an unsustainable fashion.
The problem is simple.
The user wants the CONTENT to have focus, as that is what they go there to get.
The advertisers want the ADVERTISEMENTS to have focus, so they have "Impact."
That is why advertisements are obnoxious, obtrusive, cover 80 to 90% of the display, hoover around, make blaring noises, flash rapidly enough to induce epileptic seizures in those vulnerable, and overall make users reach for adblock software.
The solution? Advertisers need to pay more for less obtrusive ads.
If a site can get enough revenue to operate on just a simple hyperlinking rotating image banner, they wont need full page flash plague competing with their content.
But advertisers want eyeballs. ALL of the user's eyeballs. If advertisers had their way, people would spend 80 to 90% of their time watching adverts-- both on the internet and on television.
Allowing advertisements to become ubiquitous to the point of requiring brain bleach to control is NOT the answer, and only further increases the "Need" to inject yet more adverts to secure a workable revenue stream for the site/channel operators. Basically, they are saturating the market for adverts, and the price paid out per advert served drops. To make up for that, they have to display more adverts. Works GREAT for advertising companies, but is poison for content producers. It has a double-edge, in that as the percentage of time spent viewing adverts goes up, the number of viewers watching the site goes down.
It should not be any bit at all hard to determine where the two trends meet, especially with the INSANE amounts of analytics going on with advert tracking, and page viewing.
The problem is that the advert companies dont want to pay what the adverts are actually worth, and are driving the price paid per impression into the ground, while making a killing doing so. Users dont want to actually pay a fee to use the internet's various webpage services, which have traditionally always been free. (with a few exceptions.)
The real solution is to keep content as the primary focus, put a fucking ball gag and super glue in the mouths of the advertisers, and cut off the flow of gravy by refusing to plaster wall to wall adverts all over the internet, thus making the internet advert real-estate space a premium commodity, commanding a high price through encouraging scarcity.
Users would easily handle a 30% advert (max), 70% content (min) mix. They will walk away from, or start using adblock to circumvent anything above where the curves meet.
This isnt hard.
carp DO taste nasty when not properly prepared. So do catfish. (if you cook it wrong, it's horrendous) The issue with carp is that they are a very bony fish as well, which makes processing them difficult, and even when cooked correctly, makes eating said fish very hard.
But all that is unimportant; You guys are not looking at this as an economic opportunity. Many products are made from fish that are not intended for human consumption, but which still require many tons of fish per hour to manufacture industrially.
Such as fish emulsion fertilizer and the like. There are also a few dubiously useful suppliments that humans injest but never actually taste, such as fish oil capsules, that could be mass manufactured.
A business can be made out of "over harvesting" said asian carp in that area.
Thalidomide is an interesting case.
It is a photo enantiomer, meaning that it has a left handed, and right handed isomer that will bend light one way, or another, when in solution.
The right handed isomer is an effective sedative, while the left handed one is a tetragenic compound.
The problem is that even if highly refined so that only R isomer is administered, the pH of the patient's blood will racemize the isomers again.
It could be entirely possible for thalidomide to be safe, if administered with a chaparone to prevent racemization.
At the time, the preparations of thalidomide were a heterogenous mix of both isomers, as there was no research into possible side effects from the mixed sample, and the prospect of birth defects wasnt considered, as the intended use was not for treating morning sickness. As an anti-cancer treatment for non-pregnant people, it is still a useful compound.
Thalidomide was originally developed as a sedative/hypnotic compound, and not as a treatment for nausea. (This would be similar to say, scopolamine, which is used to treat motion sickness. This is not meant to imply that the comounds are related. They arent. However, scopolamine is ALSO useful for treating some forms of nausea. Fancy that.) The use as treatment for nausea is what heralded the use of the product to treat morning sickness, and the subsequent epidemic of infant mortality and deformity that swept the world. It isn't that thalidomide is a bad drug: it was, and is still being shown to be a VERY useful drug. The problem is that thalidomide was not used properly, and was provided OTC, which strongly exacerbated the problem. To pick on poor scopolamine again, it too had a stint as an OTC motion sickness medicine and sleep aid, which ended up causing all manner of problems when certain... shall we say, "Degenerate" people discovered that it made an excellent date rape drug when dissolved in alcoholic beverages.
It isn't that either drug is "bad". It is that the lust for profits from the sale of the drugs can lead to very bad decisions in marketing and distribution of those drugs. Drugs developed for a certain purpose should be extensively and thuroughtly tested for efficacy before being used in alternative manners; such as for instance, Minoxadil. It is the primary ingredient in Rogaine, a male hairloss treatment with FDA approval. It was originally a prescription heart medicine for treating hypertension. It took quite some time for minoxadil to recieve FDA approval for treating alopecia. That is a good thing, as the testing helped establish what the ideal dosages are, and that the concentration must be different for treating women than for treating men. If minoxadil had been rushed to market as a treatment for alopecia, there could have been very dangerous results, since it *IS* a blood pressure medication! This is one of the reasons why rogaine is a topically applied preparation, and not a preparation for internal consumption. (The regrowth of hair was a common side effect of orally administered minoxadil for treating hypertension. Oral administration of the compound would be effective for regrowing hair, but the concentrations needed would make taking the drug dangerous to a patient's cardiac health. Topically applied minoxadil allows high concentrations at the site of interest, with a slow overall rate of absorption, making it ineffective at lowering blood pressure. If rushed to market, it is quite concievable that minoxadil tablets would have been seen for treating alopecia, and that there would have been class action suits as bald people all over started dieing.)
The FDA's insistence on efficacy studies is to prevent dangerous drug use, and to ensure that a drug actually does what it says it does. The long term drug study requirements are intended to catch things like thalidomide birth defects, as it would have shown up with thalidomide being used as a sedative/hypnotic as a
Thank you for taking the time soulskill.
To elaborate on the first question I asked:
While obviously, I do not have access to the feedback provided to slash media, and instead must attempt to grep the summation of that feedback from the postings of others over the past 2 two days, the predominant opinion has been that the fundamental design of the beta, with its white theme, and more graphical (vs textual) presentation methodology is in and of itself something that is not seen as being desirable by a considerable proportion of the community.
Many use mobile connections with the useragent string set to desktop mode, or use a tethered mobile connection to view the site, being technology industrial professionals who are busy and on the go. As such, they have a vested interest to disable the loading of images, as these can burn into the data allowance their broadband providers have established, and can result in nasty overage charges or worse. Because of this, and for some, simply for personal preference reasons, the more graphical nature of the beta is seen as simply undesirable in any fashion. Given the prevailing and powerful nature of this opinion, and how well represented it has been in discussions of this topic I have observed, I must conclude that a goodly portion of the feedback provided has expressed this opinion. As far as I can tell, it would take a radical rethinking of the beta's design to accommodate this feedback. Given the nature of the opinion, I find it difficult to believe that it has not been presented in the feedback over the past 5 months in copious abundance. This is why I asked the question the way I did.
Personally, I do like that images directly related to the story are included, but feel these images should be very small thumbnails, (possibly text-wrapped in the top-right corner of the story summary body) and not large, flashy ones. I too view slashdot with a mobile device with the useragent string modified, and can speak with personal conviction that these images should never exceed 200px wide, at the largest. I could begrudge a compromise for using a more intelligent query for page assets to be determined by either a preferences setting, (for people who may be browsing while tethered, for instance, who would otherwise possibly benefit from having larger UI assets displayed for visibility reasons) or by evaluating the current display window size, before actually initiating any HTTP GET operations, for persons like myself who prefer to avoid using the mobile version of the site's content layout. (The excessive javascript of the mobile version often crashes the stock browser of my device.)
I eagerly await any answers you may receive from the design team concerning these queries, and fully appreciate that these kinds of questions are outside of your department.
So far, however, the impression I have been made to hold concerning the reasons and motivations for the kinds and implementations of recent slashdot upgrades has been that the design team has been implementing changes based upon their own personal preferences, (eg, "the old design looks like something from the 90s", or "gah, that's so clunky looking!") Rather than from any supportably technical or objective position. I would very much like to hear that this is not the case, and to be made aware of the reasons behind the decision to update layout in this fashion, and behind the choices in its implementation.
If however, you are forced to confirm the position I have been made to hold concerning such choices (that they are arbitrary, and capriciously chosen and enacted) then I would ask that you be honest in reporting this to the community. I would also like for you to continue to ask questions on our behalf, inquiring why the personal aesthetic preferences of the design team trumps that of the preferences of thousands of registered users.
Thank you again for taking the time to respond.
I really do appreciate that you and Soulskill did at least break the silence that up until now has been deafening, but really, the nature of your reply does not fill me with confidence, and with the replies I am reading by other users, it looks as if that feeling is well represented, and that I am not alone.
I just want you to know that I am listening to you as well.
With that in mind, I have some difficult questions for you.
You say that you have been reading and contemplating our feedback. It is clear that you have been at least observing the fallout that has occured over the past few days here in the comments sections of some very promising and nice looking stories, as the quality of the community provided content dropped to levels that would make even /b/ look intelligent. Your colleague Soulskill even made some well received commentary recently, and we've eagerly awaited this public level of ice-breaking on the discussion. For this I, and clearly many others are greatful.
However, since you claim to have been receiving valuable feedback about the beta experiment since at least 5 months ago, why is it that the nature of the beta has not radically changed to accommodate that feedback? Why did you allow this situation to come to a head like this, if you have been observing and seriously considering the feedback provided?
I see in your announcement that you and slashmedia believe it is time for a change in the site's layout. What factors does slashmedia use to make these determinations, and why do you believe that a radical change instead of a refinement and polish of the current system is in order?
Can you please elaborate on some of the design choices that slashmedia has taken in the beta, ans why they felt these were good decisions, and why they have apparently completely ignored 5 months of user feedback about the beta?
I understand that nobody really profits from continuing the public protest, or from relentless, mindless trolling. That's why we need to have a real, and valuable discussion here about this, and why a show of good will about our feedback actually being considered, and how it is considered, in detail, is clearly needed for our community to resolve its differences with slashmedia's choices in performing its services as the community's host.
I am sure it would mean a great deal to all of us if the dialog did not end here. We, as a community need answers to these questions if we are going to stay and continue to contribute to what makes slashdot great.
I hate to say it, but ignoring us and leaving these kinds of questions unanswered is likely to be seen as a worse slap in the face than hearing only silence was. Please continue this dialog.
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Only if there is a process for the cell to do so. Like a computer, a cell isn't magical. This is why amyloid plaque buildup in neural tissues is a fatal degenerative disease. There is no mechanism for the cells to flush the defective products they are synthesizing from the broken synthesis chain.
The real world KEEPS the defective biproduct, and simulates its impact on the rest of the system. A computer based simulation of that process that aims to be accurate, must also do so.
The issue is that the "zombies", in this case, defective H proteins, stay in the cell and are NOT really dealt with. They become a new, undefined input in the system that must be accounted for when simulating other cellular processes being performed in parallel inside the cell.
This can lead to a very extensive chain ot unexpected executions and transformations. Dealing with that programmatically is going to make any computer currently in operation attempting it cry to the ghost of Alan Turing and beg for mercy.
If the goal is accurate simulation, then a (try),(catch),(finally) isn't going to work properly.