My point was that ionising radiation can and does cause cancer, simply by particle interaction. In effect you've clarified this further - you can't directly cause cancer from EM radiation, it is simply energy. You might very well get tissue damage from exposing yourself to high energy non-ionising rads - as you say, from the energy being dumped as heat - but that's all you'll get (in the same way you don't get cancer if you burn yourself). No doubt if you have your mobile glued to your head it's not going to end well for you, but I suspect the social ramifications would be worse than a bit of head heating
Oh and apologies, i think i got it the wrong way round about bursts. There was a study done after the Chernobyl incident with the resettlement and it was concluded that short bursts of high energy radiation were far worse than prolonged exposure to small amounts of radiation.
Why would they cause cancer (any more than wifi/general EM radiation)? It's not ionising radiation as far as i know and short bursts of exposure to any sort of radiation is fine - people live in Chernobyl without any side effects and the background radiation level there is substantially above the norm.
Certainly this is an interesting study, but they chose a relatively small sample size and a pretty obscure cancer. Interestingly it IS NOT brain cancer, they state a 50% increased chance of salivary gland cancer (50%). Now, correct me if i'm wrong, but this is a case of overblown statistics and media hype. Parotid cancer is relatively rare, in 2002/2003 in England there were around 650 cases. A 50% increase is.. oh, right.. only 900 odd cases. What am I getting at? Double a small number and you get a small number. Ok, so you increase your risk of cancer which is bad, but it's a pretty rare form of cancer and your chance doesn't really go up that much. Say i had a 5% chance of mouth cancer and using my phone bumps it up to 7.5%, should I be worried? Well perhaps i'd cut back a bit, but i wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
Now compare this to Lung cancer due to smoking. 90% of all lung cancer cases are attributable to smoke inhalation and a 23-fold increase. That is a fundamentally different statistic, 23-fold is 2300% and is definitely something to worry about. It's not a totally accurate conversion, but suffice to say 23 times more likely is much worse than an increase of 3 odd percent.
If TFA you linked had said that there is 10 times the risk i'd be listening, but as it stands it's just over enthusiastic reporting.
Welcome to Britain...
The 40% income tax here is a joke!
Re:The Mysterious Reoccurrence of Mr. Freckles
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· Score: 3, Interesting
We've had that for a few years now, they're called mobile phones.
When you think about it, the telephone is just about the rudest technological device that exists. As Stephen Fry once said, "it's like someone standing behind you yelling 'speak to me, speak to me' over and over again until you pick up".
I call to the defence:
"Early nineties sci-fi films!"
If they've taught us anything, it's that the terminal is clearly an evil mechanism for hacking government computers.
Or, like most top secret installations these days, you dig and avoid the problem entirely. Facilities like NORAD, for instance (and you think if anything has ever existed at Area 51 it's above ground?).
The UK (and no doubt the US and similar) government employs researchers with the sole task of poring over satellite pictures to determine the capacity of power plants, populations of regions and in general "what things are and what they can do". They also have far more high resolution satellite images than Google is allowed to produce.
We've been doing this kind of thing for years and still are. The only difference now is that the public can give it a go.
Reminds me of the famous incident concerning one of the first Nuclear tests when a university professor used dimensional analysis to calculate what the detonation payload was (a classified figure at the time) based on a photo that was published in the papers (that was the last time the US Military put scales on their photos:P).
Just to stay on the topic of the Kindle, whilst the paper saving is certainly significant, the portability is what would swing me.
It would be rather nice to be able to carry around all my physics and maths textbooks (at university level this equates to a lot of kilograms of book)in something that i can read with one hand.
Whilst i do have pdf copies of some of my textbooks, and some books are even good enough to provide a CD with an e copy, it would be nice not to have to get out the laptop when i'm on a train and want to get some work done.
Urm, well not necessarily. The IP of most authors is restating things that other people have discovered. Take a physics textbook, Gauss' law is not owned by Pearson Publishing, neither are Newton's laws or Einstein's "Postulates of Special Relativity".
A major factor when considering the cost is the limited runs and copies of each book. Not to mention the way some publishers continually update their texts to incorporate new developments/syllabi. My 1st year physics textbook is probably less than 15 years old and it's already onto it's 12th edition. The reason most "best sellers" can be sold at under $8-10 is because once they go viral, the publishers do print runs of hundreds of thousands and they can guarantee profit.
Compare that to a science or computing textbook, say on Gravitation or some other very specific topic that perhaps only 25,000 are sold a year globally. Thus, they tend to cost more.
It's the same with newspapers. The Times can sell for under £1 where a copy of New Scientist retails for over £3. Do NS go to more trouble to make their magazine? Arguably not, they just cover the major topics in science and have a few thoughtful articles about how we're all doomed. Compare that to a major newspaper who are pushed to make 100 pages (including supplements) of news and articles daily - surely that effort should cost more? The fact is that New Scientist sell a lot less than the Times or any major newspaper (ie. their circulation is a hell of a lot lower) and for the publishers and editors to get paid, they have to mark up to account for it.
I just find it amusing that they claim they're not interested in what we're looking at, just the start and end points of the connections. If they wanted to know what we were looking at, sounds like it'd be pretty damned simple just to navigate to the logged IP address...
Forgive me, but this sounds like them saying "We're going to monitor you using GPS - don't worry, we only store the coordinates, not what you were looking at!".
being able to write HTML does not make you a programmer
Neither does it make you a designer. It makes you an HTML coder.
The whole point of HTML is design. It is a markup language, and it's sole purpose is to make a website look nice. If it didn't then we'd just have command line websites and everyone would use Lynx. It can be complemented by CSS, styles and scripting, but it is the skeletal design of a site.
Secondly i agree, i meant to explicitly state that coder != programmer. HTML is code, after all. But yeah, i realise that putting designer, coder and admin is misleading.
I would just say Web Designer. There are three main categories, design, coding and administration.
HTML and CSS is just markup - lets make this clear, being able to write HTML does not make you a programmer. I would expect a web designer to be able to design the graphics and type the HTML to display it. They don't even need javascript necessarily. Their sole role is to design a web page.
A Web Developer on the other hand takes the design and adds bit into it to make it interactive properly - so this might include flash content, javascript image galleries, etc. They are also the people that do the server side scripting in PHP and Ajax. They are the programmers.
There are people who do a little of both but i think in most companies there are people who do almost solely one or the other. Crossover experience is useful because if you're a designer you need to know what is within the limits of the coder and if you're coding you need to be in constant contact with the designer to make sure that your code not only works, but looks pretty when in action. Again, with coding, you might want to knock up a piece of code that displays a certain thing depending on the situation - and of course your thing will be rendered in HTML so clearly coders need to know HTML, but it's not their job to make the images or design the colour scheme.
A webmaster doesn't need to do either of these things but sometimes does both. The webmaster, to my mind, controls the hard drive space and/or server. It's his job to check that everything works ok, that people can't access files that they can't and to liaise with clients to see what they want. Again it's handy to have design and coding experience, but the webmaster is basically an administration role.
Finally you have the people who test things, i.e. testers.
That's my take on it. In an ideal world an applicant to a job would need a mixture of experience with all three, but needs to specialise in one. This description makes web designers look a bit wimpy compared to developers who need to know basically everything, but good coding is NOTHING without a good front end to back it up with.
The hose trails behind in the water like an engine intake. The water then gets pumped out of holes on the back. The hose is only about 2 or 3 metres long.
I assume your comment was implying that the pack is tethered?
Solar power is incredibly poor in the cost:power department. A solar panel in a temperate zone on your house will not pay for itself (through selling power back to the grid) within a lifetime.
Wind is sadly the same, although cheaper. Both suffer from the nature issue - in that if the wind dies down, or it's winter and there's less sunlight hours etc then power is decreased. Ok so it's good for a "top up" but it's still negligible if it's powering a street.
Nuclear is, believe it or not, one of the safest ways to generate power these days. The waste is pretty much unacceptable, and that's why i don't think this is a good idea, but it is a viable power source. Chernobyl was a failure, not through system error, but through human error. Remember it was a controlled turn off of the safety measures to see what would happen. What happened was the reactor went into meltdown and it took a HELL of a lot to shut it off.
These days, most nuclear facilities are much more secure. The SCRAM mechanism for a fast reactor shut down is efficient and fast - it basically forces control rods into the reactor to slow it down. They're all mechanical and automated and i believe operate from 0 to extended in under a second. You'd probably get less radiation from a Nuclear battery than you would if you lived in a Uranium rich area (like Cornwall, UK).
The waste is what turns it off for me. Until there is a completely viable method for disposal or recycling that doesn't involve vats of waste in big concrete bunkers then it's not an option!
No fence, but a few light years (4.2 to Proxima Centauri) between the nearest solar system means that either this is a very very slow moving comet and we've just not seen it before or it's been travelling for a few thousand/million years to get here..
As for chemical composition, it's relatively easy to guess what comets are made of through spectral analysis - and most of the universe probably runs on the same sorts of atomic combinations. However, actually picking samples would certainly yield better results.
AMD were royally in the red when they bought ATI. One would assume that they couldn't afford to plough billions into r/d and so their chips suffered. They have since more or less recovered, ATI is still more than a match for Nvidia and will provide a healthy revenue for AMD (even if AMD chips aren't the fastest, the HD4870X2 is still the fastest single card on the market i believe).
They'll get back eventually. The trouble (if you can call it that) with Intel is that they have a ridiculously large pot of cash that they can put wherever the hell they want, so they can pump funds into research that's a few generations ahead of the current. AMD are still not a bad chip manufacturer.
You have to think of it this way, when you look at the benchmarks, similarly priced Phenom and C2Quad chips perform well. Sure the quads are faster, but the Phenoms don't exactly slouch. Both will give you top notch performance. A far cry from the days when a Pentium 4 was a complete joke compared to the Athlons.
Yep i'll agree to that one. You can only enjoy university once (you can go when you're older of course, but be realistic, it's going to be crap compared to being 18), and that sort of opportunity doesn't crop up again.
You've got the rest of your life to learn practical things, so you may as well get a good "paper" grounding first. You're also more likely to get a higher paying job if you have a degree. Whilst people will disagree and say "but hey, i'm earning £30k and you've graduated and you're earning £24k", in the long term someone with a degree will likely earn far more than someone without.
Experience may be worth a lot, but so is a degree. A degree is also useful if you want to broaden. Not much use doing loads of IT experience when actually you find you'd like teaching a lot more. A degree offers flexibility.
There are arguments both ways, in my opinion, you can't lose by taking the degree route (but i'm a physics undergrad so what do i know =P).
Personally i think that it should be included. It's a basic service that MS should provide. All this talk about monopolies, they really don't have one. In all fairness, the only reason that there is a market for AV products is because Microsoft never created a decent one. Why shouldn't they be allowed to make it?
If i buy a PC, i would be a bit miffed if i then had to pay MORE to protect it. Granted i've not had a virus in a long time - firewall seems to cover it nicely. Sure maybe i should have to pay for a full suite with advanced controls and heuristics, but why should they not be allowed to do this? They should know better than anyone how to make an efficient AV app for their code.
This might well be what he's looking for though. The lectures give a good background into various physical processes, even if they're a general overview. This actually sounds perfect for the OP.
As a maths student, the applications of the formulae should be reasonably straight forward. The feynman lectures are a great way of seeing them in context without necessarily having to plough through lots of questions and examples.
Slashdot Mirror
I am well aware of the difference, thankyou.
My point was that ionising radiation can and does cause cancer, simply by particle interaction. In effect you've clarified this further - you can't directly cause cancer from EM radiation, it is simply energy. You might very well get tissue damage from exposing yourself to high energy non-ionising rads - as you say, from the energy being dumped as heat - but that's all you'll get (in the same way you don't get cancer if you burn yourself). No doubt if you have your mobile glued to your head it's not going to end well for you, but I suspect the social ramifications would be worse than a bit of head heating
Oh and apologies, i think i got it the wrong way round about bursts. There was a study done after the Chernobyl incident with the resettlement and it was concluded that short bursts of high energy radiation were far worse than prolonged exposure to small amounts of radiation.
Why would they cause cancer (any more than wifi/general EM radiation)? It's not ionising radiation as far as i know and short bursts of exposure to any sort of radiation is fine - people live in Chernobyl without any side effects and the background radiation level there is substantially above the norm.
Certainly this is an interesting study, but they chose a relatively small sample size and a pretty obscure cancer. Interestingly it IS NOT brain cancer, they state a 50% increased chance of salivary gland cancer (50%). Now, correct me if i'm wrong, but this is a case of overblown statistics and media hype. Parotid cancer is relatively rare, in 2002/2003 in England there were around 650 cases. A 50% increase is.. oh, right.. only 900 odd cases. What am I getting at? Double a small number and you get a small number. Ok, so you increase your risk of cancer which is bad, but it's a pretty rare form of cancer and your chance doesn't really go up that much. Say i had a 5% chance of mouth cancer and using my phone bumps it up to 7.5%, should I be worried? Well perhaps i'd cut back a bit, but i wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
Now compare this to Lung cancer due to smoking. 90% of all lung cancer cases are attributable to smoke inhalation and a 23-fold increase. That is a fundamentally different statistic, 23-fold is 2300% and is definitely something to worry about. It's not a totally accurate conversion, but suffice to say 23 times more likely is much worse than an increase of 3 odd percent.
If TFA you linked had said that there is 10 times the risk i'd be listening, but as it stands it's just over enthusiastic reporting.
Death by Snoo Snoo? "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised."
Arguably it's called entrepreneurship.
Welcome to Britain... The 40% income tax here is a joke!
We've had that for a few years now, they're called mobile phones.
When you think about it, the telephone is just about the rudest technological device that exists. As Stephen Fry once said, "it's like someone standing behind you yelling 'speak to me, speak to me' over and over again until you pick up".
I call to the defence: "Early nineties sci-fi films!" If they've taught us anything, it's that the terminal is clearly an evil mechanism for hacking government computers.
Or, like most top secret installations these days, you dig and avoid the problem entirely. Facilities like NORAD, for instance (and you think if anything has ever existed at Area 51 it's above ground?).
:P).
The UK (and no doubt the US and similar) government employs researchers with the sole task of poring over satellite pictures to determine the capacity of power plants, populations of regions and in general "what things are and what they can do". They also have far more high resolution satellite images than Google is allowed to produce.
We've been doing this kind of thing for years and still are. The only difference now is that the public can give it a go.
Reminds me of the famous incident concerning one of the first Nuclear tests when a university professor used dimensional analysis to calculate what the detonation payload was (a classified figure at the time) based on a photo that was published in the papers (that was the last time the US Military put scales on their photos
Just to stay on the topic of the Kindle, whilst the paper saving is certainly significant, the portability is what would swing me. It would be rather nice to be able to carry around all my physics and maths textbooks (at university level this equates to a lot of kilograms of book)in something that i can read with one hand. Whilst i do have pdf copies of some of my textbooks, and some books are even good enough to provide a CD with an e copy, it would be nice not to have to get out the laptop when i'm on a train and want to get some work done.
The IP of the authors?
Urm, well not necessarily. The IP of most authors is restating things that other people have discovered. Take a physics textbook, Gauss' law is not owned by Pearson Publishing, neither are Newton's laws or Einstein's "Postulates of Special Relativity".
A major factor when considering the cost is the limited runs and copies of each book. Not to mention the way some publishers continually update their texts to incorporate new developments/syllabi. My 1st year physics textbook is probably less than 15 years old and it's already onto it's 12th edition. The reason most "best sellers" can be sold at under $8-10 is because once they go viral, the publishers do print runs of hundreds of thousands and they can guarantee profit.
Compare that to a science or computing textbook, say on Gravitation or some other very specific topic that perhaps only 25,000 are sold a year globally. Thus, they tend to cost more.
It's the same with newspapers. The Times can sell for under £1 where a copy of New Scientist retails for over £3. Do NS go to more trouble to make their magazine? Arguably not, they just cover the major topics in science and have a few thoughtful articles about how we're all doomed. Compare that to a major newspaper who are pushed to make 100 pages (including supplements) of news and articles daily - surely that effort should cost more? The fact is that New Scientist sell a lot less than the Times or any major newspaper (ie. their circulation is a hell of a lot lower) and for the publishers and editors to get paid, they have to mark up to account for it.
I just find it amusing that they claim they're not interested in what we're looking at, just the start and end points of the connections. If they wanted to know what we were looking at, sounds like it'd be pretty damned simple just to navigate to the logged IP address... Forgive me, but this sounds like them saying "We're going to monitor you using GPS - don't worry, we only store the coordinates, not what you were looking at!".
Neither does it make you a designer. It makes you an HTML coder.
The whole point of HTML is design. It is a markup language, and it's sole purpose is to make a website look nice. If it didn't then we'd just have command line websites and everyone would use Lynx. It can be complemented by CSS, styles and scripting, but it is the skeletal design of a site. Secondly i agree, i meant to explicitly state that coder != programmer. HTML is code, after all. But yeah, i realise that putting designer, coder and admin is misleading.
I would just say Web Designer. There are three main categories, design, coding and administration.
HTML and CSS is just markup - lets make this clear, being able to write HTML does not make you a programmer. I would expect a web designer to be able to design the graphics and type the HTML to display it. They don't even need javascript necessarily. Their sole role is to design a web page.
A Web Developer on the other hand takes the design and adds bit into it to make it interactive properly - so this might include flash content, javascript image galleries, etc. They are also the people that do the server side scripting in PHP and Ajax. They are the programmers.
There are people who do a little of both but i think in most companies there are people who do almost solely one or the other. Crossover experience is useful because if you're a designer you need to know what is within the limits of the coder and if you're coding you need to be in constant contact with the designer to make sure that your code not only works, but looks pretty when in action. Again, with coding, you might want to knock up a piece of code that displays a certain thing depending on the situation - and of course your thing will be rendered in HTML so clearly coders need to know HTML, but it's not their job to make the images or design the colour scheme.
A webmaster doesn't need to do either of these things but sometimes does both. The webmaster, to my mind, controls the hard drive space and/or server. It's his job to check that everything works ok, that people can't access files that they can't and to liaise with clients to see what they want. Again it's handy to have design and coding experience, but the webmaster is basically an administration role.
Finally you have the people who test things, i.e. testers.
That's my take on it. In an ideal world an applicant to a job would need a mixture of experience with all three, but needs to specialise in one. This description makes web designers look a bit wimpy compared to developers who need to know basically everything, but good coding is NOTHING without a good front end to back it up with.
Make 'em use text-only browsers :D
"Look mum, i'm watching Lord of The Rings in ASCII art!"
The hose trails behind in the water like an engine intake. The water then gets pumped out of holes on the back. The hose is only about 2 or 3 metres long. I assume your comment was implying that the pack is tethered?
Don't most people have their own firewalls anyway? The built in firewalls aren't exactly amazing for making custom rules and port forwarding, etc.
Solar power is incredibly poor in the cost:power department. A solar panel in a temperate zone on your house will not pay for itself (through selling power back to the grid) within a lifetime.
Wind is sadly the same, although cheaper. Both suffer from the nature issue - in that if the wind dies down, or it's winter and there's less sunlight hours etc then power is decreased. Ok so it's good for a "top up" but it's still negligible if it's powering a street.
Nuclear is, believe it or not, one of the safest ways to generate power these days. The waste is pretty much unacceptable, and that's why i don't think this is a good idea, but it is a viable power source. Chernobyl was a failure, not through system error, but through human error. Remember it was a controlled turn off of the safety measures to see what would happen. What happened was the reactor went into meltdown and it took a HELL of a lot to shut it off.
These days, most nuclear facilities are much more secure. The SCRAM mechanism for a fast reactor shut down is efficient and fast - it basically forces control rods into the reactor to slow it down. They're all mechanical and automated and i believe operate from 0 to extended in under a second. You'd probably get less radiation from a Nuclear battery than you would if you lived in a Uranium rich area (like Cornwall, UK).
The waste is what turns it off for me. Until there is a completely viable method for disposal or recycling that doesn't involve vats of waste in big concrete bunkers then it's not an option!
No fence, but a few light years (4.2 to Proxima Centauri) between the nearest solar system means that either this is a very very slow moving comet and we've just not seen it before or it's been travelling for a few thousand/million years to get here..
As for chemical composition, it's relatively easy to guess what comets are made of through spectral analysis - and most of the universe probably runs on the same sorts of atomic combinations. However, actually picking samples would certainly yield better results.
AMD were royally in the red when they bought ATI. One would assume that they couldn't afford to plough billions into r/d and so their chips suffered. They have since more or less recovered, ATI is still more than a match for Nvidia and will provide a healthy revenue for AMD (even if AMD chips aren't the fastest, the HD4870X2 is still the fastest single card on the market i believe). They'll get back eventually. The trouble (if you can call it that) with Intel is that they have a ridiculously large pot of cash that they can put wherever the hell they want, so they can pump funds into research that's a few generations ahead of the current. AMD are still not a bad chip manufacturer. You have to think of it this way, when you look at the benchmarks, similarly priced Phenom and C2Quad chips perform well. Sure the quads are faster, but the Phenoms don't exactly slouch. Both will give you top notch performance. A far cry from the days when a Pentium 4 was a complete joke compared to the Athlons.
So why can't the church solve the credit crisis =P
It's not like God needs it?
Yep i'll agree to that one. You can only enjoy university once (you can go when you're older of course, but be realistic, it's going to be crap compared to being 18), and that sort of opportunity doesn't crop up again. You've got the rest of your life to learn practical things, so you may as well get a good "paper" grounding first. You're also more likely to get a higher paying job if you have a degree. Whilst people will disagree and say "but hey, i'm earning £30k and you've graduated and you're earning £24k", in the long term someone with a degree will likely earn far more than someone without. Experience may be worth a lot, but so is a degree. A degree is also useful if you want to broaden. Not much use doing loads of IT experience when actually you find you'd like teaching a lot more. A degree offers flexibility. There are arguments both ways, in my opinion, you can't lose by taking the degree route (but i'm a physics undergrad so what do i know =P).
Personally i think that it should be included. It's a basic service that MS should provide. All this talk about monopolies, they really don't have one. In all fairness, the only reason that there is a market for AV products is because Microsoft never created a decent one. Why shouldn't they be allowed to make it? If i buy a PC, i would be a bit miffed if i then had to pay MORE to protect it. Granted i've not had a virus in a long time - firewall seems to cover it nicely. Sure maybe i should have to pay for a full suite with advanced controls and heuristics, but why should they not be allowed to do this? They should know better than anyone how to make an efficient AV app for their code.
This might well be what he's looking for though. The lectures give a good background into various physical processes, even if they're a general overview. This actually sounds perfect for the OP. As a maths student, the applications of the formulae should be reasonably straight forward. The feynman lectures are a great way of seeing them in context without necessarily having to plough through lots of questions and examples.