There is good reason to doubt that SARS is in fact a coronoavirus. Only 40% of Canadian cases tested positive by nasal swab PCR for the suspected coronavirus, and less than one third of them tested positive for serum antibodies, according to this press report.
AIDS is also 99.99% preventable. SARS is exceedingly difficult to prevent, and considerably more contagious. Regression fitting the case curve of SARS, I see that by 25 May, there should be roughly 10,000 cases. By 26 August, there should be roughly 100,000 cases. By the end of the year, the number should be in the millions.
The Spanish Influenza of 1916-1918 killed roughly 20,000,000 people, with a mortality rate of only 1%. SARS has a mortality rate of roughly 10%. Given the larger global population today, we can conclude that the potential death count for SARS over the course of 3 years is roughly 600,000,000 people.
That's a prediction about future events which is rationally derived from historical data regarding similar past diseases and from current epidemiology of the SARS infection. It's not "angst hype". 600,000,000 is a worst case, but it is also the case which appears to be playing out today, as we speak. Hopefully, innovative treatment and public health policy can dramatically reduce the actual mortality of the disease. Hiding your head in the sand cannot.
I can't think of a good use of FPGA for video off the top of my head, frankly. Almost anything that an FPGA could do for video co-processing could be done better, cheaper, faster with a DSP. That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of things I haven't thought of -- this is not my bread-and- butter tech zone, and I make no pretense of expertise. Just offering my.02 in hopes that it may be useful if only to elicit the rebuttal of the better informed.
Given that the contributors all have direct input into the metric algorithm, it's clearly a game in the game-theoretical sense. Don't try to avoid "gamability", work *with* it. Make the cost-effective methods of gaming the system represent actual contributions.
Here are some useful metrics:
Tokens of uncommented code. Decision points. Words of comment. Bugs resolved. Words of documentation. Peer review metrics. Tokens of code subsequently revised. Bugs reopened. Number of distinct patches. Messages on a mailing list, in count, in word count. Megabytes hosted. Dollars spent.
I think estimating the cost of the contribution is the way to go. Dollar values represent a compression of social values from many otherwise largely incommensurable dimensions of value into a single number, so they will simplify any such computation enormously. The more complex it is, the more complaints it will generate, so simplification seems very worthwhile.
Most of the cost of contribution will be time*rate. So an easy way to estimate it is to generate estimated time spent -- a quantity metric, and a quality metric to determine the rate.
To the degree that these observations are non- controversial they may seem obvious;)
Well, interestingly, the systems were approximately comparable in performance. Reading the numbers, one suspects that a P3-1.13GHz would have tromped the Celeron 2.2GHz with a resounding *crunch*.
Yeah, it's not a scientific benchmark, just a low-budget approximation of one. But it's credible data. Marginally useful, but credible.
You asked the poster to supply just one scientist who was not a creationist, but did not believe in classical macroevolution. I provided numerous examples, but now you criticise my reply because they were not creationists?
I don't think I'll bother to reply to you in future. It seems you are so blinded by ideology that you can't think coherently! Sorry to be so frank, but I'm not one to beat around the bush.
They are prohibiting Dini from blacklisting students who are in fact qualified, as a result of their beliefs, irrelevant to their qualification.
Dini is a modern Torquemada. Like most modern inquisitors, he finds that co-option is more palatable than coercion. If you know what is good for you, you will deny the truth in favor of the politically correct doctrine of the day.
> Or maybe because those who believe the world is > sitting on an elephant on a turtle aren't making > nuisances of themselves. I haven't heard turtle > believers arguing loudly and often in front of > legislatures that we need to throw out all of the > astronomy and geology books.
Damn darkies, always making trouble. They should know their place!
Actually, the only reason you haven't heard of this is that you don't live in India, where Hindu fundamentalists have seized control of the government, which tolerates the mass murder of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and atheists, by roving vigilante mobs.
Creationism probably isn't a scientific explanation. But it might be provable. That is the argument of design theorists. They avoid the artificial limitations of the Popperian model of science by resort to deductive proof.
James Valentine, Stanley Awramil, Philip Signor, Peter Sadler, Simon Conway Morris, Derek Biggs, Harry Whittington, Jeffrey Schwarz, Douglas Erwin, David Jablonski, James Lake, Ravi Jain, Maria Rivera, Carl Woese, W. Ford Doolittle, Malcom Gordon...
When a Chinese paleontologist lecturing on problems with macroevolution in the U.S. was advised that criticizing Darwinism was politically incorrect in the U.S., he laughed, saying "In China, we can critize Darwin, but not the government; in America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin."
There's a client, there's a server. Voila, client-server.
But yes, CVS is constructed by the chewing-gum and rat-hair method. Fortunately for us, it has about 12 years of practical shake-out, and it's about as robust a piece of software as exists on the planet, ugliness notwithstanding.
The motherboards aren't available yet. The Opeteron numbers will increase dramatically when everybody is running dual channel memory, but until then, this is the kind of performance you will see if you get yourself a current board.
Premature benchmarking, yes, but hey, that's what benchmark sites are for.
Intel is already making up the numbers. They can peg the clock wherever they like, and just introduce wait states. In fact, they have effectively already done this, but call them pipeline stages.
A modern CPU is a hairy beast, and it has so many physical metrics, with such a tenuous relationship to application performance, that you could pin just about any number you like on it. Why stop at clocks?
People who are intelligent enough to butter toast on the top use benchmarks anyhow.
I agree that it's not an unsolvable problem, however, it's a bit more complex than you paint it: Dynamic content can provide different results on every access. What does the officer do if every messenger gives a different result?
Actually, Saddam is in a Dacha on the Black Sea, Iraq is a smoldering heap of burnt childrens bodies, descending into the kind of murderous anarchy you see in Mad Max movies, Afghanistan is a rats nest of corrupt warlords, with a puppet dictator installed by a foreign power that has to supply his bodyguards because any Afghan on the staff would be sure to frag him, and Al Qaeda is spreading like SARS.
The vast majority of people don't care, or simply trust the goverment so much that they discount any reports of wrongdoing as 'crackpot' 'conspiracy theory'. That, in conjunction with a very effective control over the mass media by 5 corporations with an intimate revolving-door relationship with the administration, creates the conditions for what Mussolini called 'corporatism', or 'fascism' -- our current system of governance.
Slashdot Mirror
...reimplement Emacs in Scheme...
Been done: Edwin.
It came with TI PC-Scheme in the mid-80s.
Google it, you might find a copy in the wild.
I think it was a pre-emptive attack.
There is good reason to doubt that SARS is in fact
a coronoavirus. Only 40% of Canadian cases tested
positive by nasal swab PCR for the suspected
coronavirus, and less than one third of them tested
positive for serum antibodies, according to
this press report.
AIDS is also 99.99% preventable. SARS is
exceedingly difficult to prevent, and considerably
more contagious. Regression fitting the case
curve of SARS, I see that by 25 May, there should
be roughly 10,000 cases. By 26 August, there
should be roughly 100,000 cases. By the end of
the year, the number should be in the millions.
The Spanish Influenza of 1916-1918 killed roughly
20,000,000 people, with a mortality rate of only
1%. SARS has a mortality rate of roughly 10%.
Given the larger global population today, we can
conclude that the potential death count for SARS
over the course of 3 years is roughly 600,000,000
people.
That's a prediction about future events which is
rationally derived from historical data regarding
similar past diseases and from current epidemiology
of the SARS infection. It's not "angst hype".
600,000,000 is a worst case, but it is also the
case which appears to be playing out today, as
we speak. Hopefully, innovative treatment and
public health policy can dramatically
reduce the actual mortality of the disease. Hiding
your head in the sand cannot.
I can't think of a good use of FPGA for video .02 in hopes that
off the top of my head, frankly. Almost anything
that an FPGA could do for video co-processing could
be done better, cheaper, faster with a DSP.
That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of things
I haven't thought of -- this is not my bread-and-
butter tech zone, and I make no pretense of
expertise. Just offering my
it may be useful if only to elicit the rebuttal
of the better informed.
Given that the contributors all have direct
input into the metric algorithm, it's clearly
a game in the game-theoretical sense. Don't
try to avoid "gamability", work *with* it.
Make the cost-effective methods of gaming the
system represent actual contributions.
Here are some useful metrics:
Tokens of uncommented code.
Decision points.
Words of comment.
Bugs resolved.
Words of documentation.
Peer review metrics.
Tokens of code subsequently revised.
Bugs reopened.
Number of distinct patches.
Messages on a mailing list, in count, in word count.
Megabytes hosted.
Dollars spent.
I think estimating the cost of the contribution
is the way to go. Dollar values represent a
compression of social values from many otherwise
largely incommensurable dimensions of value into
a single number, so they will simplify any such
computation enormously. The more complex it is,
the more complaints it will generate, so
simplification seems very worthwhile.
Most of the cost of contribution will be time*rate.
So an easy way to estimate it is to generate
estimated time spent -- a quantity metric, and a
quality metric to determine the rate.
To the degree that these observations are non-
controversial they may seem obvious;)
Well, interestingly, the systems were
approximately comparable in performance.
Reading the numbers, one suspects that a
P3-1.13GHz would have tromped the Celeron 2.2GHz
with a resounding *crunch*.
Yeah, it's not a scientific benchmark, just
a low-budget approximation of one. But it's
credible data. Marginally useful, but credible.
You asked the poster to supply just one scientist
who was not a creationist, but did not believe in
classical macroevolution. I provided numerous
examples, but now you criticise my reply because
they were not creationists?
I don't think I'll bother to reply to you in future.
It seems you are so blinded by ideology that you can't
think coherently! Sorry to be so frank, but I'm
not one to beat around the bush.
Not on the basis of. He intends to ignore their
qualifications and the quality of their work on
ideological grounds. That is a punitive action.
The analogy is direct. I notice that you decline
to offer any refutation.
Certainly not all design work has been religiously
based or motivated, but some of the best editorial
work has been done in a religious milieux:
The proceedings of this
1996 conference cover presentations of work done
from a wide variety of viewpoints. I found it
fascinating.
I have done this above, if you read at +1 or lower
(until I get modded down by the PC monitors, that is.)
They are prohibiting Dini from blacklisting students
who are in fact qualified, as a result of their
beliefs, irrelevant to their qualification.
Dini is a modern Torquemada. Like most modern
inquisitors, he finds that co-option is more
palatable than coercion. If you know what is good
for you, you will deny the truth in favor of the
politically correct doctrine of the day.
The old orthodoxy is the new heresy.
> Or maybe because those who believe the world is
> sitting on an elephant on a turtle aren't making
> nuisances of themselves. I haven't heard turtle
> believers arguing loudly and often in front of
> legislatures that we need to throw out all of the
> astronomy and geology books.
Damn darkies, always making trouble. They should
know their place!
Actually, the only reason you haven't heard of this
is that you don't live in India, where Hindu
fundamentalists have seized control of the government,
which tolerates the mass murder of Muslims,
Christians, Sikhs and atheists, by roving
vigilante mobs.
Creationism probably isn't a scientific explanation.
But it might be provable. That is the argument of
design theorists. They avoid the artificial limitations
of the Popperian model of science by resort to
deductive proof.
Byrd, RC, 1988.
Southern Medical Journal 81(7): 826-829.
Krucoff, Mitchell, W., Suzanne W. Crater, et al, 2001.
American Heart Journal 142:760-767.
Kwang Y. Cha, Daniel P. Wirth, et al, 2001.
Journal of Reproductive Medicine 46:781-787.
Sicher, F.E., D. Targ, et al, 1998.
Western Journal of Medicine 169:356-363.
Check out this link for some convenient online references.
James Valentine, Stanley Awramil, Philip Signor,
Peter Sadler, Simon Conway Morris, Derek Biggs, Harry
Whittington, Jeffrey Schwarz, Douglas Erwin, David
Jablonski, James Lake, Ravi Jain, Maria Rivera,
Carl Woese, W. Ford Doolittle, Malcom Gordon...
When a Chinese paleontologist lecturing on problems
with macroevolution in the U.S. was advised that
criticizing Darwinism was politically incorrect
in the U.S., he laughed, saying "In China, we can
critize Darwin, but not the government; in
America, you can criticize the government, but
not Darwin."
There's a client, there's a server. Voila, client-server.
But yes, CVS is constructed by the chewing-gum
and rat-hair method. Fortunately for us, it has
about 12 years of practical shake-out, and it's
about as robust a piece of software as exists on
the planet, ugliness notwithstanding.
The motherboards aren't available yet. The Opeteron
numbers will increase dramatically when everybody
is running dual channel memory, but until then,
this is the kind of performance you will see if
you get yourself a current board.
Premature benchmarking, yes, but hey, that's what
benchmark sites are for.
Intel is already making up the numbers.
They can peg the clock wherever they like,
and just introduce wait states. In fact,
they have effectively already done this,
but call them pipeline stages.
A modern CPU is a hairy beast, and it has so
many physical metrics, with such a tenuous
relationship to application performance,
that you could pin just about any number you
like on it. Why stop at clocks?
People who are intelligent enough to butter
toast on the top use benchmarks anyhow.
I agree that it's not an unsolvable problem, however,
it's a bit more complex than you paint it: Dynamic
content can provide different results on every access.
What does the officer do if every messenger gives
a different result?
CVS is client-server.
Filesystems are databases.
CVS has filesystem security, performance and backup
characteristics, and uses locks to insure
consistent commits.
Well, they did give your money to Theo, so...
I expect to see you vote Libertarian next autumn.
Actually, Saddam is in a Dacha on the Black Sea,
Iraq is a smoldering heap of burnt childrens
bodies, descending into the kind of murderous
anarchy you see in Mad Max movies, Afghanistan is
a rats nest of corrupt warlords, with a puppet
dictator installed by a foreign power that has to
supply his bodyguards because any Afghan on the
staff would be sure to frag him, and Al Qaeda is
spreading like SARS.
The vast majority of people don't care, or simply
trust the goverment so much that they discount
any reports of wrongdoing as 'crackpot' 'conspiracy
theory'. That, in conjunction with a very effective
control over the mass media by 5 corporations with
an intimate revolving-door relationship with the
administration, creates the conditions for what
Mussolini called 'corporatism', or 'fascism' --
our current system of governance.
All of which is not to mention that it has become
a political pulpit and propaganda vehicle under
the current editorship.
Just the facts, Ma'am.
I'm also a former reader.