Can I just say that it is not true that "Everyone hates it". I don't hate it and never have done.
What I can't understand is why the objections to daylight saving are getting bigger whilst the hassle is getting smaller. When I was young my father had to go round the house manually adjusting all the mechanical clocks twice a year. For the last few years I haven't had to adjust any clocks in the house at all. They are all controlled by radio or internet and just change automatically. The only clocks I have to change are my ancient digital watch and the one on the dash in the car.
Thank you for that. I watched this hour long lecture and I can't deny that it was interesting. However, it was produced two years ago and whilst the speaker discusses possible future upgrades in general terms, he covers those which might be applied over the next 20 years. It is not at all clear which are the ones covered by this new funding.
It is great that LIGO will be upgraded and able to detect more events, but that is all that the article says. Can anyone provide a link to a slightly more technical article which explains how it will be upgraded and why these upgrades will make it more sensitive?
The basic problem with internet voting is exactly the same as all other forms of "voter absent" polling such as postal voting and that is how to ensure that the voter hasn't been threatened or bribed. You can make the actual mechanism as secure as you like with bug bounties and such like, but there will still be many thousands of women who will sit at the family computer whilst their husband says "Vote for that guy or I'll punch you again like I did last night" (just an example - many other permutations of abusive relationships are available!).
I agree that there are some steps which can be taken to reduce this problem (e.g. allowing people to vote multiple times and only counting the last one), but these don't seem to properly address the fundamental problem.
This asymmetry -- and its potential consequences -- puzzled us,
The contract is written by the online business and is therefore entirely for their benefit. So long as the percentage of consumers who refuse to do business with them because they either can't understand the terms or disagree with them is a rounding error they have zero incentive to make them less asymmetric. How can these academics possibly find that puzzling?
The solution to this problem - I have always felt - is some sort of "terms seal of approval". I observe that 99% of web sites fall into a tiny number of common categories. The government could create a handful of "Approved terms" which had been carefully vetted for fairness (to both sides), readability and enforceability. A website could then simply select the one most relevant to their business, insert a link and a seal of approval saying something like "Covered by Government Terms Type 3" or some such.
Both sides would benefit from such an arrangement:
Consumers would have only a tiny number of easily readable sets of terms to understand and certainty that these terms would not change without some sort of fairly widespread warning. They would also know that the terms complied with relevant consumer protection laws.
The business would benefit from (a) a good impression of a fair company being given to their customers, (b) no need to spend a lot of money getting a lawyer to hand craft some terms and (c) certainty that the terms would not be thrown out by the courts due to some drafting error.
So, as I understand it, Musk can't be "Chairman" of Tesla for the next three years, but he can remain as "CEO". Could someone who understands what the difference between these two posts is possibly explain it for the benefit of those of us - particularly from outside the USA - who don't. What does this mean is practice about the reduction (if any) if Musk's influence over Tesla.
I note that whilst the article has plenty about the challenge of sequencing that many DNA sequences at high quality and low cost, there is no mention of the sheer logistical complexity of getting samples from 66,000 different species some of which are presumably very rare.
No doubt quite a lot can be achieved by contacting a great number of zoos around the world, but it seems to me that there must be a great many species not held in collections. One rarely sees bats in zoos for example and I understand that there are about 1000 species of those. There must be many bird species known only through observation and I dread to think about all the fish species, particularly from the deep sea, which only occasionally get caught.
It might be interesting to know if they can collect DNA from stuffed specimens or those preserved in spirit.
Perhaps we could do with this sort of initiative here in the UK. Last year my daughter, who is studying at an overpoweringly white and middle class girl's grammar school wanted to start studying Computer Science for her GCSEs but the school decided to stop offering the course saying that it wouldn't be a problem as she could still study it at A level. Last week we were talking to the deputy head teacher who said that actually it was now most unlikely that they and the boy's grammar would be offering the A level in the future either (the two schools combine classes at A level). In both cases the school has cited lack of pupil interest in taking the courses as the reason.
If privileged children like my daughter can't get to study the subject despite constant posturing from the government about the importance of more children learning to "code" then I dread to think how difficult it must be for those with fewer advantages.
Notes for Americans etc:
GCSE - Exams taken by 16 year old children
A Levels - Exams taken by 18 year old children and the main qualification for University entrance
Grammar School - A free state run school for children from 11 which has an entrance exam (the 11 plus) and which therefore takes the most able pupils (although it helps if your parents can afford a tutor for the exam).
They are only MORE harmful to the weeds than the crops, and even then, only when you re-engineer the crops to be resistant,
Amazing. I had no idea that was the case. Should I deduce that until it became possible to engineer crops there weren't any herbicides?
The thing is that in my shed I have big bags of stuff which every year I spread on my lawn. It kills the weeds and not the grass and indeed it makes the grass grow faster (which is a bit odd if it is in fact just less toxic to grass than weeds). Presumably, my grass has been engineered in some way and I just thought that it was ordinary lawn grass! Perhaps grass is a special case, but then aren't a lot of crops just basically types of grass?
The article seems to suggest that the plan is to use current herbicides in greater concentrations to overcome resistance. But, surely the entire point of the current herbicides is that they fiendishly designed to be poisonous to weeds but not to crops. Once you have a gadget which only sprays the weeds, you can use a less specific chemical which just kills any plant it is sprayed on and which presumably the weeds haven't yet had a need to develop resistance to. It also seems to me that a weedkiller which kills any plant can attack much more fundamental aspects of plant biochemistry and therefore be harder to develop resistance to.
I already have weedkillers in my shed which basically say on the label "Kills all plants, only spray this on your weeds" and what they seem to be proposing is essentially the huge automated equivalent of me roaming my garden and carefully spraying any weeds I find.
Whilst I don't want to appear negative and I wish this project well, I can't help observing that whilst the maker and free software world is full of very talented people when it comes to writing delightful user interfaces and making LEDs blink on and off, the heart of a UPS is some serious power electronics.
As someone who did a fair amount of power electronics many years ago at University I can see that designing and constructing an efficient inverter for a UPS is a none-trivial task. Further, if the inverter isn't efficient then users will end up spending more on extra electricity than they saved by not buying a UPS from an existing supplier. And this is before we come to the very considerable question of safety!
Of course, the power electronics could be assembled industrially and then sold as something to which you add your own batteries, Arduino and case but then we have some thorny questions:
- Will these modules need to go through formal safety and EMC approval (an expensive process)?
- Are there going to be different versions for different power levels and if so how many?
- Is this project for North America only or will versions be needed for those parts of the world with 220-240V?
I suppose that a half way house would be to supply bare PCBs and perhaps specially made inductive components and let people assemble it themselves. I think that in most parts of the world this wouldn't require any paperwork (electronic components are usually just that - components). In such case I am sure a web page would soon spring up tracking the number of electrocutions and fires! Probably best to get the PCBs produced and sold from a less litigious country than the USA!
OK, so Coinbase is like a bank. We have just the same rules for having to hand over numerous personal details when you open a bank account in the UK.
BUT, if it is like a bank then why is it any sort of story at all that they are required to hand over said customer details to the IRS? Surely all banks and similar institutions have to do that all the time anyway as part of their license. Here in the UK I have always taken it for granted that my bank sends all my personal and financial details to the Inland Revenue (UK equivalent of IRS).
So, I asked the question not because I am unfamiliar with the process of opening bank accounts, but because the original story lead me to the conclusion that Coinbase must be a much less regulated entity otherwise there wouldn't need to be a court battle to get their customer details.
So, there are a lot more men than women in Silicon Valley. OK, but since babies are born in almost exactly a 50:50 ratio that means that some places in the US must have more available women than men? I presume single men in Silicon Valley can't move to these places since there are no suitable jobs, but perhaps they could at least vacation there. Ahh, perhaps people in Silicon Valley don't get vacations either.
Notes:
1: Since I am in the UK and married I am asking where all the single women are purely out of curiosity.
2: My wife is from a different European country, so I don't see that there is a problem with dating someone in a different US state.
How does anyone know whether to believe any of this stuff any longer?
It seems to be that all these "cyber espionage" stories consist of impossible to verify leaks (intentional or otherwise) about other impossible to verify leaks. I guess it probably is true that some emails were leaked by someone, but after that everything could be no more true than the contents of a John le Carré novel and the latter would be a better read!
We don't seem to have these "Shutdown" things in the UK either - at least I don't remember any and there certainly hasn't been one during the nearly 30 years that I have worked for the government. We had things like the "Three day week" back in the 1970s, but that was to conserve fuel supplies.
But, perhaps I am taking a parochial view the UK and Australia are unusual in this respect. Can anyone come up with some examples of other nations that enjoy similar "budget confusion" based holidays?
Does anyone know some basic facts about the performance of this device: How efficient is it? What is the maximum power it can transfer? I have been to the manufacturers web site and after a quick search I can't seem to find these basic facts. It seems to say that the maximum range is 5 metres (15 feet) and I would guess that both parameters might be range dependent.
I agree that for very low power devices efficiency is not fantastically important since they contribute such a tiny amount to your total electricity bill.
"We travel a lot for work," she said, gesturing to a colleague, "and if they don't take credit cards that makes things difficult."
Umm, am I missing something here? Surely this article is about places that don't accept cash, not ones that don't accept credit cards?
Also, how exactly does travelling a lot make it hard to use cash unless she is referring to international travel. Perhaps if you travel a lot you end up in places where you don't know where the cash machines are?
Is said 34 year old auditor extremely dumb, or (rather more likely) has she been misquoted?
Replying to my own post. A few more minutes though suggests that perhaps optical communications might work. I don't know very much about that technology, but preventing the receiving telescope from being blinded by the light from the star would clearly be a big issue to solve. Perhaps one could choose a wavelength where the star is relatively dark?
Aligning the transmitter sounds tricky, but presumably you could use the same optics to track the sun (which is presumably quite bright when viewed from Alpha Centauri).
Well one wishes them the best of luck, but it seems to me that going fast enough is only a tiny part of their problems and that getting any sort of useful communications back again is a least as big a challenge.
Consider the New Horizons mission to Pluto. The spacecraft is large and has a big high gain antenna. Also, it's power source hasn't been sitting around for 44 years. Never the less, data returns to earth at a few hundred bits per second.
Now consider Alpha Centauri. My quick calculations suggest that it is about 7000 times as far away (can someone confirm that?). Applying the inverse square law gives us a received power level - assuming the same transmit power and antennas - which is 77 dB (49000000 times) lower. Now, I am not saying that it can't be done, and I am sure that NASA have lots of very clever people, but as someone who has spend his career in radio and radar, finding an extra 77 dB is a very challenging requirement!
So, 577 GB for 31 million users? That gives us about 18.6 MB per customer!!
Clearly this is rather more than just some basic contact details and IP addresses and suggests that the bulk download of data from phones described in the article isn't just an occasional aberration.
How come the Andoid OS even allows a keyboard app access to stored data in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
Can I just say that it is not true that "Everyone hates it". I don't hate it and never have done.
What I can't understand is why the objections to daylight saving are getting bigger whilst the hassle is getting smaller. When I was young my father had to go round the house manually adjusting all the mechanical clocks twice a year. For the last few years I haven't had to adjust any clocks in the house at all. They are all controlled by radio or internet and just change automatically. The only clocks I have to change are my ancient digital watch and the one on the dash in the car.
Thank you for that. I watched this hour long lecture and I can't deny that it was interesting. However, it was produced two years ago and whilst the speaker discusses possible future upgrades in general terms, he covers those which might be applied over the next 20 years. It is not at all clear which are the ones covered by this new funding.
It is great that LIGO will be upgraded and able to detect more events, but that is all that the article says. Can anyone provide a link to a slightly more technical article which explains how it will be upgraded and why these upgrades will make it more sensitive?
The basic problem with internet voting is exactly the same as all other forms of "voter absent" polling such as postal voting and that is how to ensure that the voter hasn't been threatened or bribed. You can make the actual mechanism as secure as you like with bug bounties and such like, but there will still be many thousands of women who will sit at the family computer whilst their husband says "Vote for that guy or I'll punch you again like I did last night" (just an example - many other permutations of abusive relationships are available!).
I agree that there are some steps which can be taken to reduce this problem (e.g. allowing people to vote multiple times and only counting the last one), but these don't seem to properly address the fundamental problem.
This asymmetry -- and its potential consequences -- puzzled us,
The contract is written by the online business and is therefore entirely for their benefit. So long as the percentage of consumers who refuse to do business with them because they either can't understand the terms or disagree with them is a rounding error they have zero incentive to make them less asymmetric. How can these academics possibly find that puzzling?
The solution to this problem - I have always felt - is some sort of "terms seal of approval". I observe that 99% of web sites fall into a tiny number of common categories. The government could create a handful of "Approved terms" which had been carefully vetted for fairness (to both sides), readability and enforceability. A website could then simply select the one most relevant to their business, insert a link and a seal of approval saying something like "Covered by Government Terms Type 3" or some such.
Both sides would benefit from such an arrangement:
Consumers would have only a tiny number of easily readable sets of terms to understand and certainty that these terms would not change without some sort of fairly widespread warning. They would also know that the terms complied with relevant consumer protection laws.
The business would benefit from (a) a good impression of a fair company being given to their customers, (b) no need to spend a lot of money getting a lawyer to hand craft some terms and (c) certainty that the terms would not be thrown out by the courts due to some drafting error.
So, as I understand it, Musk can't be "Chairman" of Tesla for the next three years, but he can remain as "CEO". Could someone who understands what the difference between these two posts is possibly explain it for the benefit of those of us - particularly from outside the USA - who don't. What does this mean is practice about the reduction (if any) if Musk's influence over Tesla.
I note that whilst the article has plenty about the challenge of sequencing that many DNA sequences at high quality and low cost, there is no mention of the sheer logistical complexity of getting samples from 66,000 different species some of which are presumably very rare.
No doubt quite a lot can be achieved by contacting a great number of zoos around the world, but it seems to me that there must be a great many species not held in collections. One rarely sees bats in zoos for example and I understand that there are about 1000 species of those. There must be many bird species known only through observation and I dread to think about all the fish species, particularly from the deep sea, which only occasionally get caught.
It might be interesting to know if they can collect DNA from stuffed specimens or those preserved in spirit.
Perhaps we could do with this sort of initiative here in the UK. Last year my daughter, who is studying at an overpoweringly white and middle class girl's grammar school wanted to start studying Computer Science for her GCSEs but the school decided to stop offering the course saying that it wouldn't be a problem as she could still study it at A level. Last week we were talking to the deputy head teacher who said that actually it was now most unlikely that they and the boy's grammar would be offering the A level in the future either (the two schools combine classes at A level). In both cases the school has cited lack of pupil interest in taking the courses as the reason.
If privileged children like my daughter can't get to study the subject despite constant posturing from the government about the importance of more children learning to "code" then I dread to think how difficult it must be for those with fewer advantages.
Notes for Americans etc:
GCSE - Exams taken by 16 year old children
A Levels - Exams taken by 18 year old children and the main qualification for University entrance
Grammar School - A free state run school for children from 11 which has an entrance exam (the 11 plus) and which therefore takes the most able pupils (although it helps if your parents can afford a tutor for the exam).
Question:
Is there any particular incentive to do either well or badly in the test? Does it affect your military service in any way?
The point I am getting at is that military service was to get more or less acceptable then this might affect the motivation of those taking the tests.
Simplified Example:
Many years ago potential conscripts thought "Gosh, my turn to do my bit for my beloved country. I'd better try really hard in these tests".
Today potential conscripts think "Bah, why do I have to do this stupid military service? I really can't be bothered".
Result: Noticeable decline in IQ results!
They are only MORE harmful to the weeds than the crops, and even then, only when you re-engineer the crops to be resistant,
Amazing. I had no idea that was the case. Should I deduce that until it became possible to engineer crops there weren't any herbicides?
The thing is that in my shed I have big bags of stuff which every year I spread on my lawn. It kills the weeds and not the grass and indeed it makes the grass grow faster (which is a bit odd if it is in fact just less toxic to grass than weeds). Presumably, my grass has been engineered in some way and I just thought that it was ordinary lawn grass! Perhaps grass is a special case, but then aren't a lot of crops just basically types of grass?
The article seems to suggest that the plan is to use current herbicides in greater concentrations to overcome resistance. But, surely the entire point of the current herbicides is that they fiendishly designed to be poisonous to weeds but not to crops. Once you have a gadget which only sprays the weeds, you can use a less specific chemical which just kills any plant it is sprayed on and which presumably the weeds haven't yet had a need to develop resistance to. It also seems to me that a weedkiller which kills any plant can attack much more fundamental aspects of plant biochemistry and therefore be harder to develop resistance to.
I already have weedkillers in my shed which basically say on the label "Kills all plants, only spray this on your weeds" and what they seem to be proposing is essentially the huge automated equivalent of me roaming my garden and carefully spraying any weeds I find.
Whilst I don't want to appear negative and I wish this project well, I can't help observing that whilst the maker and free software world is full of very talented people when it comes to writing delightful user interfaces and making LEDs blink on and off, the heart of a UPS is some serious power electronics.
As someone who did a fair amount of power electronics many years ago at University I can see that designing and constructing an efficient inverter for a UPS is a none-trivial task. Further, if the inverter isn't efficient then users will end up spending more on extra electricity than they saved by not buying a UPS from an existing supplier. And this is before we come to the very considerable question of safety!
Of course, the power electronics could be assembled industrially and then sold as something to which you add your own batteries, Arduino and case but then we have some thorny questions:
- Will these modules need to go through formal safety and EMC approval (an expensive process)?
- Are there going to be different versions for different power levels and if so how many?
- Is this project for North America only or will versions be needed for those parts of the world with 220-240V?
I suppose that a half way house would be to supply bare PCBs and perhaps specially made inductive components and let people assemble it themselves. I think that in most parts of the world this wouldn't require any paperwork (electronic components are usually just that - components). In such case I am sure a web page would soon spring up tracking the number of electrocutions and fires! Probably best to get the PCBs produced and sold from a less litigious country than the USA!
OK, so Coinbase is like a bank. We have just the same rules for having to hand over numerous personal details when you open a bank account in the UK.
BUT, if it is like a bank then why is it any sort of story at all that they are required to hand over said customer details to the IRS? Surely all banks and similar institutions have to do that all the time anyway as part of their license. Here in the UK I have always taken it for granted that my bank sends all my personal and financial details to the Inland Revenue (UK equivalent of IRS).
So, I asked the question not because I am unfamiliar with the process of opening bank accounts, but because the original story lead me to the conclusion that Coinbase must be a much less regulated entity otherwise there wouldn't need to be a court battle to get their customer details.
1) Why would Coinbase need to collect things like dates of birth or physical addresses in the first place?
2) What motivation would anyone have to provide the correct details even if they did ask?
3) Why would anyone doing something dodgy use a coin exchange in their own country?
So, there are a lot more men than women in Silicon Valley. OK, but since babies are born in almost exactly a 50:50 ratio that means that some places in the US must have more available women than men? I presume single men in Silicon Valley can't move to these places since there are no suitable jobs, but perhaps they could at least vacation there. Ahh, perhaps people in Silicon Valley don't get vacations either.
Notes:
1: Since I am in the UK and married I am asking where all the single women are purely out of curiosity.
2: My wife is from a different European country, so I don't see that there is a problem with dating someone in a different US state.
How does anyone know whether to believe any of this stuff any longer?
It seems to be that all these "cyber espionage" stories consist of impossible to verify leaks (intentional or otherwise) about other impossible to verify leaks. I guess it probably is true that some emails were leaked by someone, but after that everything could be no more true than the contents of a John le Carré novel and the latter would be a better read!
Does anyone know whether this weapon (assuming it actually exists) would fall within any of the current US-Russia arms control treaties?
We don't seem to have these "Shutdown" things in the UK either - at least I don't remember any and there certainly hasn't been one during the nearly 30 years that I have worked for the government. We had things like the "Three day week" back in the 1970s, but that was to conserve fuel supplies.
But, perhaps I am taking a parochial view the UK and Australia are unusual in this respect. Can anyone come up with some examples of other nations that enjoy similar "budget confusion" based holidays?
Does anyone know some basic facts about the performance of this device: How efficient is it? What is the maximum power it can transfer? I have been to the manufacturers web site and after a quick search I can't seem to find these basic facts. It seems to say that the maximum range is 5 metres (15 feet) and I would guess that both parameters might be range dependent.
I agree that for very low power devices efficiency is not fantastically important since they contribute such a tiny amount to your total electricity bill.
Ah, OK, that makes some sense (although it still doesn't explain what it has to do with shops which don't take cash).
Where I work we don't have company credit cards, so the claiming back pain is exactly the same for either payment method.
"We travel a lot for work," she said, gesturing to a colleague, "and if they don't take credit cards that makes things difficult."
Umm, am I missing something here? Surely this article is about places that don't accept cash, not ones that don't accept credit cards?
Also, how exactly does travelling a lot make it hard to use cash unless she is referring to international travel. Perhaps if you travel a lot you end up in places where you don't know where the cash machines are?
Is said 34 year old auditor extremely dumb, or (rather more likely) has she been misquoted?
Replying to my own post. A few more minutes though suggests that perhaps optical communications might work. I don't know very much about that technology, but preventing the receiving telescope from being blinded by the light from the star would clearly be a big issue to solve. Perhaps one could choose a wavelength where the star is relatively dark?
Aligning the transmitter sounds tricky, but presumably you could use the same optics to track the sun (which is presumably quite bright when viewed from Alpha Centauri).
Well one wishes them the best of luck, but it seems to me that going fast enough is only a tiny part of their problems and that getting any sort of useful communications back again is a least as big a challenge.
Consider the New Horizons mission to Pluto. The spacecraft is large and has a big high gain antenna. Also, it's power source hasn't been sitting around for 44 years. Never the less, data returns to earth at a few hundred bits per second.
Now consider Alpha Centauri. My quick calculations suggest that it is about 7000 times as far away (can someone confirm that?). Applying the inverse square law gives us a received power level - assuming the same transmit power and antennas - which is 77 dB (49000000 times) lower. Now, I am not saying that it can't be done, and I am sure that NASA have lots of very clever people, but as someone who has spend his career in radio and radar, finding an extra 77 dB is a very challenging requirement!
Yes, I was writing complete rubbish and it is indeed 18.6 KB not MB. Doh!!
Makes mental note to triple check maths before posting comments! Clearly 18.6 kB could easily be the amount typed into the keyboard.
So, 577 GB for 31 million users? That gives us about 18.6 MB per customer!!
Clearly this is rather more than just some basic contact details and IP addresses and suggests that the bulk download of data from phones described in the article isn't just an occasional aberration.
How come the Andoid OS even allows a keyboard app access to stored data in the first place?