If you look at the video in TFA, or even at any of the $20 RC toys that are out there now, you will see one ubiquitous characteristic not present a decade ago that explains why they are such an attractive option: the gyro-stabilization.
Even a few years back when toy RC copters were just becoming popular, the kludgiest self-righting unit could sell for $100's, and reviews were always comparing their self-righting capabilities and ease of use. Nowadays, the RC gyro units go for pocket money, and the user-friendliness of gyro-copters compared to an RC plane is like WSIWYG vs. LaTeX.
Now you couple that evolution with the task at hand (taking good pictures/video w.r.t. VTOL vs. Hand Launch, Hover vs. Fly By), and you immediately begin to see why it's taking off (haha!).
but isn't that 8 flavors? (2+2)*2? Or does processor architecture not count as a flavor?
And here we see one of the biggest examples of how "consumer" Linux likes to shoot itself in the foot: noting differences for the sake of noting differences (could also be interpreted as being too proud of how nerdy it is).
Linux Mint is arguably as mainstream and consumer oriented as Ubuntu (also with fewer polarizing design "features" than Unitybuntu). Yet if one compares the summary, or the quoted post to something like Windows 7, and what do you see?
The six flavours of Windows 7 in this article already seem annoying, and you notice that there is _zero_ mention of any technical details (32 vs 64 bit? processor architecture zomg hax?!) that are really inconsequential to an average consumer, only mention of what features they can or cannot access.
I think if the Linux community really wants to share the "joy" of Linux with the masses, they need to stop trying to force their own personal "joy" of being too nerdy on the masses as well.
Know your audience, and save your urges for a Gentoo summary or something, please.
What the shit kind of haphazard article was this? I can see how the fast pace of technological evolution can make other things seem glacial, but some of those things were a fucking stretch beyond measure.
Does he think we already live in a paperless society? Because clipboards, manila folders, envelopes, and calendars all still exist and are commonplace.
And taking issue with binoculars and magnifying glasses? I guess as a technologically advanced people, we've replaced basic optics with what, psychic powers to conveniently amplify the size of things for our comprehension? He goes on to make a statement about how they are confusing and whatnot (no they aren't, Sherlock Holmes used a magnifying glass to search for clues and shit), but how does that even deal with his preface of the article, which is about anachronism?
And I can see how the phone's silhouette is one that isn't QUITE the most modern thing... but honestly what would you update it with? A little metal rectangle to represent the candy-bar phones we have now? Honestly the next best thing is probably the Motorola-Brick, which is iconic as a cell-phone, but existed concurrently with those phone silhouettes anyway.
Other no-duh's include Studio mics (vs. what else would you use? A pinhole to represent the integrated mic in a webcam?), and who the fuck doesn't recognize a gear or a screwdriver as the innards of something?
And finally, regarding
I suspect my voicemail is no longer stored on spooled magnetic tape
was the best thing ever and there was not a peep from the same commentators that blasted MS.
Wait, are you talking about the same Slashdot as I've been reading? Because for the past half-decade I've heard nothing but whining here about iOS's app lockdown.
From developers. The were off in a sepia colored la-la land referred to as Instagram.
For the last time, Apple is not microsoft and is not a convicted monopolist. Your comparison is retarded. When Apple holds ~85% share of all computers EVERYWHERE, then you can start making valid comparisons between the two.
You're right, they're only a tiny helpless corporation with more spare cash (not even something intangible like nonliquid assetsmoney, but real money) than any other company in existence right now. Stop picking on them! they obviously don't have the capability to do anything beyond what they currently are able to manage, poor guys:C
I personally wouldn't have bitched one bit if MS took a stand against Flash. In fact, I would applaud them.
Apple releases an update that disables third party software, less than a month after their inability to put a dent into bd.Flashback. And yet you still shovel on the praise and manage to spin it in your own mind, that rather than it being the heavy-handed tactics of a company that has no idea how to play well with others, they are simply taking a brave stand against flash!
Man, Kudos to Apple, and kudos to yourself for being so brave too!
The reality distortion field is strong with this one.
This research has strong implications for the understanding of erosion processes on the Red Planet's surface and for future cosmonauts getting caught in a Martian sandstorm, presumably.
To everyone thinking "duh, that's how evolution works!!11!onebbq":
I think the irony of "mistake/mutation" becoming a competitive advantage being, selected for, and leading to the progeny today (us) is not lost on geneticists. It's probably the last thing that would be lost on them, considering their field.
I think the real issue is in TFA's title/summary. What's important that it's one mutation mechanism specifically that seems to dominate gains in intelligence: copying, or additions (and potentially over-expression relative to ancestral baseline) of a specific gene/protein. The potential over-expression being parenthetical, because many genes can lay dormant and subsequently expressed proteins may be inactive without phosphorylation. But what's important to note (which TFA really failed to emphasize) is that intelligence seems to be linked to excesses of sets of genes, which is only a subset of all potential mutation mechanisms ( subtraction, substitution,... just look here: http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/mutationsanddisorders/possiblemutations )
I think the real take-away from this is that there is more evidence for varying levels of intelligence being a function of varying levels of a set of genes, rather than intelligence being a function of having that set of genes at all or not.
In other words, all animals that have this baseline set of genes would (if their environment selected for intelligence over spending resources on physical fitness for survival) eventually have the capability to be intelligent. This would be in contrast to say, the assumption that human intelligence is very special and due to a magical insertion/deletion mechanism creating a new gene entirely.
This is science at its best. Not only can you not cherry-pick your data to make a conclusive paper, but you also really shouldn't cherry-pick papers to make a conclusion (or vice versa) in life.
Keep in mind that the conclusion you are the living counter-example of is from one study out of many, and that the final study which directly relates one download to one lost sale (the most conservative estimate you can make) arrived at a loss of less than $2/album sold. So that means that even if not everyone were like you, the loss really becomes a sliding scale from $0-$2 per album.
You take all of the papers into account, and a larger pattern does emerge: Yes, any record that goes gold (500k sales) or platinum (1M sales) will see roughly ~$1M-$2M in losses. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_recording_sales_certification ) At the same time, we know that artists are thriving in this environment http://boingboing.net/2009/11/13/labels-may-be-losing.html
What does one do with these conclusions? Well that really depends on who you are: If you're the corporation, you obviously tighten your group and try to squish indie label companies for the sake of the bottom line (and in spite of artistic creativity). If you're the musician, you could "sell-out" because being well known, even if via overproduction and sheer marketing and autotuning, was your life goal, or you can maybe find a nice indie label that will help develop you for you. If you're Fox News, you defend the corporation because they're people too, who cares about our neighbors!
And as the average consumer? Well I guess I'm always impressed by the number of people defending corporations and what they think is "capitalism" in this day and age, when it's really resembling more and more a conspiracy by all the companies to screw over the consumers, rather than a competition to win their favor.
That's probably the most insightful thing I've read so far (including the very moronic title and summary). CO2 is the final byproduct of any form of reduction mechanism because it's such a low energy state. It's why cars and fires spit it out, and we do too.
Plants can only create hydrocarbons back from CO2 by using an external energy source like sunlight, and I'm wagering it's pretty improbable to imagine that this magical algae has managed to violate the fundamental laws of physics and thermodynamics to create perpetual energy out of something that is completely spent energetically. Chances are the algae need some additional nutrient in the water as well as CO2 if they were to drive any additional mechanisms for energy production.
I'm pretty sure that whoever wrote the headline "Biochemist Creates CO2-Eating Light That Runs On Algae" has never learned anything beyond high-school physics...
I honestly thought that this light was in some spectral or intensity regime, where a mechanism (which here is falsely advertised as eating) was discovered where light could chemically dissociate CO2 into more useful compounds, and that algae were the catalyst for this mechanism. A bit (lot) disappointing to read that it was a grotesquely overblown version of "we keep this organism alive with a waste product and it gives us something we want in return."
The headline is about as misleading as something like "Scientist discovers CO2-eating oxygen that runs on Tree!" Except that Oxygen has absolutely nothing to do with the verb placed before it, and is actually a byproduct of the reaction.
I say fire him immediately. Having someone at the top who egregiously lied for so long sets the tone for the whole company. That's not how you want to do business, so that's not who you want as your leader.
"Our company is doing fine! We're experts in this field and we say so!"
Actually... lying about their core competence is probably exactly how they need to go about it given their downward spiral.
Actually, it's more of an indication of how unqualified so many of the board members are today.
Much of the top-level execs in companies are there because of old boys' networks and mutual backscratching (VC's only willing to fund if you let them replace half of your board with their buddies, etc.) GM pre-bailout was an extreme with its almost corporate inbreeding, but it's true for just about every CO today.
If you had any common sense, or were awake for the last half of a decade, you'd understand where my ATT+iPhone comparison was coming from, especially in regards to how a company could sell their product (either content for Netflix and Sony, or monthly phone service for ATT) to a large number of customers and still end up making very little profit due to their "partners".
Don't allow Comcast the rights to broadcast Sony properties, including working with PS Network. I'm sure Comcast would concede.
Ahh and there's the beauty of it. Who would you believe to be violating some form of neutrality, if you were watching a hulu/youtube/redtube;) clip and it was blocked to you by the content owner because they didn't like your choice of ISP?
The thing is Comcast simply said "Oh normal data is so expensive, woe is us! But we're able to provide XFINITY content through a magical data pipe that doesn't need to worry about this!" With that, it becomes Sony's (and Netflix's!) fault for obviously creating (or having, in Netflix's case) a product that uses up so much magical interpipe juice.
Although what you say is very true, aside from signing distribution deals with Xfinity, the only way for the content providers to not get reamed (in the ATT pays Apple per iPhone sold sense), is to play some form of hardball with the ISPs. But my example of what the public perception would look like is exactly why these companies are taking the more passive and whiny route for now.
Actually, ~0.1 Sv is exactly the dose rates where hormesis is in question. And while hormesis is not the topic of TFA, I was responding to the parent thread above me and not the article.
I linked wikipedia because it's not behind a paywall like the citations to scientific papers it references are. And by "believe", I mean that the studies in question have large error bars associated with them due to the difficulty of controlling for so many variables, but that the mean trend motivates hormesis.
Given that there are papers for and against many topics similar to this in the scientific community, it is as much a statement as whether certain scientists either "believe" in global warming or not.
In fact, so innocent he obviously didn't even know what to do with porn in general! He probably had all of that plurality of porn nested next to his genitals because that's how he thought porn was supposed to work as far as arousal goes!
No chance of him being a total idiot trying to smuggle out terrorist information in an almost in-plain-sight medium while simultaneously being stupid enough to draw attention to it like wearing a raincoat on a hot summer day. Nope, no way that's a possibility.
Double unfortunately, I copy-pasted the wrong section:
Quoting results from literature research,[6][7] they furthermore claim that approximately 40% of laboratory studies on cell cultures and animals indicate some degree of chemical or radiobiological hormesis, and state:
"...its existence in the laboratory is beyond question and its mechanism of action appears well understood."
They go on to outline a growing body of research that illustrates that the human body is not a passive accumulator of radiation damage but it actively repairs the damage caused via a number of different processes
Once again, yes even in the wikipedia "article" itself it is debated, but that's the point of error-bars in science.
There is no threshold below which radiation is 'safe'. There is a threshold below which is become statistically indistinguishable from random events, but that is not the same thing. We've known even "low" levels of radiation can be dangerous -- look at the cancer clusters showing up in TSA screeners.
Unfortunately, what you say is at best inconclusive, but at worst wrong. Google "hormesis". Studies "including for example the respected "Iowa Radon Lung Cancer Study" of Field et al. (2000), which also used sophisticated radon exposure dosimetry....argue that radon exposure is negatively correlated with the tendency to smoke and environmental studies need to accurately control for this; people living in urban areas where smoking rates are higher usually have lower levels of radon exposure due the increased prevalence of multi-story dwellings". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
I know that hormesis sounds like a crackpot theory along with holistic super-diluted medicinal honey therapy, but some of the greatest minds in Medical Physics believe it exists. It is basically the hypothesis that low levels of additional radiation can actually make you healthier than no additional radiation at all (including daily dosage of cosmic rays). Hence the quote about high background radon studies and inverse correlations with health outcomes.
One of the main mechanisms that is thought to possibly explain it is that while the additional radiation exposure is not enough to cause significant DNA damage, it still activates certain dormant mechanisms for DNA repair, resulting in a healthier-than-average individual.
So in short, there is at least very suggestive evidence for a "safe" (and even moreso than safe) level of radiation.
IMHO, it's because Ubuntu was really the only distro that had a fighting chance at "mass" adoption (that number is relative, but considering how MacOX was sitting at 9% for an eternity...) with their tri-force of:
A pretty, and relatively user friendly interface, A centralized software update suites that didn't requiring googling what to sudo apt-get for in a console And pretty good brand recognition and media attention.
UNTIL they decided to completely over-indulge their own sense of relevance by forcing the mandatory Unity interface on users with some absolutely retarded idea that they would to do this for the huge wave of tablet adoption they were now going to see, since I'm assuming Desktop users are already totes in the Ubuntu bandwagon?
I think the real issue isn't that (consumer) Desktop Linux hasn't taken off, but that the people behind the main distro that actually had a fighting chance decided to chop some of the more useful limbs off of it to make it more...fingerable.
Pure and innocent Scientific Inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge generally hits a pretty thick wall pretty quickly as soon as it steps into the realm of things that already being researched, with the qualification that they are things the military is researching, or has researched within the past decade.
Even now, just to use the results of certain types of this research -- such as very accurate nuclear interaction cross-sections (discovered for the purposes of nuclear weapons, but) used for the purposes of cancer treatment -- puts you under the watchful eye of the FBI.
Yes, not everything falls under this category, and no, nobody needs to be reminded of the benefits of such research like how our microwave ovens defeated the germans, but just think about some of the examples we DO know about: WWII to Cold war era: Nuclear Science Cryptography (Government mandated PGP backdoor, anyone?)
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at the video in TFA, or even at any of the $20 RC toys that are out there now, you will see one ubiquitous characteristic not present a decade ago that explains why they are such an attractive option: the gyro-stabilization.
Even a few years back when toy RC copters were just becoming popular, the kludgiest self-righting unit could sell for $100's, and reviews were always comparing their self-righting capabilities and ease of use. Nowadays, the RC gyro units go for pocket money, and the user-friendliness of gyro-copters compared to an RC plane is like WSIWYG vs. LaTeX.
Now you couple that evolution with the task at hand (taking good pictures/video w.r.t. VTOL vs. Hand Launch, Hover vs. Fly By), and you immediately begin to see why it's taking off (haha!).
but isn't that 8 flavors? (2+2)*2? Or does processor architecture not count as a flavor?
And here we see one of the biggest examples of how "consumer" Linux likes to shoot itself in the foot: noting differences for the sake of noting differences (could also be interpreted as being too proud of how nerdy it is).
Linux Mint is arguably as mainstream and consumer oriented as Ubuntu (also with fewer polarizing design "features" than Unitybuntu). Yet if one compares the summary, or the quoted post to something like Windows 7, and what do you see?
The six flavours of Windows 7 in this article already seem annoying, and you notice that there is _zero_ mention of any technical details (32 vs 64 bit? processor architecture zomg hax?!) that are really inconsequential to an average consumer, only mention of what features they can or cannot access.
I think if the Linux community really wants to share the "joy" of Linux with the masses, they need to stop trying to force their own personal "joy" of being too nerdy on the masses as well.
Know your audience, and save your urges for a Gentoo summary or something, please.
What the shit kind of haphazard article was this?
I can see how the fast pace of technological evolution can make other things seem glacial, but some of those things were a fucking stretch beyond measure.
Does he think we already live in a paperless society?
Because clipboards, manila folders, envelopes, and calendars all still exist and are commonplace.
And taking issue with binoculars and magnifying glasses? I guess as a technologically advanced people, we've replaced basic optics with what, psychic powers to conveniently amplify the size of things for our comprehension?
He goes on to make a statement about how they are confusing and whatnot (no they aren't, Sherlock Holmes used a magnifying glass to search for clues and shit), but how does that even deal with his preface of the article, which is about anachronism?
And I can see how the phone's silhouette is one that isn't QUITE the most modern thing... but honestly what would you update it with? A little metal rectangle to represent the candy-bar phones we have now? Honestly the next best thing is probably the Motorola-Brick, which is iconic as a cell-phone, but existed concurrently with those phone silhouettes anyway.
Other no-duh's include Studio mics (vs. what else would you use? A pinhole to represent the integrated mic in a webcam?), and who the fuck doesn't recognize a gear or a screwdriver as the innards of something?
And finally, regarding
I suspect my voicemail is no longer stored on spooled magnetic tape
given http://searchdatamanagement.rl.techtarget.co.uk/detail/RES/1320101138_161.html that article, I'm not so sure this guy even understands the world beyond just what he himself specifically sees and touches.
Basically, he tried to justify a full blown article based on his observation of: Floppies, and Radio Buttons.
Wait, are you talking about the same Slashdot as I've been reading? Because for the past half-decade I've heard nothing but whining here about iOS's app lockdown.
From developers. The were off in a sepia colored la-la land referred to as Instagram.
For the last time, Apple is not microsoft and is not a convicted monopolist. Your comparison is retarded. When Apple holds ~85% share of all computers EVERYWHERE, then you can start making valid comparisons between the two.
You're right, they're only a tiny helpless corporation with more spare cash (not even something intangible like nonliquid assetsmoney, but real money) than any other company in existence right now. Stop picking on them! they obviously don't have the capability to do anything beyond what they currently are able to manage, poor guys :C
I personally wouldn't have bitched one bit if MS took a stand against Flash. In fact, I would applaud them.
Apple releases an update that disables third party software, less than a month after their inability to put a dent into bd.Flashback.
And yet you still shovel on the praise and manage to spin it in your own mind, that rather than it being the heavy-handed tactics of a company that has no idea how to play well with others, they are simply taking a brave stand against flash!
Man, Kudos to Apple, and kudos to yourself for being so brave too!
The reality distortion field is strong with this one.
This research has strong implications for the understanding of erosion processes on the Red Planet's surface and for future cosmonauts getting caught in a Martian sandstorm, presumably.
Fixed that for you.
To everyone thinking "duh, that's how evolution works!!11!onebbq":
I think the irony of "mistake/mutation" becoming a competitive advantage being, selected for, and leading to the progeny today (us) is not lost on geneticists. It's probably the last thing that would be lost on them, considering their field.
I think the real issue is in TFA's title/summary. What's important that it's one mutation mechanism specifically that seems to dominate gains in intelligence: copying, or additions (and potentially over-expression relative to ancestral baseline) of a specific gene/protein. The potential over-expression being parenthetical, because many genes can lay dormant and subsequently expressed proteins may be inactive without phosphorylation. ... just look here: http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/mutationsanddisorders/possiblemutations )
But what's important to note (which TFA really failed to emphasize) is that intelligence seems to be linked to excesses of sets of genes, which is only a subset of all potential mutation mechanisms ( subtraction, substitution,
I think the real take-away from this is that there is more evidence for varying levels of intelligence being a function of varying levels of a set of genes, rather than intelligence being a function of having that set of genes at all or not.
In other words, all animals that have this baseline set of genes would (if their environment selected for intelligence over spending resources on physical fitness for survival) eventually have the capability to be intelligent.
This would be in contrast to say, the assumption that human intelligence is very special and due to a magical insertion/deletion mechanism creating a new gene entirely.
This is science at its best. Not only can you not cherry-pick your data to make a conclusive paper, but you also really shouldn't cherry-pick papers to make a conclusion (or vice versa) in life.
Keep in mind that the conclusion you are the living counter-example of is from one study out of many, and that the final study which directly relates one download to one lost sale (the most conservative estimate you can make) arrived at a loss of less than $2/album sold. So that means that even if not everyone were like you, the loss really becomes a sliding scale from $0-$2 per album.
You take all of the papers into account, and a larger pattern does emerge: Yes, any record that goes gold (500k sales) or platinum (1M sales) will see roughly ~$1M-$2M in losses. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_recording_sales_certification )
At the same time, we know that artists are thriving in this environment http://boingboing.net/2009/11/13/labels-may-be-losing.html
What does one do with these conclusions? Well that really depends on who you are: If you're the corporation, you obviously tighten your group and try to squish indie label companies for the sake of the bottom line (and in spite of artistic creativity). If you're the musician, you could "sell-out" because being well known, even if via overproduction and sheer marketing and autotuning, was your life goal, or you can maybe find a nice indie label that will help develop you for you. If you're Fox News, you defend the corporation because they're people too, who cares about our neighbors!
And as the average consumer? Well I guess I'm always impressed by the number of people defending corporations and what they think is "capitalism" in this day and age, when it's really resembling more and more a conspiracy by all the companies to screw over the consumers, rather than a competition to win their favor.
That's probably the most insightful thing I've read so far (including the very moronic title and summary). CO2 is the final byproduct of any form of reduction mechanism because it's such a low energy state. It's why cars and fires spit it out, and we do too.
Plants can only create hydrocarbons back from CO2 by using an external energy source like sunlight, and I'm wagering it's pretty improbable to imagine that this magical algae has managed to violate the fundamental laws of physics and thermodynamics to create perpetual energy out of something that is completely spent energetically. Chances are the algae need some additional nutrient in the water as well as CO2 if they were to drive any additional mechanisms for energy production.
I'm pretty sure that whoever wrote the headline "Biochemist Creates CO2-Eating Light That Runs On Algae" has never learned anything beyond high-school physics...
I honestly thought that this light was in some spectral or intensity regime, where a mechanism (which here is falsely advertised as eating) was discovered where light could chemically dissociate CO2 into more useful compounds, and that algae were the catalyst for this mechanism. A bit (lot) disappointing to read that it was a grotesquely overblown version of "we keep this organism alive with a waste product and it gives us something we want in return."
The headline is about as misleading as something like "Scientist discovers CO2-eating oxygen that runs on Tree!" Except that Oxygen has absolutely nothing to do with the verb placed before it, and is actually a byproduct of the reaction.
I say fire him immediately. Having someone at the top who egregiously lied for so long sets the tone for the whole company. That's not how you want to do business, so that's not who you want as your leader.
"Our company is doing fine! We're experts in this field and we say so!"
Actually... lying about their core competence is probably exactly how they need to go about it given their downward spiral.
Actually, it's more of an indication of how unqualified so many of the board members are today.
Much of the top-level execs in companies are there because of old boys' networks and mutual backscratching (VC's only willing to fund if you let them replace half of your board with their buddies, etc.) GM pre-bailout was an extreme with its almost corporate inbreeding, but it's true for just about every CO today.
All NPC's such as quest givers and merchants will be removed from the game, and replaced with players whose characters have taken arrows in the knee.
If you had any common sense, or were awake for the last half of a decade, you'd understand where my ATT+iPhone comparison was coming from, especially in regards to how a company could sell their product (either content for Netflix and Sony, or monthly phone service for ATT) to a large number of customers and still end up making very little profit due to their "partners".
Case(s) in point:
The $200/phone that ATT doesn't pay to "all those other phone manufacturers"
http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/26/sprint-pays-apple-200-more-per-iphone-than-att-and-other-carriers/
How wonderful the business "synergy" works out for one of the companies involved.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/08/technology/iphone_carrier_subsidy/index.htm
Did you seriously just crawl out of a pre-2000 rock just to troll?
._. Not sure if trolling or fanboy...
Don't allow Comcast the rights to broadcast Sony properties, including working with PS Network. I'm sure Comcast would concede.
Ahh and there's the beauty of it. Who would you believe to be violating some form of neutrality, if you were watching a hulu/youtube/redtube;) clip and it was blocked to you by the content owner because they didn't like your choice of ISP?
The thing is Comcast simply said "Oh normal data is so expensive, woe is us! But we're able to provide XFINITY content through a magical data pipe that doesn't need to worry about this!" With that, it becomes Sony's (and Netflix's!) fault for obviously creating (or having, in Netflix's case) a product that uses up so much magical interpipe juice.
Although what you say is very true, aside from signing distribution deals with Xfinity, the only way for the content providers to not get reamed (in the ATT pays Apple per iPhone sold sense), is to play some form of hardball with the ISPs. But my example of what the public perception would look like is exactly why these companies are taking the more passive and whiny route for now.
Actually, ~0.1 Sv is exactly the dose rates where hormesis is in question. And while hormesis is not the topic of TFA, I was responding to the parent thread above me and not the article.
Also, irrelevant*
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
I linked wikipedia because it's not behind a paywall like the citations to scientific papers it references are. And by "believe", I mean that the studies in question have large error bars associated with them due to the difficulty of controlling for so many variables, but that the mean trend motivates hormesis.
Given that there are papers for and against many topics similar to this in the scientific community, it is as much a statement as whether certain scientists either "believe" in global warming or not.
Clearly, this man is innocent.
In fact, so innocent he obviously didn't even know what to do with porn in general! He probably had all of that plurality of porn nested next to his genitals because that's how he thought porn was supposed to work as far as arousal goes!
No chance of him being a total idiot trying to smuggle out terrorist information in an almost in-plain-sight medium while simultaneously being stupid enough to draw attention to it like wearing a raincoat on a hot summer day. Nope, no way that's a possibility.
Double unfortunately, I copy-pasted the wrong section:
Quoting results from literature research,[6][7] they furthermore claim that approximately 40% of laboratory studies on cell cultures and animals indicate some degree of chemical or radiobiological hormesis, and state:
"...its existence in the laboratory is beyond question and its mechanism of action appears well understood."
They go on to outline a growing body of research that illustrates that the human body is not a passive accumulator of radiation damage but it actively repairs the damage caused via a number of different processes
Once again, yes even in the wikipedia "article" itself it is debated, but that's the point of error-bars in science.
There is no threshold below which radiation is 'safe'. There is a threshold below which is become statistically indistinguishable from random events, but that is not the same thing. We've known even "low" levels of radiation can be dangerous -- look at the cancer clusters showing up in TSA screeners.
Unfortunately, what you say is at best inconclusive, but at worst wrong. Google "hormesis".
Studies "including for example the respected "Iowa Radon Lung Cancer Study" of Field et al. (2000), which also used sophisticated radon exposure dosimetry....argue that radon exposure is negatively correlated with the tendency to smoke and environmental studies need to accurately control for this; people living in urban areas where smoking rates are higher usually have lower levels of radon exposure due the increased prevalence of multi-story dwellings".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
I know that hormesis sounds like a crackpot theory along with holistic super-diluted medicinal honey therapy, but some of the greatest minds in Medical Physics believe it exists. It is basically the hypothesis that low levels of additional radiation can actually make you healthier than no additional radiation at all (including daily dosage of cosmic rays). Hence the quote about high background radon studies and inverse correlations with health outcomes.
One of the main mechanisms that is thought to possibly explain it is that while the additional radiation exposure is not enough to cause significant DNA damage, it still activates certain dormant mechanisms for DNA repair, resulting in a healthier-than-average individual.
So in short, there is at least very suggestive evidence for a "safe" (and even moreso than safe) level of radiation.
Please try these three steps in order on a recent (11.10 or 12.04) install of Ubuntu while connected to the Internet:
You just proved my point.
IMHO, it's because Ubuntu was really the only distro that had a fighting chance at "mass" adoption (that number is relative, but considering how MacOX was sitting at 9% for an eternity...) with their tri-force of:
A pretty, and relatively user friendly interface,
A centralized software update suites that didn't requiring googling what to sudo apt-get for in a console
And pretty good brand recognition and media attention.
UNTIL they decided to completely over-indulge their own sense of relevance by forcing the mandatory Unity interface on users with some absolutely retarded idea that they would to do this for the huge wave of tablet adoption they were now going to see, since I'm assuming Desktop users are already totes in the Ubuntu bandwagon?
I think the real issue isn't that (consumer) Desktop Linux hasn't taken off, but that the people behind the main distro that actually had a fighting chance decided to chop some of the more useful limbs off of it to make it more...fingerable.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/102599-ubuntu-14-04-will-be-a-smartphone-and-tablet-os-so-what
Pure and innocent Scientific Inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge generally hits a pretty thick wall pretty quickly as soon as it steps into the realm of things that already being researched, with the qualification that they are things the military is researching, or has researched within the past decade.
Even now, just to use the results of certain types of this research -- such as very accurate nuclear interaction cross-sections (discovered for the purposes of nuclear weapons, but) used for the purposes of cancer treatment -- puts you under the watchful eye of the FBI.
Yes, not everything falls under this category, and no, nobody needs to be reminded of the benefits of such research like how our microwave ovens defeated the germans, but just think about some of the examples we DO know about:
WWII to Cold war era: Nuclear Science
Cryptography (Government mandated PGP backdoor, anyone?)
Sources:
MCNP:
http://mcnpx.lanl.gov/
PGP:
http://books.google.com/books?id=cSe_0OnZqjAC&pg=PA352&lpg=PA352&dq=pgp+government+mandated+backdoor&source=bl&ots=cVtmm3vwYK&sig=fwjn6mfbXVWngTS0pgHIFWFV9bE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=5OyZT8_pLsXUgAf3gNX1DQ&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=pgp%20government%20mandated%20backdoor&f=false)