I took a trip to Taiwan last year, lights like these were everywhere in Taipei. Instead of a progress bar, there was a digital timer in the light: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W76ZvdwNECI
Unfortunately it also drives some drivers crazy. They can't stand it that I'm going 35MPH in a 45MPH zone and go racing past... Just to end up stopped at a stoplight which then turns green a few seconds later and I go drifting on past. And still they don't get it.
What I really would like to know is if this approach is any faster or slower compared to driving the speed limit, or under what conditions it is the best strategy to use. I've seen a few research papers that talk about optimal speeds to avoid stopping but the motivation is always to save energy, not to get to a destination as quickly as possible. For me, I care more about getting where I'm going as quickly as possible -- just one traffic light can cost several minutes. If I care about time, wouldn't the optimal strategy be to drive as quickly as possible? Of course, I may still get stuck at lights, but I would be no worse than if I drove at slower speeds but never hit any lights.
According to TFA: "more than one billion aquatic organisms" are killed annually by NY's Indian Point plant.
No definition of what they mean by "aquatic organism" is given. Blue whales? Minnows? Paramecium?
I live about 5 miles from the Surry Nuclear Power Plant which draws and discharges its cooling water directly from the James River -- there are no cooling towers at all. You think this would be a worst case scenario for increasing the river water temperature and killing off organisms but I've never heard a thing about that in the 10 years I've lived here. The wiki article says that testing has minimal environmental impact but doesn't cite who performs the testing or how it was done.
Single data point. We shouldn't set the standard for appropriate police armament based on a single incident 15 years ago.
And yet, this happens all the time. 9/11 prompted the inception of Homeland Security and the infamous TSA. The Virginia Tech shooting prompted a wave of hair trigger false alarm lockdowns on college campuses where students, faculty, and staff were detained in situ and forbidden to leave for hours.
What convenient one-word label should we use for the anti-science side of this debate?
Using a "convenient one word label" turns the debate from scientific to political. It's focusing more on "us vs. them" than discussing the real issues at hand.
The use of "denier" in this context sounds no different than a religious zealot blindly assuming that whatever is "denied" is in fact true. When it comes to arguing global warming, there appear to be more parallels with religion than with actual science.
There's lots of reasons to not believe it's true -- I'd imagine that the customs process for Commonwealth citizens isn't that onerous, especially for British citizens visiting Australia
An airport security agent asked me pretty much the same questions at JFK Airport in New York. I was on a flight from Mexico and I was only in JFK to transfer planes to San Francisco. The difference being, I was entering the United States with a valid United States passport. I couldn't believe he was asking me what I planned to do once I arrived home, either -- the temptation to say "oh I don't know, smoke some weed, I guess, maybe get on welfare" was overwhelming -- and yet I knew this guy could feasibly detain me for as long as he felt like, make me miss my flight, cost me hundreds of dollars when I had to book a new flight, and so on and so forth -- so I just had to stand there, answer his questions like I was at a job interview, and act like the whole thing wasn't completely outrageous.
I always wonder what triggers the questioning. Last year I went on a trip to China and on entry back into the US I got nothing from the customs agent other than a stamp on my passport. Same for when I returned from Sweden. About a year before that, on entry, I was asked only about the purpose of my trip before being allowed through. Then, about five years ago, I drove into Canada for a day trip to Vancouver and on the way back into the US was hounded by a customs agent with questions about where I lived, how I got to Washington state since I lived on the east coast -- did I drive there?, and a demand to search the rear seats and the trunk. They did the whole mirrors under the car routine and everything before letting me through. I remember the Canadian border agents didn't care at all that I was going there for the day. Maybe I was dressed more casually when I was in the car, I don't know.
Every content industry, gaming included, hates the first sale doctrine. Actually, every industry hates the first sale doctrine. If the car industry could prevent the sale of used cars, and force you to buy exclusively new cars, they would probably pop the cork, and the cheers would be heard all around the world. But they haven't found a way to go around the first sale doctrine.
I recall several car TV commercials where the manufacturer used the high resale value as a major selling point. In this case, the manufacturer is using first sale doctrine to attract customers.
Also, car manufacturers and dealers have found a way around the first sale doctrine. It's called a lease.
Virginia Technical University? I've never heard of that one and I've lived in Virginia for my entire life. I guess they mean Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, more commonly known as Virginia Tech. If the editors missed that error, they probably missed a lot more.
Makes you wonder, when people say we can't do that for consumer vehicles, eh? Where's the Can-do spirit?!?
You could, it just costs more. That said, most US made vehicles will run 100K miles with minimal supervision. My 12 year old GMC truck has really been quite reliable and could well run another 10 years. I'm part owner of a 40 year old plane that could fly for another 40 years.
Not everything is an iPad.
To be fair, with airplanes, hours the engine has run and takeoff/landing cycles are more important than age. Of course, being an aircraft owner, you probably already know this.
This happens more than you know. Chinese workers emigrated to the US en masse to build the first transcontinental railroad, albeit the construction was overseen by US railroad companies. Today, plenty of infrastructure and construction projects in the US are awarded to non-US firms -- Skanska comes readily to mind. The huge gantry cranes you see in every US port are manufactured in China and then shipped here, but I don't know if I'd call those infrastructure.
However, it isn't clear from the link you posted or from searching the internet whether the final assembly for the bridges you mention is performed by Chinese workers. Most of the controversy seems to be about prefab components manufactured overseas and then shipped here. Maybe the final assembly is still performed by Americans. There was also a big fuss about this when Boeing started doing this for the 787, offshoring the fabrication of large pieces of the airframe and then flying them to Everett for final assembly.
Zero-G/Microgravity is not all that great for human beings. As I understand it, besides muscle issues (ie, not using them), there's also bone-loss. I believe these are dealt with on ISS via a combination of exercise and drugs. The problem is, we don't know how much gravity is necessary. Would 0.5G be enough? 0.25G? 0.16G (ie, lunar gravity)? Do we need gravity the whole time? Could we, for example, put beds in a 1G centrifuge so people get eight hours of 1G while they sleep but spend the rest of their time in Zero-G with no ill effects?
These are things that need to get figured out.
+1 if I had mod points. This sounds like a lot of the studies that have been/are performed with respect to living at altitude. For example, I remember hearing that endurance athletes can get a significant benefit in V02 max and red blood cell count by living at altitude but training at sea level.
Punish the people who break the law, punish cops who break the law more severely because they are given more trust, but keep the evidence.
And here you have the reason for 'tainted evidence' rule - cops are not punished more severely. They are punished very lightly or not at all.
But throwing out the evidence punishes not the cops or prosecutors but the society as a whole. It makes no sense, it only serves the interest of criminals -- collude with cops, taint all evidence, then taint all evidence of tainting the evidence, and everyone goes free.
Throwing out illegally obtained evidence protects the innocent from being violated by the police when the police only have a hunch that someone is a criminal. Otherwise, there will always be a cop or prosecutor willing to break the law and receive punishment on the hopes that their illegally obtained evidence will put away a criminal mastermind. If their alleged mastermind turns out to be innocent, what then? Throwing away evidence is premised on the whole presumed innocent until proven guilty idea.
Imagine if this was a U2 or similar piloted vehicle instead of a drone. We'd be preparing the bombers right now, along with special congressional resolutions condemning the Iraqis to death for "capturing" one of "our boys."
There are at least two cases where this has happened. The Soviets shot down a U2 in 1960 and held the pilot hostage for over a year until he was traded for another prisoner. Also, in 2001, the Chinese forced a P-3 to land on Chinese soil and held the crew hostage for 10 days before they were released. In both cases, I'm sure the Soviets and the Chinese pored over whatever sensitive stuff was left intact and wasn't destroyed by the crash in the case of the U2 or the US aircrew in the case of the P3.
I wasn't born in the 1960s so I couldn't tell you what the public sentiment was at the time, but in the 2001 incident, I don't remember anyone caring all that much about the hostage crew, all the way up to President Clinton. If I remember, the Chinese forced Clinton to give some kind of apology before they released the crew.
I travel to give the occasional presentation and I think I've only seen one or two projectors in the past 5 years that had something other than a VGA input. This is probably why many business laptops still have VGA outputs at the expense of providing others like DisplayPort, DVI, or HDMI.
The other problem is that monitors and projectors long outlive their PC contemporaries. I've got a 20" Dell LCD that I purchased in 2003 that's still going strong today. It has VGA and DVI inputs, since only in the past few years have HDMI and DisplayPort become standard on monitors.
I'm rather partial to DisplayPort and Thunderbolt since the connectors are smaller and don't have pins that are easily bent, but these outputs aren't too common in laptops, unless you have a Mac.
Tell that to my ISP, who won't let me run a 'server' as part of my terms and conditions...
So, do what I did...get a 'business' account with them...then run all the servers you want, no data caps, no ports blocked, and even get a decent SLA.
I get about 10-12 down and about 4-5 up for speed...and I pay $69/month with Cox cable.
I looked at getting a business account from Cox as well. Except they wanted me to sign a 3 year contract with early termination fees when I only planned on staying where I lived for 2 years. Plus, it was $20 more per month for slower speeds. Instead, I just went with a $5/month hosting plan with unlimited bandwidth and I can still SSH into my home network if I need to.
You can do all the background checks you want. If a representative of the Chinese government says "Here's 20K$ to hand us some code", a very large percentage of people will say "Deal". If a representative of the Chinese government says "hand us the code you work on, or your relatives in China disappear", a very large percentage of people will say "what sort of media would you like it on".
Part of the process for some of these checks, especially for security clearances, is to find and weed out the candidates who are likely to disclose confidential information. It probably wasn't too rigorous in this case since security clearances and the extensive background checks that go with them are reserved only for US citizens. Getting a clearance, however, can be quite extensive, with investigators running down and questioning everyone you've lived and worked with for the past decade, administering polygraphs, and analyzing your behavior and personality to see if you are likely to keep quiet or blab to the first foreign agent you see. Of course, some still fall through the cracks.
There's absolutely no sense of entitlement at all. A country should be putting the employment of it's citizens ahead of those of other countries.
You got it. I applied for a job in Canada recently and it was stated on the application under no uncertain terms that Canadian citizens would be given preference.
I have a relative who works as a researcher for a major drug company. She had to move laterally in the company after they announced they were moving all new drug discovery work to China.
As a senior Computer Science PhD student, this has me worried. I also know of a few recent American CS graduates that have gone to China to work as researchers for a particular American software company because that company's US research offices weren't hiring. I still know plenty of other graduates who had no difficulty finding research positions in the US, but it seems that a few major players are shifting their work to Asia. Hopefully the rest won't follow.
So they drag these guys from halfway around the world to try them in my backyard (I live 30 miles from Norfolk, where the Eastern District court is). The Eastern District is also notorious for patent suits. In that article, the newspaper claims it's the speediness that attracts these cases, but I'm guessing it's the likelihood of getting a jury packed with current and former military members who favor harsh punishments for trivial infractions.
We've also had our share of Somali pirates and a few Guantanamo prisoners tried here.
I too am concerned by the militarization of the police. I was in Boston for New Years and there were guys in camo carrying assault rifles guarding the subways.
I remember traveling to Europe in the late 90s and being shocked to see police in the Paris subways with assault rifles. Until that point, I had never seen that at any US city, only regular uniformed police. Fast forward 15 years, and you see paramilitary police everywhere in the US.
The comparison to anonymized data in the summary is stupid. Facebook publishing any of those messages, they're just doing analysis on them. There would be good point in this article if they actually published those messages because then anonymizing doesn't work, but it's a moot point because they aren't making anything public. Only the aggregated search amounts.
The articles I've read about this don't specifically say as to how much aggregation Facebook will provide. I'm guessing that it would be a really coarse grained distribution of Facebook users' opinions and no different than the level of granularity most other political polls provide. However, if they provide breakdowns on very fine grained age ranges, geographic regions, ethnicity, gender, political views, etc, identifying specific people may be possible. I recall a similar study done with aggregated Facebook data by Harvard researchers where third parties using the data were able to identify some of the individuals.
Overall, I think this is mostly FUD. The only thing that makes this different than traditional surveys is that Facebook users don't have a choice as to whether or not they participate, but when it comes to Facebook, user choice seems to be the exception, not the rule.
Slashdot Mirror
I took a trip to Taiwan last year, lights like these were everywhere in Taipei. Instead of a progress bar, there was a digital timer in the light: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W76ZvdwNECI
Unfortunately it also drives some drivers crazy. They can't stand it that I'm going 35MPH in a 45MPH zone and go racing past... Just to end up stopped at a stoplight which then turns green a few seconds later and I go drifting on past. And still they don't get it.
What I really would like to know is if this approach is any faster or slower compared to driving the speed limit, or under what conditions it is the best strategy to use. I've seen a few research papers that talk about optimal speeds to avoid stopping but the motivation is always to save energy, not to get to a destination as quickly as possible. For me, I care more about getting where I'm going as quickly as possible -- just one traffic light can cost several minutes. If I care about time, wouldn't the optimal strategy be to drive as quickly as possible? Of course, I may still get stuck at lights, but I would be no worse than if I drove at slower speeds but never hit any lights.
According to TFA: "more than one billion aquatic organisms" are killed annually by NY's Indian Point plant.
No definition of what they mean by "aquatic organism" is given. Blue whales? Minnows? Paramecium?
I live about 5 miles from the Surry Nuclear Power Plant which draws and discharges its cooling water directly from the James River -- there are no cooling towers at all. You think this would be a worst case scenario for increasing the river water temperature and killing off organisms but I've never heard a thing about that in the 10 years I've lived here. The wiki article says that testing has minimal environmental impact but doesn't cite who performs the testing or how it was done.
Single data point. We shouldn't set the standard for appropriate police armament based on a single incident 15 years ago.
And yet, this happens all the time. 9/11 prompted the inception of Homeland Security and the infamous TSA. The Virginia Tech shooting prompted a wave of hair trigger false alarm lockdowns on college campuses where students, faculty, and staff were detained in situ and forbidden to leave for hours.
What convenient one-word label should we use for the anti-science side of this debate?
Using a "convenient one word label" turns the debate from scientific to political. It's focusing more on "us vs. them" than discussing the real issues at hand.
Which is why the label "denier" is appropriate.
The use of "denier" in this context sounds no different than a religious zealot blindly assuming that whatever is "denied" is in fact true. When it comes to arguing global warming, there appear to be more parallels with religion than with actual science.
Shouldn't all science be questioned?
Yes, but the problems with the deniers is that they don't listen to the answers.
Terms like "denier" or "believer" have no place in this debate. Both imply an unwillingness to consider what is known and what isn't.
There's lots of reasons to not believe it's true -- I'd imagine that the customs process for Commonwealth citizens isn't that onerous, especially for British citizens visiting Australia
An airport security agent asked me pretty much the same questions at JFK Airport in New York. I was on a flight from Mexico and I was only in JFK to transfer planes to San Francisco. The difference being, I was entering the United States with a valid United States passport. I couldn't believe he was asking me what I planned to do once I arrived home, either -- the temptation to say "oh I don't know, smoke some weed, I guess, maybe get on welfare" was overwhelming -- and yet I knew this guy could feasibly detain me for as long as he felt like, make me miss my flight, cost me hundreds of dollars when I had to book a new flight, and so on and so forth -- so I just had to stand there, answer his questions like I was at a job interview, and act like the whole thing wasn't completely outrageous.
I always wonder what triggers the questioning. Last year I went on a trip to China and on entry back into the US I got nothing from the customs agent other than a stamp on my passport. Same for when I returned from Sweden. About a year before that, on entry, I was asked only about the purpose of my trip before being allowed through. Then, about five years ago, I drove into Canada for a day trip to Vancouver and on the way back into the US was hounded by a customs agent with questions about where I lived, how I got to Washington state since I lived on the east coast -- did I drive there?, and a demand to search the rear seats and the trunk. They did the whole mirrors under the car routine and everything before letting me through. I remember the Canadian border agents didn't care at all that I was going there for the day. Maybe I was dressed more casually when I was in the car, I don't know.
Every content industry, gaming included, hates the first sale doctrine. Actually, every industry hates the first sale doctrine. If the car industry could prevent the sale of used cars, and force you to buy exclusively new cars, they would probably pop the cork, and the cheers would be heard all around the world. But they haven't found a way to go around the first sale doctrine.
I recall several car TV commercials where the manufacturer used the high resale value as a major selling point. In this case, the manufacturer is using first sale doctrine to attract customers.
Also, car manufacturers and dealers have found a way around the first sale doctrine. It's called a lease.
Virginia Technical University? I've never heard of that one and I've lived in Virginia for my entire life. I guess they mean Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, more commonly known as Virginia Tech. If the editors missed that error, they probably missed a lot more.
Makes you wonder, when people say we can't do that for consumer vehicles, eh? Where's the Can-do spirit?!?
You could, it just costs more. That said, most US made vehicles will run 100K miles with minimal supervision. My 12 year old GMC truck has really been quite reliable and could well run another 10 years. I'm part owner of a 40 year old plane that could fly for another 40 years.
Not everything is an iPad.
To be fair, with airplanes, hours the engine has run and takeoff/landing cycles are more important than age. Of course, being an aircraft owner, you probably already know this.
It isn't just the tech industry under attack. Maybe someone can explain why Chinese contractors and workers are building bridges here?
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/us-bridges-roads-built-chinese-firms-14594513?tab=9482930?ion=1206853&playlist=14594944
This happens more than you know. Chinese workers emigrated to the US en masse to build the first transcontinental railroad, albeit the construction was overseen by US railroad companies. Today, plenty of infrastructure and construction projects in the US are awarded to non-US firms -- Skanska comes readily to mind. The huge gantry cranes you see in every US port are manufactured in China and then shipped here, but I don't know if I'd call those infrastructure.
However, it isn't clear from the link you posted or from searching the internet whether the final assembly for the bridges you mention is performed by Chinese workers. Most of the controversy seems to be about prefab components manufactured overseas and then shipped here. Maybe the final assembly is still performed by Americans. There was also a big fuss about this when Boeing started doing this for the 787, offshoring the fabrication of large pieces of the airframe and then flying them to Everett for final assembly.
Zero-G/Microgravity is not all that great for human beings. As I understand it, besides muscle issues (ie, not using them), there's also bone-loss. I believe these are dealt with on ISS via a combination of exercise and drugs. The problem is, we don't know how much gravity is necessary. Would 0.5G be enough? 0.25G? 0.16G (ie, lunar gravity)? Do we need gravity the whole time? Could we, for example, put beds in a 1G centrifuge so people get eight hours of 1G while they sleep but spend the rest of their time in Zero-G with no ill effects?
These are things that need to get figured out.
+1 if I had mod points. This sounds like a lot of the studies that have been/are performed with respect to living at altitude. For example, I remember hearing that endurance athletes can get a significant benefit in V02 max and red blood cell count by living at altitude but training at sea level.
It protects the innocent by disincentivizing the collection of evidence through illegal means.
Punish the people who break the law, punish cops who break the law more severely because they are given more trust, but keep the evidence.
And here you have the reason for 'tainted evidence' rule - cops are not punished more severely. They are punished very lightly or not at all.
But throwing out the evidence punishes not the cops or prosecutors but the society as a whole. It makes no sense, it only serves the interest of criminals -- collude with cops, taint all evidence, then taint all evidence of tainting the evidence, and everyone goes free.
Throwing out illegally obtained evidence protects the innocent from being violated by the police when the police only have a hunch that someone is a criminal. Otherwise, there will always be a cop or prosecutor willing to break the law and receive punishment on the hopes that their illegally obtained evidence will put away a criminal mastermind. If their alleged mastermind turns out to be innocent, what then? Throwing away evidence is premised on the whole presumed innocent until proven guilty idea.
Sorry, my mistake, it was Bush who gave the apology, not Clinton.
Imagine if this was a U2 or similar piloted vehicle instead of a drone. We'd be preparing the bombers right now, along with special congressional resolutions condemning the Iraqis to death for "capturing" one of "our boys."
There are at least two cases where this has happened. The Soviets shot down a U2 in 1960 and held the pilot hostage for over a year until he was traded for another prisoner. Also, in 2001, the Chinese forced a P-3 to land on Chinese soil and held the crew hostage for 10 days before they were released. In both cases, I'm sure the Soviets and the Chinese pored over whatever sensitive stuff was left intact and wasn't destroyed by the crash in the case of the U2 or the US aircrew in the case of the P3.
I wasn't born in the 1960s so I couldn't tell you what the public sentiment was at the time, but in the 2001 incident, I don't remember anyone caring all that much about the hostage crew, all the way up to President Clinton. If I remember, the Chinese forced Clinton to give some kind of apology before they released the crew.
I travel to give the occasional presentation and I think I've only seen one or two projectors in the past 5 years that had something other than a VGA input. This is probably why many business laptops still have VGA outputs at the expense of providing others like DisplayPort, DVI, or HDMI.
The other problem is that monitors and projectors long outlive their PC contemporaries. I've got a 20" Dell LCD that I purchased in 2003 that's still going strong today. It has VGA and DVI inputs, since only in the past few years have HDMI and DisplayPort become standard on monitors.
I'm rather partial to DisplayPort and Thunderbolt since the connectors are smaller and don't have pins that are easily bent, but these outputs aren't too common in laptops, unless you have a Mac.
So, do what I did...get a 'business' account with them...then run all the servers you want, no data caps, no ports blocked, and even get a decent SLA.
I get about 10-12 down and about 4-5 up for speed...and I pay $69/month with Cox cable.
I looked at getting a business account from Cox as well. Except they wanted me to sign a 3 year contract with early termination fees when I only planned on staying where I lived for 2 years. Plus, it was $20 more per month for slower speeds. Instead, I just went with a $5/month hosting plan with unlimited bandwidth and I can still SSH into my home network if I need to.
You can do all the background checks you want. If a representative of the Chinese government says "Here's 20K$ to hand us some code", a very large percentage of people will say "Deal". If a representative of the Chinese government says "hand us the code you work on, or your relatives in China disappear", a very large percentage of people will say "what sort of media would you like it on".
Part of the process for some of these checks, especially for security clearances, is to find and weed out the candidates who are likely to disclose confidential information. It probably wasn't too rigorous in this case since security clearances and the extensive background checks that go with them are reserved only for US citizens. Getting a clearance, however, can be quite extensive, with investigators running down and questioning everyone you've lived and worked with for the past decade, administering polygraphs, and analyzing your behavior and personality to see if you are likely to keep quiet or blab to the first foreign agent you see. Of course, some still fall through the cracks.
There's absolutely no sense of entitlement at all. A country should be putting the employment of it's citizens ahead of those of other countries.
You got it. I applied for a job in Canada recently and it was stated on the application under no uncertain terms that Canadian citizens would be given preference.
I have a relative who works as a researcher for a major drug company. She had to move laterally in the company after they announced they were moving all new drug discovery work to China.
As a senior Computer Science PhD student, this has me worried. I also know of a few recent American CS graduates that have gone to China to work as researchers for a particular American software company because that company's US research offices weren't hiring. I still know plenty of other graduates who had no difficulty finding research positions in the US, but it seems that a few major players are shifting their work to Asia. Hopefully the rest won't follow.
So they drag these guys from halfway around the world to try them in my backyard (I live 30 miles from Norfolk, where the Eastern District court is). The Eastern District is also notorious for patent suits. In that article, the newspaper claims it's the speediness that attracts these cases, but I'm guessing it's the likelihood of getting a jury packed with current and former military members who favor harsh punishments for trivial infractions.
We've also had our share of Somali pirates and a few Guantanamo prisoners tried here.
I too am concerned by the militarization of the police. I was in Boston for New Years and there were guys in camo carrying assault rifles guarding the subways.
I remember traveling to Europe in the late 90s and being shocked to see police in the Paris subways with assault rifles. Until that point, I had never seen that at any US city, only regular uniformed police. Fast forward 15 years, and you see paramilitary police everywhere in the US.
The comparison to anonymized data in the summary is stupid. Facebook publishing any of those messages, they're just doing analysis on them. There would be good point in this article if they actually published those messages because then anonymizing doesn't work, but it's a moot point because they aren't making anything public. Only the aggregated search amounts.
The articles I've read about this don't specifically say as to how much aggregation Facebook will provide. I'm guessing that it would be a really coarse grained distribution of Facebook users' opinions and no different than the level of granularity most other political polls provide. However, if they provide breakdowns on very fine grained age ranges, geographic regions, ethnicity, gender, political views, etc, identifying specific people may be possible. I recall a similar study done with aggregated Facebook data by Harvard researchers where third parties using the data were able to identify some of the individuals.
Overall, I think this is mostly FUD. The only thing that makes this different than traditional surveys is that Facebook users don't have a choice as to whether or not they participate, but when it comes to Facebook, user choice seems to be the exception, not the rule.