Guys, you're clearly missing the massive societal benefit of this news. Say you go to see a movie, only to find out that it's terrible. What do you do to help your fellow man from wasting their time and money? Write a review? Tell your friends? That's just not good enough! Now, all you have to do is send Sony an email and they'll cheerfully pull it from US distribution!
Their lifting capacity, even with the extra fuel (really, reduced fuel available for ascent) is sufficient, and the small amount of payload reduction is vastly offset by the cost savings of re-using 9 engines plus structure. Assuming everything works, of course, but their program is looking pretty good.
The driver hit something in the road; the vehicle detected the damage, realized it was going to catch on fire, and politely asked the driver to pull over and exit the vehicle. Once the driver had exited, the battery compartment started merrily burning, but the design kept the fire contained within the front compartment. At no point did the fire enter the passenger compartment, which would have been perfectly safe for the driver. Frankly, I can only dream of owning such a safe vehicle.
As the linked article isn't fully detailed, you might want to read the actual paper (seems to be free access). Among other things, they note that these photocell stickers retain their original 7.5% efficiency, which although not incredibly high, is still pretty decent, given how cheap this will likely be. It should be great for costs to have the actual wafer be reusable.
...is Canada intercepting every single text message sent in their country? TFA doesn't say, but frankly I'm pretty curious. The UK people banned for the Twitter comment actually makes a little sense, as Twitter is public, but AFAIK text messages aren't.
That's not at all true. If you are paying money to a company, then you are the customer. If you're using a "free" (ad-supported) service, then you are the *product*, and the advertisers are the customer. This is an important distinction that people should keep in mind when using services like Facebook: you are the product that the company is selling to advertisers. Your happiness and satisfaction are only relevant if they generate more saleable metrics. Don't pretend that those companies care about you; the loss of a single saleable unit is irrelevant.
Really? I don't think you've looked at this very carefully...personally I use Mozy, it's a couple bucks a month, the initial upload took a week or so, but it was all backgrounded and I never even noticed (yes, you can turn your computer off, etc.). Daily incremental backups take just a few seconds. Retrieval is via downloading, if you just want a few files, or for some money ($50? I think?) they'll overnight you a couple of DVD's with your whole backup on it. So, it's cheap, requires absolutely no thinking on my part, is fire/meteor proof, and has unlimited storage. The choice was obvious, from my point of view.
It's still not clear to me why precisely I want a hardware keyboard in my ebook reader. There just aren't a lot of reasons to interact with an ebook reader that can't be done with a couple arrow buttons.
Frankly, the Kindle looks like a bargain-basement product, with an upper-tier price. Yes I know most of the cost is in the screen, I just wish it didn't look like crap. Also, open formats would be nice...
Seems to me there's a few (obvious) technical hurdles to address, first.
Wow, it's a good thing you read this summary on Slashdot. I'm positive the team of experts that has been researching this for years has never, ever considered your off-the-cuff objections! You better call that company and its investors, and tell them that their team of scientists is wrong.
Yes I'm flaming you, but this trend is annoying. Why do Slashdotters think that experts, who make a LIVING working in their field, have never considered your obvious objections?
we'd had a lot of problems where students made a graph in Excel at school, took it home, and were unable to open it in Excel at home because it was an older version. I figured this was a natural situation in which to evangelize for open source. I got OOo installed on all the Windows computers in the labs, added instructions in the lab manual, and urged my students to use it, explaining the reasons
Your "failed evangelicalism" might have to do with the fact that Calc's graphing functionality is, at best, wildly primitive. I use OOo for many things, but Excel is actually usable for science-related graph/figure generation, and Calc is simply not up to the task. I filed a list of suggestions ~4 years ago, and the bug is still open. Until some major functionality is implemented, I don't even try to recommend OOo to science students.
Good, there's nothing more annoying when reading literature than genes given "cute" names by researchers trying to be funny. Name it after the function, so we don't have to keep looking it back up! I'm all for using the courts to force researchers to name genes properly, dammit!
Seriously, WTF are these people thinking?! Stain-resistant pants are "nanotechnology" in the sense that they have small fabric fibers! How the hell is this an environmental hazard?
Still, the idea of a "catastrophe brought on by millions of uncontrolled, destructive [Eddie Bauer pants] that chew through the environment" is very appealing to me, and I suggest that the SciFi channel makes a movie about it.
...[E]xperts note that little research has yet been conducted into the effects of nanotech materials on humans...
Yes, of course, the dangerous effects of pants on humans. These people are just fucking stupid. Way to be afraid of a marketing word.
Hasn't much of the human genome been patented by greedy companies?
In a word, no.
You can't generally patent "found" sequences. You have to create or assemble something novel. The raw sequence of the human genome is not patentable. Inserting novel or transgenic genes into the human genome might be, but that's still science fiction.
"This is incorrect. Formatting even simple papers is difficult, let alone ones with complex graphs and tables. It's not something an author can (or wants) to do."
This is patent nonsense. About 90% of the papers that I have published to require camera ready copy. In general the most that the publishers have to do is stick their copyright lines at the bottom.
To be honest, this makes you sound like some high school/college kid who has never published an article, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and ask you what field you work in. In the biological sciences (where I work), as well as the chemical and ecological sciences (in which I have close colleagues), you are completely incorrect. Trust me, scientists cannot format a paper for publishing, don't want to, and shouldn't be required to. Preparing a paper for print requires professionals that have training and experience at their jobs. Someday you should take a look at a pile of grant applications, which tend to represent the best writing most scientists can do. You're lucky to avoid serious grammatical errors, and are unlikely to see even correct indenting, much less some beautiful multi-page layout with embedded figures, multicolumn text flow, pretty typesetting, etc. It already takes months to write a paper, and now you want people with no training or interest to learn how to become publishers? Ridiculous.
Also, since the papers are reformatted (both text and graphics) for publishing, the publishers don't even want the authors to try to format their papers, because it will look like crap, and it just makes more work for them. Normally you submit your article text in a fairly non-structured form, and submit your graphics and charts separately in a different format.
"Not at all. The other major cost is the cost of reviewing papers. A major journal will receive ten times more papers than it can publish. Each one needs to be read and evaluated."
This would be read and evaluated by peer reviewers. Whom you noticable (sic) do not pay. So, in fact, its the cost of paying for an editor, and a secretary to keep track of who is doing what.
Who reads and evaluates the 50-60% of papers that are not even sent to peer review, but are rejected and returned to the authors? Who finds reviewers in the first place? Is there some magic list somewhere? Who vets their qualifications? Who matches a reviewers previous and current research experience to newly published papers? Who collates and evaluates reviewer comments, deciding which ones have merit, and which ones don't? Oh wait, that all requires a paid staff of professionals.
"Electronic typesetting is not cheap, not is something automatic just because its electronic. A human has to decide where articles go, how figures are positions etc. "
Generally speaking, the authors. What you say is true for a few journals but I doubt that it is true for most.
See my response to your first assertion. You are incorrect. Scientists are not publishers, and lack the training and interest. Also, how is the author supposed to know how his or her article fits into the journal? Do you just assume that every article starts with a full page, and waste a lot of space? There are so many problems with this idea it's not even worth contemplating.
"And if we did, would there be any way to protect the planet?"
Uh, no? First, how would you propose we detect a gamma ray burst, which travels at the speed of light (of course), before it gets here? Second, you're talking about a pulse of energy strong enough to destroy life on a planetary scale from 6,000 light years away! How the hell are you going to protect against that?! Tin foil can't help you now!
On a side note, this was a plot device in a book by Stephen Baxter, although I can't remember the title. Every couple million years, two stars in the center part of the galaxy would collide, and knock all life in the galaxy back to single-stage or before; species would struggle back up the evolutionary ladder, and just as they achieved spaceflight, the next stars would collide. Great book-
I've been a subscriber for a couple years, and they recently "forced" everyone to add their online radio bit to their subscription, in the form of a $3/mo rate hike, but then you get the online radio for "free". So far, I've been very underwhelmed, for a couple reasons:
1. The player uses lots of Flash trickery that doesn't work well, as far as I can tell- the ticker that tells you what song you are listening to is frequently wrong. 2. The player itself is WMP, which is useless to me at home (with no Windows machines); I loathe their choice, but I'm sure they had to go with WMP due to contractual concerns from the record labels, and WMP offers strong DRM. 3. The real killer, though, is the shitty quality- the "high quality" mode is only 64kbps, and sounds like crap. I am not an audiophile, and most of my music is 128k/160k mp3's, which sound great to me. XM radio sounds great to me. XM radio online sounds terrible. So, it's pretty much worthless, IMHO.
From TFA, which apparently no one has read yet: "The final papers, which he does read, are usually much better as a result of Qualrus, too."
There you go! For the reading and comprehension impaired, here's a summary of what's actually happening, which even the reporter didn't get: 1. Students write a draft of their essay, which they then upload via a Web form to this program 2. The program gives them a score on various parts of their essay, giving them valuable feedback on what needs to be improved. 3. Students improve the pieces of their essay that the program suggests. 4. Students submit the final draft to the professor, who reads and grades each one by hand. Due to steps 1-3, the quality of the final draft is much higher.
This sounds like a great thing to me. Wish I had something similar for my students. I don't have the time to read through dozens of drafts for every student. Too bad I'm not in sociology.
Except that, if he used two batteries, then he can't compare the results of the batteries to each other. Using two different batteries, you are introducing a much larger amount of experimental error than serial tests of the same battery. Can you guarantee that the internal chemistries of two old batteries will cause them to perform in *exactly* the same manner? The differences he saw in the runs were very small, less than a standard deviation (at least it looks like it to me, I wish he'd done some statistical analysis).
Slashdot Mirror
Guys, you're clearly missing the massive societal benefit of this news. Say you go to see a movie, only to find out that it's terrible. What do you do to help your fellow man from wasting their time and money? Write a review? Tell your friends? That's just not good enough! Now, all you have to do is send Sony an email and they'll cheerfully pull it from US distribution!
Their lifting capacity, even with the extra fuel (really, reduced fuel available for ascent) is sufficient, and the small amount of payload reduction is vastly offset by the cost savings of re-using 9 engines plus structure. Assuming everything works, of course, but their program is looking pretty good.
The driver hit something in the road; the vehicle detected the damage, realized it was going to catch on fire, and politely asked the driver to pull over and exit the vehicle. Once the driver had exited, the battery compartment started merrily burning, but the design kept the fire contained within the front compartment. At no point did the fire enter the passenger compartment, which would have been perfectly safe for the driver. Frankly, I can only dream of owning such a safe vehicle.
Once is happenstance.
Twice is coincidence.
Now, three times...
As the linked article isn't fully detailed, you might want to read the actual paper (seems to be free access). Among other things, they note that these photocell stickers retain their original 7.5% efficiency, which although not incredibly high, is still pretty decent, given how cheap this will likely be. It should be great for costs to have the actual wafer be reusable.
Bring a tablet, I'll bring my e-ink reader, and let's go sit in the sun and read for 4 hours.
Yes, they're a niche item, but it's a substantial and highly useful niche.
Since BBV is in bad shape, here's links to some mirrors.
In the original forum thread, a poster linked a torrent for the actual software: http://burnbit.com/torrent/204972/ESM_2_0_8_23_04_zip
I don't see a torrent for the notes archive, so here's a magnet link. Sorry if it stops working:
...is Canada intercepting every single text message sent in their country? TFA doesn't say, but frankly I'm pretty curious. The UK people banned for the Twitter comment actually makes a little sense, as Twitter is public, but AFAIK text messages aren't.
You happen to know what apps do this? Googling for "recording streaming video" is kind of worthless...
That's not at all true. If you are paying money to a company, then you are the customer. If you're using a "free" (ad-supported) service, then you are the *product*, and the advertisers are the customer. This is an important distinction that people should keep in mind when using services like Facebook: you are the product that the company is selling to advertisers. Your happiness and satisfaction are only relevant if they generate more saleable metrics. Don't pretend that those companies care about you; the loss of a single saleable unit is irrelevant.
The warrant has already been withdrawn by Swedish prosecutors. Updating the Slashdot story might be a really good idea.
Swedish prosecutors have withdrawn an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, saying the rape suspicions against him are unfounded.
In a brief statement Saturday, chief prosecutor Eva Finne says: "I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape."
Really? I don't think you've looked at this very carefully...personally I use Mozy, it's a couple bucks a month, the initial upload took a week or so, but it was all backgrounded and I never even noticed (yes, you can turn your computer off, etc.). Daily incremental backups take just a few seconds. Retrieval is via downloading, if you just want a few files, or for some money ($50? I think?) they'll overnight you a couple of DVD's with your whole backup on it. So, it's cheap, requires absolutely no thinking on my part, is fire/meteor proof, and has unlimited storage. The choice was obvious, from my point of view.
It's still not clear to me why precisely I want a hardware keyboard in my ebook reader. There just aren't a lot of reasons to interact with an ebook reader that can't be done with a couple arrow buttons.
Frankly, the Kindle looks like a bargain-basement product, with an upper-tier price. Yes I know most of the cost is in the screen, I just wish it didn't look like crap. Also, open formats would be nice...
Wow, it's a good thing you read this summary on Slashdot. I'm positive the team of experts that has been researching this for years has never, ever considered your off-the-cuff objections! You better call that company and its investors, and tell them that their team of scientists is wrong.
Yes I'm flaming you, but this trend is annoying. Why do Slashdotters think that experts, who make a LIVING working in their field, have never considered your obvious objections?
Good, there's nothing more annoying when reading literature than genes given "cute" names by researchers trying to be funny. Name it after the function, so we don't have to keep looking it back up! I'm all for using the courts to force researchers to name genes properly, dammit!
Still, the idea of a "catastrophe brought on by millions of uncontrolled, destructive [Eddie Bauer pants] that chew through the environment" is very appealing to me, and I suggest that the SciFi channel makes a movie about it.
Yes, of course, the dangerous effects of pants on humans. These people are just fucking stupid. Way to be afraid of a marketing word.
In a word, no.
You can't generally patent "found" sequences. You have to create or assemble something novel. The raw sequence of the human genome is not patentable. Inserting novel or transgenic genes into the human genome might be, but that's still science fiction.
To be honest, this makes you sound like some high school/college kid who has never published an article, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and ask you what field you work in. In the biological sciences (where I work), as well as the chemical and ecological sciences (in which I have close colleagues), you are completely incorrect. Trust me, scientists cannot format a paper for publishing, don't want to, and shouldn't be required to. Preparing a paper for print requires professionals that have training and experience at their jobs. Someday you should take a look at a pile of grant applications, which tend to represent the best writing most scientists can do. You're lucky to avoid serious grammatical errors, and are unlikely to see even correct indenting, much less some beautiful multi-page layout with embedded figures, multicolumn text flow, pretty typesetting, etc. It already takes months to write a paper, and now you want people with no training or interest to learn how to become publishers? Ridiculous.
Also, since the papers are reformatted (both text and graphics) for publishing, the publishers don't even want the authors to try to format their papers, because it will look like crap, and it just makes more work for them. Normally you submit your article text in a fairly non-structured form, and submit your graphics and charts separately in a different format.
Who reads and evaluates the 50-60% of papers that are not even sent to peer review, but are rejected and returned to the authors? Who finds reviewers in the first place? Is there some magic list somewhere? Who vets their qualifications? Who matches a reviewers previous and current research experience to newly published papers? Who collates and evaluates reviewer comments, deciding which ones have merit, and which ones don't? Oh wait, that all requires a paid staff of professionals.
See my response to your first assertion. You are incorrect. Scientists are not publishers, and lack the training and interest. Also, how is the author supposed to know how his or her article fits into the journal? Do you just assume that every article starts with a full page, and waste a lot of space? There are so many problems with this idea it's not even worth contemplating.
"And if we did, would there be any way to protect the planet?"
Uh, no? First, how would you propose we detect a gamma ray burst, which travels at the speed of light (of course), before it gets here? Second, you're talking about a pulse of energy strong enough to destroy life on a planetary scale from 6,000 light years away! How the hell are you going to protect against that?! Tin foil can't help you now!
On a side note, this was a plot device in a book by Stephen Baxter, although I can't remember the title. Every couple million years, two stars in the center part of the galaxy would collide, and knock all life in the galaxy back to single-stage or before; species would struggle back up the evolutionary ladder, and just as they achieved spaceflight, the next stars would collide. Great book-
I've been a subscriber for a couple years, and they recently "forced" everyone to add their online radio bit to their subscription, in the form of a $3/mo rate hike, but then you get the online radio for "free". So far, I've been very underwhelmed, for a couple reasons:
1. The player uses lots of Flash trickery that doesn't work well, as far as I can tell- the ticker that tells you what song you are listening to is frequently wrong.
2. The player itself is WMP, which is useless to me at home (with no Windows machines); I loathe their choice, but I'm sure they had to go with WMP due to contractual concerns from the record labels, and WMP offers strong DRM.
3. The real killer, though, is the shitty quality- the "high quality" mode is only 64kbps, and sounds like crap. I am not an audiophile, and most of my music is 128k/160k mp3's, which sound great to me. XM radio sounds great to me. XM radio online sounds terrible. So, it's pretty much worthless, IMHO.
From TFA, which apparently no one has read yet:
"The final papers, which he does read, are usually much better as a result of Qualrus, too."
There you go! For the reading and comprehension impaired, here's a summary of what's actually happening, which even the reporter didn't get:
1. Students write a draft of their essay, which they then upload via a Web form to this program
2. The program gives them a score on various parts of their essay, giving them valuable feedback on what needs to be improved.
3. Students improve the pieces of their essay that the program suggests.
4. Students submit the final draft to the professor, who reads and grades each one by hand. Due to steps 1-3, the quality of the final draft is much higher.
This sounds like a great thing to me. Wish I had something similar for my students. I don't have the time to read through dozens of drafts for every student. Too bad I'm not in sociology.
Except that, if he used two batteries, then he can't compare the results of the batteries to each other. Using two different batteries, you are introducing a much larger amount of experimental error than serial tests of the same battery. Can you guarantee that the internal chemistries of two old batteries will cause them to perform in *exactly* the same manner? The differences he saw in the runs were very small, less than a standard deviation (at least it looks like it to me, I wish he'd done some statistical analysis).
"Pi is exactly equal to 3!"
(gasps of horror)
"Sorry I had to do that, but now that I have your attention..."
You consider being a slashdot editor a reward?!