Answer Adding A collapse Thread button in Slashcode would do wonders.
It only takes an astute reader seeing 5 or 6 posts before they realize that the current replay chain has gone hopelessly off the rails, with no hope of recovery. It seems that so may stories on slashdot are hijacked in this way, more so than back in the day.... We need a tool to tell these kids to get off our lawn. Failing that, give us a "Honey I shrunk the Kids" button, so they disappear into the grass.
Try clicking the subject line of the parent post, that works for me. If you're suggesting putting a button with similar function on every post (recursive collapse parent post?), I could get behind that, although I can see problems with it, too.
Here's what I saw when looking at the code as delivered to my browser: <p>
1. a part of the organized armed forces of a country liable to call only in emergency
<br></br>
1. a body of citizens organized for military service
<br></br>
3. the whole body of able-bodied male citizens declared by law as being subject to call to military service. </p>
If you put ordered list tags into the comment box then slashcode must have stripped them and replaced them (poorly). I'm not interested in slogging through slashcode, but I'm up for a quick test. I'll post a simple list and see if it gets munched.
Raw HTML as entered: <p>
<ol>
<li>item 1</li>
<li>item 2</li>
<li>item 3</li>
</ol> </p>
slashcode output:
item 1
item 2
item 3
Lots of extra space, but numbered properly. List tags appear intact. Can't reproduce, works for me. I'm sorry, that's the worst response to hear on a bug report, but I don't think I can help you.
The summary and its linked article are both unclear as to what "misconduct" is being discussed. Fortunately, clarity is available through the original paper:
. . . we found that misconduct is responsible for most retracted articles and that fraud or suspected fraud is the most common form of misconduct. Moreover, the incidence of retractions due to fraud is increasing, a trend that should be concerning to scientists and non-scientists alike.
The study is looking into why scientific papers are being retracted and what trends there are in the retractions.
It's too bad that the summary was so generic it could have meant anything from nosepicking to marital infidelity to fabricating data. This is an interesting topic, and it's sad that the frequency of fraudulent publications is increasing.
Do you itemize your deductions? Have you ever altered your behavior over the course of a year in order to be eligible for a specific deduction at tax time? Declared your personal vehicle as being used for business purposes?
None of these things are immoral, all are legal, and none of them are required by law. At what point on the greyscale of "complex to implement" does tax avoidance become "shady"?
What's so funny is it seems like you think I'm an extroverted NT.
Ah, MBTI! I can play that game. Actually, I thought you were self-identifying as ES?J since you were commenting judgmentally on the isolation and (presumed) theoretical nature of the other poster. Complaining about being confused for NT rounds out the profile to ESFJ. As Muad'Dib said, "What do you despise? By this you are truly known."
We would all be a lot happier if we didn't think we have to be confined to one corner of the world.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. For what it's worth, I wasn't trying to pidgeonhole you; I think you're reading something into my post that I didn't intend to be there. I know that MBTI analysts say that the preferences described are static, and if that hurts your feelings, I'm sorry; please take it out on them, not me;^)
All I intended with my post was to point out that divisiveness based on personality is counterproductive, and understanding that people can be different from you and still be good people is important. You and VortexCortex both seemed to be defensive about your styles of interaction, both of which are perfectly valid. Learning to accept others' preferences and accommodating them is well worth the effort, for everyone involved.
Of course, I may be offering advice where none is wanted; in which case I'll shut up and leave you alone.
Some people find interacting with other humans more time-worthy than playing with theoretical constructs in your head alone.
Yes, and we call them Politicians/Salesmen.
All joking aside, extroverted realists and introverted dreamers both have a place in the world, as do extroverted dreamers (artists) and introverted realists (accountants). Please don't be offended when one of the introverts refuses to join in your watercooler chats about the latest sport results. It's not a judgement of your personal worth or of sport in general (OK, it might be a judgement about sport in general), some people simply don't put as much value on personal interaction as you do. It's possible to reach out to an introvert and become friends, but you need to give them some space - they find interaction tiring rather than energizing, and conversation without a useful purpose is a stressful burden on them. That doesn't make them a bad person, just different.
We'd all be a lot happier if we were to show each other a bit more mutual respect.
I find your ideas fascinating, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I'll have to look up this program and see if it's appropriate for myself and a couple of my children. How did you hear about it, and what kind of results have other participants been able to achieve?
Seriously, please submit a Slashdot article describing your experience when it's through; I'd love to read about your successes, and it would be better "news for nerds" than a lot of stuff posted recently.
It's funny that you used the Fiesta as your counterpoint; Ken Block doesn't seem to mind pitting his Fiesta against Porches in rallycross events. I think this strengthens your analogy - not every car is built for drag racing, you've got to use it for what it was intended.
. . . The other is identify useless data. For instance, "Three customers give the $10 they each owe to their waiter. His boss hands $5 back to the waiter, saying it's on the house because they're regulars. The waiter pockets $2 as a tip, and gives $1 back to each customer. How much did each customer pay? Isn't it weird that 3 * $9 + $2 != 3 * $10?
This may be the first time I've been presented with that problem. It first struck me as a paradox like the one where I count my fingers forward from 1 on one hand and backward from 10 on the other, then add 5+6=11 to say I have eleven fingers. After scribbling a bit here's what I've come up with:
Net change of money: Owner: +$25 Waiter: +$2 Cust1: -$9 Cust2: -$9 Cust3: -$9
This all balances out, the sum of those values is zero (+27-27=0). Adding the +$2 to the -$27 to get $29 is wrong, and not (in my opinion) a problem with useless data but instead with sloppy equation prep. The other distraction is comparing it to the $30 they all paid originally; a better question seems to be "Where did the $5 change go?" The answer to that is obvious, $2 went to the Waiter, $3 to the customers. The paradox all seems to come from the confusion of money paid vs money refunded and not keeping signs straight.
Sorry if I'm coming across as a wet blanket here! Incidentally, my wife hates it when I get all mathy on stuff like this; she'll have the right answers to household budget questions by the time I've finished figuring out which columns to put things in. I just like clearly understanding why my math works out right instead of going on my gut; it keeps me from asking questions like the one posed in your paradox =)
Back in '06 Disney basically payed Pixar to come and fix the problems in their animation department, too. Disney's turned a corner since Michael Eisner left, and doesn't scare me as much as it used to.
Pollution is actually worse . . . there is more pollution than ever. Where do you live?
There's a chance he lives in Ohio, where improvements in water quality have prevented the river from catching fire since 1969. Quoting from the Wiki article:
Water quality has improved and, partially in recognition of this improvement, the Cuyahoga River was designated as one of 14 American Heritage Rivers in 1998. . . River reaches that were once devoid of fish now support 44 species. The most recent survey in 2008 revealed the two most common species in the river were hogsuckers and spotfin shiners, both moderately sensitive to water quality.
Alternately, he might be from England:
. . . the Clean Air Act [of] 1956 . . . started life as a private members bill promoted by Sir Gerald Nabarro in the aftermath of the Great London Smog of 1952. This event saw the deaths of between 4,000 and 12,000 people[citation needed] as a direct result of air pollution. The original Act was updated by the 1968 and 1993 Clean Air Acts. These Acts require that considerable areas of the UK have been declared as Smoke Control Areas where the use of solid fuel is either prohibited or only allowed in special appliances.
I'm going to assume that since I haven't in my lifetime heard of people literally dying in the western world due to smog inhalation that the situation has improved somewhat since 1952.
No, we don't live in a pristine wilderness where no industrial byproducts contaminate the natural world. Yes, there are more steps we can (and should) take to continue to reduce the impact of industry on all (esp. human) life on Earth. But to claim that we're somehow getting worse despite all of our efforts is either ignorant or delusional.
Perhaps I should ask, "Where do you live?" For what it's worth, India, China, and many places in Africa are legitimate answers if you want to hold a "pollution is worse today" position.
Jensen says Wikipedia should now devote more resources toward getting editors access to higher-quality scholarship (in private databases like JSTOR), admission to military-history conferences, and maybe even training in the field of historiography, so that they could bring the articles up to a more polished, professional standard. 'Wikipedia is now a mature reference work with a stable organizational structure and a well-established reputation. The problem is that it is not mature in a scholarly sense (PDF).'"
Hang on, that almost sounds like wanting people to do original research. I thought that was against Wikipedia policy. Training professional historians and getting them access to raw information sources would probably do wonders for the article quality, but I somehow doubt that the Cult of Wales would put up with such heresy. A lack of professionalism was taken as a known side-effect of volunteer-driven content creation, and considered a lesser evil than allowing any crackpot theorist to use the wiki as a soapbox (which allowing original research opens the door for).
That being said, having a few senior editors get technical writing courses and convincing organizations that publish peer-reviewed scholarly articles to open their archives to the public would both be great ideas.
Welcome to Slashdot! Come over to my Slashdot journal, I've made a post there that explains my methods and how I got my results. Comments are open, so I'll gladly respond to any further questions you have there.
If all else fails, Google these things and look for the magic words: Consensus between independent researchers with respectable backgrounds.
Without that, nothing means anything. Just this woman career path and the subjects of her official qualifications are enough to worry me.
From the wikipedia article you quoted:
A more recent study (October 2010) published in PLoS ONE contradicts the conclusion of Kaye and supports Schweitzer's original conclusion.[14]
14^ Peterson, JE; Lenczewski, ME; Reed, PS (October 2010). Stepanova, Anna. ed. "Influence of Microbial Biofilms on the Preservation of Primary Soft Tissue in Fossil and Extant Archosaurs". PLoS ONE 5 (10): 13A. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013334.
It sounds like her research isn't as discredited as you make it sound.
What part of her official qualifications are in question? Would you rather that her Ph.D. in Biology come from an institution more prestigious than Montana State University? The field she's working in is quite new; there are very few specimens of intact tissue from that long ago, and not many people are working on it. Broad consensus is hard to reach in young fields, if only because of the small number of qualified researchers.
I'm not saying that we should start conspiracy theories that "the Man" is keeping her down, nor that we should look at her results with unskeptical credulity. On the other hand, your response to her research sounds like an ad hominem attack instead of an actual argument about the research's merit. Cut the girl some slack; if she's wrong she'll have plenty of rope to hang herself with. If she's right, though, we shouldn't reject her results just because they disagree with our preconceived notions.
Aeon: one of a class of powers or beings conceived as emanating from the Supreme Being and performing various functions in the operations of the universe.
I see that you like dictionary.com as a reference. I prefer Merriam-Webster:
aeonnoun \-n, -än\ 1: an immeasurably or indefinitely long period of time : age 2 a usually eon : a very large division of geologic time usually longer than an era
b : a unit of geologic time equal to one billion years
I'm a sucker for archaic spellings and exaggeration, what can I say?
Thanks for cluing me in to an alternate definition. I am not up on my gnostic terminology, so I thought it an odd editorial choice to put that definition first. Several other dictionaries do the same, though, so I guess it's time to update my vocabulary =)
Is this why we haven't heard much from Mary Schwietzer lately? Six years ago she isolated soft tissue remnants from inside a T-rex femur.
More recently, Charlotte Oskam (Biologist at Murdoch University in Australia) identified DNA in fossilized egg shells.
We've always known that DNA was unlikely to survive the passage of aeons, this just puts a number to it. Specific conditions could still allow better than typical preservation, and so I dislike making an absolute statement that we'll never find it. Hopefully those who are still looking for the elusive ancient DNA will take this study as a way to focus their search rather than have their funding cut.
The difference is that this is being marketed as a "boarding gate", not as a remote checkpoint. To me, at least, that suggests much closer proximity to a specific plane and checking being done much closer to boarding time, thus being more likely to cause disruptions to the flight schedule. Add to this the already-mentioned issue of more severe response than you'd get with a metal detector, and you're set for frequent, pointless, expensive disruptions to air travel. People grumble about the security checks now, it'll be worse if it's happening at every gate right at boarding time.
The truly paranoid among us would also argue that the necessary increase in security personnel due to the security being distributed rather than centralized would be a selling point for the TSA rather than a liability. After all, we can't let an opportunity to expand police powers slip by, can we? =P
Try using iOS 5 in your shiny new iPhone 5 for sale since next Friday.
What? I think I need to brush up on my Douglas Adams, that sentence is written in a tense I'm not familiar with.
Your comment appears to suggest that iPhone 4 users will be forced to upgrade to the iPhone 5, and that no other option exists. I know we're knee deep in fanbois here, but owners of previous iPhone versions have multiple options available to them:
don't buy latest iPhone on release day, keep using current
don't upgrade OS on old iPhone, keep using current
change to Android phone and get Google goodness native
Who boots their computer everyday? Most of the people who I know boot once per month - if that.
People whose work computer is a laptop and who take it home every night. On these rigs sleep & suspend tend to take as long as a full shutdown and restart, so there's no benefit to leaving it on during transport. Almost everyone I work with does a full shutdown when they leave at night. Argue all you want that it's a lousy setup, and I'll agree with you; on the other hand, corporate computing environments are like that.
I could have made a comparison between various power modes and HDD vs SSD, but honestly it wouldn't have been worth it. I don't work in an IT shop, and my managers barely even realize that there's a difference between shutdown and sleep mode. I made the best business case I could, we all got the hardware I wanted, and everyone has more time to do their work now. Mileage varies on how that translates to extra productivity =)
I actually ran the numbers on this for my company. Based on average usage on our standard laptop image and typical employee salary:
$1.82 saved in salary time per bootup (assume one bootup per day) $2.23 saved in salary time per day due to files opened/programs launched
That's $4.05/day saved due to time I'm not waiting for my hard disk.
ROI for a $300 aftermarket SSD is 75 working days, after that they're effectively earning back ~$1000/year. Considering that our replacement cycle is 3 years, that pays back the purchase cost of the hardware. My boss now buys SSD upgrades for all of our new laptops.
On a personal note, I happily payed $1.00/GB for a hard drive several years ago, and thought it was a pretty good deal. I retired that drive only last month (too small for even my kids' computer these days). Now that SSDs are $1.00/GB it's an easy sell to my wife, and she sees every day the difference in boot times between her desktop and the kids' one (which she used to use until a year ago). I don't think I'll ever run a spinning platter HDD as a boot drive again.
Of course he has. And the gram is not the SI mass unit, the kilogram is:
Despite the prefix "kilo-", the kilogram is the base unit of mass, the kilogram, not the gram, is used in the definitions of derived units. Nonetheless, units of mass are named as if the gram were the base unit.
Neither the MKS nor the CGS metric system variant is consistent in this way; one uses a "kilo" prefix on the base mass unit, the other uses the "centi" prefix for its unit length. The AC you're responding to would probably be happier using the MTS variant.
His complaint may be of a first-world problem, but he's not wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Question:. . . How do we get there?
Answer
Adding A collapse Thread button in Slashcode would do wonders.
It only takes an astute reader seeing 5 or 6 posts before they realize that the current replay chain has gone hopelessly off the rails, with no hope of recovery.
It seems that so may stories on slashdot are hijacked in this way, more so than back in the day.... We need a tool to tell these kids to get off our lawn.
Failing that, give us a "Honey I shrunk the Kids" button, so they disappear into the grass.
Try clicking the subject line of the parent post, that works for me. If you're suggesting putting a button with similar function on every post (recursive collapse parent post?), I could get behind that, although I can see problems with it, too.
Here's what I saw when looking at the code as delivered to my browser:
<p>
1. a part of the organized armed forces of a country liable to call only in emergency
<br></br>
1. a body of citizens organized for military service
<br></br>
3. the whole body of able-bodied male citizens declared by law as being subject to call to military service.
</p>
If you put ordered list tags into the comment box then slashcode must have stripped them and replaced them (poorly). I'm not interested in slogging through slashcode, but I'm up for a quick test. I'll post a simple list and see if it gets munched.
Raw HTML as entered:
<p>
<ol>
<li>item 1</li>
<li>item 2</li>
<li>item 3</li>
</ol>
</p>
slashcode output:
Lots of extra space, but numbered properly. List tags appear intact. Can't reproduce, works for me. I'm sorry, that's the worst response to hear on a bug report, but I don't think I can help you.
The summary and its linked article are both unclear as to what "misconduct" is being discussed. Fortunately, clarity is available through the original paper:
. . . we found that misconduct is responsible for most retracted articles and that fraud or suspected fraud is the most common form of misconduct. Moreover, the incidence of retractions due to fraud is increasing, a trend that should be concerning to scientists and non-scientists alike.
The study is looking into why scientific papers are being retracted and what trends there are in the retractions.
It's too bad that the summary was so generic it could have meant anything from nosepicking to marital infidelity to fabricating data. This is an interesting topic, and it's sad that the frequency of fraudulent publications is increasing.
Do you itemize your deductions? Have you ever altered your behavior over the course of a year in order to be eligible for a specific deduction at tax time? Declared your personal vehicle as being used for business purposes?
None of these things are immoral, all are legal, and none of them are required by law. At what point on the greyscale of "complex to implement" does tax avoidance become "shady"?
What's so funny is it seems like you think I'm an extroverted NT.
Ah, MBTI! I can play that game.
Actually, I thought you were self-identifying as ES?J since you were commenting judgmentally on the isolation and (presumed) theoretical nature of the other poster. Complaining about being confused for NT rounds out the profile to ESFJ. As Muad'Dib said, "What do you despise? By this you are truly known."
We would all be a lot happier if we didn't think we have to be confined to one corner of the world.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. For what it's worth, I wasn't trying to pidgeonhole you; I think you're reading something into my post that I didn't intend to be there. I know that MBTI analysts say that the preferences described are static, and if that hurts your feelings, I'm sorry; please take it out on them, not me ;^)
All I intended with my post was to point out that divisiveness based on personality is counterproductive, and understanding that people can be different from you and still be good people is important. You and VortexCortex both seemed to be defensive about your styles of interaction, both of which are perfectly valid. Learning to accept others' preferences and accommodating them is well worth the effort, for everyone involved.
Of course, I may be offering advice where none is wanted; in which case I'll shut up and leave you alone.
Some people find interacting with other humans more time-worthy than playing with theoretical constructs in your head alone.
Yes, and we call them Politicians/Salesmen.
All joking aside, extroverted realists and introverted dreamers both have a place in the world, as do extroverted dreamers (artists) and introverted realists (accountants). Please don't be offended when one of the introverts refuses to join in your watercooler chats about the latest sport results. It's not a judgement of your personal worth or of sport in general (OK, it might be a judgement about sport in general), some people simply don't put as much value on personal interaction as you do. It's possible to reach out to an introvert and become friends, but you need to give them some space - they find interaction tiring rather than energizing, and conversation without a useful purpose is a stressful burden on them. That doesn't make them a bad person, just different.
We'd all be a lot happier if we were to show each other a bit more mutual respect.
I find your ideas fascinating, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I'll have to look up this program and see if it's appropriate for myself and a couple of my children. How did you hear about it, and what kind of results have other participants been able to achieve?
Seriously, please submit a Slashdot article describing your experience when it's through; I'd love to read about your successes, and it would be better "news for nerds" than a lot of stuff posted recently.
It's funny that you used the Fiesta as your counterpoint; Ken Block doesn't seem to mind pitting his Fiesta against Porches in rallycross events. I think this strengthens your analogy - not every car is built for drag racing, you've got to use it for what it was intended.
. . . The other is identify useless data. For instance, "Three customers give the $10 they each owe to their waiter. His boss hands $5 back to the waiter, saying it's on the house because they're regulars. The waiter pockets $2 as a tip, and gives $1 back to each customer. How much did each customer pay? Isn't it weird that 3 * $9 + $2 != 3 * $10?
This may be the first time I've been presented with that problem. It first struck me as a paradox like the one where I count my fingers forward from 1 on one hand and backward from 10 on the other, then add 5+6=11 to say I have eleven fingers. After scribbling a bit here's what I've come up with:
Net change of money:
Owner: +$25
Waiter: +$2
Cust1: -$9
Cust2: -$9
Cust3: -$9
This all balances out, the sum of those values is zero (+27-27=0). Adding the +$2 to the -$27 to get $29 is wrong, and not (in my opinion) a problem with useless data but instead with sloppy equation prep. The other distraction is comparing it to the $30 they all paid originally; a better question seems to be "Where did the $5 change go?" The answer to that is obvious, $2 went to the Waiter, $3 to the customers. The paradox all seems to come from the confusion of money paid vs money refunded and not keeping signs straight.
Sorry if I'm coming across as a wet blanket here! Incidentally, my wife hates it when I get all mathy on stuff like this; she'll have the right answers to household budget questions by the time I've finished figuring out which columns to put things in. I just like clearly understanding why my math works out right instead of going on my gut; it keeps me from asking questions like the one posed in your paradox =)
Back in '06 Disney basically payed Pixar to come and fix the problems in their animation department, too. Disney's turned a corner since Michael Eisner left, and doesn't scare me as much as it used to.
Pollution is actually worse . . . there is more pollution than ever. Where do you live?
There's a chance he lives in Ohio, where improvements in water quality have prevented the river from catching fire since 1969. Quoting from the Wiki article:
Water quality has improved and, partially in recognition of this improvement, the Cuyahoga River was designated as one of 14 American Heritage Rivers in 1998. . . River reaches that were once devoid of fish now support 44 species. The most recent survey in 2008 revealed the two most common species in the river were hogsuckers and spotfin shiners, both moderately sensitive to water quality.
Alternately, he might be from England:
. . . the Clean Air Act [of] 1956 . . . started life as a private members bill promoted by Sir Gerald Nabarro in the aftermath of the Great London Smog of 1952. This event saw the deaths of between 4,000 and 12,000 people[citation needed] as a direct result of air pollution. The original Act was updated by the 1968 and 1993 Clean Air Acts. These Acts require that considerable areas of the UK have been declared as Smoke Control Areas where the use of solid fuel is either prohibited or only allowed in special appliances.
I'm going to assume that since I haven't in my lifetime heard of people literally dying in the western world due to smog inhalation that the situation has improved somewhat since 1952.
No, we don't live in a pristine wilderness where no industrial byproducts contaminate the natural world. Yes, there are more steps we can (and should) take to continue to reduce the impact of industry on all (esp. human) life on Earth. But to claim that we're somehow getting worse despite all of our efforts is either ignorant or delusional.
Perhaps I should ask, "Where do you live?" For what it's worth, India, China, and many places in Africa are legitimate answers if you want to hold a "pollution is worse today" position.
Jensen says Wikipedia should now devote more resources toward getting editors access to higher-quality scholarship (in private databases like JSTOR), admission to military-history conferences, and maybe even training in the field of historiography, so that they could bring the articles up to a more polished, professional standard. 'Wikipedia is now a mature reference work with a stable organizational structure and a well-established reputation. The problem is that it is not mature in a scholarly sense (PDF).'"
Hang on, that almost sounds like wanting people to do original research. I thought that was against Wikipedia policy. Training professional historians and getting them access to raw information sources would probably do wonders for the article quality, but I somehow doubt that the Cult of Wales would put up with such heresy. A lack of professionalism was taken as a known side-effect of volunteer-driven content creation, and considered a lesser evil than allowing any crackpot theorist to use the wiki as a soapbox (which allowing original research opens the door for).
That being said, having a few senior editors get technical writing courses and convincing organizations that publish peer-reviewed scholarly articles to open their archives to the public would both be great ideas.
I can type in complete sentences rapidly on an iPhone. You just have to trust autocorrect and type quickly...
I don't see anything wrong with that...
Welcome to Slashdot! Come over to my Slashdot journal, I've made a post there that explains my methods and how I got my results. Comments are open, so I'll gladly respond to any further questions you have there.
Actually, it was 1993.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Schweitzer
And it's been pretty discredited since then.
If all else fails, Google these things and look for the magic words: Consensus between independent researchers with respectable backgrounds.
Without that, nothing means anything. Just this woman career path and the subjects of her official qualifications are enough to worry me.
From the wikipedia article you quoted:
A more recent study (October 2010) published in PLoS ONE contradicts the conclusion of Kaye and supports Schweitzer's original conclusion.[14]
14^ Peterson, JE; Lenczewski, ME; Reed, PS (October 2010). Stepanova, Anna. ed. "Influence of Microbial Biofilms on the Preservation of Primary Soft Tissue in Fossil and Extant Archosaurs". PLoS ONE 5 (10): 13A. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013334.
It sounds like her research isn't as discredited as you make it sound.
What part of her official qualifications are in question? Would you rather that her Ph.D. in Biology come from an institution more prestigious than Montana State University? The field she's working in is quite new; there are very few specimens of intact tissue from that long ago, and not many people are working on it. Broad consensus is hard to reach in young fields, if only because of the small number of qualified researchers.
I'm not saying that we should start conspiracy theories that "the Man" is keeping her down, nor that we should look at her results with unskeptical credulity. On the other hand, your response to her research sounds like an ad hominem attack instead of an actual argument about the research's merit. Cut the girl some slack; if she's wrong she'll have plenty of rope to hang herself with. If she's right, though, we shouldn't reject her results just because they disagree with our preconceived notions.
Aeon: one of a class of powers or beings conceived as emanating from the Supreme Being and performing various functions in the operations of the universe.
I see that you like dictionary.com as a reference. I prefer Merriam-Webster:
aeonnoun \-n, -än\
1: an immeasurably or indefinitely long period of time : age
2 a usually eon : a very large division of geologic time usually longer than an era
b : a unit of geologic time equal to one billion years
Matches definition 2 and World English Dictionary entry from dictionary.com.
I'm a sucker for archaic spellings and exaggeration, what can I say?
Thanks for cluing me in to an alternate definition. I am not up on my gnostic terminology, so I thought it an odd editorial choice to put that definition first. Several other dictionaries do the same, though, so I guess it's time to update my vocabulary =)
Is this why we haven't heard much from Mary Schwietzer lately? Six years ago she isolated soft tissue remnants from inside a T-rex femur.
More recently, Charlotte Oskam (Biologist at Murdoch University in Australia) identified DNA in fossilized egg shells.
We've always known that DNA was unlikely to survive the passage of aeons, this just puts a number to it. Specific conditions could still allow better than typical preservation, and so I dislike making an absolute statement that we'll never find it. Hopefully those who are still looking for the elusive ancient DNA will take this study as a way to focus their search rather than have their funding cut.
And that is different to today....how?
The difference is that this is being marketed as a "boarding gate", not as a remote checkpoint. To me, at least, that suggests much closer proximity to a specific plane and checking being done much closer to boarding time, thus being more likely to cause disruptions to the flight schedule. Add to this the already-mentioned issue of more severe response than you'd get with a metal detector, and you're set for frequent, pointless, expensive disruptions to air travel. People grumble about the security checks now, it'll be worse if it's happening at every gate right at boarding time.
The truly paranoid among us would also argue that the necessary increase in security personnel due to the security being distributed rather than centralized would be a selling point for the TSA rather than a liability. After all, we can't let an opportunity to expand police powers slip by, can we? =P
I clicked through out of pure curiosity over how a hyphen would be rendered differently in serif vs sans-serif...
and left disappointed =(
I thought most big rigs were already running a central tire inflation system; wouldn't a self-inflating tire be redundant for your fleet?
Try using iOS 5 in your shiny new iPhone 5 for sale since next Friday.
What? I think I need to brush up on my Douglas Adams, that sentence is written in a tense I'm not familiar with.
Your comment appears to suggest that iPhone 4 users will be forced to upgrade to the iPhone 5, and that no other option exists. I know we're knee deep in fanbois here, but owners of previous iPhone versions have multiple options available to them:
Seriously, the upgrade isn't mandatory...
Let's put it in your post's terms:
A=Argentine Peso
B=Paypal $US
C=Black Market $US
According to the article:
A=B/4.7, x=1/4.7
B=C, y=1
xy=1/4.7
A=C/6.3
A!=xyC
This is exactly what arbitrage is, and the free-market solution would eventually be that the black market rate would change to 4.7Peso/dollar.
Who boots their computer everyday? Most of the people who I know boot once per month - if that.
People whose work computer is a laptop and who take it home every night. On these rigs sleep & suspend tend to take as long as a full shutdown and restart, so there's no benefit to leaving it on during transport. Almost everyone I work with does a full shutdown when they leave at night. Argue all you want that it's a lousy setup, and I'll agree with you; on the other hand, corporate computing environments are like that.
I could have made a comparison between various power modes and HDD vs SSD, but honestly it wouldn't have been worth it. I don't work in an IT shop, and my managers barely even realize that there's a difference between shutdown and sleep mode. I made the best business case I could, we all got the hardware I wanted, and everyone has more time to do their work now. Mileage varies on how that translates to extra productivity =)
I actually ran the numbers on this for my company. Based on average usage on our standard laptop image and typical employee salary:
$1.82 saved in salary time per bootup (assume one bootup per day)
$2.23 saved in salary time per day due to files opened/programs launched
That's $4.05/day saved due to time I'm not waiting for my hard disk.
ROI for a $300 aftermarket SSD is 75 working days, after that they're effectively earning back ~$1000/year. Considering that our replacement cycle is 3 years, that pays back the purchase cost of the hardware. My boss now buys SSD upgrades for all of our new laptops.
On a personal note, I happily payed $1.00/GB for a hard drive several years ago, and thought it was a pretty good deal. I retired that drive only last month (too small for even my kids' computer these days). Now that SSDs are $1.00/GB it's an easy sell to my wife, and she sees every day the difference in boot times between her desktop and the kids' one (which she used to use until a year ago). I don't think I'll ever run a spinning platter HDD as a boot drive again.
You haven't heard of Metric prefixes?
Those *are* SI units with standard prefixes.
Of course he has. And the gram is not the SI mass unit, the kilogram is:
Despite the prefix "kilo-", the kilogram is the base unit of mass, the kilogram, not the gram, is used in the definitions of derived units.
Nonetheless, units of mass are named as if the gram were the base unit.
Neither the MKS nor the CGS metric system variant is consistent in this way; one uses a "kilo" prefix on the base mass unit, the other uses the "centi" prefix for its unit length. The AC you're responding to would probably be happier using the MTS variant.
His complaint may be of a first-world problem, but he's not wrong.