I believe an incident of this nature was described in Krakauer's book "Into Thin Air". My recollection (it's been years since I read it) was that someone decided to climb Everest despite advice from his opthalmolagists that it was inadvisable, and he did become effectively blind while on the mountain (may not have been permanent).
"He [Orkut] continued to work on inCircle, however, and signed agreements in 2002 and 2003 stating that any social networking technology he created belonged to Affinity Engines, the company said....'In July 2003, based on oral statements and written assurances from... Buyukkokten, AEI was led to believe that Buyukkokten was not involved in any software development efforts related to social networking at Google,'"
The four-seat Cessna 172 Syhawks that I learned to fly in cruise at about 110 knots and consume about 8.6 gph under typical atmospheric conditions at the flight levels used for relatively short distances. That's 14-15 mpg, though to be fair that doesn't include the additional fuel required for runup, taxi, and climbout, nor account for headwinds, which could slow you down quite a bit. OTOH, the straight-line distance between two points may well be less than the shortest distance by road, which is a factor to consider when comparing it with a car.
The two-seat Diamond DA-20 I'm planning to get checked out in shortly is quite a bit more efficient. I believe its cruise speed is about 125 knots, and cruise fuel consumption is about 6 gph. So that's 24 mpg. Not bad at all...
One unfortunate thing about avgas is that it's still low-lead rather than totally unleaded.
A "stall" does not mean an engine-out event, it means a fixed wing aircraft is travelling too slowly for the wings to produce lift.
No. This is just wrong. A stall does not mean a fixed-wing aircraft is traveling too slowly. Stalls occur when the wing exceeds the critical angle of attack, at which time laminar flow across the wing is no longer maintained and thus lift is lost.
Although this *can* happen when the plane is being flown very slowly (== at high angle of attack), low speed is *not* a necessary condition for a stall.
Microsoft paid a reward it hadn't even offered yet:
While Microsoft had not announced any reward for information about the person or group that released, and presumably wrote, the Sasser worm, the informants approached the software giant's German office on Wednesday and inquired about whether such a cash award would be paid.
"Aware of this program, individuals in Germany approached Microsoft investigators," Smith said. "We did not hesitate and made a decision to offer a reward of $250,000."
Why should Microsoft be any different? Because it's in their economic interest to pay the rewards. Every virus/worm writer they discourage undoubtedly saves them quite a bit of money, even if indirectly (less bad publicity, less hassle from OEMs who are sick of high support costs, etc.).
Yeah, this happens to me all the time at stoplights -- I'll be practically blinded by the SUV headlights behind me being reflected off my sideview mirror. Recently I've tried jockeying the mirror around with the servos in an attempt to reflect the lights right back into the owner's face, but I haven't found the right angle just yet:-(
Just curious: Where in the U.S. did you live that power went out weekly? I suspect that power reliability varies a lot from place to place, as I've lived in five U.S. cities in my life and in none of them did power go out more than once every couple of years on average.
I know there's a lot of variability in India as well. A lot of places I visited had power outages at least once a day, yet my friends in Mumbai (Bombay) say they rarely have problems.
I'd like to see those rules you cite. Last time I looked into this (a few years ago... I think I was hiring a Canadian on a TN visa and figured I'd do some research on H1Bs as well), the rule was that you could not pay an H1B visa holder less than the prevailing wage for the position. That is not semantically equivalent to "may not use them to lower wages".
Really. Only it's a Roman numeral, and it's at the end, because the firstborn males in my family going back for a few generations have had the same first, middle, and last names disambiguated only by Jr., III, IV, etc.
Nothing leet about that, in fact it seems rather medieval and I really hope that if/when I have kids my firstborn is a female and I can dodge the issue. Don't want to start looking like we're incubating an English monarchy or something.
It does make for occasional, mildly amusing mistakes when computers don't know how to deal with it, though. For example, I've gone up to ATMs and had them display "Hello, Mr. Iv!", apparently not realizing that the IV is a suffix and not my actual last name. Sometimes it just gets appended so I become something like "Mr. Jonesiv".
Megahertz indicates how many times the CPU clock cycles per second. It says nothing about how many cycles are required per instruction (or these days, how many instructions can be issuedper cycle), nor about how many instructions are required to implement a given algorithm.
To use a highly contrived and oversimplified example, a 200MHz processor that can do a floating-point multiply in 10 cycles will be faster (for that task, at least) than a 1GHz processor that requires 100 cycles.
This is from memory and might be wrong, but hey, it's slashdot... NGSCB is dependent, among other things, on a little hardware cryptographic doohickey (that's the technical term) called a Trusted Platform Module. The TPM lives on the motheboard and contains a unique machine ID -- although the abstraction model does not allow direct access to the machine ID, it just allows verification that a signature was generated by that machine. Upgrade components in the machine (other than the mobo) and you should be fine, as you still have the same TPM.
Yes, there was a story the made this very clear in the book "Angle of Attack", about the engineering behind the Apollo moon missions. It basically said that the moon mission was designed for (IIRC) a 99% confidence level (i.e. 1% chance of fatal accident). Had the confidence level been 95%, they could've done it for a tenth the cost. Had they instead wanted 99.9%, there wouldn't have been enough money on the planet to do it.
And not only does safety cost money, but that money can have perverse consequences. Some economists, for instance, have posited that increased security in U.S. airports following 9/11 may actually have caused more deaths than otherwise would have occurred. Why? Because the added security increases costs and inconvenience, and at the margin that might cause some number of people who would've flown to drive instead. And given that driving is vastly more likely to result in a fatality than a scheduled flight in a transport-category aircraft, net fatalities might actually rise.
...in a couple of his books, including the excellent "Genome" and "Nature via Nurture" (which I've just started to read). In fact, in the latter book he specifically compares the genetic differences between chimps and humans to that between horses and donkeys and speculates that chimps and humans might conceivably be able to produce viable, albeit infertile, offspring akin to mules. He hastens to add that such an experiment would be profoundly unethical -- but it certainly is an interesting theoretical question.
Birth rates fall precipitously as societies become richer. Most "developed" societies have birth rates well below the replacement rate. The trend is so dramatic that the latest population projections from the U.N., IIRC, show worldwide population peaking in something like 2050 and declining from there.
Is it ethical for an American-owned and American-operated company NOT to outsource IT jobs overseas *if* they can get higher quality code at a lower total cost (accounting for communication challenges, etc.)? Or to put it another way, it is ethical to deny a smart guy in Bangalore our business simply because we want to favor someone from the (ahem) homeland? If so, what is the ethical justification for this action?
(Note that this is totally hypothetical and I am making no claim as to the relative skills or costs of American and overseas programmers in actual practice.)
Obviously lots more people would be employed as ditch-diggers if we didn't have backhoes.
Lots more people would be employed as scribes if we didn't have printing presses.
Lots more people would be employed as farmers if we didn't have combines.
Lots more people would be employed as telephone operators if we didn't have automatic telephone switches.
Lots more people would be employed as candlemakers if we didn't have electricity.
Bottom line for individuals: If you don't want to be replaced by a machine, you'd better find something you can do better than a machine. During the industrial revolution machines replaced a lot of unskilled manual labor, and as we progress through the information revolution it's only to be expected that certain types of mental activity will be displaced by machines as well.
Bottom line for society: Technology will introduce ways to automate certain tasks and reduce their costs. That will have a deleterious effect for people whose livelihood depended on performing those tasks. But it will often have a positive impact on everyone else who enjoys the lower costs or wider availability of those technologies.
Great question! A related one is: Jane takes a DNA test that shows she is 10% likely to get breast cancer if she doesn't smoke and 90% likely if she does. Jane chooses to smoke nevertheless. To what degree is society ethically obligated to help pay for her treatment when she knew the risks she was taking?
These are all, of course, more specific instances of the general question: To what extent should DNA information and lifestyle choices (smoking, skydiving, riding motorcycles without a helmet, sitting motionless in front of a monitor consuming nothing but Doritos and Jolt all day) interact to influence insurance rates?
in my case (motorcycle roadracing) it is mostly played with yourself
Hmm, I'm surprised this isn't something that appeals to more slashdot readers, considering how proficient most are at playing with themselves:-)
Redmond has different cable provider than Seattle?
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I'm across the lake in Seattle, and I get both BBC(A) and CBC, plus PBS rebroadcasts of BBC World News, plus Chinese-language news and a variety of other goodies (if you can speak the language) on the International Channel. To be honest, I get most of my news on the Web, but I can't see why you couldn't get it on TV if you wanted to... or does Redmond have a different cable provider than Seattle and not offer these channels?
Great comments MtViewGuy. For folks not familiar with it, the Boeing assembly facility at Paine Field in Everett, just north of Seattle, is definitely worth a visit if you're into airplanes and are anywhere in the area.
The main assembly building, where Boeing's widebody jets (747/767/777) are built, is the largest building on the planet. Its footprint is nearly 100 acres -- enough to accommodate Disneyland (the one in California) with room to spare. As you drive along the outside of the building, you pass a series of hangar doors, each one of which is the size of an American football field on its side -- 300 feet wide and close to 100 feet tall.
The scale of the place is so gigantic that once you're inside, you can find yourself subject to interesting optical illusions. Looking at a plane sitting at the far end of the assembly line, you think, "That can't possibly be as big as the plane right next to me." But because your brain underestimates the distance, it also underestimates the size of what it's seeing. (This is a common perceptual effect that is, in part, responsible for the famous "moon illusion" that makes the moon look bigger when it's near the horizon than when it's closer to the zenith.)
Some other interesting stats include the number of employees on-site (24,000 in three shifts) and the annual electric bill (US$18 million).
much deeper than most of the newer subway systems in the States, which are usually built by digging a big trench and then roofing it over
Hmm, while this may be true for some U.S. subway systems, there are some quite deep ones here. The Washington Metro has a number of stations that are approx. 200 feet underground, and Portland (Oregon) has a station that's 260 feet down.
I do that on a PC all the time. If you want to do it too, download ActiveState perl and ppm install Image::Magick. You can put Cygwin on there if you want (it's obviously useful to have grep, etc.).
Is that it was known to be round, and in fact its circumference was known to within 15% of the modern value, sometime around 2000 years ago. It was only later, I think the 3rd century AD, when Christian doctrine began to refute that view.
Unfortunately all the details escape me and I haven't the time to look them up now, but IIRC there's a pretty good description of this in Boorstin's excellent book The Discoverers.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe an incident of this nature was described in Krakauer's book "Into Thin Air". My recollection (it's been years since I read it) was that someone decided to climb Everest despite advice from his opthalmolagists that it was inadvisable, and he did become effectively blind while on the mountain (may not have been permanent).
only a slight exaggeration... no worse than the hard disk guys ;-)
"He [Orkut] continued to work on inCircle, however, and signed agreements in 2002 and 2003 stating that any social networking technology he created belonged to Affinity Engines, the company said....'In July 2003, based on oral statements and written assurances from ... Buyukkokten, AEI was led to believe that Buyukkokten was not involved in any software development efforts related to social networking at Google,'"
The two-seat Diamond DA-20 I'm planning to get checked out in shortly is quite a bit more efficient. I believe its cruise speed is about 125 knots, and cruise fuel consumption is about 6 gph. So that's 24 mpg. Not bad at all...
One unfortunate thing about avgas is that it's still low-lead rather than totally unleaded.
No. This is just wrong. A stall does not mean a fixed-wing aircraft is traveling too slowly. Stalls occur when the wing exceeds the critical angle of attack, at which time laminar flow across the wing is no longer maintained and thus lift is lost.
Although this *can* happen when the plane is being flown very slowly (== at high angle of attack), low speed is *not* a necessary condition for a stall.
/licensed private pilot
Why should Microsoft be any different? Because it's in their economic interest to pay the rewards. Every virus/worm writer they discourage undoubtedly saves them quite a bit of money, even if indirectly (less bad publicity, less hassle from OEMs who are sick of high support costs, etc.).
Yeah, this happens to me all the time at stoplights -- I'll be practically blinded by the SUV headlights behind me being reflected off my sideview mirror. Recently I've tried jockeying the mirror around with the servos in an attempt to reflect the lights right back into the owner's face, but I haven't found the right angle just yet :-(
Just curious: Where in the U.S. did you live that power went out weekly? I suspect that power reliability varies a lot from place to place, as I've lived in five U.S. cities in my life and in none of them did power go out more than once every couple of years on average.
I know there's a lot of variability in India as well. A lot of places I visited had power outages at least once a day, yet my friends in Mumbai (Bombay) say they rarely have problems.
I'd like to see those rules you cite. Last time I looked into this (a few years ago... I think I was hiring a Canadian on a TN visa and figured I'd do some research on H1Bs as well), the rule was that you could not pay an H1B visa holder less than the prevailing wage for the position. That is not semantically equivalent to "may not use them to lower wages".
Really. Only it's a Roman numeral, and it's at the end, because the firstborn males in my family going back for a few generations have had the same first, middle, and last names disambiguated only by Jr., III, IV, etc.
Nothing leet about that, in fact it seems rather medieval and I really hope that if/when I have kids my firstborn is a female and I can dodge the issue. Don't want to start looking like we're incubating an English monarchy or something.
It does make for occasional, mildly amusing mistakes when computers don't know how to deal with it, though. For example, I've gone up to ATMs and had them display "Hello, Mr. Iv!", apparently not realizing that the IV is a suffix and not my actual last name. Sometimes it just gets appended so I become something like "Mr. Jonesiv".
Check out AsmL at Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/foundations/AsmL/
To use a highly contrived and oversimplified example, a 200MHz processor that can do a floating-point multiply in 10 cycles will be faster (for that task, at least) than a 1GHz processor that requires 100 cycles.
This is from memory and might be wrong, but hey, it's slashdot ... NGSCB is dependent, among other things, on a little hardware cryptographic doohickey (that's the technical term) called a Trusted Platform Module. The TPM lives on the motheboard and contains a unique machine ID -- although the abstraction model does not allow direct access to the machine ID, it just allows verification that a signature was generated by that machine. Upgrade components in the machine (other than the mobo) and you should be fine, as you still have the same TPM.
And not only does safety cost money, but that money can have perverse consequences. Some economists, for instance, have posited that increased security in U.S. airports following 9/11 may actually have caused more deaths than otherwise would have occurred. Why? Because the added security increases costs and inconvenience, and at the margin that might cause some number of people who would've flown to drive instead. And given that driving is vastly more likely to result in a fatality than a scheduled flight in a transport-category aircraft, net fatalities might actually rise.
...in a couple of his books, including the excellent "Genome" and "Nature via Nurture" (which I've just started to read). In fact, in the latter book he specifically compares the genetic differences between chimps and humans to that between horses and donkeys and speculates that chimps and humans might conceivably be able to produce viable, albeit infertile, offspring akin to mules. He hastens to add that such an experiment would be profoundly unethical -- but it certainly is an interesting theoretical question.
Birth rates fall precipitously as societies become richer. Most "developed" societies have birth rates well below the replacement rate. The trend is so dramatic that the latest population projections from the U.N., IIRC, show worldwide population peaking in something like 2050 and declining from there.
(Note that this is totally hypothetical and I am making no claim as to the relative skills or costs of American and overseas programmers in actual practice.)
Lots more people would be employed as scribes if we didn't have printing presses.
Lots more people would be employed as farmers if we didn't have combines.
Lots more people would be employed as telephone operators if we didn't have automatic
telephone switches.
Lots more people would be employed as candlemakers if we didn't have electricity.
Bottom line for individuals: If you don't want to be replaced by a machine, you'd better find something you can do better than a machine. During the industrial revolution machines replaced a lot of unskilled manual labor, and as we progress through the information revolution it's only to be expected that certain types of mental activity will be displaced by machines as well.
Bottom line for society: Technology will introduce ways to automate certain tasks and reduce their costs. That will have a deleterious effect for people whose livelihood depended on performing those tasks. But it will often have a positive impact on everyone else who enjoys the lower costs or wider availability of those technologies.
These are all, of course, more specific instances of the general question: To what extent should DNA information and lifestyle choices (smoking, skydiving, riding motorcycles without a helmet, sitting motionless in front of a monitor consuming nothing but Doritos and Jolt all day) interact to influence insurance rates?
Hmm, I'm surprised this isn't something that appeals to more slashdot readers, considering how proficient most are at playing with themselves :-)
I'm across the lake in Seattle, and I get both BBC(A) and CBC, plus PBS rebroadcasts of BBC World News, plus Chinese-language news and a variety of other goodies (if you can speak the language) on the International Channel. To be honest, I get most of my news on the Web, but I can't see why you couldn't get it on TV if you wanted to ... or does Redmond have a different cable provider than Seattle and not offer these channels?
The main assembly building, where Boeing's widebody jets (747/767/777) are built, is the largest building on the planet. Its footprint is nearly 100 acres -- enough to accommodate Disneyland (the one in California) with room to spare. As you drive along the outside of the building, you pass a series of hangar doors, each one of which is the size of an American football field on its side -- 300 feet wide and close to 100 feet tall.
The scale of the place is so gigantic that once you're inside, you can find yourself subject to interesting optical illusions. Looking at a plane sitting at the far end of the assembly line, you think, "That can't possibly be as big as the plane right next to me." But because your brain underestimates the distance, it also underestimates the size of what it's seeing. (This is a common perceptual effect that is, in part, responsible for the famous "moon illusion" that makes the moon look bigger when it's near the horizon than when it's closer to the zenith.)
Some other interesting stats include the number of employees on-site (24,000 in three shifts) and the annual electric bill (US$18 million).
Hmm, while this may be true for some U.S. subway systems, there are some quite deep ones here. The Washington Metro has a number of stations that are approx. 200 feet underground, and Portland (Oregon) has a station that's 260 feet down.
I do that on a PC all the time. If you want to do it too, download ActiveState perl and ppm install Image::Magick. You can put Cygwin on there if you want (it's obviously useful to have grep, etc.).
Unfortunately all the details escape me and I haven't the time to look them up now, but IIRC there's a pretty good description of this in Boorstin's excellent book The Discoverers.