If you decide to take on a huge quantity of high risk property like a house via financing, you should be aware of the requirements for sustaining it. It's not my job, nor that of the bank, nor your employer, to ensure you can pay back your mortgage. You voluntarily accepted the risks going into it. Suck it up and handle your responsibilities - either find a way to pay for it, or default, but either way quit bitching.
Actually, I have built a quicksort, and several kinds of hash functions and hash tables, from scratch. I've also built a FILE style I/O layer using sockets, an HTTP server, a BSD style NDBM replacement, and most recently, a high speed, memory efficient GUI text scrolling window class. All of these except the GUI module I did before I actually got a real job.
Requiring only one or two of the easy things from that list is a perfectly reasonable entry requirement.
I went with a 'family' camp of 6-8 people, with only one veteran burner, two single-year ladies, and everyone else newbies. As one of the noobs, I built a couple of cooled hexayurts, one for me and one for the veteran. They were totally worth the time we put into them, if for no other reason than naps in the dark at 2 pm.
I can safely say that we relied on nothing but ice and portapotties from others while there. Our spot is also green on the moop map. I'm not sure how I feel about going as easy as the OP. I'm sure it would make some things easier, but the experience would be so vastly different that I'm not clear it would be the same festival.
If there is actual utility, then by pretty much by definition it's not racist. It's simply a statement of how things are.
How things got that way may be associated with racist problems, and racism concerns might be raised regarding how to change something, but to call the app itself racist is just stupid. Then again, a lot of how the US handles race issues is just stupid, so I suppose that's not unexpected.
Estimating probabilities based on the best evidence we have available isn't being a charlatan; it's called being rational, and is the foundation of the scientific method. You can estimate based on strong evidence, but you can also estimate on weak evidence, and weak evidence is far from useless, especially if there's a lot of it.
You would do well to read up on the scientific method, and Bayesian probability estimation in particular, because I do not think you understand it at this point. Everything is probability, and science does not 'discover' things by black and white on/off switch.
[sarc]Naturally, everything you see on teevee is true and accurate, and all distinguished presenters are to be trusted, and all science program scripts are written for maximum accuracy and conveyance of relevant information. Why would we ever question something we saw on a tv program? Tune in for next week's "Ancient Aliens" for proof that the anti-TV conspiracy started in ancient Egypt![/sarc]
People interested in real science don't get their science from TV. People interested in real science learn from books written by scientists, from papers written by scientists, and by talking to real scientists doing real work in the actual field. Everything else is just the pop culture treatment.
You're a fool if you think that regular astronomers are 'finally twigging' out about events that don't directly radiate in the visible spectrum. They are in fact painfully aware of the fact that they can only see the visible side effects of most events.
As for your question regarding exotic matter and dust, the opinion for many decades was that dust was the answer. That opinion has been replaced with exotic matter over time, for extremely good reasons which you apparently don't yet understand.
I'm pretty sure you're confused about this. PWM is 'pulse width modulation', not 'pulse removal modulation'. If you are dimming to ten percent, you'd expect the pulses to be ten percent as wide as at 100%, with the pulse rate unchanged.
I've run a small company in several jurisdictions now, and my SO does small business accounting. I generally run my own taxes and I've had a good look at the tradoffs of hiring an employee versus hiring a contractor.
Every time, in every jurisdiction: Thou Shalt Not Hire.
Between the additional paperwork, onerous red tape, and ridiculous unemployment regulations and fees, I've decided vehemently against hiring every single time. IMHO, the only place where it makes sense are things like fast food, where you have a ton of necessary employees, can amortize the costs, and don't really have any other options.
YMMV, but in my opinion, local and state governments have seriously screwed themselves in this regard. The hiring environment is so business unfriendly that contracting will win pretty much every time.
Of course not; don't be silly. However, it's an extreme stretch to say that you'll actually get ten years out of this. As I said, this is a useful piece of information, but I'd hardly consider it an important one, and I'd be surprised if it was worth even a month of extra time over what we already know.
Personally, I'd rather we focus on things like the 7kc lysosome enzyme project. That's far more likely to give us 'an extra ten years' than this.
That depends very much on your definition of long term. Assuming it even works in humans (which isn't very likely given past experience with mouse models), will it gain a year or two? Five? Ten at the outside, before some other factor overwhelms it? Will using this mechanism have unacceptable side effects? Even if it violates everything we know about aging and happens to be a perfect cure for this class of problem, it still gains us at best 50 years: at age 120, the remainder of the body will fail due to AGE (primarily glucosepane) accumulation, which is utterly beyond the scope of brain regulation.
That's the big problem with stuff like this - it's a very specific result, in a very specific environment. It may not compound with other factors - for example, this same pathway may be one of the active pathways in caloric restriction. In fact, this is quite likely, given how deep the calorie restriction hooks are embedded in biology.
I'm not saying that it isn't valuable. It's definitely an interesting result, and one more piece of the puzzle that is age related disease and metabolism. However, it's not system repair, and without system repair, it cannot have a significant impact over the long term. Even living to 120 is not long term to me; it is an awfully young age to die, and should not be tolerated by polite society any more than starving to death should be.
... it's not quite that simple. There are many mechanisms which impact and cause aging, and while regulation of the hypothalmus may allow the body to more easily compensate for or reduce the impact of some aging symptoms, many other unaffected systems continue to go wrong and grow old. For a better description and more thorough analysis, see:
http://fightaging.org
While this information is interesting from a research standpoint, it's likely to be near-useless in the long term. The only real strategies to properly handle aging are the repair and maintenance approach. Currently, the SENS foundation is one of the biggest funders of research into repair mechanisms, and they could certainly use more support.
This patent is explicitly for PSTN modems, from the looks of it low rate V34 or V17, and is extremely unlikely to be held legitimate or even remotely applicable to WiFi if you go to court/war over it. Further, it expires very soon, so it may be best to not respond and wait for expiration. Simply looking at the diagrams included in the patent text may be sufficient to get the case thrown out, should it come to that. However, by that point, you will have wasted a ton of money.
Probably the best approach is to not respond, and do no further releases until its expiration in april so that if a suit arrives, you can say that you immediately stopped using the offending code. I don't know that I would even bother to hire an attorney given what I see in the patent, but that's up to you.
As a followup, I think those calling for a "proportional" response neglect the fact that ideology seriously skews what proportional means. How does one have a "proportional" response to a suicide bomber? How does one have a "proportional" response to rockets fired anonymously from densely populated civilian areas?
Quite frankly, the only reasonable definition of "proportional" in these situations is "hurts the other side enough that they will think twice about doing it again". People condemn the Israelis for bulldozing the homes and towns of suicide bombers, for invading by ground, and for carpet bombing areas where rockets are shot from - but the simple fact of the matter is that it takes at least that level of force to get the attention of the extremists on the Palestinian side. Yes, it sucks, and yes, innocent people die, and yes, it's unfair. But "proportional" is in the mind of the attacker, not the mind of the defender, and lobbing rockets tit-for-tat back into Palestine just isn't going to cut it.
That said, I think Israel has a serious problem with its religious nutjob haredim population. They are the primary driver of the idiotic Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, and their extremism and growth as a political power is going to cause nothing but problems going forward. It's not impossible that they will get a political ruling majority in coming years, at which point any prospect of peace or a two state solution will be completely off the table.
My preferred mechanism for dealing with the Israeli haredim extremists in the outer settlements is to finish building the wall on the 67 borders and cut them off from all support. Let them defend the land if they think they can. No government assistance.
From the summary: "Is the average Xbox 360 player at all aware that drone strikes in countries like Pakistan cause a serious number of civilian deaths on a regular basis?"
References please. What is a 'serious number', how often is 'regular basis', and what is the ratio of civilian kills to combatant kills?
What you consider a 'serious number' of civilian casualties may in fact be completely meaningless depending on the number of combatant kills, and some of us have different thresholds for the number of deaths we consider to be a problem.
Of course there are limitations and assumptions. But the point is more that it's a real test, that makes real predictions, that we can perform. Sure, it only covers a very small amount of the possible space, but that's a lot more than zero.
The idea is to throw a big enough problem at the simulation that it has no reasonable time frame in which it can complete. Sure, they could just throttle the whole thing, but it would be easier and less processor intensive to just limit the scope of problems like that.
My favorite test of the universe being a simulation is to run bigger and bigger quantum computer factorizations in the hopes of hitting some sort of processing limit in the simulator. The processing power required to run all the parallel universes for factorization increases exponentially with the key length, and presumably at some point you'd see spontaneous decoherence or some other mechanism which disrupted the process.
Observing some kind of upper limit on quantum computing power would be evidence for a simulator with limited processing power, or of a simulation with some sort of pruning algorithm to keep the number of universes from exceeding some level. Failure to observe such a limit would be evidence against these types of simulations.
Not very strong evidence, of course. But evidence we'll have within a few decades at the current rate of quantum computer development.
I agree that we shouldn't reject it outright, and I don't believe that it is being rejected outright by the research community. However, it is being greeted with a healthy amount of skepticism, and for good reason - it makes a strong claim, on what initially appears to be fairly weak evidence, that goes against a much larger body of existing research.
This is how things are supposed to work. Time will tell us whether or not it's a legitimate claim, as there will definitely be people who try to duplicate or verify it. But as I mentioned above, there's already a lot of evidence against the claim, and odds are pretty strongly against it panning out.
Keep in mind that not all strains of corn are the same, and will not have the same calories per unit weight or other nutritional values.
Consider for a moment the possibility that the control group was fed with a lower energy density corn than the monsanto strain; even a small amount of caloric difference can have a very large impact on lifespan and health in old age. Consider a second possibility that the rats simply liked the monsanto strain more, and ate more of it as a result.
This study is definitely a data point against monsanto; but it is not a very strong one, and it has a huge pile of conflicting evidence to overcome or address.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. I would say exactly that.
I just hope they continue to stand up to the unions. The time for unions is long in the past, and they do nothing but distort the market now.
If you decide to take on a huge quantity of high risk property like a house via financing, you should be aware of the requirements for sustaining it. It's not my job, nor that of the bank, nor your employer, to ensure you can pay back your mortgage. You voluntarily accepted the risks going into it. Suck it up and handle your responsibilities - either find a way to pay for it, or default, but either way quit bitching.
-dentin
Actually, I have built a quicksort, and several kinds of hash functions and hash tables, from scratch. I've also built a FILE style I/O layer using sockets, an HTTP server, a BSD style NDBM replacement, and most recently, a high speed, memory efficient GUI text scrolling window class. All of these except the GUI module I did before I actually got a real job.
Requiring only one or two of the easy things from that list is a perfectly reasonable entry requirement.
-dentin
Alter Aeon MUD
http://www.alteraeon.com
I went with a 'family' camp of 6-8 people, with only one veteran burner, two single-year ladies, and everyone else newbies. As one of the noobs, I built a couple of cooled hexayurts, one for me and one for the veteran. They were totally worth the time we put into them, if for no other reason than naps in the dark at 2 pm.
I can safely say that we relied on nothing but ice and portapotties from others while there. Our spot is also green on the moop map. I'm not sure how I feel about going as easy as the OP. I'm sure it would make some things easier, but the experience would be so vastly different that I'm not clear it would be the same festival.
If there is actual utility, then by pretty much by definition it's not racist. It's simply a statement of how things are.
How things got that way may be associated with racist problems, and racism concerns might be raised regarding how to change something, but to call the app itself racist is just stupid. Then again, a lot of how the US handles race issues is just stupid, so I suppose that's not unexpected.
Estimating probabilities based on the best evidence we have available isn't being a charlatan; it's called being rational, and is the foundation of the scientific method. You can estimate based on strong evidence, but you can also estimate on weak evidence, and weak evidence is far from useless, especially if there's a lot of it.
You would do well to read up on the scientific method, and Bayesian probability estimation in particular, because I do not think you understand it at this point. Everything is probability, and science does not 'discover' things by black and white on/off switch.
-dentin
[sarc]Naturally, everything you see on teevee is true and accurate, and all distinguished presenters are to be trusted, and all science program scripts are written for maximum accuracy and conveyance of relevant information. Why would we ever question something we saw on a tv program? Tune in for next week's "Ancient Aliens" for proof that the anti-TV conspiracy started in ancient Egypt![/sarc]
People interested in real science don't get their science from TV. People interested in real science learn from books written by scientists, from papers written by scientists, and by talking to real scientists doing real work in the actual field. Everything else is just the pop culture treatment.
-dentin
So long as you agree that it is not just plausible speculation, but currently the most likely plausible explanation, then we're on the same page.
Just because there are multiple plausible hypothesis, doesn't mean they're all equally probable.
-dentin
You're a fool if you think that regular astronomers are 'finally twigging' out about events that don't directly radiate in the visible spectrum. They are in fact painfully aware of the fact that they can only see the visible side effects of most events.
As for your question regarding exotic matter and dust, the opinion for many decades was that dust was the answer. That opinion has been replaced with exotic matter over time, for extremely good reasons which you apparently don't yet understand.
-dentin
I'm pretty sure you're confused about this. PWM is 'pulse width modulation', not 'pulse removal modulation'. If you are dimming to ten percent, you'd expect the pulses to be ten percent as wide as at 100%, with the pulse rate unchanged.
I've run a small company in several jurisdictions now, and my SO does small business accounting. I generally run my own taxes and I've had a good look at the tradoffs of hiring an employee versus hiring a contractor.
Every time, in every jurisdiction: Thou Shalt Not Hire.
Between the additional paperwork, onerous red tape, and ridiculous unemployment regulations and fees, I've decided vehemently against hiring every single time. IMHO, the only place where it makes sense are things like fast food, where you have a ton of necessary employees, can amortize the costs, and don't really have any other options.
YMMV, but in my opinion, local and state governments have seriously screwed themselves in this regard. The hiring environment is so business unfriendly that contracting will win pretty much every time.
Of course not; don't be silly. However, it's an extreme stretch to say that you'll actually get ten years out of this. As I said, this is a useful piece of information, but I'd hardly consider it an important one, and I'd be surprised if it was worth even a month of extra time over what we already know.
Personally, I'd rather we focus on things like the 7kc lysosome enzyme project. That's far more likely to give us 'an extra ten years' than this.
-dentin
That depends very much on your definition of long term. Assuming it even works in humans (which isn't very likely given past experience with mouse models), will it gain a year or two? Five? Ten at the outside, before some other factor overwhelms it? Will using this mechanism have unacceptable side effects? Even if it violates everything we know about aging and happens to be a perfect cure for this class of problem, it still gains us at best 50 years: at age 120, the remainder of the body will fail due to AGE (primarily glucosepane) accumulation, which is utterly beyond the scope of brain regulation.
That's the big problem with stuff like this - it's a very specific result, in a very specific environment. It may not compound with other factors - for example, this same pathway may be one of the active pathways in caloric restriction. In fact, this is quite likely, given how deep the calorie restriction hooks are embedded in biology.
I'm not saying that it isn't valuable. It's definitely an interesting result, and one more piece of the puzzle that is age related disease and metabolism. However, it's not system repair, and without system repair, it cannot have a significant impact over the long term. Even living to 120 is not long term to me; it is an awfully young age to die, and should not be tolerated by polite society any more than starving to death should be.
-dentin
... it's not quite that simple. There are many mechanisms which impact and cause aging, and while regulation of the hypothalmus may allow the body to more easily compensate for or reduce the impact of some aging symptoms, many other unaffected systems continue to go wrong and grow old. For a better description and more thorough analysis, see:
http://fightaging.org
While this information is interesting from a research standpoint, it's likely to be near-useless in the long term. The only real strategies to properly handle aging are the repair and maintenance approach. Currently, the SENS foundation is one of the biggest funders of research into repair mechanisms, and they could certainly use more support.
http://sens.org
-dentin
This patent is explicitly for PSTN modems, from the looks of it low rate V34 or V17, and is extremely unlikely to be held legitimate or even remotely applicable to WiFi if you go to court/war over it. Further, it expires very soon, so it may be best to not respond and wait for expiration. Simply looking at the diagrams included in the patent text may be sufficient to get the case thrown out, should it come to that. However, by that point, you will have wasted a ton of money.
Probably the best approach is to not respond, and do no further releases until its expiration in april so that if a suit arrives, you can say that you immediately stopped using the offending code. I don't know that I would even bother to hire an attorney given what I see in the patent, but that's up to you.
It could also buy us a very large chunk of the SENS research plan to make people immortal.
As a followup, I think those calling for a "proportional" response neglect the fact that ideology seriously skews what proportional means. How does one have a "proportional" response to a suicide bomber? How does one have a "proportional" response to rockets fired anonymously from densely populated civilian areas?
Quite frankly, the only reasonable definition of "proportional" in these situations is "hurts the other side enough that they will think twice about doing it again". People condemn the Israelis for bulldozing the homes and towns of suicide bombers, for invading by ground, and for carpet bombing areas where rockets are shot from - but the simple fact of the matter is that it takes at least that level of force to get the attention of the extremists on the Palestinian side. Yes, it sucks, and yes, innocent people die, and yes, it's unfair. But "proportional" is in the mind of the attacker, not the mind of the defender, and lobbing rockets tit-for-tat back into Palestine just isn't going to cut it.
That said, I think Israel has a serious problem with its religious nutjob haredim population. They are the primary driver of the idiotic Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, and their extremism and growth as a political power is going to cause nothing but problems going forward. It's not impossible that they will get a political ruling majority in coming years, at which point any prospect of peace or a two state solution will be completely off the table.
My preferred mechanism for dealing with the Israeli haredim extremists in the outer settlements is to finish building the wall on the 67 borders and cut them off from all support. Let them defend the land if they think they can. No government assistance.
From the summary: "Is the average Xbox 360 player at all aware that drone strikes in countries like Pakistan cause a serious number of civilian deaths on a regular basis?"
References please. What is a 'serious number', how often is 'regular basis', and what is the ratio of civilian kills to combatant kills?
What you consider a 'serious number' of civilian casualties may in fact be completely meaningless depending on the number of combatant kills, and some of us have different thresholds for the number of deaths we consider to be a problem.
1) Just because it's hard doesn't mean we aren't going to do it, and 2) I never said it covered all scenarios. I may be old, but I'm not an idiot.
Of course there are limitations and assumptions. But the point is more that it's a real test, that makes real predictions, that we can perform. Sure, it only covers a very small amount of the possible space, but that's a lot more than zero.
The idea is to throw a big enough problem at the simulation that it has no reasonable time frame in which it can complete. Sure, they could just throttle the whole thing, but it would be easier and less processor intensive to just limit the scope of problems like that.
My favorite test of the universe being a simulation is to run bigger and bigger quantum computer factorizations in the hopes of hitting some sort of processing limit in the simulator. The processing power required to run all the parallel universes for factorization increases exponentially with the key length, and presumably at some point you'd see spontaneous decoherence or some other mechanism which disrupted the process.
Observing some kind of upper limit on quantum computing power would be evidence for a simulator with limited processing power, or of a simulation with some sort of pruning algorithm to keep the number of universes from exceeding some level. Failure to observe such a limit would be evidence against these types of simulations.
Not very strong evidence, of course. But evidence we'll have within a few decades at the current rate of quantum computer development.
-dentin
I agree that we shouldn't reject it outright, and I don't believe that it is being rejected outright by the research community. However, it is being greeted with a healthy amount of skepticism, and for good reason - it makes a strong claim, on what initially appears to be fairly weak evidence, that goes against a much larger body of existing research.
This is how things are supposed to work. Time will tell us whether or not it's a legitimate claim, as there will definitely be people who try to duplicate or verify it. But as I mentioned above, there's already a lot of evidence against the claim, and odds are pretty strongly against it panning out.
Keep in mind that not all strains of corn are the same, and will not have the same calories per unit weight or other nutritional values.
Consider for a moment the possibility that the control group was fed with a lower energy density corn than the monsanto strain; even a small amount of caloric difference can have a very large impact on lifespan and health in old age. Consider a second possibility that the rats simply liked the monsanto strain more, and ate more of it as a result.
This study is definitely a data point against monsanto; but it is not a very strong one, and it has a huge pile of conflicting evidence to overcome or address.