When I was growing up, a long generation after Einstein and Pauling, it was still considered safe, but it was objectively much LESS SAFE than it is now.
Did the test identify 3% of students as above the 97th percentile and 10% of students above the 90th percentile? If, so, then it did its job.
Age has to counted to the DAY? At 5 years old (age for entering kindergarten), you're still slicing those hairs thin (1.66%) at one month resolution. Age to the day would be.055%. What's the resolution of the test? The only advantage of computing age to the day is it's easier than rounding or truncating to get age to the month. Also, what grade has to be considered. A 2196 day old child entering 1st grade who scores above 90% of children of his age may belong in a GT 1st-grade class (although I consider 90% a low bar for "gifted." But if that 2196 day old child is entering 2nd grade and scores the same, he's behind most of the 2nd graders in his class, and not to be compared with a 2500-day old child who scores similarly above average for her age.
The article was pretty sketchy on details. How do they establish how fast coelecanth genes are changing? It's not like they can break open a package of 300 million year old coelecanths and sequence the ancient genome. You have to compare it to other modern animals.
That was my thought. Evolution requires selective pressure that causes certain traits to become assets or liabilities. The coelacanth fills an ecological niche and doesn't have much if any competition in that niche except from other coelacanths.
Competition from other members of the same species is supposed to be one of the major drivers of natural selection.
I disagree. You phrase it as if they only have two choices: Use our laws (pushed onto other countries), or use the other countries laws. In fact, people and corporations have a third choice: Encourage practices that are acceptable.
How do you do that when political speech that is critical of the government is against the law? Yahoo can't even EXPLAIN to its Chinese customers and users what it is that they think is wrong with the way the Chinese government regulates them and pushes them around and uses their service against their users without running afoul of Chinese law enforcement and risking getting some of their Chinese employees thrown in jail.
Your thinking has been influenced by how things are in the West and you think it's normal and universal that people can advocate for what they think is right. It's just not true in half the world.
Men and women have the same brain structures. Hell, they have the same bodies initially while growing. That's why men have nonfunctional nipples. They have different hormone levels, but the minds aren't vastly different.
So, let's just ignore the fact that pretty much every animal on the planet that uses sexual reproduction has specialized roles for the different sexes. Let's just assume that their brains are identical, and they (generally -- obviously biology is not 100% precise and there's a wide spectrum of behavior) just *choose* to do what all the other members of their sex are doing.
Humans? Well, we're *special*. We couldn't *possibly* be subject to the same forces that guide mindless animals.
--Jeremy
There are measurable differences in the brain structures of men and women, but the differences in average capacity to do any mental task are insignificant and can't explain the massive differences you see in their presence in fields like engineering.
The problem of hiring female engineers happens because there are very few female applicants. I've interviewed one female applicant, ever, in 20 years as an engineer. ONE. I've worked for a number of engineering companies, small and large and I can count on ONE HAND the number of female engineering co-workers I have had, out of hundreds of engineers. They were all good at their jobs. I wouldn't hesitate to hire a woman engineer, if there was one available.
My sister is an engineer and my niece is in engineering school. They are the only two female engineers in my whole extended family, but there are dozens of male engineers, scientists and programmers.
I don't know why, but women, at least in the USA, almost universally lack interest in being engineers. No hiring policy can change that.
Try half. High efficiency silicon cells are up to 20%.
The best are now sitting at 44% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PVeff%28rev130307%29.jpg). That doesn't mean cheaper solar cells don't have lots of potential, but it does mean the editors here screwed up again. There are a few other errors in TFS as well, but this one really got me:
could lead to PVCs that cost about as much as paint to cover a one-meter square wall."
Huh? So does this mean a PV coating will will have the same cost per area as paint. Personal expertise tells me no. Does it mean a postage stamp of PV coating will coast as much as a square meter of paint? That's actually more realistic for the midterm future, but the language in TFS shows such a basic lack of understanding of both numbers and units that it's impossible to tell what the editor or submitter really meant to say.
I was referring to commercially available cells. Heterojunction cells can get as high as you say under some conditions. I think the 44% is only achieved with a 1000X light concentrating lens. That's not a fair comparison. The 20ish percent is fair because it's commercial flat cells that don't suffer from the HARD TO USE problems that come with the types that only work well under concentrators.
Add a keyboard and monitor adapter and it becomes a fairly capable portable computer. Especially combined with PCoIP or terminal services (be it Windows via RDP, Unix via X11 or whatever). You then gain the benefit of complete data protection (central backup, archive, etc).
I spent a week using only an iPad for my system admin job (including typing up documents, using the above mentioned accessories) and it was workable. Yes there were some minor annoyances (bugs in the keyboard behaviour in a couple of apps), but there were no fundamental deal-breaker type problems. I have no doubt these problems will be resolved in short order or maybe even do not exist in other tablets.
Whether it is an iPad, Android tablet or something else (dumb terminal for PCoIP or web forms perhaps running ChromeOS) - Windows on the client is on borrowed time.
If your bean counters don't evaluate based on TCO, then fire them and hire professionals.
Total cost of ownership of a laptop is less and it includes more:
example: Lenovo IdeaPad laptop
* several times the processing power
* 500 GB mass storage vs. 128 GB.
* 4 GB RAM vs. 512 MB
* display 13.3" vs. 9.6"
* keyboard is included
* doesn't require another computer to unlock full functionality
* $479 for the Lenovo vs.
$799 for the iPad with 128GB and WiFi
$15 min for a wireless keyboard
$199 for wireless external HD you will need with the iPad
sounds like total cost of ownership for the iPad based system is over $1000. More if you need an external monitor.
Of course, if you need a real operating system with a reasonable file system on your tablet (and I contend you do, for business), you'll have either a Windows 8 tablet or an Android tablet, not an iPad. They're not a lot cheaper, just better.
That $500 iPad is convenient but it sucks for productivity. All pads do. Try typing a 1-page document on one and then do the same thing on a desktop or laptop system and you will see what I mean. If your bean counters don't evaluate effects on productivity, fire them and hire professionals.
You're just proving his claim that distracted driving is not as dangerous as drunk driving.
This is assuming that drunk drivers are really causing double the fatalities compared to distracted drivers.
He said it's 1/4 as dangerous. I think it's much less than that.
I think your calculation is off. By my count, fully 10% of drivers AT ANY GIVEN TIME are talking on a cell phone and should therefore be classified as distracted. Given all other sources of distraction, the level of distraction has to be at least 15% if not much higher. How many people do you think are driving DRUNK at any given time? Seven percent????
This writer makes a fundamental mistake: believing that if full driverless technology is not perfect or at least near-perfect, it is therefore unacceptable. But this is not true. Driverless technology becomes workable when it is better than the average human driver. That's a pretty low bar to clear. I know all of us think we're above-average drivers, but there are a lot of really bad drivers out there, and even a flawed automatic system could do a better job.
It becomes workable when it achieves ALL of these things:
performs as well in most situations as a human being
doesn't perform significantly worse than a normal human being in any but extremely rare situations
is highly reliable and
it is cheaper than the alternatives
the first obvious application is to replace cab drivers.
Parallels or other virtualization, lets Windows run inside a window on Intel Macs. Full copy paste functionality between OS's & excellent performance within Windows. Put it in its sandbox, snapshot it so you can start clean everyday & most IT problems just go away, and eventually Windows can be phased out.
You still buy Windows when you run Windows in a VM.
If you sell it as a replacement for Windows and it doesn't work, it's false advertising. If you sell it as-is-no-warranty-not-sure-if-it-will-work-for-you... There's going to be a very slow uptake. And they WILL HAVE TO COMPETE WITH MICROSOFT which already works.
This is my point. Microsoft is not going away. Businesses are locked in and they are not looking for a way out. MS may lose most of or even all of the consumer market, but they will still have significant presence in the business market for at least a decade. The only way they might go away is if they get bought by a bigger company. If they do, they will call their product Windows.
Do you seriously think the number of people using Photoshop and/or Premiere is at all relevant to the entire PC-market?
When considered with the vast number of applications that only run on Windows and for which there is no complete replacement even possible on a tablet platform, yes.
Windows may be dead or dying for a HOME operating system. For business, it will keep on going.
Businesses have critical dependencies on specific software and business methods that tie into it. Such businesses, which comprise a HUGE market, are not going to switch from Windows to MacOS or anything else in the foreseeable future. To do so, they would require a full-on replacement for Windows that includes a full Windows API so every program can run just like it does on Windows, with the same access to hardware, system resources and other programs. And they are not going to go there without a GUARANTEE that whatever proposed replacement will run every program with no trouble.
Never mind that Microsoft never gave them perfect forward migration or any guarantee of it. But they were Microsoft, the same company, so there was some degree of trust that they were going to make the new system reasonably compatible with the old API and they did ever since Windows NT. Conservative companies even so waited at least a year after release before they started phasing in new systems. Sometimes well over two years.
And they're not going to go for a small company's product or a free (e.g. Linux) replacement for Windows because there's nobody to sue if they fuck up your systems and stop critical business processes.
Maybe in a decade, Microsoft will be mostly gone from the business world. Probably not.
"I thought my passthought. But maybe I didn't think it the right way. Let me try again..."
Just what we need, an even more complicated and harder to use apparatus with a reduced probability of correctly identifying the right user.
Since when is "works correctly 99% of the time" good enough for an authentication system?
And what happens to the success rate if your brain chemistry and/or thought patterns change?
We know that changes take place in the brain during puberty, pregnancy, when in love, stress, medical conditions, etc. I'm curious if their testing included these scenarios. Granted, it would prevent drive-by tweeting if people would have to calm down before they could login... (grin)
Or when your frustration level continually elevates due to repeated authentication failures.
Average heat pumps produce 4x more heat than they consume
Entirely untrue. Heat pumps MOVE energy from one place to another. They do not produce heat (well, ideally they do not, due to naturally being less that perfectly efficient they do) nor do they absorb it. When you turn on the heat, they just gather up some of the heat outside and provide it to you on the other end. When cooling, they just gather some heat from inside your home and dump it outside.
Exception: Emerancy/backup/secondary heating units exist in most heat pumps to offset extra cold winters or times when the pump has to defrost itself because it froze its outside heat exchanger and still needs to warm the home.
yeah, that's pretty pedantic, all right. It also reflects the fact that you don't understand the meaning of the word 'produce.'
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When I was growing up, a long generation after Einstein and Pauling, it was still considered safe, but it was objectively much LESS SAFE than it is now.
Did the test identify 3% of students as above the 97th percentile and 10% of students above the 90th percentile? If, so, then it did its job.
Age has to counted to the DAY? At 5 years old (age for entering kindergarten), you're still slicing those hairs thin (1.66%) at one month resolution. Age to the day would be .055%. What's the resolution of the test? The only advantage of computing age to the day is it's easier than rounding or truncating to get age to the month. Also, what grade has to be considered. A 2196 day old child entering 1st grade who scores above 90% of children of his age may belong in a GT 1st-grade class (although I consider 90% a low bar for "gifted." But if that 2196 day old child is entering 2nd grade and scores the same, he's behind most of the 2nd graders in his class, and not to be compared with a 2500-day old child who scores similarly above average for her age.
The article was pretty sketchy on details. How do they establish how fast coelecanth genes are changing? It's not like they can break open a package of 300 million year old coelecanths and sequence the ancient genome. You have to compare it to other modern animals.
That was my thought. Evolution requires selective pressure that causes certain traits to become assets or liabilities. The coelacanth fills an ecological niche and doesn't have much if any competition in that niche except from other coelacanths.
Competition from other members of the same species is supposed to be one of the major drivers of natural selection.
I disagree. You phrase it as if they only have two choices: Use our laws (pushed onto other countries), or use the other countries laws. In fact, people and corporations have a third choice: Encourage practices that are acceptable.
How do you do that when political speech that is critical of the government is against the law? Yahoo can't even EXPLAIN to its Chinese customers and users what it is that they think is wrong with the way the Chinese government regulates them and pushes them around and uses their service against their users without running afoul of Chinese law enforcement and risking getting some of their Chinese employees thrown in jail.
Your thinking has been influenced by how things are in the West and you think it's normal and universal that people can advocate for what they think is right. It's just not true in half the world.
Men and women have the same brain structures. Hell, they have the same bodies initially while growing. That's why men have nonfunctional nipples. They have different hormone levels, but the minds aren't vastly different.
So, let's just ignore the fact that pretty much every animal on the planet that uses sexual reproduction has specialized roles for the different sexes. Let's just assume that their brains are identical, and they (generally -- obviously biology is not 100% precise and there's a wide spectrum of behavior) just *choose* to do what all the other members of their sex are doing.
Humans? Well, we're *special*. We couldn't *possibly* be subject to the same forces that guide mindless animals.
--Jeremy
There are measurable differences in the brain structures of men and women, but the differences in average capacity to do any mental task are insignificant and can't explain the massive differences you see in their presence in fields like engineering.
Wow! Surely you meant to post this offensive drivel as an AC.
The problem of hiring female engineers happens because there are very few female applicants. I've interviewed one female applicant, ever, in 20 years as an engineer. ONE. I've worked for a number of engineering companies, small and large and I can count on ONE HAND the number of female engineering co-workers I have had, out of hundreds of engineers. They were all good at their jobs. I wouldn't hesitate to hire a woman engineer, if there was one available.
My sister is an engineer and my niece is in engineering school. They are the only two female engineers in my whole extended family, but there are dozens of male engineers, scientists and programmers.
I don't know why, but women, at least in the USA, almost universally lack interest in being engineers. No hiring policy can change that.
Try half. High efficiency silicon cells are up to 20%.
The best are now sitting at 44% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PVeff%28rev130307%29.jpg). That doesn't mean cheaper solar cells don't have lots of potential, but it does mean the editors here screwed up again. There are a few other errors in TFS as well, but this one really got me:
could lead to PVCs that cost about as much as paint to cover a one-meter square wall."
Huh? So does this mean a PV coating will will have the same cost per area as paint. Personal expertise tells me no. Does it mean a postage stamp of PV coating will coast as much as a square meter of paint? That's actually more realistic for the midterm future, but the language in TFS shows such a basic lack of understanding of both numbers and units that it's impossible to tell what the editor or submitter really meant to say.
I was referring to commercially available cells. Heterojunction cells can get as high as you say under some conditions. I think the 44% is only achieved with a 1000X light concentrating lens. That's not a fair comparison. The 20ish percent is fair because it's commercial flat cells that don't suffer from the HARD TO USE problems that come with the types that only work well under concentrators.
Add a keyboard and monitor adapter and it becomes a fairly capable portable computer. Especially combined with PCoIP or terminal services (be it Windows via RDP, Unix via X11 or whatever). You then gain the benefit of complete data protection (central backup, archive, etc).
I spent a week using only an iPad for my system admin job (including typing up documents, using the above mentioned accessories) and it was workable. Yes there were some minor annoyances (bugs in the keyboard behaviour in a couple of apps), but there were no fundamental deal-breaker type problems. I have no doubt these problems will be resolved in short order or maybe even do not exist in other tablets.
Whether it is an iPad, Android tablet or something else (dumb terminal for PCoIP or web forms perhaps running ChromeOS) - Windows on the client is on borrowed time.
If your bean counters don't evaluate based on TCO, then fire them and hire professionals.
Total cost of ownership of a laptop is less and it includes more:
example: Lenovo IdeaPad laptop
* several times the processing power
* 500 GB mass storage vs. 128 GB.
* 4 GB RAM vs. 512 MB
* display 13.3" vs. 9.6"
* keyboard is included
* doesn't require another computer to unlock full functionality
* $479 for the Lenovo vs.
sounds like total cost of ownership for the iPad based system is over $1000. More if you need an external monitor.
Of course, if you need a real operating system with a reasonable file system on your tablet (and I contend you do, for business), you'll have either a Windows 8 tablet or an Android tablet, not an iPad. They're not a lot cheaper, just better.
That $500 iPad is convenient but it sucks for productivity. All pads do. Try typing a 1-page document on one and then do the same thing on a desktop or laptop system and you will see what I mean. If your bean counters don't evaluate effects on productivity, fire them and hire professionals.
You're just proving his claim that distracted driving is not as dangerous as drunk driving. This is assuming that drunk drivers are really causing double the fatalities compared to distracted drivers.
He said it's 1/4 as dangerous. I think it's much less than that.
Try half. High efficiency silicon cells are up to 20%.
I think your calculation is off. By my count, fully 10% of drivers AT ANY GIVEN TIME are talking on a cell phone and should therefore be classified as distracted. Given all other sources of distraction, the level of distraction has to be at least 15% if not much higher. How many people do you think are driving DRUNK at any given time? Seven percent????
This writer makes a fundamental mistake: believing that if full driverless technology is not perfect or at least near-perfect, it is therefore unacceptable. But this is not true. Driverless technology becomes workable when it is better than the average human driver. That's a pretty low bar to clear. I know all of us think we're above-average drivers, but there are a lot of really bad drivers out there, and even a flawed automatic system could do a better job.
It becomes workable when it achieves ALL of these things:
the first obvious application is to replace cab drivers.
If I own Dell stock and I claim that limiting Icahn's ownership undermines my share value (which it probably does), I could sue the company.
I don't see evidence of Microsoft abandoning the home market. I see evidence of them needing to fork their tablet OS from their desktop OS.
That's nice. But you're that way because you were all Mac from day one. If you had started with Windows, you would still be using Windows.
Parallels or other virtualization, lets Windows run inside a window on Intel Macs. Full copy paste functionality between OS's & excellent performance within Windows. Put it in its sandbox, snapshot it so you can start clean everyday & most IT problems just go away, and eventually Windows can be phased out.
You still buy Windows when you run Windows in a VM.
If you sell it as a replacement for Windows and it doesn't work, it's false advertising. If you sell it as-is-no-warranty-not-sure-if-it-will-work-for-you... There's going to be a very slow uptake. And they WILL HAVE TO COMPETE WITH MICROSOFT which already works.
This is my point. Microsoft is not going away. Businesses are locked in and they are not looking for a way out. MS may lose most of or even all of the consumer market, but they will still have significant presence in the business market for at least a decade. The only way they might go away is if they get bought by a bigger company. If they do, they will call their product Windows.
Almost everything that works on Windows XP also works on Windows 7. Microsoft put a lot of work into making that happen.
Do you seriously think the number of people using Photoshop and/or Premiere is at all relevant to the entire PC-market?
When considered with the vast number of applications that only run on Windows and for which there is no complete replacement even possible on a tablet platform, yes.
Windows may be dead or dying for a HOME operating system. For business, it will keep on going.
Businesses have critical dependencies on specific software and business methods that tie into it. Such businesses, which comprise a HUGE market, are not going to switch from Windows to MacOS or anything else in the foreseeable future. To do so, they would require a full-on replacement for Windows that includes a full Windows API so every program can run just like it does on Windows, with the same access to hardware, system resources and other programs. And they are not going to go there without a GUARANTEE that whatever proposed replacement will run every program with no trouble.
Never mind that Microsoft never gave them perfect forward migration or any guarantee of it. But they were Microsoft, the same company, so there was some degree of trust that they were going to make the new system reasonably compatible with the old API and they did ever since Windows NT. Conservative companies even so waited at least a year after release before they started phasing in new systems. Sometimes well over two years.
And they're not going to go for a small company's product or a free (e.g. Linux) replacement for Windows because there's nobody to sue if they fuck up your systems and stop critical business processes.
Maybe in a decade, Microsoft will be mostly gone from the business world. Probably not.
"I thought my passthought. But maybe I didn't think it the right way. Let me try again..."
Just what we need, an even more complicated and harder to use apparatus with a reduced probability of correctly identifying the right user.
Since when is "works correctly 99% of the time" good enough for an authentication system?
And what happens to the success rate if your brain chemistry and/or thought patterns change?
We know that changes take place in the brain during puberty, pregnancy, when in love, stress, medical conditions, etc. I'm curious if their testing included these scenarios. Granted, it would prevent drive-by tweeting if people would have to calm down before they could login... (grin)
Or when your frustration level continually elevates due to repeated authentication failures.
I'm going to be pedantic.
Average heat pumps produce 4x more heat than they consume
Entirely untrue. Heat pumps MOVE energy from one place to another. They do not produce heat (well, ideally they do not, due to naturally being less that perfectly efficient they do) nor do they absorb it. When you turn on the heat, they just gather up some of the heat outside and provide it to you on the other end. When cooling, they just gather some heat from inside your home and dump it outside.
Exception: Emerancy/backup/secondary heating units exist in most heat pumps to offset extra cold winters or times when the pump has to defrost itself because it froze its outside heat exchanger and still needs to warm the home.
yeah, that's pretty pedantic, all right. It also reflects the fact that you don't understand the meaning of the word 'produce.'