Several years ago, I more or less tried every mainstream allergy medication on the market to deal with seasonal allergies, and found that they either didn't work at all, or had side effects that made them completely undesirable.
Earlier this year, after seeing advertisements on TV for two new competing allergy meds, I mentioned it to my doctor during my yearly physical, and lo and behold, the new product worked like a charm.
Maybe nationalized healthcare would help compell doctors to stop prescribing unnecessary or excessive treatments or medications. The most noticeable distinction is with regards to the prescription of antibiotics, which a private US doctor will almost universally prescribe to any sick patient who walks through their door. Not only is it an economic drain, but also greatly increases the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.
With the Macbook/Pro, Apple effectively closed the gap between its 'Pro' and 'Consumer' grade laptop products, and immediately faced a barrage of criticism for not offering a "Pro" 12/13" laptop.
The iBook was a fairly significant step down from the PowerBook. The MacBook is a fairly small step down from the MacBook Pro. Even back during the PowerBook days, the 12" model was often speced lower than the larger models.
That all said, I still use a 12" PowerBook as my main machine, and do wish that Apple would offer a slightly "nicer" machine at the Black MacBook's $1500 price-point (which, as it currently stands, is a very poor value for the money)
I'd also like to prescription drugs prohibited from advertising on TV/web. That's a tough one. Although I wouldn't want to see advertisements for things like blood pressure medication on TV, advertisements today for prescription medications tend to target people with undiagnosed or previously-untreatable conditions (the 'frequent urination' ones come to mind). Nobody ever imagined that Viagra would be remotely as successful as it has been, given just how difficult it is to acquire meaningful and accurate statistics for a condition such as ED.
As long as doctors have a spine with regards to what they prescribe (eg. don't give antidepressants to anyone who asks), I honestly don't see the problem. I don't like advertisements more than anybody else, but there's nothing wrong with allowing the pharma companies to market their product.
(And for Christ sake.... big pharma isn't even all that profitable compared to most industries! Look at the numbers if you don't believe me. R&D is bloody expensive.)
Damn that Water Closet Three! For any Americans in the room, that's a toilet. Oddly enough, the abbreviation also seems to have worked its way into most European languages and cultures as well.
The GPL provides an extremely good framework for an Open Source license, but includes a few too many clauses based upon RMS's personal ethos that make it somewhat unviable for widespread real-world use, not to mention the power trip he went on for GPL3.
I always perceive the GPL as a "fringe" (or far-left, if you will...) license, and have always been surprised that no sort of "moderate" license has come to prominence that finds a sort of happy middle ground between the GPL and Mozilla or BSD Licenses. Heck, even if they copied the GPL word-for-word, but eased up on the interoperability clauses, I'd be perfectly happy.
Where is our Creative Commons license for software? I think that CC has more than proven the importance of customizable licenses that are comprehensible by humans.
1) Journal articles are generally supposed to be concise explanations of your research findings. Not a thorough documentation of your lab procedures. I agree that most papers should go into more depth than they actually do, although omitting a detailed explanation of your experimental procedures is perfectly acceptable because:
2) Eliminating the nitty-gritty details forces you to create your own experimental procedure to verify the results. This greatly helps when attempting to find/isolate flaws in the original researcher's findings that may be due to faults in his procedures. A decent paper should at the very least provide a "roadmap" for repeating the experiment.
3) If this all fails, phone up the original author of the paper, and tell him that you're having trouble repeating 'X' part of his experiment. More likely than not, he'll be flattered that you've taken an interest in his research, and will be happy to assist you, as external verification will greatly increase his reputation and validity of the paper. Conversely, he really doesn't want somebody to publish a paper stating that his findings were not reproducible.
The "guts" are mostly similar to a 3.5" desktop drive, although the platters themselves have a 2.5" diameter, reducing the rotational inertia, weight, and surface area of said platters, allowing the drive to spin faster, and with less power.
Similarly, smaller platters also allow for faster seek times.
Sounds like you're purchasing your drives from a dodgy OEM, especially since all of their laptop drives ship with 3-year warranty.
I suppose this might have been different in the past, though judging a hard drive manufacturer purely based upon anecdotal evidence is a bit flimsy. There are people who say the same thing about every single other hard drive manufacturer out there.
I'll wholeheartedly agree that there can be bad batches of drives (which is most likely what you encountered), though any faults are usually rectified quickly enough that there doesn't seem to be all that huge of a difference across manufacturers when you look at the entire population.
If you've ever managed a computer lab (eg. large number of identical machines), you'll occasionally run into a batch of machines with particularly dodgy power supplies, hard drives, etc..... More interestingly, if you've got a large sample of "identical" machines that were ordered in separate batches, you'll also likely find that the patterns of failure differ somewhat between the two batches.
The only exception to this is that server/enterprise-grade drives tend to be more reliable then their counsumer-grade counterparts. This is why they cost (a lot) more.
ANSI (American National Standards Institute) laser classifications are not used in Australia, and are indicated by roman numerals instead of digits (eg. Class IIIa). There is no class 3a in the international system.
A 5-500mW visible HeNe laser would be classified as 3b under the international system, and can be extremely dangerous if placed in the wrong hands. Class 3R lasers are still potentially hazardous, although consdierably less so without the proper optics. I'm not sure if Australia are considering an exemption for 3R devices.... Most "laser pointers" should fall under Class 1 and 2.
(However, you were correct in stating that most laser pointers are ANSI Class IIIa)
(not everybody has 120VAC wall current, you know).
Actually, if you exclude North America, virtually nobody has it. Any electronics manufacturer hoping to sell equipment outside of the US and Canada should know this.
The lab is an eclectic blend of computer science, evolutionary engineering and molecular biology, essentially it's research/development and -- best of all -- the research is worth something to me and my other pet projects. If you'll excuse my interruption.... what exactly is it that your lab is attempting to do that involves all three of those things? Create life? Build cylons?
I also can't figure out for the life of me what evolutionary engineering entails...
The Soyuz has been modified extensively since it was first designed in the 1960s, and not a single crewmember has died since 1971 whilst on board a Soyuz.
Those are facts. Yes, tons of other things have gone wrong, and there have been (far too) many close calls. However, these are typically the result of other failures of the Russian Space Programme, and not the Soyuz hardware.
There's no folklore involved here. The simplistic design of the Soyuz ensures that its crew can return safely, even after multiple other systems have failed, whilst the immensely complex design of the shuttle depends upon a great many systems, the failure of any one of which can spell disaster for the crew.
Yes, but the OP's choice of universities is mildly amusing to say the least.
MIT blows its own horn very loudly. Hell, they do a better job of marketing and hyping themselves than Apple do.
The Media Lab might not produce a great deal of "legitimate" scientific output, but it does a fantastic job of capturing the imagination of the public.
Their magazine also serves as a fantastic vehicle for bolstering their own reputation.
This isn't all necessarily a bad thing, although you've got to acknowledge that most of the "top" universities owe much of reputations by shrewdly marketing themselves to the people providing the research grants.
Soyuz did indeed work exactly as it was designed to do.
However, when the design specification calls from a device that allows a crew of three to fall uncontrolled from orbit "like a rock" and survive relatively unharmed (even after the failure of several systems), I'm impressed.
Similarly, if the crew had not survived, I don't think anyone would be blaming the engineers, considering the number of other things that went wrong.
The Russians seem to have taken Murhphy's law to heart, and came up with a basic design that ensures the survival of the crew under virtually any circumstances. Even if this may have been the design goal, it's absolutely remarkable that we're capable of achieving it, just like spaceflight itself.
The last fatality was in 1971 with a much older version of the spacecraft.
Saying that Soyuz is no good is like saying that Linux is no good because the 2.2 kernel sucked.
Soyuz is a $#*#*ing remarkable spacecraft. Its reentry mechanism might not be the most elegant, but is certainly the most robust, and has proven able to get the crew back even after every other system has failed.
Since the last fatality in 1971, Soyuz cosmonauts have survived two booster failures -- one in which the booster wildly deviated off-course, and another in which the rocket exploded on the pad with the capsule still attached.
To contrast, the Space Shuttle was destroyed by a piece of foam, and must follow its landing procedure to a T in order for the crew to have even a remote chance of survival.
Intel got lucky with Core. It was never on their roadmap as a flagship desktop chip.
It's effectively a multicore version of a laptop-adapted Pentium III with a bunch of modern features tacked on.
Nobody ever envisioned that this would work as well as it did, and Intel only started paying attention to the idea once their lab in Israel was producing low-power mobile chips that were faster than their flagship Pentium 4 desktop chips.
AMD didn't have an answer to Core, because Intel themselves were largely ignorant of the fact that the P6 architecture that they had previously deemed obsolete was adaptable to more modern systems. AMD saw Itanium and Pentium 4 in Intel's roadmaps, and knew that it had nothing to fear, as the products they had developed were vastly superior to both.
Both Clinton and Obama have promised massive rail investments, and both also endorsed a big Pro-Amtrak bill in the senate last year.
Even though I'm not a Hillary supporter, her transportation plan is damn impressive, and a massive step in the right direction.
McCain made some vague promises in 2000, but has been carrying the party line of denying funding to public transport ever since.
Although public transport is starting to take off around city centers with great success, thanks to state funding (virtually all NYC commuters arrive via public transport today), Amtrak's intercity network remains pathetic.
Considering how staggeringly expensive the interstate highway system is to maintain, it's appalling and shocking that more thought hasn't been given to rail transport, especially when rail corridors could have very easily (and cheaply) been built alongside the highways.
Operating at peak capacity, a 2-track light railroad can carry as many passengers as a 16-lane freeway, without experiencing any of the bottlenecking associated with rush hour traffic seen on road networks. Heavy rail systems are even more efficient, assuming that the demand exists for one.
France is running trains along their new LGV Est line at 320km/h along nearly the entire length of the 300km track, and plans to turn the speed up to 350km/h once the system has been in operation for a few years.
The fastest train in the US, Amtrak's Acela has a top speed of 241km/h, which it is only able to attain on 18 miles of track. The rest of the Northeast Corridor is still running on equipment built during the Great Depression. The average speed of an Acela journey from DC to Boston is 129km/h (80mph). There are conventional rail systems that do better than that....
This service only exists between Boston and DC, and is extremely expensive to travel on. Most other routes are considerably worse.
Even without husk-gripping, coconuts move... they're supposed to, thats how they get from island to island...
I think this is a note to self: do NOT eat coconuts that you find on the seashore. I wonder if anyone's realized that little issue... This is only true if the island's swallow population is sufficiently large.
States maintain control over the rates/types/classification of taxes, while the federal government centrally collects and redistributes those taxes.
I also imagine that it wouldn't be too terribly hard to pass a constitutional amendment mandating that any interstate sales taxes levied by the states must be in the form of a VAT, and not be subject to completely ludicrous terms.
The sort of shenanigans that have been coming up lately, such as New Jersey demanding truck drivers pay some sort of sales/importation tax on goods being transported through the state have quite a few people understandably upset. One of the primary motivations behind the Constitution was that the states' own greed under the Articles of Federation was preventing any sort of meaningful interstate commerce from occurring.
The VAT system in the EU seems to be successful, and that's different countries.
The whole states-rights thing is a very tricky issue, considering that political borders have considerably less significance in places like the Northeast.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps.
Several years ago, I more or less tried every mainstream allergy medication on the market to deal with seasonal allergies, and found that they either didn't work at all, or had side effects that made them completely undesirable.
Earlier this year, after seeing advertisements on TV for two new competing allergy meds, I mentioned it to my doctor during my yearly physical, and lo and behold, the new product worked like a charm.
Maybe nationalized healthcare would help compell doctors to stop prescribing unnecessary or excessive treatments or medications. The most noticeable distinction is with regards to the prescription of antibiotics, which a private US doctor will almost universally prescribe to any sick patient who walks through their door. Not only is it an economic drain, but also greatly increases the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.
You went into an Apple store with the intent of purchasing a Mac and iPod, and started asking questions about Ubuntu?
Sounds like you had your mind made up from the start.
I find this amusing.
With the Macbook/Pro, Apple effectively closed the gap between its 'Pro' and 'Consumer' grade laptop products, and immediately faced a barrage of criticism for not offering a "Pro" 12/13" laptop.
The iBook was a fairly significant step down from the PowerBook. The MacBook is a fairly small step down from the MacBook Pro. Even back during the PowerBook days, the 12" model was often speced lower than the larger models.
That all said, I still use a 12" PowerBook as my main machine, and do wish that Apple would offer a slightly "nicer" machine at the Black MacBook's $1500 price-point (which, as it currently stands, is a very poor value for the money)
As long as doctors have a spine with regards to what they prescribe (eg. don't give antidepressants to anyone who asks), I honestly don't see the problem. I don't like advertisements more than anybody else, but there's nothing wrong with allowing the pharma companies to market their product.
(And for Christ sake.... big pharma isn't even all that profitable compared to most industries! Look at the numbers if you don't believe me. R&D is bloody expensive.)
Damn that Water Closet Three! For any Americans in the room, that's a toilet. Oddly enough, the abbreviation also seems to have worked its way into most European languages and cultures as well.
These are also the same people ferociously fighting against consumers copying/renting/lending digital media.
I'd be fairly happy even if they allowed some sort of digital public library to be set up...
The GPL provides an extremely good framework for an Open Source license, but includes a few too many clauses based upon RMS's personal ethos that make it somewhat unviable for widespread real-world use, not to mention the power trip he went on for GPL3.
I always perceive the GPL as a "fringe" (or far-left, if you will...) license, and have always been surprised that no sort of "moderate" license has come to prominence that finds a sort of happy middle ground between the GPL and Mozilla or BSD Licenses. Heck, even if they copied the GPL word-for-word, but eased up on the interoperability clauses, I'd be perfectly happy.
Where is our Creative Commons license for software? I think that CC has more than proven the importance of customizable licenses that are comprehensible by humans.
Gaffer tape is vastly superior to duct tape.
Easier to tear, less residue, matte surface.
Need I go on?
That's intentional for a variety of reasons.
1) Journal articles are generally supposed to be concise explanations of your research findings. Not a thorough documentation of your lab procedures. I agree that most papers should go into more depth than they actually do, although omitting a detailed explanation of your experimental procedures is perfectly acceptable because:
2) Eliminating the nitty-gritty details forces you to create your own experimental procedure to verify the results. This greatly helps when attempting to find/isolate flaws in the original researcher's findings that may be due to faults in his procedures. A decent paper should at the very least provide a "roadmap" for repeating the experiment.
3) If this all fails, phone up the original author of the paper, and tell him that you're having trouble repeating 'X' part of his experiment. More likely than not, he'll be flattered that you've taken an interest in his research, and will be happy to assist you, as external verification will greatly increase his reputation and validity of the paper. Conversely, he really doesn't want somebody to publish a paper stating that his findings were not reproducible.
The "guts" are mostly similar to a 3.5" desktop drive, although the platters themselves have a 2.5" diameter, reducing the rotational inertia, weight, and surface area of said platters, allowing the drive to spin faster, and with less power.
Similarly, smaller platters also allow for faster seek times.
Sounds like you're purchasing your drives from a dodgy OEM, especially since all of their laptop drives ship with 3-year warranty.
I suppose this might have been different in the past, though judging a hard drive manufacturer purely based upon anecdotal evidence is a bit flimsy. There are people who say the same thing about every single other hard drive manufacturer out there.
I'll wholeheartedly agree that there can be bad batches of drives (which is most likely what you encountered), though any faults are usually rectified quickly enough that there doesn't seem to be all that huge of a difference across manufacturers when you look at the entire population.
If you've ever managed a computer lab (eg. large number of identical machines), you'll occasionally run into a batch of machines with particularly dodgy power supplies, hard drives, etc..... More interestingly, if you've got a large sample of "identical" machines that were ordered in separate batches, you'll also likely find that the patterns of failure differ somewhat between the two batches.
The only exception to this is that server/enterprise-grade drives tend to be more reliable then their counsumer-grade counterparts. This is why they cost (a lot) more.
All else aside, how much do these things cost? Who's paying?
The homeland security folks have had a blank cheque to pay for whatever cool toys they want for far too long.
Air travel is expensive enough as it is, and considering just how rarely I do it, the taxpayer subsidies are sickening as well.
DOUBLE-FAIL.
ANSI (American National Standards Institute) laser classifications are not used in Australia, and are indicated by roman numerals instead of digits (eg. Class IIIa). There is no class 3a in the international system.
A 5-500mW visible HeNe laser would be classified as 3b under the international system, and can be extremely dangerous if placed in the wrong hands.
Class 3R lasers are still potentially hazardous, although consdierably less so without the proper optics. I'm not sure if Australia are considering an exemption for 3R devices....
Most "laser pointers" should fall under Class 1 and 2.
(However, you were correct in stating that most laser pointers are ANSI Class IIIa)
Actually, if you exclude North America, virtually nobody has it. Any electronics manufacturer hoping to sell equipment outside of the US and Canada should know this.
I also can't figure out for the life of me what evolutionary engineering entails...
How is that an emotional argument?
The Soyuz has been modified extensively since it was first designed in the 1960s, and not a single crewmember has died since 1971 whilst on board a Soyuz.
Those are facts. Yes, tons of other things have gone wrong, and there have been (far too) many close calls. However, these are typically the result of other failures of the Russian Space Programme, and not the Soyuz hardware.
There's no folklore involved here. The simplistic design of the Soyuz ensures that its crew can return safely, even after multiple other systems have failed, whilst the immensely complex design of the shuttle depends upon a great many systems, the failure of any one of which can spell disaster for the crew.
Yes, but the OP's choice of universities is mildly amusing to say the least.
MIT blows its own horn very loudly. Hell, they do a better job of marketing and hyping themselves than Apple do.
The Media Lab might not produce a great deal of "legitimate" scientific output, but it does a fantastic job of capturing the imagination of the public.
Their magazine also serves as a fantastic vehicle for bolstering their own reputation.
This isn't all necessarily a bad thing, although you've got to acknowledge that most of the "top" universities owe much of reputations by shrewdly marketing themselves to the people providing the research grants.
Soyuz did indeed work exactly as it was designed to do.
However, when the design specification calls from a device that allows a crew of three to fall uncontrolled from orbit "like a rock" and survive relatively unharmed (even after the failure of several systems), I'm impressed.
Similarly, if the crew had not survived, I don't think anyone would be blaming the engineers, considering the number of other things that went wrong.
The Russians seem to have taken Murhphy's law to heart, and came up with a basic design that ensures the survival of the crew under virtually any circumstances. Even if this may have been the design goal, it's absolutely remarkable that we're capable of achieving it, just like spaceflight itself.
The last fatality was in 1971 with a much older version of the spacecraft.
Saying that Soyuz is no good is like saying that Linux is no good because the 2.2 kernel sucked.
Soyuz is a $#*#*ing remarkable spacecraft. Its reentry mechanism might not be the most elegant, but is certainly the most robust, and has proven able to get the crew back even after every other system has failed.
Since the last fatality in 1971, Soyuz cosmonauts have survived two booster failures -- one in which the booster wildly deviated off-course, and another in which the rocket exploded on the pad with the capsule still attached.
To contrast, the Space Shuttle was destroyed by a piece of foam, and must follow its landing procedure to a T in order for the crew to have even a remote chance of survival.
Intel got lucky with Core. It was never on their roadmap as a flagship desktop chip.
It's effectively a multicore version of a laptop-adapted Pentium III with a bunch of modern features tacked on.
Nobody ever envisioned that this would work as well as it did, and Intel only started paying attention to the idea once their lab in Israel was producing low-power mobile chips that were faster than their flagship Pentium 4 desktop chips.
AMD didn't have an answer to Core, because Intel themselves were largely ignorant of the fact that the P6 architecture that they had previously deemed obsolete was adaptable to more modern systems. AMD saw Itanium and Pentium 4 in Intel's roadmaps, and knew that it had nothing to fear, as the products they had developed were vastly superior to both.
Remember that Intel spent billions developing the Itanium, whilst one of their cash-strapped subsidiaries in Israel came up with the Core Duo.
Just because Fusion might not be the glorious flagship envisioned by AMD doesn't mean that it'll flop.
Both Clinton and Obama have promised massive rail investments, and both also endorsed a big Pro-Amtrak bill in the senate last year.
Even though I'm not a Hillary supporter, her transportation plan is damn impressive, and a massive step in the right direction.
McCain made some vague promises in 2000, but has been carrying the party line of denying funding to public transport ever since.
Although public transport is starting to take off around city centers with great success, thanks to state funding (virtually all NYC commuters arrive via public transport today), Amtrak's intercity network remains pathetic.
Considering how staggeringly expensive the interstate highway system is to maintain, it's appalling and shocking that more thought hasn't been given to rail transport, especially when rail corridors could have very easily (and cheaply) been built alongside the highways.
Operating at peak capacity, a 2-track light railroad can carry as many passengers as a 16-lane freeway, without experiencing any of the bottlenecking associated with rush hour traffic seen on road networks. Heavy rail systems are even more efficient, assuming that the demand exists for one.
France is running trains along their new LGV Est line at 320km/h along nearly the entire length of the 300km track, and plans to turn the speed up to 350km/h once the system has been in operation for a few years.
The fastest train in the US, Amtrak's Acela has a top speed of 241km/h, which it is only able to attain on 18 miles of track. The rest of the Northeast Corridor is still running on equipment built during the Great Depression. The average speed of an Acela journey from DC to Boston is 129km/h (80mph). There are conventional rail systems that do better than that....
This service only exists between Boston and DC, and is extremely expensive to travel on. Most other routes are considerably worse.
Flying may suck, but it's a hell of a lot better than Greyhound.
Maybe someday they'll fix Amtrak....
I think this is a note to self: do NOT eat coconuts that you find on the seashore. I wonder if anyone's realized that little issue... This is only true if the island's swallow population is sufficiently large.
No. You misunderstood my point.
States maintain control over the rates/types/classification of taxes, while the federal government centrally collects and redistributes those taxes.
I also imagine that it wouldn't be too terribly hard to pass a constitutional amendment mandating that any interstate sales taxes levied by the states must be in the form of a VAT, and not be subject to completely ludicrous terms.
The sort of shenanigans that have been coming up lately, such as New Jersey demanding truck drivers pay some sort of sales/importation tax on goods being transported through the state have quite a few people understandably upset. One of the primary motivations behind the Constitution was that the states' own greed under the Articles of Federation was preventing any sort of meaningful interstate commerce from occurring.
The VAT system in the EU seems to be successful, and that's different countries.
The whole states-rights thing is a very tricky issue, considering that political borders have considerably less significance in places like the Northeast.