The Earth's orbital changes around the Sun varies from more circular to more elliptical and its axis wobble changes and the net effect is that the different solar inputs are what causes the major climate shift on about a 110,000 year cycle.
From the/. summary (emphasis mine):
They have concluded that the driving factor since 1900 has been greenhouse gases.
From the U of Edinburgh press release (emphasis mine):
Research examining the causes of climate change in the northern hemisphere over the past 1000 years has shown that until the year 1800, the key driver of periodic changes in climate was volcanic eruptions.
These tend to prevent sunlight reaching the Earth, causing cool, drier weather. Since 1900, greenhouse gases have been the primary cause of climate change.
Now let me tie it all together for you. Let's say we assume:
(1) Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, variations in solar radiation are the strongest determinants of global temperature.
(2) Over the course of the last thousand years, volcano eruptions have been the strongest determinants of global temperature.
(3) Over the last hundred years, anthropogenic greenhouse gasses are the strongest determinants of global temperature.
Here's the important point: you can believe ALL THREE of these things without the least contradiction. Denialist arguments seem to assume that any dominant factor must be dominant in every past period and over every timescale. This is why people scratch their heads at the denialists' "gotchas!", e.g. "Gotcha! There were no SUVs in the medieval warm period." So what? It's a straw argument. Nobody ever claimed that *all* past climate variation was due to greenhouse gasses, much less *anthropogenic* greenhouse gasses.
Well, you are right of course, the behavior was unprofessional. That doesn't mean that the reaction isn't disturbing.
Just because the inciting behavior is unreasonable doesn't make the piling on reaction *rational*. It has more than a whiff of a mob turning on someone who is suddenly perceived as vulnerable.
The people reacting to this act like they know all about this person. But do they? All they have to go on is one foolish comment. Many years ago, in the early 70s, my older teen sister volunteered in a program for intellectually disabled children -- this was at a time before this kind of service was common, or required for high school graduation. One day she remarked to one of her friends that she had to leave because it was time to go see "her retards." Word got back to one of the parents and my sister was banned from the program. Now I can understand the position of the parent defending her child, but is it reasonable for her to deprive her child of the support and help of someone he loved just because that person said something stupid?
If there is one thing I've learned over the years it's that the fruits of self-righteousness are bitter. The instinct to become part of an avenging mob is no respecter of fact, context, circumstance or consequences. It is not to be trusted.
I don't think it's so simple as "refactoring is bad". I think i'ts more that 'stopping the delivery of new value to users is bad". Cleaning up as you go along is not only a healthy practice, actually accomplishing something new is healthy for refactoring. It keeps you focused on achieving flexibility that is actually needed as opposed to that which might be useful.
California is already split into numerous pieces. Drawing some lines and formalizing it will allow each of those pieces to govern themselves as they see fit and allow people to stop bitching at each other for tromping on each others "rights".
This is certainly true on paper. In practice California is tied together in ways that aren't easy to undo. Take, for example, disputes over water underlies some of the regional hostility; under the plan region 4 realistically can't gain control of its water resources. It still must supply region 3 and 5 with water lest they dry up and blow away.
A specialized state loses some economic flexibility; in a tech down turn they aren't as buoyed agriculture and vice versa. You lose some economies of scale; wineries in region 2 and farms in region 5 and 6 and biotech companies in region 3 lose access to the life sciences programs at UC Davis. People priced out of region 3 into region 4 will potentially pay income tax in two states.
For better or worse, California is made up of diverse regions that are uncomfortably tied together.
I'm sure if you grew up in San Francisco, you'd be delighted to clear out of your hometown and let the newcomers enjoy it. I remember San Francisco before the dot com boom. It had all the charm, but it was a lot more affordable to live there. Likewise I've seen Key West go from a place where funky people lived to a place where the people who serve you your drink have to commute from an hour further north.
I was once privileged to visit Hawaii on work. I say "privileged", because I got to work with Hawaiian people rather than just have them open my car door for me. One guy took me up to the mountain headwaters of the Lao Stream, where his uncle used to drop him from a footbridge into a deep pool. He used to inner tube from there down to the ocean then hitchhike back up to the state park. Now the lower reaches of the river look like this. Why? Because the pineapple plantations have been converted to condos, and the resulting immigration boom has sucked the river dry. Meanwhile higher housing prices have forced many of his childhood friends to move to California. And you think they're happy about that because their housing dollar stretches further in Fresno than Wailuku?
The reason the free market works so efficiently is that it is, in effect, an unbeatable rationing mechanism. It mercilessly restricts the consumption of goods and encourages the production of goods where demand his high. But what happens when you commoditize a community? When the thing that makes a place special is the people, and they can't afford to live there anymore? You end up with an EPCOT center replica of what the place used to be.
You can see this in a place like Waikiki. Sheraton has mall there which is called (without any intended irony) the "Sheraton Hawaiian Village". But you won't meet any Hawaiians there, unless they're twirling fire baton or cleaning your hotel room. It's really no different from an upscale mall in Palm Springs -- with a little more swimming, a little less golf.
The AK's I saw at the last gun show ranged from $650 up to $2000. Where are you getting them for $30?
You live in rich country full of gun collectors who drive up the price for nice examples. In Africa, AK-47s can be had for around $300 [reference:http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2007/06/12/looking_for_a_deal_on_ak_47s_go_to_africa#sthash.IpUFO50V.dpbs].
It's also possible that at certain situations (e.g., after a proxy war) markets in very poor countries may be flooded with very cheap weapons, with ak-47s selling for as little as $6 [reference http://archive.is/5gesc%5D. However this is obviously not a sustainable price; it only reflects a glut on the local market. Also, these aren't places you'd want to live, despite the occasional gun purchase bargain.
Same here. Had a T42 sitting on a high lab bench doing a big database update and somebody knocked onto the concrete floor. Aside from a hairline crack in the corner it landed on, it was perfectly fine.
Well, I was agreeing with you, but I took a slightly more skeptical position with respect to science fiction enthusiasts' actual knowledge of science. You suggested that science fiction writers might be in a slightly privileged position in comparison to artists because they have more of an understanding of nature. That may be true of *some* science fiction authors (e.g. David Brin, who is a working scientist), but by in large the science fiction community displays what to my mind is a deceptively superficial knowledge of science.
Take the lithium deuteride example. Yes, I agree a sci-fi writer is more likely to know offhand that it's used in thermonuclear bombs than an average artist. But that is really just a piece of technology trivia. It's not *working* knowledge. What's the difference? Working knowledge allows you to make valid inferences, or at least leads you in the right direction. As far as the author was concerned "lithium deuteride" might as well have been magic pixie dust. He didn't realize that it's usefulness is as a way of packing a lot of hydrogen (or rather deuterium) atoms into a confined space -- the very reason LiH is of interest for storage and transport of hydrogen to be used in fuel cells. If he *had* understood this, he could have done rough scaling calculations on th required mass for his hypothetical warhead. That would be an example of working knowledge; although it wouldn't man he knows anything about economics, or biology (often a weak spot in sci-fi in my opinion).
So in my opinion a science fiction author is not in a *privileged* position relative to an artist to have an opinion about things like economics; nor is he even in a privileged position relative to an artist to have an opinion about science. Not necessarily. For one thing I think you're selling short the intellectual abilities of artists. But the sci-fi writer certainly has a right to have and express opinions; they just aren't any more credible *because* he's a sci-fi writer.
Well, if you outlawed every form of argument a simpleton can misconstrue, you might as well cut your own tongue out.
Literature is great way of raising questions. It's a lousy way of *answering* them. You should never walk away from a book convinced of anything, whether it is science fiction, historical drama, or a Harlequin romance. That's because an author controls the domain of discourse in fiction. He creates the fiction world and as much of its history, natural science, and society as suits his purpose. He can produce a socialist utopia or a Galt's Gulch, whichever serves his story -- or his biases.
As for the science fiction fan's supposed knowledge of nature, I'd be suspicious of it. While it's true that sci-fi fans often have familiarity with physical science and technology that exceeds the general public, that's hardly a ringing endorsement. In my writing group, I recently critiqued a manuscript in which Shiite terrorists, working under a Wahhabist imam, build a lithium deuteride super-warhead and launch it on an ICBM into equatorial orbit to cause world-wide destruction of electronic equipment via EMP. Now virtually *every* aspect of this scenario is demonstrably *wrong*. When I pointed this out, the author's reaction was "It doesn't matter." Now there's something to be said for this. All he really needs is the set-up for his post-apocalyptic adventure, and it could just as well be magic and pixie dust as EMP and lithium deuteride. But I feel that as far as you explain anything, that explanation ought to hold water.
The thing about scientific literacy is that it isn't knowledge of a bunch of random, disconnected facts (e.g. lithium deuteride is used in thermonuclear warheads) as it is a capacity to figure things out, like whether it is remotely feasible to take out the entire world with EMP from a single warhead. Basic fact-finding and simple computation.
Well, that's enough information to confirm that DNA is not involved. While the methodology may be intrusive and problematic from an informed consent point of view, it's not as alarming as the police randomly stopping motorists to add their DNA to a surveillance database.
If this is in linux, this might have something to do with ACPI. The firmware has a table called the DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table) which basically tells the operating system how to turn integrated peripherals like network cards off and on when going to sleep or waking up.
One peculiarity of the DSDT is that the ACPI specification allows it to include different instructions to different operating systems, and this is a common source of problems in linux installs. Some manufacturers (Toshiba) deliberately sabotage non-Windows operating systems in their DSDTs. Others simply deliver DSDTs that are untested and potentially buggy in non-windows operating systems.
Anyhow, an OS can switch devices off an on itself using ACPI, so I think ACPI may trump BIOS settings. One way to test this is to boot with ACPI turned off. If this fixes the problem of the mic being available even when disabled in BIOS, then you have and ACPI/DSDT problem. If not, then it is a design flaw in the machine's design (e.g. turning the mic off in BIOS simply turns the gain to 0) and you wasted your time reading this post.
How many people here (a) have read the Divine Comedy and (b) worked as a programmer? I'm sure I'm not the only one, but we've got to be a pretty small audience.
Who do you think is the analog of Beatrice? Or Francesca da Rimini from Canto V?
Twenty or thirty years ago there used to be people called "journalists" whose job it was to (a) collect enough data so you could figure out what happened, and (b) write it up in an intelligible story.
Look at the linked story *critically*. How does the "reporter" know DNA was being taken? What is his source for this, or is he just guessing?
This story is basically rumor -- passing along what's on the grapevine. There's no actual reporting here. If there were, that would answer the questions a reasonable person might have. For example: are the researchers collecting DNA or not? And who *are* these researchers? Can we get a name please? Or an institution?
Back in the day a reporter would have identified the researchers and called them up for an interview, or at least a statement from the research institution's public affairs office. He'd look up the grant in the federal records and find out whether or not the researchers had been granted money to collect DNA and what they are being paid to do with it (yes, you can do that!). He'd may even have interviewed people on the institutional review board (required by US law) that approved the project.
But the "reporter" in this case did none of this. She appears not to have done *any* verification or independent research. A story like this would take a real reporter two or three days to nail down, not two or three phone calls.
I'm not saying some horrendous violation of civil liberties could not have taken place, I'm saying the writer of the article didn't do enough work for anyone to decide what did or did not happen. This is not reporting, it's *blogging* under a byline.
He's a regular Daniel Boone, leading a life of simple-but-rewarding chores: loading logs into the log splitter as he waits for his iTunes movie to download; snow blowing a clear path for the UPS truck to deliver their Amazon groceries; or just whittlin' a shim to mount the high gain yagi antenna to the mast so he can check his Facebook down at the fishin' hole.
The question isn't whether antibacterial agents like tricolosan *cause* antibiotic resistance. Clearly that's poppycock. But that *doesn't* mean anti-bacterial soap can't contribute to the spread of pathogenic bacteria in general.
By altering the user's microbiome, an antibacterial agent could potentially open an ecological niche for a pathogen. If the particular strain of pathogen happens to be antibiotic resistant, then the antibacterial has contributed to the the spread of antibiotic resistance without actually causing resistance itself.
As for normal soap and water, that does not in any way shape or form kill bacteria. It washes away stray bacteria that haven't established colonies on your skin. It does nothing for bacteria protected in the pores or by biofilms. Therefore normal handwashing helps prevent the spread of stray pathogens you may have picked up without creating an opportunity for them to colonize your skin.
So the bottom line:
Hand washing with ordinary soap -- definitely good. Hand washing with antibacterial soap -- in most cases unnecessary, and possibly harmful.
Well, a cable would be a good place to put a monitoring device. You can certainly get inconspicuous USB keyloggers that could easily be molded into a keyboard cable.
If the NSA is removing UTP, I wouldn't take that as evidence that the NSA doesn't know what they're doing. I'd take that as evidence that the NSA has packet monitoring hardware that fits into a cable.
The real question here is "how likely is it for each gun owner to kill someone with a gun eventually".
The rate at which gun owners kill people is in any case very, very low as AC suggests; but it's not really what you want to know. What you want to know is your chance of getting killed by a gun owner.
Suppose you identify some group that (a) has a lower rate of firearm ownership than the general population and (b) is less likely to commit crimes than the current gun owning population. You could decrease the *percentage* of dangerous gun owners by giving everyone in that group a gun.... BUT since *some* of that group will turn out to be criminals, you've increased the TOTAL number of criminals with guns.
What you really want to know is what the marginal effect of increased gun ownership would have on public safety, taking into account, of course, the possible deterrent effect of a more highly armed populace.
The problem with the hope for an *increased* deterrent effect is that the US already has the highest rate of firearm ownership in the world *by far*. Nearly half of all households have a gun, and about 1/3 of adults own a gun. It's hard to imagine getting much more deterrence benefit by increasing those already astonishing numbers.
Furthermore, if you look for deterrent effect by comparing states by firearm ownership, there is no evidence. States with higher rates of firearm ownership have higher rates of gun violence. This is correlation rather than causation, of course; it is quite possible that people in violent states buy more guns to protect themselves. BUT -- if there were a dramatic deterrent effect you'd expect to see it in the data eventually.
I was hiking just the other day in the woods, and came across a pair of young men plinking with a handgun -- not legal in this park, by the way, but I'm not uptight about stuff like that. They were standing on on side of the path and shooting across the path at some soda cans they'd set up on a log. I excused myself as I crossed their improved shooting range, and they resumed firing.
It was then I noticed that even though they were standing only eight feet from their target they couldn't hit it. And this was with all the time in the world to draw a bead on their target.
Now in the hypothetical scenario where the good guy is called upon to draw his weapon to defend people from a shooter, the good guy is always a crack shot, but if it were one of these bozos shooting to save his life, the safest place to be when they were shooting is between them and whatever they were shooting at.
I'm fairly relaxed about guns. They're not my thing, but I don't get vapors if someone else has one. But it's been my observation that gun owners are like drivers in their skill self-assessment. Nearly all of them think they're better than average and it's quite common for them to think they're pretty darn amazing.
A school shooting that ends with only one critically injured student is a pretty good outcome. Expecting a *better* outcome with some randomly chosen gun enthusiast trying to shoot to save his life strikes me as unrealistically optimistic.
I keep hearing reports like this but it doesn't jibe with my experience. After the first couple of years where things were dicey, I've had no trouble at all with them. I recently replaced some CFLs that were ten years old, not because they failed, but because their output and color temperature dropped.
So I think it's very possible there's something wrong with your power. It's also possible you purchased a bad brand or from a bad batch.
I should warn you about LED bulbs: at present the quality varies tremendously. I have some I'm pleased with, and some which looked identical but clearly have lower build quality and which never worked acceptably (flicker and color temperature in the 7000k range which is too blue even for me). I think it's kind of wild west market, with Chinese factories turning out quality product under contract and then cheap knockoffs under the table. LEDs are subject to thermal runaway too, and the same bulb may last for a long time in one installation but a short time in another. Yet a different model LED bulb might last a long time in a demanding installation because it has better circuitry. It's tough because a lot of what matters in the long term is stuff you can't see.
I have a motley mix of bulb types and models; in general my house has converged to all robust bulbs as I simply swap out bad bulbs for something else.
Slashdot Mirror
You wrote (emphasis mine):
The Earth's orbital changes around the Sun varies from more circular to more elliptical and its axis wobble changes and the net effect is that the different solar inputs are what causes the major climate shift on about a 110,000 year cycle.
From the /. summary (emphasis mine):
They have concluded that the driving factor since 1900 has been greenhouse gases.
From the U of Edinburgh press release (emphasis mine):
Research examining the causes of climate change in the northern hemisphere over the past 1000 years has shown that until the year 1800, the key driver of periodic changes in climate was volcanic eruptions.
These tend to prevent sunlight reaching the Earth, causing cool, drier weather. Since 1900, greenhouse gases have been the primary cause of climate change.
Now let me tie it all together for you. Let's say we assume:
(1) Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, variations in solar radiation are the strongest determinants of global temperature.
(2) Over the course of the last thousand years, volcano eruptions have been the strongest determinants of global temperature.
(3) Over the last hundred years, anthropogenic greenhouse gasses are the strongest determinants of global temperature.
Here's the important point: you can believe ALL THREE of these things without the least contradiction. Denialist arguments seem to assume that any dominant factor must be dominant in every past period and over every timescale. This is why people scratch their heads at the denialists' "gotchas!", e.g. "Gotcha! There were no SUVs in the medieval warm period." So what? It's a straw argument. Nobody ever claimed that *all* past climate variation was due to greenhouse gasses, much less *anthropogenic* greenhouse gasses.
Well, you are right of course, the behavior was unprofessional. That doesn't mean that the reaction isn't disturbing.
Just because the inciting behavior is unreasonable doesn't make the piling on reaction *rational*. It has more than a whiff of a mob turning on someone who is suddenly perceived as vulnerable.
The people reacting to this act like they know all about this person. But do they? All they have to go on is one foolish comment. Many years ago, in the early 70s, my older teen sister volunteered in a program for intellectually disabled children -- this was at a time before this kind of service was common, or required for high school graduation. One day she remarked to one of her friends that she had to leave because it was time to go see "her retards." Word got back to one of the parents and my sister was banned from the program. Now I can understand the position of the parent defending her child, but is it reasonable for her to deprive her child of the support and help of someone he loved just because that person said something stupid?
If there is one thing I've learned over the years it's that the fruits of self-righteousness are bitter. The instinct to become part of an avenging mob is no respecter of fact, context, circumstance or consequences. It is not to be trusted.
Death rate from tonsillectomy: 1/15,000
Death rate from colonoscopy: 1/17,000
Deaths from general anesthesia: estimate vary, but roughly 1/100,000
I don't think it's so simple as "refactoring is bad". I think i'ts more that 'stopping the delivery of new value to users is bad". Cleaning up as you go along is not only a healthy practice, actually accomplishing something new is healthy for refactoring. It keeps you focused on achieving flexibility that is actually needed as opposed to that which might be useful.
California is already split into numerous pieces. Drawing some lines and formalizing it will allow each of those pieces to govern themselves as they see fit and allow people to stop bitching at each other for tromping on each others "rights".
This is certainly true on paper. In practice California is tied together in ways that aren't easy to undo. Take, for example, disputes over water underlies some of the regional hostility; under the plan region 4 realistically can't gain control of its water resources. It still must supply region 3 and 5 with water lest they dry up and blow away.
A specialized state loses some economic flexibility; in a tech down turn they aren't as buoyed agriculture and vice versa. You lose some economies of scale; wineries in region 2 and farms in region 5 and 6 and biotech companies in region 3 lose access to the life sciences programs at UC Davis. People priced out of region 3 into region 4 will potentially pay income tax in two states.
For better or worse, California is made up of diverse regions that are uncomfortably tied together.
I'm sure if you grew up in San Francisco, you'd be delighted to clear out of your hometown and let the newcomers enjoy it. I remember San Francisco before the dot com boom. It had all the charm, but it was a lot more affordable to live there. Likewise I've seen Key West go from a place where funky people lived to a place where the people who serve you your drink have to commute from an hour further north.
I was once privileged to visit Hawaii on work. I say "privileged", because I got to work with Hawaiian people rather than just have them open my car door for me. One guy took me up to the mountain headwaters of the Lao Stream, where his uncle used to drop him from a footbridge into a deep pool. He used to inner tube from there down to the ocean then hitchhike back up to the state park. Now the lower reaches of the river look like this. Why? Because the pineapple plantations have been converted to condos, and the resulting immigration boom has sucked the river dry. Meanwhile higher housing prices have forced many of his childhood friends to move to California. And you think they're happy about that because their housing dollar stretches further in Fresno than Wailuku?
The reason the free market works so efficiently is that it is, in effect, an unbeatable rationing mechanism. It mercilessly restricts the consumption of goods and encourages the production of goods where demand his high. But what happens when you commoditize a community? When the thing that makes a place special is the people, and they can't afford to live there anymore? You end up with an EPCOT center replica of what the place used to be.
You can see this in a place like Waikiki. Sheraton has mall there which is called (without any intended irony) the "Sheraton Hawaiian Village". But you won't meet any Hawaiians there, unless they're twirling fire baton or cleaning your hotel room. It's really no different from an upscale mall in Palm Springs -- with a little more swimming, a little less golf.
Lesbians, by this logic, are God's chosen, since female-to-female transmission of HIV is extremely rare.
The AK's I saw at the last gun show ranged from $650 up to $2000. Where are you getting them for $30?
You live in rich country full of gun collectors who drive up the price for nice examples. In Africa, AK-47s can be had for around $300 [reference:http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2007/06/12/looking_for_a_deal_on_ak_47s_go_to_africa#sthash.IpUFO50V.dpbs].
It's also possible that at certain situations (e.g., after a proxy war) markets in very poor countries may be flooded with very cheap weapons, with ak-47s selling for as little as $6 [reference http://archive.is/5gesc%5D. However this is obviously not a sustainable price; it only reflects a glut on the local market. Also, these aren't places you'd want to live, despite the occasional gun purchase bargain.
Same here. Had a T42 sitting on a high lab bench doing a big database update and somebody knocked onto the concrete floor. Aside from a hairline crack in the corner it landed on, it was perfectly fine.
Well, I was agreeing with you, but I took a slightly more skeptical position with respect to science fiction enthusiasts' actual knowledge of science. You suggested that science fiction writers might be in a slightly privileged position in comparison to artists because they have more of an understanding of nature. That may be true of *some* science fiction authors (e.g. David Brin, who is a working scientist), but by in large the science fiction community displays what to my mind is a deceptively superficial knowledge of science.
Take the lithium deuteride example. Yes, I agree a sci-fi writer is more likely to know offhand that it's used in thermonuclear bombs than an average artist. But that is really just a piece of technology trivia. It's not *working* knowledge. What's the difference? Working knowledge allows you to make valid inferences, or at least leads you in the right direction. As far as the author was concerned "lithium deuteride" might as well have been magic pixie dust. He didn't realize that it's usefulness is as a way of packing a lot of hydrogen (or rather deuterium) atoms into a confined space -- the very reason LiH is of interest for storage and transport of hydrogen to be used in fuel cells. If he *had* understood this, he could have done rough scaling calculations on th required mass for his hypothetical warhead. That would be an example of working knowledge; although it wouldn't man he knows anything about economics, or biology (often a weak spot in sci-fi in my opinion).
So in my opinion a science fiction author is not in a *privileged* position relative to an artist to have an opinion about things like economics; nor is he even in a privileged position relative to an artist to have an opinion about science. Not necessarily. For one thing I think you're selling short the intellectual abilities of artists. But the sci-fi writer certainly has a right to have and express opinions; they just aren't any more credible *because* he's a sci-fi writer.
Well, if you outlawed every form of argument a simpleton can misconstrue, you might as well cut your own tongue out.
Literature is great way of raising questions. It's a lousy way of *answering* them. You should never walk away from a book convinced of anything, whether it is science fiction, historical drama, or a Harlequin romance. That's because an author controls the domain of discourse in fiction. He creates the fiction world and as much of its history, natural science, and society as suits his purpose. He can produce a socialist utopia or a Galt's Gulch, whichever serves his story -- or his biases.
As for the science fiction fan's supposed knowledge of nature, I'd be suspicious of it. While it's true that sci-fi fans often have familiarity with physical science and technology that exceeds the general public, that's hardly a ringing endorsement. In my writing group, I recently critiqued a manuscript in which Shiite terrorists, working under a Wahhabist imam, build a lithium deuteride super-warhead and launch it on an ICBM into equatorial orbit to cause world-wide destruction of electronic equipment via EMP. Now virtually *every* aspect of this scenario is demonstrably *wrong*. When I pointed this out, the author's reaction was "It doesn't matter." Now there's something to be said for this. All he really needs is the set-up for his post-apocalyptic adventure, and it could just as well be magic and pixie dust as EMP and lithium deuteride. But I feel that as far as you explain anything, that explanation ought to hold water.
The thing about scientific literacy is that it isn't knowledge of a bunch of random, disconnected facts (e.g. lithium deuteride is used in thermonuclear warheads) as it is a capacity to figure things out, like whether it is remotely feasible to take out the entire world with EMP from a single warhead. Basic fact-finding and simple computation.
Well, that's enough information to confirm that DNA is not involved. While the methodology may be intrusive and problematic from an informed consent point of view, it's not as alarming as the police randomly stopping motorists to add their DNA to a surveillance database.
FINALLY! Someone got to the bottom of this!
The cops are really just perverts, collecting your spit for their nightstick activities.
You know, there are other detectable substances in saliva and serum besides DNA.
If this is in linux, this might have something to do with ACPI. The firmware has a table called the DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table) which basically tells the operating system how to turn integrated peripherals like network cards off and on when going to sleep or waking up.
One peculiarity of the DSDT is that the ACPI specification allows it to include different instructions to different operating systems, and this is a common source of problems in linux installs. Some manufacturers (Toshiba) deliberately sabotage non-Windows operating systems in their DSDTs. Others simply deliver DSDTs that are untested and potentially buggy in non-windows operating systems.
Anyhow, an OS can switch devices off an on itself using ACPI, so I think ACPI may trump BIOS settings. One way to test this is to boot with ACPI turned off. If this fixes the problem of the mic being available even when disabled in BIOS, then you have and ACPI/DSDT problem. If not, then it is a design flaw in the machine's design (e.g. turning the mic off in BIOS simply turns the gain to 0) and you wasted your time reading this post.
How many people here (a) have read the Divine Comedy and (b) worked as a programmer? I'm sure I'm not the only one, but we've got to be a pretty small audience.
Who do you think is the analog of Beatrice? Or Francesca da Rimini from Canto V?
Awesome! I didn't know that the Science Patrol made music videos.
Twenty or thirty years ago there used to be people called "journalists" whose job it was to (a) collect enough data so you could figure out what happened, and (b) write it up in an intelligible story.
Look at the linked story *critically*. How does the "reporter" know DNA was being taken? What is his source for this, or is he just guessing?
This story is basically rumor -- passing along what's on the grapevine. There's no actual reporting here. If there were, that would answer the questions a reasonable person might have. For example: are the researchers collecting DNA or not? And who *are* these researchers? Can we get a name please? Or an institution?
Back in the day a reporter would have identified the researchers and called them up for an interview, or at least a statement from the research institution's public affairs office. He'd look up the grant in the federal records and find out whether or not the researchers had been granted money to collect DNA and what they are being paid to do with it (yes, you can do that!). He'd may even have interviewed people on the institutional review board (required by US law) that approved the project.
But the "reporter" in this case did none of this. She appears not to have done *any* verification or independent research. A story like this would take a real reporter two or three days to nail down, not two or three phone calls.
I'm not saying some horrendous violation of civil liberties could not have taken place, I'm saying the writer of the article didn't do enough work for anyone to decide what did or did not happen. This is not reporting, it's *blogging* under a byline.
He's a regular Daniel Boone, leading a life of simple-but-rewarding chores: loading logs into the log splitter as he waits for his iTunes movie to download; snow blowing a clear path for the UPS truck to deliver their Amazon groceries; or just whittlin' a shim to mount the high gain yagi antenna to the mast so he can check his Facebook down at the fishin' hole.
The question isn't whether antibacterial agents like tricolosan *cause* antibiotic resistance. Clearly that's poppycock. But that *doesn't* mean anti-bacterial soap can't contribute to the spread of pathogenic bacteria in general.
By altering the user's microbiome, an antibacterial agent could potentially open an ecological niche for a pathogen. If the particular strain of pathogen happens to be antibiotic resistant, then the antibacterial has contributed to the the spread of antibiotic resistance without actually causing resistance itself.
As for normal soap and water, that does not in any way shape or form kill bacteria. It washes away stray bacteria that haven't established colonies on your skin. It does nothing for bacteria protected in the pores or by biofilms. Therefore normal handwashing helps prevent the spread of stray pathogens you may have picked up without creating an opportunity for them to colonize your skin.
So the bottom line:
Hand washing with ordinary soap -- definitely good.
Hand washing with antibacterial soap -- in most cases unnecessary, and possibly harmful.
Well, a cable would be a good place to put a monitoring device. You can certainly get inconspicuous USB keyloggers that could easily be molded into a keyboard cable.
If the NSA is removing UTP, I wouldn't take that as evidence that the NSA doesn't know what they're doing. I'd take that as evidence that the NSA has packet monitoring hardware that fits into a cable.
The real question here is "how likely is it for each gun owner to kill someone with a gun eventually".
The rate at which gun owners kill people is in any case very, very low as AC suggests; but it's not really what you want to know. What you want to know is your chance of getting killed by a gun owner.
Suppose you identify some group that (a) has a lower rate of firearm ownership than the general population and (b) is less likely to commit crimes than the current gun owning population. You could decrease the *percentage* of dangerous gun owners by giving everyone in that group a gun.... BUT since *some* of that group will turn out to be criminals, you've increased the TOTAL number of criminals with guns.
What you really want to know is what the marginal effect of increased gun ownership would have on public safety, taking into account, of course, the possible deterrent effect of a more highly armed populace.
The problem with the hope for an *increased* deterrent effect is that the US already has the highest rate of firearm ownership in the world *by far*. Nearly half of all households have a gun, and about 1/3 of adults own a gun. It's hard to imagine getting much more deterrence benefit by increasing those already astonishing numbers.
Furthermore, if you look for deterrent effect by comparing states by firearm ownership, there is no evidence. States with higher rates of firearm ownership have higher rates of gun violence. This is correlation rather than causation, of course; it is quite possible that people in violent states buy more guns to protect themselves. BUT -- if there were a dramatic deterrent effect you'd expect to see it in the data eventually.
I was hiking just the other day in the woods, and came across a pair of young men plinking with a handgun -- not legal in this park, by the way, but I'm not uptight about stuff like that. They were standing on on side of the path and shooting across the path at some soda cans they'd set up on a log. I excused myself as I crossed their improved shooting range, and they resumed firing.
It was then I noticed that even though they were standing only eight feet from their target they couldn't hit it. And this was with all the time in the world to draw a bead on their target.
Now in the hypothetical scenario where the good guy is called upon to draw his weapon to defend people from a shooter, the good guy is always a crack shot, but if it were one of these bozos shooting to save his life, the safest place to be when they were shooting is between them and whatever they were shooting at.
I'm fairly relaxed about guns. They're not my thing, but I don't get vapors if someone else has one. But it's been my observation that gun owners are like drivers in their skill self-assessment. Nearly all of them think they're better than average and it's quite common for them to think they're pretty darn amazing.
A school shooting that ends with only one critically injured student is a pretty good outcome. Expecting a *better* outcome with some randomly chosen gun enthusiast trying to shoot to save his life strikes me as unrealistically optimistic.
Shall I explain how the Shannon-Hartley Theorem shows that you can't transmit unlimited amounts of information in realtime unless you have infinite power, or shall we just agree that Americans are better than the Chinese at black magic and leave it at that?
I keep hearing reports like this but it doesn't jibe with my experience. After the first couple of years where things were dicey, I've had no trouble at all with them. I recently replaced some CFLs that were ten years old, not because they failed, but because their output and color temperature dropped.
So I think it's very possible there's something wrong with your power. It's also possible you purchased a bad brand or from a bad batch.
I should warn you about LED bulbs: at present the quality varies tremendously. I have some I'm pleased with, and some which looked identical but clearly have lower build quality and which never worked acceptably (flicker and color temperature in the 7000k range which is too blue even for me). I think it's kind of wild west market, with Chinese factories turning out quality product under contract and then cheap knockoffs under the table. LEDs are subject to thermal runaway too, and the same bulb may last for a long time in one installation but a short time in another. Yet a different model LED bulb might last a long time in a demanding installation because it has better circuitry. It's tough because a lot of what matters in the long term is stuff you can't see.
I have a motley mix of bulb types and models; in general my house has converged to all robust bulbs as I simply swap out bad bulbs for something else.
Then run an electric heater. Voila! Just like the good old days of inefficient light bulbs.