software quality doesn't exactly improve if you "go off the beaten path"
Very few people "go off the beaten path" to find better quality. They go off the beaten path to get features that aren't supported on the beaten path. So far I haven't felt the need to do so with android, although with my next upgrade I will probably be forced outside of the google app store to get tethering without having to pay my provider, since the tethering app I use in no longer available in the app store. With an iPhone, I would have been forced to jailbreak to run apps similar to the ones I use under android. (At which point all the iphonebois ask me which ones. I answer. They say those are entirely unnecessary. I say the are. So lets avoid that dance.)
The beaten path is much wider on android because it doesn't have a pencil-necked gatekeeper who decides whether apps are useful enough to be in the store.
This type of story seems to appear from time to time, not always healthcare related. There are no jobs, unemployment rates in inner city neighborhoods is 25% or more. There are people who have gotten out of prison and have re-offended or violated parole because surviving in prison is easier than surviving on the outside. Three meals a day and some time in the exercise yard might be better than no meals a day living on a bench at the bus stop. Plus, the members of the opposing gang in prison don't have guns.
This is just the standard PHB attitude. Any employee that isn't directly in the revenue stream is a waste of resources, unless that employee is in management, or directly serves the PHB's needs. That gives the PHB three options. Fire the "unnecessary" employees and 1) move their duties to lower paid, unqualified workers 2) Add their tasks to the duties of salaried workers who don't get paid for overtime or 3) Outsource. Lather, rinse, repeat. In the end you get $250k/yr aerospace engineers spending most of their day typing and maintaining software systems, while the PHB moves up the career ladder for "increasing productivity."
Alternative medicine is just medicine that doesn't work, or hasn't been shown to work. If an alternative medicine is shown to work, they call it medicine.
Anyone writing code that stores passwords using plaintext or reversible hashes should probably take up a career in quilting.
As should anyone writing code that can't handle every printable ASCII character in a password. Better yet straight, passwords should allow any string of bytes. Any programmer who limits passwords to alphanumeric is probably writing SQL injection vectors.
People use guessable passwords because they want to use passwords that they can remember. And people that use passwords they can remember do reuse passwords. Any password I can remember probably isn't very secure. Any password used at more than one site definitely isn't secure.
It's past time that all browsers included a standard password generator with user definable salt set at first invocation, and master password prompting. Web standards should at a minimum specify support for all printable ASCII characters in passwords. If a bank isn't competent enough to hire a programmer that can write code to handle a quote in a password, you probably shouldn't be banking there.
Until then there's still PasswordMaker for which you have to salt each account separately if you not want the default unsalted hash. And there's still the annoyance of "alphanumeric only with at least one uppercase and one number" web sites.
Diameter does matter, it's just that counting statistics aren't the main noise source. Radio photos are so unenergetic that any detection is billions of photons. The receivers are LN2 cooled, and you can get L-band (1.4GHz) system temperatures (the sum of all the noise processes) down to around 25K. The external noise sources add to that. The microwave background is 3K. Atmospheric noise is about 1K. Galactic noise can be significantly higher than that (10s to 100s of K), especially if you're looking in the plane of the galaxy. IIRC, photon shot noise is microkelvins.
I don't think that photon counts are the dominant noise factor. I believe its thermal receiver noise predominantly, so uncertainties are proportional to the thermal noise divided by the square of the area.
For a given surface area, an array is better at looking with high angular resolution. So for mapping a small region, or determining the proper motion of a pulsar, an array is good. But if you want to search the whole sky for pulsars (for example), a single dish of the same area is better because it has a wider field of view with full sensitivity.
So in general, single dish telescopes are better for surveying the sky, arrays are better at observing known sources/objects with high resolution and sensitivity
My understanding was that the initial Chinese plan was to build four of these telescopes to use as an array (it was their SKA proposal), which would give it the advantages of both an array and large dishes. I don't know whether the subsequent telescopes will be built.
Unfortunately, since Righthaven is a front company, if sanctioned it will just declare bankruptcy and disappear. It's Stephens Media, who set up the front company, that needs to be sanctioned.
I realize the allocator has to account for it. I've always felt that deallocating in a different thead should be avoided except in the very rare cases when it can't, even if it means some extra work.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe C++ and C libraries have gotten to the point where cross thread allocation/deallocation are reliably thread safe and foolproof. Maybe I can trust other programmers to do the right thing. Maybe debuggers are better at debugging problems arising from this. Maybe I'm still living in 1995.
If you don't see consistent proof about the data or the accuracy of the models, it's because you either never looked for it or, when you found it, decided to ignore it because some blogger paid by an oil company told you to ignore it. The data is not flawed, even though you have concluded it is without any evidence. And the models have been peer reviewed. Go ahead and cast your aspersions against strawman "smart people." And rest assured that you don't fit into the "smart person" category, and that you do fit into the denialist category, unwilling to look at evidence because it doesn't fit the conclusion you've already made.
Surprisingly, the Wikipedia article on cirrus clouds lists them as a positive feedback mechanism
Not surprising to a physicist, astronomer, or a climate scientist. Ice crystals in cirrus clouds are forward scattering to visible light, so most of the light scattered by cirrus goes towards the ground. The clouds are, however, more opaque in the infrared. Droplets in other cloud types are also forward scattering, but the clouds have higher optical depth, so more sunlight will get scattered into space. They are also opaque in the IR, but the effect is complicated by warming of the cloud environment by condensation. In addition to being a greenhouse gas, water vapor is an effective heat transfer mechanism. But I really don't want to see the storms that would result if the all the excess heat content of the atmosphere were carried to high altitude in water vapor so it could be radiated away.
Of course it's simplified. I'm not writing a graduate level text on theory of climate change. I'm responding to a message on slashdot. So I just mentioned the dominant feedback. I didn't mention the positive feedback of ice loss or of methane release due to melting clathrates. And I didn't mention the negative feedback of cloud formation. I didn't, because those are minor effects.
In the end, these things are really complex
and therefore we don't know anything. The mating cry of the denialist.
And, yes, changes in the sun are the number one factor in the climate of our planet.
See, things like this show that you are deliberately lying, and that you probably don't really believe any of what you are saying. Anyone who can use Google can find out that this is false. The sun is responsible for less than 10% of the temperature change since 1700.
There is a natural limit to any positive feedback mechanism where the feedback ceases or is balanced by a negative effect. Feel free to inform us as the the nature of the negative feedback mechanism and to let us know at what temperature it will stop the warming.
Actually, the data indicates that we've been on a global warming trend in the recent times following the last ice age. Shocking, isn't it.
No. We've been in a slow cooling trend (with small oscillations around the trend line) for the past 8500 years. The warming we're seeing now is well outside of the magnitude of those oscillations, and is out of phase with them. We should be in a cooling phase right now.
No. We're well within the bounds. That plot is comparing three different things without normalizing to a common point (i.e. the temperature in 1990) so it is deliberately misleading. If you actually go to Dr. Best's site you'll see the three adjusted to a common reference, in which case they are much closer to being within the bounds shown. But the bounds shown by Dr. Best are incorrect because they don't allow for error analysis or annual variance. The ones shown at realclimate.org are much more realistic. And Dr. Best has included temperature numbers for 2011 in his analysis apparently at the same weight as full year data. That point will be very inaccurate because it only includes data for a small portion of the year, which could skew the moving average.
I don't know if they considered this effect and that effect and this possibility, so I'll assume they didn't and all the science is crap and that what I want to be true is true, rather than checking it out and possibly finding out that what I want to be true isn't.
Trust me. Climate scientists are smarter than you give them credit for, and have considered all of those effects, and those possibilities, and have corrected for them, or have convinced themselves and the rest of the scientific community that they weren't causing current temperature changes. You aren't thinking of anything they haven't already considered.
I know that with all the denialist propoganda out there it's hard to find reliable information. http://skepticalscience.com/ is a good place to start. The wikipedia page on global warming is more reliable than most pages on global warming. And on either, feel free to follow back to the original source.
Slashdot Mirror
The #1 rule about the wall is nobody talks about the wall.
software quality doesn't exactly improve if you "go off the beaten path"
Very few people "go off the beaten path" to find better quality. They go off the beaten path to get features that aren't supported on the beaten path. So far I haven't felt the need to do so with android, although with my next upgrade I will probably be forced outside of the google app store to get tethering without having to pay my provider, since the tethering app I use in no longer available in the app store. With an iPhone, I would have been forced to jailbreak to run apps similar to the ones I use under android. (At which point all the iphonebois ask me which ones. I answer. They say those are entirely unnecessary. I say the are. So lets avoid that dance.)
The beaten path is much wider on android because it doesn't have a pencil-necked gatekeeper who decides whether apps are useful enough to be in the store.
This type of story seems to appear from time to time, not always healthcare related. There are no jobs, unemployment rates in inner city neighborhoods is 25% or more. There are people who have gotten out of prison and have re-offended or violated parole because surviving in prison is easier than surviving on the outside. Three meals a day and some time in the exercise yard might be better than no meals a day living on a bench at the bus stop. Plus, the members of the opposing gang in prison don't have guns.
This is just the standard PHB attitude. Any employee that isn't directly in the revenue stream is a waste of resources, unless that employee is in management, or directly serves the PHB's needs. That gives the PHB three options. Fire the "unnecessary" employees and 1) move their duties to lower paid, unqualified workers 2) Add their tasks to the duties of salaried workers who don't get paid for overtime or 3) Outsource. Lather, rinse, repeat. In the end you get $250k/yr aerospace engineers spending most of their day typing and maintaining software systems, while the PHB moves up the career ladder for "increasing productivity."
Alternative medicine is just medicine that doesn't work, or hasn't been shown to work. If an alternative medicine is shown to work, they call it medicine.
There is an enormous consensus within the scientific community. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying for political purposes.
Anyone writing code that stores passwords using plaintext or reversible hashes should probably take up a career in quilting.
As should anyone writing code that can't handle every printable ASCII character in a password. Better yet straight, passwords should allow any string of bytes. Any programmer who limits passwords to alphanumeric is probably writing SQL injection vectors.
People use guessable passwords because they want to use passwords that they can remember. And people that use passwords they can remember do reuse passwords. Any password I can remember probably isn't very secure. Any password used at more than one site definitely isn't secure.
It's past time that all browsers included a standard password generator with user definable salt set at first invocation, and master password prompting. Web standards should at a minimum specify support for all printable ASCII characters in passwords. If a bank isn't competent enough to hire a programmer that can write code to handle a quote in a password, you probably shouldn't be banking there.
Until then there's still PasswordMaker for which you have to salt each account separately if you not want the default unsalted hash. And there's still the annoyance of "alphanumeric only with at least one uppercase and one number" web sites.
That's when it's time to change ISPs. Especially if you are paying them with a credit card.
Diameter does matter, it's just that counting statistics aren't the main noise source. Radio photos are so unenergetic that any detection is billions of photons. The receivers are LN2 cooled, and you can get L-band (1.4GHz) system temperatures (the sum of all the noise processes) down to around 25K. The external noise sources add to that. The microwave background is 3K. Atmospheric noise is about 1K. Galactic noise can be significantly higher than that (10s to 100s of K), especially if you're looking in the plane of the galaxy. IIRC, photon shot noise is microkelvins.
Not sure if I'm supposed to mention it, but a couple members of the SETI@home team visited the site about a month ago.
Sorry, square of the diameter. Need more caffeine.
I don't think that photon counts are the dominant noise factor. I believe its thermal receiver noise predominantly, so uncertainties are proportional to the thermal noise divided by the square of the area.
For a given surface area, an array is better at looking with high angular resolution. So for mapping a small region, or determining the proper motion of a pulsar, an array is good. But if you want to search the whole sky for pulsars (for example), a single dish of the same area is better because it has a wider field of view with full sensitivity.
So in general, single dish telescopes are better for surveying the sky, arrays are better at observing known sources/objects with high resolution and sensitivity
My understanding was that the initial Chinese plan was to build four of these telescopes to use as an array (it was their SKA proposal), which would give it the advantages of both an array and large dishes. I don't know whether the subsequent telescopes will be built.
Unfortunately, since Righthaven is a front company, if sanctioned it will just declare bankruptcy and disappear. It's Stephens Media, who set up the front company, that needs to be sanctioned.
Because the parent is right. I will not speculate as to the motives of the grandparent.
I realize the allocator has to account for it. I've always felt that deallocating in a different thead should be avoided except in the very rare cases when it can't, even if it means some extra work.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe C++ and C libraries have gotten to the point where cross thread allocation/deallocation are reliably thread safe and foolproof. Maybe I can trust other programmers to do the right thing. Maybe debuggers are better at debugging problems arising from this. Maybe I'm still living in 1995.
If you don't see consistent proof about the data or the accuracy of the models, it's because you either never looked for it or, when you found it, decided to ignore it because some blogger paid by an oil company told you to ignore it. The data is not flawed, even though you have concluded it is without any evidence. And the models have been peer reviewed. Go ahead and cast your aspersions against strawman "smart people." And rest assured that you don't fit into the "smart person" category, and that you do fit into the denialist category, unwilling to look at evidence because it doesn't fit the conclusion you've already made.
Surprisingly, the Wikipedia article on cirrus clouds lists them as a positive feedback mechanism
Not surprising to a physicist, astronomer, or a climate scientist. Ice crystals in cirrus clouds are forward scattering to visible light, so most of the light scattered by cirrus goes towards the ground. The clouds are, however, more opaque in the infrared. Droplets in other cloud types are also forward scattering, but the clouds have higher optical depth, so more sunlight will get scattered into space. They are also opaque in the IR, but the effect is complicated by warming of the cloud environment by condensation. In addition to being a greenhouse gas, water vapor is an effective heat transfer mechanism. But I really don't want to see the storms that would result if the all the excess heat content of the atmosphere were carried to high altitude in water vapor so it could be radiated away.
Your "model in words" is beyond simplistic
Of course it's simplified. I'm not writing a graduate level text on theory of climate change. I'm responding to a message on slashdot. So I just mentioned the dominant feedback. I didn't mention the positive feedback of ice loss or of methane release due to melting clathrates. And I didn't mention the negative feedback of cloud formation. I didn't, because those are minor effects.
In the end, these things are really complex
and therefore we don't know anything. The mating cry of the denialist.
There hasn't been a global temperature plateau. The thermal energy stored in the oceans keeps rising. The sea level keeps rising almost faster than predicted. The models have done a very good job of matching *the*degree*of*change*.
And, yes, changes in the sun are the number one factor in the climate of our planet.
See, things like this show that you are deliberately lying, and that you probably don't really believe any of what you are saying. Anyone who can use Google can find out that this is false. The sun is responsible for less than 10% of the temperature change since 1700.
There is a natural limit to any positive feedback mechanism where the feedback ceases or is balanced by a negative effect. Feel free to inform us as the the nature of the negative feedback mechanism and to let us know at what temperature it will stop the warming.
Actually, the data indicates that we've been on a global warming trend in the recent times following the last ice age. Shocking, isn't it.
No. We've been in a slow cooling trend (with small oscillations around the trend line) for the past 8500 years. The warming we're seeing now is well outside of the magnitude of those oscillations, and is out of phase with them. We should be in a cooling phase right now.
No. We're well within the bounds. That plot is comparing three different things without normalizing to a common point (i.e. the temperature in 1990) so it is deliberately misleading. If you actually go to Dr. Best's site you'll see the three adjusted to a common reference, in which case they are much closer to being within the bounds shown. But the bounds shown by Dr. Best are incorrect because they don't allow for error analysis or annual variance. The ones shown at realclimate.org are much more realistic. And Dr. Best has included temperature numbers for 2011 in his analysis apparently at the same weight as full year data. That point will be very inaccurate because it only includes data for a small portion of the year, which could skew the moving average.
you free a block in different thread than you malloc'd it
I just threw up in my mouth a little.
I don't know if they considered this effect and that effect and this possibility, so I'll assume they didn't and all the science is crap and that what I want to be true is true, rather than checking it out and possibly finding out that what I want to be true isn't.
Trust me. Climate scientists are smarter than you give them credit for, and have considered all of those effects, and those possibilities, and have corrected for them, or have convinced themselves and the rest of the scientific community that they weren't causing current temperature changes. You aren't thinking of anything they haven't already considered.
I know that with all the denialist propoganda out there it's hard to find reliable information. http://skepticalscience.com/ is a good place to start. The wikipedia page on global warming is more reliable than most pages on global warming. And on either, feel free to follow back to the original source.