The most annoying thing about trying to land on a comet is that you can't timewarp past 1x anywhere close to it, and the gravity is so low it takes forever to actually land, or have your Kerbal come down after jumping.
(Would be cool if they'd add a couple to KSP. I bet there's a mod that does)
FARK has a tool like this that puts up a little banner asking you to either subscribe or turn off Adblock. I decided to actually give it a try one day. Within less than 30 minutes, my background music was stomped on by a very loud, unskippable, unpauseable video ad.
Adblock went right back on.
I don't mind ads. I understand this stuff isn't free and I'm willing to put up with them provided they aren't going to scream in my ear. But the ad makers don't seem to be willing to adjust their side of the equation.
It's played on a normal TTT board. Each player makes two moves a turn, which exist in indeterminate states. Eventually the players will develop a cyclic entanglement of their moves, at which point a measurement is made and the entangled moves collapse into permanent moves on the board. I refereed a paper on it recently for J. Chem Ed where they used it to teach basic QM to physical chemistry students.
Depends. For us, it was a zero warning phone call telling us to come pick up our son at the hospital. For #2, we were on vacation and got "How fast can you get to Norfolk?"
Feel free to keep doing this HP: we picked up an awesome employee when he bailed from there. We'll be happy to hire more of those expensive experienced people- you don't really need them to sell printer ink...
Interestingly, the Economist's article on the same points this weeks notes that there is a group specifically devoted to doing replication- the Reproducibility Initiative from PLOS One. They've got a $1.3 million grant from the Arnold Foundation to look at 50 high profile papers in cancer research.
Usenet survived the big renaming, despite all the controversy.
Actually the best part about Usenet which is mostly missing today is that the protocol is separate from the client. If you don't like the client you get a different one. This is very similar to email - there's a standard protocol that everyone uses (even microsoft) and then you choose your own client. With Yahoo groups (or google, etc), you have to use their web interface only and if they decide to change it you have to follow along. The drawback of Usenet, which is also one of its big advantages, is that corporations can't monetize it with advertizing and so it lost favor and the completely awful substitute of forums took over.
Forums like/., for example. Even today slashdot has a tiny fraction the functionality (and speed) of a high quality USENET newsreader.
Interesting since the president of the college I work at just had a letter about this in the Huffington Post. One quote: "According to the College Board's 2012 study, Trends in College Pricing, the average tuition and fee rate has increased at an average of 2.44 percent at private, nonprofit four-year colleges in recent years; in fact, when one accounts for financial aid and scholarships, the average inflation-adjusted net tuition at private colleges has actually dropped by 3.5 percent over the past five years. "
Now, that's for private, non-profit schools. Public schools it has jumped substantially, but not for any nefarious reason: it's what happens when the state legislature looks for easy cuts in the budget and axes higher ed first. When I went to William and Mary back in the mid-80s, 34.7% of the budget was covered by the state. It's 12.8% now, but they're still expected to offer everything they did before (and more) as well as give discounts to in-state students. That money can come only from two places: tuition and endowment.
Endowment is an entire 'nother subject. You might have noticed a serious drop in the stock market a few years back? We (and many other schools) run a three year trailing average on endowment draw, so that's still hurting badly. Oh, and you can't get bonds or other securities with yields higher than a percent or two these days.. Couple the two and your endowment income has cratered as well.
Can we cut budgets? Sure: I started here six years ago in IT and my budget is 20% less than was when I joined. Software vendors don't care: my SPSS licensing costs have tripled in those 3 years for example, and everyone else wants their 5% a year bump. And I'm at a healthy school: I've been at ones that aren't and it's worse.
The real abuse IMHO is the loan industry. We've somehow gotten this idea that it's ok to put yourself into debt for the rest of your life for a degree. (And that debt, unlike every other kind can't ever be vacated by bankruptcy) Nobody should take out $100k of debt for any degree, and the feds shouldn't back it, much like they shouldn't back flood insurance for people who want to live on barrier islands. That may mean you don't get your dream school. Maybe it means 2 years of community college before residential. There are plenty of ways to get an education- shop for them just like you would for an phone
Watch movies, listen to music, etc. Google docs works offline if you have local copies (or create new) No GPS though, but then again that doesn't work on my iPad without a network connection either since the maps need to be downloaded.
Oh, and the Chromebook has both USB and SD card slots, so you can bring a *lot* more music and movies than you can on any tablet without them (like an iPad.)
Having just bought a (Samsung) Chromebook, I think you ought to try one. It's considerably cheaper than either a real laptop or a (full size) tablet. Unlike cheap laptops, it has an 8 hour battery life, can't get a virus and boots in 10 seconds. Unlike a tablet, it has a 13 inch screen and a typeable keyboard. It has a ton of hidden functionality if you figure out how to access it. Yes, it only runs a browser, but I can get my email in a browser, edit documents/spreadsheets/presentations in a browser, access Evernote and similar services, etc. It won't replace my main computer, but it works great as a travel device.
I'm honestly confused by your statement. TBL was able to create and deploy HTTP because CERN paid huge sums of money to run a network that could host his servers and he worked for CERN. Buying a business class data line is not hugely expensive and if you want to run a new funky server on your line feel free. The government won't stop you, nor will the ISP unless you're doing something hideously illegal. Or get hired by a company that is willing to pay the freight- most any university will have a setup you can use, ditto major research lab like CERN. You might even get paid for developing it.
Back when I was in grad school there were two guys collecting links into a nice sorted directory. Stanford hosted it for quite a while until it took up 50+% of the entire network bandwidth and the school decided that Yahoo! had to become a real company. Nobody stopped Napster or Bittorrent (technically)
Google's not stopping you from developing the next great thing, nor will they lower the priority of your packets when you do. They just don't want you doing it on a line that the TOS specifically says you can't.
Actually, 50 fps is probably not enough. When my son and I get going we can get the puck from one side to the other in substantially less than fifth of a second. Given that the robot probably needs to start moving very quickly after the opponent hits the puck you'd only have a couple of frames to work with at that speed. Half the time when I lose a point I haven't even seen the puck before it's in the goal.
(Getting hit by a flying puck at those speeds hurts like hell. I thought I broke my finger once)
A number of years ago I worked with a professor who was writing a textbook. I wrote a quiz engine and a question bank to use with it. The professor owned the copyright to the textbook. The university owned the electronic stuff I developed, both text and code, even though it was an adjunct to the text.
Well, it depends again on what you mean by "innovative". It doesn't all work this way- I worked at Merck for a shirt while back in the late 1980s and Crixivan was pretty much entirely internal, including the massive (and extremely expensive) effort to do the xray crystal structure of HIV-1 protease in record time. Human trials, scaleup of production and the like aren't exactly trivial things to do either- they aren't cookbook.
Politically it wouldn't fly in the US anyway. While profit motive isn't always the a great option, would you rather have political appointees deciding if Gardasil testing should go forwards? Right now there are a number of people in Congress trying to rewrite the way that NSF/NIH award grants- those sort of shenanigans would be long term far more damaging.
(I'll agree with you on the open access to trial data and advertising bits- we need to simply ban public ads for prescription drugs and dramatically restrict sales tactics to doctors. I hated seeing chemists get recruited by the sales folks at Merck- it seemed like they were going over to the dark side.)
He also told me that about 90% of all the new drugs actually come from research out of universities, not the pharmaceuticals themselves
I keep reading that from a broad variety of sources as well.
(Is it true?)
Depends on what you mean by "research". A lot of the initial leads do come from universities, but the process to turn a lead into something you can buy over the counter is difficult, very long and hugely expensive. You frequently see a drug company buy the rights to the idea and then do the human trials. The HPV vaccine Gardasil is a good example- a group of people at several universities developed the concept. Merck then took over and ran the phase III human trials (the one that sees if it actually works in the field) as well as the R&D to manufacture it.
IMHO, this isn't a bad way to work- most drug companies can't really do the blue sky stuff and universities don't have the $$$ to bring something to market.
> That's aside, of course from the all-too-common situation where the business decision is made to push a
> drug even when it's more of a medical liability than an asset just because it's more of a (potential)
> financial asset than a liability.
Then 5 or 10 years back there was also the case where a very effective peanut allergy drug was nearly finished with trials and approaching approval. The developing company was bought out by a bigger rival. The new owners squashed the new drug, because they wanted to re-purpose a drug they already had for peanut allergies. It wasn't as effective as the new drug they'd just acquired, and had worse side-effects, but it was more profitable.
Urban legend or true story - I don't know. The inability to know stuff like this is a problem in itself.
Almost certainly an urban legend. This behavior doesn't make sense in the context of the drug market. The first-tier drug companies like Merck and Glaxo fund everything from a few high priced, patented drugs. They have a limited amount of time to make money off of these before they come off patent and the generic makers cut the prices by 10x. This is why you see a constant stream of "me too" modifications of existing drugs- they need to something under patent to make money.
Buying a drug and then burying it in favor of something existing would be stupid- you have a chance to reset the patent clock and get ~15 years of high profits as opposed to trying to compete against the generics
I get 40Mbps/5Mbps (actual speed usually ~36Mbps) from my local telco in the U.S., and I'm in fly-over American nowhere near the coast, so I really don't have a clue why there is so much complaining about Internet in the U.S. I have Netflix and tons of computers, and I'm not even close to saturating my link. It's the fastest in my area, though many cities around where I live have 1Gbps access. I pay a decent chunk of cash for my access, but it certainly isn't anything I can't afford. Some areas (which are usually more rural) have fewer options and slower access, and other areas have it better than I do.
You don't have a clue because you have a decent connection. Lots of us don't- far more than in other countries. Worse, there are no plans to get us anything better in the next decade. I live in a semi-rural area in a small town (Gettysburg)- not exactly the sticks. I just managed to upgrade my home network connection. I had been on 1.5 Mbps, but I now have the absolute fastest CenturyLink could sell me- 6Mbps. I'm not expecting another upgrade anytime soon...
You know, I like to both cook and play guitar, but I really don't think they work well together. An alfredo sauce covered pickup is a terrible thing and I'm pretty sure it's not good for the strings to use them as cheese knives.
Why? Seems to me to be a good idea- electric motors have gobs of torque even at standstill (Hence the use in locomotives) Why not put a second engine in that performs best where the V12 is at its worst? So long as you can keep the weight of the system down enough it should be a big win.
Slashdot Mirror
(Would be cool if they'd add a couple to KSP. I bet there's a mod that does)
Adblock went right back on.
I don't mind ads. I understand this stuff isn't free and I'm willing to put up with them provided they aren't going to scream in my ear. But the ad makers don't seem to be willing to adjust their side of the equation.
"Hmm, I could have sworn Clover, VA used to be around here..."
You can play a version online here
Catcha a falling neutrino why don't you.
Being done as we speak, by one of the coolest (both figuratively and literally) experiments ever designed.
(Technically, they weren't falling but rising- Ice Cube uses the Earth as a shield to screen non-neutrino events)
/Adoption can be amusing...
Feel free to keep doing this HP: we picked up an awesome employee when he bailed from there. We'll be happy to hire more of those expensive experienced people- you don't really need them to sell printer ink...
Biology->Chemistry->Physics->Math->Philosophy->Linguistics->Religion->Anthropology->Psychology->Biology... QED
Interestingly, the Economist's article on the same points this weeks notes that there is a group specifically devoted to doing replication- the Reproducibility Initiative from PLOS One. They've got a $1.3 million grant from the Arnold Foundation to look at 50 high profile papers in cancer research.
Other than the original idea (Heritage Foundation is hardly a shill for Obama) and implementation (The last R candidate for president) of course.
Usenet survived the big renaming, despite all the controversy.
Actually the best part about Usenet which is mostly missing today is that the protocol is separate from the client. If you don't like the client you get a different one. This is very similar to email - there's a standard protocol that everyone uses (even microsoft) and then you choose your own client. With Yahoo groups (or google, etc), you have to use their web interface only and if they decide to change it you have to follow along. The drawback of Usenet, which is also one of its big advantages, is that corporations can't monetize it with advertizing and so it lost favor and the completely awful substitute of forums took over.
Forums like /., for example. Even today slashdot has a tiny fraction the functionality (and speed) of a high quality USENET newsreader.
Now, that's for private, non-profit schools. Public schools it has jumped substantially, but not for any nefarious reason: it's what happens when the state legislature looks for easy cuts in the budget and axes higher ed first. When I went to William and Mary back in the mid-80s, 34.7% of the budget was covered by the state. It's 12.8% now, but they're still expected to offer everything they did before (and more) as well as give discounts to in-state students. That money can come only from two places: tuition and endowment.
Endowment is an entire 'nother subject. You might have noticed a serious drop in the stock market a few years back? We (and many other schools) run a three year trailing average on endowment draw, so that's still hurting badly. Oh, and you can't get bonds or other securities with yields higher than a percent or two these days.. Couple the two and your endowment income has cratered as well.
Can we cut budgets? Sure: I started here six years ago in IT and my budget is 20% less than was when I joined. Software vendors don't care: my SPSS licensing costs have tripled in those 3 years for example, and everyone else wants their 5% a year bump. And I'm at a healthy school: I've been at ones that aren't and it's worse.
The real abuse IMHO is the loan industry. We've somehow gotten this idea that it's ok to put yourself into debt for the rest of your life for a degree. (And that debt, unlike every other kind can't ever be vacated by bankruptcy) Nobody should take out $100k of debt for any degree, and the feds shouldn't back it, much like they shouldn't back flood insurance for people who want to live on barrier islands. That may mean you don't get your dream school. Maybe it means 2 years of community college before residential. There are plenty of ways to get an education- shop for them just like you would for an phone
Watch movies, listen to music, etc. Google docs works offline if you have local copies (or create new) No GPS though, but then again that doesn't work on my iPad without a network connection either since the maps need to be downloaded. Oh, and the Chromebook has both USB and SD card slots, so you can bring a *lot* more music and movies than you can on any tablet without them (like an iPad.)
Having just bought a (Samsung) Chromebook, I think you ought to try one. It's considerably cheaper than either a real laptop or a (full size) tablet. Unlike cheap laptops, it has an 8 hour battery life, can't get a virus and boots in 10 seconds. Unlike a tablet, it has a 13 inch screen and a typeable keyboard. It has a ton of hidden functionality if you figure out how to access it. Yes, it only runs a browser, but I can get my email in a browser, edit documents/spreadsheets/presentations in a browser, access Evernote and similar services, etc. It won't replace my main computer, but it works great as a travel device.
Back when I was in grad school there were two guys collecting links into a nice sorted directory. Stanford hosted it for quite a while until it took up 50+% of the entire network bandwidth and the school decided that Yahoo! had to become a real company. Nobody stopped Napster or Bittorrent (technically)
Google's not stopping you from developing the next great thing, nor will they lower the priority of your packets when you do. They just don't want you doing it on a line that the TOS specifically says you can't.
Actually, 50 fps is probably not enough. When my son and I get going we can get the puck from one side to the other in substantially less than fifth of a second. Given that the robot probably needs to start moving very quickly after the opponent hits the puck you'd only have a couple of frames to work with at that speed. Half the time when I lose a point I haven't even seen the puck before it's in the goal. (Getting hit by a flying puck at those speeds hurts like hell. I thought I broke my finger once)
A number of years ago I worked with a professor who was writing a textbook. I wrote a quiz engine and a question bank to use with it. The professor owned the copyright to the textbook. The university owned the electronic stuff I developed, both text and code, even though it was an adjunct to the text.
My PC has all of its drives, video cards and the like internal, unlike the new Powermac
Perhaps the PC makers need to update their ads?
Politically it wouldn't fly in the US anyway. While profit motive isn't always the a great option, would you rather have political appointees deciding if Gardasil testing should go forwards? Right now there are a number of people in Congress trying to rewrite the way that NSF/NIH award grants- those sort of shenanigans would be long term far more damaging.
(I'll agree with you on the open access to trial data and advertising bits- we need to simply ban public ads for prescription drugs and dramatically restrict sales tactics to doctors. I hated seeing chemists get recruited by the sales folks at Merck- it seemed like they were going over to the dark side.)
He also told me that about 90% of all the new drugs actually come from research out of universities, not the pharmaceuticals themselves
I keep reading that from a broad variety of sources as well.
(Is it true?)
Depends on what you mean by "research". A lot of the initial leads do come from universities, but the process to turn a lead into something you can buy over the counter is difficult, very long and hugely expensive. You frequently see a drug company buy the rights to the idea and then do the human trials. The HPV vaccine Gardasil is a good example- a group of people at several universities developed the concept. Merck then took over and ran the phase III human trials (the one that sees if it actually works in the field) as well as the R&D to manufacture it.
IMHO, this isn't a bad way to work- most drug companies can't really do the blue sky stuff and universities don't have the $$$ to bring something to market.
> That's aside, of course from the all-too-common situation where the business decision is made to push a > drug even when it's more of a medical liability than an asset just because it's more of a (potential) > financial asset than a liability.
Then 5 or 10 years back there was also the case where a very effective peanut allergy drug was nearly finished with trials and approaching approval. The developing company was bought out by a bigger rival. The new owners squashed the new drug, because they wanted to re-purpose a drug they already had for peanut allergies. It wasn't as effective as the new drug they'd just acquired, and had worse side-effects, but it was more profitable.
Urban legend or true story - I don't know. The inability to know stuff like this is a problem in itself.
Almost certainly an urban legend. This behavior doesn't make sense in the context of the drug market. The first-tier drug companies like Merck and Glaxo fund everything from a few high priced, patented drugs. They have a limited amount of time to make money off of these before they come off patent and the generic makers cut the prices by 10x. This is why you see a constant stream of "me too" modifications of existing drugs- they need to something under patent to make money. Buying a drug and then burying it in favor of something existing would be stupid- you have a chance to reset the patent clock and get ~15 years of high profits as opposed to trying to compete against the generics
I get 40Mbps/5Mbps (actual speed usually ~36Mbps) from my local telco in the U.S., and I'm in fly-over American nowhere near the coast, so I really don't have a clue why there is so much complaining about Internet in the U.S. I have Netflix and tons of computers, and I'm not even close to saturating my link. It's the fastest in my area, though many cities around where I live have 1Gbps access. I pay a decent chunk of cash for my access, but it certainly isn't anything I can't afford. Some areas (which are usually more rural) have fewer options and slower access, and other areas have it better than I do.
You don't have a clue because you have a decent connection. Lots of us don't- far more than in other countries. Worse, there are no plans to get us anything better in the next decade. I live in a semi-rural area in a small town (Gettysburg)- not exactly the sticks. I just managed to upgrade my home network connection. I had been on 1.5 Mbps, but I now have the absolute fastest CenturyLink could sell me- 6Mbps. I'm not expecting another upgrade anytime soon...
I seriously doubt any "useful" thing you do will be remembered by anyone by then.
You know, I like to both cook and play guitar, but I really don't think they work well together. An alfredo sauce covered pickup is a terrible thing and I'm pretty sure it's not good for the strings to use them as cheese knives.
Why? Seems to me to be a good idea- electric motors have gobs of torque even at standstill (Hence the use in locomotives) Why not put a second engine in that performs best where the V12 is at its worst? So long as you can keep the weight of the system down enough it should be a big win.