"I received a Pebble.... the battery life is such that I only need to recharge it a few times a week."
Îoey Pebble (1 year old) lasts an entire week on a charge, unless I have been using realtime apps (gps tracker). It helps to disable the "shake for backlight" setting.
"the only time the 5-star rating is going to go to a 3-star rating is if the national testing facilities start using these dummies. And if they do that..."
If they do that, you'll need twice the number of cars to sacrifice in crash tests and the dummies will wear out twice as fast. Likely, you'll need twice the number of testing facilities as well. A decision to make such tests mandatory should not be taken lightly.
My guess is that these dummies will be used to gain knowledge on how to translate standard test results to risks for nonstandard body types, and possibly to mandatory requirements on car/safety belt construction if the disadvantage of an obese person is large and preventable.
"4W charger can charge devices at the same rate as my 5 and 10 watt chargers! The last generation of phones use 5V 1A = 5 watt chargers"
That the charger is capable of delivering 5 W does not actually mean that the device will actually draw that amount. I have a dongle that measures the current and voltage of USB chargers and my smartphones rarely draw more than 0.8 A, and even then only if I use a low-resistance cable with a battery below 80%. Cables that are long enough to reach comfortably from the floor to my hands while I'm sitting usually do less than that.
Google "usb charger doctor", the dongle is only $7 or so.
"HAM radio operators have a statistically significant higher incident of cancer."
You seem to be selective in your interpretation of the data. From the second link:
"Among men, there were 14,630 deaths (SMR = 0.73 (95% CI = 0.71-0.74)) and among women, 760 (SMR = 0.72 (0.67-0.78)). There were 4,007 cancer deaths among males (SMR = 0.79 (0.76-0.81)) and 289 among females (SMR = 0.82 (0.72-0.92))."
Standardized mortality ratios (SMR) smaller than one for cancer mean that there are fewer cancer deaths among radio operators than among the total (US) population. The abstract continues to state that for some particular types of cancer, the SMR is slightly above one, but with very wide confidence intervals (CI), which indicate that there are too few cases for reliable statistics.
I think we need to resort to specifying listening volumes in dB(A) levels, since I can't imagine driving even a bad headphone to distortion levels at what I call 'normal listening volume'. For me, that's probably around 70 dBA, "normal speech at 3 ft".
"The problem with Bose has always been that they only sound "acceptably okay" at relatively low volumes, they tend to massively distort at what I would consider a normal listening volume. [...] especially if you'll be using them in very noisy environments"
Cranking up the volume to drown out envoronmental noise sounds like a good pathway towards a hearing aid by the time you're 50 years old.
There have been occasions that I actually asked co-travelers on the train to lower their volume because I could hear their hip hop beat over my own music that was playing through my own noise-isolating headphones. I suspect that those people are already semi-deaf...
"I use some fairly cheap Sennheiser in-ear monitors on aircraft now. The isolation is better than any noise cancelling headphones can ever hope to achieve"
What model? I have cx-300-2 noise-isolating earbuds, which I'd call fairly cheap at around EUR 35, but I wouldn't say they perform better than bose/beats noise cancelling headphones. Whatever else I see in a quick Google is several hundred dollars.
You are probably the only one in the world who uses that definition of 'exponential'. The exponential function has the property exp(x+1)=2.7*exp(x), which is completely analogous to your geometric series.
"the ebola death curve is exponential. Production and distribution of vaccines, and of antibodies by transfusion, is at best geometric."
Geometric is essentially the same as exponential. The only difference is that geometric is in discrete steps and exponential can also describe fractional steps. So, what did you really mean here?
It seems that I don't have a clue what you're trying to say. In lactose-tolerant people, lactose is broken down by enzymes produced by the human body, and the reaction product is absorbed. Lactose-intolerant people don't produce that enzyme. What specifically mutated bacteria that take care of the lactose in a benign or less pleasant way are you referring to? And what statement exactly do you wish to have a reference for?
What I was trying to say: if the intestine does not absorb nearly all the carbohydrates that are in the food, you will get sick. Since people don't get sick (bloating, flatulence, etc.) all the time from their normal diet, it must mean that the intestine absorbs nearly everything in their diet.
I was using an old netbook (Atom N270) as a home media server, keeping it running Ubuntu Desktop 9.something. But it was too much of a pain to maintain: keeping it on mains power for a year seems to break the battery-charge-level monitoring, which makes the internal battery useless as a UPS. Too many processes insisted on writing to files every 5 minutes, which was spinning up the hard disk all the time. Also, it got uncomfortably hot with the lid closed all the time.
So I got a second-hand thin client (Via 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB internal flash drive, 1 GB RAM, gigabit ethernet) for 75 euros, installed Ubuntu Server 12.04 and a USB hard disk that has a auto spin-down feature. The 1 GiB "SSD" turned out to be too small for OS and log files, so I augmented it with a 4 GB USB thumb drive, while cursing that it is very hard to find one that performs well on lots of small writes (With 4 kB random block write tests, the throughput of most sticks is less than 0.01 MB/s). This thing takes about 13 W of power while idle (26 euros/year at our rates) and last time I looked, there are no alternatives on the market that have comparable horsepower for much less watts. The server hosts media files (MiniDLNA) and backups (snapshots) of the various computers/tablets/phones. Once or twice a year, I sync the disk with an external USB drive. If my house goes up in flames, all will be gone.
Since my media storage is mostly audio, a 1 TB drive is plenty. When I read here from people that have 40 TB of storage in NAS arrays, I wonder what they are hoarding. At 5 GB per hour of video, that's 8000 hours!
Ubuntu 12.04 server sucks for a headless server. I think it was waiting for a keypress after an unclean boot. (There was a comment on a forum of a guy who had to drive 100 miles to a datacenter to attach a keyboard and press Enter). That one was solved, but now it just hangs during filesystem checking at boot time - some bad boot-order dependency.
Network: ethernet in living room (A/V center) and work room (desktop/printer); wifi elsewhere. Visitors get the wifi password. Non-media file transfers and backups are always over ssh. (It t1urns out that the gigabit ethernet was overkill; the VIA CPU can barely saturate a 100 Mbps ethernet line, with the faster SSH cipher (arcfour).
"your body isn't absorbing every calorie you put into it. Your body absorbs until it has what it needs"
Consider what happens if a lactose-intolerant person drinks a glass or two of milk: about 25 g of carbohydrates that their body can't absorb. It will lead to flatulence and diarrhea as a result of gut bacteria feasting on those unused calories and the inability of the body to extract water effectively from a sugar solution.
The fact that this is an abnormal response shows that the normal thing is to absorb every calorie.
" I always just use split horizon DNS, and put everything under the corporate domain name, thus eliminating the problem."
I have something like that at home, a registered domain name example.com and a portion *.home.example.com that was only resolvable from my lan.
Then, a few months back, I upgraded to the new Linux Mint LTS, which did all queries simultaneously to my ISP (fallback DNS) and my LAN DNS, using the first response. Sometimes the ISP was faster, resulting in 'nonexistent host' errors.
It took me an hour to figure out what was wrong and how to repair it (networkmanager.conf, disable dnsmasq). Sigh. I wasn't the first to have this problem. The devs didn't really see the problem. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu...
"If anything plugged into it that had storage on it... It also got you immediately perp-walked out of the building and freshly unemployed,"
Nice opportunity to get rid of a co-worker when he's away for a bathroom break...
"you could run it repeatedly on a data source until you were down to a single bit."
That's why you need two distinct compression algorithms. Sometimes one will work better, sometimes the other. While repeatedly compressing, don't forget to write down in which sequence you need to apply the decompression. I believe this can compress abitrary data down to zero bits, if you are patient enough.
"Advanced driving courses teach vehicle dynamics, skid control, proper reactionary techniques to road hazards, proactive hazard evaluation, and so on; they cost $300 here, and you can go all the way to $1500 for driving/racing combined classes"
That's cheap. Here in Netherlands, a regular driving license will cost you around 30 hours(*) of instruction, plus 10 or so hours to study the traffic rules in all kinds of edge cases, and about 1500 euros for instruction, theory exam, and driving exam. It doesn't include skid control.
Traffic fatalities (per capita) are a factor 3 lower in Netherlands and Germany, compared to the US.
(*) it took me more like 75 hours of instruction and considerably more money... started at later age and generally bad body coordination/multitasking....
From TFA (2nd link): "Your CEO, and each officer, may be fined up to $1,000,000"
Now that's refreshing! Corporate misbehavior resulting in personal fines for the management. I could think of a few more cases where that would be a good idea.
"I know people who are losing two hours of their life a day commuting each way, "
I commute well over 2 hours, 4 days per week. I don't see it as lost time. I'm reading slashdot and other sites in the train like now (plenty of space since I travel after the peak hours). In addition, 15 km of cycling per day, which is my only exercise. Fortunately the climate over here allows cycling.
But the idea of driving a car for 2 h/day horrifies me...
When a patent is filed, I believe the USPTO keeps it confidential for a long time (a year?) until it is well along in process, to avoid revealing its secrets long before the patent is decided.
In the standard procedure, the application is kept secret for 18 months; then the application is published; the USPTO will then wait another year or so (depending on the back log it could be much more) before deciding whether or not to grant the patent. In this time slot between publication and decision, competitors could point out relevant prior art to USPTO, which would affect the decision.
In the US system, one can also file a provisional patent application and wait 12 months before filing the final application, which will essentially stretch the confidential period from 18 to 30 months. This was the case here. The final application can differ from the provisional application (errors corrected, more examples provided, reworded claims, etc.). In case of relevant prior art that was published between the provisional and final application, the provisional application will count.
Bah, 99.9% of the people who complain that their BMI is high because of muscles don't have that much muscles. This is Olaf Tufte, former olympic champion
Well, that's an example of a guy who, as you say, are almost pure muscle. Go and Google for "strongest man competition". Most of those guys have quite a bit more fat, but I doubt that their overal body fat percentage is that high.
"he's hard pressed for time. The patent office is over worked, understaffed, and runs on quotas"
I'm actually amazed about what these examiners can achieve. Depending on what you assume for the hourly rate of an examiner, including all organizational overhead, they have 4 to 8 hours to read and understand the application, search prior art, and write their response.
I sometimes have to proofread draft patent applications of my own inventions, and it takes me typically 4 hours to review those (check that what the attorney wrote is a correct description of what I think the invention is). They turn my 2-page description of an idea into 25 pages of dense legalese, but at least I believe that I should have some advantage in understanding the idea, compared to the examiner.
You live in Europe. Where exactly? Europe includes Ukraine, part of Russia, and a few other non-EU countries. Even within the EU, it can vary.
"you have always been able to slap your SIM card into any phone you buy since 1995 or so.... In Europe you always bought your phone from an electronics shop and SIM from a carrier."
Well, it has always been an option, but in Netherlands and various places where I've been on holiday, it's not what all consumers opt for. Plenty of people who get a new smartphone every 2 years. A phone bought together with a SIM often has a SIM lock, which means that it will only work with one carrier. Most shops here do not offer iPhones without contract.
In Netherlands, it seems that the 3G capacity is saturated. At least, data plans are expensive, especially with pay-as-you-go and MVNOs. MVNOs are only competitive as long as you stay here. Roaming rates tend to be the EU maximum, whereas the main providers often have better deals.
Slashdot Mirror
"I received a Pebble .... the battery life is such that I only need to recharge it a few times a week."
Îoey Pebble (1 year old) lasts an entire week on a charge, unless I have been using realtime apps (gps tracker). It helps to disable the "shake for backlight" setting.
"the only time the 5-star rating is going to go to a 3-star rating is if the national testing facilities start using these dummies. And if they do that..."
If they do that, you'll need twice the number of cars to sacrifice in crash tests and the dummies will wear out twice as fast. Likely, you'll need twice the number of testing facilities as well. A decision to make such tests mandatory should not be taken lightly.
My guess is that these dummies will be used to gain knowledge on how to translate standard test results to risks for nonstandard body types, and possibly to mandatory requirements on car/safety belt construction if the disadvantage of an obese person is large and preventable.
"4W charger can charge devices at the same rate as my 5 and 10 watt chargers! The last generation of phones use 5V 1A = 5 watt chargers"
That the charger is capable of delivering 5 W does not actually mean that the device will actually draw that amount. I have a dongle that measures the current and voltage of USB chargers and my smartphones rarely draw more than 0.8 A, and even then only if I use a low-resistance cable with a battery below 80%. Cables that are long enough to reach comfortably from the floor to my hands while I'm sitting usually do less than that.
Google "usb charger doctor", the dongle is only $7 or so.
"HAM radio operators have a statistically significant higher incident of cancer."
You seem to be selective in your interpretation of the data. From the second link:
"Among men, there were 14,630 deaths (SMR = 0.73 (95% CI = 0.71-0.74)) and among women, 760 (SMR = 0.72 (0.67-0.78)). There were 4,007 cancer deaths among males (SMR = 0.79 (0.76-0.81)) and 289 among females (SMR = 0.82 (0.72-0.92))."
Standardized mortality ratios (SMR) smaller than one for cancer mean that there are fewer cancer deaths among radio operators than among the total (US) population. The abstract continues to state that for some particular types of cancer, the SMR is slightly above one, but with very wide confidence intervals (CI), which indicate that there are too few cases for reliable statistics.
I think we need to resort to specifying listening volumes in dB(A) levels, since I can't imagine driving even a bad headphone to distortion levels at what I call 'normal listening volume'. For me, that's probably around 70 dBA, "normal speech at 3 ft".
"The problem with Bose has always been that they only sound "acceptably okay" at relatively low volumes, they tend to massively distort at what I would consider a normal listening volume. [...] especially if you'll be using them in very noisy environments"
Cranking up the volume to drown out envoronmental noise sounds like a good pathway towards a hearing aid by the time you're 50 years old.
There have been occasions that I actually asked co-travelers on the train to lower their volume because I could hear their hip hop beat over my own music that was playing through my own noise-isolating headphones. I suspect that those people are already semi-deaf...
"I use some fairly cheap Sennheiser in-ear monitors on aircraft now. The isolation is better than any noise cancelling headphones can ever hope to achieve"
What model? I have cx-300-2 noise-isolating earbuds, which I'd call fairly cheap at around EUR 35, but I wouldn't say they perform better than bose/beats noise cancelling headphones. Whatever else I see in a quick Google is several hundred dollars.
You are probably the only one in the world who uses that definition of 'exponential'. The exponential function has the property exp(x+1)=2.7*exp(x), which is completely analogous to your geometric series.
"the ebola death curve is exponential. Production and distribution of vaccines, and of antibodies by transfusion, is at best geometric."
Geometric is essentially the same as exponential. The only difference is that geometric is in discrete steps and exponential can also describe fractional steps. So, what did you really mean here?
It seems that I don't have a clue what you're trying to say. In lactose-tolerant people, lactose is broken down by enzymes produced by the human body, and the reaction product is absorbed. Lactose-intolerant people don't produce that enzyme. What specifically mutated bacteria that take care of the lactose in a benign or less pleasant way are you referring to? And what statement exactly do you wish to have a reference for?
What I was trying to say: if the intestine does not absorb nearly all the carbohydrates that are in the food, you will get sick. Since people don't get sick (bloating, flatulence, etc.) all the time from their normal diet, it must mean that the intestine absorbs nearly everything in their diet.
I was using an old netbook (Atom N270) as a home media server, keeping it running Ubuntu Desktop 9.something. But it was too much of a pain to maintain: keeping it on mains power for a year seems to break the battery-charge-level monitoring, which makes the internal battery useless as a UPS. Too many processes insisted on writing to files every 5 minutes, which was spinning up the hard disk all the time. Also, it got uncomfortably hot with the lid closed all the time.
So I got a second-hand thin client (Via 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB internal flash drive, 1 GB RAM, gigabit ethernet) for 75 euros, installed Ubuntu Server 12.04 and a USB hard disk that has a auto spin-down feature. The 1 GiB "SSD" turned out to be too small for OS and log files, so I augmented it with a 4 GB USB thumb drive, while cursing that it is very hard to find one that performs well on lots of small writes (With 4 kB random block write tests, the throughput of most sticks is less than 0.01 MB/s). This thing takes about 13 W of power while idle (26 euros/year at our rates) and last time I looked, there are no alternatives on the market that have comparable horsepower for much less watts. The server hosts media files (MiniDLNA) and backups (snapshots) of the various computers/tablets/phones. Once or twice a year, I sync the disk with an external USB drive. If my house goes up in flames, all will be gone.
Since my media storage is mostly audio, a 1 TB drive is plenty. When I read here from people that have 40 TB of storage in NAS arrays, I wonder what they are hoarding. At 5 GB per hour of video, that's 8000 hours!
Ubuntu 12.04 server sucks for a headless server. I think it was waiting for a keypress after an unclean boot. (There was a comment on a forum of a guy who had to drive 100 miles to a datacenter to attach a keyboard and press Enter). That one was solved, but now it just hangs during filesystem checking at boot time - some bad boot-order dependency.
Network: ethernet in living room (A/V center) and work room (desktop/printer); wifi elsewhere. Visitors get the wifi password. Non-media file transfers and backups are always over ssh. (It t1urns out that the gigabit ethernet was overkill; the VIA CPU can barely saturate a 100 Mbps ethernet line, with the faster SSH cipher (arcfour).
"your body isn't absorbing every calorie you put into it. Your body absorbs until it has what it needs"
Consider what happens if a lactose-intolerant person drinks a glass or two of milk: about 25 g of carbohydrates that their body can't absorb. It will lead to flatulence and diarrhea as a result of gut bacteria feasting on those unused calories and the inability of the body to extract water effectively from a sugar solution.
The fact that this is an abnormal response shows that the normal thing is to absorb every calorie.
" I always just use split horizon DNS, and put everything under the corporate domain name, thus eliminating the problem."
I have something like that at home, a registered domain name example.com and a portion *.home.example.com that was only resolvable from my lan.
Then, a few months back, I upgraded to the new Linux Mint LTS, which did all queries simultaneously to my ISP (fallback DNS) and my LAN DNS, using the first response. Sometimes the ISP was faster, resulting in 'nonexistent host' errors.
It took me an hour to figure out what was wrong and how to repair it (networkmanager.conf, disable dnsmasq). Sigh. I wasn't the first to have this problem. The devs didn't really see the problem. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu...
"If anything plugged into it that had storage on it ... It also got you immediately perp-walked out of the building and freshly unemployed,"
Nice opportunity to get rid of a co-worker when he's away for a bathroom break...
"you could run it repeatedly on a data source until you were down to a single bit."
That's why you need two distinct compression algorithms. Sometimes one will work better, sometimes the other. While repeatedly compressing, don't forget to write down in which sequence you need to apply the decompression. I believe this can compress abitrary data down to zero bits, if you are patient enough.
"Advanced driving courses teach vehicle dynamics, skid control, proper reactionary techniques to road hazards, proactive hazard evaluation, and so on; they cost $300 here, and you can go all the way to $1500 for driving/racing combined classes"
That's cheap. Here in Netherlands, a regular driving license will cost you around 30 hours(*) of instruction, plus 10 or so hours to study the traffic rules in all kinds of edge cases, and about 1500 euros for instruction, theory exam, and driving exam. It doesn't include skid control.
Traffic fatalities (per capita) are a factor 3 lower in Netherlands and Germany, compared to the US.
(*) it took me more like 75 hours of instruction and considerably more money... started at later age and generally bad body coordination/multitasking....
From TFA (2nd link): "Your CEO, and each officer, may be fined up to $1,000,000"
Now that's refreshing! Corporate misbehavior resulting in personal fines for the management. I could think of a few more cases where that would be a good idea.
"I know people who are losing two hours of their life a day commuting each way, "
I commute well over 2 hours, 4 days per week. I don't see it as lost time. I'm reading slashdot and other sites in the train like now (plenty of space since I travel after the peak hours). In addition, 15 km of cycling per day, which is my only exercise. Fortunately the climate over here allows cycling.
But the idea of driving a car for 2 h/day horrifies me...
"just start charging per ip $1 per ip per year should be sufficient"
And who should benefit from the $4B/yr revenue? The American government because ICANN is in the US?
OK, replace "scientific community" by "anyone literate and educated".
There are well known midieval symbols for a sperical earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The notion of a spherical earth dates from around 400 B.C.
In the standard procedure, the application is kept secret for 18 months; then the application is published; the USPTO will then wait another year or so (depending on the back log it could be much more) before deciding whether or not to grant the patent. In this time slot between publication and decision, competitors could point out relevant prior art to USPTO, which would affect the decision.
In the US system, one can also file a provisional patent application and wait 12 months before filing the final application, which will essentially stretch the confidential period from 18 to 30 months. This was the case here. The final application can differ from the provisional application (errors corrected, more examples provided, reworded claims, etc.). In case of relevant prior art that was published between the provisional and final application, the provisional application will count.
Well, that's an example of a guy who, as you say, are almost pure muscle. Go and Google for "strongest man competition". Most of those guys have quite a bit more fat, but I doubt that their overal body fat percentage is that high.
"he's hard pressed for time. The patent office is over worked, understaffed, and runs on quotas"
I'm actually amazed about what these examiners can achieve. Depending on what you assume for the hourly rate of an examiner, including all organizational overhead, they have 4 to 8 hours to read and understand the application, search prior art, and write their response.
I sometimes have to proofread draft patent applications of my own inventions, and it takes me typically 4 hours to review those (check that what the attorney wrote is a correct description of what I think the invention is). They turn my 2-page description of an idea into 25 pages of dense legalese, but at least I believe that I should have some advantage in understanding the idea, compared to the examiner.
You live in Europe. Where exactly? Europe includes Ukraine, part of Russia, and a few other non-EU countries. Even within the EU, it can vary.
"you have always been able to slap your SIM card into any phone you buy since 1995 or so. ... In Europe you always bought your phone from an electronics shop and SIM from a carrier."
Well, it has always been an option, but in Netherlands and various places where I've been on holiday, it's not what all consumers opt for. Plenty of people who get a new smartphone every 2 years. A phone bought together with a SIM often has a SIM lock, which means that it will only work with one carrier. Most shops here do not offer iPhones without contract.
In Netherlands, it seems that the 3G capacity is saturated. At least, data plans are expensive, especially with pay-as-you-go and MVNOs. MVNOs are only competitive as long as you stay here. Roaming rates tend to be the EU maximum, whereas the main providers often have better deals.