Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched-they are later sanitized or destroyed-in an effort to keep would-be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material.
Was this policy introduced towards the end of the Clinton Administration..?
"Evil On A Budget, Inc. presents the Mini-Lair, a 30 x 30 x 20m corrugated metal lair with incorporated mini-dome, suitable for small missile launches, medium-sized lasers, or other small-to-midsize superweapons. Includes convenient, obvious self-destruct mechanism. A/C and electricity extra."
The meta-study I cited is attempting to be more inclusive, and avoid this possible source of selection bias.
The Cochrane meta-analysis only accepted studies that were judged to have "complete outcome ascertainment, accurate exposure measurement, appropriate selection of the comparison group and elimination or control of factors such as selection bias, observation bias and confounding." A more 'inclusive' meta-analysis may be compromised if it includes poorly conducted studies. There is no attempt to conceal that the authors of the Cochrane review, which is of course fully cited, were involved in some of the included studies themselves. It would be a bit surprising if they'd excluded their own work, as presumably they conduct their own research to the same standards they require of others.
Unfortunately, his ideas degraded between the TV series and the book and software
There also seems to be a bunch of First Earth Battalion style prose in a recent edition of The Mind Map Book ("We dedicate this book to all those Warriors of the Mind fighting in the Century of the Brain and Millenium of the Mind for the expansion and freedom of Human Intelligence"). Apparently this stuff can pretty much turn you into a Jedi:
"The Mentally Literate Human is capable of turning on the radiant synergistic thinking engines, and creating conceptual frameworks and new paradigms of limitless possibility...the 'mental screen...'...of the Radiant Thinking Mind...continues to grow with an infinite possibility for size and dimension."
Good meta-studies...suggest there is no significant overall injury/death mitigation benefit to cyclists from wearing helmets.
According to the excellent Cochrane meta-analyis and review:
'Wearing a helmet dramatically reduces the risk of head and facial injuries for bicyclists involved in a crash, even if it involves a motor vehicle...Head injuries are responsible for around three-quarters of deaths among bicyclists involved in crashes. Facial injuries are also common. The review found that wearing a helmet reduced the risk of head or brain injury by approximately two-thirds or more, regardless of whether the crash involved a motor vehicle. Injuries to the mid and upper face were also markedly reduced, although helmets did not prevent lower facial injuries.'
In another review from the Cochrane Collaboration:
'Although the results of the review support bicycle helmet legislation for reducing head injuries, the evidence is currently insufficient to either support or negate the claims of bicycle helmet opponents that helmet laws may discourage cycling.'
Together, these reviews suggest that an individual would be well-advised to wear a helmet, but the jury's still out on whether mandating helmet use discourages cycling (with its potential health benefits for the population).
Yes, but that would cost money, and while I could probably get damages It would be practically impossible to collect on them.
And possibly easier said than done, given this guy's previous form:
"When Dawkins publicly lampooned the research in the Atlas of Creation (he pointed out that one of the photos of a Caddis Fly was in fact a fishing fly, complete with metal hook, stolen from the internet, pictured), and labelled Yahya a charlatan on his website, Yahya used his considerable influence and battalion of lawyers to sue for libel and have Dawkins's website banned in Turkey. This is just one of thousands of cases he has brought before the Turkish courts."
Lots more here, including lurid claims about blackmail and sex parties:
Small steps, agreed, but every little bit helps. And even if they didn't, I'd be for it just because I've got enough cables and adapters stuffed in my equipment drawers as it is.
Indeed. Douglas Adams: 'Time to declare war, I think, on little dongly things':
I assume this is to test out the new hardware-based rootkit Sony's been working on?:-D
Well, the Sony Pencoed factory is less than 3 miles away from the (Bridgend) location of Fortium Techologies ( http://www.fortiumtech.com/ ), aka 'First 4 Internet', the subcontractor that developed the XCP rootkit for Sony...
I've tried buying "DRM free" ebooks from Amazon and could not figure out how to do it easily without a Kindle (you don't seem to ever got prompted to download a file; I assume it is all back-end device specific magic tied to your account...?)
There are desktop applications for Windows and Mac, e.g.:
Once this is installed and registered to your Amazon account, any purchased ebook files are automatically downloaded to a directory on your computer when the application is started, or you request a sync. From there (if DRM free) you can convert the files to some other format like epub, using a tool like Calibre:
No, the US government spends vastly more money on this kind of thing. $940K is barely even a rounding error in the federal propaganda budget.
To be fair, this does buy you some pretty sophisticated technology. 'An anonymous reader' is clearly a CIA bot, but this story reads almost like a human posted it ('But hey' is a nice touch).
A similar story: I bought a box set of the first four series of Doctor Who from the UK (Ecclestone and Tennant's series, basically.)
Well, that highlights the real dangers of buying grey market. Instead of the first four series (Hartnell and Troughton), they fobbed you off with some modern imitation with Billy Piper in it!
You can buy it on Amazon. What's the problem? It's always been the case that you've had to pay for great music in the past. Civilisation still hasn't collapsed.
I already bought it, thanks, back when Solti was still alive and hopefully in a position to benefit from my purchase. Civilisation was getting on perfectly well with an already generous 50 year copyright term at the time.
Linux is more like my ratcheting set. Sed, awk, bash scripts... they don't change. They were there 5 years ago. They'll be there 5 years from now. They're simple, dependable, and "just work"... Stop adding features. Make the product do one thing well, and then use the profits to make a completely different product if you need something else done well.
There still should be musicians and recording facilities that could match them or do better.
It's rather sad to note that, at the same time this worthy project was being completed, our elected representatives in the EU extended copyright on recorded music from 50 to 70 years:
This means that while many of the great performances from the classic mono era can still be made freely available (and some of these have arguably never been bettered), we won't see legendary early stereo recordings like Solti's complete Ring cycle, finished in 1965, in the public domain for another couple of decades. It is, of course, a complete coincidence that the pop music cash cows of the 60s were also about to go out of copyright...
One practical consequence of this is that we'll presumably see fewer of the excellent restorations that companies like Naxos have done on public domain material, often producing better releases than the original record companies, even without access to the master recordings.
Suntools (as SunView was originally known) was my first true GUI (I hadn't used a Mac or GEM and Windows 3 hadn't yet been launched). A Sun workstation running this in the 80s, complete with optical mouse and huge monitor, looked about 5 years in advance of anything else I could get time on. Now get off my lawn.
Really? It's only the default desktop of the most widely used Linux distribution in the world. Popularity doesn't mean you like it, it's a measure of how many people use/like it. More people use Unity than just about any other open source desktop available, that makes it pretty popular.
Unity's 'popularity' is almost entirely dependent on the strong Ubuntu brand (built with Gnome 2). How popular would Unity be if it were presented as an equal choice at installation with Gnome 2 (or MATE)? The spinoff distributions offer alternative defaults, of course, but Xubuntu, Lubuntu and Kubuntu have much lower profiles than the flagship Ubuntu brand. I'd be very surprised to see Unity enthusiastically adopted by the broader Linux community (packaging it is one thing; getting more than a handful of users to install it is quite another). Meanwhile, Ubuntu's 'new desktop paradigm' has probably done more than anything else to boost the popularity of Mint (v13 with MATE is much closer to 'classic Ubuntu' than any of Canonical's recent offerings).
Pontiac actually had a fully-developed self-driving prototype car by the early 80s, but the project was shelved due to some unexpected teething troubles:
"Now. You'll note that all of this software is GPL'd. Which means any Tom, Dick or Harry (or any other awesome name) can build their own binaries and distribute it on their website or repository. And I have absolutely no problem with that. None whatsoever."
Slashdot Mirror
Unbelievable. They were still using carrier pigeons in WW II? Despite the invention of radio?
If you think that's hard to believe, this is going to blow your mind:
http://historywired.si.edu/object.cfm?ID=353
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon
Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched-they are later sanitized or destroyed-in an effort to keep would-be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material.
Was this policy introduced towards the end of the Clinton Administration..?
All this and more:
http://www.villainsource.com/
"Evil On A Budget, Inc. presents the Mini-Lair, a 30 x 30 x 20m corrugated metal lair with incorporated mini-dome, suitable for small missile launches, medium-sized lasers, or other small-to-midsize superweapons. Includes convenient, obvious self-destruct mechanism. A/C and electricity extra."
Having taken an iPhone 3GS to the summit of Everest...
Good signal?
The meta-study I cited is attempting to be more inclusive, and avoid this possible source of selection bias.
The Cochrane meta-analysis only accepted studies that were judged to have "complete outcome ascertainment, accurate exposure measurement, appropriate selection of the comparison group and elimination or control of factors such as selection bias, observation bias and confounding." A more 'inclusive' meta-analysis may be compromised if it includes poorly conducted studies. There is no attempt to conceal that the authors of the Cochrane review, which is of course fully cited, were involved in some of the included studies themselves. It would be a bit surprising if they'd excluded their own work, as presumably they conduct their own research to the same standards they require of others.
Unfortunately, his ideas degraded between the TV series and the book and software
There also seems to be a bunch of First Earth Battalion style prose in a recent edition of The Mind Map Book ("We dedicate this book to all those Warriors of the Mind fighting in the Century of the Brain and Millenium of the Mind for the expansion and freedom of Human Intelligence"). Apparently this stuff can pretty much turn you into a Jedi:
"The Mentally Literate Human is capable of turning on the radiant synergistic thinking engines, and creating conceptual frameworks and new paradigms of limitless possibility...the 'mental screen...'...of the Radiant Thinking Mind...continues to grow with an infinite possibility for size and dimension."
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HqEzXjVQjsYC&pg=PA244
Good meta-studies...suggest there is no significant overall injury/death mitigation benefit to cyclists from wearing helmets.
According to the excellent Cochrane meta-analyis and review:
'Wearing a helmet dramatically reduces the risk of head and facial injuries for bicyclists involved in a crash, even if it involves a motor vehicle...Head injuries are responsible for around three-quarters of deaths among bicyclists involved in crashes. Facial injuries are also common. The review found that wearing a helmet reduced the risk of head or brain injury by approximately two-thirds or more, regardless of whether the crash involved a motor vehicle. Injuries to the mid and upper face were also markedly reduced, although helmets did not prevent lower facial injuries.'
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001855/wearing-a-helmet-dramatically-reduces-the-risk-of-head-and-facial-injuries-for-bicyclists-involved-in-a-crash-even-if-it-involves-a-motor-vehicle
In another review from the Cochrane Collaboration:
'Although the results of the review support bicycle helmet legislation for reducing head injuries, the evidence is currently insufficient to either support or negate the claims of bicycle helmet opponents that helmet laws may discourage cycling.'
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD005401/bicycle-helmet-legislation-for-the-uptake-of-helmet-use-and-prevention-of-head-injuries
Together, these reviews suggest that an individual would be well-advised to wear a helmet, but the jury's still out on whether mandating helmet use discourages cycling (with its potential health benefits for the population).
Yes, but that would cost money, and while I could probably get damages It would be practically impossible to collect on them.
And possibly easier said than done, given this guy's previous form:
"When Dawkins publicly lampooned the research in the Atlas of Creation (he pointed out that one of the photos of a Caddis Fly was in fact a fishing fly, complete with metal hook, stolen from the internet, pictured), and labelled Yahya a charlatan on his website, Yahya used his considerable influence and battalion of lawyers to sue for libel and have Dawkins's website banned in Turkey. This is just one of thousands of cases he has brought before the Turkish courts."
Lots more here, including lurid claims about blackmail and sex parties:
http://newhumanist.org.uk/2131
What's impressive is that this got out of Sophos' testing lab and into production.
What's really impressive is that is that it also orchestrated a DDOS attack on the Sophos tech support helpline...
Small steps, agreed, but every little bit helps. And even if they didn't, I'd be for it just because I've got enough cables and adapters stuffed in my equipment drawers as it is.
Indeed. Douglas Adams: 'Time to declare war, I think, on little dongly things':
http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html
And I don't see anything that would prohibit a Goatse.cx inspired logo. I can see the hands wrapping around the "o" in Slashdot now.
This one made the BBC's list of the top 12 alternative Olympics 2012 logos until someone realised. They deleted the link, but not the jpeg:
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/43006000/jpg/_43006883_sean_stayte_416.jpg
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/04/bbc_olympics_cx/
("Here is my design for the Olympic logo. It is very simple and so memorable. The hands represent Britain pulling together to reveal the Olympics.")
I assume this is to test out the new hardware-based rootkit Sony's been working on? :-D
Well, the Sony Pencoed factory is less than 3 miles away from the (Bridgend) location of Fortium Techologies ( http://www.fortiumtech.com/ ), aka 'First 4 Internet', the subcontractor that developed the XCP rootkit for Sony...
Coincidence, or something more sinister?: http://cardiffskateboardclub.com/2009/08/21/the-longest-conspiracy-theory-in-the-world/
I've tried buying "DRM free" ebooks from Amazon and could not figure out how to do it easily without a Kindle (you don't seem to ever got prompted to download a file; I assume it is all back-end device specific magic tied to your account...?)
There are desktop applications for Windows and Mac, e.g.:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/pc/download
Once this is installed and registered to your Amazon account, any purchased ebook files are automatically downloaded to a directory on your computer when the application is started, or you request a sync. From there (if DRM free) you can convert the files to some other format like epub, using a tool like Calibre:
http://calibre-ebook.com/
Even if the files do have DRM, there are unofficial Calibre plugins to disinfect them seamlessly, as this l33t h4x0r site describes:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from-kindle-e-books-and-others/
That would be a nice universe to live in. Maybe the BBC can have Doctor Who visit it sometime.
They already did that one. Look carefully and you can see Oswin typing 'get_iplayer --pid p00wqr14' in this week's episode.
No, the US government spends vastly more money on this kind of thing. $940K is barely even a rounding error in the federal propaganda budget.
To be fair, this does buy you some pretty sophisticated technology. 'An anonymous reader' is clearly a CIA bot, but this story reads almost like a human posted it ('But hey' is a nice touch).
A similar story: I bought a box set of the first four series of Doctor Who from the UK (Ecclestone and Tennant's series, basically.)
Well, that highlights the real dangers of buying grey market. Instead of the first four series (Hartnell and Troughton), they fobbed you off with some modern imitation with Billy Piper in it!
It isn't in Nature, it's in Scientific Reports, one of 'over 80' journals from the Nature Publishing Group
http://www.nature.com/srep/about/index.html
It's a new journal, with no impact factor yet.
You can buy it on Amazon. What's the problem? It's always been the case that you've had to pay for great music in the past. Civilisation still hasn't collapsed.
I already bought it, thanks, back when Solti was still alive and hopefully in a position to benefit from my purchase. Civilisation was getting on perfectly well with an already generous 50 year copyright term at the time.
Linux is more like my ratcheting set. Sed, awk, bash scripts... they don't change. They were there 5 years ago. They'll be there 5 years from now. They're simple, dependable, and "just work"... Stop adding features. Make the product do one thing well, and then use the profits to make a completely different product if you need something else done well.
So you're not an emacs user then?
There still should be musicians and recording facilities that could match them or do better.
It's rather sad to note that, at the same time this worthy project was being completed, our elected representatives in the EU extended copyright on recorded music from 50 to 70 years:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/12/musicians-copyright-extension
This means that while many of the great performances from the classic mono era can still be made freely available (and some of these have arguably never been bettered), we won't see legendary early stereo recordings like Solti's complete Ring cycle, finished in 1965, in the public domain for another couple of decades. It is, of course, a complete coincidence that the pop music cash cows of the 60s were also about to go out of copyright...
One practical consequence of this is that we'll presumably see fewer of the excellent restorations that companies like Naxos have done on public domain material, often producing better releases than the original record companies, even without access to the master recordings.
It's a real pity Debian wheezy won't have MATE.
Might be worth cutting out the middleman and using the upstream directly. The Mate guys maintain a Wheezy repository:
http://mate-desktop.org/install/#debian
I haven't tried this, but their equivalent Ubuntu repository works very well with 12.04.
Did they ever open source SunView?
That takes me back:
http://toastytech.com/guis/sv35.html
Suntools (as SunView was originally known) was my first true GUI (I hadn't used a Mac or GEM and Windows 3 hadn't yet been launched). A Sun workstation running this in the 80s, complete with optical mouse and huge monitor, looked about 5 years in advance of anything else I could get time on. Now get off my lawn.
Really? It's only the default desktop of the most widely used Linux distribution in the world. Popularity doesn't mean you like it, it's a measure of how many people use/like it. More people use Unity than just about any other open source desktop available, that makes it pretty popular.
Unity's 'popularity' is almost entirely dependent on the strong Ubuntu brand (built with Gnome 2). How popular would Unity be if it were presented as an equal choice at installation with Gnome 2 (or MATE)? The spinoff distributions offer alternative defaults, of course, but Xubuntu, Lubuntu and Kubuntu have much lower profiles than the flagship Ubuntu brand. I'd be very surprised to see Unity enthusiastically adopted by the broader Linux community (packaging it is one thing; getting more than a handful of users to install it is quite another). Meanwhile, Ubuntu's 'new desktop paradigm' has probably done more than anything else to boost the popularity of Mint (v13 with MATE is much closer to 'classic Ubuntu' than any of Canonical's recent offerings).
Pontiac actually had a fully-developed self-driving prototype car by the early 80s, but the project was shelved due to some unexpected teething troubles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W4iGm3nbWA
He know, he's fine with it. From TFA:
"Now. You'll note that all of this software is GPL'd. Which means any Tom, Dick or Harry (or any other awesome name) can build their own binaries and distribute it on their website or repository. And I have absolutely no problem with that. None whatsoever."