If you could "fix" high functioning autistic so that they could be completely normal what kind of effect might that have on scientific fields which attract such people?
I'm not sure that's an apples-to-apples comparison. Toying with the way the brain functions is quite different from repairing a physical abnormality.
I would liken curing color blindness to curing a physical ailment, not a mental one. Would you have any moral qualms about using medical science to repair the legs of a man bound to a wheelchair?
Windows 7's explorer is even worse. I use Vista at work and Windows 7 at home. A lot of other posters are saying this, and they're right: Windows 7 is basically just a glorified service pack for Vista with a less hideous color scheme.
Sadly, for every nice new feature in Win7, there's three other changes that baffle and anger me. For example, Win7 explorer no longer displays the amount of free space available on your drive. That decision just makes no sense to me. Another thing I find annoying is that when you drill-down into folders in the right-hand pane, the left-hand folder tree no longer stays in sync.
Sure, Vista explorer will randomly decide that some code folder actually has music and display columns for "artist" and "rating", but at least I can tell how much free space I have on the drive at a glance.
The GP is correct. You need standing in order to bring a consitutional issue to court.
In the United States, for example, a person cannot bring a suit challenging the constitutionality of a law unless the plaintiff can demonstrate that the plaintiff is (or will be) harmed by the law.
Though he's liberal only really in the sense that he's not a neocon and he points out the absurdities of the current administration. I don't believe I've ever heard him sing the praises of social security, welfare, or the nanny state. (though I've only watched his show a few dozen times)
Of course, "conservative" pundits are generally far from conservative themselves. They mostly just tow the party line, rather than espouse small government that is restrained in it's application of power. For some reason the word "conservative" is no longer used to mean, well, conservative.
Many SQL Calls are decades old and were copied and pasted assumed what isn't broke don't fix.
All too true. My company maintains some sites that were originally written during the 90s by a different web consulting company. The sites were happily chugging along and serving up pages for upwards of 10 years, until last weekend when they were hit with the exact attack described in this article. Fortunately, the attack was noticed early and we were able to fix the problem quickly, resulting in a minimal impact on our client's users.
I wasn't involved much with the emergency fixes, but our team ended up installing a product called dotDefender that seems to have done a fantastic job of filtering out malicious requests. It inspects GET and POST data _before_ it's passed on to the vulnerable application and stops the request if it detects things like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, directory traversal, or other attacks. If you use IIS6 and have a lot of vulnerable code; or, like us, some of the bad code is contained within compiled libraries for which you don't possess the original source, I'd definitely recommend checking it out.
Alternatively, there's a free ISAPI filter that will perform similar pre-application-level checking of GET and POST data, though I believe it only checks for SQL injection, and I can't vouch for it since I've never seen it in action.
Unfortunately, I don't believe either of these solutions work with IIS7, so if your sites run on IIS7, I wish you luck!
Bruce E. Ivins doesn't sound like a Muslim name. Did he have any friends or relatives in the Middle East? I'm disappointed that TFA doesn't address any of these questions. I wonder if they'll ever be answered.
Yeah. What happened in 2005 to make it plateau like that?
That's really interesting. I wonder if it has anything to do with the release of ASP.NET v2.0?
After avoiding Microsoft web platforms like the plague for a decade, I recently took a new job and left the LAMP and Java/JSP world behind for ASP.NET and C#; and I'm amazingly productive on the new platform. I never used ASP.NET v1, but it looks like it was missing a lot of things that were added in version 2. I'd be willing to bet that with the release of v2.0 in 2005, Microsoft stole a big chunk of what would have been PHPs market share.
Your citation does appear to show that the government subsidized the USPS by $3 billion in 2007, just like you said. I wonder where the disconnect is between that report and the statements by the NALC.
If the USPS is your model for a successful organization, and you want the medical and science field to be more like the USPS, God help the United States!
I was just pointing out that the USPS does it's job efficiently. If you think that privatization is the way to get a cheaper, more efficient organization, then I have to ask: How are your medical insurance premiums? Why do we spend the least of any country in the world on our government-run postal service, yet spend the most per person on our private health insurance? From where I'm sitting, it looks like the USPS could teach the insurance industry a thing or two about how to deliver the most bang for your buck.
That said, in truth neither government nor privatization alone are the answer. As is usual in life, a healthy middle ground is the most beneficial. Don't forget it was a government science program (DARPA) that invented the technology upon which the internet runs, even if it took the private sector to actually get it into your home. Don't immediately dismiss the government's ability to get things done with the best interests of the people at heart, rather than the profit-based motives of private industry.
It is illegal for any shipping company to charge less than the USPS for shipping... It is also illegal for private companies to deliver first class mail
You have a point there, but I still think $0.41 for a 1st class letter is an excellent deal. Maybe private industry could do better, but there's not a whole lot of room to lower that price.
Actually, the USPS recieved 3 billion dollars in government subsidies for 2007
Taxpayer subsidies to the USPS were phased out between 1971, when they covered 23 percent of costs, and 1983. Today, an appropriation to the Postal Service proportional to that paid in 1971 would cost nearly $16 billion annually. The USPS is authorized to receive compensation of $460 million per year for operating unprofitable post offices, but has not requested or received this public service subsidy in more than 18 years. The direct savings to taxpayers: $13 billion through 2007.
Also from the same page:
The USPS maintains the most affordable postage in the world. A first-class stamp, which costs 41 cents in America, costs 75 cents in Japan, 49 cents in Germany and 71 cents in Britain.
Overall postage rates have increased less than consumer prices in general since the creation of the USPS in 1971. The stability in postage rates was achieved even as direct and indirect taxpayer subsidies have been eliminateddriving the real cost of mailing letters down 23 percent.
The price of a stamp (41 cents, up 412 percent since 1971) has increased much less than many other ordinary products and services. For example: a movie ticket ($9, up 432 percent since 1971); natural gas to heat your home ($11.40 per 1,000 cubic feet, up 844 percent since 1971); a copy of Time or Newsweek ($3.95, up 690 percent since 1971).
I'll say it again: The USPS does a fantastic job, and I find it hard to believe private industry could do any better.
I think the USPS does a fantastic job. How far can you send something for $0.41 via UPS or FedEx? With USPS I can send a letter all the way to Alaska or Hawaii for the change under my couch cushions. If you compare time & cost for a 1 pound package shipped domestically, USPS comes out ahead there too.
Yep, the government does everything else so well, let's hand over this to them too!
I'm not saying the government does eveything well, but the Postal Service is one place where it excels. Many years ago, the USPS received taxpayer subsidies; but today the USPS is funded entirely by revenues from postage. If medical insurance or drug research was run half as efficiently as the USPS, we'd all be better off.
While the wave speed of the interstellar medium is given by the article as 100km/s
I read that in Wikipedia too, but it doesn't seem right. How is it possible that sounds travels so quickly through such a sparse medium? Here on Earth, the speed of in air is about 340 m/s. In water, where the molecules are closer together and can collide in more rapid succession, the speed is about 1500 m/s. In steel it's about 5000 m/s.
So how is it that compression waves travel almost 100 times faster through the sparse solar wind than they do through dense water?
Why am i able to tell the difference between 22kHz and 44.1kHz if i can't hear above 22kHz?
You're confusing sound frequency and sampling rate.
It takes two samples to produce one sound wave. Each "sample" is a value representing voltage applied to an electromagnet that moves a speaker membrane. That membrane has to occupy two different positions to create one compression wave, hence the requirement of 2 samples per sound wave.
If you want a speaker to create 22 thousand compression waves per second (i.e. a 22kHz tone), you need to supply 44 thousand voltage samples.
As a Massachusetts resident, I have no idear what happens to the ahs.
I found them! The Rs are hiding at the end of other words where they don't belong. "Sawr" for one, as in, "I went to the Tweetah Centah and sawr a great band." Or "lawr" as in "Buckle up in Massachusetts. It's the lawr!"
Actually, we probably left the Rs in England when we emigrated so many years ago. Have you ever listened to the BBC?
Why use batteries though? What about miniature flywheels and what not?
You're right, flywheels can store the same energy using less mass, and can be more efficient. I suspect, though, that heavey flywheels on a light airframe would make for some difficult gyroscopic effects.
Flywheels are preferred over conventional batteries in many aerospace applications because of the following benefits
Flywheel vs Battery Energy Storage
Energy Storage Characteristic: 5 to 10+ times greater specific energy Resulting Benefits: Lower mass
Energy Storage Characteristic: 85-95% round-trip efficiency Resulting Benefits: More usable power, lower thermal loads, compared with < 70-80% for battery system
(there's more on the page...)
Then there's the kicker at the bottom:
The huge gyroscopic forces of these high speed flywheels are an added complication. Practicalities have so far prevented the large scale adoption of flywheels for portable applications.
In the immortal words of Kari Byron: "Oh, the Newton's laws! We forgot the Newton's laws!"
This post was spell-checked with the Opera spell checker. You have to install GNU Aspell separately (except on OS X where it Just Works(TM)), and the interface is rather mediocre, but it gets the job done.
I like Firefox's spell checker better; it's one of the (very) few areas where Firefox is better than Opera.
That's a fantastic post that accurately describes my feelings on my recent switch to OS X. Despite some initial discomfort, I, too, have quickly grown to love my new Mac Pro.
I hate Finder almost as much as I the Dock. They're both useless for any sort of development environment. The Dock is quickly overwhelmed by sheer numbers, as you must mouseover the icons to get any sort of textual description. Worse, you only get 1 icon per application, regardless of how many windows it has open. The result is cumbersome application switching. Finder, on the other hand, just comes across as a bit half-assed. You'll probably prefer the shell for anything but the most basic of file operations. (No cut & paste for files? C'mon, you're going to make me open a second Finder window, browse to the other folder, then come back here and drag the files over?)
Fortunately there are some fantastic pieces of shareware and freeware to (mostly) fix these issues. I almost never even see the dock any more.
If you haven't already, get QuickSilver, NOW....seriously, go get it. I'll wait.
...good.
Now get DragThing. This will replace the dock. You can make sliding drawers, floating panels, or something in between that can hold icons and folders. It also provides panels for a list of all the windows and/or apps that you currently have open, with or without text. I bought DragThing without thinking twice.
Witch is free and crucial for application switching, too.
With these two apps, I'm just as fast moving from one application to the next as on windows. Also, PathFinder seems to be okay as a semi-replacement for Finder. I'm still in the shareware trial period...haven't decided if I'm going to buy it yet though.
You can watch system resources with Menu Meters. I find that OS X does a fantastic job of splitting work up among my 4 processor cores; much better than windows.
Oh, and if you still have to administer windows machines, Microsoft makes a Remote Desktop Client for OS X. Also, Microsoft Entourage is good (maybe better than Outlook) if you still have to use an Exchange server.
once someone in authority has a means to "subdue" a person with what they think is a method that cannot result in any permanent physical damage, they lose control, and inevitably cause more damage than would have been done with a lethal weapon which has clear and serious consequences.
You're completely right. An incident that sticks with me is when a 21 year-old college student, an innocent bystander, was killed by police using a rubber bullet while Boston celebrated the Red Sox's 2004 World Series victory.
When authorities think a device or method of subduing someone is harmless, they will be more likely to use and abuse it. This "light saber" may not be lethal, but I still think I'd rather be tackled and beaten by police, than (possibly) permanently blinded by them.
I write "ASK FOR ID" on the back of all my credit cards.
The credit card company's don't like that. Your agreement with the credit card company when you opened the account dictates that the card is not valid until signed. Additionally, if it's blank or says "See ID" on the back of your card, merchants are contractually required to have you sign it before accepting the card.
See VISA's fraud guidelines. Notice the crossed-out circle around the picture of the card with "See ID". If the card's not signed, the merchant's not supposed to accept it.
Whether or not requiring the signature is more secure may be open for debate, but "Ask for ID" is, literally, unacceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that's an apples-to-apples comparison. Toying with the way the brain functions is quite different from repairing a physical abnormality.
I would liken curing color blindness to curing a physical ailment, not a mental one. Would you have any moral qualms about using medical science to repair the legs of a man bound to a wheelchair?
Windows 7's explorer is even worse. I use Vista at work and Windows 7 at home. A lot of other posters are saying this, and they're right: Windows 7 is basically just a glorified service pack for Vista with a less hideous color scheme.
Sadly, for every nice new feature in Win7, there's three other changes that baffle and anger me. For example, Win7 explorer no longer displays the amount of free space available on your drive. That decision just makes no sense to me. Another thing I find annoying is that when you drill-down into folders in the right-hand pane, the left-hand folder tree no longer stays in sync.
Sure, Vista explorer will randomly decide that some code folder actually has music and display columns for "artist" and "rating", but at least I can tell how much free space I have on the drive at a glance.
It disturbs me that there exists a radio signal, however well encrypted, that can launch Russia's nuclear arsenal remotely.
The GP is correct. You need standing in order to bring a consitutional issue to court.
name one popular, over the top liberal pundit.
Keith Olbermann.
Though he's liberal only really in the sense that he's not a neocon and he points out the absurdities of the current administration. I don't believe I've ever heard him sing the praises of social security, welfare, or the nanny state. (though I've only watched his show a few dozen times)
Of course, "conservative" pundits are generally far from conservative themselves. They mostly just tow the party line, rather than espouse small government that is restrained in it's application of power. For some reason the word "conservative" is no longer used to mean, well, conservative.
Many SQL Calls are decades old and were copied and pasted assumed what isn't broke don't fix.
All too true. My company maintains some sites that were originally written during the 90s by a different web consulting company. The sites were happily chugging along and serving up pages for upwards of 10 years, until last weekend when they were hit with the exact attack described in this article. Fortunately, the attack was noticed early and we were able to fix the problem quickly, resulting in a minimal impact on our client's users.
I wasn't involved much with the emergency fixes, but our team ended up installing a product called dotDefender that seems to have done a fantastic job of filtering out malicious requests. It inspects GET and POST data _before_ it's passed on to the vulnerable application and stops the request if it detects things like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, directory traversal, or other attacks. If you use IIS6 and have a lot of vulnerable code; or, like us, some of the bad code is contained within compiled libraries for which you don't possess the original source, I'd definitely recommend checking it out.
Alternatively, there's a free ISAPI filter that will perform similar pre-application-level checking of GET and POST data, though I believe it only checks for SQL injection, and I can't vouch for it since I've never seen it in action.
Unfortunately, I don't believe either of these solutions work with IIS7, so if your sites run on IIS7, I wish you luck!
MSDE is a solid, ACID-compliant database (unlike a popular open-source database that also starts with the letter M).
If you're talking about MySQL, you're incorrect. MySQL with the InnoDB engine is absolutely ACID compliant.
That line is pretty damn funny all by itself, but modding it +4 Interesting takes the cake.
Everyone's a comedian.
There's no mention of any potential motive for a "top government scientist" to start mailing anthrax.
Why did he (allegedly) do it? Why did it occur in the month following 9/11? What was his relation to the 9/11 terrorists?
Bruce E. Ivins doesn't sound like a Muslim name. Did he have any friends or relatives in the Middle East? I'm disappointed that TFA doesn't address any of these questions. I wonder if they'll ever be answered.
That's really interesting. I wonder if it has anything to do with the release of ASP.NET v2.0?
After avoiding Microsoft web platforms like the plague for a decade, I recently took a new job and left the LAMP and Java/JSP world behind for ASP.NET and C#; and I'm amazingly productive on the new platform. I never used ASP.NET v1, but it looks like it was missing a lot of things that were added in version 2. I'd be willing to bet that with the release of v2.0 in 2005, Microsoft stole a big chunk of what would have been PHPs market share.
Your citation does appear to show that the government subsidized the USPS by $3 billion in 2007, just like you said. I wonder where the disconnect is between that report and the statements by the NALC.
I was just pointing out that the USPS does it's job efficiently. If you think that privatization is the way to get a cheaper, more efficient organization, then I have to ask: How are your medical insurance premiums? Why do we spend the least of any country in the world on our government-run postal service, yet spend the most per person on our private health insurance? From where I'm sitting, it looks like the USPS could teach the insurance industry a thing or two about how to deliver the most bang for your buck.
That said, in truth neither government nor privatization alone are the answer. As is usual in life, a healthy middle ground is the most beneficial. Don't forget it was a government science program (DARPA) that invented the technology upon which the internet runs, even if it took the private sector to actually get it into your home. Don't immediately dismiss the government's ability to get things done with the best interests of the people at heart, rather than the profit-based motives of private industry.
You have a point there, but I still think $0.41 for a 1st class letter is an excellent deal. Maybe private industry could do better, but there's not a whole lot of room to lower that price.
Where did that number come from? That's not true according to the National Association of Letter Carriers(my emphasis):
Also from the same page:
I'll say it again: The USPS does a fantastic job, and I find it hard to believe private industry could do any better.
I think the USPS does a fantastic job. How far can you send something for $0.41 via UPS or FedEx? With USPS I can send a letter all the way to Alaska or Hawaii for the change under my couch cushions. If you compare time & cost for a 1 pound package shipped domestically, USPS comes out ahead there too.
I'm not saying the government does eveything well, but the Postal Service is one place where it excels. Many years ago, the USPS received taxpayer subsidies; but today the USPS is funded entirely by revenues from postage. If medical insurance or drug research was run half as efficiently as the USPS, we'd all be better off.
No kidding. That's because they're under a UV light. The pig's skin only fluoresces where the UV light shines.
I read that in Wikipedia too, but it doesn't seem right. How is it possible that sounds travels so quickly through such a sparse medium? Here on Earth, the speed of in air is about 340 m/s. In water, where the molecules are closer together and can collide in more rapid succession, the speed is about 1500 m/s. In steel it's about 5000 m/s.
So how is it that compression waves travel almost 100 times faster through the sparse solar wind than they do through dense water?
You're confusing sound frequency and sampling rate.
It takes two samples to produce one sound wave. Each "sample" is a value representing voltage applied to an electromagnet that moves a speaker membrane. That membrane has to occupy two different positions to create one compression wave, hence the requirement of 2 samples per sound wave.
If you want a speaker to create 22 thousand compression waves per second (i.e. a 22kHz tone), you need to supply 44 thousand voltage samples.
I found them! The Rs are hiding at the end of other words where they don't belong. "Sawr" for one, as in, "I went to the Tweetah Centah and sawr a great band." Or "lawr" as in "Buckle up in Massachusetts. It's the lawr!"
Actually, we probably left the Rs in England when we emigrated so many years ago. Have you ever listened to the BBC?
Does the @Home service work with a prepaid SIM card?
You're right, flywheels can store the same energy using less mass, and can be more efficient. I suspect, though, that heavey flywheels on a light airframe would make for some difficult gyroscopic effects.
In fact, see this page with a Flywheel vs Battery Energy Storage comparison. It's just past halfway down the page:
Then there's the kicker at the bottom:
In the immortal words of Kari Byron: "Oh, the Newton's laws! We forgot the Newton's laws!"
This post was spell-checked with the Opera spell checker. You have to install GNU Aspell separately (except on OS X where it Just Works(TM)), and the interface is rather mediocre, but it gets the job done.
I like Firefox's spell checker better; it's one of the (very) few areas where Firefox is better than Opera.
That's a fantastic post that accurately describes my feelings on my recent switch to OS X. Despite some initial discomfort, I, too, have quickly grown to love my new Mac Pro.
...seriously, go get it. I'll wait.
...good.
I hate Finder almost as much as I the Dock. They're both useless for any sort of development environment. The Dock is quickly overwhelmed by sheer numbers, as you must mouseover the icons to get any sort of textual description. Worse, you only get 1 icon per application, regardless of how many windows it has open. The result is cumbersome application switching. Finder, on the other hand, just comes across as a bit half-assed. You'll probably prefer the shell for anything but the most basic of file operations. (No cut & paste for files? C'mon, you're going to make me open a second Finder window, browse to the other folder, then come back here and drag the files over?)
Fortunately there are some fantastic pieces of shareware and freeware to (mostly) fix these issues. I almost never even see the dock any more.
If you haven't already, get QuickSilver, NOW.
Now get DragThing. This will replace the dock. You can make sliding drawers, floating panels, or something in between that can hold icons and folders. It also provides panels for a list of all the windows and/or apps that you currently have open, with or without text. I bought DragThing without thinking twice.
Witch is free and crucial for application switching, too.
With these two apps, I'm just as fast moving from one application to the next as on windows. Also, PathFinder seems to be okay as a semi-replacement for Finder. I'm still in the shareware trial period...haven't decided if I'm going to buy it yet though.
You can watch system resources with Menu Meters. I find that OS X does a fantastic job of splitting work up among my 4 processor cores; much better than windows.
Oh, and if you still have to administer windows machines, Microsoft makes a Remote Desktop Client for OS X. Also, Microsoft Entourage is good (maybe better than Outlook) if you still have to use an Exchange server.
Interesting post. I'm curious about this:
What FCC rule prevents you from reading your own book on the air, and why? Is this just a rule for ham radio?
I'm also curious about the ban on encrypted transmissions. What's the FCC's rationale for this?
P.S. Who is your father and can you recommend any of his books in particular?
I should hope so!
8,000,000 ft^2 / 4,000 servers = 2,000 ft^2 per server
My god, those are large servers! They must still be using vacuum tubes...or maybe a 65cm manufacturing process.
You're completely right. An incident that sticks with me is when a 21 year-old college student, an innocent bystander, was killed by police using a rubber bullet while Boston celebrated the Red Sox's 2004 World Series victory.
When authorities think a device or method of subduing someone is harmless, they will be more likely to use and abuse it. This "light saber" may not be lethal, but I still think I'd rather be tackled and beaten by police, than (possibly) permanently blinded by them.
The credit card company's don't like that. Your agreement with the credit card company when you opened the account dictates that the card is not valid until signed. Additionally, if it's blank or says "See ID" on the back of your card, merchants are contractually required to have you sign it before accepting the card.
See VISA's fraud guidelines. Notice the crossed-out circle around the picture of the card with "See ID". If the card's not signed, the merchant's not supposed to accept it.
Whether or not requiring the signature is more secure may be open for debate, but "Ask for ID" is, literally, unacceptable.