(Speaking as someone who has reviewed conference submissions) For some good quality (tier 2) computer engineering conferences, only about one in five submissions is accepted. (At tier 1 - ISCA and PLDI, it's like 5%) Often times papers are reject not because they are bad or horribly flawed, but simply that there are better (more important, better conducted, more thorough) papers available. High submission fees discriminate against these papers, and especially against research groups that do not have as much fundings as others.
This is being reported as if it's a new thing. It's not. Far from it. I've been at Wikipedia for nearly 5 years now, and this debate has been raging as long as I've been there. In 2003/2004, it centered around high schoolers. By 2005/2006, it was individual Pokemon and TV shows. Now it's individual TV episodes and characters thereof.
It is unfortunate that this tendency plays right into the hands of global warming deniers. When applied to that controversy, the whole debate becomes a he-said-she-said that takes place in the absence of any evidence (or, to be precise, in the absence of reporting of evidence). That is to say, most deniers' arguments fall apart at even cursory comparison with actual evidence, but by then, the story is already published.
So what you're saying is, with one well placed spray of holy water, they have the ability to mow down SCO and a pack of (their own) lawyers at the same time? And this is bad how?
Yea, it's funny how Microsoft is cooperative with third party developers when they are losing, trying to catch up to a dominant format (Flash). Let's say they succeed in overtaking Flash, and Silverlight becomes the dominant format for interactive applets. How long do you think Microsoft will continue to aid the linux developers? I give 'em 5 minutes, tops.
As I noted on Slashdot recently, the library of congress website is possibly the most dysfunctional site on the internet. If you ever browse their collections, it's literally impossible to get a permanent URL (which makes it incredibly difficult to copy their public domain stuff to Wikipedia - all the URLs to confirm the copyright status break after an hour) What's even worse, it feels like somebody spent a lot of my taxpayer money to put together something that is functionally useless.
The pre-supposition of carbon mineralification is that converting it into the target form must be do-able with relatively low energy (or even exothermically - that is to say, it generates energy doing it). Wikipedia says that reacting CO2 with magnesium (which is abundantly available) to produce limestone is exothermic.
Artificial trees are one method for carbon capture. Natural ones just aren't efficient enough. A natural tree removes about 300 pounds of carbon per year from the atmosphere. An artificial one can remove about 90,000 tonnes. But as I said - the problem is, what do you do with it then?
First, diamonds are *not* a rare commodity. That is a myth that the De Beers diamond cartel has spent a century trying to create. De Beers tightly controls the supply, so that they appear to be rare. It's also a self-reinforcing myth - people think diamonds are rare, so they don't sell old family heirlooms, and thus there is no secondary market for diamonds.
Second, we already have the technology to create diamonds in a lab. See the wikipedia article on the subject. (At this point, I should mention that De Beers also tightly controls the diamond cutter workforce -- any diamond cutter who cuts for a company other than De Beers is immediately cut off from doing any De Beers work)
Right now, if we capture carbon dioxide (and we have the technology to do that already pretty efficiently) we have a huge problem of what to do with it. The best technology available today involved injecting it into the ground or under the sea - neither of which are good options. The technology that's being talked about is carbon mineralifcation - the technology to turn CO2 into graphite, or diamond, or soot. That's would be a huge help in fighting global warming.
No human - even children with perfect hearing - can hear 25,000 hz. (I've read that some people believe a tiny proportion of children with exceptionally wide-spectrum hearing can hear up to 29,000 hz, but this is more of an urban legend, I think) Neither your speakers nor your sound card are capable of (intentionally) producing 25,000 hz.
Just to give a baseline - I happened to visit the science museum in Balboa Park, CA, in 2002. I was 20 years old at the time, and I had excellent hearing (both then and now). They had a booth set up (with specially-purpose equipment) for testing the range of your hearing. I could hear up to about 16,500 hz, and I was able to perceive sounds up to about 17,500 hz. (Note: TV flyback, the high-pitched whine your TV gives off, is about 14,000 hz) This is probably about the upper limit for someone post-adolescence.
This point has already been mentioned on Slashdot before. As I said then, it is incorrect. The prohibition on ex-post facto laws means something cannot be retroactively made illegal; it can, however, be made retroactively legal.
I checked Thomas, the US Library of Congress's website (and possibly the most badly organized website on the internet), and I couldn't find who voted for it. Anyone have a link?
You misunderstand the purpose of adding the rat poison. It's not added to bombs because it is, by itself, particularly lethal to humans. It is added to bombs because of what happens if you combine rat poison with shrapnel wounds.
Most rat poisons kill by (a) thinning the capillary membranes and causing bleeding, and (b) inhibiting the blood's ability to coagulate, exacerbating bleeding once it occurs. However, if the person is already bleeding (because they have been hit by shrapnel), then adding an anti-coagulant substantially increases the likelihood that they die of blood loss (because the body cannot clot the wounds).
Ayyash's bombs were quite intentionally designed to kill as many people as possible (they were packed with nails and other shrapnel - and laced with rat poison - to ensure maximum lethality). The Irgun made it a point to minimize the casualties from their bombings - they called the King David hotel ahead and time and warned people to get out.
One of the foremost terrorists in the history of the middle east was Yahaya Ayyash, an electrical engineer (educated at Beir Ziet University) who built bombs for Hamas's Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. His bombs ended up killing over 100 civilians (mostly Israeli, but also Americans and other Westerners in Israel) and dozens of soldiers, ambulance workers, and other first responders.
"There is no Standardized Testing to ensure that students have basic logic skills and can effectively reason through a problem." - this is false.
The fundamentals of engineering exam is a standardized exam given throughout the United States to engineers (it's one of two exams you have to pass to become a licensed by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying, NCEES) It tests logic and problem solving ability.
It seems to me to be the height of hypocrisy that business leaders (Gates and company) complain about a lack of scientifically/technologically trained Americans, and thus we need to increase H1-B visas. These same leaders then turn around and support republican candidates who don't believe in evolution and want to water down the science curriculum by introducing Intelligent Design.
If you think Spitzer didn't go after any New York based interests, you must not be paying attention. He ended up collecting huge fines from (among others) Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup, all of which are based in New York City.
Disruptive technologies is a very real area of study. Supercomputing 2006 and 2007 even had a panel on it. (My phd adviser is one of the people listed there) Although somewhat buzz-wordy, the idea is to signify technologies that have the potential to bring about great change within an industry.
Just to name one kind of such technology for computing, if someone could get automatic parallelization to work reliably, that would be a very disruptive technology. (20 years of research has yet to achieve this, but people keep trying)
The point is, arbitration committee decisions are public, as are the arbitrator's votes themselves. The process is transparent.
As for the mailing list - it exists because arbitrators need a forum to discuss and deliberate that is free (or mostly free) from noise. Just look at any evidence or workshop page to see what I mean by noise. The rules for who is allowed to subscribe to the arbcom mailing list are stated clearly and publicly, as is the list of people who subscribe to it.
It's not excessive. We're not talking about blocking 1000 users here - we're talking about blocking 1000s IP addresses. The actual number of people who edit Wikipedia from that range (besides Bagley) is very likely 0.
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(Speaking as someone who has reviewed conference submissions) For some good quality (tier 2) computer engineering conferences, only about one in five submissions is accepted. (At tier 1 - ISCA and PLDI, it's like 5%) Often times papers are reject not because they are bad or horribly flawed, but simply that there are better (more important, better conducted, more thorough) papers available. High submission fees discriminate against these papers, and especially against research groups that do not have as much fundings as others.
I was there in December. As is my hobby, I took pictures of basically everything in the museum, and then put them on Wikipedia. See the gallery here.
This is being reported as if it's a new thing. It's not. Far from it. I've been at Wikipedia for nearly 5 years now, and this debate has been raging as long as I've been there. In 2003/2004, it centered around high schoolers. By 2005/2006, it was individual Pokemon and TV shows. Now it's individual TV episodes and characters thereof.
It is unfortunate that this tendency plays right into the hands of global warming deniers. When applied to that controversy, the whole debate becomes a he-said-she-said that takes place in the absence of any evidence (or, to be precise, in the absence of reporting of evidence). That is to say, most deniers' arguments fall apart at even cursory comparison with actual evidence, but by then, the story is already published.
So what you're saying is, with one well placed spray of holy water, they have the ability to mow down SCO and a pack of (their own) lawyers at the same time? And this is bad how?
Yea, it's funny how Microsoft is cooperative with third party developers when they are losing, trying to catch up to a dominant format (Flash). Let's say they succeed in overtaking Flash, and Silverlight becomes the dominant format for interactive applets. How long do you think Microsoft will continue to aid the linux developers? I give 'em 5 minutes, tops.
As I noted on Slashdot recently, the library of congress website is possibly the most dysfunctional site on the internet. If you ever browse their collections, it's literally impossible to get a permanent URL (which makes it incredibly difficult to copy their public domain stuff to Wikipedia - all the URLs to confirm the copyright status break after an hour) What's even worse, it feels like somebody spent a lot of my taxpayer money to put together something that is functionally useless.
The pre-supposition of carbon mineralification is that converting it into the target form must be do-able with relatively low energy (or even exothermically - that is to say, it generates energy doing it). Wikipedia says that reacting CO2 with magnesium (which is abundantly available) to produce limestone is exothermic.
Artificial trees are one method for carbon capture. Natural ones just aren't efficient enough. A natural tree removes about 300 pounds of carbon per year from the atmosphere. An artificial one can remove about 90,000 tonnes. But as I said - the problem is, what do you do with it then?
They're not quite identical - synthetic diamonds tend to be pinkish in color.
First, diamonds are *not* a rare commodity. That is a myth that the De Beers diamond cartel has spent a century trying to create. De Beers tightly controls the supply, so that they appear to be rare. It's also a self-reinforcing myth - people think diamonds are rare, so they don't sell old family heirlooms, and thus there is no secondary market for diamonds.
Second, we already have the technology to create diamonds in a lab. See the wikipedia article on the subject. (At this point, I should mention that De Beers also tightly controls the diamond cutter workforce -- any diamond cutter who cuts for a company other than De Beers is immediately cut off from doing any De Beers work)
Right now, if we capture carbon dioxide (and we have the technology to do that already pretty efficiently) we have a huge problem of what to do with it. The best technology available today involved injecting it into the ground or under the sea - neither of which are good options. The technology that's being talked about is carbon mineralifcation - the technology to turn CO2 into graphite, or diamond, or soot. That's would be a huge help in fighting global warming.
No human - even children with perfect hearing - can hear 25,000 hz. (I've read that some people believe a tiny proportion of children with exceptionally wide-spectrum hearing can hear up to 29,000 hz, but this is more of an urban legend, I think) Neither your speakers nor your sound card are capable of (intentionally) producing 25,000 hz.
Just to give a baseline - I happened to visit the science museum in Balboa Park, CA, in 2002. I was 20 years old at the time, and I had excellent hearing (both then and now). They had a booth set up (with specially-purpose equipment) for testing the range of your hearing. I could hear up to about 16,500 hz, and I was able to perceive sounds up to about 17,500 hz. (Note: TV flyback, the high-pitched whine your TV gives off, is about 14,000 hz) This is probably about the upper limit for someone post-adolescence.
This point has already been mentioned on Slashdot before. As I said then, it is incorrect. The prohibition on ex-post facto laws means something cannot be retroactively made illegal; it can, however, be made retroactively legal.
I checked Thomas, the US Library of Congress's website (and possibly the most badly organized website on the internet), and I couldn't find who voted for it. Anyone have a link?
You misunderstand the purpose of adding the rat poison. It's not added to bombs because it is, by itself, particularly lethal to humans. It is added to bombs because of what happens if you combine rat poison with shrapnel wounds.
Most rat poisons kill by (a) thinning the capillary membranes and causing bleeding, and (b) inhibiting the blood's ability to coagulate, exacerbating bleeding once it occurs. However, if the person is already bleeding (because they have been hit by shrapnel), then adding an anti-coagulant substantially increases the likelihood that they die of blood loss (because the body cannot clot the wounds).
Ayyash's bombs were quite intentionally designed to kill as many people as possible (they were packed with nails and other shrapnel - and laced with rat poison - to ensure maximum lethality). The Irgun made it a point to minimize the casualties from their bombings - they called the King David hotel ahead and time and warned people to get out.
One of the foremost terrorists in the history of the middle east was Yahaya Ayyash, an electrical engineer (educated at Beir Ziet University) who built bombs for Hamas's Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. His bombs ended up killing over 100 civilians (mostly Israeli, but also Americans and other Westerners in Israel) and dozens of soldiers, ambulance workers, and other first responders.
"There is no Standardized Testing to ensure that students have basic logic skills and can effectively reason through a problem." - this is false.
The fundamentals of engineering exam is a standardized exam given throughout the United States to engineers (it's one of two exams you have to pass to become a licensed by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying, NCEES) It tests logic and problem solving ability.
It seems to me to be the height of hypocrisy that business leaders (Gates and company) complain about a lack of scientifically/technologically trained Americans, and thus we need to increase H1-B visas. These same leaders then turn around and support republican candidates who don't believe in evolution and want to water down the science curriculum by introducing Intelligent Design.
If you think Spitzer didn't go after any New York based interests, you must not be paying attention. He ended up collecting huge fines from (among others) Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup, all of which are based in New York City.
Disruptive technologies is a very real area of study. Supercomputing 2006 and 2007 even had a panel on it. (My phd adviser is one of the people listed there) Although somewhat buzz-wordy, the idea is to signify technologies that have the potential to bring about great change within an industry.
Just to name one kind of such technology for computing, if someone could get automatic parallelization to work reliably, that would be a very disruptive technology. (20 years of research has yet to achieve this, but people keep trying)
The point is, arbitration committee decisions are public, as are the arbitrator's votes themselves. The process is transparent.
As for the mailing list - it exists because arbitrators need a forum to discuss and deliberate that is free (or mostly free) from noise. Just look at any evidence or workshop page to see what I mean by noise. The rules for who is allowed to subscribe to the arbcom mailing list are stated clearly and publicly, as is the list of people who subscribe to it.
It's not excessive. We're not talking about blocking 1000 users here - we're talking about blocking 1000s IP addresses. The actual number of people who edit Wikipedia from that range (besides Bagley) is very likely 0.
You mean like this definition here? And the lists of Bagley's known and suspected sockpuppets?