I've taken a lower paying job for the option to telecommute. I HATE commuting.
But if you can keep the same rate and telecommute, you have in a way gotten a raise to your hourly rate. Take your daily salary and subtract parking, gas, tolls, vehicle wear and tear (or bus/train fare if you live in an area with public transit) then divide by your work hours plus your commute time plus the time it takes you to de-stress from your commute; you'll have a better "real" hourly rate with telecommuting.
For example, if you figure a $50/hour rate, $10/day for parking and mileage expenses, an 8 hour day with a 1/2 hour commute each way, your net rate with time and money wasted driving to work is only $43.33!
Many rocks have small amounts of uranium and thorium.
Sure. My (somewhat smart-assed) point was that there's a difference between a flux of n photons in the visible wavelengths per second and a flux of n gamma rays per second, though both are radiation. But yes, it's entirely possible that a site outside a reactor building could have a higher ambient level of nuclear radation (alpha, beta, and gamma) than inside the building with a properly shielded reactor.
Why aren't cancer rates much higher in nations with significantly more cell phones/coverage- say, Japan for example?
Can you point us at a cancer rate by nation breakdown? Just curious, I spent a few minutes googling for one without success.
Why is it that the same people who sue cell phone companies over a tower near their house go home each night and pop dinner in a 1200W microwave emitter?
Well, let's be fair: the microwave oven is designed to keep its emissions inside.
Answer: because cell phone radiation doesn't cause cancer at any rate appreciable from statistical noise, IF AT ALL.
It's certainly difficult to isolate from the risk factors we bathe ourselves in daily, yes.
I would guess that people who walk around with their cell-phone glued to their head all the time are likely to be type-A personalities with more significant lifestyle factors.
There is far less radiation inside the reactor building (not inside the reactor core itself) than there is outside on the hockey puck (a big concrete circle in the middle of campus).
What kind of radiation? Outside the building, during certain hours one is certainly bathed in EM radiation from that big fusion reactor in the sky, but apart from the UV component it's not biologically hazardous - unless you're a vampire, of course...
We've been making the world "less shitty" for centuries with every advance; improved medicine, housing, communications, and education.
You can never get enough of what it is that you never really wanted in the first place.
In Buddhism (which, at its best, is more applied psychology than religion), there is an image of hell realms full of "hungry ghosts". As Gary Snyder put it in one of my favorite poems, "loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger: and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it."
Our "improved" medicine can do wonderful things, but also becomes more and more dehumanizing under a strictly biochemical/mechanical model of the human being and under "managed care" regimes where doctors work assembly-line style. (Especially in the area of mental health, where the treament most often given is some form of pharmaceutical roullette - spin the wheel, try a drug, repeat until patient stops complaining. )
We build larger, more comfortable houses...then have to work two jobs to pay for them. We develop these wonderful, astounding means of communications, sending images across the planet in an instant, and we use it to send "Fear Factor" into people's living rooms. More people go to school for longer periods...only to learn how to become good worker bees.
Or is it that we're looking to the wrong things for happiness?
I'd say that looking to things for happiness is the problem. Maybe even looking for "happiness"...I think a better word is "contentment", though that's getting into fine points of connotation.
I could make the argument that in these days of Hollywood, everyone thinks they should be rich and famous, and not everyone can be a star.
The problem long pre-dates Hollywood. The Buddha was talking about this 2,500 years ago: the existence of "suffering" (a bad translation of dukha, but we'll leave that be for now), and that it's origin is desire. We want the universe to be stable, to not have things and relations and, most importantly, us, fall apart: but that's not the nature of the universe.
What is takes to make the world less shitty is a change in attitude. Mindfulness and compassion. Of course these have to be built on a strata of physical improvements - it's very difficult to work on compassion when you're starving.
But on the other hand, there are strong forces at work in our culture to surpress these ideas. Mindful people don't engage in continuous conspicuous consumption, and bam!, there falls our house-of-credit-cards economy.
I'm re-reading Huxley's Island right now. I recommend it as an exploration of these topics.
Also take a listen to Chris Chandler and Anne Feeny's poem/song "Let There Be Prozac" off of Flying Poetry Circus. (Available in RealAudio at the link.)
Does this sound a lot like "The Network is the Computer" to anyone?
It does - but that phrase seems to be the submitter's invention, at least from a cursory look at the fine article. Reeves's point is much more sublte and interesting:
The final goal of any engineering activity is the some type of documentation. When a design effort is complete, the design documentation is turned over to the manufacturing team. This is a completely different group with completely different skills from the design team. If the design documents truly represent a complete design, the manufacturing team can proceed to build the product. In fact, they can proceed to build lots of the product, all without any further intervention of the designers. After reviewing the software development life cycle as I understood it, I concluded that the only software documentation that actually seems to satisfy the criteria of an engineering design is the source code listings.
...
The overwhelming problem with software development is that everything is part of the design process. Coding is design, testing and debugging are part of design, and what we typically call software design is still part of design.
It may be that he's using "design" in a more classical engineering sense than most of us coders do.
I've had my Gerber Multi-Plier for about 8 years now. Very happy with it; I did manage to break the tip off the serrated knife blade. Mine's old enough that the blades/tools don't lock, but newer models do. The one-handed plier-opening thing (you sort of flick your wrist and the pliers mechanism slides out the the handle) is very handy, you can be holding something with one hand and draw, deploy, and use the pliers with the other.
When I get some money to play with later this year, I'll probably by a new upgraded Gerber amd keep the old one in the car.
Need I remind you that everybody on that flight died?
No, you don't need to remind me. Point is, even unarmed, they were willing and able to foil (though sadly not stop) the terrorists.
Post-9/11, no aircrew in the world is going to surrender control of the plane to hostage-takers; and passengers are willing to fight. Those changes in procedure and attitude contribute to our safety; making me show ID to get on the plane doesn't.
the problems of radiaoactive waste disposal are much simpler to solve from nuclear power stations than they are from coal-fired power stations
How is it easier to dispose of low-level reactor waste than fly ash? Some radon goes up the stack, but most of the radioactive elements stay in the ash. The radioactivity of typical fly ash is about 10 times the concentration in the original coal: still within the range of common soils or rocks.
I'm just pointing out how small the nuclear reactor waste problem really is compared to risks from current power production methods than nobody is complaining about.
The problem of radioactive components of coal waste, while real, is dwarfed by problems of greenhouse gas and sulphur emissions, so that's what people focus on.
How about applying comprehensive cost/benefit analyses?
Excellent idea. Fission loses badly; it's competitive only because of massive subsidies.
Some hobbies are expensive and kill people - energy efficiency does both
That's the most bizarre claim I've seen this year. Please, explain how installing a high-efficiency heat pump or compact flourescent lightbulb in my home is expensive and deadly.
What is renewable that nuclear/coal/gas-turbine/petroleum are not? Answer: nothing, unless you apply a double standard. Applying a single standard, solar is no more renwable than nuclear, coal, gas-turbine, or petroleum.
"Renewable" means that we won't run out during the habitable lifetime of the planet. Fission and fossil fuels both fail this criteron by orders of magnitude, but the large fusion reactor about which we orbit will still be here after we're gone. (It will be what does us in, if we haven't developed into spacefarers by then.)
Or how about putting nuclear power plants on the surface of the earth
How about solving problems of radioactive waste disposal, and the security issues of fission technology and fissionable materials? And safety issues with reactor technology itself? The pebble bed idea is a small step forward, but there are still manyissues.
Fission is a bad solution, and we should devote our ressources to increased efficiency, renewables (incuding orbital solar), and fusion research instead of digging ourselves deeper into the fission pit.
The energy density of sunlight at the earth's surface is simply too low to be practical.
It's already practical for residental power. People are already building houses powered solely by photovolatics, and in areas that are far from the grid it's cost-efficient to do so. In fact, just a developing nations are skipping right to cellular over at POTS grid, photovolatics and wind will likely be the way the electricity comes to much of the world.
Agreed that orbital collectors would be great, but there's no reason for everyone not to have one on their rooftop as well.
how exactly do you bork a Windows installation these days? As long as u pick the right partition to install on its not really possible.
See here and here.
The latter link is to MS's own troubleshooting page, with remedies like "Make sure that you have the latest drivers, firmware and BIOS for the computer and all hardware. If you don't know whether you have the latest firmware or an updated BIOS, contact your hardware manufacturer or check their Web site" and "Temporarily remove all hardware that's not required by Setup (modems, sound cards, and network cards)".
Sounds borkable, and these resolutions don't sound like tasks for naive users.
Since those two accounts vary greatly, which one is correct? Which one is the truth?
They are both correct, since they refer to two different incidents. Read the fine page you linked to, it's right there at the top:
July 4, 2002, John Gilmore went to
Oakland International Airport. He had a ticket in his own name with Southwest Airlines to Baltimore-Washington International Airport....
John politely refused to show his ID and was not allowed to fly. John then went to San Francisco International Airport and attempted to fly to Washington, DC on United Airlines. There he was informed that if he was not willing to show ID he could fly, but only if he submitted to a far more intrusive search than what every passenger goes through at the security checkpoint.
I said I had no problem believing there were secret TSA security directives for airport and airline operations. Do you think all of them should be public?
Hell yes. You want me to abide by your rules, you have to disclose them.
If not, when is it okay for something to be secret?
Tactical military information, sure. (Only for a limited time, though...any classified information should automatically expire after a time limit.) That's about it. Secrecy is the enemy of democracy.
then we have people flipping out that the TSA is trying to secure airports and air travel
The TSA is not trying to secure air travel. The TSA is trying to give the appearance of trying to secure air travel, so people will continue to fly.
You want to make air travel safer? Making passengers show papers does jack. Instead, re-enforce the flight cabin doors, then give every able-bodied person on the plane a big-ass knife. Let any potential terrorists get the Flight 93 treatment, just give the passengers the tools to do the job. (Guns are problematic in cramped quarters, though the whole explosive decompression thing is a myth.)
Don't like knives? Fine, make it stunguns instead. Put 'em in the seatback pockets right next to the barf bags.
Call it what you will, but you need a liscence to purchase a firearm through a dealer now).
I think there's a difference between a licence and a check that you're not on a banned list. The former is a case of permission-denied-by-default, only those explictly authorized have access; the latter is allowed-by-default, only those explictly denied are kept out. It's a fine point, granted, but I think a significant one.
Because we all know that the majority of computer users are "savvy".
No...but non-savvy users aren't installing their own OS, be it Windows or GNU/Linux. Or if they do, they're just about as likely to bork up a Windows install as a Linux one.
What's to prevent one counter from blocking/approving ballots according to personal preference. The arguement that the other counters stop him is not valid, because he could be "the other" counter who stops legitimate votes for a canidate he opposes.
You need a system of checks and balances amoung the counters, sure. Have multiple groups of counters do the tallying, each group having representatives from all major parties involved and with other parties beingable to challenge counters (like challenging a potential juror). If the different groups tallies differ, knock them over the head and sent them back to work until the get counts that agree.
At least with an open source machine, the code and the machine can be examined for proof of it's impartiality.
Sure, but it's very easy to just "forget" to feed in ballots that don't favor your candidate...or just load modified code onto the machines. Opening the source and architecture of the machines is necessary, not sufficient; you're still got the problem of people.
And why why why do people keep thinking that a hand count done by humans would be more accurate than a machine count?
Maybe Florida 2000? Where the input method could be more accurately parsed by humans than by machines?
The advantage of a hand count is that if you don't trust it, you can repeat it yourself, or have someone you trust do it. With a machine count, you have only the machine vendor's assurance.
You're missing the fact that the American system doesn't specialize at all until pretty much the last year or University.
Have things changed enormously since I was in high school and college (1983-1991)?
We had specialization tracks available in high school (in Baltimore County, Maryland), though they were optional. There's an extra seal on my high school diploma stating that I graduated with an "Area of Concentration" in science and technology.
Certainly from my first semester at college (University of Maryland, College Park) I was taking core classes in my majors.
But to require every student to get a full liberal arts degree in order to get a job in a specialized area is not simply inefficient, it's idiotic.
If that's what you want, go to a vocational school, not a university. Nothing wrong with doing so, though it will limit your options.
A university education is supposed to make you an educated person capable of some degree of disciplined critical thinking, not just a trained potential employee. If employers prefer the former, that makes perfect sense to me.
My point was, though, that without patents the drugs never would have been developed in the first place.
Under our current system, yes.
That doesn't mean that under no possible system would the drugs have been developed.
The problem is, human HDL is unpatentable, so nobody makes such a treatment. If this is true (even if it's not), how many drugs out there are not made because there's no reason to make them?
If there is a cheap effective treatment that's not being used because no one can make high profits off it, that's a symptom that the system we have is badly broken, too beholden to the profit-seeking behavior of big pharma.
Surgical techniques can't be patented (despite a push a few years ago); yet research into surgical technique progresses. (Of course, surgical instruments and devices can be patented.)
Certainly lifestyle patterns can't be patented (Dean Ornish can't patent his method for reversing heart disease), yet research continues.
Drug companies take on huge risk when developing drugs...
Not so much. If they did, big pharma wouldn't be realizing the obscene profits they do. These companies benefit enormously from publicly funded research.
There is also a possibility for future liability when you find that the drug has nasty side effects (cox-3 inhibitors).
The scandal isn't that these drugs have unintended side effects. There isn't (or shouldn't be) liability when you've taken reasonable care. The scandal is that these corporations have
corrupted the regulatory process
corrupted the scientific process to attempt to hide these effects
corrupted medical practice to favor pharmaceutical intervention over cheaper and safer alternatives that are as effective or moreso
used unethical marketing practices to create new disorders (or broader scopes of old ones) in the perception of patients
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I've taken a lower paying job for the option to telecommute. I HATE commuting.
But if you can keep the same rate and telecommute, you have in a way gotten a raise to your hourly rate. Take your daily salary and subtract parking, gas, tolls, vehicle wear and tear (or bus/train fare if you live in an area with public transit) then divide by your work hours plus your commute time plus the time it takes you to de-stress from your commute; you'll have a better "real" hourly rate with telecommuting.
For example, if you figure a $50/hour rate, $10/day for parking and mileage expenses, an 8 hour day with a 1/2 hour commute each way, your net rate with time and money wasted driving to work is only $43.33!
Sure. My (somewhat smart-assed) point was that there's a difference between a flux of n photons in the visible wavelengths per second and a flux of n gamma rays per second, though both are radiation. But yes, it's entirely possible that a site outside a reactor building could have a higher ambient level of nuclear radation (alpha, beta, and gamma) than inside the building with a properly shielded reactor.
Providing, of course, that no one fscks up.
Can you point us at a cancer rate by nation breakdown? Just curious, I spent a few minutes googling for one without success.
Well, let's be fair: the microwave oven is designed to keep its emissions inside.
It's certainly difficult to isolate from the risk factors we bathe ourselves in daily, yes.
I would guess that people who walk around with their cell-phone glued to their head all the time are likely to be type-A personalities with more significant lifestyle factors.
What kind of radiation? Outside the building, during certain hours one is certainly bathed in EM radiation from that big fusion reactor in the sky, but apart from the UV component it's not biologically hazardous - unless you're a vampire, of course...
There's nothing new in Apple acting evilly.
Maybe some of you don't remember the "look and feel" lawsuit, and the "Keep Your Lawyers Off My Computer" buttons. Study your history, young hackers...
You can never get enough of what it is that you never really wanted in the first place.
In Buddhism (which, at its best, is more applied psychology than religion), there is an image of hell realms full of "hungry ghosts". As Gary Snyder put it in one of my favorite poems, "loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger: and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it."
Our "improved" medicine can do wonderful things, but also becomes more and more dehumanizing under a strictly biochemical/mechanical model of the human being and under "managed care" regimes where doctors work assembly-line style. (Especially in the area of mental health, where the treament most often given is some form of pharmaceutical roullette - spin the wheel, try a drug, repeat until patient stops complaining. )
We build larger, more comfortable houses...then have to work two jobs to pay for them. We develop these wonderful, astounding means of communications, sending images across the planet in an instant, and we use it to send "Fear Factor" into people's living rooms. More people go to school for longer periods...only to learn how to become good worker bees.
I'd say that looking to things for happiness is the problem. Maybe even looking for "happiness"...I think a better word is "contentment", though that's getting into fine points of connotation.
The problem long pre-dates Hollywood. The Buddha was talking about this 2,500 years ago: the existence of "suffering" (a bad translation of dukha, but we'll leave that be for now), and that it's origin is desire. We want the universe to be stable, to not have things and relations and, most importantly, us, fall apart: but that's not the nature of the universe.
What is takes to make the world less shitty is a change in attitude. Mindfulness and compassion. Of course these have to be built on a strata of physical improvements - it's very difficult to work on compassion when you're starving.
But on the other hand, there are strong forces at work in our culture to surpress these ideas. Mindful people don't engage in continuous conspicuous consumption, and bam!, there falls our house-of-credit-cards economy.
I'm re-reading Huxley's Island right now. I recommend it as an exploration of these topics.
Also take a listen to Chris Chandler and Anne Feeny's poem/song "Let There Be Prozac" off of Flying Poetry Circus. (Available in RealAudio at the link.)
It does - but that phrase seems to be the submitter's invention, at least from a cursory look at the fine article. Reeves's point is much more sublte and interesting:
It may be that he's using "design" in a more classical engineering sense than most of us coders do.
Don't care for it, myself. Too much download-slowing eye candy. The little "push pin" things with the shadows are ugly.
I also don't care for the driving directions interface; it's one line address format and results format seem like poor UI choices.
I'm sticking with Yahoo Maps, at least for now.
I've had my Gerber Multi-Plier for about 8 years now. Very happy with it; I did manage to break the tip off the serrated knife blade. Mine's old enough that the blades/tools don't lock, but newer models do. The one-handed plier-opening thing (you sort of flick your wrist and the pliers mechanism slides out the the handle) is very handy, you can be holding something with one hand and draw, deploy, and use the pliers with the other.
When I get some money to play with later this year, I'll probably by a new upgraded Gerber amd keep the old one in the car.
No, you don't need to remind me. Point is, even unarmed, they were willing and able to foil (though sadly not stop) the terrorists.
Post-9/11, no aircrew in the world is going to surrender control of the plane to hostage-takers; and passengers are willing to fight. Those changes in procedure and attitude contribute to our safety; making me show ID to get on the plane doesn't.
How is it easier to dispose of low-level reactor waste than fly ash? Some radon goes up the stack, but most of the radioactive elements stay in the ash. The radioactivity of typical fly ash is about 10 times the concentration in the original coal: still within the range of common soils or rocks.
The problem of radioactive components of coal waste, while real, is dwarfed by problems of greenhouse gas and sulphur emissions, so that's what people focus on.
Excellent idea. Fission loses badly; it's competitive only because of massive subsidies.
That's the most bizarre claim I've seen this year. Please, explain how installing a high-efficiency heat pump or compact flourescent lightbulb in my home is expensive and deadly.
"Renewable" means that we won't run out during the habitable lifetime of the planet. Fission and fossil fuels both fail this criteron by orders of magnitude, but the large fusion reactor about which we orbit will still be here after we're gone. (It will be what does us in, if we haven't developed into spacefarers by then.)
"Wasteful"? Like breathing oxygen? Thank phytoplankton.
And oceans are for OTECs.
How about solving problems of radioactive waste disposal, and the security issues of fission technology and fissionable materials? And safety issues with reactor technology itself? The pebble bed idea is a small step forward, but there are still many issues.
Fission is a bad solution, and we should devote our ressources to increased efficiency, renewables (incuding orbital solar), and fusion research instead of digging ourselves deeper into the fission pit.
It's already practical for residental power. People are already building houses powered solely by photovolatics, and in areas that are far from the grid it's cost-efficient to do so. In fact, just a developing nations are skipping right to cellular over at POTS grid, photovolatics and wind will likely be the way the electricity comes to much of the world.
Agreed that orbital collectors would be great, but there's no reason for everyone not to have one on their rooftop as well.
See here and here. The latter link is to MS's own troubleshooting page, with remedies like "Make sure that you have the latest drivers, firmware and BIOS for the computer and all hardware. If you don't know whether you have the latest firmware or an updated BIOS, contact your hardware manufacturer or check their Web site" and "Temporarily remove all hardware that's not required by Setup (modems, sound cards, and network cards)".
Sounds borkable, and these resolutions don't sound like tasks for naive users.
They are both correct, since they refer to two different incidents. Read the fine page you linked to, it's right there at the top:
Hell yes. You want me to abide by your rules, you have to disclose them.
Tactical military information, sure. (Only for a limited time, though...any classified information should automatically expire after a time limit.) That's about it. Secrecy is the enemy of democracy.
The TSA is not trying to secure air travel. The TSA is trying to give the appearance of trying to secure air travel, so people will continue to fly.
You want to make air travel safer? Making passengers show papers does jack. Instead, re-enforce the flight cabin doors, then give every able-bodied person on the plane a big-ass knife. Let any potential terrorists get the Flight 93 treatment, just give the passengers the tools to do the job. (Guns are problematic in cramped quarters, though the whole explosive decompression thing is a myth.)
Don't like knives? Fine, make it stunguns instead. Put 'em in the seatback pockets right next to the barf bags.
I think there's a difference between a licence and a check that you're not on a banned list. The former is a case of permission-denied-by-default, only those explictly authorized have access; the latter is allowed-by-default, only those explictly denied are kept out. It's a fine point, granted, but I think a significant one.
No...but non-savvy users aren't installing their own OS, be it Windows or GNU/Linux. Or if they do, they're just about as likely to bork up a Windows install as a Linux one.
You need a system of checks and balances amoung the counters, sure. Have multiple groups of counters do the tallying, each group having representatives from all major parties involved and with other parties beingable to challenge counters (like challenging a potential juror). If the different groups tallies differ, knock them over the head and sent them back to work until the get counts that agree.
Sure, but it's very easy to just "forget" to feed in ballots that don't favor your candidate...or just load modified code onto the machines. Opening the source and architecture of the machines is necessary, not sufficient; you're still got the problem of people.
Maybe Florida 2000? Where the input method could be more accurately parsed by humans than by machines?
The advantage of a hand count is that if you don't trust it, you can repeat it yourself, or have someone you trust do it. With a machine count, you have only the machine vendor's assurance.
Have things changed enormously since I was in high school and college (1983-1991)?
We had specialization tracks available in high school (in Baltimore County, Maryland), though they were optional. There's an extra seal on my high school diploma stating that I graduated with an "Area of Concentration" in science and technology.
Certainly from my first semester at college (University of Maryland, College Park) I was taking core classes in my majors.
If that's what you want, go to a vocational school, not a university. Nothing wrong with doing so, though it will limit your options.
A university education is supposed to make you an educated person capable of some degree of disciplined critical thinking, not just a trained potential employee. If employers prefer the former, that makes perfect sense to me.
Under our current system, yes.
That doesn't mean that under no possible system would the drugs have been developed.
If there is a cheap effective treatment that's not being used because no one can make high profits off it, that's a symptom that the system we have is badly broken, too beholden to the profit-seeking behavior of big pharma.
Surgical techniques can't be patented (despite a push a few years ago); yet research into surgical technique progresses. (Of course, surgical instruments and devices can be patented.) Certainly lifestyle patterns can't be patented (Dean Ornish can't patent his method for reversing heart disease), yet research continues.
Not so much. If they did, big pharma wouldn't be realizing the obscene profits they do. These companies benefit enormously from publicly funded research.
The scandal isn't that these drugs have unintended side effects. There isn't (or shouldn't be) liability when you've taken reasonable care. The scandal is that these corporations have