The article in USA Today has a nice little gem in it: "The authors acknowledged possible inaccuracies in the survey from the fact that participants were asked to remember how much and on which ear they used their mobiles over the past decade. Results for some groups showed cellphone use actually appeared to lessen the risk of developing cancers, something the researchers described as "implausible."" Now, I don't know why, but something about this statement seems kind of important.
Using a survey after the fact is not a particularly reliable way to quantify exposure. It may also lead to "recall bias".
This type of study is usually better at finding possible risk factors rather than determining the relative effect of a particular factor.
If you want to read something alot more entertaining and you're happy with it being spread across multiple pages, read the pages at TV Tropes instead: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalComputer [tvtropes.org] It includes all the ten tropes in the list, plus many more, without obnoxious advertising.
It's much funnier, has exhaustive examples, and will ultimately ruin your life.
Yes, the linked website hits one of my favorite classic computer no-nos "slot machine passwords". Remember the movie "Wargames"? In it, the WOPR locks on to individual characters in the pasword, one at a time. Tension builds as 9 are guessed and finally all are guessed. Of course such a keyboard search would take almost no time at all in real life.
I don't think this is just a case of someone pointing out a contradictory law.
"Forcing our schools to instruct children on how to utilize contraceptives encourages our children to engage in sexual behavior, whether as a victim or an offender," he wrote. "It is akin to teaching children about alcohol use, then instructing them on how to make mixed alcoholic drinks."
I think he very much believes that it just shouldn't be taught.
I suspect the DA believes that pregnant girls should end up in the "Seven Sorrows of our Sorrowful Mother Home for Infants" in nearby Necedah, WI. When I lived in Madison, ads for this facility were displayed inside many city buses.
Which all sounds like a polite way of saying that kids these days have been spoiled. Instant gratification, be it through next-day felivery net-based purchases, simplistic video games or instantly downloaded media, means they have no patience.
I've almost completely given up on replying to questions in newsgroups because of this. The most annyoing ones ask "How do I do X?" or even worse "Can U do X?" without any real details or any indication of work done.
Oh, and get off my lawn.
I learned to program when cities did not have ZIP codes.
I firmly believe that you prefer what you're accustomed to hearing in the first place. Most kids today have grown up hearing nothing better than highly-compressed FM or low-bitrate MP3 music. They don't know anything better, and given the option of hearing better music, perhaps even uncompressed, with a much larger dynamic range and noise floor, they'll gravitate to what their ears and brain have been trained to appreciate.
This certainly holds true at my office. My wife is a doctoral audiologist who prescribes and dispenses hearing instruments. A good number of patients who have worn hearing aids for many years prefer the older analog technology to the modern digital. Some of them certainly have become accustomed to the distortion and peak clipping that happens when analog hearing aids are pushed too far.
At one time, there *was* a price difference, but no longer. Digital is no more expensive, in fact it is becoming more difficult and expensive to have old equipment serviced.
I have never understood that for years, you have been able to create a folder with a space at the end of its name in a script. Try, just try, to delete that folder.. You can't create it in explorer, you can't delete it in explorer.. in fact, the only way to fix that I have found, is hope to god its a long file name, drop to a command prompt, and delete it with "Del folder~1"
This type of bug goes back before that. Under CP/M, the console command processor converts all commands to upper case, so ERA filespec will not delete a file with lower case characters in its name. On the other hand, MS-BASIC does not upper case any filenames used in OPEN statments, etc. So the easiest way to remove such a file is to get back into BASIC and KILL it.
I think MS-DOS is smart enough to fix this at the OS level.
Some CP/M comands create a space filled filename + extension if you omit a filename. But a *. wildcard will work there.
In a similar vein there are exploits that involve using "special" characters that look like normal characters, but aren't.
Is there a business case for reviewing advertisements (and the associated mobile code whether it be FLASH, etc.) for a 21st century "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval"? After all, the NYT and others are just one virus (or porn advertisement) away from a PR nightmare.
IMO the mass media don't care as long as it brings in revenue. You should see the crap that gets advertised on local TV here, particularly late at night. Various make money fast schemes and "natural male enhancement".
Local newspapes are somewhat different. Well we STILL have a local paper, unlike two neighboring cities that don't. If I found something objectionable in the newspaper's ads, I would write a letter to the editor - and it would most likely be printed. As an advertiser in that same paper I could express my displeasure to the representative who handles my account OR withdraw my ads from the paper altogether. If I felt particularly steamed, I could drive downtown and in a few minutes walk into the offices of the newspaper and express my opinion.
This is a small city. The editor and publisher are personally resopnsible for the contents of the newspaper.
Soon they will also be people who only remember when Fermat's Last Theorem was a solved problem, not one of the great mysteries told to young kids interested in mathematics.
The problem might be solved, but there still is a lingering mystery. Did Fermat have a proof by elementary methods? Does such a proof exist? But I suppose that since there is A proof, the impetus to find another one is mostly gone.
For me, the point is moot. I'm barely interested in watching TV as it is. By the time this issue is settled, there will not be any content on TV worth watching, let alone recording.
I don't own any DVDs. I have not bought a music CD in at least 8 years.
Geocities had a lot of content. A huge amount of useful information. Especially the pre-Yahoo stuff.
Yes. For example websites devoted to the internals of GW-Basic. I don't write new programs in it, but I still convert old programs written in it. Also, the early versions of G77 for Windows are there plus documentation plus collections of compiled libraries.
A bigger bite is for those of us whose ISPs were the baby Bells. I still have an old web page that is essentially prodigy. 15 MB limit, one level, browser based updating and file creation, but it's ad free and still there. More recent customers found their personal web pages are hosted on Geocities, complete with their icky ad overlays.
Yahoo managed to crap up the e-mail side too, when they migrated their customers to "Yahoo mail". I pay for e-mail as part of my internet access. If I want to read e-mail on the web, it comes with ads.
So I'm not entirely sorry that Geocities is going away. And as bad as AT&T and Yahoo are, both are far better than the local cable company.
There are things far worse than worrying about possible security threats from "courseware".
1. getting it to work in the first place can be a real big problem. A few years ago, a friend was taking online courses using WebCT. He was unable to get any of it to work. Instead, he commuted to campus and used the computers there.
2. IMO a lot of courseware is crapware. Somehow in the education market it is acceptable to subject students to software that would be higher quality if it was malware! Well, what did you expect? Look at how students are gouged on textbooks.
There was a "personality" test I had to take when I was a clerk for Radio Shack back in college... I remember the manager showed me the "results" and it basically said, "This person is either a very good person, or understood this test enough to give the answers we hoped for."
The purpose of the test is to select those who will put with bullshit as part of the hiring process. On my list for automatic DQ of employer are:
Most types of "H.R." B.S.
Resume in Word document.
Provide salary history.
Clueless (is there any other type of?) recruiter.
Buzzword laden job description.
No identification of who or what the business is.
Since I run my own business I can say
1. I probably don't want to work for you anyway. 2. Fuck you!
Surprise, surprise! People who may already exhibit signs of anger or aggression may be drawn to such games. The games don't cause the anger or aggression. Such people may also be at greater risk for showing increased anger or aggression.
That's from a psychologist. Why can't the lawmakers figure it out?
Because we have the best legislators money can buy!
IMHO O-chem as it is taught by most chemistry departments is completely useless for pre-med students. There ought to be a lower level biochemistry course in its stead as a pre-req for pre-meds. Most MDs will NEVER have to worry about organic synthesis and crap like that; they WILL need to worry about metabolic pathways and enzymatic reactions.
IAAP. Well said. For practicing physicians, basic science goes out the window. It's really about pattern matching.
If you really need a weed out course containing insane amounts of material to memorize and useless labs, try microbiology.
It's not that different from IT. 99+% of the work is technical. Very little is actually software development. Real world IT has almost nothing to do with "computer science".
I actually like "basic science", but having put students to sleep trying to teach it, I realize that enough is enough.
In the end, like IT, we are going to have another labor shortage. The cheap solution will be to outsource and bring in foreign labor.
#@%$! The Mass General sends CAT scans to India to be read. I'm sure PAP smears are sent god-knows-where now.
So when we do have socialized medicine I'll let you take my place in line to see the Pakistani psychiatrist!
Not really, but I do hate spammers much more than that. Yahoo is just the leading home of spam, and they might as well throw the babies out with the bathwater. I gave up on Yahoo a long time ago. I do have a few correspondents who still have secondary Yahoo email accounts--but I have no particular expectation that they will get any email that I route that way.
I'm stuck with Yahoo mail. My ISP doesn't give me a choice. Like other "Baby Bells", our e-mail was outsorced to Yahoo. I *pay* for e-mail along with business class internet. Recently, outgoing mail to our bookkeeper is refused and incoming mail from our accountant is not delivered. GRRR. Looking at headers, I see that the top listed host's name ends in yahoo.com.
Google's ease of discovery eliminates a lot of the understanding learned from research. Now we can get the information we want, easily, without actually understanding it. IMHO this is a very dangerous thing.
It's still GIGO - "Garbage in, Garbage out" - except now there is a LOT more garbage.
I recently read an entire book (Super Crunchers) whose substance was that regression analysis was the greatest data analysis tool since sliced bread. Nonsense.
Finding associations is relatively easy. Making sense of them is hard. In order for an association to have meaning there has to be a mechanism involved. Back when I studied epidemiology it was called "biological plausibility".
Otherwise you might think that there is a real relationship between the number of ordained ministers and root beer consumption.
Really this is driven by marketing. So I expect to see more root beer ads at the local theological seminary!
It's not the graphics part that makes it so computer-intensive.... All the mathematics behind it, once that's done, the presentation could be done on any ol' computer....
So, if you mean by "graphics" that they are good at difficult geometrical calculations (like in games, for example), than you are right.... because that's what it is, truck-load of geometry...
From Wikipedia: Tomography: "[...] Digital geometry processing is used to generate a three-dimensional image of the inside of an object from a large series of two-dimensional X-ray images taken around a single axis of rotation."
Computed tomorgraphy has been around for some time. Early CT ran on computers about as powerful as the 16 bit PDP-11. But traditional CT requires x-ray images to be taken from many different angles around the patient. In addition, it has problems with artifacts and noise, such as movement. The computations are relatively simple because you are reconstructing an image from a large number of projections. To reduce the time, radiation dose and influence of artifacts, you can reduce the number of angles, etc. but this comes at a cost in much longer computation time.
So you trade off a shorter scan for longer reconstruction of the image.
Debate if you wish if this is a supercomputer or not. I think this is exciting because it is being done with relatively inexpensive off the shelf hardware.
Also medical and instrumentation computers tend to lag far behind the usual gamer or consumer machine. 20+ years ago I was shown a piece of new lab equipment - the size of a large washing machine. Its owner bragged that its CPU was a PDP-8, someting much less powerful than the contermporary IBM-PC.
Imagine how long you would have to wait if Duke Nukem Forever had to be certified by the FDA before release.
I was looking for some mathematical routines to port into Python and ended up poking around at http://www.netlib.org/ and http://www.nist.gov/ where there are huge repositories of mathematical functions, most written in Fortran.
One of the most interesting things after perusing much of the code I was looking for, was that instead of using integration routines for calculating things like Bessel functions, Hankel functions, and other differential equation related functions, they simply used look up tables and curve fitting.
BINGO! The math routines used to compute some special statistical functions in early versions of Excel, for example, area under the normal curve and its inverse, go back to Hastings approximations from the mid 50s. They are rational function approximations. I first saw them back in the 60s as cited in the National Bureau of Standards "Handbook of Mathematical Functions". People still use these approximations today.
I got hit by this bug when the patch went live last week on Windowsupdate. As the article states, the solution in was to disable intelppm.sys from safemode. It's a lot quicker if you do it using autoruns. It's too bad this article wasn't posted last week. It would have saved me a lot of trouble shooting time.
This bit me today as I manually went though Windows Update on one of my office's machines, an older Compaq Presario with an AMD processor. Not knowing about the simple 1 line of instructions that would disable the intelppm.sys driver, I went through multiple re-boots and finally backwards using system restore. Finally downloaded 300+ MB of the XPSP3 installer (I have several other machines to update as well) and ran it after applying the patch. No real trouble after that.
I can't really blame MS for this. I can't blame HP that much either. The machine was near the bottom of the Compaq/HP line. It was purchased to allow our (former) receptionist to perform her duties and little more.
Stone and chisel. That's the way to store data for 1,000 years. The reason why I say this is simple. The more "religious" the world's populations become, the closer to the dark ages we become.
What is "As many as 20 percent of the proteins are found in saliva are also found in blood[...]" supposed to mean?
About 20% of the time, people do NOT secrete blood group antigens into their saliva or other body fluids. Before DNA analysis it was common to look for blood type in crime scene investigations. 80% of people are "secretors", the other 20% are harder to catch.
Believe it or not, this happens more often than you might think. The only difference is: this one got national attention somehow.
Maybe if it had happened in Billerica instead of Needham it would have appeared on PBS. "On Tonight's episode of This Old House - what happens when you drill through an electrical main."
Slashdot Mirror
The article in USA Today has a nice little gem in it: "The authors acknowledged possible inaccuracies in the survey from the fact that participants were asked to remember how much and on which ear they used their mobiles over the past decade. Results for some groups showed cellphone use actually appeared to lessen the risk of developing cancers, something the researchers described as "implausible."" Now, I don't know why, but something about this statement seems kind of important.
Using a survey after the fact is not a particularly reliable way to quantify exposure. It may also lead to "recall bias".
This type of study is usually better at finding possible risk factors rather than determining the relative effect of a particular factor.
If you want to read something alot more entertaining and you're happy with it being spread across multiple pages, read the pages at TV Tropes instead: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalComputer [tvtropes.org] It includes all the ten tropes in the list, plus many more, without obnoxious advertising.
It's much funnier, has exhaustive examples, and will ultimately ruin your life.
Yes, the linked website hits one of my favorite classic computer no-nos "slot machine passwords". Remember the movie "Wargames"? In it, the WOPR locks on to individual characters in the pasword, one at a time. Tension builds as 9 are guessed and finally all are guessed. Of course such a keyboard search would take almost no time at all in real life.
I don't think this is just a case of someone pointing out a contradictory law.
"Forcing our schools to instruct children on how to utilize contraceptives encourages our children to engage in sexual behavior, whether as a victim or an offender," he wrote. "It is akin to teaching children about alcohol use, then instructing them on how to make mixed alcoholic drinks."
I think he very much believes that it just shouldn't be taught.
I suspect the DA believes that pregnant girls should end up in the "Seven Sorrows of our Sorrowful Mother Home for Infants" in nearby Necedah, WI. When I lived in Madison, ads for this facility were displayed inside many city buses.
Which all sounds like a polite way of saying that kids these days have been spoiled. Instant gratification, be it through next-day felivery net-based purchases, simplistic video games or instantly downloaded media, means they have no patience.
I've almost completely given up on replying to questions in newsgroups because of this. The most annyoing ones ask "How do I do X?" or even worse "Can U do X?" without any real details or any indication of work done.
Oh, and get off my lawn.
I learned to program when cities did not have ZIP codes.
I firmly believe that you prefer what you're accustomed to hearing in the first place. Most kids today have grown up hearing nothing better than highly-compressed FM or low-bitrate MP3 music. They don't know anything better, and given the option of hearing better music, perhaps even uncompressed, with a much larger dynamic range and noise floor, they'll gravitate to what their ears and brain have been trained to appreciate.
This certainly holds true at my office. My wife is a doctoral audiologist who prescribes and dispenses hearing instruments. A good number of patients who have worn hearing aids for many years prefer the older analog technology to the modern digital. Some of them certainly have become accustomed to the distortion and peak clipping that happens when analog hearing aids are pushed too far.
At one time, there *was* a price difference, but no longer. Digital is no more expensive, in fact it is becoming more difficult and expensive to have old equipment serviced.
I have never understood that for years, you have been able to create a folder with a space at the end of its name in a script. Try, just try, to delete that folder.. You can't create it in explorer, you can't delete it in explorer.. in fact, the only way to fix that I have found, is hope to god its a long file name, drop to a command prompt, and delete it with "Del folder~1"
This type of bug goes back before that. Under CP/M, the console command processor converts all commands to upper case, so ERA filespec will not delete a file with lower case characters in its name. On the other hand, MS-BASIC does not upper case any filenames used in OPEN statments, etc. So the easiest way to remove such a file is to get back into BASIC and KILL it.
I think MS-DOS is smart enough to fix this at the OS level.
Some CP/M comands create a space filled filename + extension if you omit a filename. But a *. wildcard will work there.
In a similar vein there are exploits that involve using "special" characters that look like normal characters, but aren't.
Is there a business case for reviewing advertisements (and the associated mobile code whether it be FLASH, etc.) for a 21st century "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval"? After all, the NYT and others are just one virus (or porn advertisement) away from a PR nightmare.
IMO the mass media don't care as long as it brings in revenue. You should see the crap that gets advertised on local TV here, particularly late at night. Various make money fast schemes and "natural male enhancement".
Local newspapes are somewhat different. Well we STILL have a local paper, unlike two neighboring cities that don't. If I found something objectionable in the newspaper's ads, I would write a letter to the editor - and it would most likely be printed. As an advertiser in that same paper I could express my displeasure to the representative who handles my account OR withdraw my ads from the paper altogether. If I felt particularly steamed, I could drive downtown and in a few minutes walk into the offices of the newspaper and express my opinion.
This is a small city. The editor and publisher are personally resopnsible for the contents of the newspaper.
Soon they will also be people who only remember when Fermat's Last Theorem was a solved problem, not one of the great mysteries told to young kids interested in mathematics.
The problem might be solved, but there still is a lingering mystery. Did Fermat have a proof by elementary methods? Does such a proof exist? But I suppose that since there is A proof, the impetus to find another one is mostly gone.
ftc.gov? Nobody goes to those sites...
I do. It's the home of the National Do Not Call Registry. www.donotcall.gov.
Also notice that registrations there no longer expire every 5 years!
For me, the point is moot. I'm barely interested in watching TV as it is. By the time this issue is settled, there will not be any content on TV worth watching, let alone recording.
I don't own any DVDs. I have not bought a music CD in at least 8 years.
BFD.
Geocities had a lot of content. A huge amount of useful information. Especially the pre-Yahoo stuff.
Yes. For example websites devoted to the internals of GW-Basic. I don't write new programs in it, but I still convert old programs written in it. Also, the early versions of G77 for Windows are there plus documentation plus collections of compiled libraries.
A bigger bite is for those of us whose ISPs were the baby Bells. I still have an old web page that is essentially prodigy. 15 MB limit, one level, browser based updating and file creation, but it's ad free and still there. More recent customers found their personal web pages are hosted on Geocities, complete with their icky ad overlays.
Yahoo managed to crap up the e-mail side too, when they migrated their customers to "Yahoo mail". I pay for e-mail as part of my internet access. If I want to read e-mail on the web, it comes with ads.
So I'm not entirely sorry that Geocities is going away. And as bad as AT&T and Yahoo are, both are far better than the local cable company.
me + ear wax == suspected terrorist?
No, it's another way of banning rock music. Loud music damages the cochlea and interferes with TEOAE's.
Musician == terrorist!
I'm waiting for my wife to spew coffee out of her nose when I tell her about this. She's a doctoral audiologist. :-).
There are things far worse than worrying about possible security threats from "courseware".
1. getting it to work in the first place can be a real big problem. A few years ago, a friend was taking online courses using WebCT. He was unable to get any of it to work. Instead, he commuted to campus and used the computers there.
2. IMO a lot of courseware is crapware. Somehow in the education market it is acceptable to subject students to software that would be higher quality if it was malware! Well, what did you expect? Look at how students are gouged on textbooks.
There was a "personality" test I had to take when I was a clerk for Radio Shack back in college... I remember the manager showed me the "results" and it basically said, "This person is either a very good person, or understood this test enough to give the answers we hoped for."
The purpose of the test is to select those who will put with bullshit as part of the hiring process. On my list for automatic DQ of employer are:
Most types of "H.R." B.S.
Resume in Word document.
Provide salary history.
Clueless (is there any other type of?) recruiter.
Buzzword laden job description.
No identification of who or what the business is.
Since I run my own business I can say
1. I probably don't want to work for you anyway.
2. Fuck you!
Surprise, surprise! People who may already exhibit signs of anger or aggression may be drawn to such games. The games don't cause the anger or aggression. Such people may also be at greater risk for showing increased anger or aggression.
That's from a psychologist. Why can't the lawmakers figure it out?
Because we have the best legislators money can buy!
IAABP (I am a biology professor).
IMHO O-chem as it is taught by most chemistry departments is completely useless for pre-med students. There ought to be a lower level biochemistry course in its stead as a pre-req for pre-meds. Most MDs will NEVER have to worry about organic synthesis and crap like that; they WILL need to worry about metabolic pathways and enzymatic reactions.
IAAP. Well said. For practicing physicians, basic science goes out the window. It's really about pattern matching.
If you really need a weed out course containing insane amounts of material to memorize and useless labs, try microbiology.
It's not that different from IT. 99+% of the work is technical. Very little is actually software development. Real world IT has almost nothing to do with "computer science".
I actually like "basic science", but having put students to sleep trying to teach it, I realize that enough is enough.
In the end, like IT, we are going to have another labor shortage. The cheap solution will be to outsource and bring in foreign labor.
#@%$! The Mass General sends CAT scans to India to be read. I'm sure PAP smears are sent god-knows-where now.
So when we do have socialized medicine I'll let you take my place in line to see the Pakistani psychiatrist!
Not really, but I do hate spammers much more than that. Yahoo is just the leading home of spam, and they might as well throw the babies out with the bathwater. I gave up on Yahoo a long time ago. I do have a few correspondents who still have secondary Yahoo email accounts--but I have no particular expectation that they will get any email that I route that way.
I'm stuck with Yahoo mail. My ISP doesn't give me a choice. Like other "Baby Bells", our e-mail was outsorced to Yahoo.
I *pay* for e-mail along with business class internet. Recently, outgoing mail to our bookkeeper is refused and incoming mail from our accountant is not delivered. GRRR. Looking at headers, I see that the top listed host's name ends in yahoo.com.
Google's ease of discovery eliminates a lot of the understanding learned from research. Now we can get the information we want, easily, without actually understanding it. IMHO this is a very dangerous thing.
It's still GIGO - "Garbage in, Garbage out" - except now there is a LOT more garbage.
I recently read an entire book (Super Crunchers) whose substance was that regression analysis was the greatest data analysis tool since sliced bread. Nonsense.
Finding associations is relatively easy. Making sense of them is hard. In order for an association to have meaning there has to be a mechanism involved. Back when I studied epidemiology it was called "biological plausibility".
Otherwise you might think that there is a real relationship between the number of ordained ministers and root beer consumption.
Really this is driven by marketing. So I expect to see more root beer ads at the local theological seminary!
It's not the graphics part that makes it so computer-intensive.... All the mathematics behind it, once that's done, the presentation could be done on any ol' computer....
So, if you mean by "graphics" that they are good at difficult geometrical calculations (like in games, for example), than you are right.... because that's what it is, truck-load of geometry...
From Wikipedia:
Tomography: "[...] Digital geometry processing is used to generate a three-dimensional image of the inside of an object from a large series of two-dimensional X-ray images taken around a single axis of rotation."
Computed tomorgraphy has been around for some time. Early CT ran on computers about as powerful as the 16 bit PDP-11. But traditional CT requires x-ray images to be taken from many different angles around the patient. In addition, it has problems with artifacts and noise, such as movement. The computations are relatively simple because you are reconstructing an image from a large number of projections. To reduce the time, radiation dose and influence of artifacts, you can reduce the number of angles, etc. but this comes at a cost in much longer computation time.
So you trade off a shorter scan for longer reconstruction of the image.
Debate if you wish if this is a supercomputer or not. I think this is exciting because it is being done with relatively inexpensive off the shelf hardware.
Also medical and instrumentation computers tend to lag far behind the usual gamer or consumer machine. 20+ years ago I was shown a piece of new lab equipment - the size of a large washing machine. Its owner bragged that its CPU was a PDP-8, someting much less powerful than the contermporary IBM-PC.
Imagine how long you would have to wait if Duke Nukem Forever had to be certified by the FDA before release.
I was looking for some mathematical routines to port into Python and ended up poking around at http://www.netlib.org/ and http://www.nist.gov/ where there are huge repositories of mathematical functions, most written in Fortran.
One of the most interesting things after perusing much of the code I was looking for, was that instead of using integration routines for calculating things like Bessel functions, Hankel functions, and other differential equation related functions, they simply used look up tables and curve fitting.
BINGO! The math routines used to compute some special statistical functions in early versions of Excel, for example, area under the normal curve and its inverse, go back to Hastings approximations from the mid 50s. They are rational function approximations. I first saw them back in the 60s as cited in the National Bureau of Standards "Handbook of Mathematical Functions". People still use these approximations today.
I got hit by this bug when the patch went live last week on Windowsupdate. As the article states, the solution in was to disable intelppm.sys from safemode. It's a lot quicker if you do it using autoruns. It's too bad this article wasn't posted last week. It would have saved me a lot of trouble shooting time.
This bit me today as I manually went though Windows Update on one of my office's machines, an older Compaq Presario with an AMD processor. Not knowing about the simple 1 line of instructions that would disable the intelppm.sys driver, I went through multiple re-boots and finally backwards using system restore. Finally downloaded 300+ MB of the XPSP3 installer (I have several other machines to update as well) and ran it after applying the patch. No real trouble after that.
I can't really blame MS for this. I can't blame HP that much either. The machine was near the bottom of the Compaq/HP line. It was purchased to allow our (former) receptionist to perform her duties and little more.
Stone and chisel. That's the way to store data for 1,000 years. The reason why I say this is simple. The more "religious" the world's populations become, the closer to the dark ages we become.
You've found Leibowitz's grocery list.
What is "As many as 20 percent of the proteins are found in saliva are also found in blood[...]" supposed to mean?
About 20% of the time, people do NOT secrete blood group antigens into their saliva or other body fluids. Before DNA analysis it was common to look for blood type in crime scene investigations. 80% of people are "secretors", the other 20% are harder to catch.
see http://www.ncsu.edu/kenanfellows/2002/pligon/forensics/notes/BloodNotes.html
You mean they didn't just invent the cat scanner?
No, just the false positive cat scan.
Believe it or not, this happens more often than you might think. The only difference is: this one got national attention somehow.
Maybe if it had happened in Billerica instead of Needham it would have appeared on PBS. "On Tonight's episode of This Old House - what happens when you drill through an electrical main."