But score one for progressivism, a car that was probably generating minimal extra emissions was taken off the streets! The human cost be damned, we must save the EARTH!!!
Quoted for truth.
Why the hell would anyone mod parent as "flamebait"? Human cost is every bit as important in policy consideration as environmental cost. Especially when the same side of the political spectrum that promotes environmental consciousness is also (ostensibly) concerned with income inequality and class disparity.
Second, back at you: would a kid of any other background have been invited to the White House? (Spoiler: the girl in the above link wasn't.)
If this kid's name had been Seamus or Mordechai or simply Johnny, his arrest (a) would have hardly caught any media attention or public outcry, and (b) absolutely would have not been recognized by the President and resulted in an invitation for a personal audience.
What (if anything) this boy's background had to do with his arrest is anyone's guess, but it has everything to do with his being a media darling, capturing Presidential attention/sympathy, and evoking the unprecedented level of populist white-knighting.
A blockade is an act of war. A people have a right to defend themselves against an attack.
Then could you please explain why Gaza isn't at war with Egypt, and why Gazans aren't "defending themselves" against this "attack" by lobbing rockets at Cairo?
I can't remember an Israeli prosecution of settlers for killing Palestinians
You either have a short memory, or (more likely) are trolling and hoping that others have one.
In response to a handful of Jewish extremists celebrating the attack, Israel enacted "legislation outlawing monuments to terrorists". Your turn: can you point to a single instance of Gaza or any Muslim nation passing a law like that?
'...the "white flag" incidents where Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians, including children, who came out carrying a white flag as ordered (documented in the Goldstone report), but Israel has never prosecuted a solider for killing a Palestinian, or even admitted that it happened.'
Now, if your goal is to make sure people around you are less bothered by pain, sure, share your smell with everyone. But if you would like to keep stress levels around you down, you should suppress your smell.
Uh, from the summary at the top of this very page: "Scientists have found that mice feel 36% less pain when a male researcher is in the room, versus a female researcher. The rodents are also less stressed out."
I've only got ten hours experience, not even a pilot; but I've never encountered wind shear.
Um. With all due respect, when you're coming in with 10 hours of experience, you could go easy on calling another/.er's dead friend an idiot for dying. If nothing else, recognize that bad things do happen to good and experienced pilots - and sometimes to great and very experienced pilots.
If you keep flying, you WILL encounter wind shear. And it will scare the hell out of you. Yes, we've gotten pretty good at predicting shear...at a macro level. At the micro level it's still unpredictable and unavoidable, and probably always will be because wind gusts are chaotic. There is no such thing as "that kind of weather"; sure, there are days when it's more likely than others, but it can and does happen at any time. It's happened to me on both takeoff and final approach on fairly calm days...it's a quick and very effective refresher on respecting safety margins and keeping your wits about you.
That said, the kind of gusts/shear that cartwheel a plane and smash it back into the ground on takeoff are EXTREMELY rare. As in, maybe double digits in the entire NTSB database. A catastrophic blowout on the highway is indeed much more common.
In all my hours in a Cessna 172, I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've hit 124 knots (143mph) without a tailwind.
Typical real-life cruise TAS in a C-172 -- remember, these are mostly rust buckets from the '60s and '70s, so don't go by the published specs -- is 100-110 knots, or about 115-125mph. Which yes, is certainly faster than a typical car (I was exaggerating a bit to make a point), but in general unless something goes wonky on takeoff or short final, you have much more time and space to react to situations in a plane than in a car.
I live near a municipal airport and based on the landings I've seen I'm not sure I would entrust my life to a private pilot certified on only a puddle jumper.
Honest question: have any of these landings that you've seen actually not been successful? Has there been even one that didn't end with the plane either taking off again or taxiing back to the ramp and its occupants getting out uninjured?
99% of the time that I'm flying a plane, I'm more than a mile from anything else in the sky and at least 1000 feet from anything on the ground.
99% of the time that I'm driving a car, I'm within 50 feet of another car and less than 10 feet from something else I can hit. And my car's not going all that much slower than a Cessna.
If as many people flew small planes as people drive it would not be as safe in terms of fatalities.
Well...that's kind of the point, isn't it? There AREN'T as many people who fly small planes as there are people who drive, and those people are generally far better trained/qualified. So sure, if general aviation was totally different than it actually is, it might not be as safe.
Besides, if you thought the taxi lobby was a problem for ride sharing; you'd never even dare to mess with the airline industrial complex (which is so heavily subsidized, it is more of a scam than a market.)
Meh. IMO this really isn't a threat to commercial aviation - not even private/charter commercial operators. I think this service is going to be brought down by a lack of adoption (insufficient demand) and a deficit of pilots (insufficient supply). There just aren't very many of us, even fewer who own planes, and fewer still who fly regularly. The aviation industry doesn't need to worry much about this.
... I'm a pilot, and I wouldn't fly as a pax with most of the other pilots I know, especially not under circumstances they are unfamiliar with - like loading down the plane with people and luggage close to gross weight and doing a cross country with it.
Really? That hasn't been my experience at all -- for me and most other private pilots I know, cross-country fully loaded makes up at least half of our non-training time. I mean, I've done a bunch of local scenic stuff too, but loading up and going places is kind of what this sport is about.
Also, FWIW I've only ever met 1 or 2 guys that I wouldn't go up with, and in those cases it was their personality more than their flying skills (honestly, I have yet to come across a pilot who got their ticket but couldn't handle a plane).
...or if they wait around for an hour for the person who is late...
I don't know if there's a single pilot under FAA jurisdiction who has never waited an hour for a late passenger/companion to show up for a flight before taking off.
Jewish people in the US have not received anything close to the oppression that black people have, and I say that as someone who's part Jewish.
Jewish Americans were not:
- effectively barred from living in most of the country.
- prevented from attending public schools and later institutions of higher learning, which allowed them to gain the skills they needed to succeed.
- paid less than their non-Jewish counterparts doing the same job.
- beaten or killed as a common recreational activity in large areas of the country, with police either ignoring it or actively supporting it.
- prevented from borrowing money from banks, which allowed them to buy homes and start businesses.
- targeted by America's current system of racial oppression called the "War on Drugs".
While that is perhaps true *in* the US (though not entirely), all of that -- EVERY SINGLE POINT -- was literally the law of the land where the bulk of Jewish immigrants to the US came from. Some of it until quite recently.
No question that blacks have had a rough go of it in the US. But the claim that "Jewish people in the US have not received anything close to the oppression that black people have", while partially true on a technicality, is both misleading and laughably ignorant. If you gave the ancestors of today's black Americans -- as mistreated as they were -- a good look at the lives of the same generations of ancestors of today's American Jews and offered them to swap, most of them would keep what they had in a heartbeat.
If I'm reading the article right, that entire supply of fuel-grade uranium set us back a total of $17B. If we can produce 10% of our nation's power for 20 years (i.e. supply 2 years' worth of our country's TOTAL electricity needs) on half of what Apple brings in per quarter, why on earth are we bothering with wind farms and solar arrays?
...Microsoft decided to "cut off their air supply" (their words) by releasing Internet Explorer (a browser they purchased from a company called Spyglass after Navigator's release) as part of Windows. Not just as an app that happened to ship with Windows, but as a necessary PART OF WINDOWS...
The skeeziest part of that deal actually wasn't Microsoft's attack on Netscape - it was their raw screwing of Spyglass. For those who don't remember this history, Microsoft licensed Mosaic (which they re-branded as Internet Explorer) from Spyglass for a minimal quarterly licensing fee plus a cut of the revenue from every copy of the browser that they sold. They then proceeded to give the browser away for free** with every copy of Windows, thereby not owing Spyglass any of the commission. Spyglass threatened legal action but apparently never took any, opting to settle for an $8M payout for a piece of technology that made Microsoft hundreds of billions.
** I never understood why Spyglass didn't sue Microsoft on the basis that (by Microsoft's own declaration, as AC pointed out) Internet Explorer was an integral part of Windows, and thus some share of the sales revenue for every copy of Windows was de facto revenue from the sale of Internet Explorer. Maybe someone more familiar with the back-story can fill in this blank?
'An open door for the talented would help Facebook's bottom line,' Collier concludes, 'but not the bottom billion.'
By this definition of "help", the only way that the US can help even a small portion of the "bottom billion" is by becoming part of them, which isn't in the world's interests and certainly isn't in ours. This video explains it very succinctly. At current immigration levels, the US population is slated to reach half a billion people by 2070, and top 625M by 2100.
Forget what this will do to our domestic standard of living -- consider what it will do to our ability to continue helping ANYONE in the developing world. With any luck, we will barely be able to maintain a poverty level here at home above that of today's banana republics.
What the hell is so wrong with having a meritocratic immigration system, i.e. an "open door for the talented"? It gives those people who are genuinely pushing the boundaries of opportunity in their native countries a chance to realize their potential, while also enabling them to contribute to developments that will almost certainly benefit those same native countries. Symbiotically, it gives the US an influx of talent that is somewhat less expensive, enabling those developments to take place more rapidly and thus driving commerce both here and abroad.
We can't take in the "bottom billion", and we won't do anyone any favors by killing ourselves trying. They have to, as the saying goes, bloom where they're planted. The best that we can do to help them is continue to contribute to the global economy, which we can do better with an increased talent pool that's achievable in part by being judicious about whom we take in.
So that those of us who go to "mainstream" websites for geopolitical news rather than scouring them for science/tech developments, and therefore might have missed this (as I did), can learn about it?
...opening up their research to the public BEFORE submitting it for publication to a publisher like Elsevier? I know this is a naive question, and I'm not posing it to make a point.
As I understand it, study authors generally don't make a profit from selling the results of their studies (they've been paid for their time in doing the research), so it seems to me they would have nothing to lose from making those results publicly available for free (i.e. public domain) prior to journal publication. In this way, an author would render the "copyright transfer" mentioned in this article meaningless, since the work is no longer copyrightable; as such, they could subsequently re-post it wherever they liked. No?
Not trolling here...I know this is the most common criticism: "Your password is only X characters long / doesn't have enough case diversity / has no special characters / contains dictionary words", etc.
But -- in general, someone either has your password because they stole it (in which case it really doesn't matter what the password is), or they don't, in which case they have to guess or brute-force it on the website.
Most sites won't give you more than a handful of attempts at logging in before they lock you out and force two-step authentication by making you change your password via an email/text or by asking security questions. And even if they somehow didn't, every failed attempt on a live website takes time; realistically, trying more than a few combinations isn't really worth the trouble in the vast majority of cases.
So, in the realm of security considerations, why is a "secure" password considered so critical? It seems to me that, practically speaking, someone guessing your password is about the LEAST likely way to get compromised. What am I missing here?
"Some of the uses for which PGS is intended are particularly concerning, such as assessments for BRCA-related genetic risk and drug responses (e.g., warfarin sensitivity, clopidogrel response, and 5-fluorouracil toxicity) because of the potential health consequences that could result from false positive or false negative assessments for high-risk indications such as these."
Show that the level of false positives/negatives is higher with genetic testing than with conventional testing, and you might have a point. Otherwise, alarmist "OMG MY BREASTS!" scare mongering.
For instance, if the BRCA-related risk assessment for breast or ovarian cancer reports a false positive, it could lead a patient to undergo prophylactic surgery, chemoprevention, intensive screening, or other morbidity-inducing actions, while a false negative could result in a failure to recognize an actual risk that may exist."
Correct, but -- again -- irrelevant unless the error rate is higher than in hands-on testing that's currently being used.
"The risk of serious injury or death is known to be high when patients are either non-compliant or not properly dosed; combined with the risk that a direct-to-consumer test result may be used by a patient to self-manage..."
Ahh...THERE it is. We can't have patients going around getting informed about what's in their own bodies and making decisions based on that information. That's the purview of PROFESSIONALS.
Kind of like auto mechanics telling you they're the only ones that should be allowed to read the OBD messages from your car.
...the dumb things Sourceforge was doing was harming Gimp's reputation as a legitimate piece of professional software.
No, GIMP was doing that by itself without any help from Sourceforge. I've used some good OSS/FOSS alternatives to commercial software, but GIMP is a clunky, counter-intuitive mess.
I gave GIMP a solid college try -- I tried to use it for a VERY straightforward project: create a banner image out of several photos faded and alpha-blended together on the sides (something like this or this).
Starting from scratch, I downloaded GIMP and, using included help and any external tutorials I could find, got 1-1/2 hours into the project having accomplished precisely nothing of value and getting frustrated to the point of literally screaming at my screen.
Before you deride me for blaming someone else for my incompetence -- when I then fired up a computer with Photoshop (CS4 or 5, I believe it was) and started from exactly the same scratch (I had never done this sort of thing before), I had the entire project finished in under an hour, and actually understood the logic behind what the application wanted from me. It wasn't without its frustrations, but it enabled me to get my work done. Which is what a program needs to do in order to be a "legitimate piece of professional software". GIMP is a legitimate piece of something else -- SF or no SF.
Here's a hint for SF: if you want to identify bad actors, one indication is that they are an advertiser...Whenever a new technology comes along, advertisers are there to shit all over it. Excuse me, "monetize" it.
The problem here is you (well, us) as consumers. We not only want FOSS, we want delivery to be free, too -- without regard for the fact that the infrastructure to facilitate that delivery actually takes tangible resources (i.e. money, not just developer time) to operate.
So, in effect, we the consumer base are CHOOSING this advertising model. If you were willing to pay $0.25 to Sourceforge every time you downloaded a program or code tree from them, you could make a reasonable demand for SF to do away with the stupid ad shenanigans. But you're not. Even if you personally are, the user base as a whole has gotten accustomed to delivery being "free" and now demands it. And since it's not actually free, sites like SF have to find a way to stay solvent.
The "bad actors" here are consumers of free stuff who get their panties in a bunch whenever the silver platter that their free stuff is served on is even the slightest bit tarnished.
That's like blaming standard car design when debris severs a fuel line and ends up pouring fuel all over the exhaust manifold, or cracking the oil pan to similar effect.
Except how many gasoline-powered cars have actually caught fire through the mechanism you describe? Would be an interesting comparison. If the sort of debris impact we're talking about has happened to 3 Teslas out of a mere 21,500 in just a couple of years, you can bet it happens to conventional cars pretty regularly.
My guess is that gasoline-powered cars are more likely than Teslas to catch fire under different kinds of circumstances, but that a Tesla is more likely to catch fire by being hit by roadway debris because the batteries cover much more surface area under the car than the profile of the gas tank and the thin fuel lines on a conventional vehicle
No one questions that its more costly to supply infrastructure to rural areas. The question is why that excuse is at all relevant to American cities.
Because ISPs can't charge you $X/month for easy-to-deliver service in the city while charging your uncle in Glasgow, Montana $20X/month because his is harder and more expensive to provide.
Kind of like the USPS - it costs them less than $0.46 to deliver a letter from New York to Chicago, but a lot more than $0.46 to deliver one from Corona, NM to Reedsburg, WI. Since they can't (either by law or by popular acceptability) charge more for the more expensive service, the lower-cost markets subsidize the higher-cost ones to make up the difference in cost-of-delivery. Same thing with ISPs - there's a lot more miles of cable to lay and maintain to connect rural areas. In contrast, France, Britain, South Korea, etc. don't have to wire rural areas to nearly the extent the US does.
It's not like Tesla has become a profitable company and paid off this loan with the spoils of its success. To date the company has had one profitable quarter, to the tune of $11.2M -- made *entirely* from the sale of ZEV credits (a freebie from the government), not cars.
The only reason that Tesla feels it can afford to sink its investment capital into this PR move is because it learned form the 2008 crash that when car companies say "jump", Washington says "how high?", so it knows it's a safe bet -- i.e. if/when Tesla finds itself in trouble because it overextended to pay off the loan, Uncle Sam will bail it out.
Slashdot Mirror
But score one for progressivism, a car that was probably generating minimal extra emissions was taken off the streets! The human cost be damned, we must save the EARTH!!!
Quoted for truth.
Why the hell would anyone mod parent as "flamebait"? Human cost is every bit as important in policy consideration as environmental cost. Especially when the same side of the political spectrum that promotes environmental consciousness is also (ostensibly) concerned with income inequality and class disparity.
"I've been threatened with too many lawsuits / C&Ds and I'm a pretty small fish, so I'm gonna proactively pull the plug before the $#*!storm hits."
Would a kid of any other background been arrested?
First of all, yes.
Second, back at you: would a kid of any other background have been invited to the White House? (Spoiler: the girl in the above link wasn't.)
If this kid's name had been Seamus or Mordechai or simply Johnny, his arrest (a) would have hardly caught any media attention or public outcry, and (b) absolutely would have not been recognized by the President and resulted in an invitation for a personal audience.
What (if anything) this boy's background had to do with his arrest is anyone's guess, but it has everything to do with his being a media darling, capturing Presidential attention/sympathy, and evoking the unprecedented level of populist white-knighting.
A blockade is an act of war. A people have a right to defend themselves against an attack.
Then could you please explain why Gaza isn't at war with Egypt, and why Gazans aren't "defending themselves" against this "attack" by lobbing rockets at Cairo?
I can't remember an Israeli prosecution of settlers for killing Palestinians
You either have a short memory, or (more likely) are trolling and hoping that others have one.
After the Tomb of the Patriarchs massacre, the one major incident of "killings by the settlers", "The Israeli government...responded by arresting followers of Meir Kahane, criminalizing the Kach movement and affiliated movements as terrorist, forbidding certain Israeli settlers from entering Palestinian towns and demanding that those settlers turn in their army-issued rifles...Jewish Israelis were barred from entering major Arab communities in Hebron."
In response to a handful of Jewish extremists celebrating the attack, Israel enacted "legislation outlawing monuments to terrorists". Your turn: can you point to a single instance of Gaza or any Muslim nation passing a law like that?
'...the "white flag" incidents where Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians, including children, who came out carrying a white flag as ordered (documented in the Goldstone report), but Israel has never prosecuted a solider for killing a Palestinian, or even admitted that it happened.'
That is a bald-faced lie, but of course you already know that:
"After reviewing the evidence, the Military Advocate General ordered that an IDF Staff Sergeant be indicted with charges of manslaughter by a military court. This decision is based on evidence that the soldier, who was serving as a designated marksman, deliberately targeted an individual walking with a group of people waving a white flag without being ordered or authorized to do so."
As an aside, you also know that the Goldstone report that you refer to has since been disavowed by its author...
Now, if your goal is to make sure people around you are less bothered by pain, sure, share your smell with everyone. But if you would like to keep stress levels around you down, you should suppress your smell.
Uh, from the summary at the top of this very page: "Scientists have found that mice feel 36% less pain when a male researcher is in the room, versus a female researcher. The rodents are also less stressed out."
I've only got ten hours experience, not even a pilot; but I've never encountered wind shear.
Um. With all due respect, when you're coming in with 10 hours of experience, you could go easy on calling another /.er's dead friend an idiot for dying. If nothing else, recognize that bad things do happen to good and experienced pilots - and sometimes to great and very experienced pilots.
If you keep flying, you WILL encounter wind shear. And it will scare the hell out of you. Yes, we've gotten pretty good at predicting shear...at a macro level. At the micro level it's still unpredictable and unavoidable, and probably always will be because wind gusts are chaotic. There is no such thing as "that kind of weather"; sure, there are days when it's more likely than others, but it can and does happen at any time. It's happened to me on both takeoff and final approach on fairly calm days...it's a quick and very effective refresher on respecting safety margins and keeping your wits about you.
That said, the kind of gusts/shear that cartwheel a plane and smash it back into the ground on takeoff are EXTREMELY rare. As in, maybe double digits in the entire NTSB database. A catastrophic blowout on the highway is indeed much more common.
A Cessna 172 cruise speed is 143 miles/hour.
In all my hours in a Cessna 172, I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've hit 124 knots (143mph) without a tailwind.
Typical real-life cruise TAS in a C-172 -- remember, these are mostly rust buckets from the '60s and '70s, so don't go by the published specs -- is 100-110 knots, or about 115-125mph. Which yes, is certainly faster than a typical car (I was exaggerating a bit to make a point), but in general unless something goes wonky on takeoff or short final, you have much more time and space to react to situations in a plane than in a car.
I live near a municipal airport and based on the landings I've seen I'm not sure I would entrust my life to a private pilot certified on only a puddle jumper.
Honest question: have any of these landings that you've seen actually not been successful? Has there been even one that didn't end with the plane either taking off again or taxiing back to the ramp and its occupants getting out uninjured?
Cars are forgiving, the sky is NOT.
99% of the time that I'm flying a plane, I'm more than a mile from anything else in the sky and at least 1000 feet from anything on the ground.
99% of the time that I'm driving a car, I'm within 50 feet of another car and less than 10 feet from something else I can hit. And my car's not going all that much slower than a Cessna.
If as many people flew small planes as people drive it would not be as safe in terms of fatalities.
Well...that's kind of the point, isn't it? There AREN'T as many people who fly small planes as there are people who drive, and those people are generally far better trained/qualified. So sure, if general aviation was totally different than it actually is, it might not be as safe.
Besides, if you thought the taxi lobby was a problem for ride sharing; you'd never even dare to mess with the airline industrial complex (which is so heavily subsidized, it is more of a scam than a market.)
Meh. IMO this really isn't a threat to commercial aviation - not even private/charter commercial operators. I think this service is going to be brought down by a lack of adoption (insufficient demand) and a deficit of pilots (insufficient supply). There just aren't very many of us, even fewer who own planes, and fewer still who fly regularly. The aviation industry doesn't need to worry much about this.
... I'm a pilot, and I wouldn't fly as a pax with most of the other pilots I know, especially not under circumstances they are unfamiliar with - like loading down the plane with people and luggage close to gross weight and doing a cross country with it.
Really? That hasn't been my experience at all -- for me and most other private pilots I know, cross-country fully loaded makes up at least half of our non-training time. I mean, I've done a bunch of local scenic stuff too, but loading up and going places is kind of what this sport is about.
Also, FWIW I've only ever met 1 or 2 guys that I wouldn't go up with, and in those cases it was their personality more than their flying skills (honestly, I have yet to come across a pilot who got their ticket but couldn't handle a plane).
...or if they wait around for an hour for the person who is late...
I don't know if there's a single pilot under FAA jurisdiction who has never waited an hour for a late passenger/companion to show up for a flight before taking off.
Jewish people in the US have not received anything close to the oppression that black people have, and I say that as someone who's part Jewish.
Jewish Americans were not:
- effectively barred from living in most of the country.
- prevented from attending public schools and later institutions of higher learning, which allowed them to gain the skills they needed to succeed.
- paid less than their non-Jewish counterparts doing the same job.
- beaten or killed as a common recreational activity in large areas of the country, with police either ignoring it or actively supporting it.
- prevented from borrowing money from banks, which allowed them to buy homes and start businesses.
- targeted by America's current system of racial oppression called the "War on Drugs".
While that is perhaps true *in* the US (though not entirely), all of that -- EVERY SINGLE POINT -- was literally the law of the land where the bulk of Jewish immigrants to the US came from. Some of it until quite recently.
To wit: being (not "effectively" - literally) barred from living in most of the country, being excluded from academic institutions (official policy as recently as 15 years ago), being beaten and killed as a common recreational activity in large areas of the country, with police either ignoring it or actively supporting it, being targeted by a system of racial oppression in campaigns against crime, etc. Not to mention fully one third of their world population being wiped out less than a century ago, and still below pre-WWII levels.
No question that blacks have had a rough go of it in the US. But the claim that "Jewish people in the US have not received anything close to the oppression that black people have", while partially true on a technicality, is both misleading and laughably ignorant. If you gave the ancestors of today's black Americans -- as mistreated as they were -- a good look at the lives of the same generations of ancestors of today's American Jews and offered them to swap, most of them would keep what they had in a heartbeat.
You can get a 60W equivalent [LED bulb] at any Home Depot for $13 or less.
Maybe, but if you want a 100W equivalent, you're out close to $50. And the thing is hideous to boot.
If I'm reading the article right, that entire supply of fuel-grade uranium set us back a total of $17B. If we can produce 10% of our nation's power for 20 years (i.e. supply 2 years' worth of our country's TOTAL electricity needs) on half of what Apple brings in per quarter, why on earth are we bothering with wind farms and solar arrays?
...Microsoft decided to "cut off their air supply" (their words) by releasing Internet Explorer (a browser they purchased from a company called Spyglass after Navigator's release) as part of Windows. Not just as an app that happened to ship with Windows, but as a necessary PART OF WINDOWS...
The skeeziest part of that deal actually wasn't Microsoft's attack on Netscape - it was their raw screwing of Spyglass. For those who don't remember this history, Microsoft licensed Mosaic (which they re-branded as Internet Explorer) from Spyglass for a minimal quarterly licensing fee plus a cut of the revenue from every copy of the browser that they sold. They then proceeded to give the browser away for free** with every copy of Windows, thereby not owing Spyglass any of the commission. Spyglass threatened legal action but apparently never took any, opting to settle for an $8M payout for a piece of technology that made Microsoft hundreds of billions.
** I never understood why Spyglass didn't sue Microsoft on the basis that (by Microsoft's own declaration, as AC pointed out) Internet Explorer was an integral part of Windows, and thus some share of the sales revenue for every copy of Windows was de facto revenue from the sale of Internet Explorer. Maybe someone more familiar with the back-story can fill in this blank?
'An open door for the talented would help Facebook's bottom line,' Collier concludes, 'but not the bottom billion.'
By this definition of "help", the only way that the US can help even a small portion of the "bottom billion" is by becoming part of them, which isn't in the world's interests and certainly isn't in ours. This video explains it very succinctly. At current immigration levels, the US population is slated to reach half a billion people by 2070, and top 625M by 2100.
Forget what this will do to our domestic standard of living -- consider what it will do to our ability to continue helping ANYONE in the developing world. With any luck, we will barely be able to maintain a poverty level here at home above that of today's banana republics.
What the hell is so wrong with having a meritocratic immigration system, i.e. an "open door for the talented"? It gives those people who are genuinely pushing the boundaries of opportunity in their native countries a chance to realize their potential, while also enabling them to contribute to developments that will almost certainly benefit those same native countries. Symbiotically, it gives the US an influx of talent that is somewhat less expensive, enabling those developments to take place more rapidly and thus driving commerce both here and abroad.
We can't take in the "bottom billion", and we won't do anyone any favors by killing ourselves trying. They have to, as the saying goes, bloom where they're planted. The best that we can do to help them is continue to contribute to the global economy, which we can do better with an increased talent pool that's achievable in part by being judicious about whom we take in.
What's the point of posting it now?
So that those of us who go to "mainstream" websites for geopolitical news rather than scouring them for science/tech developments, and therefore might have missed this (as I did), can learn about it?
...opening up their research to the public BEFORE submitting it for publication to a publisher like Elsevier? I know this is a naive question, and I'm not posing it to make a point.
As I understand it, study authors generally don't make a profit from selling the results of their studies (they've been paid for their time in doing the research), so it seems to me they would have nothing to lose from making those results publicly available for free (i.e. public domain) prior to journal publication. In this way, an author would render the "copyright transfer" mentioned in this article meaningless, since the work is no longer copyrightable; as such, they could subsequently re-post it wherever they liked. No?
Not trolling here...I know this is the most common criticism: "Your password is only X characters long / doesn't have enough case diversity / has no special characters / contains dictionary words", etc.
But -- in general, someone either has your password because they stole it (in which case it really doesn't matter what the password is), or they don't, in which case they have to guess or brute-force it on the website.
Most sites won't give you more than a handful of attempts at logging in before they lock you out and force two-step authentication by making you change your password via an email/text or by asking security questions. And even if they somehow didn't, every failed attempt on a live website takes time; realistically, trying more than a few combinations isn't really worth the trouble in the vast majority of cases.
So, in the realm of security considerations, why is a "secure" password considered so critical? It seems to me that, practically speaking, someone guessing your password is about the LEAST likely way to get compromised. What am I missing here?
"Some of the uses for which PGS is intended are particularly concerning, such as assessments for BRCA-related genetic risk and drug responses (e.g., warfarin sensitivity, clopidogrel response, and 5-fluorouracil toxicity) because of the potential health consequences that could result from false positive or false negative assessments for high-risk indications such as these."
Show that the level of false positives/negatives is higher with genetic testing than with conventional testing, and you might have a point. Otherwise, alarmist "OMG MY BREASTS!" scare mongering.
For instance, if the BRCA-related risk assessment for breast or ovarian cancer reports a false positive, it could lead a patient to undergo prophylactic surgery, chemoprevention, intensive screening, or other morbidity-inducing actions, while a false negative could result in a failure to recognize an actual risk that may exist."
Correct, but -- again -- irrelevant unless the error rate is higher than in hands-on testing that's currently being used.
"The risk of serious injury or death is known to be high when patients are either non-compliant or not properly dosed; combined with the risk that a direct-to-consumer test result may be used by a patient to self-manage..."
Ahh...THERE it is. We can't have patients going around getting informed about what's in their own bodies and making decisions based on that information. That's the purview of PROFESSIONALS.
Kind of like auto mechanics telling you they're the only ones that should be allowed to read the OBD messages from your car.
...the dumb things Sourceforge was doing was harming Gimp's reputation as a legitimate piece of professional software.
No, GIMP was doing that by itself without any help from Sourceforge. I've used some good OSS/FOSS alternatives to commercial software, but GIMP is a clunky, counter-intuitive mess.
I gave GIMP a solid college try -- I tried to use it for a VERY straightforward project: create a banner image out of several photos faded and alpha-blended together on the sides (something like this or this).
Starting from scratch, I downloaded GIMP and, using included help and any external tutorials I could find, got 1-1/2 hours into the project having accomplished precisely nothing of value and getting frustrated to the point of literally screaming at my screen.
Before you deride me for blaming someone else for my incompetence -- when I then fired up a computer with Photoshop (CS4 or 5, I believe it was) and started from exactly the same scratch (I had never done this sort of thing before), I had the entire project finished in under an hour, and actually understood the logic behind what the application wanted from me. It wasn't without its frustrations, but it enabled me to get my work done. Which is what a program needs to do in order to be a "legitimate piece of professional software". GIMP is a legitimate piece of something else -- SF or no SF.
Here's a hint for SF: if you want to identify bad actors, one indication is that they are an advertiser...Whenever a new technology comes along, advertisers are there to shit all over it. Excuse me, "monetize" it.
The problem here is you (well, us) as consumers. We not only want FOSS, we want delivery to be free, too -- without regard for the fact that the infrastructure to facilitate that delivery actually takes tangible resources (i.e. money, not just developer time) to operate.
So, in effect, we the consumer base are CHOOSING this advertising model. If you were willing to pay $0.25 to Sourceforge every time you downloaded a program or code tree from them, you could make a reasonable demand for SF to do away with the stupid ad shenanigans. But you're not. Even if you personally are, the user base as a whole has gotten accustomed to delivery being "free" and now demands it. And since it's not actually free, sites like SF have to find a way to stay solvent.
The "bad actors" here are consumers of free stuff who get their panties in a bunch whenever the silver platter that their free stuff is served on is even the slightest bit tarnished.
That's like blaming standard car design when debris severs a fuel line and ends up pouring fuel all over the exhaust manifold, or cracking the oil pan to similar effect.
Except how many gasoline-powered cars have actually caught fire through the mechanism you describe? Would be an interesting comparison. If the sort of debris impact we're talking about has happened to 3 Teslas out of a mere 21,500 in just a couple of years, you can bet it happens to conventional cars pretty regularly.
My guess is that gasoline-powered cars are more likely than Teslas to catch fire under different kinds of circumstances, but that a Tesla is more likely to catch fire by being hit by roadway debris because the batteries cover much more surface area under the car than the profile of the gas tank and the thin fuel lines on a conventional vehicle
No one questions that its more costly to supply infrastructure to rural areas. The question is why that excuse is at all relevant to American cities.
Because ISPs can't charge you $X/month for easy-to-deliver service in the city while charging your uncle in Glasgow, Montana $20X/month because his is harder and more expensive to provide.
Kind of like the USPS - it costs them less than $0.46 to deliver a letter from New York to Chicago, but a lot more than $0.46 to deliver one from Corona, NM to Reedsburg, WI. Since they can't (either by law or by popular acceptability) charge more for the more expensive service, the lower-cost markets subsidize the higher-cost ones to make up the difference in cost-of-delivery. Same thing with ISPs - there's a lot more miles of cable to lay and maintain to connect rural areas. In contrast, France, Britain, South Korea, etc. don't have to wire rural areas to nearly the extent the US does.
Actually, a lot of C172s are ILS-equipped. Most pilots do their IFR training in this or a similar plane.
It's not like Tesla has become a profitable company and paid off this loan with the spoils of its success. To date the company has had one profitable quarter, to the tune of $11.2M -- made *entirely* from the sale of ZEV credits (a freebie from the government), not cars.
The only reason that Tesla feels it can afford to sink its investment capital into this PR move is because it learned form the 2008 crash that when car companies say "jump", Washington says "how high?", so it knows it's a safe bet -- i.e. if/when Tesla finds itself in trouble because it overextended to pay off the loan, Uncle Sam will bail it out.