TSA was created not only a gigantic practical-joke on the middle class. It was also created as a means to mask growing unemployment. All for political points.
Absolutely brilliant comment. Also, you are correct.
For those who didn't get this post: A transducer is a transducer. It can go either direction, as the physical mechanism is the same, whether one direction or the other. For example, electromagnets move a speaker cone to create sound. Yell at a speaker, and the sound pressure will generate a small voltage (a microphone).
When poster called it a "one way street," he was referring to the way we engineer and design these transducers. They are optimized, for example to produce sound accurately. This inevitably leads to design trade-offs and optimizations for a particular application. That's all. No one is threatening the second law.
When land-line phones were wired (not cordless), I discovered as a child that I could yell into the earpiece, which modulated the voltage on the line, and a faint sound could be heard at the other end. The implications for eaves-droppers was that removing the microphone from your phone handset would not render you undetectable to the other people on the line, precisely for the reasons above.
Just logged in to FB for the first time in a month or two.
It hasn't been chronological in a while. FB chooses whose posts I see at the top. Do they know me better than I do?
FB has been over for quite a while. Teenagers do not want to be "FB friends" with their grandma.
Last week, I received an invite to an event through email! Think of it. Email is just the same as FB, without inviting FB to be the middle-man (and NSA toady).
Bless this week. My friends are finally realizing that FB is just a mirror that records your every movement, and are finally returning to normal communication methods. Finally!
The fact that they have the liver and last meal are very promising. It seems likely that the flora of a mammoth's gut were different from those in a modern-day African elephant's. We are all super-organisms, you know, and an inoculation with a little of its own poop in infancy could set up the appropriate flora. The researchers can also figure out what exactly the mammoth liked to eat.
More problematic, I imagine, is mitochondria, etc. Cross-species cloning puts DNA from one beast into the cells (factories) of another beast. Such a transfer might yield incompatible sub-cellular systems. Mitochondria are RNA-based, and pass from the mother's oocyte. I have no idea whether any mammoth-mitochondria or other non-DNA-based organelles from the sample might still be viable.
They don't mention the materials used for fabrication, so the "archival" claim is not supported.
More importantly, a disk-based storage medium is not likely to be useful as "archival" due to both format rot, and the inevitable loss of accessibility as the market moves to other devices. Can you read your MO or Bernoulli disks today?
This (US Patent 8,085,304) is a truly archival technology. One that a naive user with a flatbed scanner and computer could find and read. Say, for example a government in 300 years, or an archaeologist. Sure, quick calculations show that it could hold only 5 GB (if encoded in 4-bit) for the same weight as a CD, but it is the only truly archival idea out there.
Micro skirts are the best, and make all other women in the area super jealous/angry/miffed/whatever.
The funny thing about micro skirts is that, at the beach, the average young woman is wearing a bikini that is more revealing than the micro-skirt (minus the skirt), yet no one complains.
There is a plac and a time for everything, I suppose.
Some women find it entertaining or exciting to wear a skirt with no panties. It's kind of a thing. Oh, and also, their boyfriends are near-unanimously supportive of this. Aside from that, it is really every woman's right to dress as she wishes, based upon the expectation of viewing-angle privacy that the world generally adheres to.
If creepos with tennis-shoe mirrors and pole-mounted cameras want to ruin it for the rest of us... well, then, they should be shot or put in jail. To wit; if my girl decides to stop occasionally going panty-less (exciting to both of us) because of a few pervs, then this idiotic up-skirt photography behavior should be stopped.
I spoke only fact. I ditched a local pharmacy because of their prominent "homeopathic remedies" displays.
It's like they (the presumed degree-having store managers) didn't care at all about their "education" or my health, and would have rather just found the best ways to milk customers of money. That, to me, is a pharmacist I DO NOT TRUST to keep track of my various medications, or their interactions, from a medical or chemical perspective.
Homeopathy is pseudo-science—fake—and anyone dispensing strong chemicals and drugs ought to know the difference. Either these guys did not, or they did not care about the health of their customers...
Any time the TSA insists that I surrender an item, I first insist on rendering it useless (value-less).
For example, I use expensive, specialized tweezers in my work, for which I must travel. Not knives—tweezers. On the occasions where the TSA wants to take them, I first destroy them (wrench them apart), so that they cease to have any value. I don't like thieves.
As president of my HOA, I allowed Verizon to install FIOS capability to every unit in my complex, for free.
Now, we are not as a community beholden to Time-Warner, but can switch to Verizon as a provider of all things digital (internet, TV, and phone).
Both are desperate to sell you "packages" of services, rather than just internet. Screw them. I call once a year and threaten to ditch them for their competitor. The result is a rate reduced by about 40%.
I do not own a television, nor do I use a land-line phone. I just want internet. Well, that sort of logic falls short with their telephone salespeople. The only threat that works is, "I will totally cancel service from you and will go to your competitor."
Jules Verne is apropos here. He wrote Paris in the Twentieth Century in 1863.
From a review: "This novel... shows Verne in a darker, frankly dystopian mood. His mid-20th century Paris is an enormously wealthy society, a place of technological wonders, but, like Huxley's Brave New World, it is also a society without meaningful art. Engineering and banking are the prime industries of this civilization and, as the book's protagonist discovers, not even the most talented poet can find a place for himself unless he's willing to produce odes to blast furnaces or locomotives.
From the USPTO PAIR database, "By this preliminary Amendment, claims 1-154 have been canceled..."
154 claims canceled?!? Typical patents have around 21 claims. USPTO charges per-claim over 21 total claims. JP Morgan's application had 170 claims — way beyond even a 3-sigma deviation for all patent applications. That is, it's amateurish. But, somehow they managed to avoid paying the $80/each for the excess claims. Most rejections were nominally due to the claims being "too abstract."
So, anyways, from the USPTO PAIR database — JP Morgan are claiming that their filing is under pre-AIA conditions. That is, that they are first to invent, and are not subject to the current first to file rules. Big difference. The inventor filed an "oath" regarding the invention date. Uh huh. USPTO also says, "Claims 155-175 are allowed over the prior art of record based on the earliest priority of the parent applications." I couldn't find the priority date that they are claiming, or whether it is before their filing date, but one might guess they are trying to get a pre-BitCoin patent priority date. Jerks. Once a patent is allowed and issued, any challenge to their priority would face a high hurdle, and would be expensive to prosecute.
If only someone knew of some actual prior art, and that this person also knew the name and contact information for the patent examiner. Hmmn...
Ah, here we are: From their non-final rejection, "Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JAGDISH PATEL whose telephone number is (571) 272-6748." I'm sure he has an email address as well.
Good luck, and if no one here is willing to help nuke this, I'll send it over to the 4chan trogs.
Last, below is the Public PAIR filing-documents web address. Go there and search for "Publication Number" 20130317984. Click the "Image File Wrapper" tab to see PDFs of all communications between JP Morgan and the USPTO. Happy hunting!
You should just see what one member of the ANON.penet.fi anonymous email listserver for "ship in a bottle enthusiasts" writes about the government! It is just scandalous. Scandalous, I tell you!
He/she writes often about blowing up government buildings for terrorist purposes, and thinks that s/he furthers Al Quaeda goals by making these plans! S/he has said several times that s/he will perpetrate a major terrorist act early in 2014, but has not said exactly where on US soil it will occur.
This is a former constitutional lawyer saying that privacy concerns are a First Amendment concern. WT-actual-F? This is clearly Fourth amendment territory...
It is actually both a First and a Fourth Amendment concern, which is what enabled him to avoid the cognitive dissonance of bald-faced lying.
For the uninitiated, it is a Fourth amendment concern because it is an illegal search and seizure (seizure occurs at the time of collection and retention, not later when a human examines it). Consequently, those who feel their Fourth Amendment rights may be violated will tend to censor themselves, leading also to a valid First-Amendment concern.
Long story short — weasel words from a former constitutional law professor. Not good.
This is my ultimate goal, to be what might be called a Gentleman Scientist.
I saved up at a job, quit, and then took a several-month break to write a series of patents with the aim of licensing or sale.
Support from that will hopefully allow me to "work for free" at a University when funds run low (I already do). It also helps to stretch funding to support more instrument time, collaborators, major facility visits, etc.
It's a roller coaster, but is indeed do-able. Snowballs take a while to get going, but tend to grow once started.
Good description of a science/engineering post-doc. Produce and no one asks any questions. That part is great.
Ah, but after the post-docs, if no tenure-track position is obtained, you can stay in the academy by making a decision to accept an even more unstable position — the soft-money Research Professor! You can advise students, are awesome at your craft, and as long as you keep publishing or teaching, nobody asks any questions. But here's the rub. (1) You have to obtain your own support by writing proposals which compete with those of tenured Professors. (2) With no start-up package, you have no money to hire a postdoc at the start. You are your own postdoc! (3) You may eventually hop over to the tenure track, but will have to go through the whole hiring and review process, competing with everybody else, for the position. Sadly, if the ideas stop flowing, some people get stuck as "Research Staff" for the remainder of their careers, providing facility support and service work.
To sum up, expect to be hungry, and to work all the time. After all, you are fulfilling three roles as a Research Professor. Visionary/planner, proposal-writer, post-doc, paper-writer, lecturer, and so on. But all is not lost, even at this late stage. If you have friends who are Profs., and have a strong reputation as someone who produces (papers and patents), then you'll survive by getting little freebies here and there. Knit those into publications — good ones. Give a few freebies yourself to meritorious experiments, and make sure they get published. Eventually, you can work up to being a co-I (or Co-PI) on a multi-institution project, meaning you get to eat. Keep producing! Eventually, if you continue to have good ideas, do good work, collaborate, and write well, you're likely to be scooped up somewhere.
Oh, and Food Stamps are an option during "dry" periods.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up.
TSA was created not only a gigantic practical-joke on the middle class. It was also created as a means to mask growing unemployment. All for political points.
"Fiscal responsibility" indeed.
Absolutely brilliant comment. Also, you are correct.
For those who didn't get this post: A transducer is a transducer. It can go either direction, as the physical mechanism is the same, whether one direction or the other. For example, electromagnets move a speaker cone to create sound. Yell at a speaker, and the sound pressure will generate a small voltage (a microphone).
When poster called it a "one way street," he was referring to the way we engineer and design these transducers. They are optimized, for example to produce sound accurately. This inevitably leads to design trade-offs and optimizations for a particular application. That's all. No one is threatening the second law.
When land-line phones were wired (not cordless), I discovered as a child that I could yell into the earpiece, which modulated the voltage on the line, and a faint sound could be heard at the other end. The implications for eaves-droppers was that removing the microphone from your phone handset would not render you undetectable to the other people on the line, precisely for the reasons above.
You could also go back to Newton and Gelileo...
Or Copernicus.
Just logged in to FB for the first time in a month or two.
It hasn't been chronological in a while. FB chooses whose posts I see at the top. Do they know me better than I do?
FB has been over for quite a while. Teenagers do not want to be "FB friends" with their grandma.
Last week, I received an invite to an event through email! Think of it. Email is just the same as FB, without inviting FB to be the middle-man (and NSA toady).
Bless this week. My friends are finally realizing that FB is just a mirror that records your every movement, and are finally returning to normal communication methods. Finally!
The fact that they have the liver and last meal are very promising. It seems likely that the flora of a mammoth's gut were different from those in a modern-day African elephant's. We are all super-organisms, you know, and an inoculation with a little of its own poop in infancy could set up the appropriate flora. The researchers can also figure out what exactly the mammoth liked to eat.
More problematic, I imagine, is mitochondria, etc. Cross-species cloning puts DNA from one beast into the cells (factories) of another beast. Such a transfer might yield incompatible sub-cellular systems. Mitochondria are RNA-based, and pass from the mother's oocyte. I have no idea whether any mammoth-mitochondria or other non-DNA-based organelles from the sample might still be viable.
Very interesting project in any case.
Schizophrenia is a saddening disease.
They don't mention the materials used for fabrication, so the "archival" claim is not supported.
More importantly, a disk-based storage medium is not likely to be useful as "archival" due to both format rot, and the inevitable loss of accessibility as the market moves to other devices. Can you read your MO or Bernoulli disks today?
This (US Patent 8,085,304) is a truly archival technology. One that a naive user with a flatbed scanner and computer could find and read. Say, for example a government in 300 years, or an archaeologist. Sure, quick calculations show that it could hold only 5 GB (if encoded in 4-bit) for the same weight as a CD, but it is the only truly archival idea out there.
Micro skirts are the best, and make all other women in the area super jealous/angry/miffed/whatever.
The funny thing about micro skirts is that, at the beach, the average young woman is wearing a bikini that is more revealing than the micro-skirt (minus the skirt), yet no one complains.
There is a plac and a time for everything, I suppose.
Grow up.
Some women find it entertaining or exciting to wear a skirt with no panties. It's kind of a thing. Oh, and also, their boyfriends are near-unanimously supportive of this. Aside from that, it is really every woman's right to dress as she wishes, based upon the expectation of viewing-angle privacy that the world generally adheres to.
If creepos with tennis-shoe mirrors and pole-mounted cameras want to ruin it for the rest of us... well, then, they should be shot or put in jail. To wit; if my girl decides to stop occasionally going panty-less (exciting to both of us) because of a few pervs, then this idiotic up-skirt photography behavior should be stopped.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Troll? Really?
I spoke only fact. I ditched a local pharmacy because of their prominent "homeopathic remedies" displays.
It's like they (the presumed degree-having store managers) didn't care at all about their "education" or my health, and would have rather just found the best ways to milk customers of money. That, to me, is a pharmacist I DO NOT TRUST to keep track of my various medications, or their interactions, from a medical or chemical perspective.
Homeopathy is pseudo-science—fake—and anyone dispensing strong chemicals and drugs ought to know the difference. Either these guys did not, or they did not care about the health of their customers...
I just bought a quality thermos (vacuum) that keeps my coffee hot for hours. I chose a size that fits my consumption.
Brew in the morning, bring with, have hot coffee until lunch.
Easy.
While Whole Foods does sell a lot of homeopathy items, that is *hardly* its entire character as a store.
Several pharmacies in my local area also sell homeopathic junk. They are hardly the domain of Whole Foods alone.
FTA: "So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?"
Because the Creationism Museum has a crappy cafeteria.
Any time the TSA insists that I surrender an item, I first insist on rendering it useless (value-less).
For example, I use expensive, specialized tweezers in my work, for which I must travel. Not knives—tweezers. On the occasions where the TSA wants to take them, I first destroy them (wrench them apart), so that they cease to have any value. I don't like thieves.
As president of my HOA, I allowed Verizon to install FIOS capability to every unit in my complex, for free.
Now, we are not as a community beholden to Time-Warner, but can switch to Verizon as a provider of all things digital (internet, TV, and phone).
Both are desperate to sell you "packages" of services, rather than just internet. Screw them. I call once a year and threaten to ditch them for their competitor. The result is a rate reduced by about 40%.
I do not own a television, nor do I use a land-line phone. I just want internet. Well, that sort of logic falls short with their telephone salespeople. The only threat that works is, "I will totally cancel service from you and will go to your competitor."
"Exit Clause"?
Jules Verne is apropos here. He wrote Paris in the Twentieth Century in 1863.
From a review: "This novel ... shows Verne in a darker, frankly dystopian mood. His mid-20th century Paris is an enormously wealthy society, a place of technological wonders, but, like Huxley's Brave New World, it is also a society without meaningful art. Engineering and banking are the prime industries of this civilization and, as the book's protagonist discovers, not even the most talented poet can find a place for himself unless he's willing to produce odes to blast furnaces or locomotives.
From the USPTO PAIR database, "By this preliminary Amendment, claims 1-154 have been canceled..."
154 claims canceled?!? Typical patents have around 21 claims. USPTO charges per-claim over 21 total claims. JP Morgan's application had 170 claims — way beyond even a 3-sigma deviation for all patent applications. That is, it's amateurish. But, somehow they managed to avoid paying the $80/each for the excess claims. Most rejections were nominally due to the claims being "too abstract."
So, anyways, from the USPTO PAIR database — JP Morgan are claiming that their filing is under pre-AIA conditions. That is, that they are first to invent, and are not subject to the current first to file rules. Big difference. The inventor filed an "oath" regarding the invention date. Uh huh. USPTO also says, "Claims 155-175 are allowed over the prior art of record based on the earliest priority of the parent applications." I couldn't find the priority date that they are claiming, or whether it is before their filing date, but one might guess they are trying to get a pre-BitCoin patent priority date. Jerks. Once a patent is allowed and issued, any challenge to their priority would face a high hurdle, and would be expensive to prosecute.
If only someone knew of some actual prior art, and that this person also knew the name and contact information for the patent examiner. Hmmn...
Ah, here we are: From their non-final rejection, "Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JAGDISH PATEL whose telephone number is (571) 272-6748." I'm sure he has an email address as well.
Good luck, and if no one here is willing to help nuke this, I'll send it over to the 4chan trogs.
Last, below is the Public PAIR filing-documents web address. Go there and search for "Publication Number" 20130317984. Click the "Image File Wrapper" tab to see PDFs of all communications between JP Morgan and the USPTO. Happy hunting!
http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair
/sarcasm off
Oh my goodness!
You should just see what one member of the ANON.penet.fi anonymous email listserver for "ship in a bottle enthusiasts" writes about the government! It is just scandalous. Scandalous, I tell you!
He/she writes often about blowing up government buildings for terrorist purposes, and thinks that s/he furthers Al Quaeda goals by making these plans! S/he has said several times that s/he will perpetrate a major terrorist act early in 2014, but has not said exactly where on US soil it will occur.
Heavens to Betsy, I am scared!
This is a former constitutional lawyer saying that privacy concerns are a First Amendment concern. WT-actual-F? This is clearly Fourth amendment territory...
It is actually both a First and a Fourth Amendment concern, which is what enabled him to avoid the cognitive dissonance of bald-faced lying.
For the uninitiated, it is a Fourth amendment concern because it is an illegal search and seizure (seizure occurs at the time of collection and retention, not later when a human examines it). Consequently, those who feel their Fourth Amendment rights may be violated will tend to censor themselves, leading also to a valid First-Amendment concern.
Long story short — weasel words from a former constitutional law professor. Not good.
Really? An ellipse as a coding example for K-12 kids? Kids don't even learn what the definition of an ellipse *is* until trigonometry or calculus.
Wait, wasn't there a thread just yesterday that we had a STEM shortage?
But today it's an over-abundance?
This is my ultimate goal, to be what might be called a Gentleman Scientist.
I saved up at a job, quit, and then took a several-month break to write a series of patents with the aim of licensing or sale.
Support from that will hopefully allow me to "work for free" at a University when funds run low (I already do). It also helps to stretch funding to support more instrument time, collaborators, major facility visits, etc.
It's a roller coaster, but is indeed do-able. Snowballs take a while to get going, but tend to grow once started.
Good description of a science/engineering post-doc. Produce and no one asks any questions. That part is great.
Ah, but after the post-docs, if no tenure-track position is obtained, you can stay in the academy by making a decision to accept an even more unstable position — the soft-money Research Professor! You can advise students, are awesome at your craft, and as long as you keep publishing or teaching, nobody asks any questions. But here's the rub. (1) You have to obtain your own support by writing proposals which compete with those of tenured Professors. (2) With no start-up package, you have no money to hire a postdoc at the start. You are your own postdoc! (3) You may eventually hop over to the tenure track, but will have to go through the whole hiring and review process, competing with everybody else, for the position. Sadly, if the ideas stop flowing, some people get stuck as "Research Staff" for the remainder of their careers, providing facility support and service work.
To sum up, expect to be hungry, and to work all the time. After all, you are fulfilling three roles as a Research Professor. Visionary/planner, proposal-writer, post-doc, paper-writer, lecturer, and so on. But all is not lost, even at this late stage. If you have friends who are Profs., and have a strong reputation as someone who produces (papers and patents), then you'll survive by getting little freebies here and there. Knit those into publications — good ones. Give a few freebies yourself to meritorious experiments, and make sure they get published. Eventually, you can work up to being a co-I (or Co-PI) on a multi-institution project, meaning you get to eat. Keep producing! Eventually, if you continue to have good ideas, do good work, collaborate, and write well, you're likely to be scooped up somewhere.
Oh, and Food Stamps are an option during "dry" periods.