Several Blackbird pilots earned austronaut wings tho. Just saying.
They might have earned astronaut wings, but not while flying a Blackbird. While it's an amazing aircraft it didn't even get close to the 80 or 100 km (depending on who you ask) you'd need for that.
The X-15 was able to get above 100 km (which is how Chuck Yeager got his astronaut wings).
Thanks for an excellent post! The X-15 was not piloted by Chuck Yeager, however, fellow daredevil Joe Walker got the honour of flying it to an altitude of 107.8 km (thanks to Wikipedia for the exact height).
Sorry for nitpicking, it's peripheral to your post anyway.
Those are the most-often quoted problems with GIMP. I know that these are real concerns, I work in a publishing house, albeit not with graphic design. For us CMYK is the killer feature. I have always wondered why the GIMP team doesn't include those changes from the fork CinePaint? It supposedly offers the ability to work in CMYK, along with HDR support.
I only use Photoshop once in a while for light image tuning, but as it's for DTP tasks I do need to see CMYK output while working. I suppose that it's not trivial to incorporate this in GIMP even with code from CinePaint, in addition to a lack of interest from the GIMP team. If anyone could chime in with a better explanation I'd be interested to hear it:)
Thanks a lot for your effort, and that of your sibling posters. I appreciate it. It clarified a few things for me:) And thanks for taking me seriously. The reason why the question was formulated... cautiously is that when I've asked similar questions earlier it's often been misconstrued as rhetorical critique, not curiosity.
Sounds like you want the US to rewrite it's entire constitution from scratch.
I'm genuinely curious (I'm a foreigner), why would that be? I don't know enough about the US constitution to say anything about points 5-6, but 1-4 doesn't seem to be against it? Educate me:)
Among other things, it sounds like you want the US to go to a parliamentary setup voting for parties instead of the current situation where the people vote for individuals.
I'm still genuinely curious. Is your constitution based on voting for individuals, not political principles? Don't regard this as an attack, but I'd appreciate a short explanation:)
would you say a "Good" game should be given a 50% score?
Yes. You mention it in your post, but the trend of only using the very upmost part of the scale is stupid. A game that really sucks might still get 40%. Not that score matters that much (read the review instead).
When reviewers give 100% you just can't take it seriously. 100% is divine perfection, or should at least be reserved for a real-life Matrix. The reviewer even guzzles "The only trick now is to see how they can top themselves with the next game". Yes, that would be a trick indeed, Spinal Tap jokes aside.
50% for an otherwise good game with a few flaws would be reasonable, think median of the games currently on the market. The original Half Life merits 80-something or maybe 90 (one of my all-time favourites). I can't recall any good examples of sub-20 ones, as I probably didn't play them:)
However, if you buy a tool set from your neighbor you have known for 15 years and it turns out its stolen how the hell should that be illegal? That would be ridiculous.
In Norway it is, I just checked our criminal law. The term translates to something like "negligent possession of stolen goods". It's your responsibility to ask for the original receipt in order to verify that the property you're buying is *not* stolen, otherwise you're negligent and could be sentenced to a fine or jail.
It makes some sense in that it disables real criminals to claim negligence when caught possessing stolen goods, while cases like the one you describe are extremely rare. The real reason is probably that stolen goods is common on internet auction sites, if a deal seems too good to be true it often is. Honest Norwegians have also learned to be *very* careful when buying used bicycles, as theft of bicycles is rampant.
If you bought those tools from your neighbour which turned out to be stolen the court might decide that *he* probably bought them in a suspect manner, if he didn't steal them himself. If you had no reason at all to be suspicious, and could prove it, I would think that you'd be acquitted. Even the courts can use common sense. In the real world this excuse is far more commonly employed by people who are guilty as hell, to make it simple the law just declares it illegal to be involved with stolen property no matter what.
For a site like Slashdot that's running a database back end, all the session info could be stored directly on the database, so the only thing you need on the client side is the identification cookie.
Yes, a cookie *should* store only an ID string like an MD5 of the users preferences_id, which is meaningless to someone who doesn't already have the string in their preferences db. You, on the other hand, could use that MD5 to run a query against your db to provide an otherwise anonymous user with his preferred yellow on lilac colour scheme.
All this is of course meaningless nowadays when every man and his dog requires you to register and log in in order to track whatever you're doing serverside whether cookies are enabled or not. But you *could* do it:)
Let's say we have one system that is held at a fixed temperature, and another system that is isolated, other than a radiative connection to the first. Looking only at this second system, the only interaction it has is through this radiation field. It eventually assumes the same temperature as the first system. However, it's only "seeing" the radiation field. Therefore it's the radiation field that has that temperature.
Isn't that a bit like saying that a conveyor belt of negligible weight transporting 10000 tons of rocks from one location to another, one ton at a time, has significant weight itself? Kinetic energy in atoms is different from the energy of photons. As I understand it photons don't have temperature, they carry potential energy (momentum) which can be manifested in kinetic energy in matter it hits, but before it hits any matter this momentum is not temperature. When it hits the photon is converted to kinetic energy and ceases to exist. If I'm mistaken I'd love a clarification:)
Also, wouldn't a system (I'm assuming that it contains matter) that is completely isolated except for incoming radiation energy at a fixed level reach an arbitrarily high temperature given enough time?
That can be remedied by blocking certain USB devices and managing removable media.
Easily subverted by uploading my document to a web server and downloading it to my work machine, or by any other means you'll never think of blocking. The only way to be sure is to allow physical access to the (non-networked) machine only after passing a check point where you're stripped nude, the only content allowed is content produced on the machine itself. Alternatively you can nuke from orbit.
There's no sane reason not to run local security software if you want the machine to be remotely useful. If you control above-unity fission reactors from your workstation, your secret bunker is probably secure enough. Disregard this.
If you are in a purely server / desktop enviornment (that is, DESKTOPS, not laptops), security really should be done at the networking side (routers, switches, servers, proxies).
Not only. Local firewalls are probably not necessary with the advent of the XP firewall, but you still need as much security as you can get. Users will plug in their USB keys to get documents, their phones to charge them, or a presentation CD they've prepared at home, they'll mistype urls and hit typo-squatting domains amongst other things - all of which are potential vectors for things you don't want on your network. Locking down the machines, install security software on them and keep the OS AND software updated is an easy way to mitigate the risk of infection.
, and hope the tens of thousands of PCs you have got their GP update or SMS push.
And if they haven't, your startup, login and locally scheduled check and scanning scripts won't allow them to access the network until your remotely run update script is finished. If it finds anything, lock down everything on the machine. You should do anything to minimize the risk of a keylogger recording your CEOs password. Ask people managing tens of thousands of PCs, they should know these things.
Shoot, we have PCs in conference rooms and training rooms that may not get turned on for months at a time.
"Shoot" indeed. This is what prompted me to write this reply. Tangential to your post, but still: Why? I'm assuming that you're in the IT department, if not, educate whoever is responsible:)
A couple of suggestions:
Desktops aimed at the corporate marked have had WOL for ages. Wake them up every midnight to run an update script which culminates with shutting them down again. This is easily done automatically
Rip out the hard drive and boot those ghost machines via PXE from a common updated image. You can easily keep images for different computers. Mostly they'll be used for Powerpoint and web browsing, Linux is an option if you don't want to maintain multiple images
Ditch the stationary meeting room PCs alltogether. Most people leading a meeting will be able to bring their own laptop. Lock out the meeting room connection from your regular network, and force everyone to treat it as an unsafe network, but allow VPN ports. That way visiting participants can also plug in their own machines. It's way safer than the connection in any hotel.
Keep a dedicated laptop for each meeting room. Keep them plugged in at your desk, and people can fetch it if they need it
Really, this is a solved problem. Laziness or ineptitude are the only causes for not having an updated machine in a meeting room.
In ours, for example, the firewall in XP tends to block the machine from communicating with the SMS server.
Is the communication at a really low layer? The firewall in XP is actually decent, and can be configurated centrally to (dis)allow pretty specific things. It's not iptables, but if your sms server is not employing really aparte methods of network communication this should not be a problem.
Sorry if I seem to be bashing you, that's not my point. I've seen many situations similar to those you mention in your post, usually the cause is the IT department being so inept as to not even consider the issues. All these problems are solvable. You can never be completely immune, but with a little effort and knowledgeable people you can get pretty damn close.
its not my responsibility to back up your arguments, its yours.
He did. Sometimes it's better to find your own references than to rely on your opponent to cherry-pick one for you. In any case these numbers are not exactly secret, maybe something from the National Institute of Corrections would be appropriate? You're welcome.
I had to go through all that and more just to be able to save my progress in the game.
Same thing with GTA IV. Not logged in to GFWL, no saving. "Oh well," I thought, "at least I'll be able to access my save games from my other computer." Guess what, no. They don't even store the savegames online for you. No added value at all, it's like "For no reason, you'll only be able to drive this car you've already paid for if the salesman gets to knock you on the head with a club."
Unfortunately, making "self-centered"/immature/blanket statements like that is a hallmark of the condition. No real reflections over other's perspective, just the intellectual realization that other people are different, and do "stupid things" for seemingly no reason.
Sort of/not really. I suspect that most adults with more than slight Asperger's have learnt *not* to make those statements, while those of us without ASD can make them for humourous effect because we can expect that they will be understood as such.
I used to work with a guy with Asperger's. He surely had empathy, but for instance he had difficulties with following a casual conversation in a group because he missed all the little cues which you and I catch as a matter of fact. If the topic changed due to a non-verbal cue he'd likely miss it even though he tried hard to follow the conversation, and he'd be lost. He'd then make completely unrelated remarks because he didn't really know what we were talking about. In the start he'd usually just keep quiet.
We always kept this in mind, and I'm quite sure this made his working day more comfortable. He *knew* rationally that he'd miss some things, but after he became reasonably sure that he could follow our conversation correctly he became less insecure and could contribute to the conversation. What would surely make him say nothing for a long time was if someone who didn't know him giggled or looked down their nose at him because of something he said. Please don't be that person if you know what's going on.
Out of 10,000 children, 1980 would be found positive, out of which only 90 would have the disease.
Actually, about 60 (0.6%) will have ASD according to Wikipedia. Also, you'll be reasonably sure that, say, 9600 of the 10000 don't exhibit behaviour consistent with ASD at all (number from thin air). Checking all 10000 doesn't make sense, most will have a perfectly normal development from early age.
On the other hand, if they really have found a reliable biological marker (no false negatives) which indicates ASD, you could test those 400 you suspect have some difficulties which might indicate ASD. Fringe cases of ASD has been difficult to diagnose, a simple MRI to give an exact indication seems like it could be extremely helpful, especially for very young children in which (uh, in whom? @sig) ASD can be difficult to diagnose by observing behaviour.
IANAPhysician, but I have two friends who've worked for years with ASD kids of ages 3-18. According to them a lot of ASD children don't get the care they need early enough because of difficulties in diagnosing the disorder. Correct care and a proper learning/training environment from an early age can be crucial to how socially well-functioning they will be as adolescents and adults. The development in this field is moving fast, note that my knowledge from a few years back might be outdated.
I'm visiting my father (who *is* a physician) this weekend, I'm looking forward to hearing his thoughts on this.
See: "Joke". Reference ancient Egypt and the finds regarding electricity.
The ancient Egyptians performed some impressive feats of engineering (exactly how they went about building the pyramids is still up for debate). They also had good insights in many sciences, but electricity is not part of it.
Some battery-ish bottles have been found near Baghdad, these were extremely weak and just might have been used for gilding or metal-plating. As for the nutcases who claim that all the "schoolbook experts" are wrong and the Egyptians had what we know as electricity and electric light, well... the nutcases are wrong. See this article for a thorough refutation based on numerous impossibilities with the hypothesis.
I agree that their stone reliefs will last longer than any computer, though:)
You need to buy more ram, if you ever find swap in use that is just a sign to buy more ram.
Not necessarily. While plenty of ram is important and good, "used" swap space is in many cases just reserved for copy-on-write, for instance after a fork. Your system can allocate lots of memory which is never touched, this may exist in swap without any disk I/O happening at all. Swap I/O is not good, that is what you need to watch out for:) See the first comment on this article
Your computer might benefit from using swap as well, your memory might be better employed as disk cache. YMMV. This is from an article which describes it for Linux, but the same goes for Windows:
It's unbelievably simple, although not apparent at first. Most running programs have code paths and data in memory that they rarely, if ever, touch. I would be bold and say most program-allocated memory is very rarely touched, but I might be wrong. So, the RAM taken up by unused code and data would actually be better utilized as cache for frequently-used files (or, even more beneficial, inode and dentry cache).
On Linux you can play with the swappiness parameter as well, mine is currently at 15. Please note that people can get pretty religious about swap space, correct me if you want, but I don't aim to get involved in a discussion. This is my experience, try it out for yourself (or not).
There's nothing wrong with creationism as long as you acknowledge that it is not science and therefore a matter of faith.
I suppose you agree with me, but everything is wrong with teaching it on an equal base with evolution in a public school's science class. If anything it belongs in seminaries in faith communities, and even then it undermines the pupils' understanding of what science is and how thrustworthy it generally is. "Look at them scientists, they are morons to claim our Lord God didn't try to fool us as best He can!".
It's a regression that I'm very sad to see happen anywhere in the world, even if I am so lucky that I live in a country where the school authorities agree with me.
Really? In my home state of New York, there are thousands of bottles and cans littering the streets even though you have to pay a nickel on each can when you buy them.
Really? In Norway the return rates are 90% for bottles and 92% for cans. The fees are about 16 cents for cans and small bottles, 39 cents for large ones, this is a little less than 10% of the cost for soft drinks.
I believe that these high rates are largely due to information and campaigns from the government, from we are small we're taught that returning the bottle is a given. People have it in their daily routine, and even if you don't want to do it yourself you just leave the bottle beside a rubbish bin and kids or homeless people will take it. It's cheaper to clean a used bottle than to make a new one, even if you use recycled material.
I am sick and tired of people making a big deal about scalping.
Isn't scalping basically the epitome of free market capitalism? [...invalid examples here...] What is wrong with this? If you wanted your damn tickets, you should have waited in line like everyone else.
No. Scalping is like bringing a tanker to a gas station, emptying all the pumps into your tanker, and then selling the fuel at triple price right outside the gas station. This is also the only gas station reachable with the fuel people have left in their tanks.
If you are one of the bastards yourself, let me give you a big, heartfelt FUCK YOU.
I'm an avid music fan and concert attendee (list here). Where I live scalping has been outlawed based on the laws against organised crime. The bastards still find ways around it (Concert ticket + a meal (burger) at only retail + $300!), but the organised firms doing it has had some problems after the law was passed. My main problems with "Ticket resellers" as they call themselves:
1) They employ armies of drones to buy tickets online for major events on launch, making it difficult for regular fans to get a ticket at retail price.
2) They don't provide added value, they basically inflate the price by creating an artificial scarcity, and leave the fans who "must see" their favourite bands with no option but to pay them extra for no added value whatsoever. This is fraud in my book.
3) They frequently can't sell all the tickets they've bought, even for a sold-out event. That means that THERE ARE TICKETS GOING UNUSED, which would otherwise have been bought by fans at retail price. Real fans are missing out on the concert! They might not even have the chance to go to the venue on the offchance that they can get an overpriced ticket. Note that the sharks still make a profit because of the tickets they manage to sell.
4) They make their livelihood essentially by going out of their way to disable you from buying a ticket in the first place, and then selling it to you with profit. Scum.
Most bands are also againts it. They value their fans, and don't like that lowlifes essentially exploit the band by fucking their fans over.
As for your point of them taking a gamble, not really. They even out the odds by doing this for many, many events, thus mitigating the consequence of overbuying for a certain event. Also, even if they're left with surplus tickets (see point three) they usually recover their investment on any sold-out event. A well-known scalper (didn't know that word in English) around here has made millions and lives in a big villa in an expensive neighbourhood, like any successful criminal.
Slashdot Mirror
Several Blackbird pilots earned austronaut wings tho. Just saying.
They might have earned astronaut wings, but not while flying a Blackbird. While it's an amazing aircraft it didn't even get close to the 80 or 100 km (depending on who you ask) you'd need for that.
The X-15 was able to get above 100 km (which is how Chuck Yeager got his astronaut wings).
Thanks for an excellent post! The X-15 was not piloted by Chuck Yeager, however, fellow daredevil Joe Walker got the honour of flying it to an altitude of 107.8 km (thanks to Wikipedia for the exact height).
Sorry for nitpicking, it's peripheral to your post anyway.
Just curious. What does it do?
[...] 16-bit and 32-bit color [...] CMYK
Those are the most-often quoted problems with GIMP. I know that these are real concerns, I work in a publishing house, albeit not with graphic design. For us CMYK is the killer feature. I have always wondered why the GIMP team doesn't include those changes from the fork CinePaint? It supposedly offers the ability to work in CMYK, along with HDR support.
I only use Photoshop once in a while for light image tuning, but as it's for DTP tasks I do need to see CMYK output while working. I suppose that it's not trivial to incorporate this in GIMP even with code from CinePaint, in addition to a lack of interest from the GIMP team. If anyone could chime in with a better explanation I'd be interested to hear it :)
No flaming please, I'm really curious.
Thanks a lot for your effort, and that of your sibling posters. I appreciate it. It clarified a few things for me :)
And thanks for taking me seriously. The reason why the question was formulated... cautiously is that when I've asked similar questions earlier it's often been misconstrued as rhetorical critique, not curiosity.
Sounds like you want the US to rewrite it's entire constitution from scratch.
I'm genuinely curious (I'm a foreigner), why would that be? I don't know enough about the US constitution to say anything about points 5-6, but 1-4 doesn't seem to be against it? Educate me :)
Among other things, it sounds like you want the US to go to a parliamentary setup voting for parties instead of the current situation where the people vote for individuals.
I'm still genuinely curious. Is your constitution based on voting for individuals, not political principles? Don't regard this as an attack, but I'd appreciate a short explanation :)
would you say a "Good" game should be given a 50% score?
Yes. You mention it in your post, but the trend of only using the very upmost part of the scale is stupid. A game that really sucks might still get 40%. Not that score matters that much (read the review instead).
When reviewers give 100% you just can't take it seriously. 100% is divine perfection, or should at least be reserved for a real-life Matrix. The reviewer even guzzles "The only trick now is to see how they can top themselves with the next game". Yes, that would be a trick indeed, Spinal Tap jokes aside.
50% for an otherwise good game with a few flaws would be reasonable, think median of the games currently on the market. The original Half Life merits 80-something or maybe 90 (one of my all-time favourites). I can't recall any good examples of sub-20 ones, as I probably didn't play them :)
... that some bookies figured that by giving great odds on an impossible events, idiots would flock to give them money.
If they do come within the year, I guess that sufficiently many things will change that the bookies don't particularly care about going broke.
However, if you buy a tool set from your neighbor you have known for 15 years and it turns out its stolen how the hell should that be illegal? That would be ridiculous.
In Norway it is, I just checked our criminal law. The term translates to something like "negligent possession of stolen goods". It's your responsibility to ask for the original receipt in order to verify that the property you're buying is *not* stolen, otherwise you're negligent and could be sentenced to a fine or jail.
It makes some sense in that it disables real criminals to claim negligence when caught possessing stolen goods, while cases like the one you describe are extremely rare. The real reason is probably that stolen goods is common on internet auction sites, if a deal seems too good to be true it often is. Honest Norwegians have also learned to be *very* careful when buying used bicycles, as theft of bicycles is rampant.
If you bought those tools from your neighbour which turned out to be stolen the court might decide that *he* probably bought them in a suspect manner, if he didn't steal them himself. If you had no reason at all to be suspicious, and could prove it, I would think that you'd be acquitted. Even the courts can use common sense. In the real world this excuse is far more commonly employed by people who are guilty as hell, to make it simple the law just declares it illegal to be involved with stolen property no matter what.
For a site like Slashdot that's running a database back end, all the session info could be stored directly on the database, so the only thing you need on the client side is the identification cookie.
Yes, a cookie *should* store only an ID string like an MD5 of the users preferences_id, which is meaningless to someone who doesn't already have the string in their preferences db. You, on the other hand, could use that MD5 to run a query against your db to provide an otherwise anonymous user with his preferred yellow on lilac colour scheme.
All this is of course meaningless nowadays when every man and his dog requires you to register and log in in order to track whatever you're doing serverside whether cookies are enabled or not. But you *could* do it :)
Let's say we have one system that is held at a fixed temperature, and another system that is isolated, other than a radiative connection to the first. Looking only at this second system, the only interaction it has is through this radiation field. It eventually assumes the same temperature as the first system. However, it's only "seeing" the radiation field. Therefore it's the radiation field that has that temperature.
Isn't that a bit like saying that a conveyor belt of negligible weight transporting 10000 tons of rocks from one location to another, one ton at a time, has significant weight itself? Kinetic energy in atoms is different from the energy of photons. As I understand it photons don't have temperature, they carry potential energy (momentum) which can be manifested in kinetic energy in matter it hits, but before it hits any matter this momentum is not temperature. When it hits the photon is converted to kinetic energy and ceases to exist. If I'm mistaken I'd love a clarification :)
Also, wouldn't a system (I'm assuming that it contains matter) that is completely isolated except for incoming radiation energy at a fixed level reach an arbitrarily high temperature given enough time?
...fission reactors...
Damn, should be *fusion reactors*. I'm not a native speaker of English, but that was bad.
That can be remedied by blocking certain USB devices and managing removable media.
Easily subverted by uploading my document to a web server and downloading it to my work machine, or by any other means you'll never think of blocking. The only way to be sure is to allow physical access to the (non-networked) machine only after passing a check point where you're stripped nude, the only content allowed is content produced on the machine itself. Alternatively you can nuke from orbit.
There's no sane reason not to run local security software if you want the machine to be remotely useful. If you control above-unity fission reactors from your workstation, your secret bunker is probably secure enough. Disregard this.
If you are in a purely server / desktop enviornment (that is, DESKTOPS, not laptops), security really should be done at the networking side (routers, switches, servers, proxies).
Not only. Local firewalls are probably not necessary with the advent of the XP firewall, but you still need as much security as you can get. Users will plug in their USB keys to get documents, their phones to charge them, or a presentation CD they've prepared at home, they'll mistype urls and hit typo-squatting domains amongst other things - all of which are potential vectors for things you don't want on your network. Locking down the machines, install security software on them and keep the OS AND software updated is an easy way to mitigate the risk of infection.
, and hope the tens of thousands of PCs you have got their GP update or SMS push.
And if they haven't, your startup, login and locally scheduled check and scanning scripts won't allow them to access the network until your remotely run update script is finished. If it finds anything, lock down everything on the machine. You should do anything to minimize the risk of a keylogger recording your CEOs password. Ask people managing tens of thousands of PCs, they should know these things.
Shoot, we have PCs in conference rooms and training rooms that may not get turned on for months at a time.
"Shoot" indeed. This is what prompted me to write this reply. Tangential to your post, but still: Why? I'm assuming that you're in the IT department, if not, educate whoever is responsible :)
A couple of suggestions:
Really, this is a solved problem. Laziness or ineptitude are the only causes for not having an updated machine in a meeting room.
In ours, for example, the firewall in XP tends to block the machine from communicating with the SMS server.
Is the communication at a really low layer? The firewall in XP is actually decent, and can be configurated centrally to (dis)allow pretty specific things. It's not iptables, but if your sms server is not employing really aparte methods of network communication this should not be a problem.
Sorry if I seem to be bashing you, that's not my point. I've seen many situations similar to those you mention in your post, usually the cause is the IT department being so inept as to not even consider the issues. All these problems are solvable. You can never be completely immune, but with a little effort and knowledgeable people you can get pretty damn close.
The weather in Hell is actuallyquite nice for the time being.
Give it a couple of months, and it'll freeze over (again).
its not my responsibility to back up your arguments, its yours.
He did. Sometimes it's better to find your own references than to rely on your opponent to cherry-pick one for you. In any case these numbers are not exactly secret, maybe something from the National Institute of Corrections would be appropriate?
You're welcome.
I didn't even think about it, I've probably been on Slashdot too long. At least it is somewhat appropriate :)
I had to go through all that and more just to be able to save my progress in the game.
Same thing with GTA IV. Not logged in to GFWL, no saving. "Oh well," I thought, "at least I'll be able to access my save games from my other computer." Guess what, no. They don't even store the savegames online for you. No added value at all, it's like "For no reason, you'll only be able to drive this car you've already paid for if the salesman gets to knock you on the head with a club."
Fuck that.
Unfortunately, making "self-centered"/immature/blanket statements like that is a hallmark of the condition. No real reflections over other's perspective, just the intellectual realization that other people are different, and do "stupid things" for seemingly no reason.
Sort of/not really. I suspect that most adults with more than slight Asperger's have learnt *not* to make those statements, while those of us without ASD can make them for humourous effect because we can expect that they will be understood as such.
I used to work with a guy with Asperger's. He surely had empathy, but for instance he had difficulties with following a casual conversation in a group because he missed all the little cues which you and I catch as a matter of fact. If the topic changed due to a non-verbal cue he'd likely miss it even though he tried hard to follow the conversation, and he'd be lost. He'd then make completely unrelated remarks because he didn't really know what we were talking about. In the start he'd usually just keep quiet.
We always kept this in mind, and I'm quite sure this made his working day more comfortable. He *knew* rationally that he'd miss some things, but after he became reasonably sure that he could follow our conversation correctly he became less insecure and could contribute to the conversation. What would surely make him say nothing for a long time was if someone who didn't know him giggled or looked down their nose at him because of something he said. Please don't be that person if you know what's going on.
Out of 10,000 children, 1980 would be found positive, out of which only 90 would have the disease.
Actually, about 60 (0.6%) will have ASD according to Wikipedia. Also, you'll be reasonably sure that, say, 9600 of the 10000 don't exhibit behaviour consistent with ASD at all (number from thin air). Checking all 10000 doesn't make sense, most will have a perfectly normal development from early age.
On the other hand, if they really have found a reliable biological marker (no false negatives) which indicates ASD, you could test those 400 you suspect have some difficulties which might indicate ASD. Fringe cases of ASD has been difficult to diagnose, a simple MRI to give an exact indication seems like it could be extremely helpful, especially for very young children in which (uh, in whom? @sig) ASD can be difficult to diagnose by observing behaviour.
IANAPhysician, but I have two friends who've worked for years with ASD kids of ages 3-18. According to them a lot of ASD children don't get the care they need early enough because of difficulties in diagnosing the disorder. Correct care and a proper learning/training environment from an early age can be crucial to how socially well-functioning they will be as adolescents and adults. The development in this field is moving fast, note that my knowledge from a few years back might be outdated.
I'm visiting my father (who *is* a physician) this weekend, I'm looking forward to hearing his thoughts on this.
See: "Joke".
Reference ancient Egypt and the finds regarding electricity.
The ancient Egyptians performed some impressive feats of engineering (exactly how they went about building the pyramids is still up for debate). They also had good insights in many sciences, but electricity is not part of it.
Some battery-ish bottles have been found near Baghdad, these were extremely weak and just might have been used for gilding or metal-plating. As for the nutcases who claim that all the "schoolbook experts" are wrong and the Egyptians had what we know as electricity and electric light, well... the nutcases are wrong. See this article for a thorough refutation based on numerous impossibilities with the hypothesis.
I agree that their stone reliefs will last longer than any computer, though :)
You need to buy more ram, if you ever find swap in use that is just a sign to buy more ram.
Not necessarily. While plenty of ram is important and good, "used" swap space is in many cases just reserved for copy-on-write, for instance after a fork. Your system can allocate lots of memory which is never touched, this may exist in swap without any disk I/O happening at all. Swap I/O is not good, that is what you need to watch out for :)
See the first comment on this article
Your computer might benefit from using swap as well, your memory might be better employed as disk cache. YMMV. This is from an article which describes it for Linux, but the same goes for Windows:
It's unbelievably simple, although not apparent at first.
Most running programs have code paths and data in memory that they rarely, if ever, touch. I would be bold and say most program-allocated memory is very rarely touched, but I might be wrong. So, the RAM taken up by unused code and data would actually be better utilized as cache for frequently-used files (or, even more beneficial, inode and dentry cache).
On Linux you can play with the swappiness parameter as well, mine is currently at 15. Please note that people can get pretty religious about swap space, correct me if you want, but I don't aim to get involved in a discussion. This is my experience, try it out for yourself (or not).
There's nothing wrong with creationism as long as you acknowledge that it is not science and therefore a matter of faith.
I suppose you agree with me, but everything is wrong with teaching it on an equal base with evolution in a public school's science class. If anything it belongs in seminaries in faith communities, and even then it undermines the pupils' understanding of what science is and how thrustworthy it generally is. "Look at them scientists, they are morons to claim our Lord God didn't try to fool us as best He can!".
It's a regression that I'm very sad to see happen anywhere in the world, even if I am so lucky that I live in a country where the school authorities agree with me.
Really? In my home state of New York, there are thousands of bottles and cans littering the streets even though you have to pay a nickel on each can when you buy them.
Really? In Norway the return rates are 90% for bottles and 92% for cans. The fees are about 16 cents for cans and small bottles, 39 cents for large ones, this is a little less than 10% of the cost for soft drinks.
I believe that these high rates are largely due to information and campaigns from the government, from we are small we're taught that returning the bottle is a given. People have it in their daily routine, and even if you don't want to do it yourself you just leave the bottle beside a rubbish bin and kids or homeless people will take it. It's cheaper to clean a used bottle than to make a new one, even if you use recycled material.
I am sick and tired of people making a big deal about scalping.
Isn't scalping basically the epitome of free market capitalism?
[...invalid examples here...]
What is wrong with this? If you wanted your damn tickets, you should have waited in line like everyone else.
No. Scalping is like bringing a tanker to a gas station, emptying all the pumps into your tanker, and then selling the fuel at triple price right outside the gas station. This is also the only gas station reachable with the fuel people have left in their tanks.
If you are one of the bastards yourself, let me give you a big, heartfelt FUCK YOU.
I'm an avid music fan and concert attendee (list here). Where I live scalping has been outlawed based on the laws against organised crime. The bastards still find ways around it (Concert ticket + a meal (burger) at only retail + $300!), but the organised firms doing it has had some problems after the law was passed. My main problems with "Ticket resellers" as they call themselves:
1) They employ armies of drones to buy tickets online for major events on launch, making it difficult for regular fans to get a ticket at retail price.
2) They don't provide added value, they basically inflate the price by creating an artificial scarcity, and leave the fans who "must see" their favourite bands with no option but to pay them extra for no added value whatsoever. This is fraud in my book.
3) They frequently can't sell all the tickets they've bought, even for a sold-out event. That means that THERE ARE TICKETS GOING UNUSED, which would otherwise have been bought by fans at retail price. Real fans are missing out on the concert! They might not even have the chance to go to the venue on the offchance that they can get an overpriced ticket. Note that the sharks still make a profit because of the tickets they manage to sell.
4) They make their livelihood essentially by going out of their way to disable you from buying a ticket in the first place, and then selling it to you with profit. Scum.
Most bands are also againts it. They value their fans, and don't like that lowlifes essentially exploit the band by fucking their fans over.
As for your point of them taking a gamble, not really. They even out the odds by doing this for many, many events, thus mitigating the consequence of overbuying for a certain event. Also, even if they're left with surplus tickets (see point three) they usually recover their investment on any sold-out event. A well-known scalper (didn't know that word in English) around here has made millions and lives in a big villa in an expensive neighbourhood, like any successful criminal.