Most US plus for some reason think it is a great idea to stick far further out from the wall than even the huge British plug due to plugging in perpendicular.
Since most (all?) Canadian/US plugs lack any kind of cable grip to relieve stress on the pin contacts, unlike a UK plug, this is probably a safety feature since the perpendicular approach will mean that the plug can be yanked form the wall more easily if someone trips over it or pulls on it. It is safer to pull the plug from the wall than to damage the cable.
Can't explain something, Dark Matter is the reason! Can't find a cause, Dark Matter is it!
This is completely incorrect. This work is the result of looking for Dark Matter. Dark Matter is the best explanation for galactic rotation curves and the cosmic microwave background. Depending on what the Dark Matter is it may annihilate with itself and produce, amongst other things, electron-positron pairs. In fact the paper is really a very beautiful and elegant bit of work since the first bit of evidence which lead to this comes from the background 'noise' of one of the major pieces of evidence for Dark Matter - the WMAP data! As such, far from noticing something and then attributing it to Dark Matter, this is actively looking for something that suggests evidence for Dark Matter. True the evidence does not show that it HAS to be Dark Matter but if you cannot attribute it to anything else which is known and you have models which suggest that Dark Matter might produce such a signal it is very interesting.
Arkani-Hamed et al have a model which may explain this and which, if correct, predicts jets of leptons (electrons or muons) at the LHC. This is actually one of the things which my colleagues and I are looking for on the ATLAS Experiment. If we do observe them then this will be further evidence for Dark Matter and not a "oh, something else we cannot explain and put down to Dark Matter". Until we have enough bits of evidence that, combined, show that Dark Matter is the only possible cause there will always be some doubt but that should not be construed as flailing around and using Dark Matter to explain every observation that is inexplicable. Indeed, the fact that we are using Dark Matter models to suggest observations and experiments to perform and then finding that these return "inexplicable" results is very, very interesting!
Note that the poster was in the UK - so does the speech recognition understand English or just American? I remember an incredibly frustrating phonecall using the United Airlines speech "recognition" system they used a while ago to give out flight times. Being British the damn thing completely failed to understand what I was saying until I guessed that it wanted a US accent. Amazingly my fake American accent was enough to get some comprehension from the system. So, unless whatever speech recognition you use is designed for British accents and language, all you may end up doing is exchanging one speech impediment for another!
I agree that a year ago that was certainly the case but you need to update your desktop software. You can delete pages now. However the software is still not as polished as I would like but it does have the minimal basic functionality now.
Exactly so you have to have your laptop open and running and look at it while writing on the tablet. This is completely different to looking at what you are writing and requires considerably more desk space that is sometimes available in lecture theatres - especially the ones with the flip up rests as well as being limited to your laptops battery life. I agree the the Wacom tablet's precision is very good but the learning curve is extremely steep. It is far harder than learning to use a mouse since you have to relearn something that you already know i.e. how to write and when you take your pen away from the surface it takes a while to figure out where you need to put it back to continue writing. Finally you do not need to buy refill paper because you can print it - if it were not for that then I would agree that it would be a major point against it.
One Note, if its like the note book apps for the Mac, is only useful for typing and dragging information in from web pages. If you need to draw diagrams, write equations etc. it is useless and I have found that I ended up stopping using them for this very reason. I suppose in the arts they might be ideal but for most science they are extremely limited.
The pulse smart pen is far better. I tried the Wacom bluetooth tablet but the problem is that you cannot see what you write. If you use the Pulse Smartpen then it acts like a real pen - so you can see exactly what you have written - and as well as recording exactly what you wrote it records audio as well so you end up with a document that you can click on to hear what was being said at the time that you wrote that bit of text.
The only downside is that it needs special paper which you can buy in notebook form or which you can print yourself using a laser printer. The windows version has some extra software you can buy to perform OCR on your handwriting but since I have a Mac I have no idea how good it is. There is even an open SDK for you to develop your own applications for it but it unfortunately only supports Java.
While that may be true outside France, inside France things are a little murkier. Now that they have been convicted of fraud they have to be careful since now a lot of the people who gave them money can probably get it back. Paying the fine might not be a problem but continuing to raise funds might.
I've seen instructions on the web for various models but all, invariably, European. The problem is that there are not many people who want to buy DVDs in the UK and bring them to Canada - the prices make more people do it in reverse. Indeed the only reason I do it is because there are UK DVDs that you cannot get here in Canada. While it is more of a pain at least ripping and rewriting them means I get to remove the stupid trailers.
It's about realizing that there is a value to peoples' time and that they deserve to be compensated for that time if they so wish. If they so wish.
I completely agree with that principle but unfortunately it has to be balanced by the right of the purchaser to use what they purchased in a manner that they wish. If I purchase a table the carpenter who made it cannot tell me that I am not allowed to put it in my kitchen for example. However this is frequently what happens with modern technology e.g. DVDs that I purchase in the UK are not allowed to play on my Canadian DVD player.
These restrictions are completely undefendable, unjust and in no way affect the right of the artist to receive compensation. The problem is that governments do absolutely nothing to stop this and stop these unreasonable restrictions - indeed many actually back them up. The result is that people get extremely frustrated and the only way to relieve that frustration is to break the restrictions which is exactly what happens. In the process they come to view all producers of such media as money-grabbing, greedy corporations and so feel completely justified in their actions - even when they go well beyond what is reasonable - because now they are angry.
This is a common theme through history. Just look at the Cornish smugglers in the 1700's and all the illicit alcohol operations in prohibition US. When society is frustrated with unjust restrictions placed upon it they will find a way around them...but being outside the bounds of mainstream society they wil go far further than what is reasonable. Of course this in no way justifies those actions but given human nature they are an inevitable result when faced with unjust restrictions and no legitimate way to deal with them.
If you've got that little faith in the app store, maybe you shouldn't bother with it in the first place.
Nice idea - but how can you do that once you have already paid out for the hardware and want to use it? The reason I use the app store is because there is no alternative other than to jail break my iTouch (with all the attendent unreliability that will no doubt follow) and then my impression is that I cannot use the AppStore at all. Since Apple control the DRM how hard would it be for them to allow 30 minutes of app use for free? They already let you listen to 30 seconds of songs and videos for free or, alternatively, let you return the app for a full refund if you have owned it for less that 24 hours.
The problem with the DRM lock in to the AppStore is that it seems to have created and all-or-nothing market. Either you stick completely to the AppStore and all the controls Apple apply, or you Jail break you device so that you can use legitimate, OpenSource code and other applications that Apple don't want you to use, but then all the commercial apps have to be pirated. So far there is nothing that I really want to do that will make me Jail-break my iTouch but if they come out with a way to make a BlueTooth GPS work with the iTouch just watch how fast I switch.
I cant first order the food and drinks and only after that decide if it was good enough to be paid.
That is about the worst possible example to give because you can do EXACTLY that. I have, admittedly only on one or two occassions, done exactly that: once because the service took far, far too long so we got up and left telling them why and on the second occassion because the service was slow but when the food arrived it was cold (probably sitting out waiting for a server).
Of course you have to be able to tell that something is wrong with the first bite or so but effectively you do place an order, sample it and then determine whether it is worth paying for. Of course because this is done in person there is a significant reluctance threshold to overcome since you have to be prepared to argue with someone who may well be angry at your comments which is partly why it does not work online.
Because I'm pretty sure "consumers" don't do any of that with DVDs.
Some consumers do. For example I have to remember that when I buy a DVD in the UK I cannot play it in my Canadian DVD player wen I get home....at least not without ripping it and rewriting it first.
One of the interesting things about the LHC is that we have to see something more than what we have seen so far. If we predict the probability of certain types of events happening in models where the Higgs does not exist then, at LHC energies, we get probabilities of events that are greater than 100%! Hence either we see the Higgs, we see something else or we have experimental measurements that disagree with the Standard Model for unknown reasons...one of these possibilities has to happen which is one of the reasons why the LHC is so exciting: we have a guarenteed discovery there waiting to be made!
We killed smallpox outright, but every vaccine since then has been prevented from achieving its final goal through the effort of anti-vax forces of one kind or another.
The reason that we killed small pox is because it only infect humans and cannot live outside the human body for long. It is far harder, if not impossible, to eliminate viruses which can cross from other species or which can live in the environment.
IOW, the point of the vaccine is to prevent the pandemic, not to protect you. So the *right* question to ask is, does the H1N1 vaccine confer any immunity to the recipient?
If the vaccine does not protect the recipient then it would be unethical to give it because of the tiny, but non-zero, risk of serious complications and even death from the vaccination itself. Assuming a one in a million rate of problems then in country the size of Canada you would effectively be harming or killing 30 people a year to reduce (not stop) the spread of the flu. To put it another way would you advocate harming (e.g. remove one kidney) or killing 30 people every year if using their organs, tissues etc. could save the lives of 3,000?
When I go to the doctor I want to make sure that he or she is thinking about what is best for me, not what might be best for everyone else. If they are not doing so then how can you trust their medical advice?
The flu shot is not about preventing you from dying.
If it is not then how do you justify giving it? Any medical procedure, including vaccination, carries the risk of serious complications and potentially death. If there is no benefit to the person taking the vaccine and a tiny (1-2 in a million), but non-zero, chance of serious complications and death then it would be unethical to give the vaccine to someone. Those with weaker immune systems can be protected by taking precautions to isolate them: this risks nobody's life.
Of course this is only true if there is zero benefit from the flu vaccine. Given a brief search on the web the mortality rate looks to be around 1 in 10,000 per year so even a 1% decrease in mortality would justify the vaccine on purely medical grounds.
Either they are not very plentiful or they don't exist at all, otherwise we should have already detected one in cosmic rays, whose energies make those of the LHC look puny.
Not quite true. While high energy cosmic rays do indeed make the LHC energy look puny they are hitting stationary nuclei so a huge amount of their energy goes into kinetic energy and not into mass. The rate of cosmic rays creating collisions equivalent to the LHC is, IIRC, a few per hour per square km. However the Higgs boson (if it exists) is a very short-lived particle and so decays effectively at the point of first interaction which is a long way above any ground detectors. Hence the spread out nature of the collisions and the Higgs lifetime are the reasons why the Higgs would not be seen in cosmic rays if if it is there.
I was going to suggest around the ring of the LHC but it is not a US location nor would their GPS work 100m underground...so I suggested the Tevatron at Fermilab which is US-based but will still have the GPS problem.
English, Law, and History help so that you can see when a coup d'e'tat is imminent. That then allows you to run and hide in your bunker.
...which seems like a good plan until you remember that your bunker was designed and built by the scientists and engineers who are probably leading the coup d'etat due to your inept management of the country.
The problem with modern democracy is that it takes a huge amount of time, effort and money to get elected and there is no guarantee of success. This often means that those going into politics have generally been rather unsuccessful at their chosen careers (and have less to lose and more free time) or actually have no career other than politics. Neither is particularly desireable for someone who is effectively managing a country: the first is incompetent and the second ignorant.
Since we have never seen one before, how would we know if he(sic) met one?
The Higgs boson was thought of as a way to solve a very specific problem with the Standard Model. This gives the Higgs boson very specific properties. Indeed the only unknown parameter regarding the Higgs is its mass. Hence we will know it if we see it.
As has recently been demonstrated we don't actually need to find the Higgs to get a Nobel prize, we just need to show some promise that we might find it....
Does it explain why, if the Universe is so loath to produce a Higgs boson, it bombards our atmosphere when enormously high energy particles that can create Higgs bosons if they exist? Why hasn't it propagated back in time to stop cosmic rays? It sounds far more like fiction, and inconsistent fiction at that.
Slashdot Mirror
Most US plus for some reason think it is a great idea to stick far further out from the wall than even the huge British plug due to plugging in perpendicular.
Since most (all?) Canadian/US plugs lack any kind of cable grip to relieve stress on the pin contacts, unlike a UK plug, this is probably a safety feature since the perpendicular approach will mean that the plug can be yanked form the wall more easily if someone trips over it or pulls on it. It is safer to pull the plug from the wall than to damage the cable.
Can't explain something, Dark Matter is the reason! Can't find a cause, Dark Matter is it!
This is completely incorrect. This work is the result of looking for Dark Matter. Dark Matter is the best explanation for galactic rotation curves and the cosmic microwave background. Depending on what the Dark Matter is it may annihilate with itself and produce, amongst other things, electron-positron pairs. In fact the paper is really a very beautiful and elegant bit of work since the first bit of evidence which lead to this comes from the background 'noise' of one of the major pieces of evidence for Dark Matter - the WMAP data! As such, far from noticing something and then attributing it to Dark Matter, this is actively looking for something that suggests evidence for Dark Matter. True the evidence does not show that it HAS to be Dark Matter but if you cannot attribute it to anything else which is known and you have models which suggest that Dark Matter might produce such a signal it is very interesting.
Arkani-Hamed et al have a model which may explain this and which, if correct, predicts jets of leptons (electrons or muons) at the LHC. This is actually one of the things which my colleagues and I are looking for on the ATLAS Experiment. If we do observe them then this will be further evidence for Dark Matter and not a "oh, something else we cannot explain and put down to Dark Matter". Until we have enough bits of evidence that, combined, show that Dark Matter is the only possible cause there will always be some doubt but that should not be construed as flailing around and using Dark Matter to explain every observation that is inexplicable. Indeed, the fact that we are using Dark Matter models to suggest observations and experiments to perform and then finding that these return "inexplicable" results is very, very interesting!
Note that the poster was in the UK - so does the speech recognition understand English or just American? I remember an incredibly frustrating phonecall using the United Airlines speech "recognition" system they used a while ago to give out flight times. Being British the damn thing completely failed to understand what I was saying until I guessed that it wanted a US accent. Amazingly my fake American accent was enough to get some comprehension from the system. So, unless whatever speech recognition you use is designed for British accents and language, all you may end up doing is exchanging one speech impediment for another!
I agree that a year ago that was certainly the case but you need to update your desktop software. You can delete pages now. However the software is still not as polished as I would like but it does have the minimal basic functionality now.
You can definitely see what you write -- onscreen
Exactly so you have to have your laptop open and running and look at it while writing on the tablet. This is completely different to looking at what you are writing and requires considerably more desk space that is sometimes available in lecture theatres - especially the ones with the flip up rests as well as being limited to your laptops battery life. I agree the the Wacom tablet's precision is very good but the learning curve is extremely steep. It is far harder than learning to use a mouse since you have to relearn something that you already know i.e. how to write and when you take your pen away from the surface it takes a while to figure out where you need to put it back to continue writing. Finally you do not need to buy refill paper because you can print it - if it were not for that then I would agree that it would be a major point against it.
One Note, if its like the note book apps for the Mac, is only useful for typing and dragging information in from web pages. If you need to draw diagrams, write equations etc. it is useless and I have found that I ended up stopping using them for this very reason. I suppose in the arts they might be ideal but for most science they are extremely limited.
The pulse smart pen is far better. I tried the Wacom bluetooth tablet but the problem is that you cannot see what you write. If you use the Pulse Smartpen then it acts like a real pen - so you can see exactly what you have written - and as well as recording exactly what you wrote it records audio as well so you end up with a document that you can click on to hear what was being said at the time that you wrote that bit of text.
The only downside is that it needs special paper which you can buy in notebook form or which you can print yourself using a laser printer. The windows version has some extra software you can buy to perform OCR on your handwriting but since I have a Mac I have no idea how good it is. There is even an open SDK for you to develop your own applications for it but it unfortunately only supports Java.
I agree about the money portion
While that may be true outside France, inside France things are a little murkier. Now that they have been convicted of fraud they have to be careful since now a lot of the people who gave them money can probably get it back. Paying the fine might not be a problem but continuing to raise funds might.
I've seen instructions on the web for various models but all, invariably, European. The problem is that there are not many people who want to buy DVDs in the UK and bring them to Canada - the prices make more people do it in reverse. Indeed the only reason I do it is because there are UK DVDs that you cannot get here in Canada. While it is more of a pain at least ripping and rewriting them means I get to remove the stupid trailers.
It's about realizing that there is a value to peoples' time and that they deserve to be compensated for that time if they so wish. If they so wish.
I completely agree with that principle but unfortunately it has to be balanced by the right of the purchaser to use what they purchased in a manner that they wish. If I purchase a table the carpenter who made it cannot tell me that I am not allowed to put it in my kitchen for example. However this is frequently what happens with modern technology e.g. DVDs that I purchase in the UK are not allowed to play on my Canadian DVD player.
These restrictions are completely undefendable, unjust and in no way affect the right of the artist to receive compensation. The problem is that governments do absolutely nothing to stop this and stop these unreasonable restrictions - indeed many actually back them up. The result is that people get extremely frustrated and the only way to relieve that frustration is to break the restrictions which is exactly what happens. In the process they come to view all producers of such media as money-grabbing, greedy corporations and so feel completely justified in their actions - even when they go well beyond what is reasonable - because now they are angry.
This is a common theme through history. Just look at the Cornish smugglers in the 1700's and all the illicit alcohol operations in prohibition US. When society is frustrated with unjust restrictions placed upon it they will find a way around them...but being outside the bounds of mainstream society they wil go far further than what is reasonable. Of course this in no way justifies those actions but given human nature they are an inevitable result when faced with unjust restrictions and no legitimate way to deal with them.
If you've got that little faith in the app store, maybe you shouldn't bother with it in the first place.
Nice idea - but how can you do that once you have already paid out for the hardware and want to use it? The reason I use the app store is because there is no alternative other than to jail break my iTouch (with all the attendent unreliability that will no doubt follow) and then my impression is that I cannot use the AppStore at all. Since Apple control the DRM how hard would it be for them to allow 30 minutes of app use for free? They already let you listen to 30 seconds of songs and videos for free or, alternatively, let you return the app for a full refund if you have owned it for less that 24 hours.
The problem with the DRM lock in to the AppStore is that it seems to have created and all-or-nothing market. Either you stick completely to the AppStore and all the controls Apple apply, or you Jail break you device so that you can use legitimate, OpenSource code and other applications that Apple don't want you to use, but then all the commercial apps have to be pirated. So far there is nothing that I really want to do that will make me Jail-break my iTouch but if they come out with a way to make a BlueTooth GPS work with the iTouch just watch how fast I switch.
I cant first order the food and drinks and only after that decide if it was good enough to be paid.
That is about the worst possible example to give because you can do EXACTLY that. I have, admittedly only on one or two occassions, done exactly that: once because the service took far, far too long so we got up and left telling them why and on the second occassion because the service was slow but when the food arrived it was cold (probably sitting out waiting for a server).
Of course you have to be able to tell that something is wrong with the first bite or so but effectively you do place an order, sample it and then determine whether it is worth paying for. Of course because this is done in person there is a significant reluctance threshold to overcome since you have to be prepared to argue with someone who may well be angry at your comments which is partly why it does not work online.
I've seen these in the UK but not in Canada, at least not for a reasonable price.
And Keychest would allow movie studios to dictate how many devices, connected to which distribution networks, a given title can be played on.
So it is permanent for as long as they say it is permanent.
Because I'm pretty sure "consumers" don't do any of that with DVDs.
Some consumers do. For example I have to remember that when I buy a DVD in the UK I cannot play it in my Canadian DVD player wen I get home....at least not without ripping it and rewriting it first.
One of the interesting things about the LHC is that we have to see something more than what we have seen so far. If we predict the probability of certain types of events happening in models where the Higgs does not exist then, at LHC energies, we get probabilities of events that are greater than 100%! Hence either we see the Higgs, we see something else or we have experimental measurements that disagree with the Standard Model for unknown reasons...one of these possibilities has to happen which is one of the reasons why the LHC is so exciting: we have a guarenteed discovery there waiting to be made!
We killed smallpox outright, but every vaccine since then has been prevented from achieving its final goal through the effort of anti-vax forces of one kind or another.
The reason that we killed small pox is because it only infect humans and cannot live outside the human body for long. It is far harder, if not impossible, to eliminate viruses which can cross from other species or which can live in the environment.
IOW, the point of the vaccine is to prevent the pandemic, not to protect you. So the *right* question to ask is, does the H1N1 vaccine confer any immunity to the recipient?
If the vaccine does not protect the recipient then it would be unethical to give it because of the tiny, but non-zero, risk of serious complications and even death from the vaccination itself. Assuming a one in a million rate of problems then in country the size of Canada you would effectively be harming or killing 30 people a year to reduce (not stop) the spread of the flu. To put it another way would you advocate harming (e.g. remove one kidney) or killing 30 people every year if using their organs, tissues etc. could save the lives of 3,000?
When I go to the doctor I want to make sure that he or she is thinking about what is best for me, not what might be best for everyone else. If they are not doing so then how can you trust their medical advice?
The flu shot is not about preventing you from dying.
If it is not then how do you justify giving it? Any medical procedure, including vaccination, carries the risk of serious complications and potentially death. If there is no benefit to the person taking the vaccine and a tiny (1-2 in a million), but non-zero, chance of serious complications and death then it would be unethical to give the vaccine to someone. Those with weaker immune systems can be protected by taking precautions to isolate them: this risks nobody's life.
Of course this is only true if there is zero benefit from the flu vaccine. Given a brief search on the web the mortality rate looks to be around 1 in 10,000 per year so even a 1% decrease in mortality would justify the vaccine on purely medical grounds.
Either they are not very plentiful or they don't exist at all, otherwise we should have already detected one in cosmic rays, whose energies make those of the LHC look puny.
Not quite true. While high energy cosmic rays do indeed make the LHC energy look puny they are hitting stationary nuclei so a huge amount of their energy goes into kinetic energy and not into mass. The rate of cosmic rays creating collisions equivalent to the LHC is, IIRC, a few per hour per square km. However the Higgs boson (if it exists) is a very short-lived particle and so decays effectively at the point of first interaction which is a long way above any ground detectors. Hence the spread out nature of the collisions and the Higgs lifetime are the reasons why the Higgs would not be seen in cosmic rays if if it is there.
I was going to suggest around the ring of the LHC but it is not a US location nor would their GPS work 100m underground...so I suggested the Tevatron at Fermilab which is US-based but will still have the GPS problem.
English, Law, and History help so that you can see when a coup d'e'tat is imminent. That then allows you to run and hide in your bunker.
The problem with modern democracy is that it takes a huge amount of time, effort and money to get elected and there is no guarantee of success. This often means that those going into politics have generally been rather unsuccessful at their chosen careers (and have less to lose and more free time) or actually have no career other than politics. Neither is particularly desireable for someone who is effectively managing a country: the first is incompetent and the second ignorant.
Since we have never seen one before, how would we know if he(sic) met one?
The Higgs boson was thought of as a way to solve a very specific problem with the Standard Model. This gives the Higgs boson very specific properties. Indeed the only unknown parameter regarding the Higgs is its mass. Hence we will know it if we see it.
As has recently been demonstrated we don't actually need to find the Higgs to get a Nobel prize, we just need to show some promise that we might find it....
Does it explain why, if the Universe is so loath to produce a Higgs boson, it bombards our atmosphere when enormously high energy particles that can create Higgs bosons if they exist? Why hasn't it propagated back in time to stop cosmic rays? It sounds far more like fiction, and inconsistent fiction at that.
He mentions geeks asking peer women out for a date as an example for being sexistic.
The textbook definition of sexism is discrimination on the grounds of gender. So, unless you ask out men as well, technically you are being sexist.