Second, I remember a time when, if someone needed stitches or a cast, they went to their doctor's office. The ER was where the ambulance took you if your brains were hanging out of your skull.
Yup, but then again I remember a time that if you got a minor infection after this happened you couldn't have sued the doctor for a few hundred thousand dollars for not performing the treatment in accordance with the general standards of care, which generally translates into the best possible manner of rendering the treatment generally available.
Or, another illustration:
Suppose an oncologist advises a patient that it might make sense to just make the most of their last few weeks on earth and not suffer with chemotherapy. The patient dies in a few weeks. The family talks to a lawyer and a bunch of experts second-guess that decision and the doctor could easily end up paying a fortune for prematurely ending a life.
Suppose instead the oncologist just tells the family what the best care available is, and discloses the side effects. The patient goes through agony and dies in a few weeks. Well, what do you expect from chemotherapy, the doctor has given the patient the best care available and that's just how things go. Family's insurance pays the $100k bill and no lawyers are involved. Doctor gets paid more for administering the treatment.
And then we wonder why healthcare is so expensive... NPR had a really great two-part program on these sorts of situations a few months ago.
If everybody got $15k handed to them when a loved one died, then the average funeral would be held in Maui and would cost $30k. Services and costs rise to meet the amount of money available - just look at college tuition and oil prices. When parents became willing to dump their retirement funds into tuition colleges obliged by raising prices. When investors were willing to give billions of dollars to hedge funds money managers were happy to trade oil futures until the credit crunch took all their money away.
Ultimately, what is the purpose of a funeral, and why is it that it cannot be accomplished without spending $10-15k? Disposal of a body is pretty cheap. A family gathering in somebody's house is pretty cheap. Renting a church doesn't really have to be all that expensive either. I doubt that 100 years ago they managed to spend $15k (inflation-adjusted) to do all of this.
You suggest that the desires of the patient are the ONLY thing that should be considered when deciding on treatment plans.
However, there are others who have a legitimate stake in the matter. In particular is whoever is paying for it.
Suppose that for a cost of one billion dollars I could extend somebody's life for one year, completely devoid of any pain or suffering. It would be a very fulfilling year, one that anybody would want to live.
Who wouldn't want that? One more year with their family, one more year to accomplish whatever it is that makes somebody feel happy about living. If left up only to the recipient of such care, everybody would elect to have this treatment.
However, at a cost of one billion dollars each the entire human race would essentially be enslaved to providing for the care of maybe a few thousand or tens of thousands of people who manage to receive the treatment before the entire planet runs out of resources.
Obviously a billion dollars is a contrived example. The opposite contrived example would be ten dollars - I think virtually everybody could agree that for taxpayers to balk at spending ten dollars to extend somebody's life for a year sounds very stingy (although one could debate that we do this all the time when we ignore starving people in poor nations).
So, at this point we're just haggling over price. At what point do those actually paying for care get to say "enough is enough?" That is exactly what this article is about. Talking about putting a price on life sounds barbaric, but the fact is that everybody does this every day - they just don't talk about it.
Here is something else to think about - if you really do consider my life to be worth a million dollars per year, or whatever, can I elect just to receive the cash for two years of life right now and then thirty years from now you can just let me die in peace?
If spoken Chinese is anything like spoken Japanese (the written languages are almost the same - loosely speaking), then the problem may not be that people don't know the words so much as the fact that the words are ambiguous.
In Japanese (as in Chinese) the vocalization of a symbol has nothing to do with the appearance of the symbol, as the symbols are ideograms and are not phonetic. (Japanese also has two phonetic alphabets that work just like any writing system most/. readers already understand.) There are many cases of homonyms in the language, but they are of the sort that can lead to more confusion than homonyms typically do in English.
Most of the time the correct meaning of a word is obvious from context. However, when there isn't much context a verbal conversation can easily be ambiguous. In this case people will often resort to tracing letters on their hands/etc.
I'm certainly open to additional insight from native speakers of either language.:)
I agree with most of your points, but I would focus more on length of copyrights in general than whether they outlast the original artists.
If copyrights were 3-5 years I think that most artistic works would be able to rake in the lion's share of their potential profits.
If the artist happens to die in year 2, I think it is fine to keep the copyright, since presumably the artist received some compensation up-front in addition to royalty-based payments.
I don't really have an issue with the concept of IP in general - I just think it has gotten WAY out of hand. Let's have incentives for creating things, but let's use that as the basis of a business and not a license to print money, or make it into a lottery.
To make this work, you do need to enable the parents to actually discipline their kids.
Sure, raising them right in the first place is important. But, if a parent messes up and gets a fine when their kid destroys something, what are they to do about it?
You could disown them, which doesn't really solve the problem.
Other than that what are you going to do - threaten to beat the kid? I'm sure in most progressive societies that will get you more than the fine you're trying to avoid. If you tell the kid to come home after school and not burn down the mall, what recourse do you actually have if they do the opposite?
Blaming the parents amounts to outsourcing the police. However, if you're going to do that, you had better start allowing parents to construct cells.
Actually, in most stereos the loudness button has no effect on dynamic range.
Instead it boosts the low and high ranges to make up for the Taylor-Munsen curve.
At low volumes, your ear/brain does not perceive low and high frequencies, so you won't hear them if you turn down your stereo. The loudness button is designed to make quietly-played music more accurately-reproduced.
Now, some better car stereos have true dynamic range compression, but I'd say they are the exception. You won't find it on anything that came with the car (except for very deluxe cars), or just about anything that cost you less than $200.
I'm sure using names/rosters does incur some kind of licensing cost, so I don't actually have a big problem with charging for them. However, I do tend to agree with you that this should be more in line with a $1-10 DLC than a $70 new title.
However, whoever did draw your blood should make the information available to you.
For that matter, one should not even have to have a doctor to have a blood test performed, but good luck with that. Note, I'm fine with insurance not covering tests without a doctor's recommendation - but there is no reason that people shouldn't be able to pay cash and get test results (completely anonymously).
Of course I have no idea what anonymized means in this case, but typically anything that is personally identifiable gets stripped. At least, this is what happens in companies that follow EU privacy regulations so that they can work with EU specimens (the EU is pretty strict about this stuff).
US law really needs to be tightened up - it should be illegal to use specimens for ANY purpose without the consent of the donor, even if it doesn't "cost" them anything. While they're at it, perhaps they can pass a law that requires disclosure of test results to anybody who gets tested? You should try getting a copy of your own blood test results sometime - if your doctor is nice it isn't a problem, but the testing company will act like you're a lunatic if you try to obtain your own results from them.
Agree with you on PNAS - they're generally considered a top-tier journal with the exception of anything written by NAS members. So, the irony is that the articles written by no-names in that journal are often the better ones. That isn't to say that NAS members can't write good stuff - only that skipping the review stage allows them not to in some cases.
That said, water structure is an interesting topic. I had a professor in college going back 15 years that was doing work in this area. The college didn't have a lot of funding so the methods were fairly classical. If you look at the properties of simple compounds that have a mix of hydophilic and hydrophobic character you'll find that they behave as if their size in solution is much larger than you'd otherwise expect. This is because the water molecules surrounding the hydrophobic regions become ordered and contribute to the apparent size of the molecule. A simple viscosity measurement will demonstrate this fairly well.
Now, just measuring viscosity doesn't tell you exactly what is happening at the molecular level, but it does go to show you that you can do fairly advanced work without a $10M grant. Moderately more expensive techniques can generate more experimental constraints, and it sounds like modelling is getting to the point where perhaps we can use those constraints to make some models.
For a more direct look at this sort of thing I once heard a talk by a guy who was immersing protein crystals in organic solvents. This would actually stabilize loosely-bound water molecules associated with the protein so that you could detect them in an X-Ray crystal structure (sometimes 2 layers deep). The obvious downside is that this really isn't observing the system under normal conditions. Crystallography is a lot more expensive than a viscometer, but it still is a relatively cheap field.
Come up with an idea and patent it. I'm sure the antifreeze companies would line up to license it for reasonable cost. Just think of the marketing possibilities.
As the other poster indicated, it isn't easy to do - the stuff has such as strong flavor that you can't overpower it. Keep in mind that whatever additive you use can't change the properties of the antifreeze or make it corrosive or anything like that.
I'm not sure I'd really put antifreeze in the same category as the other stuff in this thread. It isn't like anybody actually wants that stuff to be toxic.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is illegal at all, and that is part of the problem.
It didn't need to be illegal since it was so expensive that nobody would do it except in unusual circumstances (you're a stalker, or the subject is a suspect in a major crime).
Now it is getting to the point where lots of people can follow everybody around all the time in a distributed manner, and it is legitimate to ask the question of whether this is really a good thing.
This would of course be equitable if insurance companies weren't allowed to make investments.
There is no reason that somebody with a $100k 401k account should be required to hold auto insurance. They could of course choose to do so if they wanted.
Ironically, back when the US government fixed airline prices, they did start competing on quality. That led to the government regulating stuff like what kinds of food could be served, and on what kind of dishes. Heaven forbid that maybe a better company drive a worse one out of business or something!
The airline industry is a perfect example of oversupply - every time a company is on the verge of collapse the government bails them out. That costs taxpayers money and provides little benefit. If they just let one or two go down the rest would be much more stable. You don't let it get to the point where there are only 3 or anything, but right now there are just too many.
And when companies price-fix, don't you think they'll go ahead and quality-fix as well? The whole point is that they DON'T want to compete with each other. They just chop the market up percentage-wise and everybody takes their cut - just like a mob.
That won't be true anyway - unless you would increase the sector size by 10'000 as well.
If 1cm^2 of material stores a given number of bits - 1m^2 of material can store 10,000 as many. I don't care of those bits are track boundaries, sector headers, ecc code, or whatever. I'm talking about raw bits stored on raw media. And, you completely missed my point.
In any other area of study SI prefixes are all the same. km/s are the same as m/ms, g/mL are the same as kg/L, and so on. Throw a count of bits into the equation and suddenly that doesn't apply - or it applies sometimes and not others (because I'm sure the hard drive manufacturers aren't the only people to have every used the term KB to refer to 1000 bytes, and maybe 1 in 100 times there wasn't somebody anal-retentive standing there to correct them). Gee, can't imagine why anybody would get that confused when people go around redefining otherwise-standard SI prefixes.
So using the power of 2 is very convenient for engineers working in IT.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. That's why IT engineers should use kibibytes whenever it makes their math easier. They just shouldn't call them kilobytes.
Look, I'm fine if it makes everybody happier if some law is passed stating that all hard drive size advertisements have to be in terms of base-2 units. I really could care less about that. Whatever floats your boat. I don't sell hard drives.
My issue is that in the metric system kilo means 1000, period. This is true of EVERY unit of measure out there. However, lots of people decided to use it for 1024 in IT and now you'd think that we were talking about adding a book to the Holy Bible when it is suggested that perhaps having ONE particular area of study where the SI prefixes aren't applied consistently isn't a good idea.
I know that every clock in the world has 60 seconds in a minute, but if somebody came up with the hare-brained idea to define a hectosecond as 60 seconds I'd be the first in line to oppose that as well.
Use whatever units you like, but don't go redefining SI prefixes. Whoever thought that was a good idea was just dumb, or at least was having a glaring moment of dumbness...
And that kibi/gibi stuff only means that we have given up fighting and submitted to those marketing lies
Or maybe it just means that programmers have finally figured out the metric system?
In EVERY other discipline out there kilo means 1000. The reason it was defined as 1024 in IT wasn't out of some kind of brilliance, but rather shear laziness. Yes, I understand binary, and yes I understand why binary units are useful. So does the SI, which is why they invented the kibi prefix.
I could care less about marketers one way or another. I do care that a storage medium that stores one 1 MB per cm^2 does not store 10GB per m^2 if you use IT lingo. I don't see how that is in any way convenient for any engineer who actually works with anything in the physical world.
Insofar as the algorithm involves fewer operations I could see it consuming less power.
However, parallelizing an algorithm shouldn't save anything at all. Running an algorithm in parallel allows the operation to take place in less time, but it shouldn't allow it to be performed using fewer instructions. In fact, many parallel approaches might actually take more instruments (but this is vastly compensated by the ability to scale it up).
I don't know enough about matrix algorithms to really comment on the details of the paper, but it seems like making this more parallel doesn't improve the efficiency of the algorithm - only its utility.
MythTV doesn't pick up channels - your schedule info service does that. MythTV will support EIT if your broadcaster support it, in which case you'll get whatever schedule info they broadcast.
SchedulesDirect is probably the most common schedule service in the US, and it tends to have just about anything any on-screen guide will have (they get their data from Tribute, which is what everybody else uses). It will cost you $20/yr though or so.
Perhaps the better comparison is between a Honda Civic and a gold-plated Rolls Royce.
There really isn't a whole lot that the Rolls will do that the Civic won't, but it looks nicer and costs a lot more.
If you want to stay in the same price range then maybe the comparison is between an ipad and a decent laptop. Or, for cars look at a gold-plated Rolls Royce vs a Porche.
I dunno - the danger of scientific consensus could be summed up in a few plays on a statement you made:
We say there is a theological consensus about the existence of God because all the theology papers that reach a conclusion about it reach the same conclusion: God must exist. It's not because theologians "just believe" that God exists due to their personal biases instead of what clear logic dictates. If anyone wants to claim that God doesn't exist, all they need to do is write up their reasoning in a paper (and lose their job at their Christian university or church).
We say there is an economic consensus about the risk of credit default swaps because all the economic papers that reach a conclusion about it reach the same conclusion: CDSs are safe investments. It's not because economists "just believe" that CDSs are safe due to their personal biases instead of what the facts say. If anyone wants to claim that a CDS isn't safe, all they need to do is write up their observations and reasoning in a paper (and lose their job on Wall Street).
The concern I have is the herd mentality. There is safety in numbers. How many stock analysts that pushed CDSs lost their jobs? Probably very few, because "who could have seen that coming!" Did anything bad happen to scientists who maintained the majority view that EM radiation must propagate through the ether? Generally you have more security and success if you're wrong but in the majority than if you're right but in a fringe minority. Sure, you could win a Nobel Prize, but if you don't come up with a REALLY clever experiment chances are you'll just end up getting shunned.
Don't get me wrong - scientific consensus isn't a bad thing. However, the part where we dismiss anybody who disagrees with it as a "quack" or whatever isn't always good. Most major advances in science have come from theories that deviated from scientific consensus at the time they were developed. At the same time, the majority of these kinds of theories turn out to be wrong. I think there needs to be a healthy tension in research between conformity and innovation. Most of the funding probably should be aligned with the consensus, but simply voicing a dissenting view should not ruin one's career.
If you use both you realize quite quickly that quantum mechanics, aeronautical engineering and medicine are sciences,
Uh, have you actually looked at the methods used in medicine? Medical research done on mice is science. Medicine as practiced on humans is well-informed artistry with lots of tradition acting as governance. That isn't meant as a condemnation - the ethical constraints practitioners operate under greatly inhibits their ability to do real science.
Even the best clinical trials tend to show what would in most other fields be considered tenuous results. Based on their confidence limits we can already assume that 5% of the BEST trials reach completely incorrect conclusions. All doctors can do is make the most of the information that reaches them - science-based medicine is better than the alternative, but it is still limited which is why medicine progresses slower than say, electrical engineering.
The problem with medicine is the same problem we have with environmentalism. In both cases we can't perform well-controlled experiments. In the former it is due to ethical issues, and in the latter it is due to having only a single test subject.
I dunno - as long as the guards are paid the plant doesn't shut down.
If payroll stops working, then the plant will certainly shut down. Sure, no manager will decide to shut it down, but if nobody shows up to work, it won't be up to the managers.
Sure, it might take a few weeks, but if it persists there could be problems.
If management shows up with an armored car and a pallet of $20 bills and starts handing them out, that could easily mitigate their payroll problems.
These banks and merchants have created a system that is weak and exploitable that uses its customers as a buffer and even a shield against those weaknesses. You cannot protect your "secret information" so long as it must be shared in order to use it.
Yup - the whole system is flawed. There is no reason that the card reader needs to be a trusted device.
The credit card should be a smartcard with an embedded RSA key. The card reader gives the card a transaction. The card displays the amount of the transaction on a built-in display, and the owner enters a PIN directly into a keypad on the card. If the PIN is correct, the card signs the transaction with a unique signature ID and a timestamp. The card reader passes the transaction back to the bank, which verifies the signature and then relays back a signed transaction cleared message, at which point the item is sold or pump turns on or whatever (for pre-authorizations like with a gas pump obviously the transaction needs to be tweaked a bit, but probably not a big deal).
In such a model no component of the system is trusted at all, except for the smartcard (which the owner controls) and the bank (which the bank controls). The card reader is welcome to log every byte that passes through it, but it can't create another signed transaction without the key. Replay attacks are prevented by the signature ID - the bank would never accept the same ID twice.
Credit cards are completely insecure. Anybody who can look at the card already has enough information to clone it. You don't even need to read the magnetic stripe - you just have a camera grab the numbers on both side you have enough info to clone the card.
I'm not sold on that. Profit is just a way of rewarding people for devoting their effort to something that turned out to do well. Public schools are non-profit and clearly this hasn't led to an education renaissance.
How do you know how important something is to somebody? Simple - how much are they willing to pay for it. If health care really is important, then we should be willing to reward people for coming up with good solutions.
At the same time, health care tends to be a fairly inefficient market, so I do agree that regulation is in order.
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Second, I remember a time when, if someone needed stitches or a cast, they went to their doctor's office. The ER was where the ambulance took you if your brains were hanging out of your skull.
Yup, but then again I remember a time that if you got a minor infection after this happened you couldn't have sued the doctor for a few hundred thousand dollars for not performing the treatment in accordance with the general standards of care, which generally translates into the best possible manner of rendering the treatment generally available.
Or, another illustration:
Suppose an oncologist advises a patient that it might make sense to just make the most of their last few weeks on earth and not suffer with chemotherapy. The patient dies in a few weeks. The family talks to a lawyer and a bunch of experts second-guess that decision and the doctor could easily end up paying a fortune for prematurely ending a life.
Suppose instead the oncologist just tells the family what the best care available is, and discloses the side effects. The patient goes through agony and dies in a few weeks. Well, what do you expect from chemotherapy, the doctor has given the patient the best care available and that's just how things go. Family's insurance pays the $100k bill and no lawyers are involved. Doctor gets paid more for administering the treatment.
And then we wonder why healthcare is so expensive... NPR had a really great two-part program on these sorts of situations a few months ago.
I dunno.
If everybody got $15k handed to them when a loved one died, then the average funeral would be held in Maui and would cost $30k. Services and costs rise to meet the amount of money available - just look at college tuition and oil prices. When parents became willing to dump their retirement funds into tuition colleges obliged by raising prices. When investors were willing to give billions of dollars to hedge funds money managers were happy to trade oil futures until the credit crunch took all their money away.
Ultimately, what is the purpose of a funeral, and why is it that it cannot be accomplished without spending $10-15k? Disposal of a body is pretty cheap. A family gathering in somebody's house is pretty cheap. Renting a church doesn't really have to be all that expensive either. I doubt that 100 years ago they managed to spend $15k (inflation-adjusted) to do all of this.
Ok, time to sacrifice some karma I guess...
You suggest that the desires of the patient are the ONLY thing that should be considered when deciding on treatment plans.
However, there are others who have a legitimate stake in the matter. In particular is whoever is paying for it.
Suppose that for a cost of one billion dollars I could extend somebody's life for one year, completely devoid of any pain or suffering. It would be a very fulfilling year, one that anybody would want to live.
Who wouldn't want that? One more year with their family, one more year to accomplish whatever it is that makes somebody feel happy about living. If left up only to the recipient of such care, everybody would elect to have this treatment.
However, at a cost of one billion dollars each the entire human race would essentially be enslaved to providing for the care of maybe a few thousand or tens of thousands of people who manage to receive the treatment before the entire planet runs out of resources.
Obviously a billion dollars is a contrived example. The opposite contrived example would be ten dollars - I think virtually everybody could agree that for taxpayers to balk at spending ten dollars to extend somebody's life for a year sounds very stingy (although one could debate that we do this all the time when we ignore starving people in poor nations).
So, at this point we're just haggling over price. At what point do those actually paying for care get to say "enough is enough?" That is exactly what this article is about. Talking about putting a price on life sounds barbaric, but the fact is that everybody does this every day - they just don't talk about it.
Here is something else to think about - if you really do consider my life to be worth a million dollars per year, or whatever, can I elect just to receive the cash for two years of life right now and then thirty years from now you can just let me die in peace?
If spoken Chinese is anything like spoken Japanese (the written languages are almost the same - loosely speaking), then the problem may not be that people don't know the words so much as the fact that the words are ambiguous.
In Japanese (as in Chinese) the vocalization of a symbol has nothing to do with the appearance of the symbol, as the symbols are ideograms and are not phonetic. (Japanese also has two phonetic alphabets that work just like any writing system most /. readers already understand.) There are many cases of homonyms in the language, but they are of the sort that can lead to more confusion than homonyms typically do in English.
Most of the time the correct meaning of a word is obvious from context. However, when there isn't much context a verbal conversation can easily be ambiguous. In this case people will often resort to tracing letters on their hands/etc.
I'm certainly open to additional insight from native speakers of either language. :)
I agree with most of your points, but I would focus more on length of copyrights in general than whether they outlast the original artists.
If copyrights were 3-5 years I think that most artistic works would be able to rake in the lion's share of their potential profits.
If the artist happens to die in year 2, I think it is fine to keep the copyright, since presumably the artist received some compensation up-front in addition to royalty-based payments.
I don't really have an issue with the concept of IP in general - I just think it has gotten WAY out of hand. Let's have incentives for creating things, but let's use that as the basis of a business and not a license to print money, or make it into a lottery.
To make this work, you do need to enable the parents to actually discipline their kids.
Sure, raising them right in the first place is important. But, if a parent messes up and gets a fine when their kid destroys something, what are they to do about it?
You could disown them, which doesn't really solve the problem.
Other than that what are you going to do - threaten to beat the kid? I'm sure in most progressive societies that will get you more than the fine you're trying to avoid. If you tell the kid to come home after school and not burn down the mall, what recourse do you actually have if they do the opposite?
Blaming the parents amounts to outsourcing the police. However, if you're going to do that, you had better start allowing parents to construct cells.
Actually, in most stereos the loudness button has no effect on dynamic range.
Instead it boosts the low and high ranges to make up for the Taylor-Munsen curve.
At low volumes, your ear/brain does not perceive low and high frequencies, so you won't hear them if you turn down your stereo. The loudness button is designed to make quietly-played music more accurately-reproduced.
Now, some better car stereos have true dynamic range compression, but I'd say they are the exception. You won't find it on anything that came with the car (except for very deluxe cars), or just about anything that cost you less than $200.
I'm sure using names/rosters does incur some kind of licensing cost, so I don't actually have a big problem with charging for them. However, I do tend to agree with you that this should be more in line with a $1-10 DLC than a $70 new title.
However, whoever did draw your blood should make the information available to you.
For that matter, one should not even have to have a doctor to have a blood test performed, but good luck with that. Note, I'm fine with insurance not covering tests without a doctor's recommendation - but there is no reason that people shouldn't be able to pay cash and get test results (completely anonymously).
Of course I have no idea what anonymized means in this case, but typically anything that is personally identifiable gets stripped. At least, this is what happens in companies that follow EU privacy regulations so that they can work with EU specimens (the EU is pretty strict about this stuff).
US law really needs to be tightened up - it should be illegal to use specimens for ANY purpose without the consent of the donor, even if it doesn't "cost" them anything. While they're at it, perhaps they can pass a law that requires disclosure of test results to anybody who gets tested? You should try getting a copy of your own blood test results sometime - if your doctor is nice it isn't a problem, but the testing company will act like you're a lunatic if you try to obtain your own results from them.
Agree with you on PNAS - they're generally considered a top-tier journal with the exception of anything written by NAS members. So, the irony is that the articles written by no-names in that journal are often the better ones. That isn't to say that NAS members can't write good stuff - only that skipping the review stage allows them not to in some cases.
That said, water structure is an interesting topic. I had a professor in college going back 15 years that was doing work in this area. The college didn't have a lot of funding so the methods were fairly classical. If you look at the properties of simple compounds that have a mix of hydophilic and hydrophobic character you'll find that they behave as if their size in solution is much larger than you'd otherwise expect. This is because the water molecules surrounding the hydrophobic regions become ordered and contribute to the apparent size of the molecule. A simple viscosity measurement will demonstrate this fairly well.
Now, just measuring viscosity doesn't tell you exactly what is happening at the molecular level, but it does go to show you that you can do fairly advanced work without a $10M grant. Moderately more expensive techniques can generate more experimental constraints, and it sounds like modelling is getting to the point where perhaps we can use those constraints to make some models.
For a more direct look at this sort of thing I once heard a talk by a guy who was immersing protein crystals in organic solvents. This would actually stabilize loosely-bound water molecules associated with the protein so that you could detect them in an X-Ray crystal structure (sometimes 2 layers deep). The obvious downside is that this really isn't observing the system under normal conditions. Crystallography is a lot more expensive than a viscometer, but it still is a relatively cheap field.
Come up with an idea and patent it. I'm sure the antifreeze companies would line up to license it for reasonable cost. Just think of the marketing possibilities.
As the other poster indicated, it isn't easy to do - the stuff has such as strong flavor that you can't overpower it. Keep in mind that whatever additive you use can't change the properties of the antifreeze or make it corrosive or anything like that.
I'm not sure I'd really put antifreeze in the same category as the other stuff in this thread. It isn't like anybody actually wants that stuff to be toxic.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is illegal at all, and that is part of the problem.
It didn't need to be illegal since it was so expensive that nobody would do it except in unusual circumstances (you're a stalker, or the subject is a suspect in a major crime).
Now it is getting to the point where lots of people can follow everybody around all the time in a distributed manner, and it is legitimate to ask the question of whether this is really a good thing.
This would of course be equitable if insurance companies weren't allowed to make investments.
There is no reason that somebody with a $100k 401k account should be required to hold auto insurance. They could of course choose to do so if they wanted.
Ironically, back when the US government fixed airline prices, they did start competing on quality. That led to the government regulating stuff like what kinds of food could be served, and on what kind of dishes. Heaven forbid that maybe a better company drive a worse one out of business or something!
The airline industry is a perfect example of oversupply - every time a company is on the verge of collapse the government bails them out. That costs taxpayers money and provides little benefit. If they just let one or two go down the rest would be much more stable. You don't let it get to the point where there are only 3 or anything, but right now there are just too many.
And when companies price-fix, don't you think they'll go ahead and quality-fix as well? The whole point is that they DON'T want to compete with each other. They just chop the market up percentage-wise and everybody takes their cut - just like a mob.
That won't be true anyway - unless you would increase the sector size by 10'000 as well.
If 1cm^2 of material stores a given number of bits - 1m^2 of material can store 10,000 as many. I don't care of those bits are track boundaries, sector headers, ecc code, or whatever. I'm talking about raw bits stored on raw media. And, you completely missed my point.
In any other area of study SI prefixes are all the
same. km/s are the same as m/ms, g/mL are the same as kg/L, and so on. Throw a count of bits into the equation and suddenly that doesn't apply - or it applies sometimes and not others (because I'm sure the hard drive manufacturers aren't the only people to have every used the term KB to refer to 1000 bytes, and maybe 1 in 100 times there wasn't somebody anal-retentive standing there to correct them). Gee, can't imagine why anybody would get that confused when people go around redefining otherwise-standard SI prefixes.
So using the power of 2 is very convenient for engineers working in IT.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. That's why IT engineers should use kibibytes whenever it makes their math easier. They just shouldn't call them kilobytes.
Look, I'm fine if it makes everybody happier if some law is passed stating that all hard drive size advertisements have to be in terms of base-2 units. I really could care less about that. Whatever floats your boat. I don't sell hard drives.
My issue is that in the metric system kilo means 1000, period. This is true of EVERY unit of measure out there. However, lots of people decided to use it for 1024 in IT and now you'd think that we were talking about adding a book to the Holy Bible when it is suggested that perhaps having ONE particular area of study where the SI prefixes aren't applied consistently isn't a good idea.
I know that every clock in the world has 60 seconds in a minute, but if somebody came up with the hare-brained idea to define a hectosecond as 60 seconds I'd be the first in line to oppose that as well.
Use whatever units you like, but don't go redefining SI prefixes. Whoever thought that was a good idea was just dumb, or at least was having a glaring moment of dumbness...
And that kibi/gibi stuff only means that we have given up fighting and submitted to those marketing lies
Or maybe it just means that programmers have finally figured out the metric system?
In EVERY other discipline out there kilo means 1000. The reason it was defined as 1024 in IT wasn't out of some kind of brilliance, but rather shear laziness. Yes, I understand binary, and yes I understand why binary units are useful. So does the SI, which is why they invented the kibi prefix.
I could care less about marketers one way or another. I do care that a storage medium that stores one 1 MB per cm^2 does not store 10GB per m^2 if you use IT lingo. I don't see how that is in any way convenient for any engineer who actually works with anything in the physical world.
Insofar as the algorithm involves fewer operations I could see it consuming less power.
However, parallelizing an algorithm shouldn't save anything at all. Running an algorithm in parallel allows the operation to take place in less time, but it shouldn't allow it to be performed using fewer instructions. In fact, many parallel approaches might actually take more instruments (but this is vastly compensated by the ability to scale it up).
I don't know enough about matrix algorithms to really comment on the details of the paper, but it seems like making this more parallel doesn't improve the efficiency of the algorithm - only its utility.
MythTV doesn't pick up channels - your schedule info service does that. MythTV will support EIT if your broadcaster support it, in which case you'll get whatever schedule info they broadcast.
SchedulesDirect is probably the most common schedule service in the US, and it tends to have just about anything any on-screen guide will have (they get their data from Tribute, which is what everybody else uses). It will cost you $20/yr though or so.
Perhaps the better comparison is between a Honda Civic and a gold-plated Rolls Royce.
There really isn't a whole lot that the Rolls will do that the Civic won't, but it looks nicer and costs a lot more.
If you want to stay in the same price range then maybe the comparison is between an ipad and a decent laptop. Or, for cars look at a gold-plated Rolls Royce vs a Porche.
I dunno - the danger of scientific consensus could be summed up in a few plays on a statement you made:
We say there is a theological consensus about the existence of God because all the theology papers that reach a conclusion about it reach the same conclusion: God must exist. It's not because theologians "just believe" that God exists due to their personal biases instead of what clear logic dictates. If anyone wants to claim that God doesn't exist, all they need to do is write up their reasoning in a paper (and lose their job at their Christian university or church).
We say there is an economic consensus about the risk of credit default swaps because all the economic papers that reach a conclusion about it reach the same conclusion: CDSs are safe investments. It's not because economists "just believe" that CDSs are safe due to their personal biases instead of what the facts say. If anyone wants to claim that a CDS isn't safe, all they need to do is write up their observations and reasoning in a paper (and lose their job on Wall Street).
The concern I have is the herd mentality. There is safety in numbers. How many stock analysts that pushed CDSs lost their jobs? Probably very few, because "who could have seen that coming!" Did anything bad happen to scientists who maintained the majority view that EM radiation must propagate through the ether? Generally you have more security and success if you're wrong but in the majority than if you're right but in a fringe minority. Sure, you could win a Nobel Prize, but if you don't come up with a REALLY clever experiment chances are you'll just end up getting shunned.
Don't get me wrong - scientific consensus isn't a bad thing. However, the part where we dismiss anybody who disagrees with it as a "quack" or whatever isn't always good. Most major advances in science have come from theories that deviated from scientific consensus at the time they were developed. At the same time, the majority of these kinds of theories turn out to be wrong. I think there needs to be a healthy tension in research between conformity and innovation. Most of the funding probably should be aligned with the consensus, but simply voicing a dissenting view should not ruin one's career.
If you use both you realize quite quickly that quantum mechanics, aeronautical engineering and medicine are sciences,
Uh, have you actually looked at the methods used in medicine? Medical research done on mice is science. Medicine as practiced on humans is well-informed artistry with lots of tradition acting as governance. That isn't meant as a condemnation - the ethical constraints practitioners operate under greatly inhibits their ability to do real science.
Even the best clinical trials tend to show what would in most other fields be considered tenuous results. Based on their confidence limits we can already assume that 5% of the BEST trials reach completely incorrect conclusions. All doctors can do is make the most of the information that reaches them - science-based medicine is better than the alternative, but it is still limited which is why medicine progresses slower than say, electrical engineering.
The problem with medicine is the same problem we have with environmentalism. In both cases we can't perform well-controlled experiments. In the former it is due to ethical issues, and in the latter it is due to having only a single test subject.
I dunno - as long as the guards are paid the plant doesn't shut down.
If payroll stops working, then the plant will certainly shut down. Sure, no manager will decide to shut it down, but if nobody shows up to work, it won't be up to the managers.
Sure, it might take a few weeks, but if it persists there could be problems.
If management shows up with an armored car and a pallet of $20 bills and starts handing them out, that could easily mitigate their payroll problems.
These banks and merchants have created a system that is weak and exploitable that uses its customers as a buffer and even a shield against those weaknesses. You cannot protect your "secret information" so long as it must be shared in order to use it.
Yup - the whole system is flawed. There is no reason that the card reader needs to be a trusted device.
The credit card should be a smartcard with an embedded RSA key. The card reader gives the card a transaction. The card displays the amount of the transaction on a built-in display, and the owner enters a PIN directly into a keypad on the card. If the PIN is correct, the card signs the transaction with a unique signature ID and a timestamp. The card reader passes the transaction back to the bank, which verifies the signature and then relays back a signed transaction cleared message, at which point the item is sold or pump turns on or whatever (for pre-authorizations like with a gas pump obviously the transaction needs to be tweaked a bit, but probably not a big deal).
In such a model no component of the system is trusted at all, except for the smartcard (which the owner controls) and the bank (which the bank controls). The card reader is welcome to log every byte that passes through it, but it can't create another signed transaction without the key. Replay attacks are prevented by the signature ID - the bank would never accept the same ID twice.
Credit cards are completely insecure. Anybody who can look at the card already has enough information to clone it. You don't even need to read the magnetic stripe - you just have a camera grab the numbers on both side you have enough info to clone the card.
I'm not sold on that. Profit is just a way of rewarding people for devoting their effort to something that turned out to do well. Public schools are non-profit and clearly this hasn't led to an education renaissance.
How do you know how important something is to somebody? Simple - how much are they willing to pay for it. If health care really is important, then we should be willing to reward people for coming up with good solutions.
At the same time, health care tends to be a fairly inefficient market, so I do agree that regulation is in order.