I'd like to get more information about these worlds before I die. Also, I'd like to know if I would really get my own planet if I went "Full Mormon" so I can prepare accordingly.
Chromebooks will be HUGE in K-12 education in the next year. Over the past year chromebooks were hard to acquire and I had to resort to ordering them in batches of 5s and 10s from various suppliers as they were backordered. The supply problem seems to be resolved as of about February and my district will be purchasing hundreds of them after July 1. Other districts in my area are as well, in total I am aware of about 4,000 chromebooks that will be purchased this Summer. More importantly I see K-12 student computer use trending in this direction. The support costs for a device like this are minimal and for most students these limited devices are sufficient.
Most/. readers had an ant farm as a kid and loved it. Keeping a beehive is a natural extension of that love. A glass walled beehive in your house is an unnatural extension of that love but it is damn cool.
I love this idea and it does work when done correctly. Imagine the ant farm you had as a kid. Now replace the ants with bees. Now make it so the whole thing doesn't die after a month. That's what you have when this is done correctly!
Like many slashdotters (apparently) I am a beekeeper. I go a step closer to this particular type of insanity though in that I construct hives similar to what this article features. Well, actually not that similar because mine actually work and this one is wrong in more than a few ways. I've constructed a few that didn't work and I've made some that do work and from my failures I can tell you that the following things are wrong with this design: 1) The hive is stationary and it is inside of your house. Expecting the caretaker to work on the hive inside of their house is a bad idea. For this to work the hive must have the ability to be taken outside 2) Releasing calming smoke into the hive. This is just a bad idea. In a hive as small as this smoke does little good and releasing smoke in the wrong area of the hive actually has the opposite effect. 3) Pull a cord to collect honey. I could see this working actually, the queen will only lay eggs in cells with specific properties so having a spring or something with a cord attached to it could allow a pull of that cord to release honey to drip down. Unfortunately that drip would be covered in bees attempting to repair the damage within seconds. The larger problem is that the few cells that were damaged to retrieve this honey would not be immediately filled, it would take a few weeks to be able to pull the cord again to get honey. 5) Allow in orange light so the bees can see. What? Seriously? The bees prefer a dark hive, no light. They communicate by scent and touch. Tinted glass allows us to see the bees, not allowing the bees to see each other. The glass isn't a problem though, bees do fine in a glass hive as long as they are not in direct sunlight and they can still find their way out of the hive by walking towards the brightest source of light they can see.
There are more problems but I can forgive the rest because this is an artistic representation of a sexy design. An observation hive in your house is great and it works well with little maintenance when done correctly and this hive may convince some to give it a try.
If I'm forced to make my electric vehicle loud I will do two things: 1) Play some ANNOYING sound VERY LOUD 2) Add a message which reads "Don't like what you hear? Repeal the ‘Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2010’."
I bike or walk whenever I can, I detest the vehicle noise my city is drowning in.
I have three Langstroth hives that I don't use foundation in. This gives the natural (vairable) cell size which I believe is beneficial. These are also some of the hives I don't treat for Varroa in since I produce treatment free honey in addition to regular honey.
I think this is my last year going completely without foundation, even though I start a box with a few drawn frames as guides it takes longer for them to be filled with usable comb. I've noticed that when conditions aren't perfect the bees will still draw new comb from foundation but they will only draw new foundation when they have a strong nectar flow or they are from a recent swarm.
As a practical beekeeper I feel it is my duty to take this one step further and speculate on how to apply this finding to saving my bees.
Virus transmission should be kept to a minimum, I can't think of much else to do to keep a virus like this in check. The primary vector for honeybee viruses is the varroa mite and this pest continues to be the primary killer of honeybees despite all of the hubub about this "Colony Collapse Disorder". Finding that this mite has a hand in CCD is no surprise to me. Nosema is not new to the beekeeping world although N. ceranae is a bigger problem than the tamer N. apis that we're used to dealing with. The treatment is the same though, feed Fumidil B.
The bad news is that there isn't much new here so there won't be a silver bullet cure. Keep the bees healthy as best we can, that's about all I can see here.
I agree that Billy Mitchell seemed like a villain in the movie. Without a villain there aren't heroes though, and without Billy Mitchell there wouldn't be a "King of Kong" and hardly anyone would care who holds the high score in a game from 1981.
Where would professional wrestling be without guys like Billy Mitchell? I don't know, but no one would care.
Although I wouldn't mind seeing more of those ladies I am referring the counter-protests. You know that local church that goes out wielding graphic "pro-life" carnage on their stick-signs? They deserve a counter-protest.
Exactly what I was thinking, good thing I did a search for a few words before just posting on my own.
Many years ago females in "IT" were super-duper rare. Recently this has changed to be only rare. Being a recent change, this means that when a company cuts employees they are cutting the part that has the female population.
And I agree, in general women have better empathy and such and I prefer a manager have more of these qualities than technical expertiese. Both are great.
And, it should be noted, that when dealing with IT-boys women tend to get more favors. For better or worse I've seen it in many places.
I still use my Palm V, and it is definitely over 5 years old. What they need to do to boost sales is make ones that break (cellphones) or force the software to demand new technology (computers). Untill one of those happens, I'll stick with my Palm V.
Just wanted to throw in my.02, I think this same thing. Any ad that is of the old variety, flashing punch monkey or "FREE IPOD!!!!!" I striaght up ignore because they are so cheap and low-grade that it is probably a scam.
If an ad is well done (like the ones on slashdot) or if it is from Google (who I trust) I'm a lot more likely to click on it.
I can see how a colony of honeybees could survuve a few years of absolute darkness. We all should know how they store a lot of honey, but they have many other behaviors that help them last through adverse conditions. Apart from the queen, any bee will give its life to protect the hive. No help stoping years of darkness here, though.
Bees eat more than nectar, they also eat polen and when both are scarce bees have been known to eat many, many other things to include other insects and assorted decaying plant matter.
Also, a colony of bees has an intellect that is much more than the sum of the bee minds it contains. Like ants, science isn't quite sure how the bees communicate (pheremones of some sorts) but the end effect is that they can guide many others to far away flowers, organize a defense of the hive, keep the hive core temperature habitable from 40 below (F) to 120+ (F), neglecting un-needed bees to death in times of drought, and a lot more.
So, I can see a large hive with a lot of stored food seeing the sun go away and not come back doing some things like killing/not feeding the majority of the hive, the surviviors eating what they can find, and the queen surviving years of hell to create a new colony when the conditions allow for it.
Much like the Bush administration, large corporations tend to ignore facts and instead create their own "phacts" that look much nicer.
If the Economist shows enough people that it isn't the internet boogeyman, the RIAA will show that it is phactually the internet gremlin. And the power of a Phact is relative to how much $$$ its backers have, easily overpowering simple facts with a little advertising. Or a lot.
If you don't use separators the number 10000000 becomes mysterious, and adding a $ to the front makes it frighteneing. $10.000.000 is much easier to recognize.
Either a "," or "." separator solves this problem.
However, when you see 10.234 this could be two very different numbers under the "." system. You can guess using context, but guessing could be very bad.
BR
Give me my $10,000,000 and 10,234 any day, I know what they mean and even if you don't know my system you know what they mean as well.
You may not be aware, but using a "," as a separator gives you numers like "12,345,678.89". Not ambiguous at all.
A simple example against the "." separator:
There are 10.234 ppm of asbestos in your air at work.
If you are using the "," and "." system you know that this means about ten. If you are used to seeing numbers like "12.345.678.89" you have no way of knowing if you have 10 or 10000.
Because no matter how well you educate a population, some percentage of said population is just plain stupid.
These are the people that sue McDonalds for not warning them that the coffee is hot, or for not warning their children not to eat the styrofoam box the pancakes came in.
Call me what you will, but I think these people deserve what they get.
I agree with all of Slashdotia when I say that Fox News is conservative. If any of you think that the Daily Show isn't biased, you are wrong.
Yes, the show pokes fun at everything that is news, but not in a fair and balanced way. I love the Daily Show to death and it is my primary source of TV news (Internet is #1) but you must realize that the news is presented with a bias towards humor, and a minor bias towards the left.
Would I change it if I had the power? No. The Daily Show is near comedy perfection, but it is not fair and balanced.
I seem to be in the minority here, but I think there is still plenty of content for SF. I agree that too much has been about over-officification of humanity or offending ET, but there is plenty that can be done.
What we need to do is overturn Star Trek. Trek was great, but it has lost appeal after too many failed attempts. What needs to be done is to write a new future for humantiy using different technologies, since we have a clearer view of what they might be. No more dilithium crystals or tachyon mystery particles.
The best example of this that I know of is the Alterntiy RPG from WotC, which I can't find a good link to for the life of me. Just Alternity.net. Alternity is a favorite of mine that never had the popularity it deserved. If SF took this route I see its future renewed.
The problem with online advertising in its current state is that we, the consumer, do not want or like it.
We do like google. And when google started running little text link adds off to the right, I said "Way to go, google, now you can mage something for all your hard work." A lesser company might have sold "preferred listing" links *COUGH* YAHOO *COUGH* but Google remained honest and our friends.
And now, I see that google's little text links are actually usefull to me. I'm searching for airfare, and google suggests that I try an online airfare that I hadn't tried before. I do and I get a good price! And that place gets my business, and Google gets a few millicents for my click.
As long as google can remain my friend, I hope they do take over all of online advertising. Adds that arent' hideous in some way and actually advertise things I'm interested in will, in my eyes, revolutanize the online world.
I know I had the same exact thought when I read the story blip from slashdot's main page. We're scanning for gas giants (seti aside) and all we find are gas giants. Therefore there are no earth sized planets?!?
I think this is what the term "asshat" was designed for.
My asnwer is that we wouldn't get along with another civilization at all. But we would get along with each other a lot better all of the sudden.
Countries wage war on each other until they see some new enemy, then they ally against the larger foe. It isn't this clear cut, but I see definite clues of this throughout history.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to get more information about these worlds before I die. Also, I'd like to know if I would really get my own planet if I went "Full Mormon" so I can prepare accordingly.
I was expecting more tentacles. Seamonster = Tentacles
Chromebooks will be HUGE in K-12 education in the next year. Over the past year chromebooks were hard to acquire and I had to resort to ordering them in batches of 5s and 10s from various suppliers as they were backordered. The supply problem seems to be resolved as of about February and my district will be purchasing hundreds of them after July 1. Other districts in my area are as well, in total I am aware of about 4,000 chromebooks that will be purchased this Summer. More importantly I see K-12 student computer use trending in this direction. The support costs for a device like this are minimal and for most students these limited devices are sufficient.
Most /. readers had an ant farm as a kid and loved it.
Keeping a beehive is a natural extension of that love.
A glass walled beehive in your house is an unnatural extension of that love but it is damn cool.
I love this idea and it does work when done correctly. Imagine the ant farm you had as a kid. Now replace the ants with bees. Now make it so the whole thing doesn't die after a month. That's what you have when this is done correctly!
Like many slashdotters (apparently) I am a beekeeper. I go a step closer to this particular type of insanity though in that I construct hives similar to what this article features. Well, actually not that similar because mine actually work and this one is wrong in more than a few ways. I've constructed a few that didn't work and I've made some that do work and from my failures I can tell you that the following things are wrong with this design:
1) The hive is stationary and it is inside of your house.
Expecting the caretaker to work on the hive inside of their house is a bad idea. For this to work the hive must have the ability to be taken outside
2) Releasing calming smoke into the hive.
This is just a bad idea. In a hive as small as this smoke does little good and releasing smoke in the wrong area of the hive actually has the opposite effect.
3) Pull a cord to collect honey.
I could see this working actually, the queen will only lay eggs in cells with specific properties so having a spring or something with a cord attached to it could allow a pull of that cord to release honey to drip down. Unfortunately that drip would be covered in bees attempting to repair the damage within seconds. The larger problem is that the few cells that were damaged to retrieve this honey would not be immediately filled, it would take a few weeks to be able to pull the cord again to get honey.
5) Allow in orange light so the bees can see.
What? Seriously? The bees prefer a dark hive, no light. They communicate by scent and touch. Tinted glass allows us to see the bees, not allowing the bees to see each other. The glass isn't a problem though, bees do fine in a glass hive as long as they are not in direct sunlight and they can still find their way out of the hive by walking towards the brightest source of light they can see.
There are more problems but I can forgive the rest because this is an artistic representation of a sexy design. An observation hive in your house is great and it works well with little maintenance when done correctly and this hive may convince some to give it a try.
If I'm forced to make my electric vehicle loud I will do two things:
1) Play some ANNOYING sound VERY LOUD
2) Add a message which reads "Don't like what you hear? Repeal the ‘Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2010’."
I bike or walk whenever I can, I detest the vehicle noise my city is drowning in.
I have three Langstroth hives that I don't use foundation in. This gives the natural (vairable) cell size which I believe is beneficial. These are also some of the hives I don't treat for Varroa in since I produce treatment free honey in addition to regular honey. I think this is my last year going completely without foundation, even though I start a box with a few drawn frames as guides it takes longer for them to be filled with usable comb. I've noticed that when conditions aren't perfect the bees will still draw new comb from foundation but they will only draw new foundation when they have a strong nectar flow or they are from a recent swarm.
As a practical beekeeper I feel it is my duty to take this one step further and speculate on how to apply this finding to saving my bees. Virus transmission should be kept to a minimum, I can't think of much else to do to keep a virus like this in check. The primary vector for honeybee viruses is the varroa mite and this pest continues to be the primary killer of honeybees despite all of the hubub about this "Colony Collapse Disorder". Finding that this mite has a hand in CCD is no surprise to me. Nosema is not new to the beekeeping world although N. ceranae is a bigger problem than the tamer N. apis that we're used to dealing with. The treatment is the same though, feed Fumidil B. The bad news is that there isn't much new here so there won't be a silver bullet cure. Keep the bees healthy as best we can, that's about all I can see here.
Farewell Starcraft II, we had a good run but my heart now lies with Civilization V.
I agree that Billy Mitchell seemed like a villain in the movie. Without a villain there aren't heroes though, and without Billy Mitchell there wouldn't be a "King of Kong" and hardly anyone would care who holds the high score in a game from 1981. Where would professional wrestling be without guys like Billy Mitchell? I don't know, but no one would care.
Although I wouldn't mind seeing more of those ladies I am referring the counter-protests. You know that local church that goes out wielding graphic "pro-life" carnage on their stick-signs? They deserve a counter-protest.
Exactly what I was thinking, good thing I did a search for a few words before just posting on my own.
Many years ago females in "IT" were super-duper rare. Recently this has changed to be only rare. Being a recent change, this means that when a company cuts employees they are cutting the part that has the female population.
And I agree, in general women have better empathy and such and I prefer a manager have more of these qualities than technical expertiese. Both are great.
And, it should be noted, that when dealing with IT-boys women tend to get more favors. For better or worse I've seen it in many places.
I still use my Palm V, and it is definitely over 5 years old. What they need to do to boost sales is make ones that break (cellphones) or force the software to demand new technology (computers). Untill one of those happens, I'll stick with my Palm V.
Just wanted to throw in my .02, I think this same thing. Any ad that is of the old variety, flashing punch monkey or "FREE IPOD!!!!!" I striaght up ignore because they are so cheap and low-grade that it is probably a scam.
If an ad is well done (like the ones on slashdot) or if it is from Google (who I trust) I'm a lot more likely to click on it.
I can see how a colony of honeybees could survuve a few years of absolute darkness. We all should know how they store a lot of honey, but they have many other behaviors that help them last through adverse conditions. Apart from the queen, any bee will give its life to protect the hive. No help stoping years of darkness here, though.
Bees eat more than nectar, they also eat polen and when both are scarce bees have been known to eat many, many other things to include other insects and assorted decaying plant matter.
Also, a colony of bees has an intellect that is much more than the sum of the bee minds it contains. Like ants, science isn't quite sure how the bees communicate (pheremones of some sorts) but the end effect is that they can guide many others to far away flowers, organize a defense of the hive, keep the hive core temperature habitable from 40 below (F) to 120+ (F), neglecting un-needed bees to death in times of drought, and a lot more.
So, I can see a large hive with a lot of stored food seeing the sun go away and not come back doing some things like killing/not feeding the majority of the hive, the surviviors eating what they can find, and the queen surviving years of hell to create a new colony when the conditions allow for it.
Much like the Bush administration, large corporations tend to ignore facts and instead create their own "phacts" that look much nicer.
If the Economist shows enough people that it isn't the internet boogeyman, the RIAA will show that it is phactually the internet gremlin. And the power of a Phact is relative to how much $$$ its backers have, easily overpowering simple facts with a little advertising. Or a lot.
If you don't use separators the number 10000000 becomes mysterious, and adding a $ to the front makes it frighteneing. $10.000.000 is much easier to recognize.
Either a "," or "." separator solves this problem.
However, when you see 10.234 this could be two very different numbers under the "." system. You can guess using context, but guessing could be very bad.
BR Give me my $10,000,000 and 10,234 any day, I know what they mean and even if you don't know my system you know what they mean as well.
You may not be aware, but using a "," as a separator gives you numers like "12,345,678.89". Not ambiguous at all.
A simple example against the "." separator:
There are 10.234 ppm of asbestos in your air at work.
If you are using the "," and "." system you know that this means about ten. If you are used to seeing numbers like "12.345.678.89" you have no way of knowing if you have 10 or 10000.
Because no matter how well you educate a population, some percentage of said population is just plain stupid.
These are the people that sue McDonalds for not warning them that the coffee is hot, or for not warning their children not to eat the styrofoam box the pancakes came in.
Call me what you will, but I think these people deserve what they get.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this guy was telling a tale when I read the story.
The chance that his car was terribly malfunctioning are much smaller than the chance that he wanted to go fast and get away with it.
Isn't it a little suspicious that he stopped just in time when the toll booth was coming up?
I agree with all of Slashdotia when I say that Fox News is conservative. If any of you think that the Daily Show isn't biased, you are wrong.
Yes, the show pokes fun at everything that is news, but not in a fair and balanced way. I love the Daily Show to death and it is my primary source of TV news (Internet is #1) but you must realize that the news is presented with a bias towards humor, and a minor bias towards the left.
Would I change it if I had the power? No. The Daily Show is near comedy perfection, but it is not fair and balanced.
I seem to be in the minority here, but I think there is still plenty of content for SF. I agree that too much has been about over-officification of humanity or offending ET, but there is plenty that can be done.
What we need to do is overturn Star Trek. Trek was great, but it has lost appeal after too many failed attempts. What needs to be done is to write a new future for humantiy using different technologies, since we have a clearer view of what they might be. No more dilithium crystals or tachyon mystery particles.
The best example of this that I know of is the Alterntiy RPG from WotC, which I can't find a good link to for the life of me. Just Alternity.net. Alternity is a favorite of mine that never had the popularity it deserved. If SF took this route I see its future renewed.
We need a new future!
The problem with online advertising in its current state is that we, the consumer, do not want or like it.
We do like google. And when google started running little text link adds off to the right, I said "Way to go, google, now you can mage something for all your hard work." A lesser company might have sold "preferred listing" links *COUGH* YAHOO *COUGH* but Google remained honest and our friends.
And now, I see that google's little text links are actually usefull to me. I'm searching for airfare, and google suggests that I try an online airfare that I hadn't tried before. I do and I get a good price! And that place gets my business, and Google gets a few millicents for my click.
As long as google can remain my friend, I hope they do take over all of online advertising. Adds that arent' hideous in some way and actually advertise things I'm interested in will, in my eyes, revolutanize the online world.
Way to go Google.
I know I had the same exact thought when I read the story blip from slashdot's main page. We're scanning for gas giants (seti aside) and all we find are gas giants. Therefore there are no earth sized planets?!?
I think this is what the term "asshat" was designed for.
My asnwer is that we wouldn't get along with another civilization at all. But we would get along with each other a lot better all of the sudden.
Countries wage war on each other until they see some new enemy, then they ally against the larger foe. It isn't this clear cut, but I see definite clues of this throughout history.