The bill is about moving to renewables for electrical generation, not for heating your home and your soup. At this time, I don't believe that gas furnaces, water heaters, and cooking appliances contribute a significant proportion of carbon emissions in the US.
At my university, we technically have access to a DOE supercomputer. I say "technically" because the actual facility is hundreds of miles away, they offer no consistent support for users, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to be cleared to even log in to the thing, all of which make it pretty hard to use, plus basically all of the problems you listed. When I had a project where I needed big RAM (~250GB), I spun up a virtual machine on Amazon and did my processing there. It cost me some money, but at least my work was getting done.
I don't believe that home-printed plastic zip guns are a threat anywhere outside of spy novels or Jack Bauer world. They are just not a thing we really need to worry about: there are so many problems with them, and so many alternatives, that they are not a likely effective attack vector.
They are likely to misfire or explode
Even when they work, they rarely work more than once
Even though they are printed from plastic, they still require metal parts (like the striker spring)
They may or may not trip a metal detector, but they will be perfectly visible in our baggage screening equipment today
They still require bullets, which are dense, metallic, and may carry residues that are detectable by swabbing
Buying a high-enough-quality 3D printer with feedstock to print a plastic zip gun costs more than just buying an inexpensive but reliable semi automatic pistol
Buy a gun at a gun store--most of our high-profile gun violence in this country is perpetrated by people who bought their guns legally
Buy a gun from a private party--no background check required
If terrorists wanted to smuggle guns onto an airplane, they could go to the bother of making a bunch of crappy zip guns, or they could just rely on the 95% failure rate of the TSA to even notice contraband in luggage and send a bunch of guys onto planes with store-bought pistols--at least some are likely to succeed
A person with knowledge and equipment for machining could produce a much higher-quality, more effective weapon
It's possible today to buy the pieces of a gun and assemble them yourself at home, with one part requiring some finishing on your part--making homemade guns even easier than 3D printed guns
Forget about making a homemade one-shot pistol, make bombs out of pressure cookers and dynamite, or pipes and gunpowder, or big trucks and fertilizer (NSA, please do not put me on a list for this, these are just things people have done)
I could keep adding to this list almost indefinitely
There are so many actual, real threats that we face in our country. Plastic zip guns are not one of them. We don't need to worry about banning them. People who make them will blow off their own fingers and realize it was a bad idea. Nobody else will care.
Where in the name of Zombie Feinman's ghost did you get that definition.
I typed the word 'pseudoscience' into Google. I thought that might be adequate for the forum we're in. It doesn't differ all that greatly from the definitions you provided.
Who modded that tripe up and have you taken your watered down snake oil today?
Given that I'm arguing against the existence of snake oil, it seems odd that I would also use it, myself. Carry on, though. Your outrage, though inexplicable, is at least colorful.
It sounds like an herbal tincture. I don't have any idea what the medicinal benefits of arnica montana are, but from a casual search, it sounds like there are proven effects. Creating a tincture by mixing the active part of a plant with alcohol can be a legitimate medicine. I'm not against using naturally occurring substances as medicine. We've seen that cannabis has medical effect for glaucoma and others, psilocybin shows promise for treating PTSD, Saint John's Wort has been shown in clinical trials to be a natural antidepressant, and there are certainly others that don't spring to mind.
I count those things as different from homeopathy because they are treatments that have been shown effective in clinical trials. I am not aware of any homeopathic "treatment" that has that distinction. Since most of those are basically (ideally sterile) water, there is no mechanism available to explain why they should work.
pseudoscience: a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method
There is nothing about homeopathy that can be construed as having anything at all to do with the scientific method. Homeopathy is pure fantasy. There's a difference between pseudoscience and magic.
If a crazy man in the park makes "potions" in discarded Coke bottles using his own bodily fluids as alchemical reagents and throws them on passersby to cure them of demonic posession, we wouldn't call that "pseudoscience." It's just batfuck madness. And, from the sound of this article, may be just about as sanitary as these homeopathic remedies.
If you're going to peddle water as phony medicine, you should at least have the decency to sterilize the water and the container before you push it on your marks. And filter the water, for that matter. If it's not bacterial contamination, it's metals or whatever leeches out of the pipes or storage areas.
I'm in favor of regulating the entire sector out of existence, unless we just want homeopathy to be a form of social Darwinism, but I feel like that's unfair to the children of the idiots who buy into this bullshit. They'd probably just go back to crystals and magnets, though.
her lawyer should have told her that the border agents have that authority...
Why? Who gave them that authority? Regardless of what border agents say, I don't believe they should be able to inspect my phone when I cross the border. I don't believe they should be able to operate in a 100-mile 'border zone' that they apparently invented themselves. We should challenge them on these things. We shouldn't just sit by while the creeping authoritarian police state takes over.
alleged that Oracle used software license audits and weakened existing maintenance programs to compel customers to buy the cloud products
I mean... isn't that just Oracle's usual business practice? Not just for cloud products, but for whatever product they're trying to push when they perform an "audit"?
We've been doing fire modeling for many years. It starts very simply, with the fire triangle: fuel, heat, and oxygen. Then we start adding in concepts more likely to affect wildfire. Heavy spring precipitation leads to more vegetation growth, and when followed by a dry, hot summer, creates a buildup of fuel. Topography is important because fire more readily spreads up a hill than down it. Add in weather data like wind patterns. Previously burned areas are less likely to burn right away because they're cleared of fuel. And so on. We add variables and test the model, gradually improving it over time.
These models are run all the time, and we're familiar with the results. It's a little bit odd to say that a fire simulation would have showed us that we need to widen paved areas or clear brush near buildings, though. Of course it's going to tell us that, because we designed the model with that information in the first place. When we model the risk of a building burning, one of the inputs to the model is the vegetation density near the building, and another is the clear area around the building. We put those in there because they are significant predictors of fire risk.
The problem isn't that people don't know there's fire risk. It's that they don't want to mitigate the risk because it will disturb the natural appearance or historic attributes of the site, or it will be time consuming and expensive, or despite risk assessments they don't take the possibility of fire seriously, or....
Interesting. I knew I could develop for ios (I think I need the $99 dev kit to do it, though?) and use an app I created myself, but I hadn't actually given much thought to whether or how someone else could use that app without going through the app store. I have an app idea in the back of my mind, but it's pretty far down on the list of things I should be doing...
Yeah, you're right. I'm pretty far behind on consoles these days -- my newest console is an Xbox 360. When I bought that, I think I got a few months of Xbox Live for free. But I was never tempted to pay for it once it expired. Again, I'm not the usual target audience, so it was easy to resist paying a monthly fee to have little kids swear at me and call me a faggot while I played games. But for most people, that's just part of having the console.
I know plenty of people who pay monthly fees for cable, netflix, hulu, hbo, high-priced cell service, Amazon Prime,... . I restrict myself to hbo, and only because I find that I use it frequently. People are totally down with paying monthly fees for things. I think most of them will just shrug their shoulders and pay if MS tells them there's now a monthly fee for Windows.
companies building walled garden appstores for their phones, and steam doing the same thing
I’m not a typical user, but I’m willing to put up with a walled garden on my iPad. I don’t think of it as a general purpose computer as much as an internet and email tablet. That won’t fly on my desktop, though. And I’m sure as hell not paying Microsoft a monthly fee just to be able to use my computer. That’s straying into the land of batshit crazy to me. I’ve not been a huge Linux evangelist (because I’ve had my share of problems with it that the typical windows user would be completely at sea with), but I’d be happy to recommend it to my friends in lieu of them having to pay $10 a month or whatever to MS.
The entire point of "prime day",... is to test out their infrastructure.
Interesting, and that makes sense. I was thinking about it the other day. I've never bought anything from Amazon on Prime Day, mainly because every time I look at the sale items, they seem to be a bunch of junk that I have no interest in or need for. I'd started to think of it as a typical "clearance" sale, that they were trying to make space in the warehouse (for upcoming Xmas) by ditching their leftover junk at low prices.
I'm a Prime customer, and I usually choose that option at checkout, unless there's something that I'm in a big hurry for. I had been picking it to cut down on cardboard waste, without considering the environmental overhead for transportation. I live in a town where most of the items I order on Amazon are not readily available, so I could make a 180 mile round trip to the nearest city and buy stuff, or I could order it on line.
I notice that they seemed to perform a lot of tests in this study, and I didn't catch any mention of adjustment for multiple comparisons. And a couple of the significant results are significant by a tiny margin, so something like a Bonferroni correction could render all or most of the results insignificant.
I worked in a place where the whole codebase was PHP, partially as a result of the web site being done in Drupal. I'm aware of many problems with PHP, but my approach there was to continue to develop with it because of the existing codebase and institutional expertise.
A new guy came in who was big on Python, and immediately started implementing server-side Python stuff. I warned that there may be difficulty integrating the Python and PHP services, but the new guy thought I was just an old who wanted to keep doing the old and busted thing because it's all I knew.
The boss didn't nip it in the bud early enough, and I wound up having to write code to share session information between the PHP and Python services. It was a kludge, but it worked. It would have been seamless if we'd kept working within the same language we'd started in, or if we'd undertaken to port the existing code to Python. Oh, and then the new guy quit and left us with this two-language system that few of the other employees could easily maintain.
Point is, I agree that there's more to consider than what is the "better" programming language.
The effects are small, but apparently significant in a 95% CI. They are clear about not knowing the cause.
They did the study with two groups of young people, one a couple of years later than the other. The later group showed lower performance almost across the board. Their study conclusion is based upon the aggregate of both groups. My question is, what if they split the groups out and showed test performance for each? I wonder if what they've measured is only significant because of the performance of the later group of students?
I was working on a project with a guy who loved to over-engineer things. At one point, we wanted the ability to share XML documents between sites by advertising them and allowing remote sites to download them on their own schedule. He spent the evening in his hotel room drawing up a complex client-server system with an elaborate API. When we met the next morning, I said, "Why don't we just do it with RSS?" And over the next half hour we verified that RSS did everything we wanted it to, already has developed tools and APIs, and is super simple. We stood up that system in more or less its current state the Monday after we got back from the meeting. RSS FTW.
In my previous job, we had no problem with outdated technology holding us back. In fact, we leased server hardware and had it replaced at the recommended interval, we had a petabyte disk array, virtualization, and even a mobile telepresence device (not heavily used). We had plenty of tech. What the bosses wouldn't do is hire more people. They were convinced that the solution to any problem was throwing more gigahertz and terabytes at it. But the hard problems we needed to address weren't technological in nature, they were human problems. Last I heard, the department was crumbling and their software solution retired in shambles. But people are expensive, and you have to keep paying them to keep them.
In the place I work now, they've been collecting client usage data for 10 years, but they've never organized or analyzed it. That's what I'm doing there, but again, the barrier to this wasn't technological in nature, it was just that it was never anyone's job to do it.
When you decide to throw away your $4,000 computer to solve your Windows glitch, can I have it? I'll actually come to your house and pick it up, if you live in North America.
I used to have curbside recycling service. I'd separate my recyclables and put them in paper bags in a bin, and someone would come haul them off. Then we went 'single stream' and for some reason I can't have curbside service anymore. Annoying, but whatever.
So I bring it to the recycling center myself. I used to put my #1 plastic in one bin, #2 in another, and so on. The number is printed on the item, so it's easy. But then there were opaque rules about certain kinds of #1 in this bin and other kinds in that, the formerly #2 bin now just says 'milk jugs' so I guess they don't take other kinds of #2? And now they've gotten to the point where most of it goes in one big bin which I assume just gets dumped somewhere.
They used to make us separate brown, green, and clear glass, but it turned out that all they do with it is crush it into little bits and bury it in a big pit in the landfill, so why bother sorting by color?
The thing that's really discouraging to me is that I'm perfectly willing to participate in a recycling system by putting forth some effort to rinse, sort, and even transport my trash, but why should I even bother with all of this if the 'recycling center' is just an unnecessarily elaborate front-end for the dump?
Slashdot Mirror
The bill is about moving to renewables for electrical generation, not for heating your home and your soup. At this time, I don't believe that gas furnaces, water heaters, and cooking appliances contribute a significant proportion of carbon emissions in the US.
At my university, we technically have access to a DOE supercomputer. I say "technically" because the actual facility is hundreds of miles away, they offer no consistent support for users, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to be cleared to even log in to the thing, all of which make it pretty hard to use, plus basically all of the problems you listed. When I had a project where I needed big RAM (~250GB), I spun up a virtual machine on Amazon and did my processing there. It cost me some money, but at least my work was getting done.
There are so many actual, real threats that we face in our country. Plastic zip guns are not one of them. We don't need to worry about banning them. People who make them will blow off their own fingers and realize it was a bad idea. Nobody else will care.
I typed the word 'pseudoscience' into Google. I thought that might be adequate for the forum we're in. It doesn't differ all that greatly from the definitions you provided.
Given that I'm arguing against the existence of snake oil, it seems odd that I would also use it, myself. Carry on, though. Your outrage, though inexplicable, is at least colorful.
I try to live by that phrase, but I keep forgetting it. I refuse to memorize it because I can always look it up in a book of quotations.
You're right. A strange person's random bodily fluids do have a better chance of evoking a result. Perhaps this is an idea for a new business...
It sounds like an herbal tincture. I don't have any idea what the medicinal benefits of arnica montana are, but from a casual search, it sounds like there are proven effects. Creating a tincture by mixing the active part of a plant with alcohol can be a legitimate medicine. I'm not against using naturally occurring substances as medicine. We've seen that cannabis has medical effect for glaucoma and others, psilocybin shows promise for treating PTSD, Saint John's Wort has been shown in clinical trials to be a natural antidepressant, and there are certainly others that don't spring to mind.
I count those things as different from homeopathy because they are treatments that have been shown effective in clinical trials. I am not aware of any homeopathic "treatment" that has that distinction. Since most of those are basically (ideally sterile) water, there is no mechanism available to explain why they should work.
Okay, here is the definition:
There is nothing about homeopathy that can be construed as having anything at all to do with the scientific method. Homeopathy is pure fantasy. There's a difference between pseudoscience and magic.
If a crazy man in the park makes "potions" in discarded Coke bottles using his own bodily fluids as alchemical reagents and throws them on passersby to cure them of demonic posession, we wouldn't call that "pseudoscience." It's just batfuck madness. And, from the sound of this article, may be just about as sanitary as these homeopathic remedies.
If you're going to peddle water as phony medicine, you should at least have the decency to sterilize the water and the container before you push it on your marks. And filter the water, for that matter. If it's not bacterial contamination, it's metals or whatever leeches out of the pipes or storage areas.
I'm in favor of regulating the entire sector out of existence, unless we just want homeopathy to be a form of social Darwinism, but I feel like that's unfair to the children of the idiots who buy into this bullshit. They'd probably just go back to crystals and magnets, though.
Why? Who gave them that authority? Regardless of what border agents say, I don't believe they should be able to inspect my phone when I cross the border. I don't believe they should be able to operate in a 100-mile 'border zone' that they apparently invented themselves. We should challenge them on these things. We shouldn't just sit by while the creeping authoritarian police state takes over.
I mean... isn't that just Oracle's usual business practice? Not just for cloud products, but for whatever product they're trying to push when they perform an "audit"?
We've been doing fire modeling for many years. It starts very simply, with the fire triangle: fuel, heat, and oxygen. Then we start adding in concepts more likely to affect wildfire. Heavy spring precipitation leads to more vegetation growth, and when followed by a dry, hot summer, creates a buildup of fuel. Topography is important because fire more readily spreads up a hill than down it. Add in weather data like wind patterns. Previously burned areas are less likely to burn right away because they're cleared of fuel. And so on. We add variables and test the model, gradually improving it over time.
These models are run all the time, and we're familiar with the results. It's a little bit odd to say that a fire simulation would have showed us that we need to widen paved areas or clear brush near buildings, though. Of course it's going to tell us that, because we designed the model with that information in the first place. When we model the risk of a building burning, one of the inputs to the model is the vegetation density near the building, and another is the clear area around the building. We put those in there because they are significant predictors of fire risk.
The problem isn't that people don't know there's fire risk. It's that they don't want to mitigate the risk because it will disturb the natural appearance or historic attributes of the site, or it will be time consuming and expensive, or despite risk assessments they don't take the possibility of fire seriously, or ... .
Interesting. I knew I could develop for ios (I think I need the $99 dev kit to do it, though?) and use an app I created myself, but I hadn't actually given much thought to whether or how someone else could use that app without going through the app store. I have an app idea in the back of my mind, but it's pretty far down on the list of things I should be doing...
Yeah, you're right. I'm pretty far behind on consoles these days -- my newest console is an Xbox 360. When I bought that, I think I got a few months of Xbox Live for free. But I was never tempted to pay for it once it expired. Again, I'm not the usual target audience, so it was easy to resist paying a monthly fee to have little kids swear at me and call me a faggot while I played games. But for most people, that's just part of having the console.
I know plenty of people who pay monthly fees for cable, netflix, hulu, hbo, high-priced cell service, Amazon Prime, ... . I restrict myself to hbo, and only because I find that I use it frequently. People are totally down with paying monthly fees for things. I think most of them will just shrug their shoulders and pay if MS tells them there's now a monthly fee for Windows.
I’m not a typical user, but I’m willing to put up with a walled garden on my iPad. I don’t think of it as a general purpose computer as much as an internet and email tablet. That won’t fly on my desktop, though. And I’m sure as hell not paying Microsoft a monthly fee just to be able to use my computer. That’s straying into the land of batshit crazy to me. I’ve not been a huge Linux evangelist (because I’ve had my share of problems with it that the typical windows user would be completely at sea with), but I’d be happy to recommend it to my friends in lieu of them having to pay $10 a month or whatever to MS.
Interesting, and that makes sense. I was thinking about it the other day. I've never bought anything from Amazon on Prime Day, mainly because every time I look at the sale items, they seem to be a bunch of junk that I have no interest in or need for. I'd started to think of it as a typical "clearance" sale, that they were trying to make space in the warehouse (for upcoming Xmas) by ditching their leftover junk at low prices.
I'm a Prime customer, and I usually choose that option at checkout, unless there's something that I'm in a big hurry for. I had been picking it to cut down on cardboard waste, without considering the environmental overhead for transportation. I live in a town where most of the items I order on Amazon are not readily available, so I could make a 180 mile round trip to the nearest city and buy stuff, or I could order it on line.
I notice that they seemed to perform a lot of tests in this study, and I didn't catch any mention of adjustment for multiple comparisons. And a couple of the significant results are significant by a tiny margin, so something like a Bonferroni correction could render all or most of the results insignificant.
I worked in a place where the whole codebase was PHP, partially as a result of the web site being done in Drupal. I'm aware of many problems with PHP, but my approach there was to continue to develop with it because of the existing codebase and institutional expertise.
A new guy came in who was big on Python, and immediately started implementing server-side Python stuff. I warned that there may be difficulty integrating the Python and PHP services, but the new guy thought I was just an old who wanted to keep doing the old and busted thing because it's all I knew.
The boss didn't nip it in the bud early enough, and I wound up having to write code to share session information between the PHP and Python services. It was a kludge, but it worked. It would have been seamless if we'd kept working within the same language we'd started in, or if we'd undertaken to port the existing code to Python. Oh, and then the new guy quit and left us with this two-language system that few of the other employees could easily maintain.
Point is, I agree that there's more to consider than what is the "better" programming language.
Okay, here you go: https://www.swisstph.ch/filead...
The effects are small, but apparently significant in a 95% CI. They are clear about not knowing the cause.
They did the study with two groups of young people, one a couple of years later than the other. The later group showed lower performance almost across the board. Their study conclusion is based upon the aggregate of both groups. My question is, what if they split the groups out and showed test performance for each? I wonder if what they've measured is only significant because of the performance of the later group of students?
I was working on a project with a guy who loved to over-engineer things. At one point, we wanted the ability to share XML documents between sites by advertising them and allowing remote sites to download them on their own schedule. He spent the evening in his hotel room drawing up a complex client-server system with an elaborate API. When we met the next morning, I said, "Why don't we just do it with RSS?" And over the next half hour we verified that RSS did everything we wanted it to, already has developed tools and APIs, and is super simple. We stood up that system in more or less its current state the Monday after we got back from the meeting. RSS FTW.
In my previous job, we had no problem with outdated technology holding us back. In fact, we leased server hardware and had it replaced at the recommended interval, we had a petabyte disk array, virtualization, and even a mobile telepresence device (not heavily used). We had plenty of tech. What the bosses wouldn't do is hire more people. They were convinced that the solution to any problem was throwing more gigahertz and terabytes at it. But the hard problems we needed to address weren't technological in nature, they were human problems. Last I heard, the department was crumbling and their software solution retired in shambles. But people are expensive, and you have to keep paying them to keep them.
In the place I work now, they've been collecting client usage data for 10 years, but they've never organized or analyzed it. That's what I'm doing there, but again, the barrier to this wasn't technological in nature, it was just that it was never anyone's job to do it.
Really? What substance do they pour over the clips? And to what end? Do they pour a liquid, like coffee? Or a fluid-like solid, like sand?
I'm sorry. Pouring vs poring is one that really bugs me, for some reason.
When you decide to throw away your $4,000 computer to solve your Windows glitch, can I have it? I'll actually come to your house and pick it up, if you live in North America.
I used to have curbside recycling service. I'd separate my recyclables and put them in paper bags in a bin, and someone would come haul them off. Then we went 'single stream' and for some reason I can't have curbside service anymore. Annoying, but whatever.
So I bring it to the recycling center myself. I used to put my #1 plastic in one bin, #2 in another, and so on. The number is printed on the item, so it's easy. But then there were opaque rules about certain kinds of #1 in this bin and other kinds in that, the formerly #2 bin now just says 'milk jugs' so I guess they don't take other kinds of #2? And now they've gotten to the point where most of it goes in one big bin which I assume just gets dumped somewhere.
They used to make us separate brown, green, and clear glass, but it turned out that all they do with it is crush it into little bits and bury it in a big pit in the landfill, so why bother sorting by color?
The thing that's really discouraging to me is that I'm perfectly willing to participate in a recycling system by putting forth some effort to rinse, sort, and even transport my trash, but why should I even bother with all of this if the 'recycling center' is just an unnecessarily elaborate front-end for the dump?