You wouldn't think that if your son was one of the hundreds of deaths.
This is especially true given that it would barely cost anything to fix the problem. You'd have a small initial outlay to design new connectors, some expense to toss and replace existing ones (or not, you could conceivably phase this in as old systems wore out), and then... basically nothing, as it's hard to imagine the tubes would cost much more on an ongoing basis. You'd be saving some lives basically for free.
... and I can tell you that this approach - blaming the operator for mistakes - doesn't fly. Sure, nurses shouldn't make mistakes. But they do. Systems should be designed to make mistakes less likely. That's what we do in defense systems, it's what we do in aircraft control systems, and it should be what we do in medical systems.
Inflation is currently running more like about 1% per year, has been in that neighborhood for quite a while, and there's reason to believe that we could be entering a period of deflation. And your typical passbook savings is paying a fraction of a percent in interest. So, while there are still a lot of good reasons to keep money in the bank (if your house burns down, your cash is gone... but if your bank burns down, your money doesn't. FDIC insurance. Etc.), the rate of return vs. inflation isn't really one of them.
Because you can run iPad apps on it while someone else is using your other iPad. Likewise, people pay for a Time Capsule instead of a generic home wireless router because of features it offers.
Still not getting it. My router (as I'm sure is the case with most people) is tucked in a somewhat out of the way place because it needs to be connected to the cable modem, which needs to be connected to the wall. The only way I could use a touch screen on it is if I were standing next to my desk. I'm certainly not going to be able to sit down in the easy chair and use it because of the must-be-connected-to-the-wall thing.
In that case, I don't understand why I had never heard of WLANs prior to July 21, 1999, when Apple announced AirPort.
And it wasn't a big seller then, it's not a big seller now, and it's never been a big seller at any point in between, at least compared to the market leaders. So no matter when it was introduced, it's still quite a stretch to say that Apple "popularized" 802.11*.
Look, don't get me wrong, I own a Time Capsule and like it. But I really can't understand why I'd want one that was also an iPad (given that you can't walk around with it) and it's kind of silly to pretend that Apple was the driving force behind wireless networking, because it simply wasn't.
We're deliberately introducing errors into the time signal to avoid an unnoticeable difference between UTC and solar time, then forcing programmers to spend time and money coding around this. Why not just stop?
Isn't this like legislating that PI is 3.14 because some people have problems with the idea of irrational numbers?
The situation here is that we have a perfectly good time system that slowly gets out of sync with the rotation of the earth, because the rotation of the earth isn't constant. So we've legislated that the time system must be "fixed" because people have problems with the idea of this getting out of sync. That wouldn't be too bad in itself, but it 1) costs money to introduce the leap second (you have to figure out when to do it, make announcements, adjust your time sources, etc), 2) it costs more money to code around the change you introduced for no particular reason, and 3) it costs still more money to test all your changes. And you avoid... an unnoticeable change in your perception of time. It's crazy.
We adjust for solar time because UTC is an astronomical timescale
And the proposal is that it stop being an astronomical timescale. So?
The thing is that regardless of what UTC and TAI were MEANT to be for, in practice, people are using UTC as if it were TAI. And it's probably easier to change UTC than revise the entire Internet.
The proper solution is to make programmers aware of leap seconds. There are 86400 seconds in a normal day, however there is an additional second added once or twice a year to adjust for solar time.
and
We shouldn't remove fixes to the clock just because programmers are undereducated.
This is, quite frankly, nuts. We're taking a perfectly good, regular time system, deliberately introducing random error into it, and then forcing programmers to be able to realize this, code around it, and test the workarounds. All this costs money.
Or we could, you know, just stop doing that. UTC and solar time drift apart so slowly (a couple of seconds per decade) that it would be many, many years before the difference was bigger than the margin of error of the average timepiece, and probably hundreds of years before it became noticeable to actual humans. If it becomes a problem then, they can just add a leap minute. But deliberately screwing up your time system, and then forcing system designers to work around that? Dude, that's not a feature.
but the proposed solution (to let UTC drift farther and farther away from reality) sucks even harder.
The drift rate is so slow that everyone currently living will be long dead by the time this becomes noticeable, and if it's a problem far in the future, they can introduce a leap minute.
Option A is to introduce a totally unnecessary leap second into our time system, then force everyone to code around that and check all that code. Option B is to just not do it. Doing away with leap seconds saves money and effort, and there's literally no downside.
So the choices are 1) do leap seconds, which cost money to implement, introduce safety problems into various mission critical systems (which cost money to wring out), and have... no benefit whatsoever.
Or 2) don't bother with leap seconds. Then you won't have to do the work of introducing them, you won't have to code around them, you won't have to check the code you wrote to get around them, etc, etc... and there's no noticeable downside whatsover.
Sure, Win95 looks bad today - it certainly crashed a lot, for one thing. But there's no denying that it improved the lot of most ordinary computer users by leaps and bounds. It really was a tremendous advance over Win 3.x. Linux might have been better still, but the fact is that almost no one had even heard of Linux at the time, and in any case, Linux wasn't really in any kind of shape for the average user to handle in 1995.
The transition that really blew me away, though, was DOS - Windows 3.x. I was in grad school, and I was taking this Matlab-based course. At the time, you programmed Matlab by editing a script file with a text editor... which meant "edit.exe". I was going crazy - I kept having to start edit, amend my script, shut down edit, run Matlab, shut down Matlab, write up results in WordPerfect 5.1. Shut down WP, start edit, save, shut down edit, start Matlab... rinse, repeat. Then I read about this thing called Windows (3.1 had just rolled out)... you mean I can run all this stuff... at THE SAME TIME??? I ran to the bookstore.
Sure, Windows 3.x was sucky. But at the time, it was a godsend. The thing to remember is that things in retrospect look different than they did at the time.
Try as I might, I can't imagine why anyone would want something like this. For one thing, it's a given that your router is going to have to be physically plugged into something like a cable modem (or equivalent), so it's not like you can walk around with it. So why would anyone want to spend the money for a touch-screen interface when you could access & control the thing remotely via the web (or AirPort application)?
I wouldn't put a touch screen router beyond Apple, seeing as how Apple did popularize 802.11b with AirPort.
Now I know you can't be serious. 802.11b was popular way, way before Apple came out with the Airport. Apple never even captured that big a share of the wireless router market - I think they're currently ranked like fifth, behind Netgear, Linksys, Belkin, and D-link... and they've never really dominated the market.
Seriously, if this is supposed to be a joke or a troll or something, I'm just not getting it.
The environmental conditions in Africa are not all that different from those in South America, so when the Africanized bees came across, there was really nothing stopping them. But Earth and Mars are way more different than South America and Africa - enough so that Martian bacteria would probably struggle on earth (they'd almost certainly die from oxygen poisoning, for one thing). Think of it this way: we have a great number of bacteria on earth that are adapted to extremely tough conditions - hot springs, etc. So why haven't they taken over the earth? Because they're adapted to and REQUIRE those conditions. A bacterium that likes living in relatively dry, UV-irradiated soil in frigid temperatures and anoxic conditions is probably not going to fare so well, say, in a room temperature test tube with 20% O2 at STP.
I have Verizon FiOS service, and it's advertised to be 15 Mbps. I've checked it numerous times with Speedtest, and every time I check, I get... 15 Mbps. So they're not ALL "lying".
The abbreviation "tks" or "tnx" or simply "tu" for "thank you" was a telegraphic form that started with wire-based telegraphy and migrated into radio telegraphy and then into satellite communications and now it's made its way into cell phone texting.
To more precise, this is really more like convergent evolution than "making its way into" cell phone texting. It's not like today's cell phone texters looked back on their telegraphy experience and repurposed this technique. They reinvented it. Kind of a small point, but it's worth noting that the reason you keep seeing this kind of thing is because it's the obvious and natural thing to do when there's a non-insignificant amount of effort required to make each character.
... but that expression has been (uh, pardon the expression) absolutely SOP in the military since before I got in (mid-80's). I think it actually dates back to Vietnam.
Ok, it seems there are two possibilities here: it could be that being "confronted by the question of how they survived" is a rhetorical device leading up to just such a hypothesis, even if they didn't publish it in the article. Or maybe you're just a lot smarter than the "idiot" (who's a paleontology PhD) quoted here. Which do you think is more likely?
For one thing, even the (misleading) headline doesn't claim that life may have arisen twice. It asks the question whether sea life (in context, meaning multi-cellular sea-life such as sponges). And the headline and summary are, in fact misleading: the guy they're interviewing specifically says it's really unlikely sea animals evolved twice. Finally: read this article. Among the interesting bits of data: based on genomic analysis, it's 10^2860 (not a typo) more likely that all extant life forms had a single ancestor than that there were multiple ancestors.
So: if life really did arise twice, be more shocked. 10^2860 is a really, really big number.
That does leave the possibility that life arose, died off, then started up again... but bear in mind, our single-celled ancestors showed up in the oceans almost as soon as the oceans condensed. There wasn't really a lot of time for another, completely independent system of life to start up and then die off. Nor is it very likely that independent life forms were created after "our" kind of life took off - particularly once the atmosphere and oceans became oxygenated, conditions became very unfavorable for the kinds of processes thought to be responsible for the earliest proto-life. O2 was damned deadly to EXISTING life - its appearance in the atmosphere is thought to have killed off a whole bunch of species that couldn't adapt.
Dr. Maloof is now wondering if life might have arisen twice after the first attempt was quashed 635 million years ago: 'Since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how some relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the Snowball Earth.'
Doesn't sound like he's wondering to me - in fact, it sounds like he's pretty much ruled it out. WTF?
I read the article with increasing amazement the farther into it I got. Among the six reasons why OMG we'll all die if we can't keep flash:
#2: Flash is used for more than just video delivery. Then goes on to say, in effect: yeah, we also need it for flash-based web sites! Well, OK then. Pardon me if I stick with the Jobsian version of the internet.
#4: Flash: contains 87% more DRM than icky HTML 5.The snark just writes itself here!
#5: But but but... Flash advertisements.That's funny. I could have sworn this article was about why we should WANT Flash, not about why Adobe should burn in hell for 10,000 years.
The other three, while not quite as egregious, are still not exactly compelling arguments for why web users should be very, very sad if Flash dies. What the hell was the author thinking here?
... had a policy where the combo was changed every time someone with access rotated out of the organization, or every 90 days, whichever came first. So in practice, wear patterns on the keys wasn't an issue.
... I agree that the documents should have been released, one can hardly fault the Pentagon for refusing to go along with the redaction idea. The Pentagon considers these documents classified, and by law, they would have had to redact all the classified info. Since Wikileaks was obviously not going to go along with that (what would have been left to release?), there was no cooperation between them and the Pentagon.
Then why does the administration want Assange charged with all these violations? This information is either material or it isn't. If this material isn't "new or dangerous", then 1) why was it classified, and 2) why the big reaction?
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This is especially true given that it would barely cost anything to fix the problem. You'd have a small initial outlay to design new connectors, some expense to toss and replace existing ones (or not, you could conceivably phase this in as old systems wore out), and then... basically nothing, as it's hard to imagine the tubes would cost much more on an ongoing basis. You'd be saving some lives basically for free.
... and I can tell you that this approach - blaming the operator for mistakes - doesn't fly. Sure, nurses shouldn't make mistakes. But they do. Systems should be designed to make mistakes less likely. That's what we do in defense systems, it's what we do in aircraft control systems, and it should be what we do in medical systems.
Inflation is currently running more like about 1% per year, has been in that neighborhood for quite a while, and there's reason to believe that we could be entering a period of deflation. And your typical passbook savings is paying a fraction of a percent in interest. So, while there are still a lot of good reasons to keep money in the bank (if your house burns down, your cash is gone... but if your bank burns down, your money doesn't. FDIC insurance. Etc.), the rate of return vs. inflation isn't really one of them.
Still not getting it. My router (as I'm sure is the case with most people) is tucked in a somewhat out of the way place because it needs to be connected to the cable modem, which needs to be connected to the wall. The only way I could use a touch screen on it is if I were standing next to my desk. I'm certainly not going to be able to sit down in the easy chair and use it because of the must-be-connected-to-the-wall thing.
And it wasn't a big seller then, it's not a big seller now, and it's never been a big seller at any point in between, at least compared to the market leaders. So no matter when it was introduced, it's still quite a stretch to say that Apple "popularized" 802.11*.
Look, don't get me wrong, I own a Time Capsule and like it. But I really can't understand why I'd want one that was also an iPad (given that you can't walk around with it) and it's kind of silly to pretend that Apple was the driving force behind wireless networking, because it simply wasn't.
We're deliberately introducing errors into the time signal to avoid an unnoticeable difference between UTC and solar time, then forcing programmers to spend time and money coding around this. Why not just stop?
The situation here is that we have a perfectly good time system that slowly gets out of sync with the rotation of the earth, because the rotation of the earth isn't constant. So we've legislated that the time system must be "fixed" because people have problems with the idea of this getting out of sync. That wouldn't be too bad in itself, but it 1) costs money to introduce the leap second (you have to figure out when to do it, make announcements, adjust your time sources, etc), 2) it costs more money to code around the change you introduced for no particular reason, and 3) it costs still more money to test all your changes. And you avoid... an unnoticeable change in your perception of time. It's crazy.
And the proposal is that it stop being an astronomical timescale. So?
The thing is that regardless of what UTC and TAI were MEANT to be for, in practice, people are using UTC as if it were TAI. And it's probably easier to change UTC than revise the entire Internet.
and
This is, quite frankly, nuts. We're taking a perfectly good, regular time system, deliberately introducing random error into it, and then forcing programmers to be able to realize this, code around it, and test the workarounds. All this costs money.
Or we could, you know, just stop doing that. UTC and solar time drift apart so slowly (a couple of seconds per decade) that it would be many, many years before the difference was bigger than the margin of error of the average timepiece, and probably hundreds of years before it became noticeable to actual humans. If it becomes a problem then, they can just add a leap minute. But deliberately screwing up your time system, and then forcing system designers to work around that? Dude, that's not a feature.
The drift rate is so slow that everyone currently living will be long dead by the time this becomes noticeable, and if it's a problem far in the future, they can introduce a leap minute.
Option A is to introduce a totally unnecessary leap second into our time system, then force everyone to code around that and check all that code. Option B is to just not do it. Doing away with leap seconds saves money and effort, and there's literally no downside.
So the choices are 1) do leap seconds, which cost money to implement, introduce safety problems into various mission critical systems (which cost money to wring out), and have... no benefit whatsoever.
Or 2) don't bother with leap seconds. Then you won't have to do the work of introducing them, you won't have to code around them, you won't have to check the code you wrote to get around them, etc, etc... and there's no noticeable downside whatsover.
The choice seems pretty obvious to me.
Sure, Win95 looks bad today - it certainly crashed a lot, for one thing. But there's no denying that it improved the lot of most ordinary computer users by leaps and bounds. It really was a tremendous advance over Win 3.x. Linux might have been better still, but the fact is that almost no one had even heard of Linux at the time, and in any case, Linux wasn't really in any kind of shape for the average user to handle in 1995.
The transition that really blew me away, though, was DOS - Windows 3.x. I was in grad school, and I was taking this Matlab-based course. At the time, you programmed Matlab by editing a script file with a text editor... which meant "edit.exe". I was going crazy - I kept having to start edit, amend my script, shut down edit, run Matlab, shut down Matlab, write up results in WordPerfect 5.1. Shut down WP, start edit, save, shut down edit, start Matlab... rinse, repeat. Then I read about this thing called Windows (3.1 had just rolled out)... you mean I can run all this stuff... at THE SAME TIME??? I ran to the bookstore.
Sure, Windows 3.x was sucky. But at the time, it was a godsend. The thing to remember is that things in retrospect look different than they did at the time.
Try as I might, I can't imagine why anyone would want something like this. For one thing, it's a given that your router is going to have to be physically plugged into something like a cable modem (or equivalent), so it's not like you can walk around with it. So why would anyone want to spend the money for a touch-screen interface when you could access & control the thing remotely via the web (or AirPort application)?
Now I know you can't be serious. 802.11b was popular way, way before Apple came out with the Airport. Apple never even captured that big a share of the wireless router market - I think they're currently ranked like fifth, behind Netgear, Linksys, Belkin, and D-link... and they've never really dominated the market.
Seriously, if this is supposed to be a joke or a troll or something, I'm just not getting it.
The environmental conditions in Africa are not all that different from those in South America, so when the Africanized bees came across, there was really nothing stopping them. But Earth and Mars are way more different than South America and Africa - enough so that Martian bacteria would probably struggle on earth (they'd almost certainly die from oxygen poisoning, for one thing). Think of it this way: we have a great number of bacteria on earth that are adapted to extremely tough conditions - hot springs, etc. So why haven't they taken over the earth? Because they're adapted to and REQUIRE those conditions. A bacterium that likes living in relatively dry, UV-irradiated soil in frigid temperatures and anoxic conditions is probably not going to fare so well, say, in a room temperature test tube with 20% O2 at STP.
I have Verizon FiOS service, and it's advertised to be 15 Mbps. I've checked it numerous times with Speedtest, and every time I check, I get... 15 Mbps. So they're not ALL "lying".
To more precise, this is really more like convergent evolution than "making its way into" cell phone texting. It's not like today's cell phone texters looked back on their telegraphy experience and repurposed this technique. They reinvented it. Kind of a small point, but it's worth noting that the reason you keep seeing this kind of thing is because it's the obvious and natural thing to do when there's a non-insignificant amount of effort required to make each character.
... but that expression has been (uh, pardon the expression) absolutely SOP in the military since before I got in (mid-80's). I think it actually dates back to Vietnam.
Ok, it seems there are two possibilities here: it could be that being "confronted by the question of how they survived" is a rhetorical device leading up to just such a hypothesis, even if they didn't publish it in the article. Or maybe you're just a lot smarter than the "idiot" (who's a paleontology PhD) quoted here. Which do you think is more likely?
For one thing, even the (misleading) headline doesn't claim that life may have arisen twice. It asks the question whether sea life (in context, meaning multi-cellular sea-life such as sponges). And the headline and summary are, in fact misleading: the guy they're interviewing specifically says it's really unlikely sea animals evolved twice. Finally: read this article. Among the interesting bits of data: based on genomic analysis, it's 10^2860 (not a typo) more likely that all extant life forms had a single ancestor than that there were multiple ancestors.
So: if life really did arise twice, be more shocked. 10^2860 is a really, really big number.
That does leave the possibility that life arose, died off, then started up again... but bear in mind, our single-celled ancestors showed up in the oceans almost as soon as the oceans condensed. There wasn't really a lot of time for another, completely independent system of life to start up and then die off. Nor is it very likely that independent life forms were created after "our" kind of life took off - particularly once the atmosphere and oceans became oxygenated, conditions became very unfavorable for the kinds of processes thought to be responsible for the earliest proto-life. O2 was damned deadly to EXISTING life - its appearance in the atmosphere is thought to have killed off a whole bunch of species that couldn't adapt.
From TFS:
Doesn't sound like he's wondering to me - in fact, it sounds like he's pretty much ruled it out. WTF?
I read the article with increasing amazement the farther into it I got. Among the six reasons why OMG we'll all die if we can't keep flash:
The other three, while not quite as egregious, are still not exactly compelling arguments for why web users should be very, very sad if Flash dies. What the hell was the author thinking here?
... had a policy where the combo was changed every time someone with access rotated out of the organization, or every 90 days, whichever came first. So in practice, wear patterns on the keys wasn't an issue.
... I agree that the documents should have been released, one can hardly fault the Pentagon for refusing to go along with the redaction idea. The Pentagon considers these documents classified, and by law, they would have had to redact all the classified info. Since Wikileaks was obviously not going to go along with that (what would have been left to release?), there was no cooperation between them and the Pentagon.
Or every member of every Army that's ever gone to war against the US would be a traitor. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Then why does the administration want Assange charged with all these violations? This information is either material or it isn't. If this material isn't "new or dangerous", then 1) why was it classified, and 2) why the big reaction?