Disclaimer: I'm one of those 6-cups-a-day men, and 99.9999% of it is regular... but I will say that it's nearly impossible to tell good decaf from the regular kind. Home roasted decaf beans: fine. Sanka: not so much.
Well, I suppose to the extent that your run of the mill burglar is going to have the tech smarts to crack your light bulb network, this is an issue (which is to say, not that big an issue). But that's not how I interpreted the first post in this series, which seemed to indicate that your favorite flavor of The Man was going to use networked lightbulbs to keep you under surveillance. And I still don't understand that one. I can't imagine why, say, the NSA would care about when I turn on my laundry room light - what would that tell them? And for my part, I wouldn't really care if they did know. As to the "grow op" issue - they can already tell that just from my whole house lighting bill. And even if they couldn't, I'm guessing that anyone intent on hiding a grow up could probably come up with internet-free light bulbs.
Really, which is more likely? 1) there's a giant world-government conspiracy to discredit Anonymous (which, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty small potatoes)? or 2) a group of semi-antisocial types turned their anti-sociability on each other?
Whereas Mars, on the other hand, is totally cheap to colonize! Dude, here's a hint: it's ALL about economics. If money were truly no object, we could colonize Mars right now. The trouble is that it would be insanely expensive and there's no conceivable (economic) payoff.
The fact that the planet's situation in orbit is consistent with the existence of liquid water does not mean that any liquid water actually exists there. The place could be bone dry. There may not be a CO2 atmosphere, so it might be too cold for liquid water after all.
We can't, to my knowledge, actually tell whether this planet has liquid water or not. This is all just a very small step above wild speculation at this point.
Imagine having a game that control the lights in the room.
Or gte a notice on your phone when an motion sensitive light turns on?
Or not. In which case don't buy them.
Thanks, I won't. Seriously, that's the big draw? Games that can turn your lights on and off? And dude, I have motion sensitive lights at my place - if the light started texting me every time it turned on I'd be shutting that feature off in about 1 second.
Where does the surveillance part come in? Unless the light is fitted with some kind of sensor (microphone, camera, or whatever), it would seem that the absolute most anyone could find out would be whether the light's on or not - which doesn't seem all that interesting. And even that would require someone crack your light bulb (so to speak).
For one thing, I almost never need bulb-by-bulb (or fixture-by-fixture) control of lighting. The few exceptions to the rule are pretty easily solved by... wait for it... a switch on the fixture itself (for reading lights or whatever). The only thing being able to do this buys you is the ability to remotely control your lights, and the only use I can see for that is to check whether you turned off all your lights after you've left your house.
The bottom line is that I don't consider this all that compelling of a feature. Not absolutely useless, but it would have to be just about free or I wouldn't buy it.
On the right, you have various GOP governors threatening to secede from the United States over the issue of health care regulation (seriously!), GOP presidential candidates accusing the president of wanting to impose sharia AND atheism, and socialism AND fascism... at the same time, more high GOP officials insisting that talking to your doctor about end of life planning == death panels... I could go on and on.
And on the left, you have... what, exactly, that could compare to this? I really get sick of the false equivalency thing.
I'm not going to Facebook to have political debates, and people who use their FB status to do a lot of political diatribes will mostly find themselves defriended.
I read a number of "liberal" blogs, and you'd be surprised at the number of conservative types who show up in the comments section. Of course, some are simply trolls, but many actually post topics that have some thought behind them. I really think this whole topic is greatly exaggerated.
This is what I don't understand - how would Google even know what opinions to confirm? I have rather distinct political opinions, but I'm not sure how you'd pick them out from my search terms. And in practice, they don't seem to be doing anything of the sort - I just googled up "global warming" and on the first page were hits from both Fox News and NPR (you can guess the tone of the coverage at each).
This idea that people are being trapped in so-called "filter bubbles" is not new - these days it's the most banal of conventional wisdom. And for all that, it's not even right: mostly what left and right wing blogs (at least) seem to do is read each other, then make fun of the latest intellectual atrocity from the other side. So the idea that people are not even being exposed ideas they don't agree with is kind of silly.
I'm also not aware that Google is filtering my searches based on its interpretation of my political beliefs - at least, if it is, it's not apparent - when I search for any political topic I seem to get several different perspectives on it (unless the two sides are using different terminology to refer to the same thing - then you get what you asked for). I do notice that I can do local search, searches that exclude all but my preferred language, searches that filter "naughty" sites... but I don't seem to be able to search for just the Democratic, Green, Tory, Republican, etc... perspective. So I'm not sure what the TED speaker is even talking about.
Even if this turns out to work in real life, the amount of sugar used to accompany antibiotics would be dwarfed by, say, world-wide production of Coca-Cola alone. And of course that's only one current use of sugar. This use wouldn't amount to a drop in the bucket by comparison.
Actually, several sorts of bacteria (notably including those responsible for tooth decay), are attracted to xylitol, will attempt to eat it, and and then starve.
Yes, I get the joke, but the usual disclaimer for these kind of results applies: did this work in vivo or just in the test tube? The abstract shows one experiment done in vivo: they introduced infected catheters into mice, then treated the mice with 1) nothing, 2) antibiotic, and 3) antibiotic plus mannitol (a sugar alcohol). Option 3) killed substantial amounts of bad bacteria, while the others did not. So that's good. But... they used kind of a lot of mannitol - 1.5 g/kg - which would be the equivalent of a couple of ounces (twice daily) for a typical human. That might be tough to swallow (so to speak).
More buts: all of these results seemed to apply to biofilms, and although controlling the growth of biofilms is important, infecting bacteria are most likely not in the form of biofilms after they've invaded the body. And it's unclear to me whether any of the other experiments were done in vivo. Also, if the presence of sugar at the infection site is key to getting this to work, that might be problematic - mammal bodies keep blood sugar concentration on fairly tight control, no matter how many spoonfuls of sugar you eat, so it might be tough to produce the sugar concentration you need at the infection site.
Bottom line: sounds like interesting, promising research. But bear in mind that it's not ready for prime time now, and might not ever be.
I was going to object that there are limits to the amount of cash you can conveniently use ($10k transaction limits before attracting attention, etc)... but then again, BitCoin has similar problems (scarcity, lack of secure options for storage, etc). Really, what is the advantage of BitCoin over plain old cash?
It seems that I should have directed my ire against those bitching that postage keeps going up. Congress is still at fault, though - they do simultaneously threaten the USPS not to let postage go up, and prevent them from closing down unprofitable services. But thanks for the correction - that's an important point.
Not sure I'm getting the point. Neutrino beams, as you say, are a bitch to generate, and just as much a bitch to detect/demodulate (because of the non-interacting-with-matter thing). So why would anyone use them to communicate, when EM based comms are easy?
I'm a hiring manager in the defense industry, and I end up needing to hire a bunch of former enlisted guys/girls to do engineering & technology work on these systems. Most of the work involves writing analyses, and most of the candidates don't have bachelor's degrees. When making hiring decisions, I need to have some level of comfort that not only does this person understand the system involved, but also can write up the findings. I can be reasonably sure that someone with an AA/AS has at least taken English 101, and therefore has turned in at least acceptable papers. So for me it's a discriminator.
I don't think it's the case that, as a society, we have no use whatsoever for English, history, philosophy, etc, PhDs. Those subjects are interesting, and someone ought to be researching, studying, and (last but not least) teaching them. But I think the trouble is that we grind out way, way too many of them - more than could ever possibly be employed in the field. This is nothing more than ripping off the students in question, and leads to the phenomenon you describe - increasingly esoteric areas of "research". After all, these PhD candidates have to write a dissertation about SOMETHING... and practically every conceivable question has already been addressed.
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Disclaimer: I'm one of those 6-cups-a-day men, and 99.9999% of it is regular... but I will say that it's nearly impossible to tell good decaf from the regular kind. Home roasted decaf beans: fine. Sanka: not so much.
Well, I suppose to the extent that your run of the mill burglar is going to have the tech smarts to crack your light bulb network, this is an issue (which is to say, not that big an issue). But that's not how I interpreted the first post in this series, which seemed to indicate that your favorite flavor of The Man was going to use networked lightbulbs to keep you under surveillance. And I still don't understand that one. I can't imagine why, say, the NSA would care about when I turn on my laundry room light - what would that tell them? And for my part, I wouldn't really care if they did know. As to the "grow op" issue - they can already tell that just from my whole house lighting bill. And even if they couldn't, I'm guessing that anyone intent on hiding a grow up could probably come up with internet-free light bulbs.
Really, which is more likely? 1) there's a giant world-government conspiracy to discredit Anonymous (which, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty small potatoes)? or 2) a group of semi-antisocial types turned their anti-sociability on each other?
I know which one I find easier to believe.
Whereas Mars, on the other hand, is totally cheap to colonize! Dude, here's a hint: it's ALL about economics. If money were truly no object, we could colonize Mars right now. The trouble is that it would be insanely expensive and there's no conceivable (economic) payoff.
The fact that the planet's situation in orbit is consistent with the existence of liquid water does not mean that any liquid water actually exists there. The place could be bone dry. There may not be a CO2 atmosphere, so it might be too cold for liquid water after all.
We can't, to my knowledge, actually tell whether this planet has liquid water or not. This is all just a very small step above wild speculation at this point.
Thanks, I won't. Seriously, that's the big draw? Games that can turn your lights on and off? And dude, I have motion sensitive lights at my place - if the light started texting me every time it turned on I'd be shutting that feature off in about 1 second.
It's more or less the same reason we "needed" blu-ray, and we will be "needing" 3d TV.
What exactly do you need to look at during the operation in question?
Where does the surveillance part come in? Unless the light is fitted with some kind of sensor (microphone, camera, or whatever), it would seem that the absolute most anyone could find out would be whether the light's on or not - which doesn't seem all that interesting. And even that would require someone crack your light bulb (so to speak).
For one thing, I almost never need bulb-by-bulb (or fixture-by-fixture) control of lighting. The few exceptions to the rule are pretty easily solved by... wait for it... a switch on the fixture itself (for reading lights or whatever). The only thing being able to do this buys you is the ability to remotely control your lights, and the only use I can see for that is to check whether you turned off all your lights after you've left your house.
The bottom line is that I don't consider this all that compelling of a feature. Not absolutely useless, but it would have to be just about free or I wouldn't buy it.
Ok, I'll put in an envelope and mail it to you. Problem solved. Of course, that's not very secure, but then again... neither is BitCoin.
On the right, you have various GOP governors threatening to secede from the United States over the issue of health care regulation (seriously!), GOP presidential candidates accusing the president of wanting to impose sharia AND atheism, and socialism AND fascism... at the same time, more high GOP officials insisting that talking to your doctor about end of life planning == death panels... I could go on and on.
And on the left, you have... what, exactly, that could compare to this? I really get sick of the false equivalency thing.
I'm not going to Facebook to have political debates, and people who use their FB status to do a lot of political diatribes will mostly find themselves defriended.
I read a number of "liberal" blogs, and you'd be surprised at the number of conservative types who show up in the comments section. Of course, some are simply trolls, but many actually post topics that have some thought behind them. I really think this whole topic is greatly exaggerated.
This is what I don't understand - how would Google even know what opinions to confirm? I have rather distinct political opinions, but I'm not sure how you'd pick them out from my search terms. And in practice, they don't seem to be doing anything of the sort - I just googled up "global warming" and on the first page were hits from both Fox News and NPR (you can guess the tone of the coverage at each).
This idea that people are being trapped in so-called "filter bubbles" is not new - these days it's the most banal of conventional wisdom. And for all that, it's not even right: mostly what left and right wing blogs (at least) seem to do is read each other, then make fun of the latest intellectual atrocity from the other side. So the idea that people are not even being exposed ideas they don't agree with is kind of silly.
I'm also not aware that Google is filtering my searches based on its interpretation of my political beliefs - at least, if it is, it's not apparent - when I search for any political topic I seem to get several different perspectives on it (unless the two sides are using different terminology to refer to the same thing - then you get what you asked for). I do notice that I can do local search, searches that exclude all but my preferred language, searches that filter "naughty" sites... but I don't seem to be able to search for just the Democratic, Green, Tory, Republican, etc... perspective. So I'm not sure what the TED speaker is even talking about.
Even if this turns out to work in real life, the amount of sugar used to accompany antibiotics would be dwarfed by, say, world-wide production of Coca-Cola alone. And of course that's only one current use of sugar. This use wouldn't amount to a drop in the bucket by comparison.
Actually, several sorts of bacteria (notably including those responsible for tooth decay), are attracted to xylitol, will attempt to eat it, and and then starve.
If you read the abstract, one of the ingredients they used was mannitol, which isn't strictly speaking a sugar at all - it's a sugar alcohol.
Yes, I get the joke, but the usual disclaimer for these kind of results applies: did this work in vivo or just in the test tube? The abstract shows one experiment done in vivo: they introduced infected catheters into mice, then treated the mice with 1) nothing, 2) antibiotic, and 3) antibiotic plus mannitol (a sugar alcohol). Option 3) killed substantial amounts of bad bacteria, while the others did not. So that's good. But... they used kind of a lot of mannitol - 1.5 g/kg - which would be the equivalent of a couple of ounces (twice daily) for a typical human. That might be tough to swallow (so to speak).
More buts: all of these results seemed to apply to biofilms, and although controlling the growth of biofilms is important, infecting bacteria are most likely not in the form of biofilms after they've invaded the body. And it's unclear to me whether any of the other experiments were done in vivo. Also, if the presence of sugar at the infection site is key to getting this to work, that might be problematic - mammal bodies keep blood sugar concentration on fairly tight control, no matter how many spoonfuls of sugar you eat, so it might be tough to produce the sugar concentration you need at the infection site.
Bottom line: sounds like interesting, promising research. But bear in mind that it's not ready for prime time now, and might not ever be.
I was going to object that there are limits to the amount of cash you can conveniently use ($10k transaction limits before attracting attention, etc)... but then again, BitCoin has similar problems (scarcity, lack of secure options for storage, etc). Really, what is the advantage of BitCoin over plain old cash?
It seems that I should have directed my ire against those bitching that postage keeps going up. Congress is still at fault, though - they do simultaneously threaten the USPS not to let postage go up, and prevent them from closing down unprofitable services. But thanks for the correction - that's an important point.
Not sure I'm getting the point. Neutrino beams, as you say, are a bitch to generate, and just as much a bitch to detect/demodulate (because of the non-interacting-with-matter thing). So why would anyone use them to communicate, when EM based comms are easy?
I'm a hiring manager in the defense industry, and I end up needing to hire a bunch of former enlisted guys/girls to do engineering & technology work on these systems. Most of the work involves writing analyses, and most of the candidates don't have bachelor's degrees. When making hiring decisions, I need to have some level of comfort that not only does this person understand the system involved, but also can write up the findings. I can be reasonably sure that someone with an AA/AS has at least taken English 101, and therefore has turned in at least acceptable papers. So for me it's a discriminator.
I don't think it's the case that, as a society, we have no use whatsoever for English, history, philosophy, etc, PhDs. Those subjects are interesting, and someone ought to be researching, studying, and (last but not least) teaching them. But I think the trouble is that we grind out way, way too many of them - more than could ever possibly be employed in the field. This is nothing more than ripping off the students in question, and leads to the phenomenon you describe - increasingly esoteric areas of "research". After all, these PhD candidates have to write a dissertation about SOMETHING... and practically every conceivable question has already been addressed.