Nice use of euphemisms. You speak of "labor" as if it some mythical, fungible pixie dust instead of twenty two people with mortgages, car payments, food and diapers to buy...
Does that mean that once a person has been trained and hired, their employers (and ultimately, all of society) should be compelled to continue to employ them forever in the same line of work doing the same tasks, however useless or irrelevant those jobs might now be?
If a company performs a task one way, is it compelled to perform it in the same way with the same number of employees for the remainder of its existence? Is the automation only unethical for existing companies, or can a new competitor starting from scratch use new methods and techniques and drive the old assembly line out of business?
I think the point was more that if these people had had a map and known how to use it then it could have been a lifesaver. The big problem with the GPS units in these circumstances is users who don't know how to find alternate routes when their original planned path is impassible (or at least, ought to be recognized as such). Someone may know how to enter an origin and destination and follow the given directions, but may not know how to select an alternate route (using the software, or just by looking at the rest of the map on the device).
On the other hand, someone using a paper map almost certainly does have those basic navigation skills; you can't use a paper map at all without them.
Sorry if I sound unsympathetic... but really, who starts to drive through a large unpopulated expanse of land without at least making sure they have enough gas to make it across?
Sorry if I sound unsympathetic, but really, who posts a Slashdot comment without reading the article...oh, never mind.
The article doesn't mention anyone running out of fuel. It talks about people who followed (or possibly mis-followed) directions from the GPS units and drove onto private, closed, rough, or unmaintained roads deep in the desert wilderness and then got stuck. If you want to lecture these people about anything, it should be over their failure to carry enough water before entering the desert. Even if you're going the right way your vehicle can still break down and strand you far from civilization; all the gasoline in the world won't help you when you're dying from dehydration.
How do you protect servers from rogue admins, they same way you protect passengers jets from rogue pilots...
By having a copilot on the flight deck next to them? Or did you mean by making sure that their aware that if they crash the plane, they don't get fired, or sued, or even jailed, but rather that they die? (It's not 100% effective, but it's pretty good.)
the same way you protect patients from rogue doctors..
By surrounding them with highly-trained colleagues and subordinates -- other doctors and nurses -- who monitor their conduct, who have received thorough and ongoing training, and who will get in their way if they try to do something dangerous? Or did you mean by requiring them to be licensed by a professional body that monitors their conduct, sets standards for their training, and can prevent them from ever working in medicine again if they behave in a way sufficiently contrary to their patients' interests?
I dare say that few admins operate under similar surveillance and control. On the other hand, it is also possible to establish practices which make a rogue admin's actions much less...lethal than a plane crash or a patient's death.
In a courtroom one must take an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The standards for a social network are considerably lower in regard to accuracy.
In general, the cases cited employ social-networking-derived evidence to impeach the credibility of plaintiffs. That is, defendants are comparing plaintiffs' statements and testimony made as part of legal proceedings to statements (and other evidence) they've posted on social networking sites.
The legal value of this information (as presented in the article) varies. It ranges from the somewhat plausible (one defendant claimed a serious injury cost him "the enjoyment of life", but described online a fishing vacation in Florida and a trip to the Daytona 500) to the utterly bizarre (a plaintiff argued that a defendant didn't really suffer "serious permanent personal injuries" because - in part - her MySpace postings still regularly include smiley emoticons).
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you just answered your own question there. Particularly if you substitute "DARPA, DoE, UK MoD, and a whole alphabet soup of agencies and utility companies" for just "DoE". Even if it doesn't work at all, they get the revenue from all those sales -- and they're set for years if they can sucker just one of those agencies into an ongoing research program.
Notably 'cold fusion' appears likely to have nothing to do with it.
The New Energy Times blog is what might be deemed a rather credulous source on this topic. I note that a rather substantial part of the linked blog post is consumed with keeping track of who knows the 'secrets' of this invention, and how they will protect their work from 'industrial espionage', their 'right to...withhold their intellectual property from the public', and how the blog post is 'likely [to] bring predators'.
While their (the Times blog's) preferred nomenclature is 'LENR' (low energy nuclear reaction) rather than 'cold fusion', there's an awful lot of overlap between those two umbrellas, and the distinction between the two seems to be more semantic and marketing than real. A reaction which takes protons and nickel as inputs and generates copper and free energy as an output is fusion by any commonsense definition of the word.
The ratings really are absolutely ridiculous. Besides being pretty inconsistent from one movie to the next, you can kill a million people rather graphically and still get a PG-13 rating, but show tits for more than about 3 seconds (or more than once) and it's a guaranteed R rating.
I was gobsmacked to discover that The King's Speech actually drew an R rating from the MPAA. (Apparently, they objected to the use of profanity - including the dreaded 'fuck' - even in the context of speech therapy. For the record, it was part of one of the most brilliantly funny scenes in the film.) The Lord of the Rings films, meanwhile, get a PG-13, despite impalements, beheadings, and the deaths of thousands. Casino Royale gets a PG-13, even with all its James Bond violence, and the sadistic clubbing of the protagonist's testicles while he's tied to a chair.
This Film Is Not Yet Rated is an excellent, biting documentary about the MPAA's secretive, deceptive, politicized ratings system. You should be warned, however, that while the film currently has no MPAA rating, an early version of the film received a provisional NC-17 rating.
but this type of FDM system just has abysmal tolerances on the parts it produces, too horribly bad for any useful "widget"
it's not being a condescending ass to say "why blow large amount of money for half-assed crap when you can get something really, really good that can work in sugar or plastic or steel, that can last your whole life"
Your condescending remark would have made more sense (but wouldn't have been any less gratuitously rude) had you been replying to a comment endorsing the FDM 'Thing-o-Matic' system in the article. The post to which you responded, however, was discussing small CNC milling systems designed to work in plastic and capable of generating useful parts with reasonable tolerances. There exist situations (not particularly uncommon ones, either) where having a smaller, less-capable CNC mill makes more sense as a purchase than larger, more-capable, non-CNC equipment -- even at the same price point. I recommend that you re-read my post, in case you missed or misunderstood the list of several such situations and circumstances I already provided.
large, real metal cutting milling machines can also be had used for that price range, and you can add CNC over time while first learning the tricks of the trade. Instead of cutting plastic or sugar, learn to make real fucking machines with a real fucking machine.
Not everyone wants to commit the time and money to train to be a fully-fledged machinist. Not every job requires (or is even properly done with) metal parts. Not every designer wants to spend a week in the shop making ten identical copies of a widget for a prototype when his time would be better spent at the drafting table. Not every shop wants to hire half a dozen machinists when they can hire one to oversee a bunch of CNC mills.
The thing that's tough is if you need to make a call quickly once you land.
You shouldn't be doing that anyway. The deadliest accident in aviation history involved a taxiing aircraft. (A communications error led one 747 pilot to begin his takeoff roll while another 747 was taxiing on the runway in front of him.) Even during taxiing, there is the potential for accident or disaster. Pilot has a stroke and slumps over the controls, aircraft turns too sharply and rolls onto its side. Engine ingests lost luggage or flock of birds and explodes. Luggage van or fuel truck wanders somewhere it shouldn't. Another aircraft crashes. Take your pick, really.
Introducing loose items can make evacuation appreciably more difficult by causing trips and falls. Larger items can become dangerous projectiles, even taxiing at fifty or sixty kilometers per hour. (Your flight attendant in the backwards-facing jumpseat is going to be pissed off when s/he gets your Blackberry in the face during a sudden stop.) Making a phone call means you (and people seated near you) may not hear directions or warnings from the crew. Keep your phone stowed until you're on the jetway. There's nothing you're doing that's so important it can't wait an extra ten or fifteen minutes.
And the book is generally hardcover and weighs a few hundred times as much as my cell phone.
I am very impressed by this new technology, and would dearly like to acquire a three-gram cell phone like yours. Alternatively, I would like to know how it is that you managed to get an entire set of the Encyclopedia Britannica into your carry-on.
So they should ban books during the same times.
This is true. I have occasionally seen flight attendants ask readers of particularly weighty tomes to stow them during takeoff, but this needs to be better and more broadly enforced. They are also more strict about this for passengers in the first row, because objects in those passengers' laps will fly straight forward and smack directly into the backward-facing flight attendant in the jumpseat by the cabin door. Similarly, compliance regarding stowage tends to be monitored more closely in emergency exit rows. See also, for example, this discussion about stowage of carry-on items.
In at least one respect, books are marginally better than cellular phones and music players in that books don't generate sound that interferes with the ability of the passenger (and other, nearby passengers) to hear and understand announcements from the flight crew.
Imagine a world where, physically at least, most decisions could be undone, and the only lasting consequences of a poor choice were social.
Done!
You'll be looking to read books by John Barnes set in his Thousand Cultures universe. Periodic backups of one's mental state and permanent recording of genetic information mean that in the event of your untimely death you can be restored from archives. Don't forget to make frequent backups, however, or you'll lose years of memories. Sound familiar to the Slashdot crowd?
Variations on this theme exist from a number of sf authors; and general conquest of disease and non-fatal injury are pretty much a staple of the field.
We should, as a society, be aiming to conquer death and injury.
Yep, it's too bad that we don't spend very much money on medical research.
How could this possibly work? Farmers ship millions of tons of foodstuffs every year, unless they're spreading an equal volume of human excrement on their fields they'd be farming in pit mines after a few decades.
I never thought about the question until I read this article, and I suspect that many people are in the same boat. (I do work as a biologist and biochemist, but the issue hadn't crossed my mind before, and I don't know if my 'gut feeling' would have been right or not.)
But then I thought a bit more about the question. In the United States, cereal crops (wheat, rice, oats, barley, etc.) yield an average of about 6000 kg of grain per hectare each year. That's just 600 grams (a little over a pound) per square meter of cultivated land. Assuming soil density falling somewhere between 1 and 1.5 grams per cubic centimeter, that works out to shaving off between 0.4 and 0.6 millimeters - about two hundredths of an inch - each year. And that doesn't account for the water content of the crop, which we all know is added by rain or irrigation, and shouldn't count against our soil use.
In other words, the amount we take off, even if it came entirely from the soil, would only consume a couple of inches every century. On geological timescales that's a fair bit, but it's totally imperceptible over one or two growing seasons, and only meaningful to a farmer if he stays in one place for several generations. Even then, our hypothetical science-minded farmer who wonders why his field doesn't sink away might suspect that the soil is being topped up by deposition of dust from the air, or the continuous slow wear and erosion of the bedrock beneath his field.
Incidentally, the above calculation is something that science students really need to know (or be taught) to do: basic back-of-the-envelope order-of-magnitude calculations for testing the basic reasonableness of hypotheses.
Yeh, Flamsteed, Airy, Halley, Moore, Lassell, Hawking, Newton, Herschel, Cox,... Britain is rubbish for astronomy and all that dull space stuff. Don't know why we British bother, to be honest!
The reason why Newton invented calculus, optics, and the theory of gravitation was to have something to do on all those cloudy nights with rubbish observing. Flamsteed, meanwhile, spent his cloudy nights getting into political fights with Newton, and burning his books in front of the Royal Society during an authorship dispute. Halley headed for Saint Helena's clear skies and warm weather as soon as he graduated from Oxford; when he got back to England he mucked about with building diving bells to pass the time on his cloudy evenings.
Hawking never did any observational astronomy, nor did Cox. Lassell built an observatory in Malta as soon as he could afford to. Herschel composed twenty-four symphonies during his overcast nights.
If there's one conclusion to be drawn, it's that a British astronomer is a frustrated astronomer.
Because the final in-depth analysis has been published by the journal which originally published Wakefield's findings.
Wakefield's original fraudulent study was published in The Lancet in 1998, and fully retracted by that journal's editors in early 2010 (after the UK's General Medical Council found that he had engaged in serious ethical lapses in the course of his research). The commentary discussing the case and referred to in the Slashdot summary appeared in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Both are very respected medical journals, but they are distinct.
Seems to me that not taking a mercury-based substance is a good outcome, regardless of the other shenanigans.
The problem is that the Wakefield study fingered the mumps-measles-rubella (MMR) combination vaccine as the culprit, not the mercury-based preservative thiomersal (called thimerosal in the United States). Indeed, the MMR vaccine administered in the UK has never contained thiomersal.
On the topic of thiomersal preservatives, in general I am in favor of reducing one's exposure to mercury (and other toxic and/or bioaccumulative chemicals) to a level which is as low as reasonable achievable, but I am also aware that all choices made in formulating drugs will involve tradeoffs. If thiomersal is removed, one pays for a slightly reduced mercury exposure with an increased risk of infection; if thiomersal is replaced by another preservative, one may be at risk of decreased antimicrobial efficacy or increased risk of allergic reactions to the new compound. Before I start shouting "OMG it contains MERCURY we're all going to DIE get it out of my vaccine!" I need reasonable evidence that the thiomersal exposure is genuinely harmful or persuasive study confirming that alternatives to thiomersal aren't going to be more dangerous (through reduced antimicrobial efficacy or increased risk of their own side effects).
I don't think it's particularly novel or newsworthy that a Wikipedia article briefly contained some vandalism that was quickly repaired. I do find it a bit disappointing that your first reaction was to run to Slashdot and crow about it for cheap karma points. If you found the vandalism so distressing, why didn't you take some time out of your busy schedule to fix it before you came back here?
Mind you, while the statement was unpleasantly polemical and its tone inappropriate for an encyclopedia article and there are legally-loaded complications to the word 'murderer', it suffers from that damnable niggling quirk of also likely being true.
Because as bad as police can be, the alternative (not having them) is much worse.
I'm not entirely sure how you get from my statement that police should not employ selective enforcement as a means to arbitrary powers of search and seizure to the conclusion that I believe the police should be disbanded.
Perhaps you've been (mis)led to believe that it is impossible to criticize someone or something you generally endorse? Is unconditional support (or, conversely, absolute rejection) the only possible response to all the actions of police -- or of politicians, or lawyers, or judges, or reporters, or doctors, or priests? Surely we're capable of more nuanced analysis. "Either you're with us or you're against us!" is a cheap rhetorical trick that works well in televised soundbites, but has no place is rational debate.
But all this talk about encrypted cell phones makes me realize just how pedestrian my life really is. The most interesting thing on my cell phone (to me) is the text from my wife saying that our daughter is staying over at a friend's tonight. Mostly, it's all "Pick up milk" or "Will be late". Maybe an occasional "I'll take the Bears and the points" which isn't going to get me in too much trouble, because here in Chicago the cop is probably taking the Bears and the points too, with the same bookie.
Actually, if the police wanted to nail you, your 'pedestrian' it's-only-a-little-bit-illegal gambling message is quite sufficient. It doesn't matter that the cop also gambles, just like it doesn't matter that he rolls through stop signs, or speeds on the highway, or sometimes smokes a joint with his buddies. Selective, infrequent enforcement of widely-committed acts is one of the most powerful tools the police have; it enables nearly arbitrary detention and harassment of virtually anyone, and those laws are unlikely to be a priority to ever come off the books because (through limited enforcement) they affect so few people directly. "But wait!", you say, "Surely I'm not a suspect, so I have nothing to worry about!" I wish you the best of luck playing those odds. It's a gamble that most of us would probably win -- but it works out breathtakingly badly for those who lose.
Problem being that PJ is a basket case.... I mean that in the nicest possible way, she's a shy nerd spazz. Lovely voice, but a total paranoid shut-in. Probably got lots of cats and a glass menagerie.... People like PJ don't readily trust other people, because they don't really know any other people.
This pop psychological pseudo-diagnosis brought to you by someone posting to Slashdot. Seriously?
I mean this in the nicest possible way, of course, but Rogerborg is a total paranoid shut-in who thinks attacking nice people he's never met makes him looker smarter and 'cooler' to his basement-dwelling nerd peers.
Even if the parent poster's insulting and appalling stereotyping is spot on, his breathtakingly casual approach to openly attacking another human being would seem to confirm every 'paranoid' suspicion about humanity he accuses PJ of harboring.
You have to wonder, why can't PJ's argument hold up to opposition? Everybody has to know: when you are reading groklaw forums, you are reading a one-sided debate.
I don't think that PJ has ever tried to present herself as being an impartial observer; she openly advocates for the side she feels is in the right. Why should she provide a soapbox for her opposition, who already were rather well funded and perfectly capable of providing their own platforms? I note that PJ was never invited to offer commentary on SCO's website, and no other legal expert seemed interested in presenting his own blog covering the case from poor downtrodden SCO's side.
In any event, having watched oh-so-many basement-dwelling wannabe lawyers trot out their weighty opinions on questions of law here on Slashdot, I can certainly understand why PJ - a trained legal professional - might get tired of matching wits with the unarmed. For that matter, she may just not want to let troll/countertroll flaming and bickering distract from constructive discussions and drag down the level of conversation. The sensible hostess knows when to send the belligerent, uninvited guests home.
Your relationship with your doctor is based on trust and consent - you don't ask your taxi driver to submit to a breathalyzer before he drives you home, so why should you ask your doctor how he's sleeping?
Because there is already a legal framework in place which imposes heavy criminal penalties on a taxi driver who consumes alcohol to excess before working, but there is no similar legal restriction (and uneven, voluntarily applied corporate policies) on surgeons who fail to get adequate rest?
Go ahead -- tell me what happens in the following situations.
You call the police and report "I saw a taxi driving erratically. The driver appeared to be distracted and insufficiently alert; I think he was drunk."
You call the police and report "I saw a surgeon who was awake for 24 hours before starting a day of elective surgeries. The surgeon appeared distracted and insufficiently alert; I think he was dangerously low on sleep."
Let me know which call actually gets a response which saves lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice use of euphemisms. You speak of "labor" as if it some mythical, fungible pixie dust instead of twenty two people with mortgages, car payments, food and diapers to buy...
Does that mean that once a person has been trained and hired, their employers (and ultimately, all of society) should be compelled to continue to employ them forever in the same line of work doing the same tasks, however useless or irrelevant those jobs might now be?
If a company performs a task one way, is it compelled to perform it in the same way with the same number of employees for the remainder of its existence? Is the automation only unethical for existing companies, or can a new competitor starting from scratch use new methods and techniques and drive the old assembly line out of business?
On the other hand, someone using a paper map almost certainly does have those basic navigation skills; you can't use a paper map at all without them.
Sorry if I sound unsympathetic... but really, who starts to drive through a large unpopulated expanse of land without at least making sure they have enough gas to make it across?
Sorry if I sound unsympathetic, but really, who posts a Slashdot comment without reading the article...oh, never mind.
The article doesn't mention anyone running out of fuel. It talks about people who followed (or possibly mis-followed) directions from the GPS units and drove onto private, closed, rough, or unmaintained roads deep in the desert wilderness and then got stuck. If you want to lecture these people about anything, it should be over their failure to carry enough water before entering the desert. Even if you're going the right way your vehicle can still break down and strand you far from civilization; all the gasoline in the world won't help you when you're dying from dehydration.
How do you protect servers from rogue admins, they same way you protect passengers jets from rogue pilots...
By having a copilot on the flight deck next to them? Or did you mean by making sure that their aware that if they crash the plane, they don't get fired, or sued, or even jailed, but rather that they die? (It's not 100% effective, but it's pretty good.)
the same way you protect patients from rogue doctors..
By surrounding them with highly-trained colleagues and subordinates -- other doctors and nurses -- who monitor their conduct, who have received thorough and ongoing training, and who will get in their way if they try to do something dangerous? Or did you mean by requiring them to be licensed by a professional body that monitors their conduct, sets standards for their training, and can prevent them from ever working in medicine again if they behave in a way sufficiently contrary to their patients' interests?
I dare say that few admins operate under similar surveillance and control. On the other hand, it is also possible to establish practices which make a rogue admin's actions much less...lethal than a plane crash or a patient's death.
In a courtroom one must take an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The standards for a social network are considerably lower in regard to accuracy.
In general, the cases cited employ social-networking-derived evidence to impeach the credibility of plaintiffs. That is, defendants are comparing plaintiffs' statements and testimony made as part of legal proceedings to statements (and other evidence) they've posted on social networking sites.
The legal value of this information (as presented in the article) varies. It ranges from the somewhat plausible (one defendant claimed a serious injury cost him "the enjoyment of life", but described online a fishing vacation in Florida and a trip to the Daytona 500) to the utterly bizarre (a plaintiff argued that a defendant didn't really suffer "serious permanent personal injuries" because - in part - her MySpace postings still regularly include smiley emoticons).
where is the profit in lying?
...The DoE can buy one [and] test it...
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you just answered your own question there. Particularly if you substitute "DARPA, DoE, UK MoD, and a whole alphabet soup of agencies and utility companies" for just "DoE". Even if it doesn't work at all, they get the revenue from all those sales -- and they're set for years if they can sucker just one of those agencies into an ongoing research program.
Notably 'cold fusion' appears likely to have nothing to do with it.
The New Energy Times blog is what might be deemed a rather credulous source on this topic. I note that a rather substantial part of the linked blog post is consumed with keeping track of who knows the 'secrets' of this invention, and how they will protect their work from 'industrial espionage', their 'right to...withhold their intellectual property from the public', and how the blog post is 'likely [to] bring predators'.
While their (the Times blog's) preferred nomenclature is 'LENR' (low energy nuclear reaction) rather than 'cold fusion', there's an awful lot of overlap between those two umbrellas, and the distinction between the two seems to be more semantic and marketing than real. A reaction which takes protons and nickel as inputs and generates copper and free energy as an output is fusion by any commonsense definition of the word.
The ratings really are absolutely ridiculous. Besides being pretty inconsistent from one movie to the next, you can kill a million people rather graphically and still get a PG-13 rating, but show tits for more than about 3 seconds (or more than once) and it's a guaranteed R rating.
I was gobsmacked to discover that The King's Speech actually drew an R rating from the MPAA. (Apparently, they objected to the use of profanity - including the dreaded 'fuck' - even in the context of speech therapy. For the record, it was part of one of the most brilliantly funny scenes in the film.) The Lord of the Rings films, meanwhile, get a PG-13, despite impalements, beheadings, and the deaths of thousands. Casino Royale gets a PG-13, even with all its James Bond violence, and the sadistic clubbing of the protagonist's testicles while he's tied to a chair.
This Film Is Not Yet Rated is an excellent, biting documentary about the MPAA's secretive, deceptive, politicized ratings system. You should be warned, however, that while the film currently has no MPAA rating, an early version of the film received a provisional NC-17 rating.
but this type of FDM system just has abysmal tolerances on the parts it produces, too horribly bad for any useful "widget" it's not being a condescending ass to say "why blow large amount of money for half-assed crap when you can get something really, really good that can work in sugar or plastic or steel, that can last your whole life"
Your condescending remark would have made more sense (but wouldn't have been any less gratuitously rude) had you been replying to a comment endorsing the FDM 'Thing-o-Matic' system in the article. The post to which you responded, however, was discussing small CNC milling systems designed to work in plastic and capable of generating useful parts with reasonable tolerances. There exist situations (not particularly uncommon ones, either) where having a smaller, less-capable CNC mill makes more sense as a purchase than larger, more-capable, non-CNC equipment -- even at the same price point. I recommend that you re-read my post, in case you missed or misunderstood the list of several such situations and circumstances I already provided.
large, real metal cutting milling machines can also be had used for that price range, and you can add CNC over time while first learning the tricks of the trade. Instead of cutting plastic or sugar, learn to make real fucking machines with a real fucking machine.
Not everyone wants to commit the time and money to train to be a fully-fledged machinist. Not every job requires (or is even properly done with) metal parts. Not every designer wants to spend a week in the shop making ten identical copies of a widget for a prototype when his time would be better spent at the drafting table. Not every shop wants to hire half a dozen machinists when they can hire one to oversee a bunch of CNC mills.
In short, don't be a condescending ass.
The thing that's tough is if you need to make a call quickly once you land.
You shouldn't be doing that anyway. The deadliest accident in aviation history involved a taxiing aircraft. (A communications error led one 747 pilot to begin his takeoff roll while another 747 was taxiing on the runway in front of him.) Even during taxiing, there is the potential for accident or disaster. Pilot has a stroke and slumps over the controls, aircraft turns too sharply and rolls onto its side. Engine ingests lost luggage or flock of birds and explodes. Luggage van or fuel truck wanders somewhere it shouldn't. Another aircraft crashes. Take your pick, really.
Introducing loose items can make evacuation appreciably more difficult by causing trips and falls. Larger items can become dangerous projectiles, even taxiing at fifty or sixty kilometers per hour. (Your flight attendant in the backwards-facing jumpseat is going to be pissed off when s/he gets your Blackberry in the face during a sudden stop.) Making a phone call means you (and people seated near you) may not hear directions or warnings from the crew. Keep your phone stowed until you're on the jetway. There's nothing you're doing that's so important it can't wait an extra ten or fifteen minutes.
And the book is generally hardcover and weighs a few hundred times as much as my cell phone.
I am very impressed by this new technology, and would dearly like to acquire a three-gram cell phone like yours. Alternatively, I would like to know how it is that you managed to get an entire set of the Encyclopedia Britannica into your carry-on.
So they should ban books during the same times.
This is true. I have occasionally seen flight attendants ask readers of particularly weighty tomes to stow them during takeoff, but this needs to be better and more broadly enforced. They are also more strict about this for passengers in the first row, because objects in those passengers' laps will fly straight forward and smack directly into the backward-facing flight attendant in the jumpseat by the cabin door. Similarly, compliance regarding stowage tends to be monitored more closely in emergency exit rows. See also, for example, this discussion about stowage of carry-on items.
In at least one respect, books are marginally better than cellular phones and music players in that books don't generate sound that interferes with the ability of the passenger (and other, nearby passengers) to hear and understand announcements from the flight crew.
Going to be fun for heavy sleepers.. fall asleep for a couple of hours.. oops, you're now 150 miles past your destination!
To be fair, this is better than the current system, where if you fall asleep you drive into a bridge embankment and die in a spectacular crash.
Imagine a world where, physically at least, most decisions could be undone, and the only lasting consequences of a poor choice were social.
Done!
You'll be looking to read books by John Barnes set in his Thousand Cultures universe. Periodic backups of one's mental state and permanent recording of genetic information mean that in the event of your untimely death you can be restored from archives. Don't forget to make frequent backups, however, or you'll lose years of memories. Sound familiar to the Slashdot crowd?
Variations on this theme exist from a number of sf authors; and general conquest of disease and non-fatal injury are pretty much a staple of the field.
We should, as a society, be aiming to conquer death and injury.
Yep, it's too bad that we don't spend very much money on medical research.
How could this possibly work? Farmers ship millions of tons of foodstuffs every year, unless they're spreading an equal volume of human excrement on their fields they'd be farming in pit mines after a few decades.
I never thought about the question until I read this article, and I suspect that many people are in the same boat. (I do work as a biologist and biochemist, but the issue hadn't crossed my mind before, and I don't know if my 'gut feeling' would have been right or not.)
But then I thought a bit more about the question. In the United States, cereal crops (wheat, rice, oats, barley, etc.) yield an average of about 6000 kg of grain per hectare each year. That's just 600 grams (a little over a pound) per square meter of cultivated land. Assuming soil density falling somewhere between 1 and 1.5 grams per cubic centimeter, that works out to shaving off between 0.4 and 0.6 millimeters - about two hundredths of an inch - each year. And that doesn't account for the water content of the crop, which we all know is added by rain or irrigation, and shouldn't count against our soil use.
In other words, the amount we take off, even if it came entirely from the soil, would only consume a couple of inches every century. On geological timescales that's a fair bit, but it's totally imperceptible over one or two growing seasons, and only meaningful to a farmer if he stays in one place for several generations. Even then, our hypothetical science-minded farmer who wonders why his field doesn't sink away might suspect that the soil is being topped up by deposition of dust from the air, or the continuous slow wear and erosion of the bedrock beneath his field.
Incidentally, the above calculation is something that science students really need to know (or be taught) to do: basic back-of-the-envelope order-of-magnitude calculations for testing the basic reasonableness of hypotheses.
Yeh, Flamsteed, Airy, Halley, Moore, Lassell, Hawking, Newton, Herschel, Cox, ... Britain is rubbish for astronomy and all that dull space stuff. Don't know why we British bother, to be honest!
The reason why Newton invented calculus, optics, and the theory of gravitation was to have something to do on all those cloudy nights with rubbish observing. Flamsteed, meanwhile, spent his cloudy nights getting into political fights with Newton, and burning his books in front of the Royal Society during an authorship dispute. Halley headed for Saint Helena's clear skies and warm weather as soon as he graduated from Oxford; when he got back to England he mucked about with building diving bells to pass the time on his cloudy evenings.
Hawking never did any observational astronomy, nor did Cox. Lassell built an observatory in Malta as soon as he could afford to. Herschel composed twenty-four symphonies during his overcast nights.
If there's one conclusion to be drawn, it's that a British astronomer is a frustrated astronomer.
"Nuke-lee-ar" is still three syllables. You don't say "new-clear", do you?
Sure you do! At the heart of every atom, you find its newklus.
Because the final in-depth analysis has been published by the journal which originally published Wakefield's findings.
Wakefield's original fraudulent study was published in The Lancet in 1998, and fully retracted by that journal's editors in early 2010 (after the UK's General Medical Council found that he had engaged in serious ethical lapses in the course of his research). The commentary discussing the case and referred to in the Slashdot summary appeared in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Both are very respected medical journals, but they are distinct.
Seems to me that not taking a mercury-based substance is a good outcome, regardless of the other shenanigans.
The problem is that the Wakefield study fingered the mumps-measles-rubella (MMR) combination vaccine as the culprit, not the mercury-based preservative thiomersal (called thimerosal in the United States). Indeed, the MMR vaccine administered in the UK has never contained thiomersal.
On the topic of thiomersal preservatives, in general I am in favor of reducing one's exposure to mercury (and other toxic and/or bioaccumulative chemicals) to a level which is as low as reasonable achievable, but I am also aware that all choices made in formulating drugs will involve tradeoffs. If thiomersal is removed, one pays for a slightly reduced mercury exposure with an increased risk of infection; if thiomersal is replaced by another preservative, one may be at risk of decreased antimicrobial efficacy or increased risk of allergic reactions to the new compound. Before I start shouting "OMG it contains MERCURY we're all going to DIE get it out of my vaccine!" I need reasonable evidence that the thiomersal exposure is genuinely harmful or persuasive study confirming that alternatives to thiomersal aren't going to be more dangerous (through reduced antimicrobial efficacy or increased risk of their own side effects).
Current Wikipedia article text on her:...
Of course, that particular bit of vandalism was (according to the timestamps here and there) just ten minutes before your Slashdot post, and removed by another Wikipedia editor just three minutes later.
I don't think it's particularly novel or newsworthy that a Wikipedia article briefly contained some vandalism that was quickly repaired. I do find it a bit disappointing that your first reaction was to run to Slashdot and crow about it for cheap karma points. If you found the vandalism so distressing, why didn't you take some time out of your busy schedule to fix it before you came back here?
Mind you, while the statement was unpleasantly polemical and its tone inappropriate for an encyclopedia article and there are legally-loaded complications to the word 'murderer', it suffers from that damnable niggling quirk of also likely being true.
Because as bad as police can be, the alternative (not having them) is much worse.
I'm not entirely sure how you get from my statement that police should not employ selective enforcement as a means to arbitrary powers of search and seizure to the conclusion that I believe the police should be disbanded.
Perhaps you've been (mis)led to believe that it is impossible to criticize someone or something you generally endorse? Is unconditional support (or, conversely, absolute rejection) the only possible response to all the actions of police -- or of politicians, or lawyers, or judges, or reporters, or doctors, or priests? Surely we're capable of more nuanced analysis. "Either you're with us or you're against us!" is a cheap rhetorical trick that works well in televised soundbites, but has no place is rational debate.
But all this talk about encrypted cell phones makes me realize just how pedestrian my life really is. The most interesting thing on my cell phone (to me) is the text from my wife saying that our daughter is staying over at a friend's tonight. Mostly, it's all "Pick up milk" or "Will be late". Maybe an occasional "I'll take the Bears and the points" which isn't going to get me in too much trouble, because here in Chicago the cop is probably taking the Bears and the points too, with the same bookie.
Actually, if the police wanted to nail you, your 'pedestrian' it's-only-a-little-bit-illegal gambling message is quite sufficient. It doesn't matter that the cop also gambles, just like it doesn't matter that he rolls through stop signs, or speeds on the highway, or sometimes smokes a joint with his buddies. Selective, infrequent enforcement of widely-committed acts is one of the most powerful tools the police have; it enables nearly arbitrary detention and harassment of virtually anyone, and those laws are unlikely to be a priority to ever come off the books because (through limited enforcement) they affect so few people directly. "But wait!", you say, "Surely I'm not a suspect, so I have nothing to worry about!" I wish you the best of luck playing those odds. It's a gamble that most of us would probably win -- but it works out breathtakingly badly for those who lose.
Problem being that PJ is a basket case.... I mean that in the nicest possible way, she's a shy nerd spazz. Lovely voice, but a total paranoid shut-in. Probably got lots of cats and a glass menagerie.... People like PJ don't readily trust other people, because they don't really know any other people.
This pop psychological pseudo-diagnosis brought to you by someone posting to Slashdot. Seriously?
I mean this in the nicest possible way, of course, but Rogerborg is a total paranoid shut-in who thinks attacking nice people he's never met makes him looker smarter and 'cooler' to his basement-dwelling nerd peers.
Even if the parent poster's insulting and appalling stereotyping is spot on, his breathtakingly casual approach to openly attacking another human being would seem to confirm every 'paranoid' suspicion about humanity he accuses PJ of harboring.
You have to wonder, why can't PJ's argument hold up to opposition? Everybody has to know: when you are reading groklaw forums, you are reading a one-sided debate.
I don't think that PJ has ever tried to present herself as being an impartial observer; she openly advocates for the side she feels is in the right. Why should she provide a soapbox for her opposition, who already were rather well funded and perfectly capable of providing their own platforms? I note that PJ was never invited to offer commentary on SCO's website, and no other legal expert seemed interested in presenting his own blog covering the case from poor downtrodden SCO's side.
In any event, having watched oh-so-many basement-dwelling wannabe lawyers trot out their weighty opinions on questions of law here on Slashdot, I can certainly understand why PJ - a trained legal professional - might get tired of matching wits with the unarmed. For that matter, she may just not want to let troll/countertroll flaming and bickering distract from constructive discussions and drag down the level of conversation. The sensible hostess knows when to send the belligerent, uninvited guests home.
Your relationship with your doctor is based on trust and consent - you don't ask your taxi driver to submit to a breathalyzer before he drives you home, so why should you ask your doctor how he's sleeping?
Because there is already a legal framework in place which imposes heavy criminal penalties on a taxi driver who consumes alcohol to excess before working, but there is no similar legal restriction (and uneven, voluntarily applied corporate policies) on surgeons who fail to get adequate rest?
Go ahead -- tell me what happens in the following situations.
Let me know which call actually gets a response which saves lives.