Being accused of cheating in the academic world is kind of like being accused of a sex crime in the world at large...
Note that the original article talks about "further investigation"; it doesn't say "public denouncement". It is possible to carry out many stages of an investigation without making an open accusation or announcement.
Particularly at higher levels, no one wants to make an open accusation without very solid evidence. In my experience - and I don't teach, but I deal with people who do, at both high school and university levels - a teacher, professor, or TA won't make an accusation until they have an iron-clad, red-handed case. If something suspicious happens on the midterm, they might not say anything, but they'll be watching like hawks on the final exam.
Students who are suspected of collusion may be seated far apart. Students suspected of using banned aids will be placed at the front of the room, right under the proctor's nose. Professors will keep a photocopy of exam papers before handing them back, to catch the student who edits his work and hands it back for extra marks. Two slightly different versions of the same test will be handed out to adjacent columns of students, to see who gets the right answers to the wrong test paper.
Except in the most egregiously obvious cases, students will often get one 'free' pass, just because their proctors and teachers recognize their own fallibility. But just because a student wasn't called out, doesn't mean they weren't caught -- and they're gonna get nailed if they try it again.
Still doesn't change the fact that, by disallowing them to use the massive amounts of coal under their feet, we're disallowing them to build infrastructure and means of production so that they can accumulate capital.
How does a single village build a coal-fired power plant?
How does a rural community accumulate capital if they can only accomplish tasks during daylight hours -- and then can only accomplish enough to maintain a subsistence agricultural lifestyle?
I've put a solar panel array in the back yard....it wasn't cheap...
How much would it have cost you to have grid power if it hadn't been installed already at your house? If the nearest bit of the grid were just a mile away, you'd probably be out a good $50,000 -- and a lot of these villages are a lot further from reliable power than that. Don't forget that in some of these remote areas a long stretch of unguarded power line might as well have a "Steal me for free scrap metal!" sign on it, too. Gasoline or diesel (not to mention spare parts) for a generator are going to be costly and difficult to acquire.
If each home runs a pair of 4-watt LEDs for six hours each evening, that's 48 watt-hours: four hours of daytime sunlight from a small 12-watt panel (let's say five hours to allow for losses). That's well below-average sun for rural Africa, and even a modest battery should be able to carry them through a few days of cloud. (In a pinch, they can cut back to one lamp for a few nights, too.) There's no inverter costs or losses; the whole system can run at 12 volts DC.
I guess I'm still confused how LED lighting can be cheaper than incandescent (or a candle).
Not every place in the world has centralized, reliable electricity. Running a generator in a remote location requires regular maintenance and spare parts, distribution wires to every home, and a reliable source of gasoline or diesel. Using LED lamps means needing less than a tenth of the generation and storage capacity you would need for incandescents -- each home can supply its own needs with a single moderately-sized and -priced panel. Not only that, but LED lamps will last orders of magnitude longer than incandescents (close enough to 'forever' in this application as to make no difference), and are virtually unbreakable -- there are also places on Earth where you can't just drive your SUV to Wal-Mart for a new pack of bulbs.
Candles don't suffer from being off-grid, but have you actually ever tried to light a room using just candles? If you're trying to illuminate (for reading and writing, or any sort of detailed handwork) instead of just trying to get freaky on the couch, candles are a pretty crappy source of light. You need a lot of open flames to avoid eyestrain, which means both a large attendant fire risk and - for the entire village - literally tons of candles every year.
If you give a man a candle, he'll have low-quality light for an evening. If you give a man an LED lamp and solar panel, he'll have light for decades. The higher up-front cost is more than balanced by the near-zero recurring cost and - particularly - by the socioeconomic benefit of reliable, constant, work-compatible night-time light.
You're likely not in the fastest line (when compared to your neighbors), but -- unlike the poorly worded story headline -- you're equally likely not in the slowest line. Consider a situation involving three queues: the one you're standing in, and the two (one on each side of you) that you can readily observe. Assign a random speed to each queue/cashier. Do this multiple times. Look at the results. On average, and entirely unsurprisingly, one time in three you'll be in the fastest line; one time in three, you'll be in the slowest line. (And in the remaining third of cases, you'll fall in the middle.)
What's this mean? Two thirds of the time at least one neighboring line will be moving faster than you, and you'll curse and stew and froth about your terrible misfortune. But look on the bright side -- two times out of three, at least one of the neighboring queues will have exactly the same burning jealousy towards your swifter, more efficient checkout.
Ironically, the most efficient set-up is to have one line feed into several cashiers.
Alanis Morissette called; she wants her misused word back. Anyway...the above statement ain't necessarily so. What putting everyone into a single queue does is ensure that the distribution of waiting times is very narrow -- everyone will spend very nearly the same amount of time in the queue before reaching a cashier. However, this setup will almost always impair overall checkout efficiency (measured in customers per hour) by some amount; the average waiting time will be slightly longer. Each time a customer clears the cash desk and the cashier has to wait for the next customer to arrive, time is lost. Since the customer can't unpack his basket while the cashier is finishing with the previous customer, time is lost. It gets worse if a customer at the head of the queue doesn't realize that a cashier is available; everyone stands around waiting that extra bit of time. Yes, this can be offset by having a staff member playing shepherd, but that's extra expense for the store (and wouldn't it be better to have that employee actually manning a cash register?). As well, the store needs to be able to maintain a larger open space by the cash registers through which people can move, to get from the head of the queue to the checkout.
In other words, the one-queue system is less efficient in terms of staff costs, less efficient in terms of average customer waiting time, and less efficient in terms of use of floor space. The only advantage is the one alluded to -- it eliminates the slow cashier/slow customer/bad luck penalty, and ensures that everyone has roughly the same wait. (And for that, I actually do prefer this system -- but I don't pretend that it's really more effiicient. I accept that I'm paying a small premium in average waiting time - and writing off a chance to ever be in a lucky fast line - to avoid the risk of occasional long waits.)
I'm not an expert in the field, but my understanding is that Homeopathy is based on the idea that there is a fundamental vital force that is responsible for overall well-being, which can be strengthened by taking particular concoctions that resonate with this force in the person. Maybe these placebos inadvertently had a homeopathic quality that was helpful for IBS sufferers.
Paging Dr. Occam. Dr. Occam to the clinic, stat!
I find the way that you phrased your last sentence interesting. Yes, it's possible that the placebos were formulated in such a way that they coincidentally contained the correct, magical homeopathic ingredients required to adjust the patient's vital forces. (Remarkable that it could happen by accident, though, given all the importance that homeopathic charlatans attach to the rituals of sequential dilutions, banging the mixture in just the right way, etc.) Which is more plausible -- "these placebos inadvertently had a homeopathic quality", or "homeopathic remedies inadvertently have a placebo quality"?
Cash transactions are faster to process than credit card or debit card transactions. (I am appalled by the number of people who don't carry any cash around, and thereby hold up the line while their two-dollar coffee purchase is processed.)
Cash transactions require no special equipment on the part of the merchant.
Cash transactions do not incur processing fees for customer or merchant, and therefore don't add a hidden markup of two to four percent to every purchase you make.
Cash transactions do not require electricity or network connectivity. (Remember the 2003 blackout? 50 million people without power for hours or days?) Cash is not vulnerable to a fire at a bank's server farm half a world away.
Cash transactions are less susceptible to breaches of privacy.
Chances are it was wide open, no security. The guy does not sound bright enough to have even hacked WEP, let alone anything stronger.
The Star Tribune says different. He's at least smart enough to be a script kiddie.
He created e-mail accounts in Matt Kostolnik's name and used a password-cracking program to hack into the Kostolniks' wireless router.
The article also raises an interesting point about how the police determined that the victims here weren't at fault. I can't say whether or not the police would have worked this out on their own, but in this case they didn't have to. The victim (Kostolnik) worked for a law firm. When the creepy neighbor started sending forged, defamatory emails to Kostolnik's boss and coworkers, the firm hired their own investigator who was able to determine that the router had been hijacked.
Cross reference which neighbours don't have their own net connections with a motive (who had a grudge against him).
Ah yes, using the tried-and-true CSI:Miami-approved "People Without Internet At Home" database. We'll have our suspect in time for the first commercial break.
Unless, of course, the neighbor actually has his own wired internet connection, and just connects through the victim's router when he wants to do something incriminating. Just sayin'.
All of those businesses that send you pointless letters all the time (TV/internet service, banks, etc) would suddenly have a huge incentive to convince people to accept them in email form (less waste).
It's a good thing that everyone has email access in their home.
Prosecute the cops who broke the law to obtain evidence and you no longer need the exclusionary rule, and so you no longer need to control what the jury knows.
So that means it should be okay for cops to torture suspects, and evidence acquired that way should be admissible as long as the cop doesn't mind being tried for assault afterwards? Better yet, let's just give the police the ability to make that threat, and coerce confessions that way; that way there's just a vague 'uttering threats' charge against the cop that probably won't even stand up in court -- who is going to take the word of the now-convicted felon against the cop who caught him? Should cops should be able to break into random homes without a warrant and toss the place fishing for evidence, as long as they don't mind a B&E trial? The state's attorney will probably be willing to plead that down to a misdemeanor and probation, since he's so happy about the conviction he got in his other trial. Maybe the cop should be able to grab your briefcase, make a copy of everything on the laptop you're carrying, and then send you and the laptop on their way. No harm, no foul, right? Nope, sorry. There's a damn good reason for the exclusionary rule, and the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' doctrine; don't even get me started on the abuses that could be made using state actors, as well.
No, the only way to make correct decisions is to weigh *all* the evidence.
The problem with this sort of internet research arises because the parties may not have the opportunity to rebut this sort of 'evidence' or even to put it into context. Not only is it possible (even likely) that the prosecution and/or defense will never know that a juror introduced his own material, the court and jury have no opportunity to evaluate the credentials of Bob2935 from Wikipedia, nor to cross-examine him. There's no guarantee that the legal or medical terminology and precedents are correctly described or apply within the court's jurisdiction. (What happens if a lawyer from the UK writes an article read by an American juror? Or if a New York lawyer writes an article relied on by a juror from Nevada? What happens if the Wikipedia article is incomplete, describing the basic elements of a crime but not getting back to exceptions and defenses?) Don't forget that it would be trivially easy for attorneys on either side to edit Wikipedia articles to bias them toward their preferred outcome.
With very rare exceptions, jury trials last less than a week, and deliberations tend to run for less than a day. While it's nice to talk about the jury deserving to see "all the evidence", there just isn't time to give juries four years of med school, a degree in forensics, plus get them ready to pass the state bar exam. We necessarily rely on the court and its officers to present evidence responsibly and in appropriate context, because the alternative -- jurors relying on the authority of whatever random subset of information turns up on the first page of Google hits -- is unconscionable. "All the evidence a juror can find in an evening before deliberation" or "All the evidence a juror can find using his smartphone during the trial" are not synonymous with "all the evidence".
I really wish something like this finally got off the ground: http://emdrive.com/ Microwaves in one end, thrust out the other.
It's too bad it's self-delusion by the inventor at best, and an outright scam to get government grants from credulous but scientifically-challenged bureaucrats at worst.
The only published explanation for the mechanism of operation contains an obviously incorrect mathematical assumption which neglects important but extremely straightforward physical effects to generate a fictitious force. (Briefly, the the EmDrive relies on microwaves bouncing off the end plates of a truncated conical cavity. The inventor assumes that since the area of one end plate is smaller than the area of the other, there will be a smaller total momentum transfer from the microwaves reflecting from that surface, resulting in a net force. In all of his calculations, he neglects to account for the axial component of force applied to the tapered walls of the cavity, which would nullify his drive's imaginary effect. The inventor attempts to handwave away this irretrievable flaw with blather about relativistic effects; the entire thing was pretty thoroughly debunked by competent and qualified physicists shortly after it started to get wide press coverage.) There has been no peer-reviewed publication in any reputable venue, and one is very unlikely to be seen.
There is no major reason for security checks if you are flying a small plane by yourself. If you crash it into a building it wouldn't be any worse than crashing a car into it. In commercial flights, you have the potential to kill 100s or 1000s of people if you manage to bring it down, while in a small plane you will most likely only kill yourself.
Well....
Especially if you're doing it deliberately, but even if you're just wreckage falling out of the sky, odds are that your top speed in an aircraft is going to be appreciably higher than then one you can readily reach on a city street (or accelerating across the parking lot or driveway). And kinetic energy scales with the square of velocity. A deliberate attacker would also be able to load his aircraft with explosives (or even just compressed gas cylinders).
Meanwhile, the barrier precautions and security landscaping that would prevent an automobile from striking a building in this way - concrete bollards, steps with reinforced railings, benches, planter boxes, etc. - are obviously useless against a threat (or an accident) which can approach from the third dimension. High-value buildings would have to be hardened against impacts not just on the ground floor but over their entire surfaces.
Setting aside the fly-it-into-a-building scenario for a second, unlike an automobile it's possible to fly a private airplane into the path of a much larger airliner and bring about disaster that way. While it is usually an accident, deliberate suicide attacks (driven by terrorism or plain-vanilla mental illness) could strike jets while they are particularly vulnerable on takeoff or landing -- once again killing hundreds of people.
Connie Willis' novel Remake covered the logical dystopian conclusion of all the way back in 1995.
The story's protagonist is a remake artist; he edits characters in and out of digital copies of movies when studios gain and lose rights to various actors' images through arcane business deals and court rulings. There are no static archives of old films (what, you want to be able to time shift using media you control?); Bogart may be in Casablanca this week and gone the next.
You make assumptions and/or work for a piss-poor company.
You're the one making assumptions, or failing to read my entire posts. I am fully aware that many companies do offer floating holidays/personal days that can be taken on short notice. My last paragraph begins "If you don't get enough genuine vacation days, or you find the company's booking policy or personal day rules too restrictive...".
The problem is individuals who believe that their sick day coverage can be treated as a free bank of personal days. That isn't the contract that they signed; that isn't the benefit that they're entitled to; that isn't the cost that the company has budgeted for.
Suppose the company allows up to ten sick days (before the employee kicks over to a disability insurance program), they're only expecting the 'average' employee to take a couple of sick days per year. (Alice and Bob each took a day for a cold, Chuck was off with pneumonia for a week and a half, Diane and Ed didn't miss any time.) The benefit with equivalent cost to the company isn't ten free personal days (an equivalent of two extra weeks of vacation, or an increase in personnel costs of at least four percent plus whatever business interruptions and inefficiencies may accrue) -- it's two days. And, of course, there are still the insurance costs of individuals with genuine illnesses that last for more than two days, and the inconvenient situation of what to do with people who use their two personal days in November but get sick in December. (I'm too sick to work effectively, but it's too much hassle to get a doctor's note, so I'm going to come in and infect all my coworkers just in time for Christmas.)
If people want to take two weeks' worth of personal days, then that cost needs to get covered somewhere else. There isn't a Magic Benefit Fairy that lets companies turn a sick day allowance into personal days on a one-for-one basis, which seems to be one what you're advocating ("Change "sick" days to "personal" days."; "Restricting use of those days means that management is betting most employees won't actually get sick and/or use those days").
Which is, of course, exactly what happens if one actually gets sick. Restricting use of those days means that management is betting most employees won't actually get sick and/or use those days and the unused "benefit" will cost the company nothing.
I notice that you didn't understand or didn't read -- or deceptively failed to quote -- the very last part of my comment. Here it is again.
Sick days are insurance, not vacation. They pay out only if something bad happens to you.
The company health insurance plan didn't pay out the maximum five thousand dollars for prescription drugs to every employee, either. Nor the twenty-five grand you'd get for losing a thumb in a punch press. Does that mean that everyone who didn't fill a prescription or lose a thumb should take home an extra thirty-thousand-dollar bonus at the end of the year?
Of course management 'bets' that most employees won't deplete their full supply of sick days, any more than most employees will fully exhaust any other form of insurance.
Claiming to be sick to take a paid day off is different in degree, but not in kind, from claiming a fake disability to take a paid month off. Either way you're abusing an insurance program -- and you can be sure that the cost is going to come out of your coworkers' salary and benefits, not the CEO's. If people take more sick days, the funding for those days doesn't appear out of nowhere on the wings of the Free Money Fairy.
If you don't get enough genuine vacation days, or you find the company's booking policy or personal day rules too restrictive, then the correct approach is to negotiate a different employment contract (remember how you signed a binding legal agreement?) or find a new job. It's not 'lie about your circumstances on the assumption that you probably won't get caught'. You're fucking your coworkers, who are paying for your dishonesty out of their benefits package. In principle I suppose it's 'fair' if everyone lies about illness an equal number of times each year, but seriously...? You want to be treated like an adult, then act like one.
Stop treating sick days as being a bonus vacation entitlement.
You don't have sick days so that you can stay home and get paid for an extra two weeks a year. You have sick days so that if you get sick and can't come in to work, you a) don't end up losing pay for that time you were sick; b) aren't tempted to force yourself to come in to work and infect all your coworkers in the process; and c) don't have to burn your vacation days or cancel your planned trip to Florida because you got the flu this year and need to make up the hours.
We're trying to treat you like adults, but it's not working. Sick days are insurance, not vacation. They pay out only if something bad happens to you.
Starting a business and making it successful is fairly easy - just boring and hard work. It's more a matter of not doing anything stupid. Find something that is well understood, copy everything others do right, and correct the things they suck at.
There are two ways of 'not doing anything stupid' in a business context. The first is for our hypothetical computer geek to learn how to run a business (which is not trivial) himself. This learning can take the form of courses, or extended research and reading, or consultation ($$$) with experts. A hands-on learning approach would see our geek dive in and make all the mistakes, and learn from those one by one, with all the attendant cost in time and treasure. Understanding exactly what it is that other companies are doing right (and separating that from the stuff that they just happen to be doing) isn't always easy.
The other way to not do something stupid is to partner with someone who already has all the necessary business skills, experience, and contacts.
Business acumen and programming ability are pretty orthogonal skill sets. While some people have aptitude in both areas, it's hubristic to assume that everyone will.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that if this were really implemented in a major way, it would create the ideal system for a terrorist group to discretely deliver several hundred bombs simultaneously all cross a major city.
It's a good thing that terrorists never found out about FedEx. Or UPS. Or the United States Postal Service. Or U-Haul.
This still doesn't explain the information embargo...
It does if this is being published in a respectable, peer-reviewed, scientific journal concurrent with the announcement. Scientific journals will generally provide advance copies of 'interesting' upcoming publications to members of the media, on condition that the news be embargoed until a particular time -- generally around the time that the full publication becomes accessible to the journal's readers. Journalists get advance copies so that they can start writing their articles early, so they can get quotes from relevant experts, and so that there is at least a faint hope that their coverage will be well-researched, thorough, and accurate, and bear at least a passing resemblance to the actual science being presented.
That's the right way to do a scientific announcement, by the way. (The wrong way is exemplified the Pons and Fleischmann's 'science by press conference' cold-fusion debacle, where you make the public announcement before your scientific peers have a chance to review your work.
These cards will be more bulky and slower than high end SDXC cards. And SDXC is already in use today.
Larger and (slightly) slower may mean cheaper, cooler, and/or more durable. A slightly larger form factor may also mean that we get larger actual capacities (rather than the theoretical maximum from the specs, which neither technology is going to reach for a while yet) sooner.
What they're doing is announcing passenger car tires that are specified to handle 400 MPH, which no passenger car can currently do.
Actually, what they're doing is announcing a standardized shape, fittings, and labelling system for passenger car tires -- so that you'll be able to recognize one that could go 400 MPH if some manufacturer gets around to designing such a tire. Neither car nor tire actually exist yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Being accused of cheating in the academic world is kind of like being accused of a sex crime in the world at large...
Note that the original article talks about "further investigation"; it doesn't say "public denouncement". It is possible to carry out many stages of an investigation without making an open accusation or announcement.
Particularly at higher levels, no one wants to make an open accusation without very solid evidence. In my experience - and I don't teach, but I deal with people who do, at both high school and university levels - a teacher, professor, or TA won't make an accusation until they have an iron-clad, red-handed case. If something suspicious happens on the midterm, they might not say anything, but they'll be watching like hawks on the final exam.
Students who are suspected of collusion may be seated far apart. Students suspected of using banned aids will be placed at the front of the room, right under the proctor's nose. Professors will keep a photocopy of exam papers before handing them back, to catch the student who edits his work and hands it back for extra marks. Two slightly different versions of the same test will be handed out to adjacent columns of students, to see who gets the right answers to the wrong test paper.
Except in the most egregiously obvious cases, students will often get one 'free' pass, just because their proctors and teachers recognize their own fallibility. But just because a student wasn't called out, doesn't mean they weren't caught -- and they're gonna get nailed if they try it again.
Still doesn't change the fact that, by disallowing them to use the massive amounts of coal under their feet, we're disallowing them to build infrastructure and means of production so that they can accumulate capital.
How does a single village build a coal-fired power plant?
How does a rural community accumulate capital if they can only accomplish tasks during daylight hours -- and then can only accomplish enough to maintain a subsistence agricultural lifestyle?
I've put a solar panel array in the back yard....it wasn't cheap...
How much would it have cost you to have grid power if it hadn't been installed already at your house? If the nearest bit of the grid were just a mile away, you'd probably be out a good $50,000 -- and a lot of these villages are a lot further from reliable power than that. Don't forget that in some of these remote areas a long stretch of unguarded power line might as well have a "Steal me for free scrap metal!" sign on it, too. Gasoline or diesel (not to mention spare parts) for a generator are going to be costly and difficult to acquire.
If each home runs a pair of 4-watt LEDs for six hours each evening, that's 48 watt-hours: four hours of daytime sunlight from a small 12-watt panel (let's say five hours to allow for losses). That's well below-average sun for rural Africa, and even a modest battery should be able to carry them through a few days of cloud. (In a pinch, they can cut back to one lamp for a few nights, too.) There's no inverter costs or losses; the whole system can run at 12 volts DC.
I guess I'm still confused how LED lighting can be cheaper than incandescent (or a candle).
Not every place in the world has centralized, reliable electricity. Running a generator in a remote location requires regular maintenance and spare parts, distribution wires to every home, and a reliable source of gasoline or diesel. Using LED lamps means needing less than a tenth of the generation and storage capacity you would need for incandescents -- each home can supply its own needs with a single moderately-sized and -priced panel. Not only that, but LED lamps will last orders of magnitude longer than incandescents (close enough to 'forever' in this application as to make no difference), and are virtually unbreakable -- there are also places on Earth where you can't just drive your SUV to Wal-Mart for a new pack of bulbs.
Candles don't suffer from being off-grid, but have you actually ever tried to light a room using just candles? If you're trying to illuminate (for reading and writing, or any sort of detailed handwork) instead of just trying to get freaky on the couch, candles are a pretty crappy source of light. You need a lot of open flames to avoid eyestrain, which means both a large attendant fire risk and - for the entire village - literally tons of candles every year.
If you give a man a candle, he'll have low-quality light for an evening. If you give a man an LED lamp and solar panel, he'll have light for decades. The higher up-front cost is more than balanced by the near-zero recurring cost and - particularly - by the socioeconomic benefit of reliable, constant, work-compatible night-time light.
What's this mean? Two thirds of the time at least one neighboring line will be moving faster than you, and you'll curse and stew and froth about your terrible misfortune. But look on the bright side -- two times out of three, at least one of the neighboring queues will have exactly the same burning jealousy towards your swifter, more efficient checkout.
Ironically, the most efficient set-up is to have one line feed into several cashiers.
Alanis Morissette called; she wants her misused word back. Anyway...the above statement ain't necessarily so. What putting everyone into a single queue does is ensure that the distribution of waiting times is very narrow -- everyone will spend very nearly the same amount of time in the queue before reaching a cashier. However, this setup will almost always impair overall checkout efficiency (measured in customers per hour) by some amount; the average waiting time will be slightly longer. Each time a customer clears the cash desk and the cashier has to wait for the next customer to arrive, time is lost. Since the customer can't unpack his basket while the cashier is finishing with the previous customer, time is lost. It gets worse if a customer at the head of the queue doesn't realize that a cashier is available; everyone stands around waiting that extra bit of time. Yes, this can be offset by having a staff member playing shepherd, but that's extra expense for the store (and wouldn't it be better to have that employee actually manning a cash register?). As well, the store needs to be able to maintain a larger open space by the cash registers through which people can move, to get from the head of the queue to the checkout.
In other words, the one-queue system is less efficient in terms of staff costs, less efficient in terms of average customer waiting time, and less efficient in terms of use of floor space. The only advantage is the one alluded to -- it eliminates the slow cashier/slow customer/bad luck penalty, and ensures that everyone has roughly the same wait. (And for that, I actually do prefer this system -- but I don't pretend that it's really more effiicient. I accept that I'm paying a small premium in average waiting time - and writing off a chance to ever be in a lucky fast line - to avoid the risk of occasional long waits.)
I'm not an expert in the field, but my understanding is that Homeopathy is based on the idea that there is a fundamental vital force that is responsible for overall well-being, which can be strengthened by taking particular concoctions that resonate with this force in the person. Maybe these placebos inadvertently had a homeopathic quality that was helpful for IBS sufferers.
Paging Dr. Occam. Dr. Occam to the clinic, stat!
I find the way that you phrased your last sentence interesting. Yes, it's possible that the placebos were formulated in such a way that they coincidentally contained the correct, magical homeopathic ingredients required to adjust the patient's vital forces. (Remarkable that it could happen by accident, though, given all the importance that homeopathic charlatans attach to the rituals of sequential dilutions, banging the mixture in just the right way, etc.) Which is more plausible -- "these placebos inadvertently had a homeopathic quality", or "homeopathic remedies inadvertently have a placebo quality"?
Why do we still carry money anyway?
Cash transactions are faster to process than credit card or debit card transactions. (I am appalled by the number of people who don't carry any cash around, and thereby hold up the line while their two-dollar coffee purchase is processed.)
Cash transactions require no special equipment on the part of the merchant.
Cash transactions do not incur processing fees for customer or merchant, and therefore don't add a hidden markup of two to four percent to every purchase you make.
Cash transactions do not require electricity or network connectivity. (Remember the 2003 blackout? 50 million people without power for hours or days?) Cash is not vulnerable to a fire at a bank's server farm half a world away.
Cash transactions are less susceptible to breaches of privacy.
Are those enough reasons?
Chances are it was wide open, no security. The guy does not sound bright enough to have even hacked WEP, let alone anything stronger.
The Star Tribune says different. He's at least smart enough to be a script kiddie.
He created e-mail accounts in Matt Kostolnik's name and used a password-cracking program to hack into the Kostolniks' wireless router.
The article also raises an interesting point about how the police determined that the victims here weren't at fault. I can't say whether or not the police would have worked this out on their own, but in this case they didn't have to. The victim (Kostolnik) worked for a law firm. When the creepy neighbor started sending forged, defamatory emails to Kostolnik's boss and coworkers, the firm hired their own investigator who was able to determine that the router had been hijacked.
Cross reference which neighbours don't have their own net connections with a motive (who had a grudge against him).
Ah yes, using the tried-and-true CSI:Miami-approved "People Without Internet At Home" database. We'll have our suspect in time for the first commercial break.
Unless, of course, the neighbor actually has his own wired internet connection, and just connects through the victim's router when he wants to do something incriminating. Just sayin'.
The only way the shareholders make any money is by paying you less than the full value of your work and keeping the rest for themselves.
You mean they want a return on the capital they put at risk up front, so that I could have a job? How dare they.
If you want to get a bigger return on your wages from a publicly-traded company, buy shares.
If you want the whole pie, then start your own company, with your own money.
All of those businesses that send you pointless letters all the time (TV/internet service, banks, etc) would suddenly have a huge incentive to convince people to accept them in email form (less waste).
It's a good thing that everyone has email access in their home.
Prosecute the cops who broke the law to obtain evidence and you no longer need the exclusionary rule, and so you no longer need to control what the jury knows.
So that means it should be okay for cops to torture suspects, and evidence acquired that way should be admissible as long as the cop doesn't mind being tried for assault afterwards? Better yet, let's just give the police the ability to make that threat, and coerce confessions that way; that way there's just a vague 'uttering threats' charge against the cop that probably won't even stand up in court -- who is going to take the word of the now-convicted felon against the cop who caught him? Should cops should be able to break into random homes without a warrant and toss the place fishing for evidence, as long as they don't mind a B&E trial? The state's attorney will probably be willing to plead that down to a misdemeanor and probation, since he's so happy about the conviction he got in his other trial. Maybe the cop should be able to grab your briefcase, make a copy of everything on the laptop you're carrying, and then send you and the laptop on their way. No harm, no foul, right? Nope, sorry. There's a damn good reason for the exclusionary rule, and the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' doctrine; don't even get me started on the abuses that could be made using state actors, as well.
No, the only way to make correct decisions is to weigh *all* the evidence.
The problem with this sort of internet research arises because the parties may not have the opportunity to rebut this sort of 'evidence' or even to put it into context. Not only is it possible (even likely) that the prosecution and/or defense will never know that a juror introduced his own material, the court and jury have no opportunity to evaluate the credentials of Bob2935 from Wikipedia, nor to cross-examine him. There's no guarantee that the legal or medical terminology and precedents are correctly described or apply within the court's jurisdiction. (What happens if a lawyer from the UK writes an article read by an American juror? Or if a New York lawyer writes an article relied on by a juror from Nevada? What happens if the Wikipedia article is incomplete, describing the basic elements of a crime but not getting back to exceptions and defenses?) Don't forget that it would be trivially easy for attorneys on either side to edit Wikipedia articles to bias them toward their preferred outcome.
With very rare exceptions, jury trials last less than a week, and deliberations tend to run for less than a day. While it's nice to talk about the jury deserving to see "all the evidence", there just isn't time to give juries four years of med school, a degree in forensics, plus get them ready to pass the state bar exam. We necessarily rely on the court and its officers to present evidence responsibly and in appropriate context, because the alternative -- jurors relying on the authority of whatever random subset of information turns up on the first page of Google hits -- is unconscionable. "All the evidence a juror can find in an evening before deliberation" or "All the evidence a juror can find using his smartphone during the trial" are not synonymous with "all the evidence".
I really wish something like this finally got off the ground: http://emdrive.com/ Microwaves in one end, thrust out the other.
It's too bad it's self-delusion by the inventor at best, and an outright scam to get government grants from credulous but scientifically-challenged bureaucrats at worst.
The only published explanation for the mechanism of operation contains an obviously incorrect mathematical assumption which neglects important but extremely straightforward physical effects to generate a fictitious force. (Briefly, the the EmDrive relies on microwaves bouncing off the end plates of a truncated conical cavity. The inventor assumes that since the area of one end plate is smaller than the area of the other, there will be a smaller total momentum transfer from the microwaves reflecting from that surface, resulting in a net force. In all of his calculations, he neglects to account for the axial component of force applied to the tapered walls of the cavity, which would nullify his drive's imaginary effect. The inventor attempts to handwave away this irretrievable flaw with blather about relativistic effects; the entire thing was pretty thoroughly debunked by competent and qualified physicists shortly after it started to get wide press coverage.) There has been no peer-reviewed publication in any reputable venue, and one is very unlikely to be seen.
There is no major reason for security checks if you are flying a small plane by yourself. If you crash it into a building it wouldn't be any worse than crashing a car into it. In commercial flights, you have the potential to kill 100s or 1000s of people if you manage to bring it down, while in a small plane you will most likely only kill yourself.
Well....
Especially if you're doing it deliberately, but even if you're just wreckage falling out of the sky, odds are that your top speed in an aircraft is going to be appreciably higher than then one you can readily reach on a city street (or accelerating across the parking lot or driveway). And kinetic energy scales with the square of velocity. A deliberate attacker would also be able to load his aircraft with explosives (or even just compressed gas cylinders).
Meanwhile, the barrier precautions and security landscaping that would prevent an automobile from striking a building in this way - concrete bollards, steps with reinforced railings, benches, planter boxes, etc. - are obviously useless against a threat (or an accident) which can approach from the third dimension. High-value buildings would have to be hardened against impacts not just on the ground floor but over their entire surfaces.
Setting aside the fly-it-into-a-building scenario for a second, unlike an automobile it's possible to fly a private airplane into the path of a much larger airliner and bring about disaster that way. While it is usually an accident, deliberate suicide attacks (driven by terrorism or plain-vanilla mental illness) could strike jets while they are particularly vulnerable on takeoff or landing -- once again killing hundreds of people.
Connie Willis
Remake
The story's protagonist is a remake artist; he edits characters in and out of digital copies of movies when studios gain and lose rights to various actors' images through arcane business deals and court rulings. There are no static archives of old films (what, you want to be able to time shift using media you control?); Bogart may be in Casablanca this week and gone the next.
You make assumptions and/or work for a piss-poor company.
You're the one making assumptions, or failing to read my entire posts. I am fully aware that many companies do offer floating holidays/personal days that can be taken on short notice. My last paragraph begins "If you don't get enough genuine vacation days, or you find the company's booking policy or personal day rules too restrictive...".
The problem is individuals who believe that their sick day coverage can be treated as a free bank of personal days. That isn't the contract that they signed; that isn't the benefit that they're entitled to; that isn't the cost that the company has budgeted for.
Suppose the company allows up to ten sick days (before the employee kicks over to a disability insurance program), they're only expecting the 'average' employee to take a couple of sick days per year. (Alice and Bob each took a day for a cold, Chuck was off with pneumonia for a week and a half, Diane and Ed didn't miss any time.) The benefit with equivalent cost to the company isn't ten free personal days (an equivalent of two extra weeks of vacation, or an increase in personnel costs of at least four percent plus whatever business interruptions and inefficiencies may accrue) -- it's two days. And, of course, there are still the insurance costs of individuals with genuine illnesses that last for more than two days, and the inconvenient situation of what to do with people who use their two personal days in November but get sick in December. (I'm too sick to work effectively, but it's too much hassle to get a doctor's note, so I'm going to come in and infect all my coworkers just in time for Christmas.)
If people want to take two weeks' worth of personal days, then that cost needs to get covered somewhere else. There isn't a Magic Benefit Fairy that lets companies turn a sick day allowance into personal days on a one-for-one basis, which seems to be one what you're advocating ("Change "sick" days to "personal" days."; "Restricting use of those days means that management is betting most employees won't actually get sick and/or use those days").
Which is, of course, exactly what happens if one actually gets sick. Restricting use of those days means that management is betting most employees won't actually get sick and/or use those days and the unused "benefit" will cost the company nothing.
I notice that you didn't understand or didn't read -- or deceptively failed to quote -- the very last part of my comment. Here it is again.
Sick days are insurance, not vacation. They pay out only if something bad happens to you.
The company health insurance plan didn't pay out the maximum five thousand dollars for prescription drugs to every employee, either. Nor the twenty-five grand you'd get for losing a thumb in a punch press. Does that mean that everyone who didn't fill a prescription or lose a thumb should take home an extra thirty-thousand-dollar bonus at the end of the year?
Of course management 'bets' that most employees won't deplete their full supply of sick days, any more than most employees will fully exhaust any other form of insurance.
Claiming to be sick to take a paid day off is different in degree, but not in kind, from claiming a fake disability to take a paid month off. Either way you're abusing an insurance program -- and you can be sure that the cost is going to come out of your coworkers' salary and benefits, not the CEO's. If people take more sick days, the funding for those days doesn't appear out of nowhere on the wings of the Free Money Fairy.
If you don't get enough genuine vacation days, or you find the company's booking policy or personal day rules too restrictive, then the correct approach is to negotiate a different employment contract (remember how you signed a binding legal agreement?) or find a new job. It's not 'lie about your circumstances on the assumption that you probably won't get caught'. You're fucking your coworkers, who are paying for your dishonesty out of their benefits package. In principle I suppose it's 'fair' if everyone lies about illness an equal number of times each year, but seriously...? You want to be treated like an adult, then act like one.
Stop treating sick days as being a bonus vacation entitlement.
You don't have sick days so that you can stay home and get paid for an extra two weeks a year. You have sick days so that if you get sick and can't come in to work, you a) don't end up losing pay for that time you were sick; b) aren't tempted to force yourself to come in to work and infect all your coworkers in the process; and c) don't have to burn your vacation days or cancel your planned trip to Florida because you got the flu this year and need to make up the hours.
We're trying to treat you like adults, but it's not working. Sick days are insurance, not vacation. They pay out only if something bad happens to you.
Starting a business and making it successful is fairly easy - just boring and hard work. It's more a matter of not doing anything stupid. Find something that is well understood, copy everything others do right, and correct the things they suck at.
There are two ways of 'not doing anything stupid' in a business context. The first is for our hypothetical computer geek to learn how to run a business (which is not trivial) himself. This learning can take the form of courses, or extended research and reading, or consultation ($$$) with experts. A hands-on learning approach would see our geek dive in and make all the mistakes, and learn from those one by one, with all the attendant cost in time and treasure. Understanding exactly what it is that other companies are doing right (and separating that from the stuff that they just happen to be doing) isn't always easy.
The other way to not do something stupid is to partner with someone who already has all the necessary business skills, experience, and contacts.
Business acumen and programming ability are pretty orthogonal skill sets. While some people have aptitude in both areas, it's hubristic to assume that everyone will.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that if this were really implemented in a major way, it would create the ideal system for a terrorist group to discretely deliver several hundred bombs simultaneously all cross a major city.
It's a good thing that terrorists never found out about FedEx. Or UPS. Or the United States Postal Service. Or U-Haul.
This still doesn't explain the information embargo...
It does if this is being published in a respectable, peer-reviewed, scientific journal concurrent with the announcement. Scientific journals will generally provide advance copies of 'interesting' upcoming publications to members of the media, on condition that the news be embargoed until a particular time -- generally around the time that the full publication becomes accessible to the journal's readers. Journalists get advance copies so that they can start writing their articles early, so they can get quotes from relevant experts, and so that there is at least a faint hope that their coverage will be well-researched, thorough, and accurate, and bear at least a passing resemblance to the actual science being presented.
That's the right way to do a scientific announcement, by the way. (The wrong way is exemplified the Pons and Fleischmann's 'science by press conference' cold-fusion debacle, where you make the public announcement before your scientific peers have a chance to review your work.
These cards will be more bulky and slower than high end SDXC cards. And SDXC is already in use today.
Larger and (slightly) slower may mean cheaper, cooler, and/or more durable. A slightly larger form factor may also mean that we get larger actual capacities (rather than the theoretical maximum from the specs, which neither technology is going to reach for a while yet) sooner.
What they're doing is announcing passenger car tires that are specified to handle 400 MPH, which no passenger car can currently do.
Actually, what they're doing is announcing a standardized shape, fittings, and labelling system for passenger car tires -- so that you'll be able to recognize one that could go 400 MPH if some manufacturer gets around to designing such a tire. Neither car nor tire actually exist yet.
USCG Sues Copyright Defense Lawyer
Am I the only one who read that headline and wondered why the United States Coast Guard was getting involved in copyright lawsuits?