Yes, really. You can't make more retroviruses without going through reverse transcription and a DNA intermediate. Similarly, you can't propagate a prion without a supply of protein -- protein which was translated from RNA, which in turn was transcribed from DNA. Both retroviruses and prions ultimately depend on DNA to make more of themselves; they've just managed to convey information about their replication process without using their own DNA as the medium.
IANAS but it would seem to me that the presence of enough spores in the water samples to grow a culture from in not truly indicative of the red color being primarily or even partially from the spores. Given the concentration of spores needed to color water red, the probability of rain containing that concentration is very, very low.
That isn't necessarily an argument for why the red color couldn't be spores; that's an argument for why red rains are quite rare, and why they require ideal and unusual conditions under which to occur. I would rephrase your statement to, "Given that the rain was red, the probability of the rain containing a sufficient concentration of spores to cause the coloration approaches unity". Given that we get full-scale animals falling from the sky from time to time, it's not that much of a stretch for occasional freak meteorological conditions to pick up a bunch of teeny tiny algal spores. From the last decade, the Wikipedia article I linked has stories about frogs and toads (several occasions), fish (twice), worms, and spiders. Spores are child's play.
It's possible to discuss the plot without giving the ending away; reviews and guides do it.
Why would you decide that Wikipedia - an online encyclopedia - should follow the customs and practices of magazine articles and movie guides? Wouldn't it be more appropriate for it to take the approach of other encyclopedias and scholarly works?
I can't be the only one who reads them to see if I might like the book/film or not.
It's not really Wikipedia's fault that you're trying to use an encyclopedia as Rottentomatoes.com.
By the way, at the end of the play Romeo fakes his own death; Juliet fails to receive word in time and commits suicide; Romeo, heartbroken, takes his own life as well; everyone else feels bad afterward for being such dicks.
Journalism used to be about taking risks to bring critical public interest information to everyone, with a strong ethic and moral code.
Yes, now it's all about major media oligopolies competing for eyeballs using every dirty trick they can get their hands on. Creating rumours, cheerleading United States involvement in foreign wars, using media outlets to satisfy domestic political agendas or even fuel petty interpersonal feuds....
...and Wikipedia can't come up with 'spoiler tags'. We really haven't gotten anywhere.
Wikipedia had spoiler tags, but decided to deprecate them -- as has been amply pointed out by other editors. Seriously, is it too much to ask for people to realize that an article section titled 'plot' will actually discuss the plot?
Clearly they're doing it just because they're dicks, as everyone knows that all other encyclopedias, serious literary reference works, and scholarly publications are very careful to wrap any discussion of plot details in spoiler tags.
I was just thinking the same thing. If you drop the plastic case, it deforms slightly on impact (or fails, as it did in this case), protecting the circuit boards and display from at least some of the shock.
The next time our engineer drops his calculator, the milled aluminum case will remain pretty and pristine, just as planned -- but without proper cushioning, the plastic circuit board screwed to it will fracture. (If the innards are free to move a bit, I also wonder if the buttons are all going to get sheared off when they bump up against the aluminum frame.)
You keep confusing a heuristic for a rationale. You also completely ignore the part that is key, that I emphasized over and over - the back-end.
I give up -- your story keeps changing. I wish you the best of luck in your future Slashdot posts, once you've figured out what your arguments actually are, and how to make them logically consistent.
You know, I was about to write a post mentioning Bruce Schneier's movie-plot contests.
One of the most important questions we ought to ask about this project is whether or not the teacher in question was actually prepared to address the implications of this sort of assignment, and particularly how this sort of thinking about painfully specific-but-scary plots distorts proper, rational security thinking. Schneier obviously gets it, but I'm not sure that the teacher here has nearly the same degree of clue. The assignment called specifically for a biological or chemical attack, despite such attacks representing a vanishingly small fraction of total terrorism attacks or deaths. Given that the project was to be evaluated based on the "students' ability to analyze information they had learned on terrorism and chemical and biological warfare and apply it to a real-life scenario", I fear that the assignment would have exactly the wrong effect on students' thinking.
The project is almost certainly a bad idea not because it 'teaches children to be terrorists' (or some similarly-worded alarmist tripe), but rather because it teaches children to unnecessarily fear terrorists. Imagining a class set of superficially-plausible worst-case scenarios involving deadly chemical and biological agents being used to "kill the MOST innocent civilians" in "an unsuspecting Australian community" then describing in detail "what effects the attack would have on a human body" seems tailor-made to promote irrational terror: visceral fear and revulsion, rather than rational thought and analysis.
The idea of limiting searches to what a regular guy can do...
No, you still are missing my point.
Why is it reasonable to decide that a 'regular guy' might have access to those other technological implements (automobile, radio, computer, database software, internet...) but not to a particular few required for ANPR: digital video camera, some frame-grabbing software, and a digital filter to grab number plate images and feed them to an OCR routine. That last one's the only one that you probably couldn't get directly off the shelf, but any halfway-competent hacker could put the whole package together for you in a few days. (And if he releases the source, then everyone gets it.)
If I cared to prove a point - and didn't have anything better to do with my time - I could set up such a system in my window, and have it publish to the web the licence plates of everyone who drove past my apartment. (Strictly speaking, I would probably use a separately-aimed and zoomed camera for each lane of traffic, in order to ensure enough pixels for reliable OCR.) It would work even while I was away.
Your argument doesn't work. You've already stipulated that all the other technologies used by police to call in plates pass your 'regular guy' test, and there's nothing to ANPR that can't be replicated (fairly easily) by a moderately-skilled and dedicated amateur.
The automation allows them to be easily used in an unreasonable fashion. I have just as much problem with cops who randomly run plates by hand, but the only reason that is not a significant problem is because it is inherently self limiting. Same thing with GPS tracking and most other forms of automated surveillance - they remove the barriers that naturally inhibit unreasonable searches - barriers that were inherent in the system when the original doctrine of "no privacy in public" was formalized.
Well, that's a different argument entirely, one that you didn't make the first time around -- and one that I might be more inclined to get on board with. In other words, I can at least respect a principled stand that police should not be able to run number plates arbitrarily, without some sort of probable cause standard (though I suspect that such a policy might have unintended consequences).
I have much more trouble arguing that the abilities of police should be arbitrarily bounded by restricting the use of particular technologies which automate legally-permissible tasks.
You are confused. Police officers using ANPR scan every single plate that they pass, hundreds of plates per minute. Regular cops don't call in plates unless they have a reason to be suspicious, but ANPR assumes everyone is suspicious because technology has made it so easy to do so. I am not a criminal and it is not reasonable to check up on me just because it is cheap to do so.
I'm not at all confused. You seem to have not understood - or forgotten - your own original argument. You asserted that ANPR should not be allowed because it allows one device to do the work of many officers. Apparently, the level of efficiency provided by allowing police to make radio calls or use computer databases is acceptable to you, but further automating the process of text recognition is not. How many plates per hour would be okay?
Now you seem to be suggesting that ANPR gives the police resources not available to the general public -- but they already have that. The general public can't call in and ask for registration info for random license plates; police officers can. If an officer were to check one random plate each minute, how would that differ from ANPR?
The primary difference being that it can be conducted en masse - i.e. its possible to track thousands of vehicles without committing any significant manpower. I have a similar problem with ANPR - one unattended machine can do what would otherwise take thousands of officers to do.
That's right. It should be illegal for the police to be able to conduct investigations too efficiently; indeed, I don't think you've followed your criticism of ANPR through to its logical conclusion. Even if a human officer is in the loop (as, for example, when a police officer notes down the plate of a passing vehicle, or when he pulls over a car), he is able to take advantage of myriad technologies. He can call in the plate number by radio (or through a wireless internet connection, in many cases), and the number can be checked against an electronic database. The owner of the car and all of the associated registration info is available, on the spot, in the field, in just a few seconds.
In an 'honest' system, the cop would pull you over and write down your license number. He would then walk to the central station - or possibly be allowed to ride a horse. He would manually locate your registration info in the massive card files, then have the secretary type out a couple of carbon copies to take back with him. (If you're from out of town, he'd have to send for copies from the Department of Motor Vehicles' central records in the state capital; with luck it's an overnight return trip by pony express.) Then he would walk back to your car, where you would be dying of starvation, and send you on your way. The use of all that modern technology (radio, computers, telephones, automobiles) means that one uniform can do what would otherwise take hundreds of officers.
At what level of efficiency does the use of publicly-available information and modern technology become unethical? And why? (Incidentally, someone opposed to ANPR on these grounds may have to face some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance attempting to resolve his preferred reading of the Second Amendment. If the cops aren't allowed to adopt new technology as it becomes available, why should the Second Amendment apply to arms developed after 1791? Goodbye semiautomatic pistols and smokeless powder; hello muskets.)
I think a principle more suited to the current situation (which will only become more extreme as the automation on the back-end becomes more and more capable) is that if surveillance requires resources not normally available to the average citizen then it requires a warrant.
I'm not seeing it. In the case of ANPR, the police are using resources not available to the general public -- but a police officer calling in a plate number is doing the same thing. In the case of GPS trackers, one could almost certainly have the poor-man's version just by strapping an iPhone to the target's vehicle.
It would could billions of hojillions of dollars and take ten years, and what we have already works.
Your post makes some excellent points, and I agree with everything that you said. I'd go even further, and note that the transition process would almost certain result in a large number of injuries and deaths as well.
Changing all of the fittings means simultaneous retraining of all the medical personnel who handle them. Patient care will be hindered because medical professionals will take more time to carry out important actions (until they become familiar with the new tools). Nurses will spend more time hunting for correct fittings and plumbing bits. Even when staff become used to the new tools, facilities will have to carry more different fittings and attachments. Procedures will have to be repeated because someone started with the wrong tool. Oh -- you used a needle with an arterial fitting rather than an IV one? You're going to have to puncture the patient again.
For some period of time, the new equipment will have to coexist beside the old. What do you do when the new drug bag isn't compatible with the old IV line? Inevitable supply line kinks may mean that hospitals receive a mix of old and new product, especially if there are occasional shortages of the new stuff.
What happens when the paramedics have inserted lines and performed other tasks using the newly-supplied fittings in their ambulance, only to arrive at a hospital that's still running through its stock of old equipment? How much room for trouble is there in the world of disposable cross-connectors and old-new converters (there will likely be at least two for each new connector) that all the hospitals and ambulances and doctors' offices will have to carry for the years it will take for all the old connectors to work their way out of the system?
Regardless of how much pre-release testing goes on, it's almost certain that at least one of the new connector types/shapes won't turn out to work as well as it should, and then we'll have to throw in another transition period to another type of equipment.
FFS, people, when will it be understood that Hemp is much more than just Cannabis? Honestly, folk... 'concluding' that the car is made of Cannabis when it's described as a 'hemp' car is like concluding a person is a heroine user when they say they took some drugs... (even if it was a headache pill).
Except that hempisCannabis. Industrial hemp is generally manufactured from Cannabis sativa sativa, while medicinal and recreational products are generally derived from Cannabis sativa indica.
Honestly, folks, concluding that a car is made from 'Cannabis' when it's described as 'hemp', is like concluding that a suit is made from 'polymers' when it's described as being 'polyester'... Oh.
Non-traditional, but is it unusual? I thought I'd seen transmission towers with guy wires, or at least some looked as though they should have guy wires (narrow base, tapering up and out).
Yep, guyed transmission pylons are not exactly a new thing. Many two-legged towers are in service today. Balancing on a single point is even relatively common. (One advantage of these towers is less site preparation may be needed. Since the lengths of the guys are adjustable, the location of the pylon doesn't need to be levelled, and a smaller foundation is required.)
And if you think that humanoid pylons are impractical - get a load of these ugly things. [dezeen.com] No pun intended.
Yep, those are quite something. But they lost me as soon as I read,
“A parametric code drives the heights in an continuous gradient, which will be manufactured physically through help of milling machines,” says Koering.
Really? Milling fifty- to hundred-foot tall structures? That sounds hideously costly, compared to the bolt-it-together steel structures currently in use, or even the ones contemplated by the linked story. While quite visually striking, these pylons are constructed of aramid fiber and resin -- not exactly inexpensive or simple to work with. And how well will they cope with lightning strikes?
One site had so many machines side to side (over 7), the air coming out the last machine regularly set things on FIRE. It was not uncommon for the machine to ignite lint going through the stack, with it coming out the
end as a small explosion like dust in a grain silo explosion. A fire extinguisher was kept on hand, and the wall eventually got a stainless steel panel because it was so common.
I call BS.
Thermodynamics 101: If the air coming out of the last unit is hot enough to ignite things, then what is the minimum temperature of the stuff inside?
I can maybe believe that there was some sort of electrical fault inside that was infrequently arcing (maybe when a dust bunny passed through the fans?) and that might have caused the apparent problem. But there's no way to have functional electronics that are hot enough to ignite organic matter.
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.
640k ought to be enough for anybody.
...Just because we can't think of any way to break this "theoretical limit" doesn't mean it can't be broken....
It would be helpful if the parent poster were cognizant of the distinction between perceived social or technical limitations and genuine physical laws.
Yeah... too bad it's a spinal fluid test. Those are nasty.
I'm with you -- though I suppose it would only applied as a 'final confirmation' sort of test to rule out much rarer neurological conditions, after all the other, less-invasive tests had been exhausted.
Truth be told, the result described in the paper isn't particularly exciting; it just looks at a larger population of patients than has been used in the past, and teases out some correlations that were already expected. It may also explain some minor contradictions between previous studies that (could have) resulted from different timing of sample collection relative to time of disease onset. I'm not sure why this is making the news, except that there isn't a "We've cured cancer (again)!" story for the Times' science writers today.
I'm far more interested in seeing how some less-invasive diagnostics are going to turn out. There's some very interesting work going on which uses the eye and retina as a convenient window on the brain. There is work using several markers for Alzheimer's disease (either generic markers of cell death in retinal cells, or specific protein tests in the retina or aqueous humor) that employ simple eyedrops for delivery, and read out using straightforward fluorescence. Here's one; there are a number of others in the pipeline as well.
Voluntary..!? Have you tried getting a mortgage with no homeowners insurance lately? Or renewing a car registration with no auto insurance?
Have you tried buying a house using only your own money, rather than money that you're borrowing from someone else? It turns out that when someone lends you a few hundred thousand dollars, there are often strings attached. If you actually owned your home outright, you'd be free to not insure it.
As for auto insurance, you're welcome to drive your car about on your own property whenever and however you'd like -- no license, registration, or insurance required. You are only required to buy insurance when you head out onto roads that are paid for by and shared with other people.
So rather than pay for your own security, you prefer to let everyone else pay for it after your house has been robbed. How very philanthropic of you.
You betray your lack of understanding of simple economics. The insurance company isn't interested in subsidizing you. They will charge (to the very best of their penny pinching knowledge) exactly what they expect to pay out in claims, to a person with similar income, living in a similar apartment, in a similar neighborhood -- plus a comfortable markup for their trouble.
If you choose a homeowner's policy with a sensibly high deductible, then you're covered for catastrophic losses (the only really necessary role of insurance, for anyone with a shred of financial sense), but you're not on the hook for the (rather silly) folks who think that an insurance policy should protect them from anything and everything unfortunate that might ever happen to them. Not only that, by choosing such a sensible policy, you're also only sharing your risk with similarly sensible people.
Electronics will just make you feel cooler. But the stuff will still be stolen and, no, you won't get it back.
Precisely. Your laptop is sitting front and center in the middle of your desk. Your television is the most conspicuous thing in your living room. In less than two minutes, the competent burglar has located and lifted the most valuable objects in your apartment. (Unless you lock the TV in your closet every time you go out...?)
Your best bet is to buy a homeowner's/renter's insurance policy with a high deductible -- self-insure for the small stuff, and cough up as little as possible so that you aren't ruined by the rare just-in-case disaster.
Actually, come to think of it, a well-trained dog is probably one of your better security options.
...Assuming that the original poster actually likes dogs, and will enjoy taking care of one.
The likely cost of dog, plus regular veterinary maintenance, plus daily feeding, plus pet-sitting while away on holiday or business is substantial. (Remember, you can't board your security system at a kennel, or even store it at a friend's place while you're away -- it doesn't work, then.) You're out of pocket for quite a bit more than the typical homeowner's insurance policy, and the cost of dog food is probably comparable to most security system monitoring charges.
Meanwhile, the typical security system doesn't need to be walked twice a day (rain, snow, or sunshine), isn't going to shed on all of your clothing, and won't chew on your shoes.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really.
Yes, really. You can't make more retroviruses without going through reverse transcription and a DNA intermediate. Similarly, you can't propagate a prion without a supply of protein -- protein which was translated from RNA, which in turn was transcribed from DNA. Both retroviruses and prions ultimately depend on DNA to make more of themselves; they've just managed to convey information about their replication process without using their own DNA as the medium.
IANAS but it would seem to me that the presence of enough spores in the water samples to grow a culture from in not truly indicative of the red color being primarily or even partially from the spores. Given the concentration of spores needed to color water red, the probability of rain containing that concentration is very, very low.
That isn't necessarily an argument for why the red color couldn't be spores; that's an argument for why red rains are quite rare, and why they require ideal and unusual conditions under which to occur. I would rephrase your statement to, "Given that the rain was red, the probability of the rain containing a sufficient concentration of spores to cause the coloration approaches unity". Given that we get full-scale animals falling from the sky from time to time, it's not that much of a stretch for occasional freak meteorological conditions to pick up a bunch of teeny tiny algal spores. From the last decade, the Wikipedia article I linked has stories about frogs and toads (several occasions), fish (twice), worms, and spiders. Spores are child's play.
It's possible to discuss the plot without giving the ending away; reviews and guides do it.
Why would you decide that Wikipedia - an online encyclopedia - should follow the customs and practices of magazine articles and movie guides? Wouldn't it be more appropriate for it to take the approach of other encyclopedias and scholarly works?
I can't be the only one who reads them to see if I might like the book/film or not.
It's not really Wikipedia's fault that you're trying to use an encyclopedia as Rottentomatoes.com.
By the way, at the end of the play Romeo fakes his own death; Juliet fails to receive word in time and commits suicide; Romeo, heartbroken, takes his own life as well; everyone else feels bad afterward for being such dicks.
Journalism used to be about taking risks to bring critical public interest information to everyone, with a strong ethic and moral code.
Yes, now it's all about major media oligopolies competing for eyeballs using every dirty trick they can get their hands on. Creating rumours, cheerleading United States involvement in foreign wars, using media outlets to satisfy domestic political agendas or even fuel petty interpersonal feuds....
Oh, wait. That was a century ago.
...and Wikipedia can't come up with 'spoiler tags'. We really haven't gotten anywhere.
Wikipedia had spoiler tags, but decided to deprecate them -- as has been amply pointed out by other editors. Seriously, is it too much to ask for people to realize that an article section titled 'plot' will actually discuss the plot?
Clearly they're doing it just because they're dicks, as everyone knows that all other encyclopedias, serious literary reference works, and scholarly publications are very careful to wrap any discussion of plot details in spoiler tags.
2. Cushioned innards no?
I was just thinking the same thing. If you drop the plastic case, it deforms slightly on impact (or fails, as it did in this case), protecting the circuit boards and display from at least some of the shock.
The next time our engineer drops his calculator, the milled aluminum case will remain pretty and pristine, just as planned -- but without proper cushioning, the plastic circuit board screwed to it will fracture. (If the innards are free to move a bit, I also wonder if the buttons are all going to get sheared off when they bump up against the aluminum frame.)
You keep confusing a heuristic for a rationale. You also completely ignore the part that is key, that I emphasized over and over - the back-end.
I give up -- your story keeps changing. I wish you the best of luck in your future Slashdot posts, once you've figured out what your arguments actually are, and how to make them logically consistent.
One of the most important questions we ought to ask about this project is whether or not the teacher in question was actually prepared to address the implications of this sort of assignment, and particularly how this sort of thinking about painfully specific-but-scary plots distorts proper, rational security thinking. Schneier obviously gets it, but I'm not sure that the teacher here has nearly the same degree of clue. The assignment called specifically for a biological or chemical attack, despite such attacks representing a vanishingly small fraction of total terrorism attacks or deaths. Given that the project was to be evaluated based on the "students' ability to analyze information they had learned on terrorism and chemical and biological warfare and apply it to a real-life scenario", I fear that the assignment would have exactly the wrong effect on students' thinking.
The project is almost certainly a bad idea not because it 'teaches children to be terrorists' (or some similarly-worded alarmist tripe), but rather because it teaches children to unnecessarily fear terrorists. Imagining a class set of superficially-plausible worst-case scenarios involving deadly chemical and biological agents being used to "kill the MOST innocent civilians" in "an unsuspecting Australian community" then describing in detail "what effects the attack would have on a human body" seems tailor-made to promote irrational terror: visceral fear and revulsion, rather than rational thought and analysis.
The idea of limiting searches to what a regular guy can do...
No, you still are missing my point.
Why is it reasonable to decide that a 'regular guy' might have access to those other technological implements (automobile, radio, computer, database software, internet...) but not to a particular few required for ANPR: digital video camera, some frame-grabbing software, and a digital filter to grab number plate images and feed them to an OCR routine. That last one's the only one that you probably couldn't get directly off the shelf, but any halfway-competent hacker could put the whole package together for you in a few days. (And if he releases the source, then everyone gets it.)
If I cared to prove a point - and didn't have anything better to do with my time - I could set up such a system in my window, and have it publish to the web the licence plates of everyone who drove past my apartment. (Strictly speaking, I would probably use a separately-aimed and zoomed camera for each lane of traffic, in order to ensure enough pixels for reliable OCR.) It would work even while I was away.
Your argument doesn't work. You've already stipulated that all the other technologies used by police to call in plates pass your 'regular guy' test, and there's nothing to ANPR that can't be replicated (fairly easily) by a moderately-skilled and dedicated amateur.
The automation allows them to be easily used in an unreasonable fashion. I have just as much problem with cops who randomly run plates by hand, but the only reason that is not a significant problem is because it is inherently self limiting. Same thing with GPS tracking and most other forms of automated surveillance - they remove the barriers that naturally inhibit unreasonable searches - barriers that were inherent in the system when the original doctrine of "no privacy in public" was formalized.
Well, that's a different argument entirely, one that you didn't make the first time around -- and one that I might be more inclined to get on board with. In other words, I can at least respect a principled stand that police should not be able to run number plates arbitrarily, without some sort of probable cause standard (though I suspect that such a policy might have unintended consequences).
I have much more trouble arguing that the abilities of police should be arbitrarily bounded by restricting the use of particular technologies which automate legally-permissible tasks.
You are confused. Police officers using ANPR scan every single plate that they pass, hundreds of plates per minute. Regular cops don't call in plates unless they have a reason to be suspicious, but ANPR assumes everyone is suspicious because technology has made it so easy to do so. I am not a criminal and it is not reasonable to check up on me just because it is cheap to do so.
I'm not at all confused. You seem to have not understood - or forgotten - your own original argument. You asserted that ANPR should not be allowed because it allows one device to do the work of many officers. Apparently, the level of efficiency provided by allowing police to make radio calls or use computer databases is acceptable to you, but further automating the process of text recognition is not. How many plates per hour would be okay?
Now you seem to be suggesting that ANPR gives the police resources not available to the general public -- but they already have that. The general public can't call in and ask for registration info for random license plates; police officers can. If an officer were to check one random plate each minute, how would that differ from ANPR?
The primary difference being that it can be conducted en masse - i.e. its possible to track thousands of vehicles without committing any significant manpower. I have a similar problem with ANPR - one unattended machine can do what would otherwise take thousands of officers to do.
That's right. It should be illegal for the police to be able to conduct investigations too efficiently; indeed, I don't think you've followed your criticism of ANPR through to its logical conclusion. Even if a human officer is in the loop (as, for example, when a police officer notes down the plate of a passing vehicle, or when he pulls over a car), he is able to take advantage of myriad technologies. He can call in the plate number by radio (or through a wireless internet connection, in many cases), and the number can be checked against an electronic database. The owner of the car and all of the associated registration info is available, on the spot, in the field, in just a few seconds.
In an 'honest' system, the cop would pull you over and write down your license number. He would then walk to the central station - or possibly be allowed to ride a horse. He would manually locate your registration info in the massive card files, then have the secretary type out a couple of carbon copies to take back with him. (If you're from out of town, he'd have to send for copies from the Department of Motor Vehicles' central records in the state capital; with luck it's an overnight return trip by pony express.) Then he would walk back to your car, where you would be dying of starvation, and send you on your way. The use of all that modern technology (radio, computers, telephones, automobiles) means that one uniform can do what would otherwise take hundreds of officers.
At what level of efficiency does the use of publicly-available information and modern technology become unethical? And why? (Incidentally, someone opposed to ANPR on these grounds may have to face some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance attempting to resolve his preferred reading of the Second Amendment. If the cops aren't allowed to adopt new technology as it becomes available, why should the Second Amendment apply to arms developed after 1791? Goodbye semiautomatic pistols and smokeless powder; hello muskets.)
I think a principle more suited to the current situation (which will only become more extreme as the automation on the back-end becomes more and more capable) is that if surveillance requires resources not normally available to the average citizen then it requires a warrant.
I'm not seeing it. In the case of ANPR, the police are using resources not available to the general public -- but a police officer calling in a plate number is doing the same thing. In the case of GPS trackers, one could almost certainly have the poor-man's version just by strapping an iPhone to the target's vehicle.
It would could billions of hojillions of dollars and take ten years, and what we have already works.
Your post makes some excellent points, and I agree with everything that you said. I'd go even further, and note that the transition process would almost certain result in a large number of injuries and deaths as well.
Changing all of the fittings means simultaneous retraining of all the medical personnel who handle them. Patient care will be hindered because medical professionals will take more time to carry out important actions (until they become familiar with the new tools). Nurses will spend more time hunting for correct fittings and plumbing bits. Even when staff become used to the new tools, facilities will have to carry more different fittings and attachments. Procedures will have to be repeated because someone started with the wrong tool. Oh -- you used a needle with an arterial fitting rather than an IV one? You're going to have to puncture the patient again.
For some period of time, the new equipment will have to coexist beside the old. What do you do when the new drug bag isn't compatible with the old IV line? Inevitable supply line kinks may mean that hospitals receive a mix of old and new product, especially if there are occasional shortages of the new stuff.
What happens when the paramedics have inserted lines and performed other tasks using the newly-supplied fittings in their ambulance, only to arrive at a hospital that's still running through its stock of old equipment? How much room for trouble is there in the world of disposable cross-connectors and old-new converters (there will likely be at least two for each new connector) that all the hospitals and ambulances and doctors' offices will have to carry for the years it will take for all the old connectors to work their way out of the system?
Regardless of how much pre-release testing goes on, it's almost certain that at least one of the new connector types/shapes won't turn out to work as well as it should, and then we'll have to throw in another transition period to another type of equipment.
People will die.
FFS, people, when will it be understood that Hemp is much more than just Cannabis? Honestly, folk... 'concluding' that the car is made of Cannabis when it's described as a 'hemp' car is like concluding a person is a heroine user when they say they took some drugs... (even if it was a headache pill).
Except that hemp is Cannabis. Industrial hemp is generally manufactured from Cannabis sativa sativa, while medicinal and recreational products are generally derived from Cannabis sativa indica.
Honestly, folks, concluding that a car is made from 'Cannabis' when it's described as 'hemp', is like concluding that a suit is made from 'polymers' when it's described as being 'polyester'... Oh.
Would you buy a screwdriver with a handle shaped like a sensuous woman?
And if so, wouldn't you be EMBARASSED to have it in a place where you - and god-forbid, anyone else - might see it?
Clearly, you've never shopped for mud flaps.
Non-traditional, but is it unusual? I thought I'd seen transmission towers with guy wires, or at least some looked as though they should have guy wires (narrow base, tapering up and out).
Yep, guyed transmission pylons are not exactly a new thing. Many two-legged towers are in service today. Balancing on a single point is even relatively common. (One advantage of these towers is less site preparation may be needed. Since the lengths of the guys are adjustable, the location of the pylon doesn't need to be levelled, and a smaller foundation is required.)
And if you think that humanoid pylons are impractical - get a load of these ugly things. [dezeen.com] No pun intended.
Yep, those are quite something. But they lost me as soon as I read,
“A parametric code drives the heights in an continuous gradient, which will be manufactured physically through help of milling machines,” says Koering.
Really? Milling fifty- to hundred-foot tall structures? That sounds hideously costly, compared to the bolt-it-together steel structures currently in use, or even the ones contemplated by the linked story. While quite visually striking, these pylons are constructed of aramid fiber and resin -- not exactly inexpensive or simple to work with. And how well will they cope with lightning strikes?
One site had so many machines side to side (over 7), the air coming out the last machine regularly set things on FIRE. It was not uncommon for the machine to ignite lint going through the stack, with it coming out the end as a small explosion like dust in a grain silo explosion. A fire extinguisher was kept on hand, and the wall eventually got a stainless steel panel because it was so common.
I call BS.
Thermodynamics 101: If the air coming out of the last unit is hot enough to ignite things, then what is the minimum temperature of the stuff inside?
I can maybe believe that there was some sort of electrical fault inside that was infrequently arcing (maybe when a dust bunny passed through the fans?) and that might have caused the apparent problem. But there's no way to have functional electronics that are hot enough to ignite organic matter.
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.
640k ought to be enough for anybody.
...Just because we can't think of any way to break this "theoretical limit" doesn't mean it can't be broken....
It would be helpful if the parent poster were cognizant of the distinction between perceived social or technical limitations and genuine physical laws.
Yeah... too bad it's a spinal fluid test. Those are nasty.
I'm with you -- though I suppose it would only applied as a 'final confirmation' sort of test to rule out much rarer neurological conditions, after all the other, less-invasive tests had been exhausted.
Truth be told, the result described in the paper isn't particularly exciting; it just looks at a larger population of patients than has been used in the past, and teases out some correlations that were already expected. It may also explain some minor contradictions between previous studies that (could have) resulted from different timing of sample collection relative to time of disease onset. I'm not sure why this is making the news, except that there isn't a "We've cured cancer (again)!" story for the Times' science writers today.
I'm far more interested in seeing how some less-invasive diagnostics are going to turn out. There's some very interesting work going on which uses the eye and retina as a convenient window on the brain. There is work using several markers for Alzheimer's disease (either generic markers of cell death in retinal cells, or specific protein tests in the retina or aqueous humor) that employ simple eyedrops for delivery, and read out using straightforward fluorescence. Here's one; there are a number of others in the pipeline as well.
Voluntary..!? Have you tried getting a mortgage with no homeowners insurance lately? Or renewing a car registration with no auto insurance?
Have you tried buying a house using only your own money, rather than money that you're borrowing from someone else? It turns out that when someone lends you a few hundred thousand dollars, there are often strings attached. If you actually owned your home outright, you'd be free to not insure it.
As for auto insurance, you're welcome to drive your car about on your own property whenever and however you'd like -- no license, registration, or insurance required. You are only required to buy insurance when you head out onto roads that are paid for by and shared with other people.
So rather than pay for your own security, you prefer to let everyone else pay for it after your house has been robbed. How very philanthropic of you.
You betray your lack of understanding of simple economics. The insurance company isn't interested in subsidizing you. They will charge (to the very best of their penny pinching knowledge) exactly what they expect to pay out in claims, to a person with similar income, living in a similar apartment, in a similar neighborhood -- plus a comfortable markup for their trouble.
If you choose a homeowner's policy with a sensibly high deductible, then you're covered for catastrophic losses (the only really necessary role of insurance, for anyone with a shred of financial sense), but you're not on the hook for the (rather silly) folks who think that an insurance policy should protect them from anything and everything unfortunate that might ever happen to them. Not only that, by choosing such a sensible policy, you're also only sharing your risk with similarly sensible people.
Electronics will just make you feel cooler. But the stuff will still be stolen and, no, you won't get it back.
Precisely. Your laptop is sitting front and center in the middle of your desk. Your television is the most conspicuous thing in your living room. In less than two minutes, the competent burglar has located and lifted the most valuable objects in your apartment. (Unless you lock the TV in your closet every time you go out...?)
Your best bet is to buy a homeowner's/renter's insurance policy with a high deductible -- self-insure for the small stuff, and cough up as little as possible so that you aren't ruined by the rare just-in-case disaster.
Actually, come to think of it, a well-trained dog is probably one of your better security options.
Since when is an option that requires me to handle dog excrement on a daily basis a 'better' option?
Actually, come to think of it, a well-trained dog is probably one of your better security options.
The likely cost of dog, plus regular veterinary maintenance, plus daily feeding, plus pet-sitting while away on holiday or business is substantial. (Remember, you can't board your security system at a kennel, or even store it at a friend's place while you're away -- it doesn't work, then.) You're out of pocket for quite a bit more than the typical homeowner's insurance policy, and the cost of dog food is probably comparable to most security system monitoring charges.
Meanwhile, the typical security system doesn't need to be walked twice a day (rain, snow, or sunshine), isn't going to shed on all of your clothing, and won't chew on your shoes.