The point here is that there are money-grubbing scientists.
You're kidding, right? The scientists who do the research and write the papers receive no financial compensation from the journals whatsoever. Often, those scientists pay part of the cost of publication in the form of page or colour charges. The scientists who peer review the work work for free as well. It's seen as something that they owe to the rest of the community.
The journal publishers are the ones who make the money. They charge libraries and scientists for subscriptions, and they charge the authors to publish. Granted, they provide services; typesetting and layout and editing and distribution aren't free. But don't mistake money-grubbing publishing companies for money-grubbing scientists. A money-grubbing scientist would want to distribute their work as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. Scientists make money (grants, tenure, collaboration opportunities) on the basis of their reputations--reputations which are built on their work being widely known.
Re:I thought the "Spam King" was Sanford Wallace?
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MySpace Sues Spam King
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It doesn't sound like much when you change it into kilowatt hours because it's spread out over an hour. Lets say all the energy is used in one second which would be 32MW which is a whole lot more impressive that 9kWh.
Meh. The engines on an Arleigh Burke class destroyer develop 75 MW for propulsion from four General Electric LM2500 marine gas turbines. Apparently, these turbines can crank out 28 MW of electrical power continuously when coupled to a generator rather than a prop shaft, for a firing rate of up to one shot every 1.2 seconds. (Put the extra turbine in the bay you removed all the missiles and missile handling equipment from.)
Honestly though, you don't need to be able to charge the rail gun in less time than it takes to reload and cool down from each shot; I figure that's going to be at least a couple of minutes, so even a much smaller generator would do the trick. (For a two-minute recharge time, you need a less-than 300 kW generator, or to steal a bit less than half a percent of the Arleigh Burke's available power output.)
Oddly enough, this has already been reported on. It turns out that the physical constants of our Universe are such that it is inevitable that toast will tend to fall butter-side down. See Tumbling toast, Murphy's Law and the fundamental constants by R. A. J. Matthews in the European Journal of Physics.
Abstract. We investigate the dynamics of toast tumbling from a table to the floor. Popular opinion is that the final state is usually butter-side down, and constitutes prima facie evidence of Murphy's Law ('If it can go wrong, it will'). The orthodox view, in contrast, is that the phenomenon is essentially random, with a 50/50 split of possible outcomes. We show that toast does indeed have an inherent tendency to land butter-side down for a wide range of conditions. Furthermore, we show that this outcome is ultimately ascribable to the values of the fundamental constants. As such, this manifestation of Murphy's Law appears to be an ineluctable feature of our universe.
Funnily enough, I was just bitching about scientific faux pas in the mainstream media, but New Scientist?
Dude, have you seen New Scientist lately? Their cover story a few months ago was a levitation device for flying cars. Which would have been great, if the basic operating principle weren't one that could have been debunked by a sharp high school student. Lo, behold the mighty EmDrive.
New Scientist's response is just embarrasing. From editor Jeremy Webb (emphasis added):
"It is a fair criticism that New Scientist did not make clear enough how controversial Roger Shawyer's engine is. We should have made more explicit where it apparently contravenes the laws of nature and reported that several physicists declined to comment on the device because they thought it too contentious.
But should New Scientist should have covered this story at all? The answer is a resounding yes..."
New Scientist is fun to read, but it's definitely not a good idea to mistake it as a source of solid science reporting.
Well, of course you can't. That would make your sense of smell totally useless, now wouldn't it? I mean, have you smelled a dog's breath lately?
Through a process called sensory adaptation, your brain automatically starts to ignore persistent stimuli. Ever notic how if a room has a particular smell, you only notice right after you walk in? The perception fades after a period of exposure; something similar happens with the smell of your breath.
If you told us that you couldn't smell other people's breath, then I'd wonder about your sense of smell.
Before the crowd starts jumping up and down, his speech contains errors. So does An Inconvenient Truth.
I would be much more comfortable with such a statement if you were prepared to discuss the nature and severity of the errors in the two presentations.
Otherwise we might as well be saying things like "Aspects of the Bibical account of Creation are, as yet, not fully supported by experiment. This is also true of aspects of evolutionary theory" and using that assessment to lend equal weight and credence to the two positions.
There's a difference between selective breeding and cellular-level manipulation of organisms.
True. The key point is, we're talking about the former and not the latter; both the cows and the apples are clones, and both are products of selective breeding. Why am I allowed to do all kinds of 'unnatural' things to a cutting from an apple tree, but I'm not allowed to do 'unnatural' things to a dollop of cow cells? I can graft a bit of apple tree onto another apple tree, but I can't graft a bit of cow onto another cow? Bah.
...the current month's rates for energy in my neighborhood are 2.2 cents/kWh for the first 800 kWh and 1.2 cents/kWh after...
First off, I don't believe you're actually paying just 2.2 cents/kWh, or that the price declines to 1.2 cents/kWh--unless your local utility is incredibly heavily subsidized by your local taxes, or you're living right on top of the Hoover Dam, or something. You should probably review your electric bill very carefully.
it's about $9,000 and lasts for around 100,000 kilowatt-hours (20 year life), which results in 9 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Second, I'd be very careful about that type of calculation. Kilowatt-hours that you use twenty years down the road but pay for now are much more expensive than they might appear at first glance. In your twentieth year, figure you get your last $450 worth of electricity: 5000 kWh. If instead you had put that $450 into a modest bond or GIC or other near-zero-risk investment earning (hypothetically) 4% per year, you'd have $986. If you'd been earning 8% making blue-chip investments in the stock market (figure 10% per year, less 2% for inflation) your $450 would be up to a little over two thousand dollars, and your last 5000 kilowatt-hours would set you back 42 cents/kWh. Oops.
I don't imagine many Americans have $8k-$11k laying around...
Which is sad and unfortunate. If we look at Slashdot readers, most are probably well-educated and have jobs with a reasonable wage. If you're earning $40K per year, you should be able to put 10% of that away into savings each year--something for a rainy day, or perhaps a windmill....
Huh? How does thinner = autmatically "much more suitable"? I just don't get it. We're used to working with people, and that extends to their personal space, which is substantially larger than the person. Who says that human/robot 'synergy' has anything to do with how fat the robot is?
Find a wheelchair. Try to navigate through your daily routine. Ever notice how most human spaces aren't designed for a wide chassis? Imagine if ''everybody'' was in a wheelchair. Try passing the 'slow walker' (you know who I'm talking about) in the hallway without running into the guy coming the other way. Tall and skinny--in other words, more human-shaped--is an advantage in working with humans, because humans work in human-shaped places.
For that matter, you're less likely to trip over a robot that's five feet tall than one that's two feet tall; tall robots are easier to see. Wide, low robots would be a nuisance to work with. It would be like having dozens of short, fat children always getting in the way.
This is to hamper the ability of opposition parties to use the Internet as a voice.
(Score: -1, Huh?)
I'm not qualified to comment on the quality (or lack thereof) of the government of Cameroon. Based on their actions here, they certainly don't come across as good neighbours. Nevertheless, I can't see how typo-squatting.com domains (so that the individual mistyping www.cnn.com as www.cnn.cm ends up at a page serving ads) has any effect on democracy in Cameroon.
I mean, it sounds like there might be a worthwhile, intelligent, and insightful post to be made about how Cameroon is governed--but the off-target and off-topic rant above isn't it.
Admiral Farragut was given his first command (a prize ship) during the War of 1812 when he was twelve years old.
And Mozart wrote his first compositions when he was five, and performed at the Imperial Court in Vienna when he was six years old. It's sad; education slipped so much between 1762 and 1812 that it took a twelve-year-old to do the job in Farragut's time.
Seriously, it's not a good idea to draw conclusions about a group based on cherry-picked atypical single cases.
Nowadays, most people can type faster than they can write and have access to all manner of spelling and grammar checkers but just look at the messages on that site (and many others) and it's quite shocking to witness the poor quality of what they've written, excluding the minority where English perhaps isn't their first language.
A key question about no-fly lists is the criteria used to put people on it. Ideally, it should be transparent so, for instance, everyone out there with a criminal record isn't concerned every time they get on a plane that law enforcement officials will descend upon them.
I'd be inclined to narrow that a bit, perhaps, but I'm not sure why it would be unreasonable for law enforcement officials not to pay closer attention to certain types of convicted criminals.
Liquid gasoline only explodes in Hollywood. You can drop a match into it and the match will go out.
Is anyone else here familiar with the expression 'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing'? I would urge anyone here to avoid following the above smug-and-soon-to-be-badly-burned idiot's advice.
At normal temperatures, gasoline has a vapour pressure sufficient that there will be a flammable vapour above any standing liquid gasoline. The flashpoint of gasoline is -40 (that's minus forty) degrees; at any temperature above that there can be sufficient vapour present to ignite and explode.
Under some conditions (for example, a confined container with a narrow neck and little air circulation) you might get the gasoline vapour to displace enough oxygen that it won't be able to burn. The upper explosive limit for gasoline is about 8%; above that level combustion will cease rapidly because the available oxygen will be depleted.
If you really insist on doing a drop-a-match-in-the-fuel experiment, use diesel fuel. The flashpoint of diesel is a little bit more than 60 degrees Celsius (about 140 F) and so won't form a flammable vapour mixture in air unless you're storing it really warm.
A tradeoff of a 5% longer route for a deduction of 5% in fuel costs is something that any shipping agency would be willing to consider.
Nix. You can't increase the actual duration of the voyage without a compelling reason. Assume that between Port A and Port B there are twenty freighters full of cargo moving back and forth. If each of them takes five percent longer, you have to build another freighter. Sure, the operating costs are a wash, but you're out a big chunk of capital. That neglects the expenditure associated with putting sails on all twenty-one ships, too.
Adding man-power to a late software project only makes it later, as was shown by Brooks some 30 years ago.
That's why you don't add manpower to a late project--you have to design the increased manpower in from the start. The grandparent noted a couple of tricks used in construction, including three shifts for 24/7 work. If you have good specifications and a modular design, you can have several groups working independently on the project right up until a final integration. Heck, code all day and have a Q&A/code review/testing group work the night shift. Have teams of a half-dozen people working on one specific task at a time on staggered, overlapping round-the-clock shifts until the tasks are complete. This is just the stuff off the top of my head; there are probably a lot of other strategies that one could employ as well.
Would these suggestions be costly to implement? Hell yes. Rushing a construction job is expensive too. When you need to have something done right and done soon, it will cost you. Fast, cheap, and good--you can only have two. Software doesn't escape that rule.
My compaq v4000 notebook I got for $740 was financed with a high interest 14.4% APR loan. With these its about $35 but I had $300 cash from working and saving so it turned out to be affordable for college students. The best Apple could do was a 90 day loan. Uh sorry.
Hmmm. Apple sells computers. I can understand why they wouldn't want to get into the messy, messy world of consumer lending, particularly over what are pretty small amounts of money in an absolute sense.
My understanding is that in many places, there are companies that exist precisely to provide financial services of various sorts--including personal loans. In most cases, these special companies can provide interest rates appreciably lower than 14.4% on products called 'student loans' or 'student lines of credit'. I don't quite remember what these companies are called, but they often have something like 'binq' or 'kredette oonyun' in their names.
For that matter, if you're already willing to get soaked for 14.4%, you might as well bite the bullet and put it on your credit card for a few months. ($900 paid off in equal instalments over six months only costs you an extra twelve bucks at 19.9% interest compared to the 14.4% gouging that Compaq so generously gave you. If you can only afford $35 a month, you'll be paying for an extra three months to a total term of about 3 years.)
I'm not quite sure what that means for the long-term health of the company, but I suspect that the more streams of revenue a company has, the more likely they are to become conservative, entrenched, and reluctant to embrace change...
I thought that adopting more revenue streams generally meant that a company had to be willing to embrace novelty and change. I mean, trying new businesses doesn't scream out 'conservative and entrenched' to me....
As for the long-term health of the company, new revenue streams are almost always good. It means that if one branch of the company has a bad year, the whole business isn't going to fold.
Let's just tell the animal rights protestors that anyway.
Please don't tell the animal rights people anything. Please! Tell them that we're working with nuclear weapons or lasers or something.
One of my coworkers worked in a Drosophilia (fruit fly) lab as a summer student some number of years ago. One Monday morning, he came in to the lab to wryly smiling colleagues. Apparently, animal rights activists had broken in to the lab over the weekend, and set all of the fruit flies 'free'. Unfortunately, this particular lab was working with curly-wing and wingless mutants, so the freed flies took a few tottering steps, then fell out of their open tubes and collected on the floor.
Here's my challenge to you: let me see you get on a wiki-aeroplane...
Right! It's always a good idea to assume that a management and development technique that works well (or not) for creating a general encyclopedia should be equally well-suited to the construction of a complex, manufactured, physical artifact. Have you ever had the following conversation at the hardware store--and if not, why not?
"This is a terrible hammer! It does an awful job installing screws!"
Just in case you think I'm being facetious, Jimbo Wales has recently cheerfully admitted that he get 10 e-mails a week from students who complain that they got an F because they cited Wikipedia and the citation turned out to be wrong. And Jimbo says "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia"
And--I hate to break it to you--he was right to say so. I know of professors who will fail a student for citing any encyclopedia article in a reference, even if the information cited is factually correct. Encyclopedias are never (or should never be) primary sources. Anyone doing any sort of research should be going right to the original source documents. College students should know better than to try to get away with citing an encyclopedia article, and they should be learning how to properly dig up primary source material.
By the time a student reaches the postsecondary level, that student should be able to find sources that aren't on the first page of Google hits. They should never trust a tertiary source. (Incidentally, Wikipedia articles tend to be better about providing citations to primary sources; Britannica seldom does so.)
Slashdot Mirror
You're kidding, right? The scientists who do the research and write the papers receive no financial compensation from the journals whatsoever. Often, those scientists pay part of the cost of publication in the form of page or colour charges. The scientists who peer review the work work for free as well. It's seen as something that they owe to the rest of the community.
The journal publishers are the ones who make the money. They charge libraries and scientists for subscriptions, and they charge the authors to publish. Granted, they provide services; typesetting and layout and editing and distribution aren't free. But don't mistake money-grubbing publishing companies for money-grubbing scientists. A money-grubbing scientist would want to distribute their work as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. Scientists make money (grants, tenure, collaboration opportunities) on the basis of their reputations--reputations which are built on their work being widely known.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and all that.
Meh. The engines on an Arleigh Burke class destroyer develop 75 MW for propulsion from four General Electric LM2500 marine gas turbines. Apparently, these turbines can crank out 28 MW of electrical power continuously when coupled to a generator rather than a prop shaft, for a firing rate of up to one shot every 1.2 seconds. (Put the extra turbine in the bay you removed all the missiles and missile handling equipment from.)
Honestly though, you don't need to be able to charge the rail gun in less time than it takes to reload and cool down from each shot; I figure that's going to be at least a couple of minutes, so even a much smaller generator would do the trick. (For a two-minute recharge time, you need a less-than 300 kW generator, or to steal a bit less than half a percent of the Arleigh Burke's available power output.)
New Scientist's response is just embarrasing. From editor Jeremy Webb (emphasis added):
New Scientist is fun to read, but it's definitely not a good idea to mistake it as a source of solid science reporting.Through a process called sensory adaptation, your brain automatically starts to ignore persistent stimuli. Ever notic how if a room has a particular smell, you only notice right after you walk in? The perception fades after a period of exposure; something similar happens with the smell of your breath.
If you told us that you couldn't smell other people's breath, then I'd wonder about your sense of smell.
Otherwise we might as well be saying things like "Aspects of the Bibical account of Creation are, as yet, not fully supported by experiment. This is also true of aspects of evolutionary theory" and using that assessment to lend equal weight and credence to the two positions.
For that matter, you're less likely to trip over a robot that's five feet tall than one that's two feet tall; tall robots are easier to see. Wide, low robots would be a nuisance to work with. It would be like having dozens of short, fat children always getting in the way.
I'm not qualified to comment on the quality (or lack thereof) of the government of Cameroon. Based on their actions here, they certainly don't come across as good neighbours. Nevertheless, I can't see how typo-squatting .com domains (so that the individual mistyping www.cnn.com as www.cnn.cm ends up at a page serving ads) has any effect on democracy in Cameroon.
I mean, it sounds like there might be a worthwhile, intelligent, and insightful post to be made about how Cameroon is governed--but the off-target and off-topic rant above isn't it.
Seriously, it's not a good idea to draw conclusions about a group based on cherry-picked atypical single cases.
At normal temperatures, gasoline has a vapour pressure sufficient that there will be a flammable vapour above any standing liquid gasoline. The flashpoint of gasoline is -40 (that's minus forty) degrees; at any temperature above that there can be sufficient vapour present to ignite and explode.
Under some conditions (for example, a confined container with a narrow neck and little air circulation) you might get the gasoline vapour to displace enough oxygen that it won't be able to burn. The upper explosive limit for gasoline is about 8%; above that level combustion will cease rapidly because the available oxygen will be depleted.
If you really insist on doing a drop-a-match-in-the-fuel experiment, use diesel fuel. The flashpoint of diesel is a little bit more than 60 degrees Celsius (about 140 F) and so won't form a flammable vapour mixture in air unless you're storing it really warm.
Would these suggestions be costly to implement? Hell yes. Rushing a construction job is expensive too. When you need to have something done right and done soon, it will cost you. Fast, cheap, and good--you can only have two. Software doesn't escape that rule.
My understanding is that in many places, there are companies that exist precisely to provide financial services of various sorts--including personal loans. In most cases, these special companies can provide interest rates appreciably lower than 14.4% on products called 'student loans' or 'student lines of credit'. I don't quite remember what these companies are called, but they often have something like 'binq' or 'kredette oonyun' in their names.
For that matter, if you're already willing to get soaked for 14.4%, you might as well bite the bullet and put it on your credit card for a few months. ($900 paid off in equal instalments over six months only costs you an extra twelve bucks at 19.9% interest compared to the 14.4% gouging that Compaq so generously gave you. If you can only afford $35 a month, you'll be paying for an extra three months to a total term of about 3 years.)
I thought that adopting more revenue streams generally meant that a company had to be willing to embrace novelty and change. I mean, trying new businesses doesn't scream out 'conservative and entrenched' to me....
As for the long-term health of the company, new revenue streams are almost always good. It means that if one branch of the company has a bad year, the whole business isn't going to fold.
-A confused Canadian
One of my coworkers worked in a Drosophilia (fruit fly) lab as a summer student some number of years ago. One Monday morning, he came in to the lab to wryly smiling colleagues. Apparently, animal rights activists had broken in to the lab over the weekend, and set all of the fruit flies 'free'. Unfortunately, this particular lab was working with curly-wing and wingless mutants, so the freed flies took a few tottering steps, then fell out of their open tubes and collected on the floor.
"This is a terrible hammer! It does an awful job installing screws!"
And--I hate to break it to you--he was right to say so. I know of professors who will fail a student for citing any encyclopedia article in a reference, even if the information cited is factually correct. Encyclopedias are never (or should never be) primary sources. Anyone doing any sort of research should be going right to the original source documents. College students should know better than to try to get away with citing an encyclopedia article, and they should be learning how to properly dig up primary source material.By the time a student reaches the postsecondary level, that student should be able to find sources that aren't on the first page of Google hits. They should never trust a tertiary source. (Incidentally, Wikipedia articles tend to be better about providing citations to primary sources; Britannica seldom does so.)