For example, the strength of the cable necessary is directly related to the mass of the earth.
One good sized metor at high enough velocity striking the earth, and we could build the elevator out of nylon rope.
Some other methods of reducing the mass of the earth are available here...
Hello! I'm with the Society for the Preservation Of Natural Gravity on Earth (SPONGE). We at SPONGE are dedicated to conserving Earth's valuable mass--it's a tremendous natural gravitational resource. Did you know that if the Earth loses all of its mass, our children would be flung off into space?
SPONGE is taking a two-pronged approach to meeting the challenges of conservation of mass. First, we are lobbying aggressively to prevent the removal of any mass from Earth. Second, we are mass-producing shoes with adhesive soles. These shoes will be distributed to the world's children (in alphabetical order, starting with Aaron; sorry Zachary) to protect them in the event of a sudden gravity shortage.
E.g., if you want to talk safety, you don't want to be the guy that gets splashed by liquid at -253C when the tank ruptures in an accident. Or yes, when a tanker ruptures on the highway. Yes, it will eventually just rise up, but in the meantime it will instantly kill anything it spills onto.
How many times have you heard of someone getting splashed by, say, gasoline in a traffic accident? From a gasoline tanker rupture? Yes, it's bad if you get a lot of liquid hydrogen on you; you'll burn any skin surface it comes in contact with for more than a second or two. It's not instantly fatal, however, and it would take a fair bit to actually kill a person. And yes, I work with cryogenic gases.
So you don't want a garrage that's just not sealed shut, you'll want one that's ventilated constantly, even in winter. Otherwise it can jolly well blow up.
The lower explosive limit (LEL) for hydrogen gas is 18%. (For comparison, the LEL for methane (natural gas) is 5.7%, and the LEL for propane is 2.1%.) You'd need to boil off quite a bit of hydrogen to get to that level, even in a perfectly-sealed garage. Just punch a duct through to the outside from the high point in the garage (and another somewhere else to let fresh air in) and you should be good to go. Or park in the driveway.
E.g., the problem is made worse by the fact that hydrogen has no colour or smell of its own, so you can't _know_ if you've walked into a room full of it or not. Gasoline, for all its other problems, does have a smell.
Many other fuel gases lack a perceptible smell, too. Trace amounts of an odorant chemical (ethyl mercaptan) are added to propane and to natural gas so that leaks can be detected. This is very much a solved problem.
E.g., worse yet, it also _burns_ with an invisible flame, so you could walk into a jet of flame from a punctured hose or tanker that did ignite, and not even know it until you get burned by it. Again, you can handwave that as _unlikely_, but it's a very real problem and given hundreds of millions of cars, somewhere it will eventually happen.
I'll take the handwaving, thanks. Yes, hydrogen is a different fuel and has some different failure modes. One expects that commercial handlers of hydrogen are trained to anticipate and defend against the hazards associated with its use, just as they are trained in proper bonding and grounding and ventilation where they handle gasoline. If there are occasional freak accidents, hey, it happens. Getting rid of gasoline will cut down on certain other classes of accidents--the guys who try to light a barbecue with gasoline, for instance.
And so on. And, yes, I'd be interested to know how these palladium balls address those problems. E.g., will it actually make the energy density worth it, or just dillute it some more?
This is rather the crux of the matter, actually. Palladium can absorb up to 900 times its weight in hydrogen gas. Under moderate pressure, it will hold it indefinitely. No cryogenics required. It neatly addresses a lot of the safety concerns in your diatribe. The downside is that it's hideously expensive.
...it's illegal for everyone except journalists to spread around classified information?
Wait--it's only okay for them to publish classified information if it embarrasses the (admittedly bloodly stupid) government, or needs to be released. Good thing we have honest, upstanding, selfless journalists to handle those decisions, then.
Good thinking, Slashdot.
Have we considered, perhaps, taking a more nuanced position?
Unless you can show that the gene SOD1 occurs in significantly less than 2% of the general population, you haven't proved anything. I could easily show that 2% of everyone who dies of heart disease has green eyes, but that doesn't prove a causal link. This sounds like medical researchers fishing for more funding. But then again, IANADWRTKOS (I Am Not A Dude Who Researches This Kind Of Stuff).
*sigh* No, I'm not just talking out of my ass. Yes, I do know what I'm talking about.
SOD1 exists in all of the population, just like the genes in the SIDS studies. The important bit is that mutant forms of the SOD1 gene are present in these familial ALS cases. These mutations are present in a significantly larger fraction of the ALS population than the normal population. Transgenic mice that express the mutant forms of SOD1 develop motor neuron disease. The science for it is solid. Occasionally, you're going to need to trust the Dudes Who Research This Kind Of Stuff.
It's generally a good idea to assume basic competence on the part of they guys at the Mayo Clinic, too. CAV3 and RyR2 mutations were already implicated in previously unexplained cases of adult cardiac arrest. The SIDS study just looked for these (known to be rare) mutations in SIDS infants, and sure enough, there were more than would be expected in a random sample.
Before you assume that researchers are just fishing for funding, at least try Google. SOD1 info abounds, and there's a fair bit about the cardiac mutants readily available.
In a group of 23 people, what are the odds that two of them have the same birthday? The answer may surprise you.
It's a shade better than 50%, if I remember correctly.
Now here's a question for you: In a group of 135 people, what are the odds that two of them carry a mutation in the same gene related to cardiac function?
Bonus question: Was your question or my question more closely related to the issue at hand?
If you take a random sample of 270 people that like fishing, there will be some mutation that is common between two or more of them, but that's hardly enough to claim that this mutation makes you enjoy fishing.
You're assuming a 'fishing expedition' for any random gene mutation in common, though.
These studies looked specifically at genes that were known to be related to heart problems in adults. CAV3 was recently identified as a genetic cause of long QT syndrome, while RyR2 is linked to catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (press release).
If these mutations occur at a low baseline rate in the general population, two hits of each may be quite significant. This link indicates that RyR2 mutations are rare in the general population, with a probable incidence of under 1%. (They found no mutations in 200 healthy volunteers having 400 copies of the gene.) I'm not going to dig further for incidence numbers, but I'd bet good money that both RyR2 and CAV3 mutations are rare and that getting two hits of each in a population of 135 is quite unlikely.
Something that occurs in less than 2% of studied cases is a "potential contributing cause"?
Yep. It's not that unusual, actually. Physicians and epidemiologists start out with a number of dead people. They look for commonalities: symptoms, age at onset, unusual blood chemistry, etc. If they don't know what the root cause of an ailment is but they see similar patterns across a number of deaths, they coin a name for it. Here, it's Sudden Infant Death Syndrome--SIDS.
The name tells you what happens but doesn't explain why. Saying "I have a runny nose and I've been sneezing a lot" would let me put you in the Sudden Adult Sniffling Syndrome (SASS) group, but it doesn't actually tell me what caused your ailment. It turns out that SASS actually has a number of different causes that ultimately lead to the same outcome. You may be having an allergic reaction to pollen. You might have a rhinovirus infection. Maybe you have a brain tumour. For this particular symptom, we have a lot of ways of evaluating the course of the disease and the status of the patient.
With SIDS it is much more difficult. There may be many factors that make an individual susceptible, some genetic, some environmental, some a combination, some requiring a lot of bad luck.
A comparison might be drawn with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known in the U.S. as Lou Gehrig's disease). In ALS, the motor neurons die off slowly, over the course of months or years. It starts in the periphery of the body and works its way up to the brain. Under the 'umbrella' of ALS, about 10% of cases are classified as 'familial'--that is, a patient is related to other individuals with the disease. Within this category, about 20% of cases are linked to one of several mutations in the gene SOD1 (superoxide dismutase). (One would expect most of the other familial cases to be related to other genes or gene combinations.) So while only about 2% of ALS cases are linked to SOD1 mutations, it is without a doubt a "contributing cause".
It seems to me if your flesh is being eaten away by an unstoppable bacteria, you're going to be pretty willing to test out a new antibiotic. Sometimes the FDA clinical trials process just isn't sensible.
The clinical trials process is there to protect people who are so desperate that they will try anything, sign anything, test anything. The alternative is to have a queue of snake-oil peddlers at the door of every dying person--"My pet theory is that weasel saliva contains powerful natural antimicrobials, so I'd like to put weasels down your pants and encourage them to bite you. It could be your only chance!"
The first humans to start using this drug will probably take half of the prescribed course and stop as soon as they're feeling better...
I'm actually hoping that the first humans to start using this drug will be receiving it from an IV bag and will remain anchored to their hospital beds.
If a patient is carrying a bug that's resistant to all other commonly-used antibiotics, I don't really want them walking about on the street.
The heart of the US military apparently isn't watched any harder than me when I drive around town. Really.... are those two time lapse cameras really the best they had?
Presumably Pentagon security is (was?) more designed to deal with security threats from people and ground vehicles. If they spot something funny on the cameras, they can always send out the Marines to investigate.
There's no reason to have a high-frame-rate high-resolution camera solely to capture pretty footage of a 757 hitting the building. It would give you a tenth of a second of warning: utterly useless from the standpoint of preserving live or property. It would allow you to determine that an airplane hit the building--utterly useless because you would already know that an airplane hit the building. Granted, it would allow you to debunk conspiracy theorists--but they wouldn't believe your video anyway.
If we assume the same mutation exists in humans, we just need to do a statistical analysis of humans who have had spontaneous permanent cancer remissions after receiving a blood donation.
There are a couple of obstacles to successfully performing such an analysis. First, if the incidence of this mutation (or lucky combination of mutations) is low, you're never going to be able to pick it out of the confounding factors.
Second, and much more important, white blood cells are filtered out of transfused blood. (White cells don't improve oxygen-carrying capacity or clotting ability, and they're more likely to provoke trouble in the transfusion recipient--so they get filtered.)
Okey you say, well what about trickle charging it overnight or while you are parked for a long time at work. Well that would work, for you. But if everyone else in your neighborhood did it, then we are back to delivering many megawatts to every neighbor hood. that simply is impossible until we have underground superconduction transmission lines in every city in america.
The power company would be thrilled if people plugged in their cars to charge overnight. Set a timer so that the charging runs from midnight to seven in the morning. That's when demand for electricity is lowest right now, and when the power company has the most unused capacity. The utilities would love to have more uniform demand for electricity over the course of the day--big power plants that run 24/7 are usually much cheaper to operate than gas turbines that are spun up for a few hours per day.
Many newer homes already have the ability to deliver sufficent juice, as long as the car charging runs at night: when the air conditioner, electric clothes dryer, lights, and television are all off. I'm assuming that most vehicles won't need a full 300 mile charge every night. Most people don't spend six hours driving on the highway every day, after all.
Your estimated 'tank capacity' of 43,9285,090 joules is 122 kWh. If we assume that a typical driver will use about a quarter tank per day--75 miles of driving--we need to feed about 30 kWh into the car. Over eight hours of charging that's a constant power of 3750 watts; at 110 volts that works out to a shade less than 35 amps of constant current.
If everyone got an electric car at once, there might be problems--but assuming modest market penetration at first, the power company won't have any worries.
Most existing medical implants are performed on the elderly. How many 18-year-olds do you know who have undergone hip replacement?
You're asking the wrong question.
You need to be asking, "how many young people have been involved in falls, car accidents, or skiing mishaps?"
Surgical fixation employing stainless steel and titanium screws, rods, and braces is regularly used to stabilize certain types of fractures. Internal fixation of fractures started before World War II; orthopedic surgeons have had better than half a century of experience with putting structural metal into people. There are WWII veterans still around today who have had metallic implants since they were young, healthy, draft-age men.
We have a great deal of experience in understanding how certain metals behave inside the human body, and frankly your estimate of their rate of wear is overly pessimistic.
I'll say it again--these things are a dumb idea and an unnecessary risk, but not because we lack knowledge about the behaviour of metallic implants in the body.
Actually, we kind of do. This technology has been used on animals for years.
Forget animals--we've been implanting stuff into human beings for decades. Orthopedic surgeons regularly install all kinds of pins, braces, plates, and artificial joints. We know how the body responds to foreign objects, and we routinely insert products that can stay in the body for the rest of an individual's life.
We also have centuries of experience with the inadvertent or involuntary insertion of small metallic objects into the body through accident or malice--years of industrial accidents, crime, and warfare have taught us when and where you can get away with leaving a little chunk of metal in the body.
Give the insert a relatively inert, nontoxic coating, and you can stick it just about anywhere without causing trouble. It will build up a bit of scar tissue around it, and then the body will happily ignore it.
I'm not saying that this isn't a dumb idea for other reasons, but I really can't see health concerns as a valid objection.
No, actually it would ELIMINATE peak-usage time, making it average-out over the whole day.
Well, no.
What it would do is reduce the difference between minimum and maximum power prices (and their associated maxima and minima in usage) to the point where the amount of money saved by storing off-peak power is equal to the cost of purchasing and maintaining one of these units.
Improvements in the technology (resulting in cost reductions for a storage unit) will reduce the size of this gap, but will never completely eliminate it.
Re:JW article on Bloodless Surgery
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Bloodless Surgery
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They called in their best surgeon. The surgery took much longer than a "normal" splenectomy. The surgeon took extra time and went slow.
So regardless of religious views, it seems to me that if you request a bloodless surgery, you get better medical care.
In other words, the time of a specialist was taken up for a case where his expertise wasn't really required. Someone else didn't receive the benefit of that surgeon, and an operating theatre and all of the support personnel (anaesthesiologist(s), nurses, etc.) were tied up for extra time.
The patient, meanwhile, spent more time on mechanical ventilation and under general anaesthesia. She was exposed to a longer, riskier procedure that had a substantially greater risk of failure. (The doctors weren't recommending a transfusion because they're lazy or slipshod.)
Greater cost in human resources and greater risk to the patient. That isn't 'better medical care'. That's a medical team that will bend over backwards to try to accomodate a patient's religious views. There are cases where a 'bloodless' surgery, from a purely medical standpoint, is in the patient's best interests. This really wasn't one of them. I'm happy that things turned out all right for this patient, but regardless of the quality of the surgeon it was a matter of luck as much as skill.
Yeah, but when is the last time you saw ANY software that actually echoed passwords to the screen? Basic security says that this should never occur. Unless you're really good at reading keystrokes, that isn't a real concern.
Here's the problem for a typical login/password dialog box:
What I want to type:
Idarubicin <tab> snickerdoodle37
What I expect to see on the screen:
Username: Idarubicin
Password: **************
What I might inadvertantly type with my fat fingers:
Idarubicin <Caps Lock> snickerdoodle37
What I don't want to see on the screen, but get anyway:
Username: IdarubacinSNICKERDOODLE37
Password:
See the problem now?
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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CRIA Falling Apart?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Just like when Bob the Construction Hand builds a bathroom, he gets paid for building the bathroom. But Bob does not get paid everytime someone uses that bathroom to take a crap.
Just like when Neal Stephenson the Author writes a book, he gets paid for writing the book. But Neal does not get paid every time someone...wait...what?
Shockingly, different industries have different models for compensation.
You should be paid to produce a recording of music - by the hour or by the song, or whatever. But once the actual work of making the music is over, you don't deserve to get paid anything more. You don't deserve to get paid every time somebody makes a copy of the music nor do you deserve to get paid every time somebody listens to that music either.
Then where's the incentive to write a good book that people want to read? If you're lucky, you'll get paid on the basis of what your last book earned...but I'm pretty sure this would just be an opportunity for book publishers to screw authors--particularly new authors.
While there are obvious and gross deficiencies in the implementation of intellectual property law in the United States (and elsewhere), the analogies used to advance arguments here on Slashdot seem to be equally flawed today.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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CRIA Falling Apart?
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· Score: 1
Why are creative people rewarded in perpetuity, when doctors don't?
I'm pretty sure that doctors get paid for each patient that sees them; why shouldn't creative people be paid for every copy of their song that a person gets to enjoy?
I'm not saying that copyright law--particularly in the United States--isn't broken. I'm just saying that the analogy is defective.
If it's border security we're talking about, I'd sure as hell rather have a *broken* system than an *insecure* and *vulnerable* system.
These people don't know what they're doing.
How do you know that the just-released patch doesn't break something in a way that opens a new vulnerability?
Is the border more or less secure if border officials have to do things 'by hand' because their computer system is brought down by a troublesome patch? Overworked officials are going to be less thorough that usual, and they may not have access to as much information.
Which risk to national security is greater--the chance that a patch will break something, resulting in less stringent checks at the border, or the possibility that unpatched systems will be infected by the latest Windows worm?
I know that I'm not comfortable giving a pat answer to any of those questions. It's fortunate that the federal government of the U.S. has Slashdot to provide them with so much free I.T. advice. Is it possible that this is plain vanilla government incompetence at work? Sure. Is it also possible that some sysadmins - despite being employed by Uncle Sam - are competent and capable of considering the costs, benefits, and risks associated with different patch management strategies?
We've already had plenty of "lame" tags on the stupid articles. It's time we started tagging stuff "awesome". If anything, the rovers most definitely deserve it for their progress.
Dude, read the article.
The rover has one broken wheel. In just about the most literal way possible...
Slashdot Mirror
mandatory chipping for the following:
- politicians
I will support your proposal...as long as I get to decide where we put the chip.
Some other methods of reducing the mass of the earth are available here...
Hello! I'm with the Society for the Preservation Of Natural Gravity on Earth (SPONGE). We at SPONGE are dedicated to conserving Earth's valuable mass--it's a tremendous natural gravitational resource. Did you know that if the Earth loses all of its mass, our children would be flung off into space?
SPONGE is taking a two-pronged approach to meeting the challenges of conservation of mass. First, we are lobbying aggressively to prevent the removal of any mass from Earth. Second, we are mass-producing shoes with adhesive soles. These shoes will be distributed to the world's children (in alphabetical order, starting with Aaron; sorry Zachary) to protect them in the event of a sudden gravity shortage.
Would you like to sign our petition?
How many times have you heard of someone getting splashed by, say, gasoline in a traffic accident? From a gasoline tanker rupture? Yes, it's bad if you get a lot of liquid hydrogen on you; you'll burn any skin surface it comes in contact with for more than a second or two. It's not instantly fatal, however, and it would take a fair bit to actually kill a person. And yes, I work with cryogenic gases.
So you don't want a garrage that's just not sealed shut, you'll want one that's ventilated constantly, even in winter. Otherwise it can jolly well blow up.
The lower explosive limit (LEL) for hydrogen gas is 18%. (For comparison, the LEL for methane (natural gas) is 5.7%, and the LEL for propane is 2.1%.) You'd need to boil off quite a bit of hydrogen to get to that level, even in a perfectly-sealed garage. Just punch a duct through to the outside from the high point in the garage (and another somewhere else to let fresh air in) and you should be good to go. Or park in the driveway.
E.g., the problem is made worse by the fact that hydrogen has no colour or smell of its own, so you can't _know_ if you've walked into a room full of it or not. Gasoline, for all its other problems, does have a smell.
Many other fuel gases lack a perceptible smell, too. Trace amounts of an odorant chemical (ethyl mercaptan) are added to propane and to natural gas so that leaks can be detected. This is very much a solved problem.
E.g., worse yet, it also _burns_ with an invisible flame, so you could walk into a jet of flame from a punctured hose or tanker that did ignite, and not even know it until you get burned by it. Again, you can handwave that as _unlikely_, but it's a very real problem and given hundreds of millions of cars, somewhere it will eventually happen.
I'll take the handwaving, thanks. Yes, hydrogen is a different fuel and has some different failure modes. One expects that commercial handlers of hydrogen are trained to anticipate and defend against the hazards associated with its use, just as they are trained in proper bonding and grounding and ventilation where they handle gasoline. If there are occasional freak accidents, hey, it happens. Getting rid of gasoline will cut down on certain other classes of accidents--the guys who try to light a barbecue with gasoline, for instance.
And so on. And, yes, I'd be interested to know how these palladium balls address those problems. E.g., will it actually make the energy density worth it, or just dillute it some more?
This is rather the crux of the matter, actually. Palladium can absorb up to 900 times its weight in hydrogen gas. Under moderate pressure, it will hold it indefinitely. No cryogenics required. It neatly addresses a lot of the safety concerns in your diatribe. The downside is that it's hideously expensive.
Wait--it's only okay for them to publish classified information if it embarrasses the (admittedly bloodly stupid) government, or needs to be released. Good thing we have honest, upstanding, selfless journalists to handle those decisions, then.
Good thinking, Slashdot.
Have we considered, perhaps, taking a more nuanced position?
*sigh* No, I'm not just talking out of my ass. Yes, I do know what I'm talking about.
SOD1 exists in all of the population, just like the genes in the SIDS studies. The important bit is that mutant forms of the SOD1 gene are present in these familial ALS cases. These mutations are present in a significantly larger fraction of the ALS population than the normal population. Transgenic mice that express the mutant forms of SOD1 develop motor neuron disease. The science for it is solid. Occasionally, you're going to need to trust the Dudes Who Research This Kind Of Stuff.
It's generally a good idea to assume basic competence on the part of they guys at the Mayo Clinic, too. CAV3 and RyR2 mutations were already implicated in previously unexplained cases of adult cardiac arrest. The SIDS study just looked for these (known to be rare) mutations in SIDS infants, and sure enough, there were more than would be expected in a random sample.
Before you assume that researchers are just fishing for funding, at least try Google. SOD1 info abounds, and there's a fair bit about the cardiac mutants readily available.
It's a shade better than 50%, if I remember correctly.
Now here's a question for you: In a group of 135 people, what are the odds that two of them carry a mutation in the same gene related to cardiac function?
Bonus question: Was your question or my question more closely related to the issue at hand?
You're assuming a 'fishing expedition' for any random gene mutation in common, though.
These studies looked specifically at genes that were known to be related to heart problems in adults. CAV3 was recently identified as a genetic cause of long QT syndrome, while RyR2 is linked to catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (press release).
If these mutations occur at a low baseline rate in the general population, two hits of each may be quite significant. This link indicates that RyR2 mutations are rare in the general population, with a probable incidence of under 1%. (They found no mutations in 200 healthy volunteers having 400 copies of the gene.) I'm not going to dig further for incidence numbers, but I'd bet good money that both RyR2 and CAV3 mutations are rare and that getting two hits of each in a population of 135 is quite unlikely.
Yep. It's not that unusual, actually. Physicians and epidemiologists start out with a number of dead people. They look for commonalities: symptoms, age at onset, unusual blood chemistry, etc. If they don't know what the root cause of an ailment is but they see similar patterns across a number of deaths, they coin a name for it. Here, it's Sudden Infant Death Syndrome--SIDS.
The name tells you what happens but doesn't explain why. Saying "I have a runny nose and I've been sneezing a lot" would let me put you in the Sudden Adult Sniffling Syndrome (SASS) group, but it doesn't actually tell me what caused your ailment. It turns out that SASS actually has a number of different causes that ultimately lead to the same outcome. You may be having an allergic reaction to pollen. You might have a rhinovirus infection. Maybe you have a brain tumour. For this particular symptom, we have a lot of ways of evaluating the course of the disease and the status of the patient.
With SIDS it is much more difficult. There may be many factors that make an individual susceptible, some genetic, some environmental, some a combination, some requiring a lot of bad luck.
A comparison might be drawn with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known in the U.S. as Lou Gehrig's disease). In ALS, the motor neurons die off slowly, over the course of months or years. It starts in the periphery of the body and works its way up to the brain. Under the 'umbrella' of ALS, about 10% of cases are classified as 'familial'--that is, a patient is related to other individuals with the disease. Within this category, about 20% of cases are linked to one of several mutations in the gene SOD1 (superoxide dismutase). (One would expect most of the other familial cases to be related to other genes or gene combinations.) So while only about 2% of ALS cases are linked to SOD1 mutations, it is without a doubt a "contributing cause".
The clinical trials process is there to protect people who are so desperate that they will try anything, sign anything, test anything. The alternative is to have a queue of snake-oil peddlers at the door of every dying person--"My pet theory is that weasel saliva contains powerful natural antimicrobials, so I'd like to put weasels down your pants and encourage them to bite you. It could be your only chance!"
I'm actually hoping that the first humans to start using this drug will be receiving it from an IV bag and will remain anchored to their hospital beds.
If a patient is carrying a bug that's resistant to all other commonly-used antibiotics, I don't really want them walking about on the street.
Presumably Pentagon security is (was?) more designed to deal with security threats from people and ground vehicles. If they spot something funny on the cameras, they can always send out the Marines to investigate.
There's no reason to have a high-frame-rate high-resolution camera solely to capture pretty footage of a 757 hitting the building. It would give you a tenth of a second of warning: utterly useless from the standpoint of preserving live or property. It would allow you to determine that an airplane hit the building--utterly useless because you would already know that an airplane hit the building. Granted, it would allow you to debunk conspiracy theorists--but they wouldn't believe your video anyway.
There are a couple of obstacles to successfully performing such an analysis. First, if the incidence of this mutation (or lucky combination of mutations) is low, you're never going to be able to pick it out of the confounding factors.
Second, and much more important, white blood cells are filtered out of transfused blood. (White cells don't improve oxygen-carrying capacity or clotting ability, and they're more likely to provoke trouble in the transfusion recipient--so they get filtered.)
The power company would be thrilled if people plugged in their cars to charge overnight. Set a timer so that the charging runs from midnight to seven in the morning. That's when demand for electricity is lowest right now, and when the power company has the most unused capacity. The utilities would love to have more uniform demand for electricity over the course of the day--big power plants that run 24/7 are usually much cheaper to operate than gas turbines that are spun up for a few hours per day.
Many newer homes already have the ability to deliver sufficent juice, as long as the car charging runs at night: when the air conditioner, electric clothes dryer, lights, and television are all off. I'm assuming that most vehicles won't need a full 300 mile charge every night. Most people don't spend six hours driving on the highway every day, after all.
Your estimated 'tank capacity' of 43,9285,090 joules is 122 kWh. If we assume that a typical driver will use about a quarter tank per day--75 miles of driving--we need to feed about 30 kWh into the car. Over eight hours of charging that's a constant power of 3750 watts; at 110 volts that works out to a shade less than 35 amps of constant current.
If everyone got an electric car at once, there might be problems--but assuming modest market penetration at first, the power company won't have any worries.
You're asking the wrong question.
You need to be asking, "how many young people have been involved in falls, car accidents, or skiing mishaps?"
Surgical fixation employing stainless steel and titanium screws, rods, and braces is regularly used to stabilize certain types of fractures. Internal fixation of fractures started before World War II; orthopedic surgeons have had better than half a century of experience with putting structural metal into people. There are WWII veterans still around today who have had metallic implants since they were young, healthy, draft-age men.
We have a great deal of experience in understanding how certain metals behave inside the human body, and frankly your estimate of their rate of wear is overly pessimistic.
I'll say it again--these things are a dumb idea and an unnecessary risk, but not because we lack knowledge about the behaviour of metallic implants in the body.
Just hold your cat up to your car door. Presto, door's unlocked. Now if I could just get the cat on to my keyring....
Forget animals--we've been implanting stuff into human beings for decades. Orthopedic surgeons regularly install all kinds of pins, braces, plates, and artificial joints. We know how the body responds to foreign objects, and we routinely insert products that can stay in the body for the rest of an individual's life.
We also have centuries of experience with the inadvertent or involuntary insertion of small metallic objects into the body through accident or malice--years of industrial accidents, crime, and warfare have taught us when and where you can get away with leaving a little chunk of metal in the body.
Give the insert a relatively inert, nontoxic coating, and you can stick it just about anywhere without causing trouble. It will build up a bit of scar tissue around it, and then the body will happily ignore it.
I'm not saying that this isn't a dumb idea for other reasons, but I really can't see health concerns as a valid objection.
Well, no.
What it would do is reduce the difference between minimum and maximum power prices (and their associated maxima and minima in usage) to the point where the amount of money saved by storing off-peak power is equal to the cost of purchasing and maintaining one of these units.
Improvements in the technology (resulting in cost reductions for a storage unit) will reduce the size of this gap, but will never completely eliminate it.
So regardless of religious views, it seems to me that if you request a bloodless surgery, you get better medical care.
In other words, the time of a specialist was taken up for a case where his expertise wasn't really required. Someone else didn't receive the benefit of that surgeon, and an operating theatre and all of the support personnel (anaesthesiologist(s), nurses, etc.) were tied up for extra time.
The patient, meanwhile, spent more time on mechanical ventilation and under general anaesthesia. She was exposed to a longer, riskier procedure that had a substantially greater risk of failure. (The doctors weren't recommending a transfusion because they're lazy or slipshod.)
Greater cost in human resources and greater risk to the patient. That isn't 'better medical care'. That's a medical team that will bend over backwards to try to accomodate a patient's religious views. There are cases where a 'bloodless' surgery, from a purely medical standpoint, is in the patient's best interests. This really wasn't one of them. I'm happy that things turned out all right for this patient, but regardless of the quality of the surgeon it was a matter of luck as much as skill.
Here's the problem for a typical login/password dialog box:
See the problem now?Just like when Neal Stephenson the Author writes a book, he gets paid for writing the book. But Neal does not get paid every time someone...wait...what?
Shockingly, different industries have different models for compensation.
You should be paid to produce a recording of music - by the hour or by the song, or whatever. But once the actual work of making the music is over, you don't deserve to get paid anything more. You don't deserve to get paid every time somebody makes a copy of the music nor do you deserve to get paid every time somebody listens to that music either.
Then where's the incentive to write a good book that people want to read? If you're lucky, you'll get paid on the basis of what your last book earned...but I'm pretty sure this would just be an opportunity for book publishers to screw authors--particularly new authors.
While there are obvious and gross deficiencies in the implementation of intellectual property law in the United States (and elsewhere), the analogies used to advance arguments here on Slashdot seem to be equally flawed today.
I'm pretty sure that doctors get paid for each patient that sees them; why shouldn't creative people be paid for every copy of their song that a person gets to enjoy?
I'm not saying that copyright law--particularly in the United States--isn't broken. I'm just saying that the analogy is defective.
These people don't know what they're doing.
How do you know that the just-released patch doesn't break something in a way that opens a new vulnerability?
Is the border more or less secure if border officials have to do things 'by hand' because their computer system is brought down by a troublesome patch? Overworked officials are going to be less thorough that usual, and they may not have access to as much information.
Which risk to national security is greater--the chance that a patch will break something, resulting in less stringent checks at the border, or the possibility that unpatched systems will be infected by the latest Windows worm?
I know that I'm not comfortable giving a pat answer to any of those questions. It's fortunate that the federal government of the U.S. has Slashdot to provide them with so much free I.T. advice. Is it possible that this is plain vanilla government incompetence at work? Sure. Is it also possible that some sysadmins - despite being employed by Uncle Sam - are competent and capable of considering the costs, benefits, and risks associated with different patch management strategies?
Dude, read the article.
The rover has one broken wheel. In just about the most literal way possible...
Shouldn't that be
But if we spell and write correctly, the Grammar Nazis^H^H^H^H^H terrorists have won!