I don't see what advantage this has over, say, fingerprint authentication. I pick up my phone, finger print is verified as I hold it, and off we go.
Up in Canada, it's nice to not have to take off your gloves. It's cold outside, and if you're carrying stuff in your other hand it can be difficult to do. (You end up trying to place a call with a glove held in your teeth.)
Also, a fingerprint scanner involves a surface on the telephone's exterior that has to be kept fairly clean and is vulnerable to pointy things. The gait monitor discussed here can be entirely internal.
No more repeating the same box image over and over in every level.
How about no more boxes?
The Start to Crate time has been established as a measure of the quality of a game--the sooner you see the first crate or barrel in a game, the poorer its quality. The overuse of crates is a symptom of the dearth of creativity suffered by game designers.
Google is a publicly traded company. They by law has to maximize the profits for their shareholders. There is a difference between being ethical and being legal.
As others have already noted, Google is legally required to obey their corporate charter. In some cases this will mean maximizing profits, but that isn't always true.
Also, sound and responsible management may involve foregoing short-term profit for long-term gains. Moving all the staff into smaller cubes and replacing them with temp contract workers will result in a short-term bump in net earnings, but it will cost a software company in the long-term when they can't attract or retain experienced and competent programmers.
Finally, one of Google's most valuable assets is intangible; Google's reputation for being both innovative and not evil has made them the darling of programmers, engineers, and even Wall Street. Tarnishing their reputation for being 'not evil' would be hurting the brand name and identity that they've worked so hard to build. The guys with the money invest in Google because Google can attract the best engineers, programmers, designers, and thinkers on the strength of Google's reputation. Damaging that reputation would be a grossly unsound move for management.
Would you say the same thing today about $600 computers as being toys and unfit for serious use?
I don't know if I would phrase it that way, but I know that for my $600 computer I keep regular backups of important data, and I'm prepared to replace the sucker if it goes bad....
On the web, you have pages which have massive in-links and pages which have extremely few, but on an intranet, is that a reliably available and reasonable indicator of authority?
On the other hand, on a corporate intranet the type of search performed, the dataset one is searching, and the searcher's behaviour and motivations are different creatures. Off the top of my head, those should all improve the performance of a search appliance.
On a corporate intranet one doesn't have to deal with millions of spam marketers who have done their best to ensure that their irrelevant sites comes first.
The search space is a lot smaller--corporations will usually have a document library that is orders of magnitude smaller than the Internet.
The searchers often have an intimate awareness of internal company jargon and other specialized knowledge which can help to tune their keyword selection.
Loony opinions are absolutely NOT represented on Wikipedia.
Ever seen the Remote Viewing article?
On the other hand, that's the point of an encyclopedia--Wikipedia should report on all significant topics, even if those areas have been discredited. Wikipedia has an article on phrenology not because phrenology was good science but because it was an idea that had significant impact in its day. 'Loony opinions' should be reported when they are or have been held by a large number of loonies.
The remote viewing article isn't in the best of shape. It is, however, growing into a balanced article that discusses the concept of remote viewing, its experimental history, and criticisms of the technique.
Creating a Wikipedia article is often an iterative process. Frequently, an article will be created by a strong proponent or opponent of a person or idea; people tend to write about things they know and things they feel strongly about. It takes a certain amount of time for other editors to find the article and round it out.
Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?
on
Google Ant
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· Score: 2, Informative
There's a longstanding tradition in biology of giving amusing names to species that are otherwise completely irrelevant or uninteresting. Two hundred years from now, nobody is going to know why somone named a spider Calponia harrisonfordi, either.
I tip my hat to Leonardo, Galileo, Newton, and others for having the guts to stand up to the religion to advance humans forward.
Um...Newton was a devout Christian. While he may have dabbled in mildly occult investigations, his beliefs were pretty thoroughly steeped in the standard Christian fare. He writes in Principia
"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being.... This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all.... The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect."
Newton was born in England in 1642, and made his annus mirabilis discoveries in 1665-66--more than a century after the second Act of Supremacy permanently ended the Pope's authority over the Church of England. He was politically well-connected and received a number of government patronage appointments. He served as president of the Royal Society. He was knighted for his government service.
Newton is certainly worthy of a hat-tipping, but to my knowledge he never faced any significant resistance or criticism (overt or otherwise) from the church.
That's a good question. I see a few problems that would have to be addressed for such an MS treatment to work.
The injected stem cells would have to be persuaded to differentiate into Schwann cells: these are the cells which wrap around nerve cells (like little jelly rolls) and 'insulate' the nerves. It's possible that the appropriate chemical signals are secreted by nerves already, and they're just waiting for stem cells to be applied. Otherwise, we would have to deliver those signals.
The stem cells would have to be delivered to the sites of nerve demyelination. I'm not sure how easily this could be accomplished. In the case of spinal cord trauma there's usually one or a few discrete sites of damage; it's not particularly difficult to find the break(s) and inject stem cells. With MS, the damage tends to be spread out over the length of the involved nerves.
MS is an autoimmune disorder. Unless the immune response that caused the initial demyelination can be dealt with, the replacement cells will get chewed up too.
Wait a second. What happens to the part where they're dead after being cut in half? That seems to me to be a severe impingement on the "working it out afterwards" phase.
Er, they cut the spinal cord in half. They don't sever the rest of the mouse....
The ethical question is similar to that of harvesting "unused" organs. At what point does the fertilized egg, which is life, become created solely because it can be sold as research or source material?
THAT's the issue. Once it becomes legal to create human beings to kill them the society has legalized ghouls.
Of course, you can do the same thing that is done to prevent trade in human organs: make the sale (and purchase) of sperm, ova, and embryos illegal.
Embryos can be donated for medical research, or to other couples, or disposed of--whatever is fine by the ethical lights of the parents.
Researchers can't get grants and can't publish their work if they aren't able to describe where their samples come from; they would go to jail if they report that they paid for materials. Without a cash incentive for fertility clinics or couples to generate excess embryos beyond what would be used for fertility treatments, you avoid the creation of embryos solely for the purpose of research.
I could have done it myself, but it would have been less work for somebody with access to a Canadian public library. So I asked a conspicuous Canadian Wikipedian to lend me a hand. He declined. Not because he didn't want to do the work -- he spends a lot of time working on Wikipedia. But because he "never goes to libraries"! Not something that encourages you as to the quality of the information Wikipedia supplies.
Really?
I'm a graduate student at a major North American university. Its library system is somewhere in the top five on the continent for holdings. Yet somehow, I never go to the library either.
In a lot of fields, there's online access to a tremendous amount of information--particularly the peer-reviewed high-quality journals that are the primary sources in the sciences. I've read reams of papers in the last couple of months without ever leaving my office; twenty years ago I would have been in a reading room on campus or pouring quarters into a photocopier. My lab has a couple of filing cabinets full of most of the older papers we might need, and there's a small department library with some specialized materials. It's been at least a year since I needed a paper from the main campus libraries.
It's easy to never go to the library.
That goes double for the public library--between the literature in the arts library, my friends' book collections, and the local used bookstores, there's no reason at all for me to ever go to the public library. I haven't had a public library card since I was in high school.
Not really. Do you think it will be difficult for NASA to find a hundred engineers willing to contribute a once-a-day effort to the program for the next three months? If they start today, they'll be finished by Christmas.
Re:Nintendogs is too much of a chore
on
Review: Nintendogs
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· Score: 3, Funny
Nintendogs needs a virtual shotgun so that I can end it Old Yeller style.
really ? so where do the impurities go ? thin air ?
i guess those (Art/Antart)ic scientists are wasting their time looking at ice cores if those impurities just dissapear when you freeze water
1. A freeze/thaw cycle kills many (not all) microorganisms--ice crystals shred cell membranes, and freezing can mangle the protein coat on viruses. A number of tropical parasitic organisms aren't well adapted to the cold, either.
2. You can remove some dissolved chemical contaminants if you don't freeze all the water. As water freezes, the assembly of regular ice crystals tends to force impurities out into the remaining liquid. If you stop after you've frozen four-fifths of the water, then you can throw out that last twenty percent that contains the concentrated contaminants. Ice that forms on bodies of salt water is almost pure water, because the salt is driven into the liquid phase by the freezing process.
Fro crying out loud people, who gives a damn?! Thousands are dead, many thousands more injured, and most of them and thousands more homeless and an even larger amount without drinkable water and an even larger amount without electrical power. WHO CARES if Linux is involved?
So...what would you suggest we do? Sit around solemnly shaking our heads and saying "Sad. So very sad."?
Slashdot posts a story with information about:
1. Katrina-related frauds that we shouldn't fall for;
2. A project to help the hurricane victims get in touch with family and friends (and yes, it runs Linux); and
3. Links to genuine donation pages for those of us who are able to pitch in some cash or supplies.
This is a technology news site. This is technology news. Slashdot has thoughtfully provided links to hurricane-related charities so that readers can contribute.
Was Slashdot supposed to close its doors so that Taco can lug around some sandbags? Should the entire state/country/continent/world stop doing anything that's not Katrina-related until after New Orleans is above water?
While I appreciate your effort to be so charmingly condescending in your reply, I would encourage you to carefully reevaluate the situation.
Given adequate resources, the three-pronged approach you suggest would indeed be ideal: move people out as quickly as possible, feed and shelter whoever hasn't been moved out yet, and simultaneously start repairing the damaged levees.
Unfortunately, the resources available in the city and surroundings are sharply limited. They have a grossly inadequate supply of things like heavy-lift helicopters, trucking capacity, and people. Dropping food and medical supplies for those who haven't yet been evacuated will save lives.
Starting to repair the levees right now won't save any lives--the flooding isn't going to get any worse than it already is, and New Orleans doesn't have the pumping capacity to lower the water levels very quickly even if the holes were plugged. Worse, it would divert resources (those helicopters and personnel) from lifesaving tasks like feeding the hungry and airlifting the injured.
If an author publishes a statement that a given work is being made "public" or something to that effect, and you use that work, or distribute it, or copy it, or whatever, you might still be infringing.
Whether or not it would be infringement depends on the jurisdiction--but in cases where the work can't be assigned to the public domain, an author's statement that the works is released to the public domain would prevent him from suing you for your use of it.
It would fall under the doctrine of promissory estoppel; if you take action in good faith based on the author's statement, he cannot later withdraw his permission and sue you.
Once they plug the holes they can repair the pumps and get the water out of the city. Once the water is out, they can get everyone out.
Draining the water from the city is a process that will take weeks, if not months. It's like trying to drain a swimming pool with a drinking straw. The pumping capacity in the city can cope with small leaks and the slow accumulation of water that is natural for a city located below sea level; it's not capable of draining the area in a day or two.
If you wait for the water to be out to evacuate the city, everyone will be dead or dying.
What then happens when all of the "natural" embryos are used up? There will be money, possibly federal money, available to entice someone into creating more embryos.
Really?
It's pretty easy for the federal government to first pull the funding from any group that tries such a thing, and also to make such an act a criminal offence.
Trading in human organs is forbidden by law and that's backed up by the threat of jail time. There isn't much of an illegal organ trade in the United States, despite the presence of many highly motivated buyers and sells.
Regulate the supply. Eliminate funding for researchers who obtain embryonic stem cells by inappropriate means. Researchers can't publish without explaining where their cells came from, so they have to follow the rules.
I'm not sure why there would be an insatiable and growing demand for embryonic cell lines anyway. With other tissue lines, biologists are generally satisfied with one or two representative cells lines per organ or per disease. Creating and maintaining new cell lines takes a lot of time and effort, and if everybody works with different cell lines makes it harder for researchers from different labs to compare results.
Slashdot Mirror
Up in Canada, it's nice to not have to take off your gloves. It's cold outside, and if you're carrying stuff in your other hand it can be difficult to do. (You end up trying to place a call with a glove held in your teeth.)
Also, a fingerprint scanner involves a surface on the telephone's exterior that has to be kept fairly clean and is vulnerable to pointy things. The gait monitor discussed here can be entirely internal.
How about no more boxes?
The Start to Crate time has been established as a measure of the quality of a game--the sooner you see the first crate or barrel in a game, the poorer its quality. The overuse of crates is a symptom of the dearth of creativity suffered by game designers.
As others have already noted, Google is legally required to obey their corporate charter. In some cases this will mean maximizing profits, but that isn't always true.
Also, sound and responsible management may involve foregoing short-term profit for long-term gains. Moving all the staff into smaller cubes and replacing them with temp contract workers will result in a short-term bump in net earnings, but it will cost a software company in the long-term when they can't attract or retain experienced and competent programmers.
Finally, one of Google's most valuable assets is intangible; Google's reputation for being both innovative and not evil has made them the darling of programmers, engineers, and even Wall Street. Tarnishing their reputation for being 'not evil' would be hurting the brand name and identity that they've worked so hard to build. The guys with the money invest in Google because Google can attract the best engineers, programmers, designers, and thinkers on the strength of Google's reputation. Damaging that reputation would be a grossly unsound move for management.
I don't know if I would phrase it that way, but I know that for my $600 computer I keep regular backups of important data, and I'm prepared to replace the sucker if it goes bad....
On the other hand, on a corporate intranet the type of search performed, the dataset one is searching, and the searcher's behaviour and motivations are different creatures. Off the top of my head, those should all improve the performance of a search appliance.
On a corporate intranet one doesn't have to deal with millions of spam marketers who have done their best to ensure that their irrelevant sites comes first.
The search space is a lot smaller--corporations will usually have a document library that is orders of magnitude smaller than the Internet.
The searchers often have an intimate awareness of internal company jargon and other specialized knowledge which can help to tune their keyword selection.
On the other hand, that's the point of an encyclopedia--Wikipedia should report on all significant topics, even if those areas have been discredited. Wikipedia has an article on phrenology not because phrenology was good science but because it was an idea that had significant impact in its day. 'Loony opinions' should be reported when they are or have been held by a large number of loonies.
The remote viewing article isn't in the best of shape. It is, however, growing into a balanced article that discusses the concept of remote viewing, its experimental history, and criticisms of the technique.
Creating a Wikipedia article is often an iterative process. Frequently, an article will be created by a strong proponent or opponent of a person or idea; people tend to write about things they know and things they feel strongly about. It takes a certain amount of time for other editors to find the article and round it out.
See Arnold Menke's Funny or Curious Zoological Names and Douglas Yanega's Curious Scientific Names for a lot more weird names.
I doubt that the reputations of these scientists are harmed by the knowledge that they may have had senses of humour.
Um...Newton was a devout Christian. While he may have dabbled in mildly occult investigations, his beliefs were pretty thoroughly steeped in the standard Christian fare. He writes in Principia
Newton was born in England in 1642, and made his annus mirabilis discoveries in 1665-66--more than a century after the second Act of Supremacy permanently ended the Pope's authority over the Church of England. He was politically well-connected and received a number of government patronage appointments. He served as president of the Royal Society. He was knighted for his government service.Newton is certainly worthy of a hat-tipping, but to my knowledge he never faced any significant resistance or criticism (overt or otherwise) from the church.
The injected stem cells would have to be persuaded to differentiate into Schwann cells: these are the cells which wrap around nerve cells (like little jelly rolls) and 'insulate' the nerves. It's possible that the appropriate chemical signals are secreted by nerves already, and they're just waiting for stem cells to be applied. Otherwise, we would have to deliver those signals.
The stem cells would have to be delivered to the sites of nerve demyelination. I'm not sure how easily this could be accomplished. In the case of spinal cord trauma there's usually one or a few discrete sites of damage; it's not particularly difficult to find the break(s) and inject stem cells. With MS, the damage tends to be spread out over the length of the involved nerves.
MS is an autoimmune disorder. Unless the immune response that caused the initial demyelination can be dealt with, the replacement cells will get chewed up too.
Er, they cut the spinal cord in half. They don't sever the rest of the mouse....
THAT's the issue. Once it becomes legal to create human beings to kill them the society has legalized ghouls.
Of course, you can do the same thing that is done to prevent trade in human organs: make the sale (and purchase) of sperm, ova, and embryos illegal.
Embryos can be donated for medical research, or to other couples, or disposed of--whatever is fine by the ethical lights of the parents.
Researchers can't get grants and can't publish their work if they aren't able to describe where their samples come from; they would go to jail if they report that they paid for materials. Without a cash incentive for fertility clinics or couples to generate excess embryos beyond what would be used for fertility treatments, you avoid the creation of embryos solely for the purpose of research.
It's okay. As long as the War on Software Piracy is as successful as the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty, we have nothing to worry about.
Really?
I'm a graduate student at a major North American university. Its library system is somewhere in the top five on the continent for holdings. Yet somehow, I never go to the library either.
In a lot of fields, there's online access to a tremendous amount of information--particularly the peer-reviewed high-quality journals that are the primary sources in the sciences. I've read reams of papers in the last couple of months without ever leaving my office; twenty years ago I would have been in a reading room on campus or pouring quarters into a photocopier. My lab has a couple of filing cabinets full of most of the older papers we might need, and there's a small department library with some specialized materials. It's been at least a year since I needed a paper from the main campus libraries.
It's easy to never go to the library.
That goes double for the public library--between the literature in the arts library, my friends' book collections, and the local used bookstores, there's no reason at all for me to ever go to the public library. I haven't had a public library card since I was in high school.
It's worth noting that the Canadian National Railway was privatized in 1995; the government doesn't make any money either way....
That's probably not such a good idea around electronics. Have you considered a rolled-up newspaper?
That's a lot of masturbation.
Not really. Do you think it will be difficult for NASA to find a hundred engineers willing to contribute a once-a-day effort to the program for the next three months? If they start today, they'll be finished by Christmas.
Geez man! How about a spoiler warning next time?
1. A freeze/thaw cycle kills many (not all) microorganisms--ice crystals shred cell membranes, and freezing can mangle the protein coat on viruses. A number of tropical parasitic organisms aren't well adapted to the cold, either.
2. You can remove some dissolved chemical contaminants if you don't freeze all the water. As water freezes, the assembly of regular ice crystals tends to force impurities out into the remaining liquid. If you stop after you've frozen four-fifths of the water, then you can throw out that last twenty percent that contains the concentrated contaminants. Ice that forms on bodies of salt water is almost pure water, because the salt is driven into the liquid phase by the freezing process.
So...what would you suggest we do? Sit around solemnly shaking our heads and saying "Sad. So very sad."?
Slashdot posts a story with information about:
1. Katrina-related frauds that we shouldn't fall for;
2. A project to help the hurricane victims get in touch with family and friends (and yes, it runs Linux); and
3. Links to genuine donation pages for those of us who are able to pitch in some cash or supplies.
This is a technology news site. This is technology news. Slashdot has thoughtfully provided links to hurricane-related charities so that readers can contribute.
Was Slashdot supposed to close its doors so that Taco can lug around some sandbags? Should the entire state/country/continent/world stop doing anything that's not Katrina-related until after New Orleans is above water?
Given adequate resources, the three-pronged approach you suggest would indeed be ideal: move people out as quickly as possible, feed and shelter whoever hasn't been moved out yet, and simultaneously start repairing the damaged levees.
Unfortunately, the resources available in the city and surroundings are sharply limited. They have a grossly inadequate supply of things like heavy-lift helicopters, trucking capacity, and people. Dropping food and medical supplies for those who haven't yet been evacuated will save lives.
Starting to repair the levees right now won't save any lives--the flooding isn't going to get any worse than it already is, and New Orleans doesn't have the pumping capacity to lower the water levels very quickly even if the holes were plugged. Worse, it would divert resources (those helicopters and personnel) from lifesaving tasks like feeding the hungry and airlifting the injured.
Whether or not it would be infringement depends on the jurisdiction--but in cases where the work can't be assigned to the public domain, an author's statement that the works is released to the public domain would prevent him from suing you for your use of it.
It would fall under the doctrine of promissory estoppel; if you take action in good faith based on the author's statement, he cannot later withdraw his permission and sue you.
Draining the water from the city is a process that will take weeks, if not months. It's like trying to drain a swimming pool with a drinking straw. The pumping capacity in the city can cope with small leaks and the slow accumulation of water that is natural for a city located below sea level; it's not capable of draining the area in a day or two.
If you wait for the water to be out to evacuate the city, everyone will be dead or dying.
To get a tilt to the right, you need to shift the fulcrum left.
Since it's September now, it is factually correct to state that there won't be anything else happening in August....
Really?
It's pretty easy for the federal government to first pull the funding from any group that tries such a thing, and also to make such an act a criminal offence.
Trading in human organs is forbidden by law and that's backed up by the threat of jail time. There isn't much of an illegal organ trade in the United States, despite the presence of many highly motivated buyers and sells.
Regulate the supply. Eliminate funding for researchers who obtain embryonic stem cells by inappropriate means. Researchers can't publish without explaining where their cells came from, so they have to follow the rules.
I'm not sure why there would be an insatiable and growing demand for embryonic cell lines anyway. With other tissue lines, biologists are generally satisfied with one or two representative cells lines per organ or per disease. Creating and maintaining new cell lines takes a lot of time and effort, and if everybody works with different cell lines makes it harder for researchers from different labs to compare results.