I never understood why vegetarians won't eat eggs.
The mistake is in assuming that "vegetarians" represent a homogeneous group with a uniform way of thinking. It's rather similar to presuming that you know how someone thinks just because they say that vote Democrat/Republican/Green.
Some people are vegetarians (or don't eat eggs) because they are opposed to factory farming. Some want to eliminate cholesterol from their diet. Some think animals are just too darned cute to eat. Some have a visceral reaction because they've seen where eggs come from. Some feel that eating only vegetables has less ecological impact. Back in my undergrad days, I knew people who went vegetarian mostly because they couldn't afford meat. A. Whitney Brown once said "I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants".
Similarly, there exists a range of deep and nuanced opinion and reasoning on both sides of the stem cell issue. (Then there's the stuff that the politicians and pundits spout; it's better suited for growing vegetables.)
Exactly. It's only 100 years in this frame of reference.
It gets worse. We're in an accelerating frame of reference (Earth is rotating about its axis and orbiting the sun, along with a number of other accelerations). The Special Theory only holds in a non-accelerating frame.
We're totally screwed for another nine years, when we'll have the hundredth anniversary of the General Theory of Relativity to help get us out of this mess.
That assumes that the people he sold the names to (and whoever else might have received them downstream) only used them once.
Er, no.
The article summary says that the ninety-two million stolen addresses spawned an estimated seven billion spam messages. That's an estimated 76 messages per address.
7,000,000,000 emails times 1/175 seconds/email equals 40,000,000 seconds, which equals a bit more than fifteen months. (Alternately you could look at it as 0.43 seconds per stolen address.)
Seriously, this criminal is not funny. Other people invested time and money in this game, only to be cheated. This guy is a crook. If someone can do a crime on-line, they can do it in real life.
To be fair, I'd actually be pretty impressed if someone built a robot in real life that could beat people up and take their money and valuables....
And, in still other words... do you feel even microscopically better about the prospect of, say, your next airline flight's pilot relaxing at a cable-modem in his condo?
To play devil's advocate for a bit....
Say there's a loss of cabin pressure. (This may have been the cause of the recent air crash in Greece.) The pilot will still have lots of oxygen, full consciousness, and full control of the aircraft.
Suppose there's a hijacking attempt. You can't put a knife to the throat of a pilot who isn't there.
Suppose the pilot has a heart attack. The aircraft is seamlessly handed off to the next pilot. The passengers never know anything even happened. In a less-dramatic scenario, you can change crews easily during long flights--at the end of a twelve-hour transcontinental flight, you can bring in a new pilot (who got a good night's sleep in his own bed) to manage the landing. Cabin crew often nod off at their posts; there are anecdotes of flight attendants entering the cockpit to find pilot, copilot, and navigator all soundly asleep while the aircraft is on autopilot.
Maybe you could feel better about having a pilot far away and on the ground....
I'd like to see a study on the percentage of people that drop out of college due to WOW and how many actually recover.
When my parents went to school they had friends who dropped out because they spent all their time in the student lounge playing bridge. (Remember when games were played using physical tokens in the real world?)
There have always been college students who will do anything and everything to pass time...except go to lectures.
Back in my undergraduate days, I was late for class a few times because I got caught up in a real-time strategy game. I have also been late for or missed classes because I was playing euchre, overslept, plain forgot, felt like going home early, or was talking to a girl. (No, really.) I imagine that any one of those things, taken to excess, could ruin a school career.
"Do no evil, and don't pander to your inner brat."
How about, "Do no evil, but there's no reason to put up with people who act like dicks"?
It's not like ZDNet lacks a platform from which to whinge; I don't think Google expected to suppress or silence them. Besides, ZDNet just announced that a tremendous amount of information is available through Google searches--why would they need to do interviews anyway?
This is an unfortunate and disturbing trend: the misinterpretation of the mantra "do no evil"--whether in the context of Google or life in general--as meaning "please take advantage of my good nature and feel free to be a dickhead because I'll take it".
People already know that there is a great deal of information on the web. If ZDNet thought that it was important to reiterate this point, a reporter with real balls would have dug out every shred of information available about, say, his editor-in-chief. (If his editor found that idea objectionable.....) The parent poster made this point, and I thought it worth emphasizing.
If ZDNet's reporter had been booted from press conferences because he broke a story about Sergey Brin accepting kickbacks from PayPal to suppress Google rankings of critical websites, that would be evil. (Note that this is a hypothetical case; Google is obviously doing no such thing.)
On the other hand, turfing out a reporter and penalizing his employer because Google doesn't particularly feel like providing tabloid fodder and fostering a lower level of public dialog--well, maybe it will encourage sensible, less sensationalist, intelligent reporting. It might be a bit thin-skinned, and it might be a bit of an overreaction, but I don't think it's evil. (Unless, of course, Google's aim is to suppress the message that you can find out lots of things with their search engine....)
I have no problem with people selling their own books. But I believe the current system is bad for students and really tough for authors. I contend that publishers are getting more than their fair share of blame. That's all I'm sayin'.
Fair enough, but I'm not sure how you can draw a distinction between people who directly sell their own textbooks to other students and those who go through a middleman--a student co-op or an organized used-book reseller. Beyond the former process being less efficient and likely to allow the publishers to sell more new editions, I can't find a clear difference. (Or did I misinterpret what you said?)
Incidentally, I would encourage you to consider the hypothetical case where it wasn't possible to reuse/resell textbooks. Would that actually result in lower prices, or would it just lead to higher publisher profits?
Publishers of textbooks would then be in a market where there was essentially no price elasticity to demand--students require textbooks, and textbooks are not readily interchangeable (they're not a commodity good). The professors who assign the textbooks get their copies for free from the publisher, and are probably less price-sensitive anyway (they have a higher income)--there's no motivation to select a textbook based on price.
Identical textbooks are sold for different prices in different countries, presumably for the purpose of maximizing profit by charging what each local market will bear. (I understand that a lot of students in the UK purchase textbooks online from North American resellers for precisely this reason.) If there were no alternate source of books, would publishers decide out of the kindness of their hearts to be happy with a "reasonable" profit and lower the unit price? I'm not saying that these textbook publishers would be less ethical or generous under such circumstances than any other business, but I'm pretty sure I know how it would turn out....
Ah. And the used-car industry is essentially a giant leech on the butt of the textbook publishers.
That should be "...on the butt of the automakers", obviously. Unless the used car dealers are including textbooks as an incentive, of course. Oops. Mea culpa.
First, and slimiest, are professors that sell free examination copies to used booksellers. Sometimes profs order exam copies JUST to sell them to the itinerant bookbuyers. (These are the guys you see wheeling a big case on wheels around your profs' offices, flush with cash) This is completely unethical, but widespread.
I agree with you on this point. I find the process disgusting. Of course, perhaps publishers should be less willing to give away copies of their textbooks.
Second are used book distributors. Profs expect a lot of support for these expensive books. They need desk copies, supplements, web site support, test banks, etcetera. The publisher has to support the book in use, even if the students are buying used text books. The used book dealer provides NONE OF THIS. They only value they add is storing the book during school breaks and driving it from one place to another.
Publishers, perhaps, should charge for these services something close to what they actually cost, eh? This sounds like a razor-blade economic model: test-bank razors supported by textbook razor blades.
So for an edition that comes out once every three years, the publisher has ONE CHANCE to make a profit - the first all-new run of the edition. Everything else (packaging with extra materials, sell-through, custom pub) is a rearguard action to try to stay afloat until the next edition.
You know that if a textbook contains information a student finds useful then the student will keep it, yes? A textbook isn't-or shouldn't, at least-be solely a source of homework problems. It should be a useful reference, and a start to the owner's personal library.
I bought many textbooks during my university career. Some I have lovingly retained and still refer to every so often. Others I sold the minute I stepped out of an exam. Good textbooks will enjoy consistent year-over-year sales because people keep them. The pool of used books will be small. Bad textbooks will require regular new editions, because nobody wants to hold on to them. Making matters "worse", they last a long time on the used book circuit because useless textbooks receive very little wear and tear.
You see, the value in the book isn't in the part that the used-book dealer sells. He's selling information that he didn't produce, support, or add to at all. The used book industry is essentially a giant leech on the butt of textbook publishers.
Ah. And the used-car industry is essentially a giant leech on the butt of the textbook publishers. They're selling all the design experimentation and engineering expertise invested by the auto manufacturer.
Not true. Chromatic abberation is entirely a function of the lens. It is an inability to focus different wavelengths of light to the same point.
I think the effect that the grandparent referred to was actually colour fringing effects, rather than 'chromatic aberration' in the strict sense.
On most CCDs, each pixel actually has three sensors side by side: one for each colour channel (red, green, blue). Take a hypothetical case--the image I wish to photograph has a very fine white line on a black background. If the line isn't wide enough to trigger all three sensors, I might get a yellow (missing the blue sensor) or cyan (missing the red sensor) line instead. If the line is slanted slightly, it will change colour along its length, as it triggers a different mix of colour sensors.
The same type of effects emerge when one takes a picture that contains a sharp edge; colour fringes appear because the edges of each pixel are slightly shifted for each colour. Smart camera software can conceal this effect--to a point--but you give up some detail and the compensation is never going to be perfect.
My digicam will take AA's. That rather beats those odd little "N" batteries (or whatever they're called) that tend to be in analog cameras.
How frequently do you need to replace/recharge the battery in your digicam?
My SLR can shoot dozens of rolls of film--I replace the battery less often than I replace my calendar--and the camera strap has a little pocket for a replacement battery attached, just in case. In terms of the number of batteries you need to carry, the old school 35mm SLR wins hands down.
TFA article says that 10% would get fatal cancer sometime in their lives. Really, how is this different from those who self select themselves for a much increased risk of cancer through smoking?
Indeed. Cancer is the number two killer in the United States, right after cardiovascular disease. Cancer's also creeping up because we keep getting better at treating other diseases (if nothing else kills you, cancer will get you eventually).
About one in four deaths in the United States are due to cancer anyway. Another 10% on top is a sizeable increase, but not actually as huge as it would seem at first blush. It might also be possible to offset somewhat through intense health surveillance of the astronauts after their return.
Re:Picturing preliminary testing...
on
19 million Amps
·
· Score: 1
A group of lab-coated engineers having a barbecue using a 48 million dollar grill.
This reminds me of the classic Dave Barry column describing a group of engineers who are tired of waiting for charcoal to ignite and heat to cooking temperature. The article ends, somewhat ominously, with
On
Goble's Web site, you can see actual photographs and a video of Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long wooden handle to dump three gallons of liquid oxygen (Not Sold In Stores) onto a grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette for ignition. What follows is the most impressive charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, featuring a large fireball that, according to Goble, reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The charcoal was ready for cooking in this has to be a world record three seconds.
There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used the same technique on a flimsy little $2.88 discount-store grill. All that's left is a circle of charcoal with a few shreds of metal in it.
"Basically, the grill vaporized," Goble said. "We were thinking of returning it to the store for a refund."
Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American, all choked up with gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere near the engineers' picnic site.
Will the three-second barrier ever be broken? Will engineers come up with a new, more-powerful charcoal-lighting technology? It's something for all of us to ponder this summer as we sit outside, chewing our hamburgers, every now and then glancing in the direction of West Lafayette, Ind., looking for a mushroom cloud.
This just might be the technique to break the three-second barrier. Stay tuned for further developments.
He says he won't rest until he can eliminate wrongdoing.
I presume that wrongdoing is that which is done by wrongdoers. A "wrongdoer" is sort of an evildoer Lite.
So, what can we do about these "wrongdoers"? George Bush won't bomb and invade them (they're not the fully fledged evil, remember), but he might send Donald Rumsfeld to give them a wedgie.
Slashdot Mirror
The mistake is in assuming that "vegetarians" represent a homogeneous group with a uniform way of thinking. It's rather similar to presuming that you know how someone thinks just because they say that vote Democrat/Republican/Green.
Some people are vegetarians (or don't eat eggs) because they are opposed to factory farming. Some want to eliminate cholesterol from their diet. Some think animals are just too darned cute to eat. Some have a visceral reaction because they've seen where eggs come from. Some feel that eating only vegetables has less ecological impact. Back in my undergrad days, I knew people who went vegetarian mostly because they couldn't afford meat. A. Whitney Brown once said "I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants".
Similarly, there exists a range of deep and nuanced opinion and reasoning on both sides of the stem cell issue. (Then there's the stuff that the politicians and pundits spout; it's better suited for growing vegetables.)
Me, I think I'm going to have steak for dinner.
Bah! They're no good to you at that point. I'd much rather have the large naked breasts be related to my cause of death, thank you very much.
It gets worse. We're in an accelerating frame of reference (Earth is rotating about its axis and orbiting the sun, along with a number of other accelerations). The Special Theory only holds in a non-accelerating frame.
We're totally screwed for another nine years, when we'll have the hundredth anniversary of the General Theory of Relativity to help get us out of this mess.
Er, no.
The article summary says that the ninety-two million stolen addresses spawned an estimated seven billion spam messages. That's an estimated 76 messages per address.
7,000,000,000 emails times 1/175 seconds/email equals 40,000,000 seconds, which equals a bit more than fifteen months. (Alternately you could look at it as 0.43 seconds per stolen address.)
You got it.
To be fair, I'd actually be pretty impressed if someone built a robot in real life that could beat people up and take their money and valuables....
To play devil's advocate for a bit....
Say there's a loss of cabin pressure. (This may have been the cause of the recent air crash in Greece.) The pilot will still have lots of oxygen, full consciousness, and full control of the aircraft.
Suppose there's a hijacking attempt. You can't put a knife to the throat of a pilot who isn't there.
Suppose the pilot has a heart attack. The aircraft is seamlessly handed off to the next pilot. The passengers never know anything even happened. In a less-dramatic scenario, you can change crews easily during long flights--at the end of a twelve-hour transcontinental flight, you can bring in a new pilot (who got a good night's sleep in his own bed) to manage the landing. Cabin crew often nod off at their posts; there are anecdotes of flight attendants entering the cockpit to find pilot, copilot, and navigator all soundly asleep while the aircraft is on autopilot.
Maybe you could feel better about having a pilot far away and on the ground....
You mean the size of the Earth's orbit, right?
Don't force me to make derisive remarks about the Astronomy Department at UMD. ;)
When my parents went to school they had friends who dropped out because they spent all their time in the student lounge playing bridge. (Remember when games were played using physical tokens in the real world?)
There have always been college students who will do anything and everything to pass time...except go to lectures.
Back in my undergraduate days, I was late for class a few times because I got caught up in a real-time strategy game. I have also been late for or missed classes because I was playing euchre, overslept, plain forgot, felt like going home early, or was talking to a girl. (No, really.) I imagine that any one of those things, taken to excess, could ruin a school career.
At least once more, apparently....
How about, "Do no evil, but there's no reason to put up with people who act like dicks"?
It's not like ZDNet lacks a platform from which to whinge; I don't think Google expected to suppress or silence them. Besides, ZDNet just announced that a tremendous amount of information is available through Google searches--why would they need to do interviews anyway?
This is an unfortunate and disturbing trend: the misinterpretation of the mantra "do no evil"--whether in the context of Google or life in general--as meaning "please take advantage of my good nature and feel free to be a dickhead because I'll take it".
People already know that there is a great deal of information on the web. If ZDNet thought that it was important to reiterate this point, a reporter with real balls would have dug out every shred of information available about, say, his editor-in-chief. (If his editor found that idea objectionable.....) The parent poster made this point, and I thought it worth emphasizing.
If ZDNet's reporter had been booted from press conferences because he broke a story about Sergey Brin accepting kickbacks from PayPal to suppress Google rankings of critical websites, that would be evil. (Note that this is a hypothetical case; Google is obviously doing no such thing.)
On the other hand, turfing out a reporter and penalizing his employer because Google doesn't particularly feel like providing tabloid fodder and fostering a lower level of public dialog--well, maybe it will encourage sensible, less sensationalist, intelligent reporting. It might be a bit thin-skinned, and it might be a bit of an overreaction, but I don't think it's evil. (Unless, of course, Google's aim is to suppress the message that you can find out lots of things with their search engine....)
Fair enough, but I'm not sure how you can draw a distinction between people who directly sell their own textbooks to other students and those who go through a middleman--a student co-op or an organized used-book reseller. Beyond the former process being less efficient and likely to allow the publishers to sell more new editions, I can't find a clear difference. (Or did I misinterpret what you said?)
Incidentally, I would encourage you to consider the hypothetical case where it wasn't possible to reuse/resell textbooks. Would that actually result in lower prices, or would it just lead to higher publisher profits?
Publishers of textbooks would then be in a market where there was essentially no price elasticity to demand--students require textbooks, and textbooks are not readily interchangeable (they're not a commodity good). The professors who assign the textbooks get their copies for free from the publisher, and are probably less price-sensitive anyway (they have a higher income)--there's no motivation to select a textbook based on price.
Identical textbooks are sold for different prices in different countries, presumably for the purpose of maximizing profit by charging what each local market will bear. (I understand that a lot of students in the UK purchase textbooks online from North American resellers for precisely this reason.) If there were no alternate source of books, would publishers decide out of the kindness of their hearts to be happy with a "reasonable" profit and lower the unit price? I'm not saying that these textbook publishers would be less ethical or generous under such circumstances than any other business, but I'm pretty sure I know how it would turn out....
That should be "...on the butt of the automakers", obviously. Unless the used car dealers are including textbooks as an incentive, of course. Oops. Mea culpa.
I agree with you on this point. I find the process disgusting. Of course, perhaps publishers should be less willing to give away copies of their textbooks.
Second are used book distributors. Profs expect a lot of support for these expensive books. They need desk copies, supplements, web site support, test banks, etcetera. The publisher has to support the book in use, even if the students are buying used text books. The used book dealer provides NONE OF THIS. They only value they add is storing the book during school breaks and driving it from one place to another.
Publishers, perhaps, should charge for these services something close to what they actually cost, eh? This sounds like a razor-blade economic model: test-bank razors supported by textbook razor blades.
So for an edition that comes out once every three years, the publisher has ONE CHANCE to make a profit - the first all-new run of the edition. Everything else (packaging with extra materials, sell-through, custom pub) is a rearguard action to try to stay afloat until the next edition.
You know that if a textbook contains information a student finds useful then the student will keep it, yes? A textbook isn't-or shouldn't, at least-be solely a source of homework problems. It should be a useful reference, and a start to the owner's personal library.
I bought many textbooks during my university career. Some I have lovingly retained and still refer to every so often. Others I sold the minute I stepped out of an exam. Good textbooks will enjoy consistent year-over-year sales because people keep them. The pool of used books will be small. Bad textbooks will require regular new editions, because nobody wants to hold on to them. Making matters "worse", they last a long time on the used book circuit because useless textbooks receive very little wear and tear.
You see, the value in the book isn't in the part that the used-book dealer sells. He's selling information that he didn't produce, support, or add to at all. The used book industry is essentially a giant leech on the butt of textbook publishers.
Ah. And the used-car industry is essentially a giant leech on the butt of the textbook publishers. They're selling all the design experimentation and engineering expertise invested by the auto manufacturer.
I think the effect that the grandparent referred to was actually colour fringing effects, rather than 'chromatic aberration' in the strict sense.
On most CCDs, each pixel actually has three sensors side by side: one for each colour channel (red, green, blue). Take a hypothetical case--the image I wish to photograph has a very fine white line on a black background. If the line isn't wide enough to trigger all three sensors, I might get a yellow (missing the blue sensor) or cyan (missing the red sensor) line instead. If the line is slanted slightly, it will change colour along its length, as it triggers a different mix of colour sensors.
The same type of effects emerge when one takes a picture that contains a sharp edge; colour fringes appear because the edges of each pixel are slightly shifted for each colour. Smart camera software can conceal this effect--to a point--but you give up some detail and the compensation is never going to be perfect.
How frequently do you need to replace/recharge the battery in your digicam?
My SLR can shoot dozens of rolls of film--I replace the battery less often than I replace my calendar--and the camera strap has a little pocket for a replacement battery attached, just in case. In terms of the number of batteries you need to carry, the old school 35mm SLR wins hands down.
Having to carry all that film, however....
For this very reason, I make a point of carrying Google Earth printouts with me at all times, just in case I feel like committing a terrorist act.
Take that, Google! I'm sick of your spotless public image!
I think that would make for an excellent demonstration of evolution in action, anyway.
Somehow, somewhere, there are still people who believe astronauts wear mittens.
Indeed. Cancer is the number two killer in the United States, right after cardiovascular disease. Cancer's also creeping up because we keep getting better at treating other diseases (if nothing else kills you, cancer will get you eventually).
About one in four deaths in the United States are due to cancer anyway. Another 10% on top is a sizeable increase, but not actually as huge as it would seem at first blush. It might also be possible to offset somewhat through intense health surveillance of the astronauts after their return.
This reminds me of the classic Dave Barry column describing a group of engineers who are tired of waiting for charcoal to ignite and heat to cooking temperature. The article ends, somewhat ominously, with
This just might be the technique to break the three-second barrier. Stay tuned for further developments.I presume that wrongdoing is that which is done by wrongdoers. A "wrongdoer" is sort of an evildoer Lite . So, what can we do about these "wrongdoers"? George Bush won't bomb and invade them (they're not the fully fledged evil, remember), but he might send Donald Rumsfeld to give them a wedgie.
You call that an appliance?
I want my Google Toaster. Ideally I should be able to burn satellite maps and driving directions into a standard slice of white bread.
I dunno...habit?