Be carefull if you are using a reflector-type telescope - one with the mirror (for example Newton reflector). These kind of telescopes should never be pointed towards the sun - whether you are looking through the eyepiece or only projecting a picture of the sun to a screen.
This is true of any telescope that doesn't have a miniscule aperture. If you have a large refracting telescope, you also run the risk of cooking the optics in your objective if you point it at the sun.
To directly examine the sun using a telescope, obtain an appropriate solar filter of the type that goes on the front of the telescope before all of the other optics. These can be purchased for telescopes of any size--including reflecting 'scopes. Google for 'solar filter' and 'telescope' and you should turn up any number of suppliers. Do not buy a filter that sits at or near the eyepiece, and don't trust any filter sold by a company that distributes such devices. These filters have an unfortunate habit of heating up on exposure to concentrated sunlight. When they melt through the focused sunlight can rapidly blind an observer.
The parent poster is quite right--for amateur observing of the transit, binoculars projecting onto paper are more than adequate, as is the use of a regular old pinhole. I was in southern Ontario for the annular solar eclipse back in 1994(?). Gaps between the leaves of trees made thousands of effective pinholes--you could see hundreds of little crescents on the ground under trees as totality approached; it was a very cool effect. My watch at the time had a relatively small, flat face and I was even able to use it as an effective low-quality pinhole to project an image of the eclipse on a wall.
From the linked report, the highest concentrations observed in the sampled dust were on the order of 200 pg/cm^2. That's 2E-10 grams per square centimeter; most of their measurements found lower concentrations.
Their wipe tests were performed after dust was allowed to accumulate for at least five days. Let's suppose that I regularly remove and ingest the dust from 200 cm^2 of my computer. That would be licking the dust off about thirty square inches of my computer's case.
In that case, I'm being exposed to 40 ng per week, or about 2 micrograms per year. That's about 0.1 mg over the course of my lifetime--a tenth of a milligram.
A recent literature review(1) (abstract and full text) gives a threshold for toxicity due to octa-BDE (the most toxic compounds studied in the wipe tets) as 2 mg/kg (fetal toxicity/teratongenicity, rat and rabbit models.)
The most toxic compound being phased out (penta-BDE; not measured in the wipe tests) affects neurobehavioural development from 0.6 mg/kg (rat and mouse models.)
The carcinogenicity of these compounds is not well-characterized, however any effects seem to appear at much higher exposures that one would expect in the real world.
In other words, these compounds bear watching and the fact that they are bioaccumulative is troubling--but they're definitely not something to panic about. I'd also be more concerned about ingestion from other sources--bioaccumulations in fish and eggs--rather than from your computer hardware. Those problems, in turn, can be addressed through proper disposal of retired computer equipment.
(1) Darnerud PO. "Toxic effects of brominated flame retardants in man and in wildlife." Environ. Int.29(6):841-53 (2003).
Not necessarily. Depends on the acid and the plastic. For sul(f/ph)uric (battery) acid, there's a number of suitable polymers. I believe polypropylene is usually used in lead-acid battery manufacture. (Car batteries made of glass don't travel well.) High-density polyethylene also resists acid quite well. PTFE (Teflon) doesn't blink on exposure to most acids.
Heavy-duty rolls of plastic from the garden center, while not impervious to acid indefinitely, will definitely provide some protection.
Although I have made several demands in strong language, no one, NO ONE, has bothered to get the master password from me, even though I have suggested it in person to several people several times. So, they have the file, but have no access to it.
Or you could write out the password and put it into a safe deposit box at the bank. Leave the key with your attorney, and instructions in your will. Better yet, give the entire password list to the company attorney.
Damn right nobody at the company wants to have access to all your passwords. What if you snap and decide to commit some act of information sabotage? Now you've got plausible deniability--'It only happened after I oh-so-responsibly (*ahem*) gave my passwords to senior management.'
Further, what happens if any of those senior officials leaves the company before you die? Now you've got to create a new password file and master password that they all have to rememorize--or the officer who left gets to sell all your secrets to the company's chief competitor.
Sometimes the most technical solution isn't the best.
It's like the joke that Bush is supreme commander of American troops -- a man who has no real military experience. If I was in the armed services I would find that insulting.
Why?
It would be absurd to expect any President to have experience in every single aspect of government. This is why a President has a Cabinet, and hires all manner of advisors. The President isn't an MD--how can he make decisions on health policy? The President definitely isn't a PhD--how can he make decisions related to research and development? The President was never a park ranger or a lumberjack (I don't think)--why can he make decisions about national parks and forestry?
George Bush is an embarrassment on any number of levels--but this isn't a fair criticism. Should a majority of Americans be considered unqualified for office because they don't serve in the military?
magine if you could go to a web site, select some tracks from various artists, click on: burn and send, and the whole CD was burned on high quality disc, and custom jacket with lyrics made, and the whole thing shipped to the customer's house, including shipping, for 3.99 (yes, the whole CD).
He looked at me funny for a second and said: But we'd lose money!
To which I replied: You're losing money now.
Where is he losing money? The music industry is extremely profitable.
Sure, there are sales to individuals that could be made under your proposed model--individuals not buying music now. That's not a loss, per se.
Assume that it costs a dollar to press a CD and ship it to your local music store. Say it costs two dollars to produce a custom compact disc and art, and ship it to an individual's home.
Back of the envelope math says that the record company makes fourteen dollars per disc under the first pricing scheme, and two dollars per disc under the second. Will they sell seven times as many discs under the new model? No? Then they're not going to change.
Supply and demand are where it's at. The market laws apply to all industries and all countries for all commodities. What makes music industry execs think they're immune to it?
Except that music isn't a commodity--not the way wheat is. For a given artist, generally there is only one supplier. Consequently, demand can be regulated through price in an effective monopoly situation. The price point will be set wherever total profit (units sold times net profit per unit) is maximized. Record companies may choose to introduce new products and new distribution schemes if they think they can make gobs of money at it, but there's no competitive pressure for them to do so.
It is Canon's customers that should be angry. Both those that purchased the $500 version (for getting hardware they could have gotten for much less), and the those that purchased the "entry-level" version (for getting sold an intentionally crippled camera). Canon lied to all of them.
Er. No.
Canon said, 'we'll give you this camera here, with magnesium body and huge feature set, for X dollars.'
Then Canon said, 'alternately we'll give you this other camera here, with plastic body, and extensive but smaller feature set, for X minus five hundred dollars.'
Canon was quite open about advertising that there were significant similarities. The sensor and a lot of the electronics are essentially the same. The more expensive camera has a more durable body, can shoot multiple frames faster, has a higher maximum shutter speed, and a few other goodies. Canon never said anything about there being entirely different firmware on the two models.
When you buy the camera, what are you paying for? The advertised set of features. What did Canon give you for your money? The advertised set of features. Why are they lying, again?
21 rocket scientists from brazil would definitely agree with this. Unfortunately they can't because they are all dead!
Why do you say that? They were working on the project. Presumably, they had at least some faith in it. Every time someone dies in an automobile accident should we conclude that the victims believe cars are too dangerous to drive? It really steams me when someone on Slashdot or elsewhere presumes to speak for the opinions of the deceased.
Someone who actually reads the linked article would discover that an investigation of the accident revealed 'poor management and a lack of funding'. The direct cause of the accident was an 'electrical flaw' that ignited one of the solid rocket motors on the booster.
Gee, it's a good thing that electrical or other engineering flaws can't ignite liquid fuel during storage, transport, or fuelling. I'm also pleased to discover that problems of sloppy management can be alleviated through the use of liquid fuels....
That's probably true, but there is potential for far greater catastrophes from nuclear plants.
No source of energy is without risk/cost....I think that most people also deem nuclear energy to be too risky (Chernobyl did a lot to convince Europe of the risks).
Ah, the classic human tendency to misperceive risk. We prefer death by slow attrition to death by catastrophe. Why is that, I wonder?
Epidemiological studies have developed measures of the number of people killed by fossil fuel generation. For each coal-fired plant, governments can say that there will be roughly x extra deaths per year, by increased asthma, emphysema, and other lung diseases and induced by higher exposure to sulfur and nitrogen oxides. x can range from hundreds to the low thousands, depending on population density and ambient weather.
It's the same sort of 'reasoning' that leads people to be more afraid of flying than driving, despite strong statistical arguments about relative safety. By risk per passenger mile, or by trip, or by raw number of deaths, air travel is safer. Unfortunately, catastrophic failures are more memorable.
It's fine if a coal plant kills a thousand people per year. They're hard to single out--anonymous, really. You can't point at a given emphysema death and say it was due to a coal plant; you can only note that ten percent more people died from emphysema-related causes this year than you would have expected.
If a nuclear plant kills a thousand people every fifty years, that's politically unacceptable. You can identify the victims. They'll know whom to blame, and whom to sue.
In many situations that could be considered academic dishonesty (although I don't agree with that view), but hardly "plagiarism," which as others pointed out involves taking another person's work and pretending it is your own.
Quite right. The matter falls under the broader umbrella of 'academic dishonesty', rather than within the realm of plagiarism, per se.
That said, the university was absolutely correct to penalize the author in question for his actions. Most universities have a policy not to accept for credit works created for other courses; often this extends to all previously written works. In this case, the author was presenting material as his own (correct), and as his original work for the course (decidedly incorrect.)
What if I wrote a guide to Perl and put it on my personal website. Suppose I did it just for fun, as a project to keep busy over the summer. Three months later, I'm back at school, and my CS prof asks me to write an introductory handbook on the scripting language of my choice. I choose to write about Perl, and extract most of my handbook content from my existing online documentation.
Doing it that way falls down for two reasons. First, as a student I don't learn anything. (The parent post noted this.) I don't have to do research. Second, I have an unfair advantage--I had an extra three months to write, review, and revise large portions of my content. Unless I cite my original source (my own work) the professor grading the assignment has no way of knowing that I didn't generate the entire assignment after it was assigned. Of course my handbook will be better than everyone else's--I had all that extra time.
One should also be aware that sloppiness with citation can often lead the professor grading the work to distrust the rest of the work. Did the student lift anything from elsewhere undetected? Has anything that was cited been inadvertently or deliberately misrepresented?
It's good that the university is cracking down now. Encouraging students to always cite sources is a valuable habit if they ever do any professional writing. Citing yourself can also be a valuable tool to encourage other academics to read your stuff.
All that said, I hope that he wasn't punished too severely for this particular transgression, because it does seem fairly minor.
I want my eye improvement to be able to give me 20/20 vision. I want it to record everything that I've ever experienced and beable to display anything to the same level.
And you want to forfeit the opportunity to ever keep anything private...
In legal proceedings, your eyeball record will be subject to subpoena. Do you think that law enforcement will be able to mind their own damn business and not flip through the rest of the movies?
Will parents demand that their children show them where they were last night?
Oh, and do you think you'll ever have sex again, once your girlfriend finds out you're recording everything and might decide to put it on your website?
Why the heck does he need to take donations for this?
It's a tried and true principle in philanthropy--you get more bang for your bucks if you put up some seed money and then let other people contribute.
Thirty million dollars will buy you a nice library with your name on it.
Or, thirty million dollars will buy you a nice library, a university lecture hall, a youth drop-in center, and a park--all with your name on them--since you only put up five or ten million in seed money for each. By putting up some serious bucks, you start the ball rolling, but you don't have to foot the entire bill. If there's a genuine interest in the project, then other donors will step forward.
You can do a 'matching' thing, too. Guilt a local government into matching every dollar you put in. Promise a service club you'll match their contributions.
I say, this is just further proof of what we've been saying all along: irradiated food isn't safe to eat.
It's interesting, actually. The best-known radiotolerant bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans, was actually discovered in radiation-sterilized meat. The entire Deinococcus genus (eight known species) consists of extremophiles; they share some very robust DNA repair processes.
On the other hand, they're quite safe to eat. Although they can cope with very high doses of radiation, like most extremophiles they're poorly suited to competition with other bacteria in less challenging environments--in the human gut, for example. The D. radiodurans was only observed after radiation treatment cleared the field, as it were.
The real question we should be asking is not whether or not radiation sterilization is a safe procedure, but whether the food industry will consider it a panacea and become more lax in their other handling procedures as a result. After all--how did D. radiodurans get into the meat in the first place?
Even if a pickpocket steals from thousands of people over his lifetime, he is only guilty of many counts of petty theft. He doesn't graduate to grand larceny after a certain cumulative dollar amount.
It's interesting--in some U.S. jurisdictions, he actually does.
It's one of the consequences of so-called 'three strikes' legislation and sentencing.
People, to some degree, are as entertained by the sophistication of the CG animation as they are by the plot, characters, and so on. This will not go on forever, just as cartoon animation became ordinary in time.
To six- or even nine-year-olds, CG animation isn't a novelty. It's been around for their entire lives. (Makes you feel old, doesn't it?) How old are television programs like Reboot, now? Toy Story came out quite a while ago, too.
To the people that aren't computer animation wonks reading Slashdot, the technique is kind of neat, but it's still the stories (and/or their screaming kids) that sell tickets.
Bizarelly I find myself in agreement with Ashcroft, plea bargains should be *only* be offered in return for becoming an informant, it should be banned (legally and not just by the AGs rules) otherwise.
Quite right. You should get a break if you turn other people in. You shouldn't get a break if you turn yourself in....
Eh?
Moreover, as far as I'm concerned giving someone a deal for pleading guilty should be a violation of the 5th ammendment. After all a plea bargain is a reduced sentence in return for not insisting on your innocence. Or put another way in the presence of a plea offer there is a penalty for insisting on your innocence.
What if you actually committed the crime in question? Why waste the time of a jury going through the motions of a trial? Why waste the government's (and your own) money? With a plea bargain, there are incentives--a lesser sentence, known in advance--to coming forward. Otherwise, there's no incentive for anyone not to roll the dice on a trial.
They wouldn't have shares in fluoride mines perhaps now would they???!!!
The toothpaste on my shelf contains 0.24% sodium fluoride; that's about one part in a thousand that's fluoride, by mass. If we assume that I go through 250 g of toothpaste per year--about half a pound--that's 0.25 g of fluoride I consume each year. Over a quarter billion or so Americans, that would be sixty or seventy tons of fluoride.
The average per capita water use in the United States is (rounded up) about two hundred gallons per day. (Ref.) Assuming that all of that water gets fluoridated at 1 part per million, that's another 200 tons per year fluoride.
If we assume that the fluoride was originally sourced from calcium fluoride (fluorspar), that's a total of about 900 tons of fluorspar to meet the entire nation's dental fluride requirements.
Current U.S. use of fluorspar is on the order of six hundred thousand tons per year. (Ref.) Nearly all is imported, and two-thirds (66%) of those imports are from China.
To conclude, fluoride use for public health purposes makes a negligible contribution to total domestic fluorine demand--less than a fifth of one percent of the total fluorine consumed. Also, domestic leaders haven't got anything to gain by selling more fluorides--the U.S. imports most of its supply from a country it doesn't particularly like, and where it definitely doesn't own any of the local natural resources.
While we are at it, where are MY RIGHTS? I didn't demand fluoride in the water. If you brush your teeth with toothpaste containing fluoride AND drink copious quantities of water containing Fluoride (BECAUSE SOME MF SOB DECIDED IT WAS IN YOUR BEST INTERESTS WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!) they can get stained black. Whoopee! Might as well issue black crayons. Why are polititians and tooth fairy campaigners so IGNORANT of long term health issues. They wouldn't have shares in fluoride mines perhaps now would they???!!!
Not only that, but excess fluoride exposure has been linked to paranoia, irrational anger, and uncontrolled fits of YELLING.
Curiously, fluoridation of water is also associated with lower rates of suicide. Ref.
Fluoridation results in a significant decrease in dental caries (cavities), but also an increase in fluorosis. Ref.
Mild to moderate fluorosis seems to have a primarily cosmetic effect; severe fluorosis can affect the integrity of the tooth. Consequently, efforts are made to moderate (but not eliminate) the exposure of people to fluoride. In general, it is thought that the significant decrease in caries more than outweighs the increased risk of (predominantly mild) fluorosis.
Many European nations do not fluoridate their water; instead they mandate fluoridated toothpaste. Recent studies have investigated appropriate dosages, though dose control can be stymied by incorrect individual usage. Ref. It has also been observed that fluoridation of water significantly improves dental health among the poor, who presumably have less access both to dental practitioners and, for that matter, toothpaste. Ref.
Until we have a better understanding of the mechanisms of both the formation of dental caries (Ref.) and fluorosis (Ref.) we're left with making public health decisions based on available epidemiological data--which overwhelmingly support the continued fluoridation of drinking water to protect oral health.
In case it helps, I once heard about someone with a sudden onset of schizophrenia. After going through a divorce (consequence of schizophrenia), she had her mercury fillings removed and fully recovered.
As they say in statistics, the plural of anecdote isn't data. I fully expect to see several postings of similar tales. In this instance, the Devil's Advocate might note that the friend was under a lot of stress related to marriage trouble, and may have suffered clinically significant mental effecs because of it. She recovered afterwards because a) she divorced the guy that was causing the stress, and b) she could blame the fillings for the divorce and not herself.
A more charitable interpretation is that the 'schizophrenia' was the result of some other undiagnosed disorder--a burst blood vessel in the brain, perhaps.
The symptoms from mercury (heavy metal) poisoning are essentially asymptomatic (non-deterministic)
As they say on Slashdot, I don't think that word means what you think it means...'asymptomatic' means 'without symptoms'. If the chief symptom of poisoning is that there are no symptoms....
The parent poster presents as fact some highly controversial ideas--the 'link' between mercury and schizophrenia or chronic fatique syndrome, for instance. There is a statistically significant increase in the body's mercury load from amalgam fillings, though it is extremely small. Well-controlled, randomized, blind trials have not found a link between mercury amalgam fillings and any illness, though there are ongoing clinical trials in several places.
Perhaps one of the most troubling observations with respect to dental amalgam is the number of individuals who self-diagnose an amalgam related disorder--of course removal of the fillings cures the psychosomatic illness.
'Over the past two decades, mercury released by amalgam fillings has been held responsible for a number of mental and somatic health complaints. However, a systematic relation between increased mercury levels and the severity of the reported symptoms has never been demonstrated in any of the present well-controlled multidisciplinary studies. These studies, however, have found a high prevalence of mental disorders, especially somatization syndromes, among patients with self-diagnosed "amalgam illness". Additionally, our own studies indicate that
amalgam anxiety is often merely one aspect of a general environmental anxiety. Overall, the present findings suggest a psychological etiology for amalgam-related complaints.'(1) [My emphasis]
From The Lancet,
'The US National Institutes of Health are 2 years into a 7-year, multicentre clinical trial of children aged 6 to 10 years to see whether any adverse health effects result from amalgam fillings (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov; search on "amalgam"). "Of course, they can't release any findings yet, but they have told us that there are no indications right now that would cause them to discontinue the trial", says Eichmiller. "And we know from the recent oestrogen trial [see Lancet 2002; 360: 146] that if there were any adverse responses, they'd pull the plug in a hurry, especially in children."' (2)
Further thoughts--in addition to damaging the teeth during filling replacement (and possibly leading to unnecessary surgery and the associated nonnegligible risks) there are concerns that the replacements for mercury amalgam may be more dangerous to health than the mercury fillings themselves.
'In many cases of removal, the amalgam filling is replaced by composite or gold restorations. Although the composite materials do not contain mercury, F Reichl and colleagues' in-vitro studies show significant cytotoxic and even genotoxic activity for some of their components. These restorative materials a
Yeah, but that doesn't tell us how many unique individuals there are in the database. I mean, there's only six billion or so people on Earth--the U.S. government doesn't actually have a file on fully two-thirds of those. (Probably.)
I probably would have several records in the database--credit history, driver's license, Social Security info, maybe university registration...and do you count my credit history as one record, or a collection of several?
If a computer program could auto-grade and give detailed comments on how to improve the writing, high school students could be assigned an essay per week, and really get the hang of writing well. Teachers could focus on teaching instead of tedium.
Unfortunately, the system described here doesn't return any such useful feedback. The Indiana system returns a grade from a six point scale. No comments, no criticism, no hint that the evaluation is meaningful.
Incidentally, what's this about "teaching instead of tedium"? Grading essays by evaluating construction, insight, and creativity should be part of the teaching process. Perhaps this is something that should be addressed earlier in the education of these students - if they're reaching college as "borderline illiterates" there is a problem - but grading in general is a part of teaching. If I were a student, I'd want to know that a human being - at some point - had bothered to look at the work that I did.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true of any telescope that doesn't have a miniscule aperture. If you have a large refracting telescope, you also run the risk of cooking the optics in your objective if you point it at the sun.
To directly examine the sun using a telescope, obtain an appropriate solar filter of the type that goes on the front of the telescope before all of the other optics. These can be purchased for telescopes of any size--including reflecting 'scopes. Google for 'solar filter' and 'telescope' and you should turn up any number of suppliers. Do not buy a filter that sits at or near the eyepiece, and don't trust any filter sold by a company that distributes such devices. These filters have an unfortunate habit of heating up on exposure to concentrated sunlight. When they melt through the focused sunlight can rapidly blind an observer.
The parent poster is quite right--for amateur observing of the transit, binoculars projecting onto paper are more than adequate, as is the use of a regular old pinhole. I was in southern Ontario for the annular solar eclipse back in 1994(?). Gaps between the leaves of trees made thousands of effective pinholes--you could see hundreds of little crescents on the ground under trees as totality approached; it was a very cool effect. My watch at the time had a relatively small, flat face and I was even able to use it as an effective low-quality pinhole to project an image of the eclipse on a wall.
Their wipe tests were performed after dust was allowed to accumulate for at least five days. Let's suppose that I regularly remove and ingest the dust from 200 cm^2 of my computer. That would be licking the dust off about thirty square inches of my computer's case.
In that case, I'm being exposed to 40 ng per week, or about 2 micrograms per year. That's about 0.1 mg over the course of my lifetime--a tenth of a milligram.
A recent literature review(1) (abstract and full text) gives a threshold for toxicity due to octa-BDE (the most toxic compounds studied in the wipe tets) as 2 mg/kg (fetal toxicity/teratongenicity, rat and rabbit models.)
The most toxic compound being phased out (penta-BDE; not measured in the wipe tests) affects neurobehavioural development from 0.6 mg/kg (rat and mouse models.)
The carcinogenicity of these compounds is not well-characterized, however any effects seem to appear at much higher exposures that one would expect in the real world.
In other words, these compounds bear watching and the fact that they are bioaccumulative is troubling--but they're definitely not something to panic about. I'd also be more concerned about ingestion from other sources--bioaccumulations in fish and eggs--rather than from your computer hardware. Those problems, in turn, can be addressed through proper disposal of retired computer equipment.
(1) Darnerud PO. "Toxic effects of brominated flame retardants in man and in wildlife." Environ. Int. 29(6):841-53 (2003).
Not necessarily. Depends on the acid and the plastic. For sul(f/ph)uric (battery) acid, there's a number of suitable polymers. I believe polypropylene is usually used in lead-acid battery manufacture. (Car batteries made of glass don't travel well.) High-density polyethylene also resists acid quite well. PTFE (Teflon) doesn't blink on exposure to most acids.
Heavy-duty rolls of plastic from the garden center, while not impervious to acid indefinitely, will definitely provide some protection.
Or you could write out the password and put it into a safe deposit box at the bank. Leave the key with your attorney, and instructions in your will. Better yet, give the entire password list to the company attorney.
Damn right nobody at the company wants to have access to all your passwords. What if you snap and decide to commit some act of information sabotage? Now you've got plausible deniability--'It only happened after I oh-so-responsibly (*ahem*) gave my passwords to senior management.'
Further, what happens if any of those senior officials leaves the company before you die? Now you've got to create a new password file and master password that they all have to rememorize--or the officer who left gets to sell all your secrets to the company's chief competitor.
Sometimes the most technical solution isn't the best.
Why?
It would be absurd to expect any President to have experience in every single aspect of government. This is why a President has a Cabinet, and hires all manner of advisors. The President isn't an MD--how can he make decisions on health policy? The President definitely isn't a PhD--how can he make decisions related to research and development? The President was never a park ranger or a lumberjack (I don't think)--why can he make decisions about national parks and forestry?
George Bush is an embarrassment on any number of levels--but this isn't a fair criticism. Should a majority of Americans be considered unqualified for office because they don't serve in the military?
He looked at me funny for a second and said: But we'd lose money!
To which I replied: You're losing money now.
Where is he losing money? The music industry is extremely profitable.
Sure, there are sales to individuals that could be made under your proposed model--individuals not buying music now. That's not a loss, per se.
Assume that it costs a dollar to press a CD and ship it to your local music store. Say it costs two dollars to produce a custom compact disc and art, and ship it to an individual's home.
Back of the envelope math says that the record company makes fourteen dollars per disc under the first pricing scheme, and two dollars per disc under the second. Will they sell seven times as many discs under the new model? No? Then they're not going to change.
Supply and demand are where it's at. The market laws apply to all industries and all countries for all commodities. What makes music industry execs think they're immune to it?
Except that music isn't a commodity--not the way wheat is. For a given artist, generally there is only one supplier. Consequently, demand can be regulated through price in an effective monopoly situation. The price point will be set wherever total profit (units sold times net profit per unit) is maximized. Record companies may choose to introduce new products and new distribution schemes if they think they can make gobs of money at it, but there's no competitive pressure for them to do so.
Er. No.
Canon said, 'we'll give you this camera here, with magnesium body and huge feature set, for X dollars.'
Then Canon said, 'alternately we'll give you this other camera here, with plastic body, and extensive but smaller feature set, for X minus five hundred dollars.'
Canon was quite open about advertising that there were significant similarities. The sensor and a lot of the electronics are essentially the same. The more expensive camera has a more durable body, can shoot multiple frames faster, has a higher maximum shutter speed, and a few other goodies. Canon never said anything about there being entirely different firmware on the two models.
When you buy the camera, what are you paying for? The advertised set of features. What did Canon give you for your money? The advertised set of features. Why are they lying, again?
From (where else?) here:
I was just reminded, is all....Yes. The kid with Kazaa will be soaking up all the bandwidth in the cell, so you won't be able to make a call in the first place.
Why do you say that? They were working on the project. Presumably, they had at least some faith in it. Every time someone dies in an automobile accident should we conclude that the victims believe cars are too dangerous to drive? It really steams me when someone on Slashdot or elsewhere presumes to speak for the opinions of the deceased.
Someone who actually reads the linked article would discover that an investigation of the accident revealed 'poor management and a lack of funding'. The direct cause of the accident was an 'electrical flaw' that ignited one of the solid rocket motors on the booster.
Gee, it's a good thing that electrical or other engineering flaws can't ignite liquid fuel during storage, transport, or fuelling. I'm also pleased to discover that problems of sloppy management can be alleviated through the use of liquid fuels....
No source of energy is without risk/cost....I think that most people also deem nuclear energy to be too risky (Chernobyl did a lot to convince Europe of the risks).
Ah, the classic human tendency to misperceive risk. We prefer death by slow attrition to death by catastrophe. Why is that, I wonder?
Epidemiological studies have developed measures of the number of people killed by fossil fuel generation. For each coal-fired plant, governments can say that there will be roughly x extra deaths per year, by increased asthma, emphysema, and other lung diseases and induced by higher exposure to sulfur and nitrogen oxides. x can range from hundreds to the low thousands, depending on population density and ambient weather.
It's the same sort of 'reasoning' that leads people to be more afraid of flying than driving, despite strong statistical arguments about relative safety. By risk per passenger mile, or by trip, or by raw number of deaths, air travel is safer. Unfortunately, catastrophic failures are more memorable.
It's fine if a coal plant kills a thousand people per year. They're hard to single out--anonymous, really. You can't point at a given emphysema death and say it was due to a coal plant; you can only note that ten percent more people died from emphysema-related causes this year than you would have expected.
If a nuclear plant kills a thousand people every fifty years, that's politically unacceptable. You can identify the victims. They'll know whom to blame, and whom to sue.
Quite right. The matter falls under the broader umbrella of 'academic dishonesty', rather than within the realm of plagiarism, per se.
That said, the university was absolutely correct to penalize the author in question for his actions. Most universities have a policy not to accept for credit works created for other courses; often this extends to all previously written works. In this case, the author was presenting material as his own (correct), and as his original work for the course (decidedly incorrect.)
What if I wrote a guide to Perl and put it on my personal website. Suppose I did it just for fun, as a project to keep busy over the summer. Three months later, I'm back at school, and my CS prof asks me to write an introductory handbook on the scripting language of my choice. I choose to write about Perl, and extract most of my handbook content from my existing online documentation.
Doing it that way falls down for two reasons. First, as a student I don't learn anything. (The parent post noted this.) I don't have to do research. Second, I have an unfair advantage--I had an extra three months to write, review, and revise large portions of my content. Unless I cite my original source (my own work) the professor grading the assignment has no way of knowing that I didn't generate the entire assignment after it was assigned. Of course my handbook will be better than everyone else's--I had all that extra time.
One should also be aware that sloppiness with citation can often lead the professor grading the work to distrust the rest of the work. Did the student lift anything from elsewhere undetected? Has anything that was cited been inadvertently or deliberately misrepresented?
It's good that the university is cracking down now. Encouraging students to always cite sources is a valuable habit if they ever do any professional writing. Citing yourself can also be a valuable tool to encourage other academics to read your stuff.
All that said, I hope that he wasn't punished too severely for this particular transgression, because it does seem fairly minor.
And you want to forfeit the opportunity to ever keep anything private...
In legal proceedings, your eyeball record will be subject to subpoena. Do you think that law enforcement will be able to mind their own damn business and not flip through the rest of the movies?
Will parents demand that their children show them where they were last night?
Oh, and do you think you'll ever have sex again, once your girlfriend finds out you're recording everything and might decide to put it on your website?
Be careful what you wish for.
It's a tried and true principle in philanthropy--you get more bang for your bucks if you put up some seed money and then let other people contribute.
Thirty million dollars will buy you a nice library with your name on it.
Or, thirty million dollars will buy you a nice library, a university lecture hall, a youth drop-in center, and a park--all with your name on them--since you only put up five or ten million in seed money for each. By putting up some serious bucks, you start the ball rolling, but you don't have to foot the entire bill. If there's a genuine interest in the project, then other donors will step forward.
You can do a 'matching' thing, too. Guilt a local government into matching every dollar you put in. Promise a service club you'll match their contributions.
It's interesting, actually. The best-known radiotolerant bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans, was actually discovered in radiation-sterilized meat. The entire Deinococcus genus (eight known species) consists of extremophiles; they share some very robust DNA repair processes.
On the other hand, they're quite safe to eat. Although they can cope with very high doses of radiation, like most extremophiles they're poorly suited to competition with other bacteria in less challenging environments--in the human gut, for example. The D. radiodurans was only observed after radiation treatment cleared the field, as it were.
The real question we should be asking is not whether or not radiation sterilization is a safe procedure, but whether the food industry will consider it a panacea and become more lax in their other handling procedures as a result. After all--how did D. radiodurans get into the meat in the first place?
It's interesting--in some U.S. jurisdictions, he actually does.
It's one of the consequences of so-called 'three strikes' legislation and sentencing.
To six- or even nine-year-olds, CG animation isn't a novelty. It's been around for their entire lives. (Makes you feel old, doesn't it?) How old are television programs like Reboot, now? Toy Story came out quite a while ago, too.
To the people that aren't computer animation wonks reading Slashdot, the technique is kind of neat, but it's still the stories (and/or their screaming kids) that sell tickets.
Quite right. You should get a break if you turn other people in. You shouldn't get a break if you turn yourself in....
Eh? Moreover, as far as I'm concerned giving someone a deal for pleading guilty should be a violation of the 5th ammendment. After all a plea bargain is a reduced sentence in return for not insisting on your innocence. Or put another way in the presence of a plea offer there is a penalty for insisting on your innocence.
What if you actually committed the crime in question? Why waste the time of a jury going through the motions of a trial? Why waste the government's (and your own) money? With a plea bargain, there are incentives--a lesser sentence, known in advance--to coming forward. Otherwise, there's no incentive for anyone not to roll the dice on a trial.
So...what are the civilians going to DO in Hawaii?
Oh. Right. Spend a ton of money on transportation, gawk at the scenery for a while, and go home. This seems to be a viable economic model.
The toothpaste on my shelf contains 0.24% sodium fluoride; that's about one part in a thousand that's fluoride, by mass. If we assume that I go through 250 g of toothpaste per year--about half a pound--that's 0.25 g of fluoride I consume each year. Over a quarter billion or so Americans, that would be sixty or seventy tons of fluoride.
The average per capita water use in the United States is (rounded up) about two hundred gallons per day. (Ref.) Assuming that all of that water gets fluoridated at 1 part per million, that's another 200 tons per year fluoride.
If we assume that the fluoride was originally sourced from calcium fluoride (fluorspar), that's a total of about 900 tons of fluorspar to meet the entire nation's dental fluride requirements.
Current U.S. use of fluorspar is on the order of six hundred thousand tons per year. (Ref.) Nearly all is imported, and two-thirds (66%) of those imports are from China.
To conclude, fluoride use for public health purposes makes a negligible contribution to total domestic fluorine demand--less than a fifth of one percent of the total fluorine consumed. Also, domestic leaders haven't got anything to gain by selling more fluorides--the U.S. imports most of its supply from a country it doesn't particularly like, and where it definitely doesn't own any of the local natural resources.
Not only that, but excess fluoride exposure has been linked to paranoia, irrational anger, and uncontrolled fits of YELLING.
Curiously, fluoridation of water is also associated with lower rates of suicide. Ref.
Fluoridation results in a significant decrease in dental caries (cavities), but also an increase in fluorosis. Ref.
Mild to moderate fluorosis seems to have a primarily cosmetic effect; severe fluorosis can affect the integrity of the tooth. Consequently, efforts are made to moderate (but not eliminate) the exposure of people to fluoride. In general, it is thought that the significant decrease in caries more than outweighs the increased risk of (predominantly mild) fluorosis.
Many European nations do not fluoridate their water; instead they mandate fluoridated toothpaste. Recent studies have investigated appropriate dosages, though dose control can be stymied by incorrect individual usage. Ref. It has also been observed that fluoridation of water significantly improves dental health among the poor, who presumably have less access both to dental practitioners and, for that matter, toothpaste. Ref.
Until we have a better understanding of the mechanisms of both the formation of dental caries (Ref.) and fluorosis (Ref.) we're left with making public health decisions based on available epidemiological data--which overwhelmingly support the continued fluoridation of drinking water to protect oral health.
As they say in statistics, the plural of anecdote isn't data. I fully expect to see several postings of similar tales. In this instance, the Devil's Advocate might note that the friend was under a lot of stress related to marriage trouble, and may have suffered clinically significant mental effecs because of it. She recovered afterwards because a) she divorced the guy that was causing the stress, and b) she could blame the fillings for the divorce and not herself.
A more charitable interpretation is that the 'schizophrenia' was the result of some other undiagnosed disorder--a burst blood vessel in the brain, perhaps.
The symptoms from mercury (heavy metal) poisoning are essentially asymptomatic (non-deterministic)
As they say on Slashdot, I don't think that word means what you think it means...'asymptomatic' means 'without symptoms'. If the chief symptom of poisoning is that there are no symptoms....
The parent poster presents as fact some highly controversial ideas--the 'link' between mercury and schizophrenia or chronic fatique syndrome, for instance. There is a statistically significant increase in the body's mercury load from amalgam fillings, though it is extremely small. Well-controlled, randomized, blind trials have not found a link between mercury amalgam fillings and any illness, though there are ongoing clinical trials in several places.
Perhaps one of the most troubling observations with respect to dental amalgam is the number of individuals who self-diagnose an amalgam related disorder--of course removal of the fillings cures the psychosomatic illness.
From The Lancet,
Further thoughts--in addition to damaging the teeth during filling replacement (and possibly leading to unnecessary surgery and the associated nonnegligible risks) there are concerns that the replacements for mercury amalgam may be more dangerous to health than the mercury fillings themselves.
Yeah, but that doesn't tell us how many unique individuals there are in the database. I mean, there's only six billion or so people on Earth--the U.S. government doesn't actually have a file on fully two-thirds of those. (Probably.)
I probably would have several records in the database--credit history, driver's license, Social Security info, maybe university registration...and do you count my credit history as one record, or a collection of several?
To be fair, that is the correct Boolean evaluation of the stated expression....
Unfortunately, the system described here doesn't return any such useful feedback. The Indiana system returns a grade from a six point scale. No comments, no criticism, no hint that the evaluation is meaningful.
Incidentally, what's this about "teaching instead of tedium"? Grading essays by evaluating construction, insight, and creativity should be part of the teaching process. Perhaps this is something that should be addressed earlier in the education of these students - if they're reaching college as "borderline illiterates" there is a problem - but grading in general is a part of teaching. If I were a student, I'd want to know that a human being - at some point - had bothered to look at the work that I did.