To this day, all countries utilizing airborne vehicles flying in excess of 20,000 feet must pay royalties to Norway for the commercial use of their property.
Since the most recent surveys of Mount Everest place its altitude at 29,035 feet (8850 metres), the Nepalese have applied for an exemption from this policy for Sherpas working commercially below 30,000 feet.
Negotiations are ongoing. There is no word yet on the legal status of climbers who become inadvertantly airborne while still above the 20,000 foot mark.
Huh? I think you got that backwards -- smaller gates require lower voltages (allow, really, since we like it when we can use lower voltages -- it saves power and makes switching faster.)
The big problem isn't the total voltage. It's the electric field--potential change (voltage) per unit distance. As the transistors in a circuit shrink, the field across them goes up. Electrons get pulled across--the system is 'leaky'. This problem imposes a minimum limit on the size of each transistor, and also increases the current draw of the chip.
Heck, this is a problem elsewhere on the die, too. (Electrons always go where you don't want them.) Forget the switches--you get into trouble with a low breakdown voltage between little tiny wires on the chip. Let's say that it takes 20000 volts (generous estimate) to break down a millimetre of insulation. If there are traces on a chip one micron apart, that's a breakdown voltage of ~20 volts. If traces are 20 nanometres apart (0.02 micron), it only takes 0.4 volts to short the chip.
Come on, folks. Insightful? The parent post was being Funny. I hope.
High g forces will kill a bacterium. One technique sometimes used in biology labs to extract the content of cells is centrifugation--fifteen thousand gees for a handful of minutes will crush most cells and let you get at the goodness inside.
This technique is not recommended for killing bacteria inside a living person, however. Pulping patients is a practice generally frowned upon by the medical profession.
The few gees that a healthy person could withstand on a continuous basis aren't enough for a bacterium to even notice.
...are the two most important available books that use logic and statistics to examine how firearms affect crime.
You mean to say, "...are the two most-cited books supporting the theory that firearms decrease crime", do you not?
Surely you don't intend to suggest that there are no detailed, well-reasoned books and papers to support the contrary hypothesis...?
I'm pretty sure that it was the intent of the author of Crazy Ideas to indicate that there is much ballyhooed research on both sides of the issue, and that the thinking and methods on both sides is often rather sloppy. (John Lott, I note, is not above such concerns.)
The problem with a blowfish analgesic is that it will alleviate physical pain, but do nothing for the psychological pain of terminal illness.
That's not a bug; it's a feature.
A drug with narrower effects permits a physician to more precisely tailor the treatment. Being able to treat chronic pain without suffering a corresponding loss in the ability to think clearly is a tremendously useful thing.
The psychological effects of terminal illness are probably not best handled with opiates anyway. Counselling and antidepressant medication would seem to be indicated--not doping patients into a blissful stupor.
Taxes are much less onerous when they are attached to an existing monentary transaction. Sales tax, hotel tax, income tax... the hurt that those things do to the payer is mainly from the actual money taken away. But taxes on something free impose many more costs- you've now got to go through all the paperwork of making a transaction that hadn't been necessary at all. (Like how the biggest irritation of tollbooths is not the money itself, but the traffic congestion from having to sit in line digging for coins)
Don't you already get a monthly bill from your ISP, and from your phone company? Couldn't such a tax be administered through either of those utilities?
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but fees on VoIP don't necessarily have to result in one more bill in your mailbox, or an additional transaction for the consumer.
One point that has not been adequately made is that this will be a recurring expense. Computers obsolesce quickly, to a degree such that 5-year-old computers will generally not run new software. Not only are computers for each student a significant expense, but the investment must be made again in 5 years!
But...why would a school need to run new software? I am a graduate student, I work in a major research institute as part of a large teaching hospital--and a four year old machine mostly meets my needs. (I'm running into a few sluggishness issues with some intensive image processing that I've started to do.)
My home machine was five years old this summer, and I only upgraded because I wanted to be able to play Warcraft III. Office 97 is still just fine for me, and it got me through my entire undergrad degree. Besides Office, I need to be able to run Acrobat Reader and a web browser--I use Opera because it's snappy even on older computers, and I like the tabbed browsing and gestures.
Sure, a high school might want to have a few bleeding edge machines handy for students who want to do video editing projects and other processor-intensive tasks, but public schools don't really need a short upgrade cycle for anything else.
I'm appalled that students were actually stealing components from your computers--perhaps it would be best to keep them in computer labs (with a cluster in the library, too) where there is some supervision? Note that another benefit of a longer upgrade cycle is that the components become much less tempting to those with sticky fingers...
Peace will come when we kill those who want war...
By that reasoning, war could just as easily be averted by killing the parent poster. Interesting.
As an actual smart person said: Except for ending slavery, communism, facism and nazism, war has never solved anything.
Tragically, there isn't another smart person around to explain the concept of rhetoric. It is unfortunately true that war is sometimes made necessary. The actions by Axis powers in World War II the parent cites certainly fit the bill--a war of aggression and conquest.
Israel and Palestine are a very complicated situation--I think that you will find those who thirst for war on both sides. You will also find people who hunger for peace.
Iraq is interesting. There is no evidence that Iraq planned a terrorist attack (past or future) on the United States. There is still no indication that they possessed weapons of mass destruction. The United States invaded in overwhelming force, and is now fighting to install a new government. Their government was objectionable in the extreme--corrupt, violent, and cruel--but this hasn't prompted a U.S. invasion anywhere else. (East Timor? Afganistan before September 11?)
Regarding slavery--perhaps it took war to end the abhorrent practice in the United States. Many other countries managed to legislated it out of existence without violent upheaval. Canada comes to mind, it being one of the destinations to which American slaves used to escape.
Communism wasn't brought to an end through warfare. (Unless, perhaps, one chooses to consider the crippling economic effects of funding a Cold War.)
War is an tool though which policy, economic, and social chage may be implemented. It is, however, a tragically blunt instrument. To assume that it is the only tool in the box--the only way to solve conflicts of ideology--is both absurd and acutely dangerous.
Northern Ireland has not yet dissolved in civil war, though disagreement still exists--as do individuals prepared to kill, prepared for war. Should the powers-that-be give up and invade the country? Impose British rule and an Anglican theocracy because it seems the fastest and most permanent solution?
Of course, I'd like him to, just to crush SCO. But I'm not even sure that Linus has that kind of cash. Last I heard, Linux had given him lots of opportunities and a steady paycheck, but no millionaire-level fortune.
Maybe IBM could lend him one of their lawyers.
Heck, there are probably a number of lawyers who would take the case pro bono just for the publicity. You can't get a much more sympathetic plaintiff.
He also needn't file a multimillion dollar suit. He could choose to ask for one dollar, plus costs, and an injunction against further libellous statements. He doesn't look greedy, and SCO still faces a court declaration that their remarks are defamatory.
Still, it would probably end up soaking up a good bit of his time, and he has better things to do...
A 160,000 page Biotech patent will consist of around 100 pages of description, probably 100 pages of claims (or less) and 159,800 pages of DNA sequences.
The largest constructs used in genetic engineering are usually no more than a few megabases in length; large bits of DNA tend to be rather awkward to manipulate. At, say, two thousand bases (each one of A, C, G, or T) per page, one megabase spans five hundred pages.
I suppose if one were to try to patent the genome of an entire organism, including all of the noncoding DNA, you might have a case for such a monstrous application document--the human genome would take up about 1.5 million pages. However, entire organism patents are still relatively rare, and few actually include the complete genome in the patent. (The patented Harvard mouse, for instance, only has one altered gene that predisposes it to cancer.)
Over a hundred thousand pages smacks of an attempt to hide something--security through obscurity, if you will.
On the other hand, I suspect that there might just be a bit of journalistic license at work here. The hundred sixty thousand pages is probably just someone saying that 2 kB of data are equivalent to one page. Someone probably included a CD-ROM with some images with their application. (I do time-lapse microscopy in a research setting, and I can very easily generate hundreds of megabytes of data in a day.)
Let's say I develop a special fluorescent protein that does something useful. If I submit a patent that includes a page of claims, a page of calculations, twenty pages of protein sequence, and fifty 1 MB micrographs demonstrating that my protein behaves per my statement of claim, is that really the equivalent of a twenty-five thousand (and twenty-two) page submission?
Sometimes the customer is obnoxious and abusive, with a holier-than-thou I'm-always-right attitude, laced with a heavy dose of threats and profanity.
Sometimes it's okay to give up on the sociopaths. There are some customers that you just don't need. Quite frankly, they cost more than they're worth.
I am by no means suggesting that there aren't some examples of truly appalling technical support out there, nor do I mean to suggest that the vast majority of callers aren't polite. However, whenever I see the adage "the customer is always right" I have to say...it just ain't so.
So, it the downloading of music a form of protest or free speech, or is it simply breaking the laws of the land?
In this context, it's neither. It's just screwing all the legitimate academic users on the campus network who have to pay for a fatter pipe because of all the recreational downloads.
How lazy can you get? Living on campus with thousands of other students and tens or hundreds of thousands of their compact discs. Just borrow discs from your neighbours and rip them. You're still "protesting", but you're not sucking up bandwidth that everybody else has to pay for.
But can they opt out of purchasing access altogether? No... they are a captive audience. They must accept the rules in order to be successful at that or any other college.
Eh? Obviously this depends the particular university and program, but it is almost always possible to complete a degree without owning a personal computer at all. I know several individuals who have survived doing so. It is possible to use the on-campus computing facilities to do research and complete assignments. I wrote my entire senior thesis using the school's computer labs, because I couldn't be bothered to repair my own computer.
Even if you own a computer, you don't have to connect it to the University's network. For many years, computers were largely standalone devices. People used floppy disks to move data back and forth.
If you don't like the university's policies on internet usage, then move off-campus--just as you would if you didn't like their policies on noise, visitors, or alcohol. If you want internet access on your own terms (but can't stand the thought of moving off campus) get dialup.
Universities have an obligation to provide access to academic tools--journals, email, course-related web research--before they support bandwidth-sucking filesharing protocols. If they have observed that this non-academic usage is using an inordinate share of resources, then why is it unreasonable for them to clamp down?
I remember those heady days in the 1998 when Napster first appeared on the scene. The campus pipe wasn't saturated only between about three and nine in the morning, and a big chunk of that usage was Napster. In the evenings, it was quite literally impossible to do anything work-related on the residence networks. In such a situation, a university has to enforce its acceptable use policy, or else its network becomes utterly useless.
- Optical ballots are easy to accidentally mismark - much worse than "butterfly ballots".
- There's no assistance to check for accidental invalid voting choices (i.e. voting for four in a "vote for three" election).
- There's no assistance for the sensory (or literacy) handicapped. (As another poster already pointed out.)
Actually, all of these problems can be solved quite readily. In a recent municipal election in Oakville, Canada, I understand that they used optical card readers. Next to each candidate's name was an arrow, with a break in its shaft. To vote for a candidate, one filled in the gap. I don't see the accidental mismarking being a problem here, unless someone does something incredibly stupid with the ballot layout (see Florida). As long as there is a single column on each ballot, there shouldn't be mismarking issues.
When you returned your ballot, it was inserted into the machine and read immediately. (There was a sleeve or some other mechanism to prevent the election workers from seeing the ballot markings.) The elector was immediately informed if the ballot had been completed correctly; if there were problems, he or she could try again (the original ballot would be marked as spoiled.)
For the visually impaired, a template marked in Braille can be placed over the ballot, with openings where they can mark their votes. I don't know if this was provided in the Oakville election, however I do know that this is done for Canadian federal elections. It's certainly not difficult to implement.
These ballots are also, obviously, very readily hand-counted. In any close race, I would expect the machine count to be checked by hand counts.
Opera has already implemented this functionality in its newer versions. There's now a Fast Forward button on the toolbar. It's pretty good at figuring out what the next page should be. In Slashdot's site, it pulls up the comments for the next story; on Google it returns the next page of results. I don't know anything about the algorithm behind it, however.
In Opera, going back and forth is a simple right-click and drag left or right, to go backwards and forwards in history respectively. MUCH nicer than constantly having to move mouse up the the back button, click. Move mouse down to comment link, click. Move mouse up to the back button, click.
Heck, it gets better than that, in Opera.
Right-click and hold then left-click. Instant back. Left-click, hold, and right-click. Forward. No dragging required; it's even faster than the gesture.
I love the gestures for minimize, close, and open link in new window--incredibly handy when combined with tabbed browsing. For anyone interested in a complete list of Opera gestures, look under Help...Contents...Mouse.
>> If Canada had been at fault, would you be so quick to ask the Toronto mayor to apologize?
Why yes I would. And, I'm fairly sure that he would have offered (hey, we're Canadians after all...) q:]
I doubt it--the mayor of Toronto at the time was that idiot Mel Lastman. (I live in Toronto.) He's the same guy who embarrassed the city during the SARS crisis by not knowing who the World Health Organization was.
There was some speculation by members of the federal government that a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania my have been involved; those remarks were later withdrawn.
I think that the layoff rate is going to accelerate again. The fact that the dot-com boom produced hundreds of thousands of 19 year old CIOs means that there are that many people-- young, hungry, flexible-- who are willing to work much cheaper, and perhaps smarter, than old fogeys like me and maybe you. But hey, I'm sure the Bush administration will fix everything...
This won't cause a net loss of jobs. It just means that the 'old fogeys' will be displaced by young hungry workers. Companies replacing their calcified workforce with staff having fresh experience, up to date education, and motivation. Yep, something's broken there...
Good for you for getting into biotech, though. There are indeed a lot of jobs there.
A vaccine by its very nature is a pathogen modified to restrict replication,
Usually, but not always, true.
Vaccines can be made using killed viruses, or weakened variants of viruses. Those vaccines are what you describe.
Vaccines may also contain only components of a virus, rather than actual pathogens. Exposure to samples of the protein coat of a virus, for instance, can be used to stimulated antibody production. In this trial, apparently a sample of the viral DNA is being used.
Finally, vaccines may use unmodified, full-strength related viruses that confer immunity to a family of diseases. Vaccinia (cowpox) is used in this way; it confers resistance to a number of poxviruses including smallpox.
There may be additional vaccine modalities which have slipped my mind...
Otherwise are they planning to infect the volunteers with Ebola... and don't expect anything to go wrong?
No. From the linked NIH page seeking volunteers:
In the new trial, volunteers will receive three injections over two months and will be followed for one year. Volunteers will not be exposed to Ebola virus.
Presumably, this test is somewhat akin to a Phase 1 clinical trial--the researchers want to know if there are any adverse responses to the vaccine itself, and perhaps get some idea about an appropriate dose. Blood from the volunteers will (I'm certain) be tested for antibodies to Ebola.
I would guess based either on the distance it travels and/or the momentum of it's decay particles.
Assuming the longest possible billionth of a trillionth of a second (1E-21 seconds), and assuming that the particle was travelling at the speed of light (3E8 meters per second), the particle would travel about 3E-13 metres, or 300 femtometres, before decaying. Hydrogen atoms are about three hundred times larger. Even if its relativistic speed extends its apparent lifetime quite significantly, it's still going to decay before it reaches any sort of detector.
Particle physicists have had to look at decay products (their masses, charges, and momenta) to identify new species for quite a while now. It's quite an art to predict what the decay products are of a new particle. It's also a probability game to look at decay products and demonstrate that they are the likely result of your particle of interest. Since you're not directly observing your new particle, you have to be able to demonstrate the likelihood that its putative decay products aren't just due to coincidence.
I've heard modern accelerator physics described as the Swiss Watch method.
To find out how a Swiss watch works:
Take two watches.
Accelerate them to (nearly) the speed of light.
Bang them together.
Try to figure out where each piece came from by watching where it landed.
Except a particle physics watch is slightly more difficult, because the watch contains gears that disappear in millionth of a millionth of a milllionth of a second, and springs that are a millionth of a millionth of an inch in size.
Nope. The energy needed to smack a rock out of its orbit and toss it back this way is very small. The hardest part is getting off this rock in the first place.
It's also pretty damn hard to catch it once it gets here. We're in the bottom of an inconveniently deep gravity well, remember?
Slashdot Mirror
Since the most recent surveys of Mount Everest place its altitude at 29,035 feet (8850 metres), the Nepalese have applied for an exemption from this policy for Sherpas working commercially below 30,000 feet.
Negotiations are ongoing. There is no word yet on the legal status of climbers who become inadvertantly airborne while still above the 20,000 foot mark.
The big problem isn't the total voltage. It's the electric field--potential change (voltage) per unit distance. As the transistors in a circuit shrink, the field across them goes up. Electrons get pulled across--the system is 'leaky'. This problem imposes a minimum limit on the size of each transistor, and also increases the current draw of the chip.
Heck, this is a problem elsewhere on the die, too. (Electrons always go where you don't want them.) Forget the switches--you get into trouble with a low breakdown voltage between little tiny wires on the chip. Let's say that it takes 20000 volts (generous estimate) to break down a millimetre of insulation. If there are traces on a chip one micron apart, that's a breakdown voltage of ~20 volts. If traces are 20 nanometres apart (0.02 micron), it only takes 0.4 volts to short the chip.
High g forces will kill a bacterium. One technique sometimes used in biology labs to extract the content of cells is centrifugation--fifteen thousand gees for a handful of minutes will crush most cells and let you get at the goodness inside.
This technique is not recommended for killing bacteria inside a living person, however. Pulping patients is a practice generally frowned upon by the medical profession.
The few gees that a healthy person could withstand on a continuous basis aren't enough for a bacterium to even notice.
You mean to say, "...are the two most-cited books supporting the theory that firearms decrease crime", do you not?
Surely you don't intend to suggest that there are no detailed, well-reasoned books and papers to support the contrary hypothesis...?
I'm pretty sure that it was the intent of the author of Crazy Ideas to indicate that there is much ballyhooed research on both sides of the issue, and that the thinking and methods on both sides is often rather sloppy. (John Lott, I note, is not above such concerns.)
That's not a bug; it's a feature.
A drug with narrower effects permits a physician to more precisely tailor the treatment. Being able to treat chronic pain without suffering a corresponding loss in the ability to think clearly is a tremendously useful thing.
The psychological effects of terminal illness are probably not best handled with opiates anyway. Counselling and antidepressant medication would seem to be indicated--not doping patients into a blissful stupor.
Don't you already get a monthly bill from your ISP, and from your phone company? Couldn't such a tax be administered through either of those utilities?
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but fees on VoIP don't necessarily have to result in one more bill in your mailbox, or an additional transaction for the consumer.
But...why would a school need to run new software? I am a graduate student, I work in a major research institute as part of a large teaching hospital--and a four year old machine mostly meets my needs. (I'm running into a few sluggishness issues with some intensive image processing that I've started to do.)
My home machine was five years old this summer, and I only upgraded because I wanted to be able to play Warcraft III. Office 97 is still just fine for me, and it got me through my entire undergrad degree. Besides Office, I need to be able to run Acrobat Reader and a web browser--I use Opera because it's snappy even on older computers, and I like the tabbed browsing and gestures.
Sure, a high school might want to have a few bleeding edge machines handy for students who want to do video editing projects and other processor-intensive tasks, but public schools don't really need a short upgrade cycle for anything else.
I'm appalled that students were actually stealing components from your computers--perhaps it would be best to keep them in computer labs (with a cluster in the library, too) where there is some supervision? Note that another benefit of a longer upgrade cycle is that the components become much less tempting to those with sticky fingers...
By that reasoning, war could just as easily be averted by killing the parent poster. Interesting.
As an actual smart person said: Except for ending slavery, communism, facism and nazism, war has never solved anything.
Tragically, there isn't another smart person around to explain the concept of rhetoric. It is unfortunately true that war is sometimes made necessary. The actions by Axis powers in World War II the parent cites certainly fit the bill--a war of aggression and conquest.
Israel and Palestine are a very complicated situation--I think that you will find those who thirst for war on both sides. You will also find people who hunger for peace.
Iraq is interesting. There is no evidence that Iraq planned a terrorist attack (past or future) on the United States. There is still no indication that they possessed weapons of mass destruction. The United States invaded in overwhelming force, and is now fighting to install a new government. Their government was objectionable in the extreme--corrupt, violent, and cruel--but this hasn't prompted a U.S. invasion anywhere else. (East Timor? Afganistan before September 11?)
Regarding slavery--perhaps it took war to end the abhorrent practice in the United States. Many other countries managed to legislated it out of existence without violent upheaval. Canada comes to mind, it being one of the destinations to which American slaves used to escape.
Communism wasn't brought to an end through warfare. (Unless, perhaps, one chooses to consider the crippling economic effects of funding a Cold War.)
War is an tool though which policy, economic, and social chage may be implemented. It is, however, a tragically blunt instrument. To assume that it is the only tool in the box--the only way to solve conflicts of ideology--is both absurd and acutely dangerous.
Northern Ireland has not yet dissolved in civil war, though disagreement still exists--as do individuals prepared to kill, prepared for war. Should the powers-that-be give up and invade the country? Impose British rule and an Anglican theocracy because it seems the fastest and most permanent solution?
Maybe IBM could lend him one of their lawyers.
Heck, there are probably a number of lawyers who would take the case pro bono just for the publicity. You can't get a much more sympathetic plaintiff.
He also needn't file a multimillion dollar suit. He could choose to ask for one dollar, plus costs, and an injunction against further libellous statements. He doesn't look greedy, and SCO still faces a court declaration that their remarks are defamatory.
Still, it would probably end up soaking up a good bit of his time, and he has better things to do...
The largest constructs used in genetic engineering are usually no more than a few megabases in length; large bits of DNA tend to be rather awkward to manipulate. At, say, two thousand bases (each one of A, C, G, or T) per page, one megabase spans five hundred pages.
I suppose if one were to try to patent the genome of an entire organism, including all of the noncoding DNA, you might have a case for such a monstrous application document--the human genome would take up about 1.5 million pages. However, entire organism patents are still relatively rare, and few actually include the complete genome in the patent. (The patented Harvard mouse, for instance, only has one altered gene that predisposes it to cancer.)
Over a hundred thousand pages smacks of an attempt to hide something--security through obscurity, if you will.
On the other hand, I suspect that there might just be a bit of journalistic license at work here. The hundred sixty thousand pages is probably just someone saying that 2 kB of data are equivalent to one page. Someone probably included a CD-ROM with some images with their application. (I do time-lapse microscopy in a research setting, and I can very easily generate hundreds of megabytes of data in a day.)
Let's say I develop a special fluorescent protein that does something useful. If I submit a patent that includes a page of claims, a page of calculations, twenty pages of protein sequence, and fifty 1 MB micrographs demonstrating that my protein behaves per my statement of claim, is that really the equivalent of a twenty-five thousand (and twenty-two) page submission?
Sometimes the customer is obnoxious and abusive, with a holier-than-thou I'm-always-right attitude, laced with a heavy dose of threats and profanity.
Sometimes it's okay to give up on the sociopaths. There are some customers that you just don't need. Quite frankly, they cost more than they're worth.
I am by no means suggesting that there aren't some examples of truly appalling technical support out there, nor do I mean to suggest that the vast majority of callers aren't polite. However, whenever I see the adage "the customer is always right" I have to say...it just ain't so.
In this context, it's neither. It's just screwing all the legitimate academic users on the campus network who have to pay for a fatter pipe because of all the recreational downloads.
How lazy can you get? Living on campus with thousands of other students and tens or hundreds of thousands of their compact discs. Just borrow discs from your neighbours and rip them. You're still "protesting", but you're not sucking up bandwidth that everybody else has to pay for.
Eh? Obviously this depends the particular university and program, but it is almost always possible to complete a degree without owning a personal computer at all. I know several individuals who have survived doing so. It is possible to use the on-campus computing facilities to do research and complete assignments. I wrote my entire senior thesis using the school's computer labs, because I couldn't be bothered to repair my own computer.
Even if you own a computer, you don't have to connect it to the University's network. For many years, computers were largely standalone devices. People used floppy disks to move data back and forth.
If you don't like the university's policies on internet usage, then move off-campus--just as you would if you didn't like their policies on noise, visitors, or alcohol. If you want internet access on your own terms (but can't stand the thought of moving off campus) get dialup.
Universities have an obligation to provide access to academic tools--journals, email, course-related web research--before they support bandwidth-sucking filesharing protocols. If they have observed that this non-academic usage is using an inordinate share of resources, then why is it unreasonable for them to clamp down?
I remember those heady days in the 1998 when Napster first appeared on the scene. The campus pipe wasn't saturated only between about three and nine in the morning, and a big chunk of that usage was Napster. In the evenings, it was quite literally impossible to do anything work-related on the residence networks. In such a situation, a university has to enforce its acceptable use policy, or else its network becomes utterly useless.
- There's no assistance to check for accidental invalid voting choices (i.e. voting for four in a "vote for three" election).
- There's no assistance for the sensory (or literacy) handicapped. (As another poster already pointed out.)
Actually, all of these problems can be solved quite readily. In a recent municipal election in Oakville, Canada, I understand that they used optical card readers. Next to each candidate's name was an arrow, with a break in its shaft. To vote for a candidate, one filled in the gap. I don't see the accidental mismarking being a problem here, unless someone does something incredibly stupid with the ballot layout (see Florida). As long as there is a single column on each ballot, there shouldn't be mismarking issues.
When you returned your ballot, it was inserted into the machine and read immediately. (There was a sleeve or some other mechanism to prevent the election workers from seeing the ballot markings.) The elector was immediately informed if the ballot had been completed correctly; if there were problems, he or she could try again (the original ballot would be marked as spoiled.)
For the visually impaired, a template marked in Braille can be placed over the ballot, with openings where they can mark their votes. I don't know if this was provided in the Oakville election, however I do know that this is done for Canadian federal elections. It's certainly not difficult to implement.
These ballots are also, obviously, very readily hand-counted. In any close race, I would expect the machine count to be checked by hand counts.
Some municipalities in Canada do, at least. I understand that there was also limited testing of electronic systems in provincial elections in Canada.
National elections still use the ultimate in open-source accountability--paper ballots, on which you mark an X.
Opera has already implemented this functionality in its newer versions. There's now a Fast Forward button on the toolbar. It's pretty good at figuring out what the next page should be. In Slashdot's site, it pulls up the comments for the next story; on Google it returns the next page of results. I don't know anything about the algorithm behind it, however.
Heck, it gets better than that, in Opera.
Right-click and hold then left-click. Instant back. Left-click, hold, and right-click. Forward. No dragging required; it's even faster than the gesture.
I love the gestures for minimize, close, and open link in new window--incredibly handy when combined with tabbed browsing. For anyone interested in a complete list of Opera gestures, look under Help...Contents...Mouse.
Why yes I would. And, I'm fairly sure that he would have offered (hey, we're Canadians after all...) q:]
I doubt it--the mayor of Toronto at the time was that idiot Mel Lastman. (I live in Toronto.) He's the same guy who embarrassed the city during the SARS crisis by not knowing who the World Health Organization was.
There was some speculation by members of the federal government that a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania my have been involved; those remarks were later withdrawn.
This won't cause a net loss of jobs. It just means that the 'old fogeys' will be displaced by young hungry workers. Companies replacing their calcified workforce with staff having fresh experience, up to date education, and motivation. Yep, something's broken there...
Good for you for getting into biotech, though. There are indeed a lot of jobs there.
Usually, but not always, true.
Vaccines can be made using killed viruses, or weakened variants of viruses. Those vaccines are what you describe.
Vaccines may also contain only components of a virus, rather than actual pathogens. Exposure to samples of the protein coat of a virus, for instance, can be used to stimulated antibody production. In this trial, apparently a sample of the viral DNA is being used.
Finally, vaccines may use unmodified, full-strength related viruses that confer immunity to a family of diseases. Vaccinia (cowpox) is used in this way; it confers resistance to a number of poxviruses including smallpox.
There may be additional vaccine modalities which have slipped my mind...
No. From the linked NIH page seeking volunteers:
Presumably, this test is somewhat akin to a Phase 1 clinical trial--the researchers want to know if there are any adverse responses to the vaccine itself, and perhaps get some idea about an appropriate dose. Blood from the volunteers will (I'm certain) be tested for antibodies to Ebola.Assuming the longest possible billionth of a trillionth of a second (1E-21 seconds), and assuming that the particle was travelling at the speed of light (3E8 meters per second), the particle would travel about 3E-13 metres, or 300 femtometres, before decaying. Hydrogen atoms are about three hundred times larger. Even if its relativistic speed extends its apparent lifetime quite significantly, it's still going to decay before it reaches any sort of detector.
Particle physicists have had to look at decay products (their masses, charges, and momenta) to identify new species for quite a while now. It's quite an art to predict what the decay products are of a new particle. It's also a probability game to look at decay products and demonstrate that they are the likely result of your particle of interest. Since you're not directly observing your new particle, you have to be able to demonstrate the likelihood that its putative decay products aren't just due to coincidence.
To find out how a Swiss watch works:
Take two watches.
Accelerate them to (nearly) the speed of light.
Bang them together.
Try to figure out where each piece came from by watching where it landed.
Except a particle physics watch is slightly more difficult, because the watch contains gears that disappear in millionth of a millionth of a milllionth of a second, and springs that are a millionth of a millionth of an inch in size.
It's also pretty damn hard to catch it once it gets here. We're in the bottom of an inconveniently deep gravity well, remember?
Look, if you're going to flame someone for his or her ignorance, it looks better if you spell ignoramus correctly.