Gasoline hasn't gone up at all per year over the price of gasoline. Because energy is so basic to our economies, by comparing the price of gasoline (or worse, oil) to inflation, you're almost comparing it to itself. It doesn't mean anything.
Gasoline prices ARE probably controlled a bit at the moment because there's still lots of conventional, easy to get oil flowing out of the middle east. But we've used more than half of that, and we're on track to use the rest pretty quick. All the other sources are more expensive to get. We will be switching to other sources of energy soon. How soon, and how expensive everything gets in the meantime, depends on how quickly we develop the technology.
Maybe, but he's also an admitted drug smuggler, drug abuser, jokes about having sex with a compound full of children and people who associate with him seem to go crazy, self destruct and/or try to kill him.
Maybe he's innocent of the murder accusations. He's still more of a sociopathic clown than a hero.
There are steganographic algorithms that are highly resistant to encoding and rencoding. They're mostly of interest for secretly watermarking photos and video. The movie studios probably use such an algorithm for watermarking preview discs now so they can trace leaks.
Steganography on YouTube would be moderately interesting - it's low efficiency but hidden. QR code videos are just stupid. They're very low efficiency and right out in the open. And if the goal is just to steal space from Google, there are better ways to do it.
He could have put a $600 cell phone in the box. But instead he used a $20 breadboard setup he made. This is Slashdot. We used to admire that sort of thing around here.
People who do real work use a "fully functional PC".
There are a variety of "real work" jobs where a tablet can be very useful either alone or in combination with a "fully functional PC." Examples are included in my previous post. "Content creation" does not equal real work. Lots of people don't "create content" when they're doing real work, and those jobs are often ones that are most valued by society: pilot, physician, some kinds of lawyer.
There are actually quite a few studies looking at various aspects of religion (and other pseudoscientific beliefs). For example, I have several studies that show praying (to whomever) has no effect on the recovery of sick people, unless the sick person knows they are being prayed for. In that case, the sick person is likely to experience a poorer recovery. The hypothesis advanced by the researchers was that knowing you're being prayed for is likely to cause more stress than it alleviates - you feel like you're failing, or you've done something wrong, if you don't get better quickly - and that stress causes a small but measurable change in outcomes. On the other hand, lots of studies show that prayer is beneficial for the person doing the praying, if that person believes.
Meditation does relieve stress and is beneficial both mentally and physically (a friend of mine sent me a paper showing that meditators experience changes in gene expression versus non-meditators), but IIRC people have looked at whether the things you think about while meditating make a difference, and they don't, unless of course you believe those those things are essential to the process.
Our minds are extremely powerful. There's a lot of scientific study of the placebo effect. Belief, even unconscious belief, can affect our actions, our health, our measurable responses to objective tests, blood chemistry, you name it. That's why it's extremely important to do blinded, controlled studies, whenever possible, where nobody who can bias the outcome knows which group is which.
In a broader sense though, the important thing about the scientific method is that it requires testing and verification. Philosophers come up with ideas that seem to make sense, but they generally don't rigorously test those ideas to make sure. The scientific method adds that step. Aristotle said, sensibly, that force was necessary to keep objects in motion, lighter objects always fall more slowly than heavier ones, and everything is composed of mixtures of four elements. Others, much later, decided to test those ideas skeptically and found out, in many cases using equipment that was available to Aristotle, that those descriptions of the world are really not true.
Much of pseudoscientific belief, not just religion but things like herbal remedies, astrology and vaccine fears, result from someone telling a good story that seems to make sense and might appeal to our prejudices. But it never gets tested. I have a friend who was studying Reiki. She insisted that Reiki masters could bend beams of light with their minds. That would be very interesting if true! Oh, but they can't bend visible light, only UV. Okay, well, we can test that! Oh, but they can't do it if someone who doesn't believe is observing.
The scientific method is really the only method we've ever discovered to produce reliable knowledge.
I didn't say it was. I said I doubt there are many amateurs who go to the trouble of finding a student, and the expense of paying $499 for CS just to not pirate it. I do know some professionals (i.e. they use CS as part of their business) who have used that trick though.
Tablets have lots of uses in "real work." I use mine to read, annotate and display scientific papers. When I write a paper I use a desktop or notebook, referring to the background research on the tablet. Pilots are apparently finding them very useful for reading manuals.
Any kind of non-trivial "real work" is normally going to involve using information and may or may not involve producing it (pilots don't produce information, they fly planes). Tablets are good at much of that using information side. They're not so good at the producing side, but can be handy that way in a pinch.
The scientific definition of real is "works consistently." "Consistently" includes specifying all the factors that must be kept the same, and omitting all the ones that don't matter. "Necessary and sufficient" if you prefer. That is, the scientific definition of real agrees pretty closely with our common sense definition. What's different is the method of testing whether something is real or not. If you're superstitious you make up stories about things that seem real. If you're scientific you first test whether something actually is real or not, then test the stories to see whether they're real or not.
Yes, the placebo effect is very real, and is quite useful. Even supposing that mediation worked only if you think about chakra's, the chakra's aren't making the mediation work, thinking about them is.
It's quite logical to discount the previous, unscientific, improperly tested work done by humanity. Billions have been spent testing herbal and other alternative remedies. The result is that the vast majority that weren't investigated scientifically a long time ago are placebos. A notable exception is ginger, which really does help nausea.
Yes, it's worth running some studies on stuff like that to see if there's anything real there. That gets done ALL the time. But for the end user, if it hasn't been shown to be efficacious scientifically, it's probably a placebo.
As far as mechanistic explanations go, which is what we're really talking about here with the yoga stuff, it's virtually guaranteed to be plain fiction. Nice stories. Does meditation help relieve stress? Absolutely. It's been well studied. Does it do so by aligning your chakras, opening your third eye and encouraging proper energy flow? Absolutely not.
I doubt there are very many amateurs who go out find themselves a student to buy it so they can have the pleasure of paying $499.
Most of the people who buy CS are the ones who use it to make money and so have more to lose and are more likely to get busted for piracy. They are, by definition, professional users. The amateurs don't make money using CS, aren't likely to get caught pirating it, and most of them don't want to pay $499 for it.
Most graphic designers are poor coders. So they'd like to pay someone to do the coding for them. Which they do. They've been paying Adobe. Perhaps with Adobe getting even more restrictive they'll pay someone else.
You've pointed out one of the problems with open source though. There are some fantastic open source projects for stuff that people who know how to code want to do. But not so much for stuff people who don't know how to code want to do.
Because amateurs don't buy CS. Amateurs don't drop the thousands of dollars that Adobe charges for CS on a photo editor. They use Elements, an alternative, or pirate it.
I think Adobe is shooting themselves in the foot with this one. The professionals will keep using CS and the amateurs will use old versions until they stop working and then switch to something else. The something else will get better (there are already a LOT better alternatives than they were a few years ago). Eventually Adobe will have some real competition for the pro market too.
Virtually all modern drugs were tested for efficacy in mice before being tested in humans. There are lots of things that look promising in mice that don't work in humans, but pretty much everything that works in humans worked in mice first.
I doubt it would realistically have much effect. Assuming you have to start treatment before you get old, by the time this kicked in properly the world would probably be in the decreasing population mode that's expected in the future anyway. It might slow down that slide a bit. Also, the people who have the best health care also tend to be the ones whose population is already falling.
Hey, even with repair you're doomed sometime in the few trillion years from the heat death of the universe so that's not a long term solution either. Wait, your "long term" isn't measured in quadrillions of years?
It's too bad you had to take a reasonably informative post and ruin it with some silly arbitrary limits. No, fiddling with your hypothalamus isn't going to make you live forever. Nobody claimed any such thing, least of all the summary or article. An extra fifty healthy years would be pretty awesome. An extra ten would be great too. A drug that slows or stops dementia would also be fantastic.
The summary doesn't say anything like "aging is caused by the brain." But I suppose actual reading comprehension gets in the way of being a smartass AC on Slashdot.
Sure. There are lots of good examples of that. There are also good examples of people making up stories to explain things and, later on, specific details in specific stories happening to coincide with a bit of truth, by coincidence.
There are a LOT of pseudoscientific traditions that all make a lot of (usually very fuzzy) claims. Every once in a while one of them (in this case yoga, or a specific sub-tradition of yoga, more likely) managed to agree (in a very fuzzy way) with the general location and possible function of something noted in a Nature paper, then proceeded to get everything else wrong.
Fending for your life is an excellent cure for existential angst. Even pretending works. I get cranky and depressed in a couple of days if I don't get enough exercise. I realise that most of the people around me consider that state normal.
So what? If you're creative enough tracing back pretty much anybody you might well end up at tyrannical royalty. I'm descended from a bastard son of Czar Nicolas II, who was abandoned on the steps of a monastery.
Elizabeth doesn't rule the UK. The UK is ruled by an elected parliamentary government that happens to have a figurehead monarch as titular head of state. The only difference between the UK and US in terms of rule is that the UK peacefully evolved a democratic system while the US established it by armed rebellion. Yes, I agree with you, that colours US politics to this day. I think I disagree with you that it's a good thing.
To this day the average American seems to have a weird adversarial view of his government. That in itself might even be okay, except that it seems to allow people to conveniently abrogate their democratic responsibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Gasoline hasn't gone up at all per year over the price of gasoline. Because energy is so basic to our economies, by comparing the price of gasoline (or worse, oil) to inflation, you're almost comparing it to itself. It doesn't mean anything.
Gasoline prices ARE probably controlled a bit at the moment because there's still lots of conventional, easy to get oil flowing out of the middle east. But we've used more than half of that, and we're on track to use the rest pretty quick. All the other sources are more expensive to get. We will be switching to other sources of energy soon. How soon, and how expensive everything gets in the meantime, depends on how quickly we develop the technology.
When you make a ton of money smuggling drugs you can do things like "happen into the AV business."
Maybe, but he's also an admitted drug smuggler, drug abuser, jokes about having sex with a compound full of children and people who associate with him seem to go crazy, self destruct and/or try to kill him.
Maybe he's innocent of the murder accusations. He's still more of a sociopathic clown than a hero.
There are steganographic algorithms that are highly resistant to encoding and rencoding. They're mostly of interest for secretly watermarking photos and video. The movie studios probably use such an algorithm for watermarking preview discs now so they can trace leaks.
Steganography on YouTube would be moderately interesting - it's low efficiency but hidden. QR code videos are just stupid. They're very low efficiency and right out in the open. And if the goal is just to steal space from Google, there are better ways to do it.
He could have put a $600 cell phone in the box. But instead he used a $20 breadboard setup he made. This is Slashdot. We used to admire that sort of thing around here.
Yes. The GP also said:
There are a variety of "real work" jobs where a tablet can be very useful either alone or in combination with a "fully functional PC." Examples are included in my previous post. "Content creation" does not equal real work. Lots of people don't "create content" when they're doing real work, and those jobs are often ones that are most valued by society: pilot, physician, some kinds of lawyer.
There are actually quite a few studies looking at various aspects of religion (and other pseudoscientific beliefs). For example, I have several studies that show praying (to whomever) has no effect on the recovery of sick people, unless the sick person knows they are being prayed for. In that case, the sick person is likely to experience a poorer recovery. The hypothesis advanced by the researchers was that knowing you're being prayed for is likely to cause more stress than it alleviates - you feel like you're failing, or you've done something wrong, if you don't get better quickly - and that stress causes a small but measurable change in outcomes. On the other hand, lots of studies show that prayer is beneficial for the person doing the praying, if that person believes.
Meditation does relieve stress and is beneficial both mentally and physically (a friend of mine sent me a paper showing that meditators experience changes in gene expression versus non-meditators), but IIRC people have looked at whether the things you think about while meditating make a difference, and they don't, unless of course you believe those those things are essential to the process.
Our minds are extremely powerful. There's a lot of scientific study of the placebo effect. Belief, even unconscious belief, can affect our actions, our health, our measurable responses to objective tests, blood chemistry, you name it. That's why it's extremely important to do blinded, controlled studies, whenever possible, where nobody who can bias the outcome knows which group is which.
In a broader sense though, the important thing about the scientific method is that it requires testing and verification. Philosophers come up with ideas that seem to make sense, but they generally don't rigorously test those ideas to make sure. The scientific method adds that step. Aristotle said, sensibly, that force was necessary to keep objects in motion, lighter objects always fall more slowly than heavier ones, and everything is composed of mixtures of four elements. Others, much later, decided to test those ideas skeptically and found out, in many cases using equipment that was available to Aristotle, that those descriptions of the world are really not true.
Much of pseudoscientific belief, not just religion but things like herbal remedies, astrology and vaccine fears, result from someone telling a good story that seems to make sense and might appeal to our prejudices. But it never gets tested. I have a friend who was studying Reiki. She insisted that Reiki masters could bend beams of light with their minds. That would be very interesting if true! Oh, but they can't bend visible light, only UV. Okay, well, we can test that! Oh, but they can't do it if someone who doesn't believe is observing.
The scientific method is really the only method we've ever discovered to produce reliable knowledge.
I didn't say it was. I said I doubt there are many amateurs who go to the trouble of finding a student, and the expense of paying $499 for CS just to not pirate it. I do know some professionals (i.e. they use CS as part of their business) who have used that trick though.
Pages on the iPad manages to make figures stay where you want them, something Word has never managed.
If only it had change tracking.
Clearly nobody in business ever needs to use reference materials.
No, wait, that's pretty much what everyone in a business does. It's more or less ALL management uses technology for!
Tablets have lots of uses in "real work." I use mine to read, annotate and display scientific papers. When I write a paper I use a desktop or notebook, referring to the background research on the tablet. Pilots are apparently finding them very useful for reading manuals.
Any kind of non-trivial "real work" is normally going to involve using information and may or may not involve producing it (pilots don't produce information, they fly planes). Tablets are good at much of that using information side. They're not so good at the producing side, but can be handy that way in a pinch.
The scientific definition of real is "works consistently." "Consistently" includes specifying all the factors that must be kept the same, and omitting all the ones that don't matter. "Necessary and sufficient" if you prefer. That is, the scientific definition of real agrees pretty closely with our common sense definition. What's different is the method of testing whether something is real or not. If you're superstitious you make up stories about things that seem real. If you're scientific you first test whether something actually is real or not, then test the stories to see whether they're real or not.
Yes, the placebo effect is very real, and is quite useful. Even supposing that mediation worked only if you think about chakra's, the chakra's aren't making the mediation work, thinking about them is.
Redhat and Canonical are software companies. They're chock full of people who clearly fit into the "people who know how to code" camp.
It's quite logical to discount the previous, unscientific, improperly tested work done by humanity. Billions have been spent testing herbal and other alternative remedies. The result is that the vast majority that weren't investigated scientifically a long time ago are placebos. A notable exception is ginger, which really does help nausea.
Yes, it's worth running some studies on stuff like that to see if there's anything real there. That gets done ALL the time. But for the end user, if it hasn't been shown to be efficacious scientifically, it's probably a placebo.
As far as mechanistic explanations go, which is what we're really talking about here with the yoga stuff, it's virtually guaranteed to be plain fiction. Nice stories. Does meditation help relieve stress? Absolutely. It's been well studied. Does it do so by aligning your chakras, opening your third eye and encouraging proper energy flow? Absolutely not.
I doubt there are very many amateurs who go out find themselves a student to buy it so they can have the pleasure of paying $499.
Most of the people who buy CS are the ones who use it to make money and so have more to lose and are more likely to get busted for piracy. They are, by definition, professional users. The amateurs don't make money using CS, aren't likely to get caught pirating it, and most of them don't want to pay $499 for it.
Most graphic designers are poor coders. So they'd like to pay someone to do the coding for them. Which they do. They've been paying Adobe. Perhaps with Adobe getting even more restrictive they'll pay someone else.
You've pointed out one of the problems with open source though. There are some fantastic open source projects for stuff that people who know how to code want to do. But not so much for stuff people who don't know how to code want to do.
Because amateurs don't buy CS. Amateurs don't drop the thousands of dollars that Adobe charges for CS on a photo editor. They use Elements, an alternative, or pirate it.
I think Adobe is shooting themselves in the foot with this one. The professionals will keep using CS and the amateurs will use old versions until they stop working and then switch to something else. The something else will get better (there are already a LOT better alternatives than they were a few years ago). Eventually Adobe will have some real competition for the pro market too.
Virtually all modern drugs were tested for efficacy in mice before being tested in humans. There are lots of things that look promising in mice that don't work in humans, but pretty much everything that works in humans worked in mice first.
I doubt it would realistically have much effect. Assuming you have to start treatment before you get old, by the time this kicked in properly the world would probably be in the decreasing population mode that's expected in the future anyway. It might slow down that slide a bit. Also, the people who have the best health care also tend to be the ones whose population is already falling.
Hey, even with repair you're doomed sometime in the few trillion years from the heat death of the universe so that's not a long term solution either. Wait, your "long term" isn't measured in quadrillions of years?
It's too bad you had to take a reasonably informative post and ruin it with some silly arbitrary limits. No, fiddling with your hypothalamus isn't going to make you live forever. Nobody claimed any such thing, least of all the summary or article. An extra fifty healthy years would be pretty awesome. An extra ten would be great too. A drug that slows or stops dementia would also be fantastic.
The summary doesn't say anything like "aging is caused by the brain." But I suppose actual reading comprehension gets in the way of being a smartass AC on Slashdot.
Sure. There are lots of good examples of that. There are also good examples of people making up stories to explain things and, later on, specific details in specific stories happening to coincide with a bit of truth, by coincidence.
There are a LOT of pseudoscientific traditions that all make a lot of (usually very fuzzy) claims. Every once in a while one of them (in this case yoga, or a specific sub-tradition of yoga, more likely) managed to agree (in a very fuzzy way) with the general location and possible function of something noted in a Nature paper, then proceeded to get everything else wrong.
Fending for your life is an excellent cure for existential angst. Even pretending works. I get cranky and depressed in a couple of days if I don't get enough exercise. I realise that most of the people around me consider that state normal.
So what? If you're creative enough tracing back pretty much anybody you might well end up at tyrannical royalty. I'm descended from a bastard son of Czar Nicolas II, who was abandoned on the steps of a monastery.
Elizabeth doesn't rule the UK. The UK is ruled by an elected parliamentary government that happens to have a figurehead monarch as titular head of state. The only difference between the UK and US in terms of rule is that the UK peacefully evolved a democratic system while the US established it by armed rebellion. Yes, I agree with you, that colours US politics to this day. I think I disagree with you that it's a good thing.
To this day the average American seems to have a weird adversarial view of his government. That in itself might even be okay, except that it seems to allow people to conveniently abrogate their democratic responsibility.
Why's that? To satisfy Slashdot pedants who think they're mathematicians?