Afaik, even considerably larger miniature heat engines have significant problems, which are only recently being solved, but most of the existing research is on things more in the millimeter to centimeter range. I suppose micrometer engines might face different problems entirely, but quite impressive.
For example, a discussion of difficulties in building a miniaturized combustion-based heat engine:
The problem being faced by micro-miniature heat engines is that, as the size is reduced, the surface-area-to-volume ratio of the combustor begins to dominate the combustion process. Both the chemical reactivity of the wall and the heat transfer to the wall affect the radical recombination and generation rates of the reactants. If important radicals such as hydroxyl or methyl are destroyed at or near the wall too quickly, the combustion process can be quenched. The thermal and chemical quenching pathways are strongly coupled, so that very small changes in temperature or chemical activity of the wall can lead to significant changes in radical concentration near the wall, making gas phase combustion using air as the oxidant difficult to sustain below a critical length scale (i.e. quenching distance) of a few millimeters (Kuo, 1986).
While the North's reaction sounds predictably paranoid, the article seems to hint that some sort of propaganda is the purpose of the tree, as evidenced by whether it's lit or not being correlated with thawing versus tension of relations. I'm not sure how effective it'd be at spreading a Christian message specifically, but maybe it's intended to spread a sort of generic, "look how awesome it is just across the border" message?
I'd put my cynical money on them finding some way to reform the patent system that only really benefits large companies while still screwing over individuals, small businesses, and free software developers, but I do hope you're right.
How many people here remember when one of the founders of Slashdot was asking on here what to do with his money when VA Linux, the parent of Slashdot, went public in 1999?
Hah, I remember that, but it was Eric Raymond, not a Slashdot founder: "Surprised by Wealth"
Typically employees can't sell their shares until at least six months post-IPO. Which, yes, can put you in a very bad position if you start spending "your" money right after the IPO in anticipation of the future wealth, and then the stock tanks and you're now in debt.
I don't see why we can't pay jurors some modest amount, though. Surely it's in all our interests to keep a justice system functioning. Occasionally, trials take a long time, so a jury may be sequestered for weeks. Why should the cost be borne entirely by the people who, by random chance, end up on the jury for such trials, especially since they're already sacrificing in other ways (e.g. not seeing their families or attending to other business for weeks)? The financial burden, at least, seems like it could be generally shared by taxpayers, at least to the level of reimbursing them at minimum wage.
That's true, and a good instinct to have, but I apply it less in this case than usual, because the study appears to actually include substantial technical detail, and Accuvant is a well-respected security firm. At the very least it looks like a more serious commissioned study than the stuff you get from the usual "independent" shill consultants that write most commissioned tech whitepapers.
I like fun cities with random winding roads, but I agree, not for driving. If you're going to go for something other than the modernist gridded-boulevards model, might as well go all the way to the winding medieval alleyways model of central europe.
Must be an election year coming up, because a bunch of Congressmen are introducing bills that would do shit about stuff we've been complaining about for the past several years. But, these bills will never make it out of committee or be passed.
There've been some milder studies vaguely like that in monkeys. In one such study, a monkey is given a cord that, if pulled, gives it some food. In the control group, that's all; in the experimental group, pulling the cord also shocks another monkey. They are much less willing to pull the "also shocks someone else" cord. That can be interpreted as a form of empathetic altruism, foregoing a reward to avoid harming someone else. A counter-argument is that it's not altruism so much as monkeys finding expressions of distress unpleasant, meaning they avoid pulling a cord that results in unpleasant sounds: a selfish behavior, because the real goal is to avoid hearing sounds they don't like. On the third hand, that counter-argument is hard to actually separate from "real" empathy, because one potential mechanism for (some kinds of) empathy is that we find it unpleasant to hear expressions of distress from others who are similar enough to us.
This study adds useful new information, but it's not the first finding of animals exhibiting what's sometimes called "directed altruism", helping another animal in response to what appears to be communication of emotional state. Even Darwin remarked that "many animals certainly sympathize with each other’s distress or danger", though of course his evidence for that claim wasn't up to modern standards.
Not to tell y'all how to run your campaigns, but as a humble suggestion, wouldn't it increase your legitimacy if you paid some nice money to someone with a low UID, say 3 digits or less, to help out?
You're right, it looks like I'm misremembering from a while ago, and they made it permanent. Googling around, it looks like, back when they first introduced the free inbound transfer in 2009, it was billed as a promotion good through June 2010, but then they just kept it.
Transfer in is currently free as a promotion, but yeah transfer out is pricey. Just storing the data is also fairly pricey compared to low-end shared-hosting options. For example, you could throw up that 500 gigs on a $9/mo Dreamhost account, but it'd cost you $50/mo of S3 storage space even under the reduced-reliability storage option (or $70/mo under the regular one). S3 has much better performance, but it doesn't sound like that's a major consideration here.
In the latter case, I think sometimes this is actually for the best. Even though it results in redundant coding, that's one form of replication. If everyone reused the same code written by one grad student long ago and never rewrote it (and the grad student's first program, no less!), there would be a lot of reliance that that program does what it says it does, and does it correctly in all cases. Sure, you could run test cases, read through the code carefully, even try to formally verify it, but in my experience nobody does any of that: if another lab sends you a hairy pile of Fortran or Perl scripts or whatever, the common case is that you try to figure it out only to the extent of figuring out how to run it.
In this case it really is the safest solution, though. Companies don't want to know that someone has violated their precious document security policies, and would be much happier overpaying to have the data recreated than finding out that someone had a private copy. This guy giving engineers copies of the documents is probably the nice thing to do, but it's a risk that the incentives don't favor. Either he's naive, or knows the engineers he's dealing with well enough to trust that nothing will happen.
It depends on the exact way it's done, but there are ways of doing that sort of "we really believe X" that end up coming off as more pro-science than others, sometimes almost just paying lip service to the religious view. A lot of late-middle-ages European scientific books would do things like that, starting off with some blather about how everything is really caused by God of course, with some quotes from the Bible, and then moving on to more or less: "but that said, let me describe for you an experiment I did and a mathematical model that seems to capture it..."
If that article's accurate, they actually had a policy against anyone except married heterosexual couples sharing a room with only a double bed. I wonder whether they also (in practice) excluded unwed opposite-sex couples who wished to share a room, and if so, whether that's permitted in the UK (can you distinguish between married and unmarried couples so long as you treat same- and opposite-sex alike? I have no idea).
It's not really that they don't have a drug, as that the gap between a given current bacterium, an a super-bacterium version of it that can live in alcohol-rich environments, is large enough that it's basically a completely different organism, so less likely to appear via the usual evolutionary processes. If you had a species of bacteria that was just on the edge of being able to live in high-alcohol environments, somewhat but not highly tolerant of alcohol, it's plausible that they would actually evolve greater tolerance/resistance for alcohol.
Really anything can be a source of evolutionary pressure; given the right circumstances, organisms can even evolve resistance to physical mechanisms, like the "armor plating" that some animal species have evolved to resist physical attacks.
I'm still on quite a few. For whatever reason, most of the "serious" discussion groups I'm in (working groups, academic discussions, etc.) don't seem to have moved from listservs to webforums, whereas most of the "hobby" groups I'm in (music fan listservs, etc.) have long since abandoned mailing lists.
To be more specific, some of those other people died as a result of the unnecessary chemo/radiation; they didn't just experience some mild worry.
There's no clear "better safe than sorry" decision here, because you can die with either choice. The goal is to collect enough data so that we can recommend screening policies that result in the statistically best outcomes.
Slashdot Mirror
Afaik, even considerably larger miniature heat engines have significant problems, which are only recently being solved, but most of the existing research is on things more in the millimeter to centimeter range. I suppose micrometer engines might face different problems entirely, but quite impressive.
For example, a discussion of difficulties in building a miniaturized combustion-based heat engine:
Source: This paper (PDF, 2005)
And a working-in-simulation model of a 65 x 22 cm Stirling engine: from a 2008 paper
While the North's reaction sounds predictably paranoid, the article seems to hint that some sort of propaganda is the purpose of the tree, as evidenced by whether it's lit or not being correlated with thawing versus tension of relations. I'm not sure how effective it'd be at spreading a Christian message specifically, but maybe it's intended to spread a sort of generic, "look how awesome it is just across the border" message?
I'd put my cynical money on them finding some way to reform the patent system that only really benefits large companies while still screwing over individuals, small businesses, and free software developers, but I do hope you're right.
Hah, I remember that, but it was Eric Raymond, not a Slashdot founder: "Surprised by Wealth"
There's apparently an organization in Colorado that's gotten permits to perform open-air cremations on a funeral pyre.
Typically employees can't sell their shares until at least six months post-IPO. Which, yes, can put you in a very bad position if you start spending "your" money right after the IPO in anticipation of the future wealth, and then the stock tanks and you're now in debt.
I don't see why we can't pay jurors some modest amount, though. Surely it's in all our interests to keep a justice system functioning. Occasionally, trials take a long time, so a jury may be sequestered for weeks. Why should the cost be borne entirely by the people who, by random chance, end up on the jury for such trials, especially since they're already sacrificing in other ways (e.g. not seeing their families or attending to other business for weeks)? The financial burden, at least, seems like it could be generally shared by taxpayers, at least to the level of reimbursing them at minimum wage.
That's true, and a good instinct to have, but I apply it less in this case than usual, because the study appears to actually include substantial technical detail, and Accuvant is a well-respected security firm. At the very least it looks like a more serious commissioned study than the stuff you get from the usual "independent" shill consultants that write most commissioned tech whitepapers.
He's saying that the attempt to define a royalty-free "baseline" subset of h.264 was unsuccessful, not that h.264 itself failed.
I like fun cities with random winding roads, but I agree, not for driving. If you're going to go for something other than the modernist gridded-boulevards model, might as well go all the way to the winding medieval alleyways model of central europe.
More accurately:
Must be an election year coming up, because a bunch of Congressmen are introducing bills that would do shit about stuff we've been complaining about for the past several years. But, these bills will never make it out of committee or be passed.
Is the intent to support a whole desktop environment inside the browser?
There've been some milder studies vaguely like that in monkeys. In one such study, a monkey is given a cord that, if pulled, gives it some food. In the control group, that's all; in the experimental group, pulling the cord also shocks another monkey. They are much less willing to pull the "also shocks someone else" cord. That can be interpreted as a form of empathetic altruism, foregoing a reward to avoid harming someone else. A counter-argument is that it's not altruism so much as monkeys finding expressions of distress unpleasant, meaning they avoid pulling a cord that results in unpleasant sounds: a selfish behavior, because the real goal is to avoid hearing sounds they don't like. On the third hand, that counter-argument is hard to actually separate from "real" empathy, because one potential mechanism for (some kinds of) empathy is that we find it unpleasant to hear expressions of distress from others who are similar enough to us.
This study adds useful new information, but it's not the first finding of animals exhibiting what's sometimes called "directed altruism", helping another animal in response to what appears to be communication of emotional state. Even Darwin remarked that "many animals certainly sympathize with each other’s distress or
danger", though of course his evidence for that claim wasn't up to modern standards.
Here's an interesting review from 2008.
Not to tell y'all how to run your campaigns, but as a humble suggestion, wouldn't it increase your legitimacy if you paid some nice money to someone with a low UID, say 3 digits or less, to help out?
You're right, it looks like I'm misremembering from a while ago, and they made it permanent. Googling around, it looks like, back when they first introduced the free inbound transfer in 2009, it was billed as a promotion good through June 2010, but then they just kept it.
Transfer in is currently free as a promotion, but yeah transfer out is pricey. Just storing the data is also fairly pricey compared to low-end shared-hosting options. For example, you could throw up that 500 gigs on a $9/mo Dreamhost account, but it'd cost you $50/mo of S3 storage space even under the reduced-reliability storage option (or $70/mo under the regular one). S3 has much better performance, but it doesn't sound like that's a major consideration here.
In the latter case, I think sometimes this is actually for the best. Even though it results in redundant coding, that's one form of replication. If everyone reused the same code written by one grad student long ago and never rewrote it (and the grad student's first program, no less!), there would be a lot of reliance that that program does what it says it does, and does it correctly in all cases. Sure, you could run test cases, read through the code carefully, even try to formally verify it, but in my experience nobody does any of that: if another lab sends you a hairy pile of Fortran or Perl scripts or whatever, the common case is that you try to figure it out only to the extent of figuring out how to run it.
A lot of these errors have been found in neuroscience journals, too, which fancies itself a harder science...
In this case it really is the safest solution, though. Companies don't want to know that someone has violated their precious document security policies, and would be much happier overpaying to have the data recreated than finding out that someone had a private copy. This guy giving engineers copies of the documents is probably the nice thing to do, but it's a risk that the incentives don't favor. Either he's naive, or knows the engineers he's dealing with well enough to trust that nothing will happen.
It depends on the exact way it's done, but there are ways of doing that sort of "we really believe X" that end up coming off as more pro-science than others, sometimes almost just paying lip service to the religious view. A lot of late-middle-ages European scientific books would do things like that, starting off with some blather about how everything is really caused by God of course, with some quotes from the Bible, and then moving on to more or less: "but that said, let me describe for you an experiment I did and a mathematical model that seems to capture it..."
Appears to have been in Cornwall.
If that article's accurate, they actually had a policy against anyone except married heterosexual couples sharing a room with only a double bed. I wonder whether they also (in practice) excluded unwed opposite-sex couples who wished to share a room, and if so, whether that's permitted in the UK (can you distinguish between married and unmarried couples so long as you treat same- and opposite-sex alike? I have no idea).
It's not really that they don't have a drug, as that the gap between a given current bacterium, an a super-bacterium version of it that can live in alcohol-rich environments, is large enough that it's basically a completely different organism, so less likely to appear via the usual evolutionary processes. If you had a species of bacteria that was just on the edge of being able to live in high-alcohol environments, somewhat but not highly tolerant of alcohol, it's plausible that they would actually evolve greater tolerance/resistance for alcohol.
Really anything can be a source of evolutionary pressure; given the right circumstances, organisms can even evolve resistance to physical mechanisms, like the "armor plating" that some animal species have evolved to resist physical attacks.
I'm still on quite a few. For whatever reason, most of the "serious" discussion groups I'm in (working groups, academic discussions, etc.) don't seem to have moved from listservs to webforums, whereas most of the "hobby" groups I'm in (music fan listservs, etc.) have long since abandoned mailing lists.
To be more specific, some of those other people died as a result of the unnecessary chemo/radiation; they didn't just experience some mild worry.
There's no clear "better safe than sorry" decision here, because you can die with either choice. The goal is to collect enough data so that we can recommend screening policies that result in the statistically best outcomes.