First, how did a person on a Segway out run the police?
There was an episode of Reno 911 where they went to arrest some old guy at his home. They didn't think he was much of a threat.
The guy asked if he could change clothes before they carted him off to jail. He went to another room while the cops admired his house.
A few seconds later, the old man drives right out his front door on a segway... and just keeps going down the street. The cops tried to chase him down on foot, but he was long gone.
It was a pretty funny scene, especially cause the guy was wearing nothing but his briefs (or something like that).
If the ten-passenger van breaks down, there are ten 'seats' out of commission until it gets fixed. The capacity of your business goes down by ten people.
If one of the segways breaks down, the other nine still work. Thus, you're only missing, and chances are you'll have a few spares around anyway. Your capacity only goes down by one.
Quite a few... Some interesting examples can be found among the various motherboard chipsets. Let's say that a manufacturer makes 2 identical chips, except one supports firewire and one doesn't. They sell the firewire-enabled chip for, say, $5 more than the non-firewire version.
Usually, the two chips are identical, or are at least created that way (Created two separate dies would cost a ton of money, and wouldn't be worth it for such a small change). Most companies will destroy a critical component on the chip after it's been made to disable Firewire on the cheaper chip, but some go the ultra-cheap route and sell the same chip at both price points. Basically, the firewire support in the firewire chip is an 'undocumented feature'.
The firewire example was something I completely made up, but 'disabling' the more expensive features isn't that uncommon. I read about this in this article (the relevant info is just after the Moore's Law sidebar and gives another example).
The only thing that comes to mind is that the RIAA must be offering the files for download.
Wouldn't that also mean that they (RIAA) were actively offering these files for free download, and thus freely giving up their rights to the file/song (assuming you actually download it from them and not someone else)? It's one thing if you download it from a third party, it's another if the copyright holder is offering it for download (whether or not you know it's them)
"Yet again, lawyers will dictate the course of technology - the fear of a lawsuit jacks up insurance rates, which makes research and development excessively costly."
But if lawsuits do happen, and the insurance companies don't charge the nanotech firms enough to , then the costs will get passed on to the consumer through higher insurance rates for everything else. In the end, it really doesn't matter... consumers will get screwed either way.
At least by raising rates, the insurance companies are encouraging more research into potenial health hazards of nanotech. Failing to research these hazards would be extremely unethical, and would be bad from a business sense (if there are problems once nanotech is widespread, a lot more R&D money will have been wasted than if they found it early on and could either abandon the research or find ways to make it safe). Once it can be shown that nanotech isn't going to be cause lung problems, etc., then rates will drop back down. This encourages nanotech companies to to conduct the research now (to get their rates down), rather than wait until we're hit by a wave of mesothelioma.
I can't believe I'm actually defending insurance companies:-/
If these are end-of-high school exams, no wonder the Indians are taking all of the technical jobs!
I checked out the sample exams (math and science) and they basically look like hybrids of the SAT/ACT and Advanced Placement tests.
You can't really compare them to state tests. State tests are written with a much lower standard in mind, because the purpose of state tests is to measure whether students are learning the basic parts of the state cirriculum. Most students (should?) score very high on these exams, assuming that they are written well. (This usually fails in practice, but that's a whole nother story...)
SAT/ACT and AP tests are specifically geared to rank the abilities/knowledge/whatever of students, and are designed to seperate them into more bins (usually with the largest distribution near the middle - think bell curve. The scores are generally adjusted to make sure the results fit this distribution).
State tests usually just seperate students into two bins, passing and failing, because that's really the only purpose. If you have too many failing students, then the school loses money because there MUST be something wrong with the schools/teachers/district. At least that's the theory behind the Leave Every Child Behind act.
The amount of math and science knowledge they're expected to have is amazing compared to what it is here.
Keep in mind they aren't expected to know everything on those exams... again, this plays into the different goals of state exams vs. college exams. If state tests were SATs, every student is, in theory, supposed to get a 1600. The test is written so that there isn't anything hard.
AP/SAT/ACT are usually written so that 1/3 of the questions are pretty easy, 1/3 are normal, and 1/3 are hard. They don't expect many people to get a 1600, because if they did, the test wouldn't tell colleges anything. They need to differentate between students.
State exams are (mostly) important on a collective level, and usually it's the lower part of the distribution that matters. The exams are written to reflect this.
If you can invest in a new laptop, I'd recommend the NEC Daylite - it allows you to turn the LCD backlight completely off. This makes viewing the screen in bright light MUCH easier (it's virtually impossible with most laptops I've used).
They're also very small and lightweight, and have excellent battery life. (Well, at least the older Transmeta CPU models had excellent battery life - don't know about the newer P-III models.) I'm pretty sure NEC has discontinued the line, but you can probably still find them on eBay. (I've heard a few e-tailers still carry them too, but you might have to dig to find them)
There were some really good stories on Google News a few months ago, but I haven't been able to dig them up again since GNews only keeps stories around for 30 days.
I managed to find a few links that talk about buildings that use/will use solar-powered AC, but they skim over the background: Duke | Some House
Here are are a couple of commerical solar-powered AC units: Coolmax | Solacool
Maybe they're being assholes because they think freenet might land them another "patriot" act violation? Don't see how it would, but the whole 'anonymous' thing might be catching their eye...
Whatever they are thinking, I'm probably going to be closing my PP account out soon...
A lot of schools used to offer as a electives in high school, but thanks to constant budget cuts, the "leave every child behind" act, etc, many have had to drop these classes. Pretty sad.
while people will really like these if they do only the 'safety' tasks (illuminated, warnings for fog, standing water,...), there's no way they wouldn't be vandalized instantly if they were used for speed limit enforcement.
On the regular roads maybe, but I can't see anybody crazy/stupid enough to walk out onto the expressway, kneel down to pry a few of these things off, then make it back without getting hit... even at night.
Actually it probably won't treat AIDS very well... once a patient has progressed to AIDS, their immune system is usually unsalvageable, even if they are able to get the virus under control - from there it's just a waiting game until an opportunistic infection comes along and deals the final blow. This treatement would probably do the same thing that current drugs do, which is prevent the patient from progressing to AIDS. It would still be a great accomplishment, because it could be cheaper and easier to use than drug cocktails, and because it would provide another weapon for those that have become resistant to the drugs that are out there.
And while you will still have HIV, it would reduce the amount of it in the blood stream (current drugs can get it down below 40 copies/mL blood, while untreated there can be millions of copies in a mL of blood), which reduces the risk of transmission, sexual or otherwise. You still wouldn't want to go around having unprotected sex, but it would help prevent transmission through accidental blood contact (not uncommon for those in medical professions).
Re:I won't admonish you for not reading the articl
on
Anti-HIV Virus Developed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think the point you are trying to make is that while this engineered virus may inhibit the effects of HIV, it does not destroy the HIV virus. People may become even more complacent about sex than they are now.
There are really two avenues of research: one to cure HIV, and one to supress it from turning into AIDS. They both have great upsides - curing HIV would be great for obvious reasons (but we haven't been able to do it yet). Supressing HIV reduces the amount of virus in the body - this helps to prevent the onset of AIDS, but it also greatly reduces the risk of transmission of the virus. On successful drug therapy, the number of copies in the bloodstream is very low (under 40 copies/mL blood by today's standards), while untreated it can be in the millions of copies per mL blood. If there isn't as much virus in the blood, the probablity of infection through all avenues (sexually and otherwise) is greatly reduced. Not enough that you'd want to take your chances, but enough to possibly have an impact on the spread of the disease.
Moreover, what happens if either of the viruses mutate? You could potentially lose the protective effects of the engineered virus and find yourself infected with a new strain of HIV.
HIV already constantly mutates - if it didn't, nobody would be dying from AIDS. There are all sorts of permutations of the virus out there - that is the one of the biggest challenges for HIV drugs, and the reason for the cocktail (rather than one drug at a time). HIV is pretty good at becoming resistant to drugs - even if a patient took a drug at precisely the right times all of the time, eventually the virus becomes resistant. Once a mutated copy of the virus is in the blood stream, the drug quickly loses it's effect.
The drug cocktail (usually three drugs) helps to prevent this - if a copy of the virus does manage to mutate around one drug, there are two other ones in the blood to destroy it. As long as the patient is complient with treatment (takes all of the drugs and doesn't miss doses), this line of treatment could theoretically last for years, especially with the number of new drugs in the pipeline. Still, triple-drug therapy isn't perfect, and overtime it seems that resistance will still develop (although it takes much longer than single-drug therapy).
Even if the virus were to mutate, it would do so under the same conditions as the anti-virus... drugs can't mutate, but the anti-virus could, and it could conceivably undergo the same permutations as the real virus - in effect, it could respond to these changes in the virus, which is where drugs will always fall short.
Another point is that it is relatively easy to get the genotype/phenotype of HIV in the blood stream, which allows doctors to determine the best drugs to treat the virus. If they are able to make this anti-virus work, it wouldn't be very difficult to simply create several different 'versions' of the anti-virus that could overcome the various common permutations of the virus.
It's also worth pointing out that while there are a lot of drugs that can treat the virus in the blood stream, not all of them can treat it in other areas (such as the lymph nodes or brain stem). If this anti-virus worked in the same way as HIV does, then it would be able to hit the virus everywhere it reproduces, even the hard-to-reach spots like the lymph nodes.
As for 'it will make people more complacent about sex', well, we'll just have to deal with that one. The same could be said for anti-retroviral drugs. It's not right to abandon this or any avenue of treatment because it may make some people less responsible about their sexual habits, especially with something as devistating as HIV/AIDS.
Of course, it's impossible to have any idea what would actually happen over a long period of time... I'm not a doctor, but even doctors find it difficult to estimate how well and for how long treatments will work - so far, most of what we know is through trial and error.
From SCO.com: Q. How many people does The SCO Group employ?
A. As of April 30, 2003, 339 employees.
From the article: Stowell said the cuts totaled less than 10 percent of the company's total worldwide work force of 275. There were cuts, however, earlier in the quarter as well. In March the company reported 305 employees, including 73 in Santa Cruz.
339 - 275 = 64 positions gone from April 2003 to May 2004, not including these layoffs. Jeez.
I think it's to avoid running a lottery, which is subject to additional rules and/or licenses. If you have to buy something to enter, an arguement could be made that it's like buying a lottery ticket. Gambling tends to be highly regulated in most areas. If they treat it as a 'contest' with no purchase necessary, then the rules are much looser.
Of course, they don't have to make it easy to do - for example, in the iTunes giveaway, you had to send in a SASE for a 1 in 3 chance to win a song... that's (37 cents x 2 envelopes) + the cost of two envelopes (one to mail, and one to mail it in), for a 33% chance of winning. Figure you actually win once for every three entries, it costs you $2.22 plus the cost of six envelopes for each song you win. You're probably better off just buying the song.
How will the "no purchase necessary" part of this promo work? I can't see them mailing out cans to people who send in a postcard... or are companies not required to do "no purchase necessary" anymore?
What's the story with C++ only being the test language for one year?
I thought this was wrong too - I remember seeing the AP course description for AP CS in 2001 (2000-01 school year), and I'm positive the language was C++. I highly doubt they switched back to Pascal... I think the summary is just way off.
Graduated in 2001 - used graph paper for geometry, or at least had a piece of xeroxed graph paper that we'd put under our loose-leaf so that we didn't have to buy special paper. It's the reality of non-existant school budgets these days.
Non-geometry graphing has been replaced by graphing calculators (TI-83 is very common). Graphing is still taught though; we spent the first few weeks of pre-calc learning the graphs of various important functions (e^x, 1/x, trig and inverse trig functions, etc) and being tested on being able to graph them and the various shifted/stretched permutations of them (without a calculator).
Are you sure he just didn't know it by the name "graph paper"? I can't imagine that you could make it through high school without at least seeing it a few times.
This study is important because it once your immune system has been compromised, you pretty much have to do everything you can to avoid bacteria like this. Exactly how to do that has been a sort of mystery, because it's very difficult to figure out where these infections actually take place. This study might show that hospitals and homes that house high-OI risk people need to clean their shower curtains more than they normally would (perhaps daily instead of once a week), or that extra ventilation/filtering needs to be added to eliminate the airborne bacteria.
To the average person, it probably doesn't mean much - our immune systems are generally strong enough to fight off the majority of bacteria we're exposed to. To an immunocompromised person, it could quite literally save their life.
If it weren't for the somewhat mysterious nature of OIs, I'd agree with you - but anything that might help to pinpoint specific sources of OIs can save a lot of lives.
0. OS updates 1. Putty 2. Firefox & extensions 3. Thunderbird 4. gVim (The 'edit with vim' that gets attached to context menus for all file types is one of my favorite tools) 5. RealVNC 6. Acroread/Flash/Java/etc. 7. Trillian 8. Norton Corporate Edition 9. SpyBot 10. Cygwin
Why is amazon trying to sell a 30-pack of AAA batteries as an accessory on the product page? According to the specs, it only needs the lithium batteries...
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First, how did a person on a Segway out run the police?
There was an episode of Reno 911 where they went to arrest some old guy at his home. They didn't think he was much of a threat.
The guy asked if he could change clothes before they carted him off to jail. He went to another room while the cops admired his house.
A few seconds later, the old man drives right out his front door on a segway... and just keeps going down the street. The cops tried to chase him down on foot, but he was long gone.
It was a pretty funny scene, especially cause the guy was wearing nothing but his briefs (or something like that).
Then again, maybe you had to be there.
Another plus:
If the ten-passenger van breaks down, there are ten 'seats' out of commission until it gets fixed. The capacity of your business goes down by ten people.
If one of the segways breaks down, the other nine still work. Thus, you're only missing, and chances are you'll have a few spares around anyway. Your capacity only goes down by one.
Quite a few... Some interesting examples can be found among the various motherboard chipsets. Let's say that a manufacturer makes 2 identical chips, except one supports firewire and one doesn't. They sell the firewire-enabled chip for, say, $5 more than the non-firewire version.
Usually, the two chips are identical, or are at least created that way (Created two separate dies would cost a ton of money, and wouldn't be worth it for such a small change). Most companies will destroy a critical component on the chip after it's been made to disable Firewire on the cheaper chip, but some go the ultra-cheap route and sell the same chip at both price points. Basically, the firewire support in the firewire chip is an 'undocumented feature'.
The firewire example was something I completely made up, but 'disabling' the more expensive features isn't that uncommon. I read about this in this article (the relevant info is just after the Moore's Law sidebar and gives another example).
Wouldn't that also mean that they (RIAA) were actively offering these files for free download, and thus freely giving up their rights to the file/song (assuming you actually download it from them and not someone else)? It's one thing if you download it from a third party, it's another if the copyright holder is offering it for download (whether or not you know it's them)
But if lawsuits do happen, and the insurance companies don't charge the nanotech firms enough to , then the costs will get passed on to the consumer through higher insurance rates for everything else. In the end, it really doesn't matter... consumers will get screwed either way.
At least by raising rates, the insurance companies are encouraging more research into potenial health hazards of nanotech. Failing to research these hazards would be extremely unethical, and would be bad from a business sense (if there are problems once nanotech is widespread, a lot more R&D money will have been wasted than if they found it early on and could either abandon the research or find ways to make it safe). Once it can be shown that nanotech isn't going to be cause lung problems, etc., then rates will drop back down. This encourages nanotech companies to to conduct the research now (to get their rates down), rather than wait until we're hit by a wave of mesothelioma.
I can't believe I'm actually defending insurance companies :-/
Cool, but that keyboard looks like it'd mutilate your wrists...
I checked out the sample exams (math and science) and they basically look like hybrids of the SAT/ACT and Advanced Placement tests.
You can't really compare them to state tests. State tests are written with a much lower standard in mind, because the purpose of state tests is to measure whether students are learning the basic parts of the state cirriculum. Most students (should?) score very high on these exams, assuming that they are written well. (This usually fails in practice, but that's a whole nother story...)
SAT/ACT and AP tests are specifically geared to rank the abilities/knowledge/whatever of students, and are designed to seperate them into more bins (usually with the largest distribution near the middle - think bell curve. The scores are generally adjusted to make sure the results fit this distribution).
State tests usually just seperate students into two bins, passing and failing, because that's really the only purpose. If you have too many failing students, then the school loses money because there MUST be something wrong with the schools/teachers/district. At least that's the theory behind the Leave Every Child Behind act.
The amount of math and science knowledge they're expected to have is amazing compared to what it is here.
Keep in mind they aren't expected to know everything on those exams... again, this plays into the different goals of state exams vs. college exams. If state tests were SATs, every student is, in theory, supposed to get a 1600. The test is written so that there isn't anything hard.
AP/SAT/ACT are usually written so that 1/3 of the questions are pretty easy, 1/3 are normal, and 1/3 are hard. They don't expect many people to get a 1600, because if they did, the test wouldn't tell colleges anything. They need to differentate between students.
State exams are (mostly) important on a collective level, and usually it's the lower part of the distribution that matters. The exams are written to reflect this.
If you can invest in a new laptop, I'd recommend the NEC Daylite - it allows you to turn the LCD backlight completely off. This makes viewing the screen in bright light MUCH easier (it's virtually impossible with most laptops I've used).
They're also very small and lightweight, and have excellent battery life. (Well, at least the older Transmeta CPU models had excellent battery life - don't know about the newer P-III models.) I'm pretty sure NEC has discontinued the line, but you can probably still find them on eBay. (I've heard a few e-tailers still carry them too, but you might have to dig to find them)
Well, he needs the work since he was fired from Priceline.com.
The fact that he's found new work so quickly is a sure sign that the economy really is on the rebound...
I managed to find a few links that talk about buildings that use/will use solar-powered AC, but they skim over the background: Duke | Some House
Here are are a couple of commerical solar-powered AC units: Coolmax | Solacool
You can find some more links if you google solar-powered air conditioning.
don't forget air conditioning... solar cells are perfect for powering air conditioners because they're generally used the most in sunny weather...
Maybe they're being assholes because they think freenet might land them another "patriot" act violation? Don't see how it would, but the whole 'anonymous' thing might be catching their eye...
Whatever they are thinking, I'm probably going to be closing my PP account out soon...
He must have died while carving it.
A lot of schools used to offer as a electives in high school, but thanks to constant budget cuts, the "leave every child behind" act, etc, many have had to drop these classes. Pretty sad.
On the regular roads maybe, but I can't see anybody crazy/stupid enough to walk out onto the expressway, kneel down to pry a few of these things off, then make it back without getting hit... even at night.
And while you will still have HIV, it would reduce the amount of it in the blood stream (current drugs can get it down below 40 copies/mL blood, while untreated there can be millions of copies in a mL of blood), which reduces the risk of transmission, sexual or otherwise. You still wouldn't want to go around having unprotected sex, but it would help prevent transmission through accidental blood contact (not uncommon for those in medical professions).
There are really two avenues of research: one to cure HIV, and one to supress it from turning into AIDS. They both have great upsides - curing HIV would be great for obvious reasons (but we haven't been able to do it yet). Supressing HIV reduces the amount of virus in the body - this helps to prevent the onset of AIDS, but it also greatly reduces the risk of transmission of the virus. On successful drug therapy, the number of copies in the bloodstream is very low (under 40 copies/mL blood by today's standards), while untreated it can be in the millions of copies per mL blood. If there isn't as much virus in the blood, the probablity of infection through all avenues (sexually and otherwise) is greatly reduced. Not enough that you'd want to take your chances, but enough to possibly have an impact on the spread of the disease.
Moreover, what happens if either of the viruses mutate? You could potentially lose the protective effects of the engineered virus and find yourself infected with a new strain of HIV.
HIV already constantly mutates - if it didn't, nobody would be dying from AIDS. There are all sorts of permutations of the virus out there - that is the one of the biggest challenges for HIV drugs, and the reason for the cocktail (rather than one drug at a time). HIV is pretty good at becoming resistant to drugs - even if a patient took a drug at precisely the right times all of the time, eventually the virus becomes resistant. Once a mutated copy of the virus is in the blood stream, the drug quickly loses it's effect.
The drug cocktail (usually three drugs) helps to prevent this - if a copy of the virus does manage to mutate around one drug, there are two other ones in the blood to destroy it. As long as the patient is complient with treatment (takes all of the drugs and doesn't miss doses), this line of treatment could theoretically last for years, especially with the number of new drugs in the pipeline. Still, triple-drug therapy isn't perfect, and overtime it seems that resistance will still develop (although it takes much longer than single-drug therapy).
Even if the virus were to mutate, it would do so under the same conditions as the anti-virus... drugs can't mutate, but the anti-virus could, and it could conceivably undergo the same permutations as the real virus - in effect, it could respond to these changes in the virus, which is where drugs will always fall short.
Another point is that it is relatively easy to get the genotype/phenotype of HIV in the blood stream, which allows doctors to determine the best drugs to treat the virus. If they are able to make this anti-virus work, it wouldn't be very difficult to simply create several different 'versions' of the anti-virus that could overcome the various common permutations of the virus.
It's also worth pointing out that while there are a lot of drugs that can treat the virus in the blood stream, not all of them can treat it in other areas (such as the lymph nodes or brain stem). If this anti-virus worked in the same way as HIV does, then it would be able to hit the virus everywhere it reproduces, even the hard-to-reach spots like the lymph nodes.
As for 'it will make people more complacent about sex', well, we'll just have to deal with that one. The same could be said for anti-retroviral drugs. It's not right to abandon this or any avenue of treatment because it may make some people less responsible about their sexual habits, especially with something as devistating as HIV/AIDS.
Of course, it's impossible to have any idea what would actually happen over a long period of time... I'm not a doctor, but even doctors find it difficult to estimate how well and for how long treatments will work - so far, most of what we know is through trial and error.
From SCO.com:
Q. How many people does The SCO Group employ? A. As of April 30, 2003, 339 employees.
From the article:
Stowell said the cuts totaled less than 10 percent of the company's total worldwide work force of 275. There were cuts, however, earlier in the quarter as well. In March the company reported 305 employees, including 73 in Santa Cruz.
339 - 275 = 64 positions gone from April 2003 to May 2004, not including these layoffs. Jeez.
Of course, they don't have to make it easy to do - for example, in the iTunes giveaway, you had to send in a SASE for a 1 in 3 chance to win a song... that's (37 cents x 2 envelopes) + the cost of two envelopes (one to mail, and one to mail it in), for a 33% chance of winning. Figure you actually win once for every three entries, it costs you $2.22 plus the cost of six envelopes for each song you win. You're probably better off just buying the song.
How will the "no purchase necessary" part of this promo work? I can't see them mailing out cans to people who send in a postcard... or are companies not required to do "no purchase necessary" anymore?
I thought this was wrong too - I remember seeing the AP course description for AP CS in 2001 (2000-01 school year), and I'm positive the language was C++. I highly doubt they switched back to Pascal... I think the summary is just way off.
Graduated in 2001 - used graph paper for geometry, or at least had a piece of xeroxed graph paper that we'd put under our loose-leaf so that we didn't have to buy special paper. It's the reality of non-existant school budgets these days.
Non-geometry graphing has been replaced by graphing calculators (TI-83 is very common). Graphing is still taught though; we spent the first few weeks of pre-calc learning the graphs of various important functions (e^x, 1/x, trig and inverse trig functions, etc) and being tested on being able to graph them and the various shifted/stretched permutations of them (without a calculator).
Are you sure he just didn't know it by the name "graph paper"? I can't imagine that you could make it through high school without at least seeing it a few times.
To the average person, it probably doesn't mean much - our immune systems are generally strong enough to fight off the majority of bacteria we're exposed to. To an immunocompromised person, it could quite literally save their life.
If it weren't for the somewhat mysterious nature of OIs, I'd agree with you - but anything that might help to pinpoint specific sources of OIs can save a lot of lives.
0. OS updates
1. Putty
2. Firefox & extensions
3. Thunderbird
4. gVim (The 'edit with vim' that gets attached to context menus for all file types is one of my favorite tools)
5. RealVNC
6. Acroread/Flash/Java/etc.
7. Trillian
8. Norton Corporate Edition
9. SpyBot
10. Cygwin
Why is amazon trying to sell a 30-pack of AAA batteries as an accessory on the product page? According to the specs, it only needs the lithium batteries...