So the newsies get to run a couple "WE'RE ALL GOING TO FRY" news stories a year.
A LOT more than two, actually. They can also run them when the temperature is a tie or near tie for the record. That happens a lot because the newscasts work on whole-number degrees, which is a very coarse measurement.
They have a LOT of measurement stations in any geographic area (typically at least one for each suburb in an urban zone), most of them with shorter histories and all of them with statistical noise on the measurements. So when the temperature is near the record a number of them will set new records.
"Breaking records" sounds horrible and scary but is utterly bogus.
We have, what, a couple hundred years of records? That means each day of the year has at most a couple hundred recorded samples. Less if the records are incomplete or earlier measurement methods were not accurate enough to qualify. Call it 180 to make the math easy.
Assume the climate is completely unchanging (rather than systematically drifting) and the measurements are randomly distributed (a multi-modal distribution around the various weather patterns typical for the date). Then this year's new sample is exactly as likely to be the new record (in a given direction) as any of the others. 1 in 181.
With 365 days in a year the expectation, with no climate change at all, is just over two "record high" days every year. Law of small numbers says some years have a bunch more than that and others less or none.
So the newsies get to run a couple "WE'RE ALL GOING TO FRY" news stories a year. Much more exciting filler than "I'ts unusually hot today" to get the viewers' adrenalin up to make the commercials more effective.
Ditto with record lows - which they can ignore (or treat properly as "it's unusually cold today") while the template is "global warming" rather than "next ice age".
If a suitcase nuke goes off in Washington, "Government continuity" at that high a level is about #273 on our priority list.
Also: If a suitcase nuke takes out enough of DC that the first nine guys in line are gone it will no doubt take hours to figure out for sure that the tenth guy is the highest-ranking one left, even if he's NOT knocked out on the side of the road.
There is reason to think it might work on AIDs since one man was cured when he received a bone marrow transplant from some one that has the natural immunity. The trick is producing enough of the right antibodies.
No, the trick is to have an immune system where the receptor that the HIV virus uses for its backdoor exploit is defective (in a way that doesn't just break the immune system.) Then the virus either can't propagate at all or propagates slowly enough that the immune system can get ahead of the virus and kill it off, rather than being killed off by the virus.
The normal immune system produces antibodies to HIV just fine. But HIV mutates VERY rapidly. (Like a couple changes EVERY GENERATION, due to a transcription enzyme that makes errors easily - and it uses a redundant chromosome system to survive this high error rate.) And it re-writes itself into the immune system cells' DNA, so an infected cell becomes a "sleeper agent", turning into an HIV factory when triggered to produce antibodies to the new variant it recognizes. So the virus sticks around until, eventually, enough of the immune system cells are booby-trapped that the response to the new HIV variants is to make more HIV rather than enough antibodies to kill it off.
If it weren't targeting the guts of the immune system, HIV would just be "another cold".
Interestingly, the thing that made the Black Plague so deadly, rather than "just another bacterial infection", is that it also attacked an immune system receptor, using it to hitch a ride to the sites (like lymph nodes and the spleen) where activated immune system cells go to reproduce into the clone armies that form the counter-attack. By infecting these sites early the bug retards the immune response to itself.
Those people with a particular "defect" to both copies of the receptor gene were immune to the plague. To them it was just a minor infection that was quickly beaten off. And with one normal and one "defective" gene they got very sick but tended to survive and recover.
And it happens that HIV and Plague both target the SAME RECEPTOR. And the SAME "DEFECT" to that receptor makes a person resistant or immune both to HIV and Plauge.
I also thought that the consensus was that bonobos were at least as closely related to humans as chimps are. Further, I had heard bonobos were thought to be substantially closer to humanity than chimps are. This news would be that gene sequencing shows bonobos are AS DISTANT from humans as chimps, not that they're AS CLOSE.
My copy of The Ancestors Tale is several years old, and it says chimps and bonobs are closer cousins to each other than either is to humans, which means they are equally distantly related to humans, genetically speaking.
Just because they're more closely related to each other than they are to us doesn't mean they're equally related to us. For insatnce, imagine the three in a line on a "genetic distance" map, with humans at one end of the line, one of (chimps, bonobos) at the other end, and the other nearly in the middle between us.
To the general public, the term âoehackerâ refers to a user who breaks into a computer system.
Best not to go to your boss asking to hire a "hacker." And I sure wouldn't use that term in writing.
How this misuse came to be was discussed at one instance of tan industry conference I attend. As near as anybody could figure out, it went like this:
In the early days of IT security issues, when the H word was still being used in the "exceptional programmer" sense and IT security was a shiny new subject, a self-appointed "computer security" expert gave a presentation at an upper-management conference. During this presentation he misused the term "Hacker" in the "computer cracker" sense (much to the confusion of the techies in the audience.)
Apparently this was the first time a lot of people at the COB, CEO, CFO, COO, VP level were exposed to the word. So they assumed the misuse was the proper definition and used it that way in their executive suites and at other conferences.
Of course once an idea gets set in the minds of the guys with the golden parachutes it can't be dislodged with dynamite. The rest of management, especially the IT head, had to use the term the way the Big Bosses did - or appear out-of-touch with their own specialty. Middle management followed like the lower-ranking pack members they are.
Then the business press picked it up from them, spread it to the rest of the press, and from there to the general public.
By the way: This is one of the things that's a problem with systems (like lisp and smalltalk) where the development environment is part of the program under development, rather than a separate toolset which treats the target code as pure data.
Modifying the environment itself can be a major hassle. And it breaks isolation when developing something intended to stand alone, dragging in a lot of unrelated code.
The publishers aren't the ones footing the bill for a major internet-connected business server operation...
But it does get cranked into the price. TANSTAAFL: The customer pays for it somehow.
Geez! Why did you wait UNTIL THE DAY?
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Good grief. Why did you wait UNTIL THE DAY they should be used to actually post about useful gadgets that require time to purchase, set up, and check out before use?
Now any of us who would have liked to obtain and use one of these gets to fret about how much BETTER the holiday could have been, rather than actually having the gadget operating and ENJOYING it.
TFA was updated two days ago so it obviously had been up for at least that long. A week or two lead would have been ideal.
This is right up there with not mentioning eclipses, meteor showers, and the like until the day of, or the day before, rather than at least a week back, so people who had forgotten about them have no time to arrange their schedules for a watch-it excursion. B-b
I'm pretty sure I can find something interesting to do with the extra years.:p
Ditto.
Even more so if, during the extra years, I am as healthy as I was at 20 (jogging as a normal gait) rather than at 65 (aching slightly all the time, pain in the morning, joints starting to fail,...)
Coming from a line of people that typically lives to see birthdays numbered in the low nineties, I can say that even if I DON'T get any extra years it would still be a fine bonus to live just the rest of the same number without the inflammation and the impairment of body functions and healing due to cell senescence.
Charging as much for an ebook as a physical book is completely off-base. You still have to make the money back on editors, artwork, advertisement, etc., but the physical print, transportation, and storage costs should cause those books to be discounted a good amount.
On the other hand, a hardcopy book is an asset on which the publishers and booksellers can be charged an inventory tax. Thus it is often to their financial advantage to actually destroy them rather than hold them in the hope of future sales. Holding them effectively becomes a liability rather than an asset (though the tax man doesn't see it that way). This is one reason it becomes hard to find many books after a year or so. It's also a reason for deep discounts on books to clear inventory.
(Interestingly: Science Fiction is an exception. It has a track record of slow long-term sales - for decades - that makes it advantageous to hang on to physical copies for future sales.)
Electronic books don't have this problem. The publisher has only one copy (plus backups) and creates additional copies for sale on-the-fly.
As it is, much of the time you can buy a print edition cheaper than an eBook version on new releases...
When the value of the hardcopy book has actually gone negative, selling it for any price above the transaction cost is better than pulping it. Meanwhile, operating a major Internet-connected business server operation is not cheap.
Eliminate the inventory taxes on books, bringing the cost of holding onto a book until it sells down near the cost of the storage space and environmental control, and you should see a drastic change in hardcopy book availability and pricing structure. (Assuming electronic books haven't substantially displaced hardcopy by then.)
If it's government funded, one billion means they are spending the entire lifetime disposable income (i.e. everything but basic food and housing) of three thousand people, just to set it up. What benefits can this research have that will pay off more than that?
Large queues are a problem, but they can be mitigated by adding more capacity (bandwidth). It doesn't matter how deep the queue can be if it's never used -- it doesn't matter how many packets can be queued if there's enough bandwidth to push every packet out as soon as it's put in the queue.
Unfortunately, TCP ramps up until there IS congestion. Raise the capacity of the congested link and it either becomes congested at the higher capacity or some other link becomes the bottleneck. You still have the problem somewhere. And costs make it prohibitive to build a backbone fast enough for ALL the last-mile links to run at full speed simultaneously (making the bottleneck be the rated speed of the customer drop.)
So AQM of some sort is a requirement to avoid the "buffer bloat" scenario in the WAN.
TCP attempts to divide traffic for different streams evenly among all the flows passing through it.
Well, no, it doesn't.... the first stream...g over the congested link will use the bulk of the bandwidth,... The other streams won't be able to ramp up to match the first stream, as they will constantly encounter congestion, and the first stream won't back off enough to let other streams ramp up to match it.
I was under my impression that, because the congestion signals are pretty much randomly distributed over the traffic in proportion to its volume (either bandwidth or number of packets), the backoff is substantial and the ramp up is slow, competing TCP flows on a congested link (with similar packet sizes) quickly converge to a fair split of the link even if the starting state is a fat flow and one or more newbies. The initial hog gets hit more often than the little guys until they're about matched. (Of course "quickly" is several turnaround times, so this only applies to flows with substantial persistence, not to things like the short bursts characteristic of web page loads.)
But my focus has been implementing the current standards, not analyzing their performance and how they could be improved. So AFAIK I could be mistaken.
ISPs... have an incentive NOT to use AQM... on the cable modem or DSL modem. [There] they have another incentive: maximizing speed-test results.
Good point. So if you have multiple machines at home you need AQM between them and the modem. (i.e. you need AQM in your own firewall, NAT machine, home router and/or WiFi access point(s), rather than just using a switch or the ISP's WiFi link to multiplex your machines.)... the first thing I do when setting up any new shared network... is put a Linux box in between the cable/DSL modem and the rest of the network. [Here's my AQM script.]... You can do... a similar thing... with some... SoHo Linux routers running DD-WRT and the like.
THANK you for that. (My wife recently started taking classes and the online tools she's using for homework break if we have substantial traffic on another machine - like me watching a YouTube clip. We'd assumed it was just congestion and were looking into a speed upgrade. But buffer bloat latency on the uplink seems a likely suspect. That script, or a derivative, is going into the next tweak of the firewall, to see if it solves the problem.)
Today, there is no incentive for an ISP to consider spending money on this. For their private customers, they sell QoS, which guarantees their customers a better queuing method. Extremely profitable. For consumers, it makes sense to simply continue investing in infrastructure.
You appear to be confused about the issue. This is not about capacity and oversubscription. This is about a pathology of queueing.
The packets leaving a router, once it has figured out where they go, are stored in a buffer, waiting their turn on the appropriate output interface. While there are a lot of details about the selection of which packet leaves when, you can ignore it and still understand this particular issue: Just assume they all wait in a single first-in-first-out queue and leave in the order they were processed.
If the buffer is full when a new packet is routed, there's nothing to do but drop it (or perhaps some other packet previously queued - but something has to go). If there are more packets to go than bandwidth to carry them, they can't all go.
TCP (the main protocol carrying high-volume data such as file transfers) attempts to fully utilize the bandwidth of the most congested hop on its path and divide it evenly among all the flows passing through it. It does this by speeding up until packets drop, then slowing down and ramping up again - and doing it in a way that is systematic so all the TCP links end up with a fair share. (Packet drop was the only congestion signal available when TCP was defined.)
So the result is that the traffic going out router interfaces tends to increase until packets occasionally drop. This keeps the pipes fully utilized. But if buffer overflow is the only way packets are dropped, it also keeps the buffers full.
A full buffer means a long line, and a long delay between the time a packet is routed and the time it leaves the router. Adding more memory to the output buffer just INCREASES the delay. So it HURTS rather than helping.
The current approach to fixing this is Van Jacobson's previous work: RED (Random Early Drop/Discard). In addition to dropping packets when the buffer gets full, an very occasional randomly-chosen packet is dropped when the queue is getting long. The queue depth is averaged - using a rule related to typical round-trip times - and the random dropping increases with the depth. The result is that the TCP sessions are signalled early enough that they back off in time to keep the queue short while still keeping the output pipe full.The random selection of packets to drop means TCP sessions are signalled in proportion to their bandwidth and all back off equally, preserving fairness. The individual flows don't have any more packets drop on the average - they just get signalled a little sooner. Running the buffers nearly empty rather than nearly full cuts round-trip time and leaves the bulk of the buffers available to forward - rather than drop - sudden bursts of traffic.
ISPs have a VERY LARGE incentive to do this. Nearly-full queues increase turnaround time of interactive sessions, creating the impression of slowness, and dropping bursty traffic creates the impression of flakeyness. This is very visible to customers and doing it poorly leaves the ISP at a serious competitive disadvantage to a competitor that does it well.
So ISPs require the manufacturers of their equipment to have this feature. Believe me, I know about this: Much of the last 1 1/2 years at my latest job involved implementing a hardware coprocessor to perform the Van Jacobson RED processing in a packet processor chip, to free the sea of RISC cores from doing this work in firmware and save their instructions for other work on the packets.
One of the main problems cancer cells have is getting enough oxygen.
Their continuous unregulated reproduction outgrows their blood supply - and while a typical tumor signals for more blood vessel growth (vascularization) into itself, the vessels themselves are organized so they can't really keep up. The result is that the bulk of a solid tumor is running on very low oxygen concentration, the main limit on its growth is its ability to obtain new vascularization, and a substantial fraction of the cancer cells may be dying off due to this oxygen shortage.
So of course having essentially every low-oxygen hack available turned on is a reasonable thing to expect of dangerous tumor types. And turning them off, even through it might not completely kill the tumor, would knock it down enormously AND the remainder would be expected to be far more vulnerable to the body's immune system.
(Of course if the tumor is a type that recognizes it should die but is evading apoptosis because that works on the normal but not the low-oxygen pathway, turning off the low-oxygen pathway means the cancer cells should just commit suicide, either completely killing the tumor or knocking it back to a miniscule number of cells with further mutations.)
The idea that CFLs are more susceptible to heat is somewhat idiotic.
Not really.
Incandescent bulbs work by being hot enough to glow white-ish and are made of materials (tungsten, glass, metal) that can stand the associated heat. Eventually enough metal evaporates that mechanical or electromagnetic stresses break the filament, or the higer voltage drop over the thinner parts causes higher dissipation there, starting a positive-feedback loop that melts the thin spot. (Switching them on stresses them substantially because their resistance is lower when cold, leading to higher current and an exacerbation of the energy-focussed-on-the-thin-spot as the thin spot heats faster than the rest.) Yes, letting the bulb overheat speeds the metal evaporation and failure.
But compact fluorescents use semiconductors. Heat them substantially above the boiling point of water and they fail. Compare this to an incandescent which operates by heating a filament to several thousand degrees (K, C, or F just give different numbers of thousands) and even their glass envelopes run at a temperature that would destroy semiconductors. And the waste heat of a CFL is more than half that of an equivalent incandescent, so it needs more cooling for a given amount of light to stay functional for its rated lifetime - or at all.
I'm surprised no mention is made of Look and Feel and the related lawsuits.
I suppose that it's good: What's at issue here is reusing the core of the interface, rather than stylistic themes or brand-recognition related appearance.
I prefer the interpretation of storing an electronic agent on someone's machine (typically located inside their house) as quartering a soldier (or in this case, his equipment) as a supreme violation of the 3rd Amendment.
Hear hear!
The main reason for the Third Amendment was that the soldier served as a spy on the activities of the people living where he was quartered. This was a major violation of the British Common Law principle that "A man's home is his castle." The consumption of resources was also significant, but secondary.
So government-mandated installation of spyware (whether clandestine or visible) is a precise electronic equivalent of quartering a military person in the home.
In Griswold v. Connecticut (the landmark case establishing a Constitutional right to privacy despite the absence of that phrase in the Constitution), Justice William O. Douglas (writing the majority opinion) "cites the amendment as implying a belief that an individual's home should be free from agents of the state".
So if such a case were to come before the court (and the appellants made this argument) we might actually see the Third Amendment interpreted to ban government spyware. B-)
Newp, they most definitely mean, GPS. A compass will only provide limited directional data. GPS provides 3d data. Direction, intensity and polarity would suffice for 3d positioning, ala GPS.
Humans have long used a compass-like device called a "diping needle", "dip needle", or "dip circle" to get a reading of "magnetic latitude" by measuring the angle of the earth's field relative to a horizontal plane.
Inner ears have three-axis linear and three-axis rotational accelerometers. It would hardly be surprising if, should the have magneto-sensitive neurons, these would also be three-axis. This would give the full vector direction of the field. With the sight of the horizon for a horizontal reference (which it needs for flight anyhow) a bird could get a more-than-adequate approximation of latitude from the vertical angle of the magnetic field, suitable for use in long migrations.
Slashdot Mirror
So the newsies get to run a couple "WE'RE ALL GOING TO FRY" news stories a year.
A LOT more than two, actually. They can also run them when the temperature is a tie or near tie for the record. That happens a lot because the newscasts work on whole-number degrees, which is a very coarse measurement.
They have a LOT of measurement stations in any geographic area (typically at least one for each suburb in an urban zone), most of them with shorter histories and all of them with statistical noise on the measurements. So when the temperature is near the record a number of them will set new records.
"Breaking records" sounds horrible and scary but is utterly bogus.
We have, what, a couple hundred years of records? That means each day of the year has at most a couple hundred recorded samples. Less if the records are incomplete or earlier measurement methods were not accurate enough to qualify. Call it 180 to make the math easy.
Assume the climate is completely unchanging (rather than systematically drifting) and the measurements are randomly distributed (a multi-modal distribution around the various weather patterns typical for the date). Then this year's new sample is exactly as likely to be the new record (in a given direction) as any of the others. 1 in 181.
With 365 days in a year the expectation, with no climate change at all, is just over two "record high" days every year. Law of small numbers says some years have a bunch more than that and others less or none.
So the newsies get to run a couple "WE'RE ALL GOING TO FRY" news stories a year. Much more exciting filler than "I'ts unusually hot today" to get the viewers' adrenalin up to make the commercials more effective.
Ditto with record lows - which they can ignore (or treat properly as "it's unusually cold today") while the template is "global warming" rather than "next ice age".
If a suitcase nuke goes off in Washington, "Government continuity" at that high a level is about #273 on our priority list.
Also: If a suitcase nuke takes out enough of DC that the first nine guys in line are gone it will no doubt take hours to figure out for sure that the tenth guy is the highest-ranking one left, even if he's NOT knocked out on the side of the road.
There is reason to think it might work on AIDs since one man was cured when he received a bone marrow transplant from some one that has the natural immunity. The trick is producing enough of the right antibodies.
No, the trick is to have an immune system where the receptor that the HIV virus uses for its backdoor exploit is defective (in a way that doesn't just break the immune system.) Then the virus either can't propagate at all or propagates slowly enough that the immune system can get ahead of the virus and kill it off, rather than being killed off by the virus.
The normal immune system produces antibodies to HIV just fine. But HIV mutates VERY rapidly. (Like a couple changes EVERY GENERATION, due to a transcription enzyme that makes errors easily - and it uses a redundant chromosome system to survive this high error rate.) And it re-writes itself into the immune system cells' DNA, so an infected cell becomes a "sleeper agent", turning into an HIV factory when triggered to produce antibodies to the new variant it recognizes. So the virus sticks around until, eventually, enough of the immune system cells are booby-trapped that the response to the new HIV variants is to make more HIV rather than enough antibodies to kill it off.
If it weren't targeting the guts of the immune system, HIV would just be "another cold".
Interestingly, the thing that made the Black Plague so deadly, rather than "just another bacterial infection", is that it also attacked an immune system receptor, using it to hitch a ride to the sites (like lymph nodes and the spleen) where activated immune system cells go to reproduce into the clone armies that form the counter-attack. By infecting these sites early the bug retards the immune response to itself.
Those people with a particular "defect" to both copies of the receptor gene were immune to the plague. To them it was just a minor infection that was quickly beaten off. And with one normal and one "defective" gene they got very sick but tended to survive and recover.
And it happens that HIV and Plague both target the SAME RECEPTOR. And the SAME "DEFECT" to that receptor makes a person resistant or immune both to HIV and Plauge.
Is the standard linux kernel optimised for 4096 cores...?
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster ...
I thought this was known.
I also thought that the consensus was that bonobos were at least as closely related to humans as chimps are. Further, I had heard bonobos were thought to be substantially closer to humanity than chimps are. This news would be that gene sequencing shows bonobos are AS DISTANT from humans as chimps, not that they're AS CLOSE.
My copy of The Ancestors Tale is several years old, and it says chimps and bonobs are closer cousins to each other than either is to humans, which means they are equally distantly related to humans, genetically speaking.
Just because they're more closely related to each other than they are to us doesn't mean they're equally related to us. For insatnce, imagine the three in a line on a "genetic distance" map, with humans at one end of the line, one of (chimps, bonobos) at the other end, and the other nearly in the middle between us.
To the general public, the term âoehackerâ refers to a user who breaks into a computer system.
Best not to go to your boss asking to hire a "hacker." And I sure wouldn't use that term in writing.
How this misuse came to be was discussed at one instance of tan industry conference I attend. As near as anybody could figure out, it went like this:
In the early days of IT security issues, when the H word was still being used in the "exceptional programmer" sense and IT security was a shiny new subject, a self-appointed "computer security" expert gave a presentation at an upper-management conference. During this presentation he misused the term "Hacker" in the "computer cracker" sense (much to the confusion of the techies in the audience.)
Apparently this was the first time a lot of people at the COB, CEO, CFO, COO, VP level were exposed to the word. So they assumed the misuse was the proper definition and used it that way in their executive suites and at other conferences.
Of course once an idea gets set in the minds of the guys with the golden parachutes it can't be dislodged with dynamite. The rest of management, especially the IT head, had to use the term the way the Big Bosses did - or appear out-of-touch with their own specialty. Middle management followed like the lower-ranking pack members they are.
Then the business press picked it up from them, spread it to the rest of the press, and from there to the general public.
By the way: This is one of the things that's a problem with systems (like lisp and smalltalk) where the development environment is part of the program under development, rather than a separate toolset which treats the target code as pure data.
Modifying the environment itself can be a major hassle. And it breaks isolation when developing something intended to stand alone, dragging in a lot of unrelated code.
'cause if you knock it offline by accident, your easiest tool with which to bring it back online is gone?
Ditto with the online manuals for the virtualizer.
This problem was described in 1961, in a short story by Hal Draper titled: MS Fnd in a Lbry.
Kind of like how it's a bad idea to mess with a host's eth0 settings if you're currently logged in via ssh through eth0.
Or putting a breakpoint in the debugger's breakpoint handling routine. Or single-stepping into the debugger.
The publishers aren't the ones footing the bill for a major internet-connected business server operation ...
But it does get cranked into the price. TANSTAAFL: The customer pays for it somehow.
Good grief. Why did you wait UNTIL THE DAY they should be used to actually post about useful gadgets that require time to purchase, set up, and check out before use?
Now any of us who would have liked to obtain and use one of these gets to fret about how much BETTER the holiday could have been, rather than actually having the gadget operating and ENJOYING it.
TFA was updated two days ago so it obviously had been up for at least that long. A week or two lead would have been ideal.
This is right up there with not mentioning eclipses, meteor showers, and the like until the day of, or the day before, rather than at least a week back, so people who had forgotten about them have no time to arrange their schedules for a watch-it excursion. B-b
I'm pretty sure I can find something interesting to do with the extra years. :p
Ditto.
Even more so if, during the extra years, I am as healthy as I was at 20 (jogging as a normal gait) rather than at 65 (aching slightly all the time, pain in the morning, joints starting to fail, ...)
Coming from a line of people that typically lives to see birthdays numbered in the low nineties, I can say that even if I DON'T get any extra years it would still be a fine bonus to live just the rest of the same number without the inflammation and the impairment of body functions and healing due to cell senescence.
Charging as much for an ebook as a physical book is completely off-base. You still have to make the money back on editors, artwork, advertisement, etc., but the physical print, transportation, and storage costs should cause those books to be discounted a good amount.
On the other hand, a hardcopy book is an asset on which the publishers and booksellers can be charged an inventory tax. Thus it is often to their financial advantage to actually destroy them rather than hold them in the hope of future sales. Holding them effectively becomes a liability rather than an asset (though the tax man doesn't see it that way). This is one reason it becomes hard to find many books after a year or so. It's also a reason for deep discounts on books to clear inventory.
(Interestingly: Science Fiction is an exception. It has a track record of slow long-term sales - for decades - that makes it advantageous to hang on to physical copies for future sales.)
Electronic books don't have this problem. The publisher has only one copy (plus backups) and creates additional copies for sale on-the-fly.
As it is, much of the time you can buy a print edition cheaper than an eBook version on new releases...
When the value of the hardcopy book has actually gone negative, selling it for any price above the transaction cost is better than pulping it. Meanwhile, operating a major Internet-connected business server operation is not cheap.
Eliminate the inventory taxes on books, bringing the cost of holding onto a book until it sells down near the cost of the storage space and environmental control, and you should see a drastic change in hardcopy book availability and pricing structure. (Assuming electronic books haven't substantially displaced hardcopy by then.)
Is it voluntary? Or did they taxpayer funded?
If it's government funded, one billion means they are spending the entire lifetime disposable income (i.e. everything but basic food and housing) of three thousand people, just to set it up. What benefits can this research have that will pay off more than that?
I agree with much of what you say. But:
Large queues are a problem, but they can be mitigated by adding more capacity (bandwidth). It doesn't matter how deep the queue can be if it's never used -- it doesn't matter how many packets can be queued if there's enough bandwidth to push every packet out as soon as it's put in the queue.
Unfortunately, TCP ramps up until there IS congestion. Raise the capacity of the congested link and it either becomes congested at the higher capacity or some other link becomes the bottleneck. You still have the problem somewhere. And costs make it prohibitive to build a backbone fast enough for ALL the last-mile links to run at full speed simultaneously (making the bottleneck be the rated speed of the customer drop.)
So AQM of some sort is a requirement to avoid the "buffer bloat" scenario in the WAN.
TCP attempts to divide traffic for different streams evenly among all the flows passing through it.
Well, no, it doesn't. ... the first stream ...g over the congested link will use the bulk of the bandwidth, ... The other streams won't be able to ramp up to match the first stream, as they will constantly encounter congestion, and the first stream won't back off enough to let other streams ramp up to match it.
I was under my impression that, because the congestion signals are pretty much randomly distributed over the traffic in proportion to its volume (either bandwidth or number of packets), the backoff is substantial and the ramp up is slow, competing TCP flows on a congested link (with similar packet sizes) quickly converge to a fair split of the link even if the starting state is a fat flow and one or more newbies. The initial hog gets hit more often than the little guys until they're about matched. (Of course "quickly" is several turnaround times, so this only applies to flows with substantial persistence, not to things like the short bursts characteristic of web page loads.)
But my focus has been implementing the current standards, not analyzing their performance and how they could be improved. So AFAIK I could be mistaken.
ISPs... have an incentive NOT to use AQM ... on the cable modem or DSL modem. [There] they have another incentive: maximizing speed-test results.
Good point. So if you have multiple machines at home you need AQM between them and the modem. (i.e. you need AQM in your own firewall, NAT machine, home router and/or WiFi access point(s), rather than just using a switch or the ISP's WiFi link to multiplex your machines.) ... the first thing I do when setting up any new shared network ... is put a Linux box in between the cable/DSL modem and the rest of the network. [Here's my AQM script.] ... You can do ... a similar thing ... with some ... SoHo Linux routers running DD-WRT and the like.
THANK you for that. (My wife recently started taking classes and the online tools she's using for homework break if we have substantial traffic on another machine - like me watching a YouTube clip. We'd assumed it was just congestion and were looking into a speed upgrade. But buffer bloat latency on the uplink seems a likely suspect. That script, or a derivative, is going into the next tweak of the firewall, to see if it solves the problem.)
Today, there is no incentive for an ISP to consider spending money on this. For their private customers, they sell QoS, which guarantees their customers a better queuing method. Extremely profitable. For consumers, it makes sense to simply continue investing in infrastructure.
You appear to be confused about the issue. This is not about capacity and oversubscription. This is about a pathology of queueing.
The packets leaving a router, once it has figured out where they go, are stored in a buffer, waiting their turn on the appropriate output interface. While there are a lot of details about the selection of which packet leaves when, you can ignore it and still understand this particular issue: Just assume they all wait in a single first-in-first-out queue and leave in the order they were processed.
If the buffer is full when a new packet is routed, there's nothing to do but drop it (or perhaps some other packet previously queued - but something has to go). If there are more packets to go than bandwidth to carry them, they can't all go.
TCP (the main protocol carrying high-volume data such as file transfers) attempts to fully utilize the bandwidth of the most congested hop on its path and divide it evenly among all the flows passing through it. It does this by speeding up until packets drop, then slowing down and ramping up again - and doing it in a way that is systematic so all the TCP links end up with a fair share. (Packet drop was the only congestion signal available when TCP was defined.)
So the result is that the traffic going out router interfaces tends to increase until packets occasionally drop. This keeps the pipes fully utilized. But if buffer overflow is the only way packets are dropped, it also keeps the buffers full.
A full buffer means a long line, and a long delay between the time a packet is routed and the time it leaves the router. Adding more memory to the output buffer just INCREASES the delay. So it HURTS rather than helping.
The current approach to fixing this is Van Jacobson's previous work: RED (Random Early Drop/Discard). In addition to dropping packets when the buffer gets full, an very occasional randomly-chosen packet is dropped when the queue is getting long. The queue depth is averaged - using a rule related to typical round-trip times - and the random dropping increases with the depth. The result is that the TCP sessions are signalled early enough that they back off in time to keep the queue short while still keeping the output pipe full.The random selection of packets to drop means TCP sessions are signalled in proportion to their bandwidth and all back off equally, preserving fairness. The individual flows don't have any more packets drop on the average - they just get signalled a little sooner. Running the buffers nearly empty rather than nearly full cuts round-trip time and leaves the bulk of the buffers available to forward - rather than drop - sudden bursts of traffic.
ISPs have a VERY LARGE incentive to do this. Nearly-full queues increase turnaround time of interactive sessions, creating the impression of slowness, and dropping bursty traffic creates the impression of flakeyness. This is very visible to customers and doing it poorly leaves the ISP at a serious competitive disadvantage to a competitor that does it well.
So ISPs require the manufacturers of their equipment to have this feature. Believe me, I know about this: Much of the last 1 1/2 years at my latest job involved implementing a hardware coprocessor to perform the Van Jacobson RED processing in a packet processor chip, to free the sea of RISC cores from doing this work in firmware and save their instructions for other work on the packets.
The first time I saw this was back about the mid '60s, when a bank got the idea to equalize wait time this way. It was called "Zip Line".
It's a pity that the non-paywall article doesn't say SQUAT about what the mechanism ACTUALLY IS.
(I wonder if that's deliberate, to get more people to pay up.)
One of the main problems cancer cells have is getting enough oxygen.
Their continuous unregulated reproduction outgrows their blood supply - and while a typical tumor signals for more blood vessel growth (vascularization) into itself, the vessels themselves are organized so they can't really keep up. The result is that the bulk of a solid tumor is running on very low oxygen concentration, the main limit on its growth is its ability to obtain new vascularization, and a substantial fraction of the cancer cells may be dying off due to this oxygen shortage.
So of course having essentially every low-oxygen hack available turned on is a reasonable thing to expect of dangerous tumor types. And turning them off, even through it might not completely kill the tumor, would knock it down enormously AND the remainder would be expected to be far more vulnerable to the body's immune system.
(Of course if the tumor is a type that recognizes it should die but is evading apoptosis because that works on the normal but not the low-oxygen pathway, turning off the low-oxygen pathway means the cancer cells should just commit suicide, either completely killing the tumor or knocking it back to a miniscule number of cells with further mutations.)
The idea that CFLs are more susceptible to heat is somewhat idiotic.
Not really.
Incandescent bulbs work by being hot enough to glow white-ish and are made of materials (tungsten, glass, metal) that can stand the associated heat. Eventually enough metal evaporates that mechanical or electromagnetic stresses break the filament, or the higer voltage drop over the thinner parts causes higher dissipation there, starting a positive-feedback loop that melts the thin spot. (Switching them on stresses them substantially because their resistance is lower when cold, leading to higher current and an exacerbation of the energy-focussed-on-the-thin-spot as the thin spot heats faster than the rest.) Yes, letting the bulb overheat speeds the metal evaporation and failure.
But compact fluorescents use semiconductors. Heat them substantially above the boiling point of water and they fail. Compare this to an incandescent which operates by heating a filament to several thousand degrees (K, C, or F just give different numbers of thousands) and even their glass envelopes run at a temperature that would destroy semiconductors. And the waste heat of a CFL is more than half that of an equivalent incandescent, so it needs more cooling for a given amount of light to stay functional for its rated lifetime - or at all.
So, yes, CFLs ARE more susceptible to heat.
Was one of the mice named Jonathan Brisby?
Algernon seems more apropos.
I'm surprised no mention is made of Look and Feel and the related lawsuits.
I suppose that it's good: What's at issue here is reusing the core of the interface, rather than stylistic themes or brand-recognition related appearance.
Maybe the RIAA should have its assets seized and business halted for a year. See how they like it.
You know, that's a really good idea.
If the Dajaz1.com people asked for that as part of the punitive damages, I could imagine a judge going for it.
Judges really don't like it when people or companies make a practice of abuse of process.
I prefer the interpretation of storing an electronic agent on someone's machine (typically located inside their house) as quartering a soldier (or in this case, his equipment) as a supreme violation of the 3rd Amendment.
Hear hear!
The main reason for the Third Amendment was that the soldier served as a spy on the activities of the people living where he was quartered. This was a major violation of the British Common Law principle that "A man's home is his castle." The consumption of resources was also significant, but secondary.
So government-mandated installation of spyware (whether clandestine or visible) is a precise electronic equivalent of quartering a military person in the home.
In Griswold v. Connecticut (the landmark case establishing a Constitutional right to privacy despite the absence of that phrase in the Constitution), Justice William O. Douglas (writing the majority opinion) "cites the amendment as implying a belief that an individual's home should be free from agents of the state".
So if such a case were to come before the court (and the appellants made this argument) we might actually see the Third Amendment interpreted to ban government spyware. B-)
Newp, they most definitely mean, GPS. A compass will only provide limited directional data. GPS provides 3d data. Direction, intensity and polarity would suffice for 3d positioning, ala GPS.
Humans have long used a compass-like device called a "diping needle", "dip needle", or "dip circle" to get a reading of "magnetic latitude" by measuring the angle of the earth's field relative to a horizontal plane.
Inner ears have three-axis linear and three-axis rotational accelerometers. It would hardly be surprising if, should the have magneto-sensitive neurons, these would also be three-axis. This would give the full vector direction of the field. With the sight of the horizon for a horizontal reference (which it needs for flight anyhow) a bird could get a more-than-adequate approximation of latitude from the vertical angle of the magnetic field, suitable for use in long migrations.
Getting longitude would be the hard part.