(no slight to the Virgin / Scaled composites gang, but they're not doing heavy lift at the moment, but what they're doing is Steerman bi-plane rides on a much more awesome scale.)
Technically, they aren't. They certainly plan to do that, but no one's currently flying commercial suborbital rocket missions.
OK, this is a horribly shameless self-plug, but hey, it's directly relevant. I started two projects aimed at tracking reference statistics: Libstats, which is PHP-based and open-source. I'm also one of the founders of Gimlet, which is hosted and closed-source, but provides a similar workfow.
If you're looking to spend some time delving in code, Libstats is looking for maintainers -- I'm no longer working in libraries, so it's largely orphaned.
Presumably for the reasons enumerated in the summary. Too many costly, and quite frankly terrifying, false positives.
More importantly, it's important that if you screen positive, the confirmatory tests and treatment yield a better outcome than doing nothing would have. Lots of people can point to a friend or relative for whom early detection treatment saved their life; however, if someone dies from the treatment of a cancer that would never have killed them, how will you ever know?
Cancer is dangerous, but it's important to remember that cancer treatments are dangerous as well. People can and do die from complications from surgery and chemotherapy.
Except the Constitution explicitly gives congress the power to collect taxes.
The funny thing is that the "individual mandate" is actually structured as an income tax ($695/year or 2.5% of income, whichever is greater) -- having health insurance merely exempts you from the tax. There are no special criminal penalties for not having insurance. See this article for more details.
It is not at all clear that it has the power to "mandate that individuals enter into contracts with private insurance companies for the purchase of an expensive product from the time they are born until the time they die".
Well, if you're a minor, you'll be covered by Medicaid. If you're a senior, you'll be covered by Medicare. So it's more accurate to say the government is "giving a tax exemption to people between the ages of 18 and 65, if they buy an expensive product from private insurance companies." Which is pretty definitely in their power.
Constitutional arguments against the mandate tend to be based on an incomplete understanding of the law. Which, given media coverage, is not surprising.
They are already talking about the possibilities for therapy and behavior modification by optically stimulating specific brain circuits.
They can talk about it all they want, but until they invent a transparent skull, I'm not sure I see many practical applications.
There are conditions (Parkinson's, epilepsy, severe depression) in which people get electrodes implanted in their brains, with (sometimes) therapeutic benefits. Optical stimulation can be much more precisely targeted and controlled -- with good DNA delivery vectors, you can target specific cell types, or the neurons connecting two brain regions. Optical stimulation, I believe, also causes less cell damage than direct electrical stimulation.
It's not the kind of thing most people will ever need, but if you have a condition that will probably only respond to brain surgery, this has a lot of potential.
Clinical trials are probably a long way off, though.
As much Deisseroth at Stanford as Boyden at MIT
on
The Birth of Optogenetics
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The summary is a bit remiss in not mentioning Karl Deisseroth's group at Stanford, who have really made this technique practical. I'm at a different (also good) neuroscience lab, and his group's work looks like magic to me -- they've crossed a lot of t's and dotted a lot of i's. It's really, really elegant, and has a lot of therapeutic potential in humans.
The problem with this is that the left all think that it is our Government's fault, while the truth is, it isn't the government, it is all of us that is at fault.
We're a democracy -- one with many flaws in its implementation, but a democracy nonetheless. In a very real sense, the government is us.
Water, electricity, sewer are "natural" monopolies due to space limitations (i.e. big fat pipes or poles). CATV has no such limitation and there's no reason for a monopoly to exist.
While that's partially true, with no telco regulation you get stuff like this, which isn't particularly good for anyone.
Also, one of the other "natural" monopoly resources is right-of-way -- the right for someone to come onto your property to install or maintain the utility. Balancing the benefit of an efficiently-run utility and individuals' right to sovereignty on their property is nontrivial -- and a big reason for government-sponsored monopolies.
Note this requires an attacker to already have access to the config.db, i.e. one must have physical access to the machine and already be logged in as a privileged user or owner of the config.db.
You don't need physical access, just the ability to run code as the logged-in user. So any number of browser driveby attacks or emailed trojans should be able to grant an attacker irrevocable access to your dropbox.
Remember when it was ok to use a "b" tag, and no one scoffed? How about table layouts? It's funny, the new standards aren't always better. This is why a format "of the people" isn't going anywhere. I could teach my grandparents how to edit HTML 10 years ago. Now, not so much.
What do you mean? The "b" tag hasn't stopped working, and table layouts still render just fine. Hell, the "font" tag still does what it used to -- just make sure you use an old DOCTYPE. Hell, leave it out altogether, and the browsers will be even more likely to render your grandparents' pages in quirks mode.
No one is forcing anyone to adopt the new standards. For a lot of people, however, the new standards are a big win.
For example, you could make your grandparents a stylesheet that'd let them use much simpler markup when editing their pages.
Honey can actually expire. If it crystallizes enough to leave the liquid fraction with high enough available water content, the liquid fraction will ferment. This generally only happens with honey that started with a higher water content than is really desirable.
Salt... erm, yeah. Maybe it's the amount of time before clumping can be expected in a humid environment?
This is really not a big surprise. The researcher has probably run many, many experiments. Many of them doubtless turned up nothing. But, by chance alone, an experiment has a 5% chance of showing an effect with 95% confidence -- that's what p <.05 means. It's like rolling a natural 20. If he's run, say, 100 experiments over the years, he should have something around 5 rather convincing results to show for his efforts.
Next, hundreds of other researchers request his materials and run the same experiments and... shock! A bunch of them show the exact same effect! Now, not only has one research lab demonstrated evidence for ESP, but the study has been successfully replicated by researchers around the world!
All of this, of course, is just by chance.
And really, you see this all the time in other fields (at least, in the fields I work in). It's just very vey very very very easy to convince yourself that the reason your earlier experiments didn't work out was that you made a mistake, and the reason this one did was that you did everything perfectly.
A few years ago, there was an excellent essay in PLOS One Why Most Published Research Findings Are False about these (and more insidious) effects. Should be required reading for scientists.
Wouldn't it be great if someone would start a pay-as-you-go scheme for electricity? Or long-distance telephone service? Or gasoline?
Flat-rate services rely on light users subsidizing heavy users. If the rates are fair, pay-per-use is a good idea -- certainly better than arbitrary data caps that might get enforced god-knows-when.
And yes, people with lots of money can afford to buy more stuff. That's how it works.
You don't need to renew your gas tank every 6000 charges
If you get 100 miles per charge, you'll be looking at renewal after 600,000 miles. 300,000 if you only get 50 miles/charge.
Either case is an awfully optimistic lifespan for any combustion engine-based car currently on the market. You'll certainly spend more on repairs over those half-million miles than you did originally on the car.
I think any of the three final teams would have removed a part from their engine and loaned it to another team.
And indeed, after Masten's third attempt, their rocket was damaged badly enough by a fire that they really thought they wouldn't be able to fly the next day, regardless of the judges' decision. It was the help of volunteers from other competing teams that got them off the ground the next day. In addition to fixing the problem that caused the fire, they essentially needed to replace all the wiring on the rocket.
And the next day, a bunch of Masten's team members drove up to FAR and helped Unreasonable Rocket to troubleshoot their rockets -- even though success by Unreasonable could only cost them prize money.
The members of these teams are not only ridiculously talented, they're also ridiculously open and supportive of each other. It's a bit humbling to watch.
OK, I'll bite. As someone who runs a SaaS product (http://gimlet.us, in case you care), I can assure you that we're not trying to nickel-and-dime our customers. We're trying to provide useful software at a reasonable price — nothing more, nothing less.
I've run a very similar open-source project, and found that by far, the most frequent question from people was "how do I get this running?" I talked to many people who wanted to try it, only to find that their IT department was an obstacle. One person told me — no lie — that their IT staff would charge $26,000 to install a small PHP/MySQL app.
Offering our software as a hosted service means we can provide it to nontechnical users without needing the help or approval of their sysadmins. It means that deploying patches is relatively straightforward, and that installers and packaging are things we just don't need to worry about. Instead, we can spend our (limited!) development time making our app better.
Will we, at some point, offer our code "for sale" as an installable, locally-run product? Almost certainly. However, the demand hasn't been there so far, so our efforts have been focused elsewhere.
Yes, there are some real concerns about putting your data up in someone else's cloud. But the idea that we're offering our app as a service to fleece people is simply not accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
(no slight to the Virgin / Scaled composites gang, but they're not doing heavy lift at the moment, but what they're doing is Steerman bi-plane rides on a much more awesome scale.)
Technically, they aren't. They certainly plan to do that, but no one's currently flying commercial suborbital rocket missions.
Mar's
Never has an apostrophe made me so sad.
OK, this is a horribly shameless self-plug, but hey, it's directly relevant. I started two projects aimed at tracking reference statistics: Libstats, which is PHP-based and open-source. I'm also one of the founders of Gimlet, which is hosted and closed-source, but provides a similar workfow.
If you're looking to spend some time delving in code, Libstats is looking for maintainers -- I'm no longer working in libraries, so it's largely orphaned.
Presumably for the reasons enumerated in the summary. Too many costly, and quite frankly terrifying, false positives.
More importantly, it's important that if you screen positive, the confirmatory tests and treatment yield a better outcome than doing nothing would have. Lots of people can point to a friend or relative for whom early detection treatment saved their life; however, if someone dies from the treatment of a cancer that would never have killed them, how will you ever know?
Cancer is dangerous, but it's important to remember that cancer treatments are dangerous as well. People can and do die from complications from surgery and chemotherapy.
Except the Constitution explicitly gives congress the power to collect taxes.
The funny thing is that the "individual mandate" is actually structured as an income tax ($695/year or 2.5% of income, whichever is greater) -- having health insurance merely exempts you from the tax. There are no special criminal penalties for not having insurance. See this article for more details.
It is not at all clear that it has the power to "mandate that individuals enter into contracts with private insurance companies for the purchase of an expensive product from the time they are born until the time they die".
Well, if you're a minor, you'll be covered by Medicaid. If you're a senior, you'll be covered by Medicare. So it's more accurate to say the government is "giving a tax exemption to people between the ages of 18 and 65, if they buy an expensive product from private insurance companies." Which is pretty definitely in their power.
Constitutional arguments against the mandate tend to be based on an incomplete understanding of the law. Which, given media coverage, is not surprising.
From what I've seen, two ponies and a small dog would probably be enough.
They are already talking about the possibilities for therapy and behavior modification by optically stimulating specific brain circuits.
They can talk about it all they want, but until they invent a transparent skull, I'm not sure I see many practical applications.
There are conditions (Parkinson's, epilepsy, severe depression) in which people get electrodes implanted in their brains, with (sometimes) therapeutic benefits. Optical stimulation can be much more precisely targeted and controlled -- with good DNA delivery vectors, you can target specific cell types, or the neurons connecting two brain regions. Optical stimulation, I believe, also causes less cell damage than direct electrical stimulation.
It's not the kind of thing most people will ever need, but if you have a condition that will probably only respond to brain surgery, this has a lot of potential.
Clinical trials are probably a long way off, though.
The summary is a bit remiss in not mentioning Karl Deisseroth's group at Stanford, who have really made this technique practical. I'm at a different (also good) neuroscience lab, and his group's work looks like magic to me -- they've crossed a lot of t's and dotted a lot of i's. It's really, really elegant, and has a lot of therapeutic potential in humans.
They've made a great video showing optical control of a mouse's motor cortex, and the lab's main optogenetics page has some publications.
The problem with this is that the left all think that it is our Government's fault, while the truth is, it isn't the government, it is all of us that is at fault.
We're a democracy -- one with many flaws in its implementation, but a democracy nonetheless. In a very real sense, the government is us.
Water, electricity, sewer are "natural" monopolies due to space limitations (i.e. big fat pipes or poles). CATV has no such limitation and there's no reason for a monopoly to exist.
While that's partially true, with no telco regulation you get stuff like this, which isn't particularly good for anyone.
Also, one of the other "natural" monopoly resources is right-of-way -- the right for someone to come onto your property to install or maintain the utility. Balancing the benefit of an efficiently-run utility and individuals' right to sovereignty on their property is nontrivial -- and a big reason for government-sponsored monopolies.
Note this requires an attacker to already have access to the config.db, i.e. one must have physical access to the machine and already be logged in as a privileged user or owner of the config.db.
You don't need physical access, just the ability to run code as the logged-in user. So any number of browser driveby attacks or emailed trojans should be able to grant an attacker irrevocable access to your dropbox.
If true, this is actually a big deal.
Remember when it was ok to use a "b" tag, and no one scoffed? How about table layouts? It's funny, the new standards aren't always better. This is why a format "of the people" isn't going anywhere. I could teach my grandparents how to edit HTML 10 years ago. Now, not so much.
What do you mean? The "b" tag hasn't stopped working, and table layouts still render just fine. Hell, the "font" tag still does what it used to -- just make sure you use an old DOCTYPE. Hell, leave it out altogether, and the browsers will be even more likely to render your grandparents' pages in quirks mode.
No one is forcing anyone to adopt the new standards. For a lot of people, however, the new standards are a big win.
For example, you could make your grandparents a stylesheet that'd let them use much simpler markup when editing their pages.
non-expiring foods/spices such as honey and salt
Honey can actually expire. If it crystallizes enough to leave the liquid fraction with high enough available water content, the liquid fraction will ferment. This generally only happens with honey that started with a higher water content than is really desirable.
Salt... erm, yeah. Maybe it's the amount of time before clumping can be expected in a humid environment?
Disclaimer: I have not read the original paper.
This is really not a big surprise. The researcher has probably run many, many experiments. Many of them doubtless turned up nothing. But, by chance alone, an experiment has a 5% chance of showing an effect with 95% confidence -- that's what p < .05 means. It's like rolling a natural 20. If he's run, say, 100 experiments over the years, he should have something around 5 rather convincing results to show for his efforts.
Next, hundreds of other researchers request his materials and run the same experiments and... shock! A bunch of them show the exact same effect! Now, not only has one research lab demonstrated evidence for ESP, but the study has been successfully replicated by researchers around the world!
All of this, of course, is just by chance.
And really, you see this all the time in other fields (at least, in the fields I work in). It's just very vey very very very easy to convince yourself that the reason your earlier experiments didn't work out was that you made a mistake, and the reason this one did was that you did everything perfectly.
A few years ago, there was an excellent essay in PLOS One Why Most Published Research Findings Are False about these (and more insidious) effects. Should be required reading for scientists.
Wouldn't it be great if someone would start a pay-as-you-go scheme for electricity? Or long-distance telephone service? Or gasoline?
Flat-rate services rely on light users subsidizing heavy users. If the rates are fair, pay-per-use is a good idea -- certainly better than arbitrary data caps that might get enforced god-knows-when.
And yes, people with lots of money can afford to buy more stuff. That's how it works.
You don't need to renew your gas tank every 6000 charges
If you get 100 miles per charge, you'll be looking at renewal after 600,000 miles. 300,000 if you only get 50 miles/charge.
Either case is an awfully optimistic lifespan for any combustion engine-based car currently on the market. You'll certainly spend more on repairs over those half-million miles than you did originally on the car.
the screen is higher than 300ppi, which is a resolution greater than the human eye can resolve.
Wouldn't it depend on how close the screen is to your eye?
I think any of the three final teams would have removed a part from their engine and loaned it to another team.
And indeed, after Masten's third attempt, their rocket was damaged badly enough by a fire that they really thought they wouldn't be able to fly the next day, regardless of the judges' decision. It was the help of volunteers from other competing teams that got them off the ground the next day. In addition to fixing the problem that caused the fire, they essentially needed to replace all the wiring on the rocket.
And the next day, a bunch of Masten's team members drove up to FAR and helped Unreasonable Rocket to troubleshoot their rockets -- even though success by Unreasonable could only cost them prize money.
The members of these teams are not only ridiculously talented, they're also ridiculously open and supportive of each other. It's a bit humbling to watch.
OK, I'll bite. As someone who runs a SaaS product (http://gimlet.us, in case you care), I can assure you that we're not trying to nickel-and-dime our customers. We're trying to provide useful software at a reasonable price — nothing more, nothing less.
I've run a very similar open-source project, and found that by far, the most frequent question from people was "how do I get this running?" I talked to many people who wanted to try it, only to find that their IT department was an obstacle. One person told me — no lie — that their IT staff would charge $26,000 to install a small PHP/MySQL app.
Offering our software as a hosted service means we can provide it to nontechnical users without needing the help or approval of their sysadmins. It means that deploying patches is relatively straightforward, and that installers and packaging are things we just don't need to worry about. Instead, we can spend our (limited!) development time making our app better.
Will we, at some point, offer our code "for sale" as an installable, locally-run product? Almost certainly. However, the demand hasn't been there so far, so our efforts have been focused elsewhere.
Yes, there are some real concerns about putting your data up in someone else's cloud. But the idea that we're offering our app as a service to fleece people is simply not accurate.