'"Point it at a smoke detector" won't work: the americium in smoke detectors emits alpha radiation, which can't penetrate the walls of the detector.'
When I was in high school 12 years ago the radiation sources the science department had were from the 80's and barely registered above background using the Geiger counter we had. I bought in some Americium based smoke detectors from home and those where emitting massively more amounts of radiation.
It is my understanding that the alpha from those sources would be stopped by the plastic housing and a few centimetres of air, not by the ionization chamber housing itself.
Unless you are picking lettuce from the grounds of the Fukushima nuclear power plant that scenario isn't going to happen (and anyway you should ALWAYS wash produce, the pesticides etc that get used aren't exactly great for you either).
From what I have read the fallout is at such low levels that it is within the bounds of variation in background radiation (ie mostly the levels are below what you would get from living in a high altitude area like Denver, Colorado). Unless you are in the immediate vicinity of the leaking reactors you aren't going to get a dose that has immediate effects, and just ignoring the whole situation will cause less damage then regularly eating junk food.
People in general are fucking terrible at risk assessment, and that is before you use the word "radiation".
There are several different types of radiation detectors with varying degrees of accuracy, and the type you can scrounge around and get now are probably not worth the money even if you put in the time and effort to calibrate and understand it.
The OP doesn't need to do that, if he isn't qualified he needs to hire someone who is. Plenty of hobby sites have professional networking people running things (normally pro-bono), if you actually expect to make money of a site you need someone technically competent running things. A start up might get one chance to make it big when it is linked by a site like Slashdot, so you need to have a quality infrastructure that will not be returning 503 messages.
The young and inexperienced can come up with great ideas but if the marketing/sales support (from a properly functioning website) doesn't exist that idea means nothing. If you actually got look at successful entrepreneurs the idea itself is basically worthless, transitioning from having an idea to having a product that generates money is the skill successful entrepreneurs have.
Anyone who lived through the Dot Com bubble should know this.
Stupid people used to die young before they had raised off-spring. Break a leg due to stupidity before germ theory and penicillin and that could be it for you. This meant that not only did nature "select" for "common sense", it gave incentives to those with poor common sense to learn those important life lessons. These days you can be an absolute moron with no ability to understand personal responsibility and have access to amazing health care for free and get government handouts to house and feed you (at least in most of the West apart from America).
It isn't that humans have evolved significantly in the last century or two it is that those who would have been dead are now sticking around to lower the average. They are also generally failing to give their children values that allow them to do anything but barely survive inside societies safety nets (hence generational unemployment, and voters that vote for bread and circuses).
IQ is a correlation to academic success. It is measuring some combination of "intelligence" (whatever that is because no one agrees on a definition) and motivation. However doing well at most IQ tests is skewed by being familiar with Western standardised testing which is overly represented in Western education systems.
I wish this had been more widely understood when I was a child as I was bought up on the cult of Intelligence* and have a severe lack of long-term motivation.
* And unfortunately standard Western schooling doesn't challenge many intelligent kids like me who coast through with minimal effort.
The implication of this news story is that we can replace test animals with "synthetic" tissue analogues but it simply isn't true (despite the fact animal libbers will spin it that way). Tissue based testing is only relevant if you are doing large scale testing to see if a possible effect occurs or are looking at a specific tissue type. The problem is that tissues do not function as individual units in the same way they function as part of an organism.
For example nearly any compound out there will kill or damage tissue samples at concentrations which even the most sickly lab rat wouldn't notice. Our systems have evolved to quickly remove toxins and to keep other compounds at homoeostasis, but this doesn't work when you isolate the tissues.
You can't replace whole organism testing with "synthetic" tissue samples and get useful science except at the most basic level. Hell, animal testing is often not even a good substitute for human testing it is just that the public got upset by the rampant testing of vulnerable people in the 40's - 70's so things have to be proven "safe" on animals first.
Plenty of tools like oscilloscopes now use FPGA's. Low end FPGA's are a couple of dollars tops, which is cheaper then the purchase plus production costs for a bunch of discrete chips.
A lot of hobbyist producers make designs with those low end FPGA's because it can be cheaper to use one FPGA over a whole bunch of products rather then stocking equivalent discrete IC's (ie you can buy an FPGA in 1000 quantities and use it across 10 products).
Of course this new product is just a cheaper FPGA, and their marketing claims are bullshit. Consumer electronics producers do not want upgradeable or repairable electronics. They want to be in the "fashion" business like Apple and sell new "upgrades" every year.
The timelines for HL2: Episodes 1 and 2 slipped by more than a year each and that was before the main Valve dev team touched Portal (Portal was almost entirely done by the Narbucular drop team that Valve hired). The HL2 episodic content is one of the things that destroyed the idea of Episodic content for me. The whole point of it was to deliver content more frequently instead of a whole game every 2-3 years, but Valve can barely get out 1/3rd of an Episode every 2-3 years.
I suspect they are either suffering from Dukeitis (a condition where developers keep iterating because they need to live up to their previous smash success) or the major designers have their fingers in every pie instead of working one or two projects at a time and are slowing everything up.
Oh no everyone will know AssMan385 is a pirate! I am sure this will bring him such shame that he will be forced to leave his home town and work as a sewage cleaner in Bangkok!
I hang around the Minecraft forums a lot and the pirates have absolutely no shame. At worst exposing them forces them to come up with a new user name.
Seriously what is the point of this? To flush out pirates on forums? Because if it is to be a sneaky anti-piracy system it is pointless. I have heard about games that detect pirated copies and corrupt saves or don't let you finish the game etc, but what is the point of giving pirates a bizarre error message? Wouldn't "Stop being a douche and support indie developers!" be a better message to display?
Not that I would ever actually pay for Garry's Mod as it is just a "dev tool" type mod. I don't see any creativity in it besides what the Half-Life 2 developers put in. I looked it up years ago and when I saw it cost money I laughed and spent the money on better games.
There is no such thing as an "accident" when human agency is involved*. An accident is when a meteor crashes through your roof and kills you. Cutting the Internet to an entire country isn't an "accident" it is stupidity.
The reason developing countries rely so heavily on mobile phones isn't because it is a good solution but because copper gets ripped up by thieves almost as soon as it is laid. Though I do enjoy reading about potential Darwin award winners who try and "scavenge" power cables.
* As the saying goes in the firearms world "Negligent discharges are either due to operator incompetence, failure to maintain the weapon in working condition, or defect of manufacture".
These "subs" won't go below any thermocline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocline) and so sea floor mounted sensors will be mostly useless. Also small boats like these won't sound significantly different than pleasure craft and trawlers, especially as they use COTS engines and propellers.
The only way to reliably track these kinds of vessels is extremely sensitive airborne magnetometers (they have non-metallic hulls) and the mark I eyeball.
Hell coal generation in the US releases more radioactive minerals (mostly uranium and thorium) than is contained in all the nuclear plants in the US! If you live near a coal plant you get a higher average dose then living next to a nuke plant!
And the effects of coal related radiation is secondary to the respiratory illness caused by coal particulates released from mining and power generation.
If the coal industry was held to the same standards as the nuclear industry it wouldn't be profitable.
The only thing I use Twitter for is for hearing about updates to Minecraft and when the occasional celebrity/corporate scandal breaks out because of a "tweet". Considering I see Twitter mentioned nearly every where I have to wonder how much they are spending to generate such a large buzz for such a prosaic service.
Twitter stopped being relevant technologically when "everyone" got smart phones which enabled them to do updates bigger than a SMS while away from their computers.
Plagiarism is not about "lifting sentences" it is about presenting ideas/facts from another source as if they are your own. Thoroughly re-writing an essay so that none of the sentences resemble the original IS STILL PLAGIARISM.
In fact in my discipline (psychology) we are expected to re-write sentences from cited sources instead of just copying them.
Plagiarism is plagiarism regardless of where it occurs. And yes it is standard practice in journalism to cite your sources even if you are basically ripping off their content.
What are you on about? Just because some people who go through gender reassignment surgery are happy at the end doesn't prove it is an effective and ethical treatment. Especially as there are others who aren't happy with the result but fear to speak out because doing so isn't accepted in the GLBT community. You complain about armchair pontification and anecdotes superseding actual research but that is exactly what you are doing.
I don't have a problem with adults doing whatever they damn well please with their bodies. What I do have a problem with is irreversible medical procedures being performed on children and the naive on the basis of lobbying not science.
Because you are not allowed to publically question the orthodoxy about sexuality. ie that it is entirely genetic, due to fundamental differences in brain anatomy, and people do not go from straight to gay or vice versa (they might be bi, but society isn't as accepting of that as it is straight homosexuality).
When you actually go and look at the science to support this there is about as much as for political preference being genetic. If you dare to point out that the idea that if it is due to differences in brain anatomy that this means straight male and female brains must differ in fundamental ways get prepared to be lynched.
P.S. For bonus points question the science behind gender reassignment surgery. P.P.S. This kind of stuff is why I believe there are no dangerous ideologies, just dangerous people.
In other news UK ISP's have noticed a sudden drop in subscription to high bandwidth/high download limit plans. They fear piracy may be to blame for this phenomenon.
If what passes for "modern" art is art than even the most kitsch, banal, and derivative of video games is high bloody art.
It is true however that there are few "high art" video games. Most games if they were translated to movies would either be 2nd rate summer blockbusters or "made for TV". But that is due to the market not the genre. Most movies and books are similarly crap.
However video games can impart an experience in a much more powerful way than any other form of media due to the amount players can relate to the character. When you as the player have to make an important decision it is much more real than reading about a character making that important decision.
"Art" games are rarely made because there is little professional recognition and support compared to "art" movies or books. Which is needed because the public doesn't buy "art" enough to make it commercially viable.
Where does all the Uranium come from? It could come from the Coal power plants if they bothered to filter the stuff instead of just discharging it into the atmosphere.
The problem with coal is that even Western countries, like Australia where I live, are quite happy to put both mines and power plants near population centres because people don't realise how fucking bad the stuff is (the Australian government is currently trying to suppress a report showing the correlation by distance of asthma to coal plants).
However the hippies in the 70's and 80's scared people so bad with anti-nuclear propaganda that the Uranium mines are located in the middle of the desert. And people keep wanting to shut down Australia's only research and medical isotope producing reactor (and the morons say we should just import isotopes, because obviously flying in short lived medical isotopes is both cheaper and safer then producing it where it is going to be used).
Slashdot Mirror
'"Point it at a smoke detector" won't work: the americium in smoke detectors emits alpha radiation, which can't penetrate the walls of the detector.'
When I was in high school 12 years ago the radiation sources the science department had were from the 80's and barely registered above background using the Geiger counter we had. I bought in some Americium based smoke detectors from home and those where emitting massively more amounts of radiation.
It is my understanding that the alpha from those sources would be stopped by the plastic housing and a few centimetres of air, not by the ionization chamber housing itself.
Unless you are picking lettuce from the grounds of the Fukushima nuclear power plant that scenario isn't going to happen (and anyway you should ALWAYS wash produce, the pesticides etc that get used aren't exactly great for you either).
From what I have read the fallout is at such low levels that it is within the bounds of variation in background radiation (ie mostly the levels are below what you would get from living in a high altitude area like Denver, Colorado). Unless you are in the immediate vicinity of the leaking reactors you aren't going to get a dose that has immediate effects, and just ignoring the whole situation will cause less damage then regularly eating junk food.
People in general are fucking terrible at risk assessment, and that is before you use the word "radiation".
There are several different types of radiation detectors with varying degrees of accuracy, and the type you can scrounge around and get now are probably not worth the money even if you put in the time and effort to calibrate and understand it.
The OP doesn't need to do that, if he isn't qualified he needs to hire someone who is. Plenty of hobby sites have professional networking people running things (normally pro-bono), if you actually expect to make money of a site you need someone technically competent running things. A start up might get one chance to make it big when it is linked by a site like Slashdot, so you need to have a quality infrastructure that will not be returning 503 messages.
The young and inexperienced can come up with great ideas but if the marketing/sales support (from a properly functioning website) doesn't exist that idea means nothing. If you actually got look at successful entrepreneurs the idea itself is basically worthless, transitioning from having an idea to having a product that generates money is the skill successful entrepreneurs have.
Anyone who lived through the Dot Com bubble should know this.
Stupid people used to die young before they had raised off-spring. Break a leg due to stupidity before germ theory and penicillin and that could be it for you. This meant that not only did nature "select" for "common sense", it gave incentives to those with poor common sense to learn those important life lessons. These days you can be an absolute moron with no ability to understand personal responsibility and have access to amazing health care for free and get government handouts to house and feed you (at least in most of the West apart from America).
It isn't that humans have evolved significantly in the last century or two it is that those who would have been dead are now sticking around to lower the average. They are also generally failing to give their children values that allow them to do anything but barely survive inside societies safety nets (hence generational unemployment, and voters that vote for bread and circuses).
IQ is a correlation to academic success. It is measuring some combination of "intelligence" (whatever that is because no one agrees on a definition) and motivation. However doing well at most IQ tests is skewed by being familiar with Western standardised testing which is overly represented in Western education systems.
I wish this had been more widely understood when I was a child as I was bought up on the cult of Intelligence* and have a severe lack of long-term motivation.
* And unfortunately standard Western schooling doesn't challenge many intelligent kids like me who coast through with minimal effort.
The implication of this news story is that we can replace test animals with "synthetic" tissue analogues but it simply isn't true (despite the fact animal libbers will spin it that way). Tissue based testing is only relevant if you are doing large scale testing to see if a possible effect occurs or are looking at a specific tissue type. The problem is that tissues do not function as individual units in the same way they function as part of an organism.
For example nearly any compound out there will kill or damage tissue samples at concentrations which even the most sickly lab rat wouldn't notice. Our systems have evolved to quickly remove toxins and to keep other compounds at homoeostasis, but this doesn't work when you isolate the tissues.
You can't replace whole organism testing with "synthetic" tissue samples and get useful science except at the most basic level. Hell, animal testing is often not even a good substitute for human testing it is just that the public got upset by the rampant testing of vulnerable people in the 40's - 70's so things have to be proven "safe" on animals first.
Plenty of tools like oscilloscopes now use FPGA's. Low end FPGA's are a couple of dollars tops, which is cheaper then the purchase plus production costs for a bunch of discrete chips.
A lot of hobbyist producers make designs with those low end FPGA's because it can be cheaper to use one FPGA over a whole bunch of products rather then stocking equivalent discrete IC's (ie you can buy an FPGA in 1000 quantities and use it across 10 products).
Of course this new product is just a cheaper FPGA, and their marketing claims are bullshit. Consumer electronics producers do not want upgradeable or repairable electronics. They want to be in the "fashion" business like Apple and sell new "upgrades" every year.
The timelines for HL2: Episodes 1 and 2 slipped by more than a year each and that was before the main Valve dev team touched Portal (Portal was almost entirely done by the Narbucular drop team that Valve hired). The HL2 episodic content is one of the things that destroyed the idea of Episodic content for me. The whole point of it was to deliver content more frequently instead of a whole game every 2-3 years, but Valve can barely get out 1/3rd of an Episode every 2-3 years.
I suspect they are either suffering from Dukeitis (a condition where developers keep iterating because they need to live up to their previous smash success) or the major designers have their fingers in every pie instead of working one or two projects at a time and are slowing everything up.
I give it a year until someone commits suicide because his "cloud" girlfriend broke up with him.
Oh no everyone will know AssMan385 is a pirate! I am sure this will bring him such shame that he will be forced to leave his home town and work as a sewage cleaner in Bangkok!
I hang around the Minecraft forums a lot and the pirates have absolutely no shame. At worst exposing them forces them to come up with a new user name.
Last I checked Minecraft wasn't a mod for HL2 that just made a simple interface for the physics features/dev console.
I bought Minecraft in Alpha.
Seriously what is the point of this? To flush out pirates on forums? Because if it is to be a sneaky anti-piracy system it is pointless. I have heard about games that detect pirated copies and corrupt saves or don't let you finish the game etc, but what is the point of giving pirates a bizarre error message? Wouldn't "Stop being a douche and support indie developers!" be a better message to display?
Not that I would ever actually pay for Garry's Mod as it is just a "dev tool" type mod. I don't see any creativity in it besides what the Half-Life 2 developers put in. I looked it up years ago and when I saw it cost money I laughed and spent the money on better games.
There is no such thing as an "accident" when human agency is involved*. An accident is when a meteor crashes through your roof and kills you. Cutting the Internet to an entire country isn't an "accident" it is stupidity.
The reason developing countries rely so heavily on mobile phones isn't because it is a good solution but because copper gets ripped up by thieves almost as soon as it is laid. Though I do enjoy reading about potential Darwin award winners who try and "scavenge" power cables.
* As the saying goes in the firearms world "Negligent discharges are either due to operator incompetence, failure to maintain the weapon in working condition, or defect of manufacture".
These "subs" won't go below any thermocline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocline) and so sea floor mounted sensors will be mostly useless. Also small boats like these won't sound significantly different than pleasure craft and trawlers, especially as they use COTS engines and propellers.
The only way to reliably track these kinds of vessels is extremely sensitive airborne magnetometers (they have non-metallic hulls) and the mark I eyeball.
Real Apple fans will only be happy when their favourite iDevice is available in suppository form.
Hell coal generation in the US releases more radioactive minerals (mostly uranium and thorium) than is contained in all the nuclear plants in the US! If you live near a coal plant you get a higher average dose then living next to a nuke plant!
And the effects of coal related radiation is secondary to the respiratory illness caused by coal particulates released from mining and power generation.
If the coal industry was held to the same standards as the nuclear industry it wouldn't be profitable.
Well just go out and start killing Bothans.
I'll tell you when to stop.
... everyone knows you don't roll your own crypto.
I guess this is further support for the theory that the ignorant have too much confidence in what they think they know.
The only thing I use Twitter for is for hearing about updates to Minecraft and when the occasional celebrity/corporate scandal breaks out because of a "tweet". Considering I see Twitter mentioned nearly every where I have to wonder how much they are spending to generate such a large buzz for such a prosaic service.
Twitter stopped being relevant technologically when "everyone" got smart phones which enabled them to do updates bigger than a SMS while away from their computers.
Plagiarism is not about "lifting sentences" it is about presenting ideas/facts from another source as if they are your own. Thoroughly re-writing an essay so that none of the sentences resemble the original IS STILL PLAGIARISM.
In fact in my discipline (psychology) we are expected to re-write sentences from cited sources instead of just copying them.
Plagiarism is plagiarism regardless of where it occurs. And yes it is standard practice in journalism to cite your sources even if you are basically ripping off their content.
What are you on about? Just because some people who go through gender reassignment surgery are happy at the end doesn't prove it is an effective and ethical treatment. Especially as there are others who aren't happy with the result but fear to speak out because doing so isn't accepted in the GLBT community. You complain about armchair pontification and anecdotes superseding actual research but that is exactly what you are doing.
I don't have a problem with adults doing whatever they damn well please with their bodies. What I do have a problem with is irreversible medical procedures being performed on children and the naive on the basis of lobbying not science.
Because you are not allowed to publically question the orthodoxy about sexuality. ie that it is entirely genetic, due to fundamental differences in brain anatomy, and people do not go from straight to gay or vice versa (they might be bi, but society isn't as accepting of that as it is straight homosexuality).
When you actually go and look at the science to support this there is about as much as for political preference being genetic. If you dare to point out that the idea that if it is due to differences in brain anatomy that this means straight male and female brains must differ in fundamental ways get prepared to be lynched.
P.S. For bonus points question the science behind gender reassignment surgery.
P.P.S. This kind of stuff is why I believe there are no dangerous ideologies, just dangerous people.
In other news UK ISP's have noticed a sudden drop in subscription to high bandwidth/high download limit plans. They fear piracy may be to blame for this phenomenon.
If what passes for "modern" art is art than even the most kitsch, banal, and derivative of video games is high bloody art.
It is true however that there are few "high art" video games. Most games if they were translated to movies would either be 2nd rate summer blockbusters or "made for TV". But that is due to the market not the genre. Most movies and books are similarly crap.
However video games can impart an experience in a much more powerful way than any other form of media due to the amount players can relate to the character. When you as the player have to make an important decision it is much more real than reading about a character making that important decision.
"Art" games are rarely made because there is little professional recognition and support compared to "art" movies or books. Which is needed because the public doesn't buy "art" enough to make it commercially viable.
Where does all the Uranium come from? It could come from the Coal power plants if they bothered to filter the stuff instead of just discharging it into the atmosphere.
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
The problem with coal is that even Western countries, like Australia where I live, are quite happy to put both mines and power plants near population centres because people don't realise how fucking bad the stuff is (the Australian government is currently trying to suppress a report showing the correlation by distance of asthma to coal plants).
However the hippies in the 70's and 80's scared people so bad with anti-nuclear propaganda that the Uranium mines are located in the middle of the desert. And people keep wanting to shut down Australia's only research and medical isotope producing reactor (and the morons say we should just import isotopes, because obviously flying in short lived medical isotopes is both cheaper and safer then producing it where it is going to be used).