Glyphosate's mechanism for harm is really quite interesting; it seems to work by preferentially killing the gut bacteria responsible for digesting potentially harmful molecules that are frequently - big surprise - carcinogens. Normally, they're safe and non-toxic because they'd be oxidized before absorption, but...
Also, I've read things suggesting that it suppresses the Cyp450 system; again, an enzyme system focused on detoxifying incidental environmental poisons. I haven't chased down the study in question, but I'll definitely do so in light of the recent announcement.
If the kids have nothing to hide, then release it. If not, pull the kids from the school. They're not obligated to go, and they're certainly not obligated to be abusive assholes either. We don't need more enabling of bullying and peer enforced sociopathy.
Actually, I'm pretty sure they are obligated to go, and in some states parents' drivers licenses can be revoked if their kids are truant.
if it wasn't a public school? Sure. Don't go snooping around my shit. Even if i've got nothing to hide I have a lot to be embarrassed about or just don't want people to know about.
What if the accused bully has entirely unrelated facts to hide? Say, closeted gay?
I suspect that knock-on effects mean this won't actually reduce bullying all that much, just spread the fun around. Also, to run with that theory, there's a reason kids tend to stay in the closet until they're out of their parents' house. In extremis, to avoid child abuse. In milder cases, they may otherwise end up sent by well-meaning parents to some hellhole of a "pray the gay away" camp or boarding school. Further, there are laws on the books protecting children in some states from having to disclose certain medical conditions to their parents - abortions, and in certain proposals I haven't heard about having gone anywhere (but I haven't heard go away) contraceptive implants may be added to that. I wonder which law will have an exception carved into it for the other's footprint?
Because it IS a public school? Yes. The rules are and should be different.
Why? How can your rights magically vanish by virtue of the fact that you attend public school? Especially your rights regarding your life OUTSIDE of school.
So only people who have enough money to attend private school have civil rights?
I'm not even going to try to calculate the size of the ash pond, but here's what we have for the mountain of coalâ¦
I used the Embalse nuclear plant as a baseline, because it was the first thing I found on Wikipedia.
A coal-fired power plant producing the same 2109 MWt output would burn 2,463,620,940 kilograms of coal per year, for a fuel stockpile on site of 24,636,209,400 kilograms. If you prefer tons, Wolfram says that's 27,160,000. - 27 megatons and change. Since uranium in the core is the form it is used in, we shall assume this is powdered coal magically prevented from blowing away, perhaps with a water mist, or plastic sheeting.
The specific energy of coal is 24 MJ/kg; of TNT, a mere 4.6 - a 5.2-fold difference.
Allowing for this, the coal pile contains 141 megatons worth of energy.
While it might be infeasible to efficiently detonate this mountain of coal, odds are once a fire starts, it would be impossible to put out, forming a firestorm effect which may aerosolize enough powdered coal to cause a thermobaric explosion.
Even failing that, the result would approximate a particularly bad coal seam fire, and the surface area involved in combustion, as well as the open-air nature of the fire, would expose the local population to a manmade âoeevil windâ - substantial portions of the coal's mass would be released in the form of CO2 and other combustion gases, asphyxiating anyone unfortunate to be downwind of it. Assuming only 10 million tons of the coal is released in the form of CO2, the result is 3.932 cubic kilometers of heavier-than-air gas rushing downhill from the fire. This will not be released all at once, but instead will sustain the event, perhaps long enough to kill even the vegetation that isn't incinerated by the firestorm or simple radiant heat from an unexpectedly well-behaved fire that doesn't spark secondary blazes - which is a rather likely eventuality.
Granted that storing ten years of coal on-site at a powerplant is vanishingly unlikely, but when apples-to-apples comparisons are made the law of large numbers suggests that any calamity at a fuel dump of this magnitude - of any kind - is likely to be severe, if not a mass-casualty event.
Or, perhaps, the doctor guessing wrong about antibiotics' necessity - we can either bitch about over-testing, or about doctors guessing wrong when it's not the most likely culprit, but not both without becoming hypocrites.
Also, when the testing involves allowing a disease to become more advanced while waiting for confirmation, that's a Bad Thing. When the test involves biopsying your testicles, that's also a Bad Thing.:-p
You may have missed the part about how he has no internet connection save for the Chromebook's integral LTE modem.
If not for that little hiccup, your solution would be quite adequate. If you do that this way, you run the risk of having to courier all of your father's print jobs to him.:p
I'm going to go on record that the real zombie apocalypse will probably happen when someone's prank accidentally infects everyone with a consumer-grade neural interface implant, and only the technical elite will be running NoScript on their hindbrains when it goes down.
There's already lethal exploits for implanted insulin pumps that can be delivered wirelessly. How much do you want to bet that there's similar for pacemakers that I haven't yet read about?
Medical device scarcity is terrifyingly bad right now.
A key component you're missing - we aren't the owners or operators of/.
A better analogy would be if/. could prevent us from typing those HTML tags into our browser anywhere once we've visited the page once.
Imagine the kind of software necessary to enforce such a measure upon end users' computers against their will, and you're a lot closer to understanding Doctorow's point.
I will be expected to try to help my grandfather with his computer over RDP. His "broadband" gives approximately 1 heavily-compressed frame per second or second and a half.
While I might be okay using VIM under such conditions I am expected to give instruction on the latest GUI-driven office suites.
I think that Apple has done much more for the security of their end users than Microsoft lately. There is evidence in Slashdot's headlines that they respond to concerns much more readily. When Greenpeace called them out, they admitted that while good, their environmental record could be better - so they made all the obvious improvements. They hold their contractors to account on safety concerns. While we might consider Foxconn pretty dismal, it stands head and shoulders and belly-button over the sweatshops that give China its reputation for cheap labor.
I don't love the company, but I must respect their drive for continuous improvement. And their customer service. And their hardware's reliability, as reported by Consumer Reports - literally half as many malfunctions as the second-best brand, and many of the other brands are closer to tenfold more prone to malfunction.
Also, my buddy the IT manager totally just bought a loaded Macbook Pro as a Windows machine after concluding it was better than any other PC laptop on the market with a high-resolution screen, and cheaper than the second-best choice. (Razer Blade Pro, I believe?)
Apple makes good stuff. Macs aren't for everyone (the gaming tower market most especially), but they do what's needful and stay out of the way better than many other computers for a whole lot of users. Astroturf? Nah, just sick of maintaining and securing a Windows PC under conditions of heavy use, and appalled by the way Windows has a Venn diagram of poorly-documented control panels sprayed around the OS.
It's worth pointing out that the portion of the smartphone market that's growing most rapidly is the sub-$100 chunk, which could be less-than-charitably described as "crap". Granted, any phone is better than no phone, and any internet access is better than none, but my Asha 501 lacks GPS, even though it has a mapping app. Multitouch is capped at two fingers. There's no flash on the camera, and a minimal amount of the other kind of flash (storage) since they know you won't take too many photos. The headphone wiring is either proprietary, or OMAP. All my headphones are CTIA, and I can't find an OMAP compatible replacement cable for sale anywhere.
We just covered a $35 Firefox OS smartphone. You know what? It's cheaper than the dumbphones my mother and grandfather use. Comparing them to iPhones, the Galaxy S series, and the HTC One series is somewhat disingenuous.
I normally don't bother responding to anons, but -
Because most small businesses and sole proprietorships will be owned and operated by people who have a gadget capable of acting as a cash register in their back pocket for unrelated reasons. The transaction-processing capability is just gravy, for them.
Fountain pens. Desktop computers. Zip drives are on their way out, but Incandescent flashlights.
Hell, I have a Pentium 4 and a couple pre-Intel macs I can't bring myself to get rid of.
Firewire. Alt-preset extreme. 8-bit consoles and actual physical cartridges.
And the daddy of them all? My original Apple Extended 2, with its ungodly USB adapter. Most days I use the USB based reproduction, but Sometimes the temptation overcomes me.
I'd go out on a limb - pardon the pun - and suggest that R&D can be something that the private sector "can't do or does poorly." When was the last time we had a new class of antibiotics put on the market?
Slashdot Mirror
Glyphosate's mechanism for harm is really quite interesting; it seems to work by preferentially killing the gut bacteria responsible for digesting potentially harmful molecules that are frequently - big surprise - carcinogens. Normally, they're safe and non-toxic because they'd be oxidized before absorption, but ...
Also, I've read things suggesting that it suppresses the Cyp450 system; again, an enzyme system focused on detoxifying incidental environmental poisons. I haven't chased down the study in question, but I'll definitely do so in light of the recent announcement.
If the kids have nothing to hide, then release it. If not, pull the kids from the school. They're not obligated to go, and they're certainly not obligated to be abusive assholes either. We don't need more enabling of bullying and peer enforced sociopathy.
Actually, I'm pretty sure they are obligated to go, and in some states parents' drivers licenses can be revoked if their kids are truant.
What if the accused bully has entirely unrelated facts to hide? Say, closeted gay?
I suspect that knock-on effects mean this won't actually reduce bullying all that much, just spread the fun around. Also, to run with that theory, there's a reason kids tend to stay in the closet until they're out of their parents' house. In extremis, to avoid child abuse. In milder cases, they may otherwise end up sent by well-meaning parents to some hellhole of a "pray the gay away" camp or boarding school. Further, there are laws on the books protecting children in some states from having to disclose certain medical conditions to their parents - abortions, and in certain proposals I haven't heard about having gone anywhere (but I haven't heard go away) contraceptive implants may be added to that. I wonder which law will have an exception carved into it for the other's footprint?
Second point - why are public schools different?
So only people who have enough money to attend private school have civil rights?
... Actually, that explains a lot.
I'm not even going to try to calculate the size of the ash pond, but here's what we have for the mountain of coalâ¦
I used the Embalse nuclear plant as a baseline, because it was the first thing I found on Wikipedia.
A coal-fired power plant producing the same 2109 MWt output would burn 2,463,620,940 kilograms of coal per year, for a fuel stockpile on site of 24,636,209,400 kilograms. If you prefer tons, Wolfram says that's 27,160,000. - 27 megatons and change. Since uranium in the core is the form it is used in, we shall assume this is powdered coal magically prevented from blowing away, perhaps with a water mist, or plastic sheeting.
The specific energy of coal is 24 MJ/kg; of TNT, a mere 4.6 - a 5.2-fold difference.
Allowing for this, the coal pile contains 141 megatons worth of energy.
While it might be infeasible to efficiently detonate this mountain of coal, odds are once a fire starts, it would be impossible to put out, forming a firestorm effect which may aerosolize enough powdered coal to cause a thermobaric explosion.
Even failing that, the result would approximate a particularly bad coal seam fire, and the surface area involved in combustion, as well as the open-air nature of the fire, would expose the local population to a manmade âoeevil windâ - substantial portions of the coal's mass would be released in the form of CO2 and other combustion gases, asphyxiating anyone unfortunate to be downwind of it. Assuming only 10 million tons of the coal is released in the form of CO2, the result is 3.932 cubic kilometers of heavier-than-air gas rushing downhill from the fire. This will not be released all at once, but instead will sustain the event, perhaps long enough to kill even the vegetation that isn't incinerated by the firestorm or simple radiant heat from an unexpectedly well-behaved fire that doesn't spark secondary blazes - which is a rather likely eventuality.
Granted that storing ten years of coal on-site at a powerplant is vanishingly unlikely, but when apples-to-apples comparisons are made the law of large numbers suggests that any calamity at a fuel dump of this magnitude - of any kind - is likely to be severe, if not a mass-casualty event.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania#Mine_fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazuku
My math, for verification:
27 kJ / gram for bituminous coal
0.027 mJ/g
80620 kJ / gram for uranium
80.62 mJ/g
2109 MWt for the Embalse nuclear power plant
2986 times denser power
3.154Ã--107 seconds per year
31,540,000
2109/.027 = 78,111 grams per second
78111*31540000
2,463,620,940 kilograms of coal per year
P.S.: You're an ass.
A coal plant with ten years worth of coal stockpiled on site, plus a similarly sized ash pond, would be just as juicy a target.
We just don't have the technology to detect the toxins released by that remotely - except in so far as the coal ash is itself startlingly radioactive.
Or, perhaps, the doctor guessing wrong about antibiotics' necessity - we can either bitch about over-testing, or about doctors guessing wrong when it's not the most likely culprit, but not both without becoming hypocrites.
:-p
Also, when the testing involves allowing a disease to become more advanced while waiting for confirmation, that's a Bad Thing. When the test involves biopsying your testicles, that's also a Bad Thing.
From what I'm told, malvertizements are the most common vector these days.
You may have missed the part about how he has no internet connection save for the Chromebook's integral LTE modem.
:p
If not for that little hiccup, your solution would be quite adequate. If you do that this way, you run the risk of having to courier all of your father's print jobs to him.
I'm going to go on record that the real zombie apocalypse will probably happen when someone's prank accidentally infects everyone with a consumer-grade neural interface implant, and only the technical elite will be running NoScript on their hindbrains when it goes down.
:P
There's already lethal exploits for implanted insulin pumps that can be delivered wirelessly. How much do you want to bet that there's similar for pacemakers that I haven't yet read about?
Medical device scarcity is terrifyingly bad right now.
I'm pretty sure that's the business model embraced by Lowe's store-brand home automation gear.
A key component you're missing - we aren't the owners or operators of /.
/. could prevent us from typing those HTML tags into our browser anywhere once we've visited the page once.
A better analogy would be if
Imagine the kind of software necessary to enforce such a measure upon end users' computers against their will, and you're a lot closer to understanding Doctorow's point.
But catching asteroids is actually fun...
I think that it's grounds for writing a grant proposal, in order to study gene therapy to tweak these things.
bonus points if you can kickstart my metabolism, while you're at it.
I absolutely do not.
However, I have every intention of raising my standard of efficiency.
I will be expected to try to help my grandfather with his computer over RDP. His "broadband" gives approximately 1 heavily-compressed frame per second or second and a half.
While I might be okay using VIM under such conditions I am expected to give instruction on the latest GUI-driven office suites.
Welcome to the new normal.
Try using Back to My Mac to RDP into an aging grandfather's computer and help them from home without making a day trip of it on 1Mbps up.
Hope you know how to use a mouse on a slide show.
I think that Apple has done much more for the security of their end users than Microsoft lately. There is evidence in Slashdot's headlines that they respond to concerns much more readily. When Greenpeace called them out, they admitted that while good, their environmental record could be better - so they made all the obvious improvements. They hold their contractors to account on safety concerns. While we might consider Foxconn pretty dismal, it stands head and shoulders and belly-button over the sweatshops that give China its reputation for cheap labor.
I don't love the company, but I must respect their drive for continuous improvement. And their customer service. And their hardware's reliability, as reported by Consumer Reports - literally half as many malfunctions as the second-best brand, and many of the other brands are closer to tenfold more prone to malfunction.
Also, my buddy the IT manager totally just bought a loaded Macbook Pro as a Windows machine after concluding it was better than any other PC laptop on the market with a high-resolution screen, and cheaper than the second-best choice. (Razer Blade Pro, I believe?)
Apple makes good stuff. Macs aren't for everyone (the gaming tower market most especially), but they do what's needful and stay out of the way better than many other computers for a whole lot of users. Astroturf? Nah, just sick of maintaining and securing a Windows PC under conditions of heavy use, and appalled by the way Windows has a Venn diagram of poorly-documented control panels sprayed around the OS.
Apple's profit margin is also their R&D budget. In my opinion, the coolest features tend to come out of Cupertino, not Mountain View.
It's worth pointing out that the portion of the smartphone market that's growing most rapidly is the sub-$100 chunk, which could be less-than-charitably described as "crap". Granted, any phone is better than no phone, and any internet access is better than none, but my Asha 501 lacks GPS, even though it has a mapping app. Multitouch is capped at two fingers. There's no flash on the camera, and a minimal amount of the other kind of flash (storage) since they know you won't take too many photos. The headphone wiring is either proprietary, or OMAP. All my headphones are CTIA, and I can't find an OMAP compatible replacement cable for sale anywhere.
We just covered a $35 Firefox OS smartphone. You know what? It's cheaper than the dumbphones my mother and grandfather use. Comparing them to iPhones, the Galaxy S series, and the HTC One series is somewhat disingenuous.
I normally don't bother responding to anons, but -
Because most small businesses and sole proprietorships will be owned and operated by people who have a gadget capable of acting as a cash register in their back pocket for unrelated reasons. The transaction-processing capability is just gravy, for them.
Fountain pens. Desktop computers. Zip drives are on their way out, but Incandescent flashlights.
Hell, I have a Pentium 4 and a couple pre-Intel macs I can't bring myself to get rid of.
Firewire. Alt-preset extreme. 8-bit consoles and actual physical cartridges.
And the daddy of them all? My original Apple Extended 2, with its ungodly USB adapter. Most days I use the USB based reproduction, but Sometimes the temptation overcomes me.
I'd go out on a limb - pardon the pun - and suggest that R&D can be something that the private sector "can't do or does poorly." When was the last time we had a new class of antibiotics put on the market?
Google's blocking me from downloading Razer's in-game VoIP software.
Trivially worked around, but concerning.