I drink Millli-Q water (ultra pure) water all the time and it does not taste awful. I agree it does not taste like tap water - the closest I can describe it as is liquid air,
Actually I encourage all scientists to drink their own Milli-Q water as it is any easy way to pick up if there is a problem with your lab water. It is really easy to ruin experiments with bad water and drinking it will let you know when it has gone bad (i.e. time to change the filters).
They can't simply "wind down" the business because that would violate their fiduciary duty to the shareholders. You can't just tell your investors "I give up!" and go home. Besides, the moment they announced "we're winding down the business," the stock would immediately go to zero or close to it and the bankruptcy would be immediate.
Of course they can "wind down" the business. This is exactly what their fiduciary duty to their shareholders is if they know that the business is not viable (i.e. they are supposed to minimize the losses to the shareholders). Businesses do this all the time when continuing the business just destroys shareholder value. This is what Kodak should have done long ago.
Defined benefit programs like pensions and health insurance are not ponzi schemes if funded correctly, but they are if a business faces a major market change. Kodak knew what it need to do, but there is no way that it could create a viable digital business that could support the film legacy costs.
I do think this does come down to greed. Kodak's management has known all of this for decades. If they had any honor they would have wound down the business to minimize the inevitable loss rather than dragging out the death so that they could maximize the stripping of the remaining value in salaries and bonuses.
I can't believe all the crap theories that people have posted. The real reason Kodak failed has nothing to do with not recognizing the coming age of digital photography, it is the simple fact that market size for digital photography is less than the old film business. This meant that their legacy costs (pensions and healthcare) could not be supported by the new digital revenue stream.
Kodak's management who are far smarter than 99.9% of the posters on/. (not difficult) knew this and have deliberately run the business into the ground so that they can dump the pension and healthcare costs onto the government and the retired workers all the while stripping the shareholders equity (i.e your 401k) out of the business into their own pockets.
Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greed.
We actually know the reason for why mitochondria have DNA. It is because three proteins that are needed on the inner membrane (part of the electron transport chain) can't be transported from the cytoplasm by the mitochondria protein import system. These three proteins are too hydrophobic and get stuck in the import system. If they can't be imported then they have to be synthesized in the mitochondria and hence the need for mitochondrial gene expression and protein synthesis.
It is actually more complex than this because you need to take into account time. The cost of the war is upfront but the oil is only produced over a period of time so it's value of this needs to be discounted. Iraq is currently only producing 2 million barrels per day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves#Iraq/. I can't be bothered doing the full calculations, but at the 30 year bond rate of 4.5% after 30 years this $1 trillion turns out to be $3.74 trillion yet we only get 60 billion barrels of oil out of Iraq. This is $62 per barrel. Using your assumption that only 25% of this flows to the USA this is a subsidy of more than $240 per barrel!
and get rid of the useless penny! What we did was phase out our 1 and 2 cent coins and now just round up or round down to the nearest 5 cents. Works well.
Why - because we end up missing some sections of non repetitive DNA in the process as a side effect of not being able to sequence through these regions. In the last announcement of the human genome being finish these regions were estimated to be around 1% of the genome. Also many of the regions that are sequenced and contain a lot of repeats are not well assembled - just because a region is "finished" doesn't mean that it is assembled correctly.
Sorry I missed your post - basically said the same thing a few posts down.
The really bad thing about all these announcements of "finishing the human genome" (apart from making the scientist involved look like idiots) is that it is stopping people from outside the field thinking about new ways of really finishing the genome as they think the problem has already been solved. This is a really hard problem and we need all the help we can get.
It is actually only about 75% complete - basically the scientist involved have no idea how to finish the remaining sections (mostly simple repeats) so they have "defined" the genome complete by saying that these regions are unimportant.
This is by my count the fourth time that the human genome has been announced "finished" - anymore times and they will all be invited to become slashdot editors.
I don't have access to the patent applications as they were only filed late last year, but the the two relevant patents are:
Australian Application Number 2005906358 Applicant(s) Newsouth Innovations Pty Ltd Inventor(s) Allon, Ori Martin, Eric Title A method and a system for facilitating ranking of textual information Status Filed Filing Date 16 November 2005 Date of Patent 16 November 2005
Patent Application Type Provisional Australian Application Number 2005905853 Applicant(s) Newsouth Innovations Pty Ltd Inventor(s) Allon, Ori Martin, Eric Title Methods and systems for facilitating ranking of an advertisement Status Filed Filing Date 20 October 2005 Date of Patent 20 October 2005
This makes me suspect that there is more to this story the SMH is reporting!
What is need is an ranking algorithm that can't be "gamed" by site owners (search engine optimised to give it its more usual name). I have actually develop such an algorithm (and even applied for a patent on it), but sadly I can't get anybody to even look at it. I have been investigating developing my own search engine, but unfortunately this is not a cheap option:-(
I disagree that good ideas are a dime a dozen - in fact really good ideas are a rare as hen's teeth to use another cliche. What are common are "bad" good ideas - ideas like "If we had 10 million dollars then..." or "As long as no big company enters the market then..."
A really good ideas requires no money to start, funds itself, is impossible or near impossible for others to replicate, and is worth billions in three years time. I see very few of these sort of good ideas around!
This is why you apply some empirical data to the hypothesis. Unless you are very young (or have no ideas at all) you will have had ideas that were latter developed by someone else. If you measure the time between when you had the idea and when the idea was put into practice, and if this is less than the time required to develop the idea, then you could have been first to bring the idea to market. If this happens a lot to your ideas then it is likely that you are having good ideas that nobody else has thought of yet.
I guess as long as you shaded the wire then it should never get over 100K. Maybe we could mine one of mars moons to get the required metal. Couldn't we also use lots of smaller wires carrying less amps instead of one massive cable?
I am also wondering if we could create a huge fresnel len out of the cables and put it between the sun and mars to de-focus the solar wind instead of just trying to build a magnetic field around mars?
As you seem to know more about this than me can I ask a couple of questions
1. I can understand that the solar wind will just wrap around a single magnet field (like a planet), but what about a more complex lens-like arrangements using multiple fields?
2. Are the solar protons coming from the non-sun direction high or low energy? If they are only low energy they might not be too much of a problem.
3. Wouldn't a magnetic field closer to the sun need to be weaker (and hence would be bigger) to effectively "shade" mars?
I am wondering if a smallish magnetic field placed between the sun and mars could be used to deflect any radiation resulting from solar storms? I would imagine that it would be easier than trying to create a new magnetic field on mars.
As a molecular biologist who has managed a bioinformatics project, I agree that it much harder to teach a software engineer biology than to teach a biologist software engineering.
I think that the reason for this is the huge amount of arbitrary knowledge required to be a functioning molecular biologist. You can't just cram this in over a weekend no matter how smart you are.
Slashdot Mirror
I drink Millli-Q water (ultra pure) water all the time and it does not taste awful. I agree it does not taste like tap water - the closest I can describe it as is liquid air, Actually I encourage all scientists to drink their own Milli-Q water as it is any easy way to pick up if there is a problem with your lab water. It is really easy to ruin experiments with bad water and drinking it will let you know when it has gone bad (i.e. time to change the filters).
They can't simply "wind down" the business because that would violate their fiduciary duty to the shareholders. You can't just tell your investors "I give up!" and go home. Besides, the moment they announced "we're winding down the business," the stock would immediately go to zero or close to it and the bankruptcy would be immediate.
Of course they can "wind down" the business. This is exactly what their fiduciary duty to their shareholders is if they know that the business is not viable (i.e. they are supposed to minimize the losses to the shareholders). Businesses do this all the time when continuing the business just destroys shareholder value. This is what Kodak should have done long ago.
Defined benefit programs like pensions and health insurance are not ponzi schemes if funded correctly, but they are if a business faces a major market change. Kodak knew what it need to do, but there is no way that it could create a viable digital business that could support the film legacy costs.
I do think this does come down to greed. Kodak's management has known all of this for decades. If they had any honor they would have wound down the business to minimize the inevitable loss rather than dragging out the death so that they could maximize the stripping of the remaining value in salaries and bonuses.
Kodak's management who are far smarter than 99.9% of the posters on /. (not difficult) knew this and have deliberately run the business into the ground so that they can dump the pension and healthcare costs onto the government and the retired workers all the while stripping the shareholders equity (i.e your 401k) out of the business into their own pockets.
Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greed.
We actually know the reason for why mitochondria have DNA. It is because three proteins that are needed on the inner membrane (part of the electron transport chain) can't be transported from the cytoplasm by the mitochondria protein import system. These three proteins are too hydrophobic and get stuck in the import system. If they can't be imported then they have to be synthesized in the mitochondria and hence the need for mitochondrial gene expression and protein synthesis.
Thanks for this. It is posts like yours that make reading slashdot worthwhile :)
Can you give any more details on this? What ratio of silicon carbide did you use?
It is actually more complex than this because you need to take into account time. The cost of the war is upfront but the oil is only produced over a period of time so it's value of this needs to be discounted. Iraq is currently only producing 2 million barrels per day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves#Iraq/. I can't be bothered doing the full calculations, but at the 30 year bond rate of 4.5% after 30 years this $1 trillion turns out to be $3.74 trillion yet we only get 60 billion barrels of oil out of Iraq. This is $62 per barrel. Using your assumption that only 25% of this flows to the USA this is a subsidy of more than $240 per barrel!
Public libraries are exempt.
It is illegal under current US copyright law to rent music CD - the RIAA is one step ahead of you :)
It is a pity then that the modern penny is actually made of zinc with just coat of copper.
and get rid of the useless penny! What we did was phase out our 1 and 2 cent coins and now just round up or round down to the nearest 5 cents. Works well.
Why - because we end up missing some sections of non repetitive DNA in the process as a side effect of not being able to sequence through these regions. In the last announcement of the human genome being finish these regions were estimated to be around 1% of the genome. Also many of the regions that are sequenced and contain a lot of repeats are not well assembled - just because a region is "finished" doesn't mean that it is assembled correctly.
The really bad thing about all these announcements of "finishing the human genome" (apart from making the scientist involved look like idiots) is that it is stopping people from outside the field thinking about new ways of really finishing the genome as they think the problem has already been solved. This is a really hard problem and we need all the help we can get.
This is by my count the fourth time that the human genome has been announced "finished" - anymore times and they will all be invited to become slashdot editors.
I don't have access to the patent applications as they were only filed late last year, but the the two relevant patents are:
Australian Application Number 2005906358
Applicant(s) Newsouth Innovations Pty Ltd
Inventor(s) Allon, Ori
Martin, Eric
Title A method and a system for facilitating ranking of textual information
Status Filed
Filing Date 16 November 2005
Date of Patent 16 November 2005
Patent Application Type Provisional
Australian Application Number 2005905853
Applicant(s) Newsouth Innovations Pty Ltd
Inventor(s) Allon, Ori
Martin, Eric
Title Methods and systems for facilitating ranking of an advertisement
Status Filed
Filing Date 20 October 2005
Date of Patent 20 October 2005
This makes me suspect that there is more to this story the SMH is reporting!
What is need is an ranking algorithm that can't be "gamed" by site owners (search engine optimised to give it its more usual name). I have actually develop such an algorithm (and even applied for a patent on it), but sadly I can't get anybody to even look at it. I have been investigating developing my own search engine, but unfortunately this is not a cheap option :-(
I disagree that good ideas are a dime a dozen - in fact really good ideas are a rare as hen's teeth to use another cliche. What are common are "bad" good ideas - ideas like "If we had 10 million dollars then ..." or "As long as no big company enters the market then ..."
A really good ideas requires no money to start, funds itself, is impossible or near impossible for others to replicate, and is worth billions in three years time. I see very few of these sort of good ideas around!
This is why you apply some empirical data to the hypothesis. Unless you are very young (or have no ideas at all) you will have had ideas that were latter developed by someone else. If you measure the time between when you had the idea and when the idea was put into practice, and if this is less than the time required to develop the idea, then you could have been first to bring the idea to market. If this happens a lot to your ideas then it is likely that you are having good ideas that nobody else has thought of yet.
I suspect that the outcome of this "review" will be my descendants owning this post long after I am dead.
Good to see CoyboyNeal bring up the rear again.
I guess as long as you shaded the wire then it should never get over 100K. Maybe we could mine one of mars moons to get the required metal. Couldn't we also use lots of smaller wires carrying less amps instead of one massive cable?
I am also wondering if we could create a huge fresnel len out of the cables and put it between the sun and mars to de-focus the solar wind instead of just trying to build a magnetic field around mars?
As you seem to know more about this than me can I ask a couple of questions
1. I can understand that the solar wind will just wrap around a single magnet field (like a planet), but what about a more complex lens-like arrangements using multiple fields?
2. Are the solar protons coming from the non-sun direction high or low energy? If they are only low energy they might not be too much of a problem.
3. Wouldn't a magnetic field closer to the sun need to be weaker (and hence would be bigger) to effectively "shade" mars?
I am wondering if a smallish magnetic field placed between the sun and mars could be used to deflect any radiation resulting from solar storms? I would imagine that it would be easier than trying to create a new magnetic field on mars.
I think that the reason for this is the huge amount of arbitrary knowledge required to be a functioning molecular biologist. You can't just cram this in over a weekend no matter how smart you are.