So, all Amazon needs to do is add a text-to-speech feature, and then they can sue any school that tries to use paper books instead of the Kindle, because compared to a text-to-speech Kindle, paper devices discriminate against students with vision problems.
I don't think you're going to help attract a lot of talented engineers by changing the nomenclature to the "'Engineering Deptartment."
That aside, I think "Software Engineer," "Software Architect," "Analyst," "Lead Developer," and such are common titles for people who are creating things with software, as opposed to "IT's" tech-support implications.
Practically every discussion of a public company on Slashdot includes a highly rated comment claiming that public companies are obligated to abuse their customers. This is only the case if abusing customers is demonstrably conducive to long term profitability. If abusing one's own customers is bad for long-term profitability, then going public more nearly creates a fiduciary responsibility not to abuse customers.
Companies have a lot of leeway in deciding what will maximize profitability. Some companies keep their customer's data private, provide excellent customer service, and work hard to ensure quality. Others do the opposite. Neither is compulsory to being a public company, and if one wanted to argue it one way or the other, it's always seemed to me that, on average, the companies that treat their customers well do the best in the long term.
Some executives (SCO) manage to do shady things that achieve a short-term stock boost where they can cash-out, at the expense of long-term performance. That's an example of acting against their fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders, which is to ensure long-term stock growth, not a bumpy ride to failure.
When I mentioned the idea of contact-lens displays in a comment one year ago, I referred to them as "the magical world of tomorrow." I guess the future is coming sooner than I thought.
You know what other evidence they could use to demonstrate that he "has a brain disorder?"
The fact that he raped an murdered a 10-year old girl.
It's not like any goody-two-shoes Ned Flanders type falls to temptation and suddenly rapes and murders little children. Whether the underlying reasons are cultural (abuse) or physical (brain damage), anyone who does this sort of thing is severely defective. For some reason, courts seem to take it that if the defense can show any reason why the crime was committed, then that's a reason why the person shouldn't be convicted.
Well, there's always a reason "why" when someone's totally screwed up. There will always be something that differentiates them from regular people who would sooner give their life to stop someone from perpetrating such acts than to commit them themselves. Finding the cause may be useful for treatment or deterrence or finding similar psychopaths and stopping them, but it's not a reason why the perpetrator shouldn't be convicted.
Yeah, the title shouldn't be "Why Doesn't Exercise Lead To Weight Loss?" it should be "People Lose Weight Exactly As Expected."
It takes a deficit of about 3,500 calories to lose a pound - so in 84 days they average a deficit of (7 x 3500 = 24,500 / 84 =) about 300 calories per day.
The abstract says they were doing aerobic exercise 5 times a week trying to burn off 500 calories per session- that's 5 times a week x 5 weeks x 500 calories = a 30,000 calories deficit, which would be a maximum expected weight loss of... surprise surprise... 30,000/3.500 = 8.5 lbs. So throw in factors like that it's hard to really control people's diets that closely and some people probably managed to up consumption at least a little, to lowered resting metabolism in conjunction with weight loss, to muscle gain displacing fat loss in conjunction with decreased exercise, and I'd think someone was being totally unrealistic if they expected these people to lose any more than an average of 7 lbs each. I mean, trying to estimate from the math ahead of time, that's almost exactly what a dietitian or personal trainer would be likely to estimate for that exercise regimen and maintaining the same diet. The headline is in direct contradiction to the results. It's like dropping something, clocking it accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2, and running the headline "Why Doesn't Gravity Work Anymore?"
Hey, 7 pounds in 12 weeks, keep doing it for 2 years, that's about 56 lbs. Do it for however long you need to to achieve a healthy weight, then you can cut your exercise regimen back some and maintain for the rest of your life. If it were quick and easy, you wouldn't see so many obese people around.
For the actual very top level, like the Olympics, that may be the case, but in general, he's got the cause and effect chain right. I know a girl who in high school was really overweight and dumpy, then in college she started running and eventually lost about 80 lbs, joined the college track and cross-country teams, and became a ranked women's runner in the state. Apparently she had an aptitude for running, but never the less, her previous sedentary high-calorie lifestyle had left her in poor shape, and a lot of hard work put her into great shape.
Maybe the very top competitive runners in the world could only reach that status due to genetics PLUS tons of hard work, I think the jury's still out on what the contributions of each are. Surely not just anyone could be an olympic runner by working really hard, because lots and lots of runners who work really hard can't make the Olympics. But if you're talking about just being in good shape vs. being fat, ANYBODY, short of people with certain diseases and similar constraints, could be thin and strong and in good cardiovascular condition if they just ate enough less and exercised enough more for long enough. Likewise, any Olympic runner or other athlete could be fat and unhealthy by sitting around eating all day.
Certainly some people have a much easier time of it than others, but I know people who are obese and in terrible health who actually have a hard time putting on weight but absolutely stuff themselves like gluttons nearly continuously, people who eat more calories at dinner than I eat in a day, almost always of terrible food, and who drink almost as many calories again each day in soda as I consume all together. (Seriosuly - a "blooming onion appetizer with dip, 16oz steak with baked potato with sour cream, a 16 oz Coke, bread and butter, and a slice of cheese cake for dessert is over 3,000 calories - I eat about 2,000 a day, and 4 liters of Coke a day is 1,690 calories.) I also know people who put on weight very easily, but who keep themselves under 2,000 calories a day, with lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grains and such, and exercise regularly, who are thin and fit. People who often WANT to eat more, but don't. People have a tremendous amount of control over their weight, which most choose not to bother with.
That's absolutely right though, there have been reports of "unintended acceleration" in cars as long as there have been cars, and the problem is caused by a person accidentally pressing the gas when intending to press the brake, and then instead of recognizing the error, flooring the car by pressing what they still believe to be the brake to the floor to counter the "unintended acceleration" they are experiencing.
A friend of mine suffered a serious brain injury when an old lady plowed into a crowd of students at a bus stop at high velocity. She claimed she was a victim of a spontaneous acceleration malfunction in the car, but the people on the scene who helped her out of her car said her foot was still flooring the gas when they opened the door, well after she ran over everybody. The front end was off the ground from hitting a low wall, so the wheels were just spinning, the engine racing.
So at the time, I did a lot of looking into "spontaneous" or "unintended" acceleration disorders, and here are some things I found:
- Despite a lot of lawsuits and accident investigations, there were no instances of lawsuits over "unintended acceleration" problems where any mechanic, engineer, or other inspector could find any physical cause for such machine-actuated acceleration when examining the vehicles after the accidents.
- While geography, weather, traffic conditions, etc. varied tremendously across different accident that were blamed on "unintended acceleration," there was a very strong correlation that the age of the drivers involved tended to be much higher than average.
- Cases of "unintended acceleration" occur across all makes and all models, but there is a concentration among Buick, Lincoln, Cadillac, Audi - cars favored by older drivers.
- In cars with "black box" crash-data recorders involved in "unintended acceleration" accidents, despite almost unanimous claims by the operators that the car accelerated despite them fully depressing the brake pedal, the black box did not record any push on the brake pedal at all- just flooring the accelerator.
- In 1989 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigated and released a report on unintended acceleration accidents, which found no evidence that any of them were due to anything other than operator error.
Maybe there's some new engineering problem with Toyotas that actually causes this, and I wouldn't place any bets on how lawsuits will turn out. But I'd sure bet you've hit the nail on the head with your PEBAAC idea regarding the true cause. Now that it's in the news, there are bound to be a lot more cases reported.
That was exactly my thought- I started to put that sort of information in my previous message, but then realized I didn't have time to keep Slashdotting then and just cut it out and posted what I had.
I thought an existing charity network might have a great chance at this- say, The Salvation Army. Officially notify workers, plus put up a website to recruit volunteers, and they can help reduce sabotage because, come on, the money's going to The Salvation Army. How many people are going to actively sabotage charity fundraising in the hopes of taking the money for themselves? Probably not a whole lot.
I also think there's a "game-theory compliant" way to organize this with proper incentives through high-feedback Ebay accounts bidding on auctions for the information. I have the gist of it, but don't have time to type it out and haven't exactly worked out all the details yet. It leverages a huge, established, diverse network of trust to create a system with the right incentives to form a contest group where each person who is the first to correctly add the location of a balloon can feel reasonably certain that, if their team wins, they'll see their share of the $40k. One big remaining uknown in this method, though, is that I can't figure out whether or not DARPA's going to announce who the winner is. If they don't, if you can win anonymously, it may be impossible to build this sort of network, because the winner could always claim they hadn't won and not pay out.
This contest absolutely is not about using technology to coordinate, as is roughly implied in DARPA's statement
The DARPA Network Challenge explores the unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve tough problems.
That is, it's not about disparate strangers coordinating quickly, as might be useful in, say, a natural crisis like an earthquake or hurricane or missing child, but networks of social trust. If they just wanted to see how fast people could put together an ad hoc information network, I bet they'd get less wrong answers submitted and the right answer submitted much sooner if there were no prize involved - people would be free with the information because it would just be a game. There'd be no incentive for deception or secrecy.
I'm guessing DARPA doesn't care about that. That's why they've got $40k on the line- not to promote communication, but to promote disinformation. They don't want to know who can build a network with modern technology, they want to know how people will build a network of trust when there's a serious incentive for betrayal.
It's part of a sneaky, long-term strategy. Apple will enter some sort of intellectual property quarrel with Microsoft, which will be resolved through cross-licensing and the transfer of some patents... including transferring this one to MS. With something this evil placed right in their hands, can MS actually abstain from using it?
Yeah, I came up with 2^10 per prefix, then kilo-mega-giga-tera is 4 prefixes so 4x10=40, plus 3 powers to get us from bits to bytes, = 2^43 for a terabyte... which yields exactly your answer. I have no idea what feat of "I'm in a hurry" cut-and-past calculator usage led me to paste in that 2^43= 1x10^15. "Slightly off," only three orders of magnitude.
Anyway, the error actually hurt my argument. The point stands that if we're supposed to be impressed that they've found a high density storage medium without means to mass produce, interface with computers, or read and write, then nature's already provided us with something much more impressive.
I found an even more impressive material, and I can already manufacture it myself in bulk.
Each base of DNA can be AGT or C, so that's 2 bits worth of data per base pair.
A terabyte = 1.1259E+15 bits, so a terabyte of DNA is 5.6295E+14 base pairs.
For mass, [5.6295E+14 base pairs] x [660 daltons per base pair] = [3.71547E+17 daltons] = 6.169686786411827E-7 grams =.62 micrograms per terabyte.
That's smaller than my fingernail by a pretty good margin. In fact, my actual fingernail already contains maybe a petabyte of storage.
Unlike their new super material, I've already developed (well, OK, discovered. Well, no, read about other people discovering) techniques for reading, writing, and copying data with this storage medium.
However, like them, I haven't worked out any computer interface yet.
DeSadeski: The fools... the mad fools. Muffley: What's happened? DeSadeski: The doomsday machine. Muffley: The doomsday machine? What is that? DeSadeski: A device which will destroy all human and animal life on earth. Muffley: All human and animal life?... I'm afraid I don't understand something, Alexiy. Is the Premier threatening to explode this if our planes carry out their attack? DeSadeski: No sir. It is not a thing a sane man would do. The doomsday machine is designed to trigger itself automatically. Muffley: But surely you can disarm it somehow. DeSadeski: No. It is designed to explode if any attempt is ever made to untrigger it. Muffley: Automatically?... But, how is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically, and at the same time impossible to untrigger? Strangelove: Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That is the whole idea of this machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the fear to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision making process which rules out human meddling, the doomsday machine is terrifying. It's simple to understand. And completely credible, and convincing. Turgidson: Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines, Stainsy. Muffley: But this is fantastic, Strangelove. How can it be triggered automatically? Strangelove: Well, it's remarkably simple to do that. When you merely wish to bury bombs, there is no limit to the size. After that they are connected to a gigantic complex of computers. Now then, a specific and clearly defined set of circumstances, under which the bombs are to be exploded, is programmed into a tape memory bank.... Yes, but the... whole point of the doomsday machine... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
Every keyboard I've ever used has been pressure sensitive. They need a different name for this.
With precedent, I suggest "keyboard col piano e forte."
I hope they didn't patent this. If they did, there's prior art. I mean, aside from pianos. With manual typewriters, when the ribbon got old, the harder you pressed, the darker the character.
Looking at the questions they're asking, there's obviously a problem here the people asking the questions have no idea what the internet is like, so they don't know what to ask or how to ask it. They don't have the concept of what kind of information you can get off the internet or how you go about finding and vetting it.
For example,
2295. what are the best varieties of beans to plant
This is the sort of thing that, traditionally, first-world countries have bureaus of agriculture, county extension services, and agriculture departments at local learning institutions that help farmers with this tricky question. You need information on varieties suited to specific soil, climate and resistant to local pests and diseases and drought, and the question isn't going to gain useful results without more specificity- ie, "best" for what. The advice that comes up in Google offers information primarily aimed at amateur summer gardeners in northern climates trying to grow tasty summer vegetables, rather than equatorial hardy macro-nutrient providing staples. It takes some serious google-fu to arrive at results that are probably useful to this questioner, and you don't get them by entering his question verbatim. When I started Googling things like "bean equatorial resistant hybrid -cocoa -coffee" I started getting some interesting results, but it would still take a while to sort through that stuff and come up with real information on what beans are best-bets wherever he lives. I can't imagine him ending up with useful information off of this Google phone line though. It takes an experienced researcher to find this stuff on Google.
For this sort of thing, the best thing you could probably do with Google is figure out who he should actually be talking to. That is, I Googled "helping african farmers," which led me to Farm Africa. There's probably someone working for them who he could talk to who could really help him out.
This is just one example I went in depth on, but most of the questions are of this nature. For the questions that can be answered easily online, it seems like nine out of ten, the answer is on Wikipedia. I think these people are envisioning the internet as being much more organized, authoritative, and encyclopedic than it is. They have very practical questions, as might be expected from rural, undeveloped areas, and Google is not well designed to provide them with answers to many of them. I wonder to what extent these operators might have already been trained, or might be additionally trained, to hook these people up with non-Google provided information. From what I'm seeing, a huge number of questions could be answered much more effectively if there were any way to provide these people with access to briefly speak to a doctor (or at least a nurse or someone who can answer basic health questions) or an agricultural specialist.
Do you not care at all what the people living there want?
You accuse other slashdotters of having a "missionary complex" and say "you should just leave them the fuck alone."
So, it doesn't matter to you at all what the people living in these places think? If they ask for our help, we should refuse? They might want our help, and we might want to help them, but no, Simonetta knows what's best for all the undeveloped areas of the world, and he says we should "leave them the fuck alone." In addition to technology, I suppose that includes other aid, like trying to dig wells to provide them with clean water? Their ancestor's children have been dying of dysentery for millennia, so we should stop trying to inflict our western anti-dysentery views upon them?
You say "why would anyone in the distant backward village want to go on the internet?" I don't know. Why don't you try using the link to go look at all the questions they're asking.
Unlike missionaries, no one is going into their villages and telling them they are going to burn in hell forever if they don't do such-and-such. They aren't trying to re-arrange their society and seize control and displace their traditions. They're just putting the phone there for them to use. If the locals don't want to use it, they don't have to. But they are using it. I suppose, though, that you know what's better for them, and it's good for your country to move ahead technologically, and learn new information, but that people in other countries are wrong to want to learn new information and use new technologies, and we should take them away from them and not let them use them? Because it's our responsibility to leave other people alone, and not offer to help other people if they're from different cultures?
Our ancestors got my just fine for thousands of years without smartphones too. Do you wish Apple and RIM would just "leave us the fuck alone" and stop pushing their newfangled technology on us?
What OS are you running? Is there some reason you can't keep a "guest" account with few privileges and no access to any of your personal data, and just log into the guest account before you hand them the machine?
The answer of using different user accounts for different users when you want to have multiple people using the same machine strikes me as so obvious, it makes me wonder if I'm misreading the question?
I'm sure this is a prank. Since this is generating bad publicity for the DHS, they will probably catch the person who put these stickers on the urinals after reviewing the video from the real, covert hidden cameras they have covering the urinals.
I agree. Furthermore, Mark Shuttleworth is looking at this wrong. Don't think of WINE as "Linux=Windows," think of WINE as "grandfathering in." Think of it the way Apple used PPC/68K Fat Binaries to transition to PPC, used The Classic Environment to transition to OSX, and used Rosetta to transfer to x86. The difference is that Apple was working to transition their own user base, and Linux would use WINE to transition somebody else's installed user base- Microsoft's. A full featured WINE doesn't make Linux into Windows any more than Parallels or VMWare turns Linux into Windows. I don't think Shuttleworth would complain about either of those products somehow corrupting the Linux ecosystem. WINE just achieves something similar in a more seamless, less expensive, less resource intensive, and non-Microsoft supporting way.
If Linux distributions (and Apple) want to gain massive market share, the huge obstacle to overcome isn't surpassing the quality of Windows (if it were, Amiga and Be would be on top), it's getting around lock-in with Windows' peerlessly massive software base. If Ubuntu (and OSX) shipped with near-flawless implementations of WINE, Windows users would flee in droves.
Sorry, I couldn't Google up a link, and it's from a TV show on skiing on the TV at a ski resort about seven years ago. So no, I have no idea how authoritative it is. They were talking about the future of skiing, and they noted that there's probably a big future in snowmaking and possibly in chemicals that increase freezing temperature, because average snowfall at ski resorts worldwide had been declining for some time, and they had a graph. They DID note that Colorado was doing fine, along with, I think, New Zealand, but I remember they said that the southern parts of the Alps- France, Spain, Italy- had a lot of resorts with really dramatically reduced snowfall, along with declines in Australia, and that South America wasn't doing so well either (I remember wondering how much skiing there was in South America to begin with.) They neglected to mention the midwest, where I know that Mad River Mountain in Ohio has records of dramatically less natural snowfall on average over the last 50 years or so, but Holiday Valley in New York had pretty decent average increases over the past 25 years or so. Anyway, sorry I can't source it, it would be interesting to see a chart aggregating long-term natural snowfall records from ski resorts around the world.
The only slightly relevant bit I found online is here, an article which makes a bunch of predictions with little data, but did have the following bit of actual data:
"Looking at states that typically get snow, 187 of 260 weather stations have reported fewer days with snowfall since 1948," said Oak Ridge meteorologist Dale Kaiser. The decrease in snow days has been especially pronounced east of the Mississippi River, he said, which is where most of America's low-elevation ski areas are located. The trend toward fewer snow days has been most pronounced in the Northeast, but many weather stations in the West showed increases in snow.
I'd like to note that there's nothing inconsistent about the TV show I saw, the data you provide, and this last bit of data. And anyway, my whole point was that snowfall is increasing in some areas and decreasing in others, so it doesn't make sense to claim that increased snowfall or icepack in some one location proves a net climate trend. Climate is complex enough that it's even possible that globally increasing snowfall could be consistent with warming or vice versa. I don't know the answer, I was trying to point out uncertainty and that this data is interesting in itself, but not a convincing bit of information regarding larger climate trends.
Slashdot Mirror
As a photographer, I've been a fan of Snowflake Bentley for a long time.
His contemporary counterpart is Ken Libbrecht.
So, all Amazon needs to do is add a text-to-speech feature, and then they can sue any school that tries to use paper books instead of the Kindle, because compared to a text-to-speech Kindle, paper devices discriminate against students with vision problems.
I don't think you're going to help attract a lot of talented engineers by changing the nomenclature to the "'Engineering Deptartment."
That aside, I think "Software Engineer," "Software Architect," "Analyst," "Lead Developer," and such are common titles for people who are creating things with software, as opposed to "IT's" tech-support implications.
Practically every discussion of a public company on Slashdot includes a highly rated comment claiming that public companies are obligated to abuse their customers. This is only the case if abusing customers is demonstrably conducive to long term profitability. If abusing one's own customers is bad for long-term profitability, then going public more nearly creates a fiduciary responsibility not to abuse customers.
Companies have a lot of leeway in deciding what will maximize profitability. Some companies keep their customer's data private, provide excellent customer service, and work hard to ensure quality. Others do the opposite. Neither is compulsory to being a public company, and if one wanted to argue it one way or the other, it's always seemed to me that, on average, the companies that treat their customers well do the best in the long term.
Some executives (SCO) manage to do shady things that achieve a short-term stock boost where they can cash-out, at the expense of long-term performance. That's an example of acting against their fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders, which is to ensure long-term stock growth, not a bumpy ride to failure.
When I mentioned the idea of contact-lens displays in a comment one year ago, I referred to them as "the magical world of tomorrow." I guess the future is coming sooner than I thought.
You know what other evidence they could use to demonstrate that he "has a brain disorder?"
The fact that he raped an murdered a 10-year old girl.
It's not like any goody-two-shoes Ned Flanders type falls to temptation and suddenly rapes and murders little children. Whether the underlying reasons are cultural (abuse) or physical (brain damage), anyone who does this sort of thing is severely defective. For some reason, courts seem to take it that if the defense can show any reason why the crime was committed, then that's a reason why the person shouldn't be convicted.
Well, there's always a reason "why" when someone's totally screwed up. There will always be something that differentiates them from regular people who would sooner give their life to stop someone from perpetrating such acts than to commit them themselves. Finding the cause may be useful for treatment or deterrence or finding similar psychopaths and stopping them, but it's not a reason why the perpetrator shouldn't be convicted.
Yeah, the title shouldn't be "Why Doesn't Exercise Lead To Weight Loss?" it should be "People Lose Weight Exactly As Expected."
It takes a deficit of about 3,500 calories to lose a pound - so in 84 days they average a deficit of (7 x 3500 = 24,500 / 84 =) about 300 calories per day.
The abstract says they were doing aerobic exercise 5 times a week trying to burn off 500 calories per session- that's 5 times a week x 5 weeks x 500 calories = a 30,000 calories deficit, which would be a maximum expected weight loss of... surprise surprise... 30,000/3.500 = 8.5 lbs. So throw in factors like that it's hard to really control people's diets that closely and some people probably managed to up consumption at least a little, to lowered resting metabolism in conjunction with weight loss, to muscle gain displacing fat loss in conjunction with decreased exercise, and I'd think someone was being totally unrealistic if they expected these people to lose any more than an average of 7 lbs each. I mean, trying to estimate from the math ahead of time, that's almost exactly what a dietitian or personal trainer would be likely to estimate for that exercise regimen and maintaining the same diet. The headline is in direct contradiction to the results. It's like dropping something, clocking it accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2, and running the headline "Why Doesn't Gravity Work Anymore?"
Hey, 7 pounds in 12 weeks, keep doing it for 2 years, that's about 56 lbs. Do it for however long you need to to achieve a healthy weight, then you can cut your exercise regimen back some and maintain for the rest of your life. If it were quick and easy, you wouldn't see so many obese people around.
For the actual very top level, like the Olympics, that may be the case, but in general, he's got the cause and effect chain right. I know a girl who in high school was really overweight and dumpy, then in college she started running and eventually lost about 80 lbs, joined the college track and cross-country teams, and became a ranked women's runner in the state. Apparently she had an aptitude for running, but never the less, her previous sedentary high-calorie lifestyle had left her in poor shape, and a lot of hard work put her into great shape.
Maybe the very top competitive runners in the world could only reach that status due to genetics PLUS tons of hard work, I think the jury's still out on what the contributions of each are. Surely not just anyone could be an olympic runner by working really hard, because lots and lots of runners who work really hard can't make the Olympics. But if you're talking about just being in good shape vs. being fat, ANYBODY, short of people with certain diseases and similar constraints, could be thin and strong and in good cardiovascular condition if they just ate enough less and exercised enough more for long enough. Likewise, any Olympic runner or other athlete could be fat and unhealthy by sitting around eating all day.
Certainly some people have a much easier time of it than others, but I know people who are obese and in terrible health who actually have a hard time putting on weight but absolutely stuff themselves like gluttons nearly continuously, people who eat more calories at dinner than I eat in a day, almost always of terrible food, and who drink almost as many calories again each day in soda as I consume all together. (Seriosuly - a "blooming onion appetizer with dip, 16oz steak with baked potato with sour cream, a 16 oz Coke, bread and butter, and a slice of cheese cake for dessert is over 3,000 calories - I eat about 2,000 a day, and 4 liters of Coke a day is 1,690 calories.) I also know people who put on weight very easily, but who keep themselves under 2,000 calories a day, with lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grains and such, and exercise regularly, who are thin and fit. People who often WANT to eat more, but don't. People have a tremendous amount of control over their weight, which most choose not to bother with.
That's absolutely right though, there have been reports of "unintended acceleration" in cars as long as there have been cars, and the problem is caused by a person accidentally pressing the gas when intending to press the brake, and then instead of recognizing the error, flooring the car by pressing what they still believe to be the brake to the floor to counter the "unintended acceleration" they are experiencing.
A friend of mine suffered a serious brain injury when an old lady plowed into a crowd of students at a bus stop at high velocity. She claimed she was a victim of a spontaneous acceleration malfunction in the car, but the people on the scene who helped her out of her car said her foot was still flooring the gas when they opened the door, well after she ran over everybody. The front end was off the ground from hitting a low wall, so the wheels were just spinning, the engine racing.
So at the time, I did a lot of looking into "spontaneous" or "unintended" acceleration disorders, and here are some things I found:
- Despite a lot of lawsuits and accident investigations, there were no instances of lawsuits over "unintended acceleration" problems where any mechanic, engineer, or other inspector could find any physical cause for such machine-actuated acceleration when examining the vehicles after the accidents.
- While geography, weather, traffic conditions, etc. varied tremendously across different accident that were blamed on "unintended acceleration," there was a very strong correlation that the age of the drivers involved tended to be much higher than average.
- Cases of "unintended acceleration" occur across all makes and all models, but there is a concentration among Buick, Lincoln, Cadillac, Audi - cars favored by older drivers.
- In cars with "black box" crash-data recorders involved in "unintended acceleration" accidents, despite almost unanimous claims by the operators that the car accelerated despite them fully depressing the brake pedal, the black box did not record any push on the brake pedal at all- just flooring the accelerator.
- In 1989 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigated and released a report on unintended acceleration accidents, which found no evidence that any of them were due to anything other than operator error.
Maybe there's some new engineering problem with Toyotas that actually causes this, and I wouldn't place any bets on how lawsuits will turn out. But I'd sure bet you've hit the nail on the head with your PEBAAC idea regarding the true cause. Now that it's in the news, there are bound to be a lot more cases reported.
That was exactly my thought- I started to put that sort of information in my previous message, but then realized I didn't have time to keep Slashdotting then and just cut it out and posted what I had.
I thought an existing charity network might have a great chance at this- say, The Salvation Army. Officially notify workers, plus put up a website to recruit volunteers, and they can help reduce sabotage because, come on, the money's going to The Salvation Army. How many people are going to actively sabotage charity fundraising in the hopes of taking the money for themselves? Probably not a whole lot.
I also think there's a "game-theory compliant" way to organize this with proper incentives through high-feedback Ebay accounts bidding on auctions for the information. I have the gist of it, but don't have time to type it out and haven't exactly worked out all the details yet. It leverages a huge, established, diverse network of trust to create a system with the right incentives to form a contest group where each person who is the first to correctly add the location of a balloon can feel reasonably certain that, if their team wins, they'll see their share of the $40k. One big remaining uknown in this method, though, is that I can't figure out whether or not DARPA's going to announce who the winner is. If they don't, if you can win anonymously, it may be impossible to build this sort of network, because the winner could always claim they hadn't won and not pay out.
The DARPA Network Challenge explores the unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve tough problems.
That is, it's not about disparate strangers coordinating quickly, as might be useful in, say, a natural crisis like an earthquake or hurricane or missing child, but networks of social trust. If they just wanted to see how fast people could put together an ad hoc information network, I bet they'd get less wrong answers submitted and the right answer submitted much sooner if there were no prize involved - people would be free with the information because it would just be a game. There'd be no incentive for deception or secrecy.
I'm guessing DARPA doesn't care about that. That's why they've got $40k on the line- not to promote communication, but to promote disinformation. They don't want to know who can build a network with modern technology, they want to know how people will build a network of trust when there's a serious incentive for betrayal.
Apple's never going to implement this.
It's part of a sneaky, long-term strategy. Apple will enter some sort of intellectual property quarrel with Microsoft, which will be resolved through cross-licensing and the transfer of some patents... including transferring this one to MS. With something this evil placed right in their hands, can MS actually abstain from using it?
Yeah, I came up with 2^10 per prefix, then kilo-mega-giga-tera is 4 prefixes so 4x10=40, plus 3 powers to get us from bits to bytes, = 2^43 for a terabyte... which yields exactly your answer. I have no idea what feat of "I'm in a hurry" cut-and-past calculator usage led me to paste in that 2^43= 1x10^15. "Slightly off," only three orders of magnitude.
Anyway, the error actually hurt my argument. The point stands that if we're supposed to be impressed that they've found a high density storage medium without means to mass produce, interface with computers, or read and write, then nature's already provided us with something much more impressive.
I found an even more impressive material, and I can already manufacture it myself in bulk.
.62 micrograms per terabyte.
Each base of DNA can be AGT or C, so that's 2 bits worth of data per base pair.
A terabyte = 1.1259E+15 bits, so a terabyte of DNA is 5.6295E+14 base pairs.
For mass, [5.6295E+14 base pairs] x [660 daltons per base pair] = [3.71547E+17 daltons] = 6.169686786411827E-7 grams =
That's smaller than my fingernail by a pretty good margin. In fact, my actual fingernail already contains maybe a petabyte of storage.
Unlike their new super material, I've already developed (well, OK, discovered. Well, no, read about other people discovering) techniques for reading, writing, and copying data with this storage medium.
However, like them, I haven't worked out any computer interface yet.
For reference:
DeSadeski: The fools... the mad fools. ... I'm afraid I don't understand something, Alexiy. Is the Premier threatening to explode this if our planes carry out their attack? ... But, how is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically, and at the same time impossible to untrigger? ... Yes, but the... whole point of the doomsday machine... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
Muffley: What's happened?
DeSadeski: The doomsday machine.
Muffley: The doomsday machine? What is that?
DeSadeski: A device which will destroy all human and animal life on earth.
Muffley: All human and animal life?
DeSadeski: No sir. It is not a thing a sane man would do. The doomsday machine is designed to trigger itself automatically.
Muffley: But surely you can disarm it somehow.
DeSadeski: No. It is designed to explode if any attempt is ever made to untrigger it.
Muffley: Automatically?
Strangelove: Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That is the whole idea of this machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the fear to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision making process which rules out human meddling, the doomsday machine is terrifying. It's simple to understand. And completely credible, and convincing.
Turgidson: Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines, Stainsy.
Muffley: But this is fantastic, Strangelove. How can it be triggered automatically?
Strangelove: Well, it's remarkably simple to do that. When you merely wish to bury bombs, there is no limit to the size. After that they are connected to a gigantic complex of computers. Now then, a specific and clearly defined set of circumstances, under which the bombs are to be exploded, is programmed into a tape memory bank.
Every keyboard I've ever used has been pressure sensitive. They need a different name for this.
With precedent, I suggest "keyboard col piano e forte."
I hope they didn't patent this. If they did, there's prior art. I mean, aside from pianos. With manual typewriters, when the ribbon got old, the harder you pressed, the darker the character.
"implanted medical devices"
I don't get it. Who wants to inject mud into their veins?
For example,
2295. what are the best varieties of beans to plant
This is the sort of thing that, traditionally, first-world countries have bureaus of agriculture, county extension services, and agriculture departments at local learning institutions that help farmers with this tricky question. You need information on varieties suited to specific soil, climate and resistant to local pests and diseases and drought, and the question isn't going to gain useful results without more specificity- ie, "best" for what. The advice that comes up in Google offers information primarily aimed at amateur summer gardeners in northern climates trying to grow tasty summer vegetables, rather than equatorial hardy macro-nutrient providing staples. It takes some serious google-fu to arrive at results that are probably useful to this questioner, and you don't get them by entering his question verbatim. When I started Googling things like "bean equatorial resistant hybrid -cocoa -coffee" I started getting some interesting results, but it would still take a while to sort through that stuff and come up with real information on what beans are best-bets wherever he lives. I can't imagine him ending up with useful information off of this Google phone line though. It takes an experienced researcher to find this stuff on Google.
For this sort of thing, the best thing you could probably do with Google is figure out who he should actually be talking to. That is, I Googled "helping african farmers," which led me to Farm Africa. There's probably someone working for them who he could talk to who could really help him out.
This is just one example I went in depth on, but most of the questions are of this nature. For the questions that can be answered easily online, it seems like nine out of ten, the answer is on Wikipedia. I think these people are envisioning the internet as being much more organized, authoritative, and encyclopedic than it is. They have very practical questions, as might be expected from rural, undeveloped areas, and Google is not well designed to provide them with answers to many of them. I wonder to what extent these operators might have already been trained, or might be additionally trained, to hook these people up with non-Google provided information. From what I'm seeing, a huge number of questions could be answered much more effectively if there were any way to provide these people with access to briefly speak to a doctor (or at least a nurse or someone who can answer basic health questions) or an agricultural specialist.
Do you not care at all what the people living there want?
You accuse other slashdotters of having a "missionary complex" and say "you should just leave them the fuck alone."
So, it doesn't matter to you at all what the people living in these places think? If they ask for our help, we should refuse? They might want our help, and we might want to help them, but no, Simonetta knows what's best for all the undeveloped areas of the world, and he says we should "leave them the fuck alone." In addition to technology, I suppose that includes other aid, like trying to dig wells to provide them with clean water? Their ancestor's children have been dying of dysentery for millennia, so we should stop trying to inflict our western anti-dysentery views upon them?
You say "why would anyone in the distant backward village want to go on the internet?" I don't know. Why don't you try using the link to go look at all the questions they're asking.
Unlike missionaries, no one is going into their villages and telling them they are going to burn in hell forever if they don't do such-and-such. They aren't trying to re-arrange their society and seize control and displace their traditions. They're just putting the phone there for them to use. If the locals don't want to use it, they don't have to. But they are using it. I suppose, though, that you know what's better for them, and it's good for your country to move ahead technologically, and learn new information, but that people in other countries are wrong to want to learn new information and use new technologies, and we should take them away from them and not let them use them? Because it's our responsibility to leave other people alone, and not offer to help other people if they're from different cultures?
Our ancestors got my just fine for thousands of years without smartphones too. Do you wish Apple and RIM would just "leave us the fuck alone" and stop pushing their newfangled technology on us?
Exactly what I was thinking.
.62 micrograms per terabyte.
DNA weighs an average of about 660 daltons per base pair.
Each base can be AGT or C, so that's 2 bits worth of data per base pair.
A terabyte = 1.1259E+15 bits, so a terabyte of DNA is 5.6295E+14 base pairs.
so [5.6295E+14 base pairs] x [660 daltons per base pair] = [3.71547E+17 daltons] = 6.169686786411827E-7 grams =
Plus, the weight of DNA/RNA per byte hasn't changed at all since the dawn of life on earth, much less 1980.
What? Crunch berries aren't real fruit!
Guess I'll be switching to Franken Berry.
What OS are you running? Is there some reason you can't keep a "guest" account with few privileges and no access to any of your personal data, and just log into the guest account before you hand them the machine?
The answer of using different user accounts for different users when you want to have multiple people using the same machine strikes me as so obvious, it makes me wonder if I'm misreading the question?
I'm sure this is a prank. Since this is generating bad publicity for the DHS, they will probably catch the person who put these stickers on the urinals after reviewing the video from the real, covert hidden cameras they have covering the urinals.
I agree. Furthermore, Mark Shuttleworth is looking at this wrong. Don't think of WINE as "Linux=Windows," think of WINE as "grandfathering in." Think of it the way Apple used PPC/68K Fat Binaries to transition to PPC, used The Classic Environment to transition to OSX, and used Rosetta to transfer to x86. The difference is that Apple was working to transition their own user base, and Linux would use WINE to transition somebody else's installed user base- Microsoft's. A full featured WINE doesn't make Linux into Windows any more than Parallels or VMWare turns Linux into Windows. I don't think Shuttleworth would complain about either of those products somehow corrupting the Linux ecosystem. WINE just achieves something similar in a more seamless, less expensive, less resource intensive, and non-Microsoft supporting way.
If Linux distributions (and Apple) want to gain massive market share, the huge obstacle to overcome isn't surpassing the quality of Windows (if it were, Amiga and Be would be on top), it's getting around lock-in with Windows' peerlessly massive software base. If Ubuntu (and OSX) shipped with near-flawless implementations of WINE, Windows users would flee in droves.
The only slightly relevant bit I found online is here, an article which makes a bunch of predictions with little data, but did have the following bit of actual data:
"Looking at states that typically get snow, 187 of 260 weather stations have reported fewer days with snowfall since 1948," said Oak Ridge meteorologist Dale Kaiser. The decrease in snow days has been especially pronounced east of the Mississippi River, he said, which is where most of America's low-elevation ski areas are located. The trend toward fewer snow days has been most pronounced in the Northeast, but many weather stations in the West showed increases in snow.
I'd like to note that there's nothing inconsistent about the TV show I saw, the data you provide, and this last bit of data. And anyway, my whole point was that snowfall is increasing in some areas and decreasing in others, so it doesn't make sense to claim that increased snowfall or icepack in some one location proves a net climate trend. Climate is complex enough that it's even possible that globally increasing snowfall could be consistent with warming or vice versa. I don't know the answer, I was trying to point out uncertainty and that this data is interesting in itself, but not a convincing bit of information regarding larger climate trends.