Oh... I get it now. I was trying to understand why suddenly bash and some of the Ubuntu pieces were suddenly supported on Windows. So, since you can easily get access to all your real Linux tools and suchlike (or will eventually) there's actually no reason at all to complain that you can't install the OS - just run it on Windows.
All that "Developers want access to their tools" blather explaining why MS decided to create the layer that allows Linux code to run just didn't seem convincing. This must have been the goal all along. I think this time it just might stick. Oh well. I'm not a gamer or video editor, so I suspect that when it's time for me to replace my current laptop, there'll be a reasonably speced ARM solution so I won't really notice. I already said "Goodby" to Microsoft, I guess it will soon be time to say the same to Intel.
I guess I misunderstood TFA. Didn't FTC hold a $50,000 challenge in 2013 and award a prize?
I immediately attempted to set this up at my house but of course ATT didn't implement the third party ring feature which is the central requirement. Funny thing...
Oh well. We have an answering machine, anyone who calls is welcome to use it. All the phones have their ringers off. We get about 20 calls a day, and about 2 messages a week. I wonder who all the other calls are from?
Around Thanksgiving, the Linux Voice podcast had a "find of the fortnight" about a small, cheap Bluetooth 4.0 module that can easily be added to an existing system. The card is designated KRC 86B, and a raw board is about $10. As a raw board, there is programming in place that handles everything you need to send audio from your phone and the board has audio in and out all configured. I think they are the same ones that are used for Bluetooth connections in new cars these days.
Bare boards have soldering pads, but no connectors. I paid a bit more for one ($14) that already had all the connectors attached - all I did was provide micro-USB power, and connect to my receiver with a standard audio miniplug. Pair and play!
There are tutorials all over the place on how to gracefully integrate these things into your existing box, but mine's just dangling out front. Despite the simplicity and low cost, the sound is excellent! Don't take my word for it, they're about $10, just do it!
OK, the first millimeter of skin is our tissue target then. It would have been nice if the nature of the cancer in the cluster had been included - anything not involving the epidermis may well be a direct consequence of the common employment of the group, but I would start my search for the culprit by eliminating the scanners, unless their cancers are in the first millimeter.
BTW, the Johns Hopkins paper DID indicate there was a SIGNIFICANT exposure risk (even based on the 'wrong' standard) posed by these scanners... You just have to be upstairs somewhere, not on the ground level.
Don't get me wrong - I am in no way a fan of scanners, I just hope people will pay attention and think while they are reading. Then if a real objection arises, they will not have wasted time and spent their credibility on non-issues.
OP says that the letter says it "questions whether it is even safe to stand near an operating scanner, let alone inside one."
Um, helps to read the fine linked document, which has been partially redacted, but still says "Individual effective dose per screening (frontal and rear) of a subject is , less than the 10 urem (0.10 uSv) limit. Further down a standard (NCRP 1993) is quoted which "recommends that members of the general public receive less than 1 mSv (0.1 rem) per year."
So, if these numbers are compared (who knows if they are reproducible) you are considered safe up to about 10,000 scans per year (1 mSv / 0.10 uSv).
The document does indicate there is a potential danger from X-ray beam overshoot "above and behind" the scanner. Yes, but note in the diagram this area BEGINS at 13.8 FEET above the ground, and RISES IN A CONE!!! So, you may be at risk if you're about 14 feet tall (or work in an office on the second floor?) standing behind the machine...
When I >need something like a PDF reader, even for Windows, I often go to freshmeat.net first. There are many more solutions there that are functional in Windows than you might think.
In this case, I typed "PDF suite" into a Wikipedia search box, and ended up on the Foxit Reader page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxit_Reader) which contains this sentence:
"Foxit Phantom PDF Suite is a complete suite of PDF editing and creation software." complete with a link to their web site.
In general, though, it is not trivial to determine who can be trusted, and to determine where an obscure application came from.
Interesting. I had a 1986 Ford Taurus wagon that had the mechanics thinking it needed a new cpu module, and I swear that it they showed me something flat, black and squarish under the hood. I thought it was on the forward side of the engine block, but that was a long time ago, and my memory has more holes than swiss cheese.
Did anybody stop to consider the possibility of collateral damage? Aside from beloved portable electronics, what about a hostage with a pacemaker? We don't want to disable that device do we? And to penetrate the body of the car (which side of the engine block are these microprocessors located on, anyway?) they're probably generating a pretty significant pulse.
My cable provider is Cox, and they are in the process of moving to some kind of switched digital provisioning system, with the consequence that CableCards don't work any more. So to get any non-clear content, one now either needs a DVR or cable box. They evidently have a workaround device for Tivo, but this is not going to help me use my CableCard in my TV.
I can't tell if anyone in a low-modded comment suggested this, but how about the Hauppauge HD-PVR? http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html Have yet to buy one, mainly because I don't think the machine I'm using is fast enough to keep up, but it looks like it should work until component video connectors go away.
Despite over 700 replies to this point, I don't think anyone mentioned West End theatres http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_End_theatre/ or alternatively http://wikitravel.org/en/London/West_End/. It's been a while since I was in London, but we discovered that a half-hour before showtime, there were deeply discounted tickets available to shows trying to fill the house. We had a great time going to whatever was available. Definitely worth a shot, since as everyone else has noted, you should try not too plan too much, and just go for it.
Have a great trip!
Actually, the levels >were over dangerous levels. Admittedly, not fatal. Fun fact: they first identified the problem when a patient (victim?) reported losing his hair after the scan. The follow up LA Times article today says that when the hospital contacted the 206 patients, 80% reported losing hair after their scans. That's pretty serious exposure.
Oh, another fun detail: the dose administered IS DISPLAYED ON THE FRONT PANEL AFTER THE SCAN!!! In 18 months, nobody ever questioned why the level was so high. If the machine delivers the dose according to the program, it must be right, evidently...
Silly me. I read the question, and assumed there would be responses about specific institutions.
My daughter is a senior at the University of Redlands. As far as I know, they have no official support for Linux, but she has been aggressively pro-Linux since high school (I made sure I sent her off to school able to dual-boot to WinXP, but on the rare occasions when that might be useful, I have to remind her she can). There have been a couple of situations in which she has needed help from the campus IT folks, and there has always been someone Linux-savvy available.
And her on-campus networking experience has been uneventful. While we helping her move back in last weekend, one Windows user complained to me about the spyware the campus network requires him to run - my daughter does not seem to need that, her system "just works". Her main complaint about the campus network is that they throttle the dorm traffic pretty severely...
I seem to remember in the early days of the web, there was a graphics format called GIF. Somebody like Unisys held a patent on the format, but initially didn't seem to care that most Web users didn't realize there was a patent. Then, one day, Unisys woke up, changed their attitude and announced that licenses would be needed from now on - several thousand dollars? Almost overnight, PNG was born. So, I guess in a sense, IBM has a point - patents lead to open source development. However, they neglect to mention that in cases like ReportLab (makes a Free/Paid Support PDF generator library in Python) a sudden change in licensing policy might result in innovation at the expense of existing innovators.
Patents are a valuable part of a thriving commercial system, and there are obvious benefits from patent law. But I think there are also significant benefits from patent-free zones. The trick is to figure out how to maintain the balance to ensure fairness, and enable benefits from both patented innovation and patent-free innovation.
Hate to burst anyone's bubble, but way back in the late '80s, the Feds were confiscating money in Dade County, FL if they found traces of cocaine on it, based on a theory that only money related to active drug dealing would be contaminated. For reasons I never understood, the task of calling them on this idiocy fell to the Coroner's office. They collected money of all denominations from cities around the US and a few foreign locations (I recall one was London). Their criterion for identifying cocaine was GC/MS analysis. Their summary result was that all US paper currency tested except "SOME" brand new bills fresh from banks were contaminated with identifiable cocaine. I read that as well over 90%. I was finally able to Google a legitimate reference to this information.
Please focus on the last two paragraphs.
From a Los Angeles Times article dated 1994 (http://articles.latimes.com/1994-11-13/local/me-62172_1_drug-money?pg=1):
"In its decision, the appeals court relied on uncontradicted evidence that more than three of every four bills circulating in Los Angeles were tainted with drug residue.
That evidence was provided by Ojai-based forensic toxicologist Jay B. Williams, who said he had done numerous studies since 1982 that turned up drugs on samples of $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills taken from throughout the West--from banks, casinos, stores and restaurants.
Williams, who has specialized in drug and alcohol tests for 27 years, said last week that the percentage of contaminated bills ranged from 15% in Bozeman, Mont., to a little more than 75% in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
The bills he tested contained quantities of cocaine as small as a nanogram, meaning one-billionth of a gram, to as much as a milligram, one-thousandth of a gram.
Williams' tests are consistent with other research nationwide. In one study, Florida researchers analyzed 135 bills gathered randomly from cities around the United States; all but four tested positive for cocaine.
One of those researchers, Lee Hearn, now the chief toxicologist for the medical examiner's office in Dade County, Fla., said: "The only bills that didn't have contamination were crisp new ones that had limited circulation, if any at all." "
No disrespect intended, but who said this was news? The spleen has been described as an overgrown lymph node (the place where white blood cells are born um, perhaps the whole 'lymphocyte' name thing comes to mind?) for decades. Maybe the discovery that they get mobilized when the body suffers major trauma is new, but I doubt it.
If I'm not mistaken (although I often am, sorry in advance) Cox has been doing this for months now, and nobody posted anything about that. If I 'typo' a URL at home, when connected via my (or my neighbor's) Cox cablemodem, I get a Verisign page indicating that www.whateveriswas.com is Under Construction.
Is this not muchly the same thing??
It pisses me off, but not enough to hunt down a better alternative.
0. IANAL. You might want to discuss some of this *with* a lawyer.
1. School principals are "peace officers"
2. When you deliver you child to school (in this case to the school bus that picks her up), you have transferred custody of your child to the school. The school is responsibe for the safety and well-being of all the children in their custody in a very specific and technical way under the law.
3. When you pick up your child, the school is transferring their custody back to you. This is why you have to sign him/her out formally when something like a doctor's appointment interrupts the school day. I'm not entirely sure how the bus fits in at this end, but while on the bus, your child is still in the school's custody.
You need to help your local 'peace officer' recognize and apply appropriate resources to solving their very real custody problem.
IANAL. YMMV. I'm glad your particular incident ended well. But consider the public service you would be doing while helping this school to prevent a far more serious incident.
Philip K Dick is my favorite science fiction author. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (um, the source for the Blade Runner screenplay) is among his very best books. And I thought Blade Runner was amazing, even though they had to leave out far more of the book than they left in.
In an aside to the audience on her Miles of Aisles live album, Joni Mitchell says to the audience, "Nobody ever said to Picasso, 'Paint A Starry Night again, man!'..." Different instantiations of a good story are different. Try to keep an open mind.
If you're looking for a high concentration of physicists with a history of openness and demonstrable experience with FOSS, why not try CERN? Didn't Tim Berners-Lee create the World Wide Web in order to facilitate collaboration amongst really large, geographically scattered groups working on high-energy physics projects?
I guess back in the day, they couldn't find any commercial projects that would do the job...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh... I get it now. I was trying to understand why suddenly bash and some of the Ubuntu pieces were suddenly supported on Windows. So, since you can easily get access to all your real Linux tools and suchlike (or will eventually) there's actually no reason at all to complain that you can't install the OS - just run it on Windows.
All that "Developers want access to their tools" blather explaining why MS decided to create the layer that allows Linux code to run just didn't seem convincing. This must have been the goal all along. I think this time it just might stick. Oh well. I'm not a gamer or video editor, so I suspect that when it's time for me to replace my current laptop, there'll be a reasonably speced ARM solution so I won't really notice. I already said "Goodby" to Microsoft, I guess it will soon be time to say the same to Intel.
I guess I misunderstood TFA. Didn't FTC hold a $50,000 challenge in 2013 and award a prize?
I immediately attempted to set this up at my house but of course ATT didn't implement the third party ring feature which is the central requirement. Funny thing...
Oh well. We have an answering machine, anyone who calls is welcome to use it. All the phones have their ringers off. We get about 20 calls a day, and about 2 messages a week. I wonder who all the other calls are from?
Around Thanksgiving, the Linux Voice podcast had a "find of the fortnight" about a small, cheap Bluetooth 4.0 module that can easily be added to an existing system. The card is designated KRC 86B, and a raw board is about $10. As a raw board, there is programming in place that handles everything you need to send audio from your phone and the board has audio in and out all configured. I think they are the same ones that are used for Bluetooth connections in new cars these days.
Bare boards have soldering pads, but no connectors. I paid a bit more for one ($14) that already had all the connectors attached - all I did was provide micro-USB power, and connect to my receiver with a standard audio miniplug. Pair and play!
There are tutorials all over the place on how to gracefully integrate these things into your existing box, but mine's just dangling out front. Despite the simplicity and low cost, the sound is excellent! Don't take my word for it, they're about $10, just do it!
Um, if you think that copyrighting/trademarking a common word is reaching, what about color?
I don't have links for the recent decision over red soles on women's shoes, nor the company in Germany that trademarked the color blue, but how about this item from 1995, in which Justice Breyer decided that companies DO have the right to trademark colors: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1995-03-29/news/1995088024_1_color-trademark-protection-pink
Compared to that, a simple little thing like trademarking a common word is pretty tame.
OK, the first millimeter of skin is our tissue target then. It would have been nice if the nature of the cancer in the cluster had been included - anything not involving the epidermis may well be a direct consequence of the common employment of the group, but I would start my search for the culprit by eliminating the scanners, unless their cancers are in the first millimeter.
BTW, the Johns Hopkins paper DID indicate there was a SIGNIFICANT exposure risk (even based on the 'wrong' standard) posed by these scanners... You just have to be upstairs somewhere, not on the ground level.
Don't get me wrong - I am in no way a fan of scanners, I just hope people will pay attention and think while they are reading. Then if a real objection arises, they will not have wasted time and spent their credibility on non-issues.
OP says that the letter says it "questions whether it is even safe to stand near an operating scanner, let alone inside one."
Um, helps to read the fine linked document, which has been partially redacted, but still says "Individual effective dose per screening (frontal and rear) of a subject is , less than the 10 urem (0.10 uSv) limit. Further down a standard (NCRP 1993) is quoted which "recommends that members of the general public receive less than 1 mSv (0.1 rem) per year."
So, if these numbers are compared (who knows if they are reproducible) you are considered safe up to about 10,000 scans per year (1 mSv / 0.10 uSv).
The document does indicate there is a potential danger from X-ray beam overshoot "above and behind" the scanner. Yes, but note in the diagram this area BEGINS at 13.8 FEET above the ground, and RISES IN A CONE!!! So, you may be at risk if you're about 14 feet tall (or work in an office on the second floor?) standing behind the machine...
You know those WiFi-sensitive T-Shirts from ThinkGeek? Maybe it's time for something that responds to X-radiation...
When I >need something like a PDF reader, even for Windows, I often go to freshmeat.net first. There are many more solutions there that are functional in Windows than you might think.
In this case, I typed "PDF suite" into a Wikipedia search box, and ended up on the Foxit Reader page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxit_Reader) which contains this sentence:
"Foxit Phantom PDF Suite is a complete suite of PDF editing and creation software." complete with a link to their web site.
In general, though, it is not trivial to determine who can be trusted, and to determine where an obscure application came from.
Interesting. I had a 1986 Ford Taurus wagon that had the mechanics thinking it needed a new cpu module, and I swear that it they showed me something flat, black and squarish under the hood. I thought it was on the forward side of the engine block, but that was a long time ago, and my memory has more holes than swiss cheese.
Did anybody stop to consider the possibility of collateral damage? Aside from beloved portable electronics, what about a hostage with a pacemaker? We don't want to disable that device do we? And to penetrate the body of the car (which side of the engine block are these microprocessors located on, anyway?) they're probably generating a pretty significant pulse.
What about residences or businesses down range??
My cable provider is Cox, and they are in the process of moving to some kind of switched digital provisioning system, with the consequence that CableCards don't work any more. So to get any non-clear content, one now either needs a DVR or cable box. They evidently have a workaround device for Tivo, but this is not going to help me use my CableCard in my TV.
I can't tell if anyone in a low-modded comment suggested this, but how about the Hauppauge HD-PVR? http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html Have yet to buy one, mainly because I don't think the machine I'm using is fast enough to keep up, but it looks like it should work until component video connectors go away.
Despite over 700 replies to this point, I don't think anyone mentioned West End theatres http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_End_theatre/ or alternatively http://wikitravel.org/en/London/West_End/. It's been a while since I was in London, but we discovered that a half-hour before showtime, there were deeply discounted tickets available to shows trying to fill the house. We had a great time going to whatever was available. Definitely worth a shot, since as everyone else has noted, you should try not too plan too much, and just go for it. Have a great trip!
Actually, the levels >were over dangerous levels. Admittedly, not fatal. Fun fact: they first identified the problem when a patient (victim?) reported losing his hair after the scan. The follow up LA Times article today says that when the hospital contacted the 206 patients, 80% reported losing hair after their scans. That's pretty serious exposure.
Oh, another fun detail: the dose administered IS DISPLAYED ON THE FRONT PANEL AFTER THE SCAN!!! In 18 months, nobody ever questioned why the level was so high. If the machine delivers the dose according to the program, it must be right, evidently...
Silly me. I read the question, and assumed there would be responses about specific institutions.
My daughter is a senior at the University of Redlands. As far as I know, they have no official support for Linux, but she has been aggressively pro-Linux since high school (I made sure I sent her off to school able to dual-boot to WinXP, but on the rare occasions when that might be useful, I have to remind her she can). There have been a couple of situations in which she has needed help from the campus IT folks, and there has always been someone Linux-savvy available.
And her on-campus networking experience has been uneventful. While we helping her move back in last weekend, one Windows user complained to me about the spyware the campus network requires him to run - my daughter does not seem to need that, her system "just works". Her main complaint about the campus network is that they throttle the dorm traffic pretty severely...
I know I could take a Kindle into the 'executive reading room', but just seems so wrong.
I seem to remember in the early days of the web, there was a graphics format called GIF. Somebody like Unisys held a patent on the format, but initially didn't seem to care that most Web users didn't realize there was a patent. Then, one day, Unisys woke up, changed their attitude and announced that licenses would be needed from now on - several thousand dollars? Almost overnight, PNG was born. So, I guess in a sense, IBM has a point - patents lead to open source development. However, they neglect to mention that in cases like ReportLab (makes a Free/Paid Support PDF generator library in Python) a sudden change in licensing policy might result in innovation at the expense of existing innovators.
Patents are a valuable part of a thriving commercial system, and there are obvious benefits from patent law. But I think there are also significant benefits from patent-free zones. The trick is to figure out how to maintain the balance to ensure fairness, and enable benefits from both patented innovation and patent-free innovation.
Hate to burst anyone's bubble, but way back in the late '80s, the Feds were confiscating money in Dade County, FL if they found traces of cocaine on it, based on a theory that only money related to active drug dealing would be contaminated. For reasons I never understood, the task of calling them on this idiocy fell to the Coroner's office. They collected money of all denominations from cities around the US and a few foreign locations (I recall one was London). Their criterion for identifying cocaine was GC/MS analysis. Their summary result was that all US paper currency tested except "SOME" brand new bills fresh from banks were contaminated with identifiable cocaine. I read that as well over 90%. I was finally able to Google a legitimate reference to this information.
Please focus on the last two paragraphs.
From a Los Angeles Times article dated 1994 (http://articles.latimes.com/1994-11-13/local/me-62172_1_drug-money?pg=1):
"In its decision, the appeals court relied on uncontradicted evidence that more than three of every four bills circulating in Los Angeles were tainted with drug residue.
That evidence was provided by Ojai-based forensic toxicologist Jay B. Williams, who said he had done numerous studies since 1982 that turned up drugs on samples of $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills taken from throughout the West--from banks, casinos, stores and restaurants.
Williams, who has specialized in drug and alcohol tests for 27 years, said last week that the percentage of contaminated bills ranged from 15% in Bozeman, Mont., to a little more than 75% in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
The bills he tested contained quantities of cocaine as small as a nanogram, meaning one-billionth of a gram, to as much as a milligram, one-thousandth of a gram.
Williams' tests are consistent with other research nationwide. In one study, Florida researchers analyzed 135 bills gathered randomly from cities around the United States; all but four tested positive for cocaine.
One of those researchers, Lee Hearn, now the chief toxicologist for the medical examiner's office in Dade County, Fla., said: "The only bills that didn't have contamination were crisp new ones that had limited circulation, if any at all."
"
No disrespect intended, but who said this was news? The spleen has been described as an overgrown lymph node (the place where white blood cells are born um, perhaps the whole 'lymphocyte' name thing comes to mind?) for decades. Maybe the discovery that they get mobilized when the body suffers major trauma is new, but I doubt it.
Everything old is news again?
If I'm not mistaken (although I often am, sorry in advance) Cox has been doing this for months now, and nobody posted anything about that. If I 'typo' a URL at home, when connected via my (or my neighbor's) Cox cablemodem, I get a Verisign page indicating that www.whateveriswas.com is Under Construction.
Is this not muchly the same thing??
It pisses me off, but not enough to hunt down a better alternative.
I mean really. They're frogs. Possibly their aesthetics are slightly different from ours?
Seriously, the school *HAS* to fix this problem.
0. IANAL. You might want to discuss some of this *with* a lawyer.
1. School principals are "peace officers"
2. When you deliver you child to school (in this case to the school bus that picks her up), you have transferred custody of your child to the school. The school is responsibe for the safety and well-being of all the children in their custody in a very specific and technical way under the law.
3. When you pick up your child, the school is transferring their custody back to you. This is why you have to sign him/her out formally when something like a doctor's appointment interrupts the school day. I'm not entirely sure how the bus fits in at this end, but while on the bus, your child is still in the school's custody.
You need to help your local 'peace officer' recognize and apply appropriate resources to solving their very real custody problem.
IANAL. YMMV. I'm glad your particular incident ended well. But consider the public service you would be doing while helping this school to prevent a far more serious incident.
There are two rules for making a good movie.
1. Find a good story.
2. Tell it well.
Philip K Dick is my favorite science fiction author. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (um, the source for the Blade Runner screenplay) is among his very best books. And I thought Blade Runner was amazing, even though they had to leave out far more of the book than they left in.
In an aside to the audience on her Miles of Aisles live album, Joni Mitchell says to the audience, "Nobody ever said to Picasso, 'Paint A Starry Night again, man!' ..." Different instantiations of a good story are different. Try to keep an open mind.
If you're looking for a high concentration of physicists with a history of openness and demonstrable experience with FOSS, why not try CERN? Didn't Tim Berners-Lee create the World Wide Web in order to facilitate collaboration amongst really large, geographically scattered groups working on high-energy physics projects?
I guess back in the day, they couldn't find any commercial projects that would do the job...
Gee,
They must have decided to keep as much distance from microsoft.com as they could get, so we didn't confuse it with a new feature of Vista?
Or maybe they realized how many people have *microsoft* blocked in their firewall rules...