There are people that are allergic to marijuana, or at least one of its major components. For these people, it would take a relatively small amount to kill them. This does not justify banning it any more than it justifies banning peanuts or shellfish. It may justify labeling it clearly (as is case with any known-to-be-allergenic consumable), but that's a reasonable thing to do with psychoactive substances as well. Double win.
For just about everyone else, the only plausible way marijuana would kill you is to have a bale dropped on you from a smuggler's plane. Nothing will stop people from getting stoned and doing stupid things. Banning getting stoned obviously doesn't have this effect. Instead, take away the "asshole on drugs" loophole for anti-social behavior. A drunk who pukes on my couch is only a miserable drunk for so long before he becomes "that asshole who puked on my couch". Unfortunately, this requires being responsible for one's own behavior, including that performed in an altered state. Unless someone gets drugged without their consent or knowledge, or it causes effects which they are not aware of (like sleep drugs and sleepwalking), it just shouldn't be an excuse for anything. Some people are quite reluctant to give up this loophole.
All I need are two messages, one for the front (reversed so they can read it in the mirror) and one for the back. The one in front would say "YOUR BRAKE LIGHTS ARE BROKEN" (because this is the single most common and most dangerous condition I see that drivers would not be aware of), and the one in back would merely say "WTF". Tailgating? High beams on? I would hit a switch and the "WTF" sign becomes a fourth brake light.
While I will probably never get around to the lit brake light sign (I might well make a paper version I can hold up, that should do well enough), the "WTF" light should be easy enough. No microcontroller needed, I just have to lay out LEDs in the correct shape and wire them in parallel and put a voltage regulator in series so they don't become friodes.
I know this is just anecdotal, but here's my experience.
QWERTY - never got past 50 wpm with any useful degree of accuracy. Dvorak - I was up to 25-30 wpm within a month, and somehow my shoulders stopped hurting. I hadn't really noticed they had been hurting before, it was just that obvious when they stopped. I was able to carry on a coherent chat the same night I switched. Within two months I had surpassed my QWERTY speed. Within 6 months I had pretty much hit the flat part of the curve at 75-80 wpm. I can peak at 85-90 now, the main problem is that often I don't THINK that fast. I can't break down words into individual letters in my head faster than that. Trying to type faster often results in odd mistakes -- not the "teh" type, but correctly spelled, entirely wrong words. For example I might want to type "farm" but my muscle memory wants to type a much more commonly used word like "from". I also start to fail at typo correction at this speed.
My fingers are now outrunning my brain. The keyboard is no longer the bottleneck, it is the ideas-to-letters conversion in my head that can only sustain 80 wpm now. For standard English, "correct" two-handed typing, I have no doubt Dvorak is inherently superior.
Then I sprained a wrist quite badly, needing a couple weeks in a brace. This didn't seem to be enough downtime to justify learning a one-handed layout, so I just typed with the left hand and the occasional one-finger poke from the right hand. It was then that I realized that standard Dvorak is an absolute DISASTER for one-handed hunt-and-peck. Qwerty is only a moderate train wreck by comparison, since the commonly used letter pairings aren't deliberately placed on opposite sides of the keyboard.
I just purchased a laptop and I'm not sure I'm going to bother converting it. Laying on one side and pecking away with one hand is much easier if I just leave well enough alone. I can always hook up an external keyboard if I ever have to do any heavy lifting with the laptop -- which I would want to anyhow. I just don't care for laptop keyboards, though HP uses a halfway decent one -- with trackpad AND clitmouse^Wtrackpoint. The trackpoint is much too firm though. A light touch does almost nothing, and a little more of a nudge sends the cursor careening across the screen. Fine movement requires brushing it multiple times, and often overshooting. *sigh* I like IBM's implementation, but HP's sucks. At least the trackpad is adequate for mobile use.
Anyhow, standard Dvorak is vastly superior in normal usage, but at the cost that it is also vastly inferior in certain fringe cases (like one-handed typing). Of course, there are specific one-hand layouts and I'm sure they work well, but if you expect to alternate frequently between one-hand and two-hand typing, it might make sense to stick to Qwerty.
I would guess that when you were 18 and went to Radio Shack or Circuit City, there was a good chance you knew one of the people on staff, either personally or by reputation. They might have a bunch of morons otherwise, but there was ONE guy who knew his shit. I've run into a couple at Fry's, and I try to find them again on later visits, but it seems the good ones don't last. Either they're getting tired of the bullshit, or they find better jobs (or both). This intolerance for bullshit sometimes bleeds over onto the job itself, unfortunately. Much as they might like dealing with people with a clue, most of the time they won't be.
These businesses are finding it harder to hold onto that one knowledgeable person and simultaneously keep the sheeple happy. They'd been getting by for a long time with dwindling numbers, but the pain doesn't really set in till they have lost the last one at most locations. By then, it's probably too late to save the business.
While the resolution of a large array can be similar to one gigantic dish, this does not mean it is as sensitive. No matter how spread the array, it is (at best) only as sensitive as the sum of its individual elements. What is nice though is that as some sites rotate out of the array, others can be brought online, which allows for continuous monitoring of a single patch of space. Even a giant array in the desert like the VLA is not capable of performing this feat since it is still just one point as far as the planet is concerned.
I think you really have something -- in one of the demos you quickly adjusted the reverb by adjusting the gamma curve of the image. This is brilliant! It is easy to put reverb INTO a sound, but it's rather more difficult to "dry" a sloppy sound. I think you may have hit on a computationally efficient way to do it. I'm sure there are other transformations that are difficult in the amplitude-and-time domain, but are rather easier in the frequency-and-time domain. This could prove the source of many new filters that nobody would have thought to try otherwise.
Also your drum beat video sounds like you were trying for something like the opening of NiN's "Closer". If so, it worked. You got a good gated handclap/snare sound out of a fuzzy blob!
It's not just size -- budgies are smarter than cockatiels, in my experience (having owned both). The budgie I have now is not yet six, and she has always been smarter than the cockatiel I had that made it to eighteen, so age is not always enough to offset general stupidity. Still, longevity does factor into it -- even the most intelligent squid isn't going to be able to accomplish much (individually) with a three year life expectancy. I marvel at the evolutionary pressures that would make them live fast and die young, yet also favor intelligence.
It's not entirely brain/body ratio either. Even accounting for the fact that a smaller body means fewer neurons need to be dedicated to controlling it, there's still only so much that can be packed into a tiny space. By this measure, the larger birds with larger skulls should have a greater potential for intelligence. Not all of them will use this space efficiently, but at least the ceiling is higher.
I'm not surprised by the fact that her poorly processed vision can actually be a hindrance at times. Personally, if I try to walk through an unfamiliar dark room (whether it's really dark or my eyes just haven't adapted yet), I'll fumble around and walk haltingly. If I close my eyes, it's like my brain "gives up" on trying to use the eyes, and much of the weirdness goes away. I may still walk into things, but I'll do it with confidence.
I think your daughter might be better off just closing her eyes when they are more of a liability than an asset. I can't see how it would hurt to try, in any case.
Don't police usually come up from behind, especially if they need time to run your plates before deciding to pull you over? Red-light cameras are taking their pictures from the FRONT (at least the ones I've seen). How often do you think cops go around checking whether the front and back plates match? They don't, as it took two years for someone to notice my car didn't even HAVE a front plate and write a ticket for it.
So these "pranksters" would swap the front plate but not the back, and it's very unlikely anyone would be the wiser until the tickets show up in the wrong place.
Mal-2
It's attrition in the target audience.
on
Are Newspapers Doomed?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Once most of the people who grew up reading newspapers die or just stop reading them, it's inevitable that the print form will cease to exist -- as we know it. I see a lot more prints of news websites than I see newspaper clippings, so the need for SOME of it to hit paper is still there. It's just that most people don't want the whole thing delivered physically any more. They still want the content, but most of it never leaves the digital form, so while NEWSPAPERS may die, journalism does not necessarily follow suit.
I have a similar configuration to this, only reversed -- I have a 17" rotated to 1024x1280 on the left, and a 20" at 1600x1200 on the right. The extra 80 pixels on the left side are useful for the taskbar, system tray, etc., allowing a full 1200 pixels vertically for a screen-spanning app if I so choose. Those extra 80 pixels are not wasted, though I think most people would find it more useful if the extra space was on the left rather than the right (since most people expect the START button to be at lower left).
My setup has a slight mismatch in the dot pitch of the two monitors, so everything is slightly larger on the 17", but that's life since I obtained the two separately.
Also note that I said it has to come to a full vote and be defeated. There is no penalty if it is shot down in committee and never brought to the floor.
Perhaps there should also be no penalty if it passes in one house of the legislature but is defeated in the other. This would only kick in if both houses say no -- though as things are now, the second house usually does not vote if the other has already shot something down. This way, the Senate or House (in the U.S., I do not know their equivalents in Australia) could step up and say "this is so stupid, we're going to shoot it down too -- just so the sponsors of this bill have to shut the fuck up."
No, it only means THIS PARTICULAR proposal is off the table for five years. One proposing ONLY to fund education, or one proposing ONLY to put baseball bats up everyone's asses (or in some other combination, just not with each other) would still be allowed to be proposed. Not only that, but only reasonably connected items should be allowed to be on the same bill in the first place. No more "increase veterans benefits (and build a bridge to nowhere)" kind of omnibus bills. Thus, unless the proposal was to educate everyone about the benefits and proper technique of shoving baseball bats up their asses, it would not be able to be on an education bill.
Hey, I do have an answer for this -- sunset clauses. They should work both ways and be MANDATORY.
Propose measure X, with a sunset clause of five years. If it passes, it has to be re-passed after those five years or it goes away. On the flip side, if it makes it to a vote and is defeated, it CANNOT BE PROPOSED AGAIN for five years. This should stop legislators from trying to bite off more than they can chew. Laws confirmed to be a good idea can be given longer sunset clauses the second time around -- say up to some multiple of the original. If it can get passed a third time, then some "cap limit" such as 99 years would come into play.
But do you think the legislatures would actually want to DO this? It would require them to not only pass laws, but to examine and renew those that have already been passed... and that would be WORK!
By raising a big, public stink about it, all that has been done is to teach the politicians that they need to sneak this through the next time -- either by hiding it within some broader "anti-terrorism" or "think of the children" bill, or by passing it before the public can get wind of it. This is the main failure of legislative bodies -- a given bill can be put up for a vote repeatedly (maybe worded a bit differently) or integrated into something larger that is difficult to oppose. It can face any number of deaths in committee, or beat-downs when held to a vote, and it doesn't die. Yet it takes only one passing vote to put it on the books forever.
Some of the earlier generations start to resemble the finished product if you squint hard. For styles that deliberately distort and obfuscate, some of these might be more desirable than the finished product. This might be a way to take a photograph and turn it into cubist art "automagically".
If Hibernate worked properly on the work machine I'd use it, but it comes out of Standby very quickly. It gets rebooted when it needs to (Wednesdays after Patch Tuesday, the occasional emergency update, or when it just starts being weird) but I can easily get away with cold booting just once a week. They kinda prefer equipment turned off for the weekend, so it usually ends up cold booting Monday mornings as well.
There's no debate where the responsibility for that time lies -- it's on the employer to either provide you with work-ready tools, or to pay you for time spent rendering your tools work-ready. There have been fundamentally similar cases of employees expected to get in costume before clocking in. They sued, and they won -- probably not what they deserved to get paid for that time, but that became a case of proving how much time they should be paid for, rather than whether or not it was work.
There may be a bit of a moral hazard here. If a company has Wage and Hour coverage in their EPLI coverage, this will pay for (most of) what they screwed the workers out of. They may be thinking "Let them sue us. Even if we lose we still aren't the ones paying them." It's a very short-sighted strategy (as they quickly find themselves unable to afford their EPLI policies), but some businesses don't care.
Where you start in a code has an awful lot to do with the output, or if it runs at all. First of all, there are base triplet "synonyms" aplenty since there are many more base triplets than there are amino acids. This means there are a variety of ways to code the same protein, so it is possible to tweak a sequence without changing its function. What if you were to start some number of base pairs into a sequence -- might it also code for a valid protein? Would changing a base pair change the output of this new sequence while leaving the original function unchanged? What happens when the bases are read back in reverse, starting at some arbitrary point?
Just like you can find just about any reasonably short sequence of digits in the first million digits of pi, maybe one gene can "run" multiple programs depending on where you start and which way you go.
It is 93 million miles, or 8.32 light minutes, separating Sun and Earth (center to center) -- the magnetosphere will be slightly less. Coincidence? I hope they are investigating some sort of possible resonance or standing wave that is directly related to this distance.
What would happen if we were to start replacing asphalt-paved roads with more reflective materials? Nothing sufficient to glare-blind drivers of course, but I have to imagine even the cement used for freeway surfaces reflects more light and retains less heat than blacktop.
I'm not saying go rip up roads either -- just use the lighter-colored material whenever replacement is already necessary. The advantages would be many: (1) no additional land footprint, it's just making existing roads have a secondary function, (2) traffic loads are usually highest when the sun is at a steep angle in the morning and afternoon/evening, so much of the road would be left exposed when the sun is at its peak, (3) it would reduce the heat of the road surface, meaning the people who drive on it would stay slightly cooler, which means running the A/C a little bit less, which means a small amount of fuel saved.
For roads that do not need resurfacing any time soon, perhaps they can be painted in a thin layer to do the same job (if less effectively).
Still, why is it assumed that life has to develop on a planet by current definitions? We're looking at Enceladus as a possible habitable body in our own solar system, and all the gas giant planets have satellites aplenty. Why should another solar system have "naked" gas giants? I think it is more reasonable to assume that gas giants gather satellites, and that some of them will be fairly large.
Also, we have a situation here that we have yet to find elsewhere -- the stability of a "double planet" system. We have yet to find anything like our own Earth-Moon system in this or any other solar system. Life has benefited greatly from the stabilizing influence of a large, close satellite and also by the tides it creates, but this appears to be a fairly uncommon situation. A satellite stabilized by proximity to a gas giant is much more likely by comparison. We should be looking for gas giants in the habitable zone or slightly outside it (tidal heating and residual heat from the planet can make up the shortfall), and when we have the technology to look for them we should scour such systems for habitable satellites, not just planets.
I'm not advocating abandoning the search for earthlike exoplanets, only saying that such worlds are only a small fraction of the potentially habitable bodies out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Endless reruns of "How It's Made", 24/7. Kinda like Discovery already is outside of prime time.
Mal-2
There are people that are allergic to marijuana, or at least one of its major components. For these people, it would take a relatively small amount to kill them. This does not justify banning it any more than it justifies banning peanuts or shellfish. It may justify labeling it clearly (as is case with any known-to-be-allergenic consumable), but that's a reasonable thing to do with psychoactive substances as well. Double win.
For just about everyone else, the only plausible way marijuana would kill you is to have a bale dropped on you from a smuggler's plane. Nothing will stop people from getting stoned and doing stupid things. Banning getting stoned obviously doesn't have this effect. Instead, take away the "asshole on drugs" loophole for anti-social behavior. A drunk who pukes on my couch is only a miserable drunk for so long before he becomes "that asshole who puked on my couch". Unfortunately, this requires being responsible for one's own behavior, including that performed in an altered state. Unless someone gets drugged without their consent or knowledge, or it causes effects which they are not aware of (like sleep drugs and sleepwalking), it just shouldn't be an excuse for anything. Some people are quite reluctant to give up this loophole.
Mal-2
All I need are two messages, one for the front (reversed so they can read it in the mirror) and one for the back. The one in front would say "YOUR BRAKE LIGHTS ARE BROKEN" (because this is the single most common and most dangerous condition I see that drivers would not be aware of), and the one in back would merely say "WTF". Tailgating? High beams on? I would hit a switch and the "WTF" sign becomes a fourth brake light.
While I will probably never get around to the lit brake light sign (I might well make a paper version I can hold up, that should do well enough), the "WTF" light should be easy enough. No microcontroller needed, I just have to lay out LEDs in the correct shape and wire them in parallel and put a voltage regulator in series so they don't become friodes.
Mal-2
I know this is just anecdotal, but here's my experience.
QWERTY - never got past 50 wpm with any useful degree of accuracy.
Dvorak - I was up to 25-30 wpm within a month, and somehow my shoulders stopped hurting. I hadn't really noticed they had been hurting before, it was just that obvious when they stopped. I was able to carry on a coherent chat the same night I switched. Within two months I had surpassed my QWERTY speed. Within 6 months I had pretty much hit the flat part of the curve at 75-80 wpm. I can peak at 85-90 now, the main problem is that often I don't THINK that fast. I can't break down words into individual letters in my head faster than that. Trying to type faster often results in odd mistakes -- not the "teh" type, but correctly spelled, entirely wrong words. For example I might want to type "farm" but my muscle memory wants to type a much more commonly used word like "from". I also start to fail at typo correction at this speed.
My fingers are now outrunning my brain. The keyboard is no longer the bottleneck, it is the ideas-to-letters conversion in my head that can only sustain 80 wpm now. For standard English, "correct" two-handed typing, I have no doubt Dvorak is inherently superior.
Then I sprained a wrist quite badly, needing a couple weeks in a brace. This didn't seem to be enough downtime to justify learning a one-handed layout, so I just typed with the left hand and the occasional one-finger poke from the right hand. It was then that I realized that standard Dvorak is an absolute DISASTER for one-handed hunt-and-peck. Qwerty is only a moderate train wreck by comparison, since the commonly used letter pairings aren't deliberately placed on opposite sides of the keyboard.
I just purchased a laptop and I'm not sure I'm going to bother converting it. Laying on one side and pecking away with one hand is much easier if I just leave well enough alone. I can always hook up an external keyboard if I ever have to do any heavy lifting with the laptop -- which I would want to anyhow. I just don't care for laptop keyboards, though HP uses a halfway decent one -- with trackpad AND clitmouse^Wtrackpoint. The trackpoint is much too firm though. A light touch does almost nothing, and a little more of a nudge sends the cursor careening across the screen. Fine movement requires brushing it multiple times, and often overshooting. *sigh* I like IBM's implementation, but HP's sucks. At least the trackpad is adequate for mobile use.
Anyhow, standard Dvorak is vastly superior in normal usage, but at the cost that it is also vastly inferior in certain fringe cases (like one-handed typing). Of course, there are specific one-hand layouts and I'm sure they work well, but if you expect to alternate frequently between one-hand and two-hand typing, it might make sense to stick to Qwerty.
Please, no one-handed typing jokes. :)
Mal-2
I would guess that when you were 18 and went to Radio Shack or Circuit City, there was a good chance you knew one of the people on staff, either personally or by reputation. They might have a bunch of morons otherwise, but there was ONE guy who knew his shit. I've run into a couple at Fry's, and I try to find them again on later visits, but it seems the good ones don't last. Either they're getting tired of the bullshit, or they find better jobs (or both). This intolerance for bullshit sometimes bleeds over onto the job itself, unfortunately. Much as they might like dealing with people with a clue, most of the time they won't be.
These businesses are finding it harder to hold onto that one knowledgeable person and simultaneously keep the sheeple happy. They'd been getting by for a long time with dwindling numbers, but the pain doesn't really set in till they have lost the last one at most locations. By then, it's probably too late to save the business.
Mal-2
If you're in California, then support Proposition 13. It's only fair, and very Discordian.
Mal-2
While the resolution of a large array can be similar to one gigantic dish, this does not mean it is as sensitive. No matter how spread the array, it is (at best) only as sensitive as the sum of its individual elements. What is nice though is that as some sites rotate out of the array, others can be brought online, which allows for continuous monitoring of a single patch of space. Even a giant array in the desert like the VLA is not capable of performing this feat since it is still just one point as far as the planet is concerned.
Mal-2
I think you really have something -- in one of the demos you quickly adjusted the reverb by adjusting the gamma curve of the image. This is brilliant! It is easy to put reverb INTO a sound, but it's rather more difficult to "dry" a sloppy sound. I think you may have hit on a computationally efficient way to do it. I'm sure there are other transformations that are difficult in the amplitude-and-time domain, but are rather easier in the frequency-and-time domain. This could prove the source of many new filters that nobody would have thought to try otherwise.
Also your drum beat video sounds like you were trying for something like the opening of NiN's "Closer". If so, it worked. You got a good gated handclap/snare sound out of a fuzzy blob!
Mal-2
It's not just size -- budgies are smarter than cockatiels, in my experience (having owned both). The budgie I have now is not yet six, and she has always been smarter than the cockatiel I had that made it to eighteen, so age is not always enough to offset general stupidity. Still, longevity does factor into it -- even the most intelligent squid isn't going to be able to accomplish much (individually) with a three year life expectancy. I marvel at the evolutionary pressures that would make them live fast and die young, yet also favor intelligence.
It's not entirely brain/body ratio either. Even accounting for the fact that a smaller body means fewer neurons need to be dedicated to controlling it, there's still only so much that can be packed into a tiny space. By this measure, the larger birds with larger skulls should have a greater potential for intelligence. Not all of them will use this space efficiently, but at least the ceiling is higher.
Mal-2
I'm not surprised by the fact that her poorly processed vision can actually be a hindrance at times. Personally, if I try to walk through an unfamiliar dark room (whether it's really dark or my eyes just haven't adapted yet), I'll fumble around and walk haltingly. If I close my eyes, it's like my brain "gives up" on trying to use the eyes, and much of the weirdness goes away. I may still walk into things, but I'll do it with confidence.
I think your daughter might be better off just closing her eyes when they are more of a liability than an asset. I can't see how it would hurt to try, in any case.
Mal-2
Don't police usually come up from behind, especially if they need time to run your plates before deciding to pull you over? Red-light cameras are taking their pictures from the FRONT (at least the ones I've seen). How often do you think cops go around checking whether the front and back plates match? They don't, as it took two years for someone to notice my car didn't even HAVE a front plate and write a ticket for it.
So these "pranksters" would swap the front plate but not the back, and it's very unlikely anyone would be the wiser until the tickets show up in the wrong place.
Mal-2
Once most of the people who grew up reading newspapers die or just stop reading them, it's inevitable that the print form will cease to exist -- as we know it. I see a lot more prints of news websites than I see newspaper clippings, so the need for SOME of it to hit paper is still there. It's just that most people don't want the whole thing delivered physically any more. They still want the content, but most of it never leaves the digital form, so while NEWSPAPERS may die, journalism does not necessarily follow suit.
Mal-2
I have a similar configuration to this, only reversed -- I have a 17" rotated to 1024x1280 on the left, and a 20" at 1600x1200 on the right. The extra 80 pixels on the left side are useful for the taskbar, system tray, etc., allowing a full 1200 pixels vertically for a screen-spanning app if I so choose. Those extra 80 pixels are not wasted, though I think most people would find it more useful if the extra space was on the left rather than the right (since most people expect the START button to be at lower left).
My setup has a slight mismatch in the dot pitch of the two monitors, so everything is slightly larger on the 17", but that's life since I obtained the two separately.
Mal-2
Also note that I said it has to come to a full vote and be defeated. There is no penalty if it is shot down in committee and never brought to the floor.
Perhaps there should also be no penalty if it passes in one house of the legislature but is defeated in the other. This would only kick in if both houses say no -- though as things are now, the second house usually does not vote if the other has already shot something down. This way, the Senate or House (in the U.S., I do not know their equivalents in Australia) could step up and say "this is so stupid, we're going to shoot it down too -- just so the sponsors of this bill have to shut the fuck up."
Mal-2
No, it only means THIS PARTICULAR proposal is off the table for five years. One proposing ONLY to fund education, or one proposing ONLY to put baseball bats up everyone's asses (or in some other combination, just not with each other) would still be allowed to be proposed. Not only that, but only reasonably connected items should be allowed to be on the same bill in the first place. No more "increase veterans benefits (and build a bridge to nowhere)" kind of omnibus bills. Thus, unless the proposal was to educate everyone about the benefits and proper technique of shoving baseball bats up their asses, it would not be able to be on an education bill.
Mal-2
Hey, I do have an answer for this -- sunset clauses. They should work both ways and be MANDATORY.
Propose measure X, with a sunset clause of five years. If it passes, it has to be re-passed after those five years or it goes away. On the flip side, if it makes it to a vote and is defeated, it CANNOT BE PROPOSED AGAIN for five years. This should stop legislators from trying to bite off more than they can chew. Laws confirmed to be a good idea can be given longer sunset clauses the second time around -- say up to some multiple of the original. If it can get passed a third time, then some "cap limit" such as 99 years would come into play.
But do you think the legislatures would actually want to DO this? It would require them to not only pass laws, but to examine and renew those that have already been passed... and that would be WORK!
Mal-2
By raising a big, public stink about it, all that has been done is to teach the politicians that they need to sneak this through the next time -- either by hiding it within some broader "anti-terrorism" or "think of the children" bill, or by passing it before the public can get wind of it. This is the main failure of legislative bodies -- a given bill can be put up for a vote repeatedly (maybe worded a bit differently) or integrated into something larger that is difficult to oppose. It can face any number of deaths in committee, or beat-downs when held to a vote, and it doesn't die. Yet it takes only one passing vote to put it on the books forever.
Mal-2
Some of the earlier generations start to resemble the finished product if you squint hard. For styles that deliberately distort and obfuscate, some of these might be more desirable than the finished product. This might be a way to take a photograph and turn it into cubist art "automagically".
Mal-2
If Hibernate worked properly on the work machine I'd use it, but it comes out of Standby very quickly. It gets rebooted when it needs to (Wednesdays after Patch Tuesday, the occasional emergency update, or when it just starts being weird) but I can easily get away with cold booting just once a week. They kinda prefer equipment turned off for the weekend, so it usually ends up cold booting Monday mornings as well.
There's no debate where the responsibility for that time lies -- it's on the employer to either provide you with work-ready tools, or to pay you for time spent rendering your tools work-ready. There have been fundamentally similar cases of employees expected to get in costume before clocking in. They sued, and they won -- probably not what they deserved to get paid for that time, but that became a case of proving how much time they should be paid for, rather than whether or not it was work.
There may be a bit of a moral hazard here. If a company has Wage and Hour coverage in their EPLI coverage, this will pay for (most of) what they screwed the workers out of. They may be thinking "Let them sue us. Even if we lose we still aren't the ones paying them." It's a very short-sighted strategy (as they quickly find themselves unable to afford their EPLI policies), but some businesses don't care.
Mal-2
Where you start in a code has an awful lot to do with the output, or if it runs at all. First of all, there are base triplet "synonyms" aplenty since there are many more base triplets than there are amino acids. This means there are a variety of ways to code the same protein, so it is possible to tweak a sequence without changing its function. What if you were to start some number of base pairs into a sequence -- might it also code for a valid protein? Would changing a base pair change the output of this new sequence while leaving the original function unchanged? What happens when the bases are read back in reverse, starting at some arbitrary point?
Just like you can find just about any reasonably short sequence of digits in the first million digits of pi, maybe one gene can "run" multiple programs depending on where you start and which way you go.
Mal-2
It is 93 million miles, or 8.32 light minutes, separating Sun and Earth (center to center) -- the magnetosphere will be slightly less. Coincidence? I hope they are investigating some sort of possible resonance or standing wave that is directly related to this distance.
Mal-2
What would happen if we were to start replacing asphalt-paved roads with more reflective materials? Nothing sufficient to glare-blind drivers of course, but I have to imagine even the cement used for freeway surfaces reflects more light and retains less heat than blacktop.
I'm not saying go rip up roads either -- just use the lighter-colored material whenever replacement is already necessary. The advantages would be many: (1) no additional land footprint, it's just making existing roads have a secondary function, (2) traffic loads are usually highest when the sun is at a steep angle in the morning and afternoon/evening, so much of the road would be left exposed when the sun is at its peak, (3) it would reduce the heat of the road surface, meaning the people who drive on it would stay slightly cooler, which means running the A/C a little bit less, which means a small amount of fuel saved.
For roads that do not need resurfacing any time soon, perhaps they can be painted in a thin layer to do the same job (if less effectively).
Mal-2
And nothing of value was lost.
Seriously, what could be in your profile that you don't know about yourself?
Mal-2
This is nothing new.
Remember dBASE I? Neither do I. dBASE II was the first one you could buy.
Mal-2
Still, why is it assumed that life has to develop on a planet by current definitions? We're looking at Enceladus as a possible habitable body in our own solar system, and all the gas giant planets have satellites aplenty. Why should another solar system have "naked" gas giants? I think it is more reasonable to assume that gas giants gather satellites, and that some of them will be fairly large.
Also, we have a situation here that we have yet to find elsewhere -- the stability of a "double planet" system. We have yet to find anything like our own Earth-Moon system in this or any other solar system. Life has benefited greatly from the stabilizing influence of a large, close satellite and also by the tides it creates, but this appears to be a fairly uncommon situation. A satellite stabilized by proximity to a gas giant is much more likely by comparison. We should be looking for gas giants in the habitable zone or slightly outside it (tidal heating and residual heat from the planet can make up the shortfall), and when we have the technology to look for them we should scour such systems for habitable satellites, not just planets.
I'm not advocating abandoning the search for earthlike exoplanets, only saying that such worlds are only a small fraction of the potentially habitable bodies out there.
Mal-2