the metabolic change in and of itself is inconsequential. But the fact that, if true on face value, there *is* a difference means that *something* *may* be going on. What it is, may well also be unimportant... or not... this finding, if it holds up at all, is just the beginning... Personally, I am not sure that sufficient controls were done to be absolutely sure that the effect, if real, is due to RF radiation.
I didn't see anywhere where the researchers controlled for just general EM from the device that is "on", not specifcally RF at either 850Mhz or 1900Mhz (which they should also differentiate between). Does this happen when *any* electronic device, particularly those with CPUs, clocks, inductors, etc is on near the head?
BTW, neurons are exquisitely sensitive to small variations in activity and firing rate of neighboring neurons. So the fact there is apparently NO PERCEPTUAL effect to these reported metabolic changes implies a certain lack of significant to the changes.
I'd say that the fact that computing PRODUCTS have largely tracked "Moore's Law" says more about market forces and competition, and "Wintel" (Microsoft/bloat/software purchases, etc), than it says about physics, engineering and computing technology... It says more about what kind of products and features are needed to drive the IT money machine to spend and spend even though actually the computing needs to write letters, emails and most documents was attained more than a decade ago. Don't forget about advertising in the equation, all those Flash-drive websites throwing ads at you, requiring 2-4GB of RAM and plenty of CPU and GPU just to support a browser to display all that marketing crap without a true increase in substantive content...
I really hope that Apple gives a go for VLC for the iPad... There is another option that *has* already been approved that is not a bad choice at all for playing movies, etc. Its Oplayer from olimsoft and is available now on iTunes. One of its problems apparently is that Apple has locked down the access to the hardware accelerating decoding present in the iPad, so Oplayer has to do it via software -- slower and therefore less smooth playback -- I hope VLC doesn't have this problem but I am guessing that Apple won't approve any 3rd app of that sort... (boo...)
The other issue that I'd personally want both Oplayer and VLC to be able to do is to stream from FTP or Samba servers. Right now Oplayer can stream from HTTP but can only d/l from FTP or Samba... not bad but it means waiting for the d/l to finish rather than just watching the vid as it comes across.
ok, if textbooks ARE the target of theft, then so much more so a $500 ipad...
c'mon use a bit more imagination. You just said that these sorts of things are targets for theft. Then 1) you really think that parents are going to be willing to assume liability for $500 stealable, fragile ipads? 2) that kids won't let other kids "steal" their ipads or whatever combo of force, peer pressure, barter, etc, etc won't come into play? 3) any time an expensive, valuable, commodity-like resource is put into play at a state, gov't, admin level, it WILL be the stuff that abuse and corruption is based on.
if there are "free" ebooks, there can also be ultra cheap textbooks, simply by printing out those "free" ebooks.
the cost of content should be the same for both formats, so it becomes an issue of format/media itself.
cost of ipad is $400-500... PLUS cost of replacement of broken, stolen and sold iPads. cost of each textbook PRINTING/DISTRIBUTING is probably about $10, and it lasts longer, so it takes somewhere between 40-100 textbooks worth to make an iPad to be cost effective...
If this is true, then why isn't California just printing out those "free" digital textbooks and cutting out existing textbook companies from the equation, saving the state 80% of the costs of textbooks...
There is no magic here. There is content and there is format/media.
The cost of a textbook media is VERY small: cost to print a book must be less than $10 and it is durable and not a target for excessive loss or theft or selling by the students. This compares with $400-500 for the iPAD, which is VERY fragile, and frankly, it would be astounding if students (parents!) didn't sell them off immediately.
The content cost can be viewed as separate and no reason not to be equal with either format...
Again, in your calculation of $50 x 10 = $500 you are assuming that the electronic textbooks are FREE. WRONG! they are going to be at least $40 of the $50 of a real textbook. The media (printing costs) are only a small part of the textbook cost. Look at digital music, just how much cheaper is an MP3 album than a CD of the same content?
So the actual calculation is $50 x 10 vs $500 + ($40 x 10), nevermind the cost of replacing broken, stolen and SOLD(!) ipads...
you means "Oops, I lost it (i.e. I sold it for $400), please give me another..."
in these discussions, people are assuming that the digital textbooks are FREE, kinda like assuming that digital music (e.g. MP3) is free and that all the costs are in the CD media (in the book format itself)... WRONG...
all you're doing is trading $10 worth of a pretty rugged yet not very steal/lost-susceptible format with a 5+ year life (a book) for a $400, fragile, VERY steal/lost prone format (ipad) with an at-best 2 year life... the costs of the content is going to be similar.
viewed from a couple of decades, sure, and yes the advancement in techniques is impressive, but viewed from the past 5 years and, worse, the projection for the next 5 years, the outlook for even maintaining progress and its required funding is pretty bleak.
and looking at the quality and skill set of American students entering neuroscience graduate school, also very depressing -- the RISE is in students coming from overseas, particularly China... US students also don't want to do the required hard work needed to do serious systems-level neurophysiology.
The Chinese investment in the neurosciences is similarly impressive. Given the current trends, the US *will* be overtaken within a couple of decades... so I beg to differ... I see current trends within the past 5 years in the US as a slowing down of progress in systems-level neuroscience...
Our progress towards "reverse engineering" the brain may actually be SLOWING DOWN, not accelerating. Despite the wishes and dreams of computer scientists, animal rights adv. and folks like Kurzweil, the real nitty gritty of "figuring out the brain" comes primarily from painstaking experiments in the anatomy and physiology of the brain. The primary funder of this research in the US is the NIH. And funding has been stagnant if not decreasing in real dollars. Consequently, fewer smart students are entering the field and fewer labs are conducting the necessary studies. So even if the difficulty stays the same as we go deeper and deeper into the problem, our progress is only barely maintaining its current rate. But it is likely that the difficulty will (and has been) increasing, which means that the same or fewer labs, the same or less research $$$, our progress will DECELERATE, not ramp up... The rapid advances in computing only help a little in these studies...
If we want to figure out the brain, we must re-invest in science education AND increase funding for basic neuroscience research.
You should be able to buy a decent used Tektronix scope on ebay for $200-300, not $2000. Something in the 2200 series, or 400 series. Digital storage scope with 2 channels, A delay B horizontal, 100Mhz bandwidth.
unless you want state-run Internet services, it is unworkable to break up these Internet "monopolies" (actually oligopoly), because it is basically a "natural" monopoly (or oligopoly, anyways). No mom/pop/shop can afford the $10B+ required to build out a nationwide network.
your definition of OSS is pointless and silly since nearly all software fits the criterion of "someone gets the source". Windows would be OSS under your definition since MS happily gives out the source to Windows if either you're the right kind of customer or you pay enough.
"Most battery compartments with the cells arranged side by side are wired in series."
that's right... in fact the only common parallelled battery arrangement I know of is in laptop lithium batteries, where 2 or more cells are ganged together in parallel to create a higher capacity battery (then stacked to get up to 10-16 volts). All the rest are pure series...
nevertheless, none of this supports your original contention that "series arrangement(s) are impossible" with this MS "invention". As long as you have one of these MS things on both ends of EVERY cell, you can do whatever you please wiring cells in series, parallel or a combo... the physically arrange of the cells is irrelevant, whether side by side, or end to end...
One of my laser pointers, as many do, wants 2 AAA cells in physical series, but it also can take 3 N cells in series to get a higher voltage (brighter). MS's "invention" fails for this device...
you don't understand this "invention"... it is just a battery contact... you need a pair per battery and the output is the UNAMBIGUOUS, correctly polarized battery output. You then can wire that up as you wish, whether in series or parallel.
Won't work if the battery compartment, for a long device, is designed to have two batteries in direct series contact. However you could put two of these "devices" in between, but it would add to the length, at least 0.5" or so...
Also this won't work for many cells, even "AA" or "AAA" where the positive nib is flatter than the conventional Duracell (common with rechargeables), since this "invention" completely depends on the shape and extent of rise of the positive nib.
Won't work if the battery compartment, for a long device, is designed to have two batteries in direct series contact. However you could put two of these "devices" in between, but it would add to the length, at least 0.5" or so...
Also this won't work for many cells, even "AA" or "AAA" where the positive nib is flatter than the conventional Duracell (common with rechargeables), since this "invention" completely depends on the shape and extent of rise of the positive nib.
perhaps at 8:30 your neighbors are settling in to an evening movies with a big batch of microwave popcorn... or dinner of microwave casseroles... 2.4ghz cordless phones are nasty also... make sure you dont have any such cordless phones...
if they are microwaving, prolly wont help to change channels, but otherwise it often helps to force your router and laptop to a wifi channel...
Yes this is true, and bad for this app... means no reliable incoming on Skype et al. Also means that getting a Wifi Smartphone is better than a dedicated Wifi phone since the smartphone will be able to navigate the browser-based authentication/login.
Since you said that you could get a Verizon signal sometimes, why not get a phone that can use it? otherwise you have nothing when you leave campus. But no point in getting an expense Verizon contract, either Verizon prepaid, or prolly better is Pageplus, which allows activation of any VZW phone, runs on the Verizon network but offers rates as low as $3/month (actually $10 for 120 days). Then use Skype for most usage, when you have wifi, but use Google voice to manage the merging of your Skype number and your VZW/PPC number, by giving a single number that rings both services.
You'll want to find a decent Verizon phone that can do wifi/Skype, perhaps a WM phone like the Diamond, Touch Pro, Treo Pro or Touch Pro 2, or an Android phone might be better (but check www.howardforums.com in the Pageplus forum to see which have been successfully activated on PPC).
Final note is that for your room, you might consider either a femtocell to give you a cell signal, or MagicJack, again with GoogleVoice, both create phone service from an Internet connection.
At least in the US such a law would be nearly pointless since these "locks" are easily uncircumvented and most carriers either don't lock their phones (Verizon) or have a similar unlocking policy anyways (notable exception the iPhone).
So the real "lock" (obstacle) to using a given phone on another carrier are all the other forms of non-interoperability, intentional or otherwise, especially 1) use of different frequency bands particularly for data (e.g. AT&T vs Tmo 3G bands), 2) the use of incompatible authentication protocols (e.g. Verizon vs Sprint), 3) use of different MMS systems (e.g. Sprint), and the refusal of many carriers to activate non-branded phones (e.g. Sprint, Verizon). The upshot is that in most cases even if a phone is "unlocked", moving it to another carrier that *should* be compatible (CDMA vs GSM), nevertheless almost always results in nothing working but voice and maybe simple SMS, unless one does major hacking and flashing. This then obviates the whole point since any $20 phone can do voice and SMS.
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no control for RF vs just being "on" (e.g. in airplane mode)... may have nothing to do with wireless/RF radiation at all...
the metabolic change in and of itself is inconsequential. But the fact that, if true on face value, there *is* a difference means that *something* *may* be going on. What it is, may well also be unimportant... or not... this finding, if it holds up at all, is just the beginning... Personally, I am not sure that sufficient controls were done to be absolutely sure that the effect, if real, is due to RF radiation.
I didn't see anywhere where the researchers controlled for just general EM from the device that is "on", not specifcally RF at either 850Mhz or 1900Mhz (which they should also differentiate between). Does this happen when *any* electronic device, particularly those with CPUs, clocks, inductors, etc is on near the head?
BTW, neurons are exquisitely sensitive to small variations in activity and firing rate of neighboring neurons. So the fact there is apparently NO PERCEPTUAL effect to these reported metabolic changes implies a certain lack of significant to the changes.
I'd say that the fact that computing PRODUCTS have largely tracked "Moore's Law" says more about market forces and competition, and "Wintel" (Microsoft/bloat/software purchases, etc), than it says about physics, engineering and computing technology... It says more about what kind of products and features are needed to drive the IT money machine to spend and spend even though actually the computing needs to write letters, emails and most documents was attained more than a decade ago. Don't forget about advertising in the equation, all those Flash-drive websites throwing ads at you, requiring 2-4GB of RAM and plenty of CPU and GPU just to support a browser to display all that marketing crap without a true increase in substantive content...
I really hope that Apple gives a go for VLC for the iPad...
There is another option that *has* already been approved that is not a bad choice at all for playing movies, etc. Its Oplayer from olimsoft and is available now on iTunes. One of its problems apparently is that Apple has locked down the access to the hardware accelerating decoding present in the iPad, so Oplayer has to do it via software -- slower and therefore less smooth playback -- I hope VLC doesn't have this problem but I am guessing that Apple won't approve any 3rd app of that sort... (boo...)
The other issue that I'd personally want both Oplayer and VLC to be able to do is to stream from FTP or Samba servers. Right now Oplayer can stream from HTTP but can only d/l from FTP or Samba... not bad but it means waiting for the d/l to finish rather than just watching the vid as it comes across.
yes, but printing a book is VERY cheap (less than $10) compared with an iPad that is fragile, stealable and only has a life of a few years at best...
perhaps a $100 ereader, then it makes more sense, ideally a Kindle with color, but not an iPad...
ok, if textbooks ARE the target of theft, then so much more so a $500 ipad...
c'mon use a bit more imagination. You just said that these sorts of things are targets for theft. Then 1) you really think that parents are going to be willing to assume liability for $500 stealable, fragile ipads? 2) that kids won't let other kids "steal" their ipads or whatever combo of force, peer pressure, barter, etc, etc won't come into play? 3) any time an expensive, valuable, commodity-like resource is put into play at a state, gov't, admin level, it WILL be the stuff that abuse and corruption is based on.
if there are "free" ebooks, there can also be ultra cheap textbooks, simply by printing out those "free" ebooks.
the cost of content should be the same for both formats, so it becomes an issue of format/media itself.
cost of ipad is $400-500... PLUS cost of replacement of broken, stolen and sold iPads.
cost of each textbook PRINTING/DISTRIBUTING is probably about $10, and it lasts longer, so it takes somewhere between 40-100 textbooks worth to make an iPad to be cost effective...
just print those free ones, then... solves both problems and saves a ton of money... it is orthogonal to the issue of ipads and format...
If this is true, then why isn't California just printing out those "free" digital textbooks and cutting out existing textbook companies from the equation, saving the state 80% of the costs of textbooks...
There is no magic here. There is content and there is format/media.
The cost of a textbook media is VERY small: cost to print a book must be less than $10 and it is durable and not a target for excessive loss or theft or selling by the students. This compares with $400-500 for the iPAD, which is VERY fragile, and frankly, it would be astounding if students (parents!) didn't sell them off immediately.
The content cost can be viewed as separate and no reason not to be equal with either format...
Again, in your calculation of $50 x 10 = $500 you are assuming that the electronic textbooks are FREE. WRONG! they are going to be at least $40 of the $50 of a real textbook. The media (printing costs) are only a small part of the textbook cost. Look at digital music, just how much cheaper is an MP3 album than a CD of the same content?
So the actual calculation is $50 x 10 vs $500 + ($40 x 10), nevermind the cost of replacing broken, stolen and SOLD(!) ipads...
you means "Oops, I lost it (i.e. I sold it for $400), please give me another..."
in these discussions, people are assuming that the digital textbooks are FREE, kinda like assuming that digital music (e.g. MP3) is free and that all the costs are in the CD media (in the book format itself)... WRONG...
all you're doing is trading $10 worth of a pretty rugged yet not very steal/lost-susceptible format with a 5+ year life (a book) for a $400, fragile, VERY steal/lost prone format (ipad) with an at-best 2 year life... the costs of the content is going to be similar.
viewed from a couple of decades, sure, and yes the advancement in techniques is impressive, but viewed from the past 5 years and, worse, the projection for the next 5 years, the outlook for even maintaining progress and its required funding is pretty bleak.
and looking at the quality and skill set of American students entering neuroscience graduate school, also very depressing -- the RISE is in students coming from overseas, particularly China... US students also don't want to do the required hard work needed to do serious systems-level neurophysiology.
The Chinese investment in the neurosciences is similarly impressive. Given the current trends, the US *will* be overtaken within a couple of decades... so I beg to differ... I see current trends within the past 5 years in the US as a slowing down of progress in systems-level neuroscience...
Our progress towards "reverse engineering" the brain may actually be SLOWING DOWN, not accelerating. Despite the wishes and dreams of computer scientists, animal rights adv. and folks like Kurzweil, the real nitty gritty of "figuring out the brain" comes primarily from painstaking experiments in the anatomy and physiology of the brain. The primary funder of this research in the US is the NIH. And funding has been stagnant if not decreasing in real dollars. Consequently, fewer smart students are entering the field and fewer labs are conducting the necessary studies. So even if the difficulty stays the same as we go deeper and deeper into the problem, our progress is only barely maintaining its current rate. But it is likely that the difficulty will (and has been) increasing, which means that the same or fewer labs, the same or less research $$$, our progress will DECELERATE, not ramp up... The rapid advances in computing only help a little in these studies...
If we want to figure out the brain, we must re-invest in science education AND increase funding for basic neuroscience research.
You should be able to buy a decent used Tektronix scope on ebay for $200-300, not $2000. Something in the 2200 series, or 400 series. Digital storage scope with 2 channels, A delay B horizontal, 100Mhz bandwidth.
unless you want state-run Internet services, it is unworkable to break up these Internet "monopolies" (actually oligopoly), because it is basically a "natural" monopoly (or oligopoly, anyways). No mom/pop/shop can afford the $10B+ required to build out a nationwide network.
your definition of OSS is pointless and silly since nearly all software fits the criterion of "someone gets the source". Windows would be OSS under your definition since MS happily gives out the source to Windows if either you're the right kind of customer or you pay enough.
"Most battery compartments with the cells arranged side by side are wired in series."
that's right... in fact the only common parallelled battery arrangement I know of is in laptop lithium batteries, where 2 or more cells are ganged together in parallel to create a higher capacity battery (then stacked to get up to 10-16 volts). All the rest are pure series...
nevertheless, none of this supports your original contention that "series arrangement(s) are impossible" with this MS "invention". As long as you have one of these MS things on both ends of EVERY cell, you can do whatever you please wiring cells in series, parallel or a combo... the physically arrange of the cells is irrelevant, whether side by side, or end to end...
One of my laser pointers, as many do, wants 2 AAA cells in physical series, but it also can take 3 N cells in series to get a higher voltage (brighter). MS's "invention" fails for this device...
you don't understand this "invention"... it is just a battery contact... you need a pair per battery and the output is the UNAMBIGUOUS, correctly polarized battery output. You then can wire that up as you wish, whether in series or parallel.
Won't work if the battery compartment, for a long device, is designed to have two batteries in direct series contact. However you could put two of these "devices" in between, but it would add to the length, at least 0.5" or so...
Also this won't work for many cells, even "AA" or "AAA" where the positive nib is flatter than the conventional Duracell (common with rechargeables), since this "invention" completely depends on the shape and extent of rise of the positive nib.
Won't work if the battery compartment, for a long device, is designed to have two batteries in direct series contact. However you could put two of these "devices" in between, but it would add to the length, at least 0.5" or so...
Also this won't work for many cells, even "AA" or "AAA" where the positive nib is flatter than the conventional Duracell (common with rechargeables), since this "invention" completely depends on the shape and extent of rise of the positive nib.
perhaps at 8:30 your neighbors are settling in to an evening movies with a big batch of microwave popcorn... or dinner of microwave casseroles... 2.4ghz cordless phones are nasty also... make sure you dont have any such cordless phones...
if they are microwaving, prolly wont help to change channels, but otherwise it often helps to force your router and laptop to a wifi channel...
Yes this is true, and bad for this app... means no reliable incoming on Skype et al. Also means that getting a Wifi Smartphone is better than a dedicated Wifi phone since the smartphone will be able to navigate the browser-based authentication/login.
Since you said that you could get a Verizon signal sometimes, why not get a phone that can use it? otherwise you have nothing when you leave campus. But no point in getting an expense Verizon contract, either Verizon prepaid, or prolly better is Pageplus, which allows activation of any VZW phone, runs on the Verizon network but offers rates as low as $3/month (actually $10 for 120 days). Then use Skype for most usage, when you have wifi, but use Google voice to manage the merging of your Skype number and your VZW/PPC number, by giving a single number that rings both services.
You'll want to find a decent Verizon phone that can do wifi/Skype, perhaps a WM phone like the Diamond, Touch Pro, Treo Pro or Touch Pro 2, or an Android phone might be better (but check www.howardforums.com in the Pageplus forum to see which have been successfully activated on PPC).
Final note is that for your room, you might consider either a femtocell to give you a cell signal, or MagicJack, again with GoogleVoice, both create phone service from an Internet connection.
At least in the US such a law would be nearly pointless since these "locks" are easily uncircumvented and most carriers either don't lock their phones (Verizon) or have a similar unlocking policy anyways (notable exception the iPhone).
So the real "lock" (obstacle) to using a given phone on another carrier are all the other forms of non-interoperability, intentional or otherwise, especially 1) use of different frequency bands particularly for data (e.g. AT&T vs Tmo 3G bands), 2) the use of incompatible authentication protocols (e.g. Verizon vs Sprint), 3) use of different MMS systems (e.g. Sprint), and the refusal of many carriers to activate non-branded phones (e.g. Sprint, Verizon). The upshot is that in most cases even if a phone is "unlocked", moving it to another carrier that *should* be compatible (CDMA vs GSM), nevertheless almost always results in nothing working but voice and maybe simple SMS, unless one does major hacking and flashing. This then obviates the whole point since any $20 phone can do voice and SMS.