The proposed Nebraska statute says "Sec. 7: Nothing in the Fair Repair Act shall apply to motor vehicle manufacturers." As for other manufacturers, they get to take into account whether compliance would be too expensive, and the maximum penalty is $500. So regardless of whether or not you think these laws are a good idea, it's nothing close to being a Tech Writer Full Employment Act, an Everybody Can Repair Their Own Car Act, or a Put All The Small Manufacturers Out Of Business Act.
The Amazon Locker program (where packages get delivered to a secure drop off point) depends on good relationships with c-stores. Personally, I'd rather have a nearby Locker than an Amazon c-store.
$50,000.00 per instance, is what MasterCard can fine a merchant for storing the security code. It's right there in the merchant agreement. Do you think they'll enforce that provision?
In construction parlance, to "pull a permit" means to obtain a permit. The context makes it clear that isn't what the court did. TFA uses better wording: the permit was invalidated.
Alternate headline: "Academic incrementally advances an established line of thought."
Lila Gatlin was writing about this in the 1960s and 70s.
"Life may be defined operationally as an information processing system—a structural hierarchy of functioning units—that has acquired through evolution the ability to store and process the information necessary for its own accurate reproduction." --Lila Gatlin, Information Theory and the Living System, 1971
I'd like more insight on how Adami's contributions are especially significant (which they may be, but TFA doesn't make that clear). Or is it just that he's a really good spokesman?
Since you're on/., you probably will care to understand the Minkwitz relationship:
deltaA/deltaX = 2 × deltaM/deltaY
where A is the astigmatism created by the lens, M is the power of the correction provided by the lens, and X and Y are the usual coordinates. Thus progressive lenses always get blurry in direct proportion to the difference between your near and far correction, and in inverse proportion to the vertical distance between the near and far sweet spots.
In practice, some advanced techniques such as grinding both sides of the lens and applying wavefront or raytracing optical simulations can make the problem less noticeable (mainly by moving the worst areas from one spot to another). Some brands of lenses are better than others, and some labs do a better job of making them than others. If you go for progressive ("PAL") lenses, ask to see the "occupational" lenses from several different manufacturers. Learn how to see the "invisible" manufacturing codes printed on your lenses.
My solution at the moment: fixed-distance computer glasses, plus Hoya Summit iQ PAL lenses adjusted to increase the size of the reading zone a bit.
I'm starting to shop for a car, and I'll be wearing gloves on the test drives. I can live with a capacitive touch screen for navigation, but I'm one of those oddball people who insists on being able to turn on the heat and tune the radio during the winter.
IIRC from the book "The Life That Lives On Man," the skin count of undesirable bacteria is maximized by daily showering. That's just frequent enough to wash away the desirable strains, and to keep things moist enough for the undesirable strains to proliferate. That research is over 20 years old, so I'd love to see an update.
Did anyone else listen to this on a scanner? It's amazing how many times the dispatcher had to remind officers to exercise discipline and to follow the orders which they had been given. Apparently many officers felt compelled to converge on any suspected sighting, abandoning their assigned lookout posts. In general, I was impressed by the police response, but it was far below the standard that would be expected in many other cities.
My rule is to wear gloves when test driving a car or shopping for a replacement radio. After all, 4-6 months of the year, I'll be wearing gloves when I climb into the car in the morning. Radio, heater, and all important controls need to be operable.
Unfortunately, there are almost no replacement radios that have real buttons and knobs. That's one area where the auto manufacturers get it right more often than the gizmo vendors.
That information has proven quite helpful in my home states (CO and NE).
Usually I'll vote against a judge if more than about 15% of attorneys recommend "Do Not Retain" (or 10%, if the the judge gets poor marks for impartiality). For borderline cases, first I'll look for mentions of the judge in news stories. If I'm still undecided, I'll vote against retention. Why? The vast majority of people vote to retain all of the judges, so even really bad judges stay in office. By voting against retention, I will amplify the votes of any voters who happen to know about a problem with the judge.
Here's one reference in the literature about the technique (co-authored by the same guy featured in TFA):
Ehleringer, J.R., Bowen, G.J., Chesson, L.A., West, A.G., Podlesak, D.W., Cerling, T.E. (2008). From the Cover: Hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios in human hair are related to geography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(8), 2788-2793. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0712228105 (geolocation based on oxygen isotopes in hair)
Notice that isotope analysis indicates that a person was or was not in a set of regions at a given time, as in "possibly Texas or Florida." So it's better at narrowing down a list of possibilities than at pinpointing someone's travels. Or as the NOVA story says, it's a "a starting point" for an investigation, not a smoking gun to show off at a trial. (At work, I get to play with some of this stuff, blasting microscopic objects with laser beams and analyzing the atoms that fly off. How fun is that?)
September 25 update from nature.com: "Since this story went to press, a judge at a Moscow city court ruled on 25 September that Olga Zenelina immediately be released from custody, pending her trial. A date for the trial has not yet been scheduled."
No, according to the cited article, 1,200 deaths per year (initially, then declining year to year) occurred because of more people driving rather than flying "attributable to the effect of 9/11."
"Two primary reasons explain the 9/11 effect on road fatalities. First, the 9/11 effect may capture the fear of flying.... Second, the 9/11 effect may be attributable to the inconvenience of flying post-9/11" [page 9 of the paper]. The authors were unable to measure these two factors independently. I think it would be reasonable to say that for most people, the choice to drive rather than fly was due primarily to a fear of terrorism (for which security theater might arguably be a solution). Only for a small but savvy minority was the choice to drive due to the TSA itself.
Kaplan, Matt (2011). "Archaeopteryx no longer first bird". Nature, published online 27 July 2011. doi:10.1038/news.2011.443
Lee, M.S.Y. and Worthy, T.H. (2011). "Likelihood reinstates Archaeopteryx as a primitive bird. Biology Letters, published online before print October 26, 2011, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2011.0884
Xing Xu, Hailu You, Kai Du and Fenglu Han (28 July 2011). "An Archaeopteryx-like theropod from China and the origin of Avialae". Nature 475 (7357): 465–470. DOI:10.1038/nature10288
Whichever side of the origins debate one subscribes to, good riddance to the horse and Archaeopteryx examples!
The typical horse progression still shown in many textbooks is oversimplified and incorrect. The "horses" shown in the progression, particularly Eohippus, really belong on "branches" of a quite complex tree. I know I've personally met creationists for whom learning about the incorrectness of that picture was the turning point in their abandonment of textbook paleobiology.
Likewise, the Archaeopteryx is often criticized as a particularly weak example even by the most dedicated evolutionists. Archaeopteryx may yet be accepted as an early member of Avialae, but there just isn't sufficient evidence of that yet.
The big box stores are usually a triple-win for cost, convenience, and quality, but there are some things to watch for. Do a preliminary scouting trip and look for:
What machine are they using? Some of the stores have put in new models of photo printers that I don't quite trust. I prefer a machine that's new enough to be in good shape, but old enough to have been evaluated by the archival crowd. The Fuji Frontier machines are generally very good. Whatever they're using, look up light fastness test results on a site like http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com./
What paper are they using? Extra points for Fuji Crystal Archive, though again there are many good and many poor options out there.
How are they handling the prints? Is the tech wearing gloves? Are they super-careful not to bend the corners?
Before you print a big batch of photos, print a couple of test images. Print a really light details on a light background, a dark one, one with lots of blue sky, and one with big areas solid gray tone. Some stores (I don't know about Costco) calibrate their machines only once or twice a year. They may print very well after calibration, but eventually they can drift and produce not-so-good prints.
Finally, if you're keeping your archival copies on DVD or CD, keep in mind that there is a huge difference in longevity depending on the construction of the disc. Be prepared to pay for true archival quality with a gold reflective layer.
As someone who works with laser spectroscopy, the biggest development here is the prospect of portability. Usually LIBS and LA-ICP-MS (laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry) systems are as big as a couple of refrigerators, and just as heavy. And that's not counting the supplies of lab-grade argon, helium, and nitrogen needed to run the equipment.
The blurb from Geophysical Research Abstracts says that they're developing a "method." That's a technical term in the field, which means they're developing a reliable, repeatable procedure which specifies exactly how to prepare the samples to avoid contamination and what elements to look for to reliably produce a fingerprint EVERY time without making too many unnecessary measurements. That's routine science, but necessary to getting wide acceptance for the technique.
Only those communities that are remote enough to depend solely on satellite are affected. FTA: "Northwestel said all communities across Nunavut, N.W.T. and Yukon that receive their long distance calling and data service via satellite are affected."
S. Keshav, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Tetherless Computing at the University of Waterloo, calculates that the marginal cost of an SMS message is about 0.3 cents (testimony before the US Congress, June 2009). His calculation includes channel costs and billing costs, but assumes negligible additional paging costs because "once a mobile has been located, either for a call or an SMS, it no longer needs to be paged."
But as someone pointed out, this is the same industry that gives us $3 MP3s.
Not all prototypes: most of the items I see in the collection are production models. Not all failures: quite a few of the items dominated a market niche during their time, even if they didn't take over the world and find a home on every desktop, and are still available for purchase.
Almost every contact my family has had with a emergency room has resulted in overbilling. In several cases, when I've complained "insurance already paid for that" or "the patient did NOT receive that treatment" both insurance and hospital have disclaimed any knowledge, and my paper records were my sole defense against paying hundreds or thousands of dollars. Sometimes those bills arrived years after I thought everything had been settled. I guess if you have a couple hundred grand you're willing to spend on such waste over your lifetime, then yeah, it's not worth caring about. Or maybe you live in a place (certainly not the US) where you really can trust medical billing.
For most purchase decisions, economics (to some degree) accounts for the amount of energy used in production. An exception is when some group tries to bias the market in favor of buying the "new, efficient" thing, even when it means that the "old, inefficient" things go to a landfill before their natural end of life.
An important, but often neglected, point to make is that energy used at the factory CAN come from more efficient, cleaner sources. Or at the very least, the energy-related pollution may be dumped a little farther from the neighborhoods you care about the most.
Slashdot Mirror
The proposed Nebraska statute says "Sec. 7: Nothing in the Fair Repair Act shall apply to motor vehicle manufacturers." As for other manufacturers, they get to take into account whether compliance would be too expensive, and the maximum penalty is $500. So regardless of whether or not you think these laws are a good idea, it's nothing close to being a Tech Writer Full Employment Act, an Everybody Can Repair Their Own Car Act, or a Put All The Small Manufacturers Out Of Business Act.
The Amazon Locker program (where packages get delivered to a secure drop off point) depends on good relationships with c-stores. Personally, I'd rather have a nearby Locker than an Amazon c-store.
$50,000.00 per instance, is what MasterCard can fine a merchant for storing the security code. It's right there in the merchant agreement. Do you think they'll enforce that provision?
In construction parlance, to "pull a permit" means to obtain a permit. The context makes it clear that isn't what the court did. TFA uses better wording: the permit was invalidated.
Lila Gatlin was writing about this in the 1960s and 70s.
"Life may be defined operationally as an information processing system—a structural hierarchy of functioning units—that has acquired through evolution the ability to store and process the information necessary for its own accurate reproduction." --Lila Gatlin, Information Theory and the Living System, 1971
I'd like more insight on how Adami's contributions are especially significant (which they may be, but TFA doesn't make that clear). Or is it just that he's a really good spokesman?
Since you're on /., you probably will care to understand the Minkwitz relationship:
deltaA/deltaX = 2 × deltaM/deltaY
where A is the astigmatism created by the lens, M is the power of the correction provided by the lens, and X and Y are the usual coordinates. Thus progressive lenses always get blurry in direct proportion to the difference between your near and far correction, and in inverse proportion to the vertical distance between the near and far sweet spots.
In practice, some advanced techniques such as grinding both sides of the lens and applying wavefront or raytracing optical simulations can make the problem less noticeable (mainly by moving the worst areas from one spot to another). Some brands of lenses are better than others, and some labs do a better job of making them than others. If you go for progressive ("PAL") lenses, ask to see the "occupational" lenses from several different manufacturers. Learn how to see the "invisible" manufacturing codes printed on your lenses.
My solution at the moment: fixed-distance computer glasses, plus Hoya Summit iQ PAL lenses adjusted to increase the size of the reading zone a bit.
Sure, PoE can transmit 36 W (if all eight connectors are used), but lighting a whole office that way? That's one incredibly efficient luminaire!
I'm starting to shop for a car, and I'll be wearing gloves on the test drives. I can live with a capacitive touch screen for navigation, but I'm one of those oddball people who insists on being able to turn on the heat and tune the radio during the winter.
IIRC from the book "The Life That Lives On Man," the skin count of undesirable bacteria is maximized by daily showering. That's just frequent enough to wash away the desirable strains, and to keep things moist enough for the undesirable strains to proliferate. That research is over 20 years old, so I'd love to see an update.
Did anyone else listen to this on a scanner? It's amazing how many times the dispatcher had to remind officers to exercise discipline and to follow the orders which they had been given. Apparently many officers felt compelled to converge on any suspected sighting, abandoning their assigned lookout posts. In general, I was impressed by the police response, but it was far below the standard that would be expected in many other cities.
7 replies, and no one actually addressed the problem the OP mentioned: distractions. Maps distract you more and not less.
Failing to solve the problem is not cleverness. All of you think you're being snarky by being morons.
Um, maps are hardly distracting if used as described in the comment you're responding to: before going somewhere.
My rule is to wear gloves when test driving a car or shopping for a replacement radio. After all, 4-6 months of the year, I'll be wearing gloves when I climb into the car in the morning. Radio, heater, and all important controls need to be operable.
Unfortunately, there are almost no replacement radios that have real buttons and knobs. That's one area where the auto manufacturers get it right more often than the gizmo vendors.
That information has proven quite helpful in my home states (CO and NE).
Usually I'll vote against a judge if more than about 15% of attorneys recommend "Do Not Retain" (or 10%, if the the judge gets poor marks for impartiality). For borderline cases, first I'll look for mentions of the judge in news stories. If I'm still undecided, I'll vote against retention. Why? The vast majority of people vote to retain all of the judges, so even really bad judges stay in office. By voting against retention, I will amplify the votes of any voters who happen to know about a problem with the judge.
Here's one reference in the literature about the technique (co-authored by the same guy featured in TFA):
Ehleringer, J.R., Bowen, G.J., Chesson, L.A., West, A.G., Podlesak, D.W., Cerling, T.E. (2008). From the Cover: Hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios in human hair are related to geography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(8), 2788-2793. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0712228105 (geolocation based on oxygen isotopes in hair)
Notice that isotope analysis indicates that a person was or was not in a set of regions at a given time, as in "possibly Texas or Florida." So it's better at narrowing down a list of possibilities than at pinpointing someone's travels. Or as the NOVA story says, it's a "a starting point" for an investigation, not a smoking gun to show off at a trial. (At work, I get to play with some of this stuff, blasting microscopic objects with laser beams and analyzing the atoms that fly off. How fun is that?)
September 25 update from nature.com: "Since this story went to press, a judge at a Moscow city court ruled on 25 September that Olga Zenelina immediately be released from custody, pending her trial. A date for the trial has not yet been scheduled."
No, according to the cited article, 1,200 deaths per year (initially, then declining year to year) occurred because of more people driving rather than flying "attributable to the effect of 9/11."
"Two primary reasons explain the 9/11 effect on road fatalities. First, the 9/11 effect may capture the fear of flying. ... Second, the 9/11 effect may be attributable to the inconvenience of flying post-9/11" [page 9 of the paper]. The authors were unable to measure these two factors independently. I think it would be reasonable to say that for most people, the choice to drive rather than fly was due primarily to a fear of terrorism (for which security theater might arguably be a solution). Only for a small but savvy minority was the choice to drive due to the TSA itself.
I'd love to see a citation of this assertion.
Kaplan, Matt (2011). "Archaeopteryx no longer first bird". Nature, published online 27 July 2011. doi:10.1038/news.2011.443
Lee, M.S.Y. and Worthy, T.H. (2011). "Likelihood reinstates Archaeopteryx as a primitive bird. Biology Letters, published online before print October 26, 2011, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2011.0884
Xing Xu, Hailu You, Kai Du and Fenglu Han (28 July 2011). "An Archaeopteryx-like theropod from China and the origin of Avialae". Nature 475 (7357): 465–470. DOI:10.1038/nature10288
Whichever side of the origins debate one subscribes to, good riddance to the horse and Archaeopteryx examples!
The typical horse progression still shown in many textbooks is oversimplified and incorrect. The "horses" shown in the progression, particularly Eohippus, really belong on "branches" of a quite complex tree. I know I've personally met creationists for whom learning about the incorrectness of that picture was the turning point in their abandonment of textbook paleobiology.
Likewise, the Archaeopteryx is often criticized as a particularly weak example even by the most dedicated evolutionists. Archaeopteryx may yet be accepted as an early member of Avialae, but there just isn't sufficient evidence of that yet.
The big box stores are usually a triple-win for cost, convenience, and quality, but there are some things to watch for. Do a preliminary scouting trip and look for:
Before you print a big batch of photos, print a couple of test images. Print a really light details on a light background, a dark one, one with lots of blue sky, and one with big areas solid gray tone. Some stores (I don't know about Costco) calibrate their machines only once or twice a year. They may print very well after calibration, but eventually they can drift and produce not-so-good prints.
Finally, if you're keeping your archival copies on DVD or CD, keep in mind that there is a huge difference in longevity depending on the construction of the disc. Be prepared to pay for true archival quality with a gold reflective layer.
As someone who works with laser spectroscopy, the biggest development here is the prospect of portability. Usually LIBS and LA-ICP-MS (laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry) systems are as big as a couple of refrigerators, and just as heavy. And that's not counting the supplies of lab-grade argon, helium, and nitrogen needed to run the equipment.
The blurb from Geophysical Research Abstracts says that they're developing a "method." That's a technical term in the field, which means they're developing a reliable, repeatable procedure which specifies exactly how to prepare the samples to avoid contamination and what elements to look for to reliably produce a fingerprint EVERY time without making too many unnecessary measurements. That's routine science, but necessary to getting wide acceptance for the technique.
Only those communities that are remote enough to depend solely on satellite are affected. FTA: "Northwestel said all communities across Nunavut, N.W.T. and Yukon that receive their long distance calling and data service via satellite are affected."
S. Keshav, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Tetherless Computing at the University of Waterloo, calculates that the marginal cost of an SMS message is about 0.3 cents (testimony before the US Congress, June 2009). His calculation includes channel costs and billing costs, but assumes negligible additional paging costs because "once a mobile has been located, either for a call or an SMS, it no longer needs to be paged." But as someone pointed out, this is the same industry that gives us $3 MP3s.
Not all prototypes: most of the items I see in the collection are production models. Not all failures: quite a few of the items dominated a market niche during their time, even if they didn't take over the world and find a home on every desktop, and are still available for purchase.
I don't keep medical bills or documents
Almost every contact my family has had with a emergency room has resulted in overbilling. In several cases, when I've complained "insurance already paid for that" or "the patient did NOT receive that treatment" both insurance and hospital have disclaimed any knowledge, and my paper records were my sole defense against paying hundreds or thousands of dollars. Sometimes those bills arrived years after I thought everything had been settled. I guess if you have a couple hundred grand you're willing to spend on such waste over your lifetime, then yeah, it's not worth caring about. Or maybe you live in a place (certainly not the US) where you really can trust medical billing.
For most purchase decisions, economics (to some degree) accounts for the amount of energy used in production. An exception is when some group tries to bias the market in favor of buying the "new, efficient" thing, even when it means that the "old, inefficient" things go to a landfill before their natural end of life.
An important, but often neglected, point to make is that energy used at the factory CAN come from more efficient, cleaner sources. Or at the very least, the energy-related pollution may be dumped a little farther from the neighborhoods you care about the most.