I bet you read the 300 word article and just missed these 30 words:
"The water produced by the electricity-generating chemical reaction is used to dilute the fuel down to the right concentration, 3-6 per cent, needed for the reaction to take place."
Yes I did miss those 30 words, mea culpa, I should have RTFA more closely.
Yet dilution creates other problems. One of the articles suggests a 20% MeOH concentration. This suggests that with a 50 W device and a75% efficient fuel cell, the poor traveller would need to carry 1 pound of diluted fuel for every 8 hours of expected use. Since these fuel cells are not rechargable, the traveller would need to carry enough fuel to last an entire trip (at least until the cartridges become available in every over-priced hotel gift shop in the country).
Dilution solves the flammability threat, but creates usability issues.
I wonder how much methanol will be needed to keep modern laptops running? At 50 W power consumption, a laptop consumes about as much energy as half a person. With an energy content of 19.5 MJ/kg MeOH and assuming a 75% conversion efficiency, a laptop needs almost 100 gm of methanol for an 8 hour flight.
Something tells me that airlines and security people won't like the idea of people carrying 4 ounce cartridges of flammable pure methyl alcohol onboard flights. Even in a "secure" cartridge form factor, the liquid would seem to pose a hazard if a terrorist learns how to open the cartridge and set fire to the liquid.
I have never downloaded music, ripped a CD, or recorded copyrighted video. I have used hard disks for my files, bought DVD media for my backups, and bought flash memory for my digital cameras. Why would I have to pay this levy? And can I ask for a rebate if I only use the media for my own copyrighted files?
The EZ-Pass transponder comes with an anti-static bag which blocks transmission of signals to the device, in case you may wish to pay the toll by other means. The EZ-Pass instructions implore you to keep the bag in your glove compartment at all times.
I wonder if this really works? While in tin-foil hat mode one day, I put my cellphone in an antistatic bag to see if the metalized plastic would block the signal. No such luck -- it only reduced the signal strength from an unscientific 2-out-of-4 bars to 1-out-of-4. Obviously, the metalized bag can act as a weak antenna and couple capacitively with the cellphone inside. In a further fit of boredom, I found I could kill reception by holding the antistatic bag in one hand and the grounded shield of a USB connector in the other (OK, I was bored).
Tin foil hat wearers be warned. An ungrounded antistatic bg will attenuate, but not necessarily kill RF signals.
oh, that would assume that you actually kept the lists yourself and not just didn't buy the list off from shady dealer.
Good point, but harsher penalties for spam will change the behavior of list makers and list buyers. Were I a list buyer, I would want the list provider to gaurantee that I would not face legal headaches for using the names of that list. Thus, I wonder how long it will take list buyers to put spam indemnity clauses in list purchase contracts? Or, I might ask for list that has no UK names on it.
In either case, domains associated with spam-regulating jurisdictions would see a drop in spam.
Don't bet on a quick fix, but learn anyway
on
Sub-Zero Squirrels
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· Score: 4, Insightful
These ground squirrels are probably deeply adapted in multidimensional ways to the low temperatures. In contrast, the biochemical pathways of people are all tuned to operate at normal body temperature. I doubt that there is an easy way to make the human body hiberate at low temperature. Too many systems would be affected or thrown out-of-balance by the cold.
Nonetheless, we can learn from hibernating animals. One area that may be promising is how bears maintain bone density during hibernation (pardon my potential redundancy if this was posetd on/. already). Helping astronauts retain bone mass during zero-G would involve a less severe chemical rejiggering than creating full-fledged cold-body hibernation.
Most spam is intended to make the recipient visit some destination and do business of some kind. Perhaps anti-spam laws needs to target the businesses that use spam to create business - the destinations of all those links in all those spams. Any company that sells viagra, ink jet cartridges, cell phone plans, or mortgages will have a more vulnerable point of presense than a spammer does. Even porn and gambling sites could be vulnerable because they require more permaneance than does a spam operation. If those companies where held accountable for their marketing affiliate's spams, then they might not engage the services of spammers.
I wonder how many domains will move their registration/hosting to the UK (or some similar spam-regulated region). If I were a spammer, I would avoid sending stuff to countries that might create legal entanglements. If a quick whois reveals that the domain is in the UK (for example), then I might as well take that domain off my address lists (since the spammer's revenue per spam is low, they should be risk averse). Of course international spammers may think they are above the law.
I still use Kermit 0.9(40) to transfer things to and from my HP-48GX. I never did get it working on any new PPC Mac. Thus it is currently relegated to a Powerbook 190cs that I use for the retro applications that only run on a 68k Macintosh.
Giving someone a monopoly right to sell something also gives them the right to artificial scarcity to inflate prices, thereby denying the medicine to the poor (ie AIDS drugs for Africans)
This is an excellent point, but the situation is more complicated than just a matter of "denying the medicine to the poor." Two issues make the situation both better and worse than this statement.
First, all drugs go off-patent and quickly become priced at the cost-of-production when second-tier pharma manufacturers release generic versions of the drugs. Patent owners often try to add indications to extend the life of the patent, but AFAIK, they only get a year or two more. At worst, patents only delay, not deny, the poor's access to the latest medicines (I know that may be cold comfort to an AIDs orphan Africa, however).
Second, and worst of all, any attempts to offer tiered pricing will fail without onerous levels of policing in countries not known for their respect of the law. It may be tempting to let the rich countries pay one price that supports R&D and the poor pay a lower price that enables access to life-saving medicine. But the realities of internal corruption, black markets, and global trade make such tiered pricing unsustainable. If a person in a poor country can buy medicine at 10 cents a pill and ship it to another country and sell it for 10 dollars a pill, then that is what will happen. This even happens in developed world too. Look at the current issue with cheap Canadian drugs coming to the U.S. or the EU's issue with cheap drugs from Portugal being sold in high-cost Sweden.
I suspect that the technical limitation is that of delivering enough current across the span of the array. Unlike plasma displays, LEDs are low voltage beasties. And unlike LCDs, LEDs are high current devices. To get say 20 W of brightness, you will need to inject on the order of 10 Amps in (and that 10 Amps only gives you 11 microamps per LED in a 640 x 480 x 3 color display). Routing that much current along the array conductors(which are probably plated or grown on the glass substrate) with acceptably small voltage losses would seem to be very tricky.
That's just my guess as to the technical hurdles for high resolution LED displays. I'm sure some bright young soul will solve the problem, however.
Moore's actual Law does not require ever-shrinking transistors. It only requires that we put more of them into each chip. Double-sides chips, multi-die packaging, or 3-D layering of circuits would help increase the number of transistors in each "chip." You may think that multi-die chips is a cheat, but when it comes to packing in several billion transistors into a CPU, who cares how they do it.
I have found that a digital camera does a very good job of quickly capturing usable images of paper documents. A 5 megapixel camera provides over 200 ppi for 8.5 x 11 hardcopy and grabs the image faster than does most flatbed scanners. Given the scarcity of drivers for Unix, the only trick is finding a memory card reader that is compatible with your system.
A good digital camera may seem like overkill for scanning in bills, but then the camera also doubles as a camera too.;)
The article suggests that Vega is only 350 million years old. Moreover, at about 3 times the mass of the Sun, the lifespan of Vega will only be about 1 billion years. Given that it took about 3.5 billion years for life to get going, it seems unlikely that planets around Vega have (or ever could have) interesting lifeforms, even if an Earth-like planet is present.
You use a rotating test chamber as shown in a figure from the fulltext. By rotating the chamber, gavity never acts in the same direction for very long and nothing settles out of solution. A second rotating chamber is oriented to let gravity work, while duplicating the effects of spin.
Personally, I am skeptical that bacteria really experience gravity. Bacteria are too small -- at that scale most "fluids" are effectively the consistency of molasses in January. I wonder if something as simple as light impacted their experiment. We shall see.....
"Knowledge of harrassment" sounds like a formal complaint to me. That is, a piece of paper with a signature and specifics that would allow me to limit the search (and our exposure) rather severely. And even then, absent a court order, I'd want our counsel's opinion that we would be permitted to make such a search. We can be sued by *either party* if we do the wrong thing.
Excellent point. It appears that companies can be damned if they do, damned if they don't monitor. I got the sense that letting a U.S. worker surf porn sites on a U.S. company computer would be tantamount to letting them post such pictures on the lunchroom bulletin board -- creating a "hostile workplace" with potentially public displays of sexually suggestive material. Likewise, I would imagine that RIAA could make a case against the company if employees download copyrighted materials on company computers.
But your point about legal counsel is totally correct. As "deep pockets" companies can get sued both by those harmed by employee's misue of company IT and by those that who would abuse a company's IT systems. Perhaps all these conflicting regulations and case law precedents on the rights and responsibilities of companies is more about full employment program for lawyers.
I think I do see your point, but I guess a distinction can be made between tools, i.e. methods, reagents, protocols (and to some extent labware) that are necessary for basic science and the drug development process. In the end, cheap access to basic biotech techniques may be beneficial for big pharma, as well, cutting down research costs.
These are good points -- R&D tools are a bit more removed from the horrible economics of the new drug application process. (What is the success rate of new tools? What is the effective investment required to develop a new tool?). Yet I am sure that the companies that develop and use these tools see them as creating competative advantage. Moreover, I cannot help but think that the people that develop new tools and methods are not partially motivated by the financial windfall associated with sales of such tools.
In theory, true experimenters should have access to the patented processes under fair use ( citation of cases ). Unfortunately, I have read (at a link lost to the sands of time) that patent holders are disputing university researcher's fair use rights because of university IP policies. The trend of academic researchers or their universities selling or licensing the fruits of academic research knocks the legs out from under the researcher's claims to non-profit fair use.
Even open access for tools would have unintended consequences. If reagents were not covered by patents, production of these chemicals would move to low-cost producer countries such as China. This could be a good thing by further reducing the cost of supplies for research. Or it might be a very bad thing by bankrupting Western pharmaceutical tool companies.
It would seem that there are economic forces that would reduce tool innovation in the absense of patents/monopolies and forces that would increase pharmaceutical innovation based on depatented tools. Perhaps the short-term would see more drug innovation with wider access to tools and the long-term would see declines in innovation as funding for tool creation drops. I don't know the answer to that one, but you raise very good issues.
Unintended Consequences: Less New Medicine
on
The Opening of Biotech
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Open access to biotechnology may have unintended consequences that reduce the utility of the biotech knowledge. As much as people hate patents, they do serve a purpose. Giving someone a monopoly right to sell something gives them the incentive to spend money on development. Drug development is hideously expensive -- without some hope of a billion dollar blockbuster payoff, companies aren't going to invest anything in open-access pharmaceuticals.
Now if we could convince goverments to spend money on all aspects of pharma development, we might be OK. Unfortunately, I'd bet that the funding government would get cranky when other countries freely exploit the medicines that the one government paid for. Citizens of countries that fund pharma R&D might reasonably object to shouldering all the burden of developing new medicines for the whole world. Does anyone think the UN would be an effective body for funding the rapid development of new drugs?
Finally, patents are a form of open access (at least in the U.S.). Patents force companies to publish their inventions. This gives competitors a leg up in innovating around any new patented process. Its not as open as the proposed Biological Innovation for Open Society (BIOS) program, but the current system is not as closed as detractors would have you believe.
> As long as you carefully transfer old files and their corresponding applications
> to new storage media, you can hope that a emulator like this will give you access
> to otherwise lost data.
Hm, not always true.....Now, even if you were still to own the files, and the software,
and the emulator to run it and view your files - how would that enable you to actually
USE them?.....
Good point. This depends on the quality of the emulator. If the emulator supports any form of copy-paste, drag-n-drop, etc., then reuse is easy. And if the old application supports a save-as-text (or similar standard format) and the emulator supports movement of files between the host file system and emulated file system, then reuse is also possible. But you are right that these features are not gauranteed.
Fair warning, I'm going to ask questions here that I don't know the answers to (which isn't very fair). Feel free to pop in with answers, I'm honestly curious.
IMO, all questions are fair and the questions you ask are good ones.
A more proper "percent of spending" for IT in a school budget would be after taking out some other costs. Take out teacher/admin labor costs, building maintenance/construction costs, etc..... Now, what's left?.... That's the percentage of IT costs from funding available to "school programs"...... That's a better percentage to look at, because it reflects more of the "discretionary" spending that IT really comes out of.
I'm not sure that I agree with the premise that IT is discretionary. Perhaps the real problem with computers in the classroom is that they are seen as a discretionary program -- a mere add-on to traditional pedagogical techniques. In contrast, many companies see IT as key infrastructure that lets the company do what the company needs to do. This IT infrastructure is critical to the productivity of manager and workers because it supports the effective accomplishment of the task at hand. Most companies would just as soon turn off the heating or electricity as they would turn off their computers.
I would argue that ubiquitous IT in classrooms (i.e., 1 computer per child in virtually every classroom) would improve education in the same way that it has improved business -- increasing productivity, accelerating processes, decreasing errors, and decreasing costs.
I think IT could improve the productivity of teachers in a myriad of ways -- either enhancing the amount of quality time a teacher can spend with each student or increasing the number of students a single teacher can handle with a given level of teaching quality. Under the current approach, the average teacher really has very little time for each student. Between lecturing, taking attendance, sitting quietly during tests, or while helping other students, each student probably gets less than 1 minute per class-hour of the teacher's undivided attention.
A computer could provide some level of individual attention the other 59 minutes of each class-hour. Although I freely admit that the computer's attention is a far cry from that of a teacher, it would help. Self-paced learning and self-paced testing would enable students to learn at their own pace, while the teacher spends more time coaching individual students. Classrooms could also adopt the management-by-exception principles that IT-enabled companies are starting to use. Rather than require the teacher to spend valuable time monitoring every student's work, the computer would do the routine monitoring and only alert the teacher to students have special problems. This would enable the teacher to focus their attention on the students that need the most help and could even inform the teacher to the likely nature of the problem (e.g., whether it is difficulty with a single concept or a more general malaise or personal problem).
The IT-is-discretionary viewpoint is valid if the costs of classroom IT prohibit its ubiquitous use. If school districts persist in spending $3k per computer, they will never be able to put a machine on every desk. If school districts think they need the latest tech at all times, they are missing the point of the technology. With suitable software, schools could use older, cheaper machines (or retain current machines for longer time periods).
Thanks for the question -- I'm sorry if my answer is indirect. Perhaps we all need to consider the role of IT in the classroom -- whether it is discretionary or infrastuctural.
Wouldn't blanket monitoring open the company to *increased* liability? Surely the way to go is to wait for a complaint/subpoena and then monitor *only* what is requested by the court.
"Don't ask, don't tell" may work in the U.S. Army, but a blind corporate eye may not be a sufficient defense in court. A 2000 article suggests that companies can be held liable for harassment in any media once any knowledge of harassment surfaces. A 2002 article suggests that many large companies can and do monitor email and surfing in the U.S.
Jurisdiction matters too, as other posts to this thread suggest, the EU has workplace privacy laws and personal data laws that forestall nonconsensual monitoring (the EU's personal data laws even complicate consensual monitoring). There are probably differences within the U.S., too. I would not be surprised if more liberal jurisdictions have both greater workplace privacy rules and hold companies to greater levels of liability for misconduct on company IT systems.
how is it legal to monitor IM sessions without the other parties consent?
Companies have the right to monitor all IM, e-mail, files on their premises. This is more than just an issue of "their house, their rules." If some employee is using IM/email to perpetrate a crime (e.g. sexual harassment, fraud, etc.), the company can be held liable for not doing something about it. Thus, at some level, companies have an obligation to monitor all IM, e-mail, files on their premises. If some companies choose not monitor, then it is because they are very trusting, foolish, or corrupt.
An excellent point, but we need to be cautious. Although we have many medicines derived from natural sources, these natural substances require just as much scrutiny as man-made synthetic ones. Most natural medicines are derived from what amounts to chemical weapons created by organisms to either kill/disable prey or kill/sicken predators. As such, they can have nasty side-effects.
A blowfish, leech, or cannibis plant does not care if a person gets cancer 10 years later, suffers permanent neurological damage, or occasionally dies abruptly. In many cases, extreme toxic reactions are the entire point of the chemical. On the one hand, humans have millions of years of evolution to adapt to these natural chemicals. On the other hand, these organisms have had millions of evolution to create ever nastier defensive/offensive chemicals.
Even long-used natural medicines can be unsafe. Very few cultures have had the inclination and record-keeping skills to correlate medicine consumption with long-term illnesses like cancer, dementia, heart disease, liver disease, etc. Very few cultures have had the numerical sample size to detect medicines that might be fatal on a rare but consistent basis. Despite a multi-thousand-year history of use, it was only in the last few decades that we uncovered the link between willow bark (aspirin) and Reyes syndrome (which is rare but fatal for children).
Just because something is natural, does not make it safe. Whether blowfish toxin or leech saliva make a good medications will take millions of dollars of clinical research and then perhaps millions of patients to discover.
They don't need to tax the phone call per se. My guess is that they would regulate it at the ISP level -- a tax on consumer internet service that goes to pay for universal service, shared infrastructure, do-not-spam lists, etc. Another option is a per megabyte transfer tax is would be considered "more fair" for lower-income, less active internet users. Of course congress might (or might not) object to such an internet tax.
Personally I think taxes suck and hate that I currently shell out $30 a month in various telecom taxes. But if you buy the argument that web and e-mail access should be universal, then it suggests the need for some form of tax & subsidy scheme to provide that access to everyone.
The article makes a big deal out of the 80 billion spent on school computing just in the last decade -- it sounds like such an outrageous number. Yet with 47.6 million school children in the U.S. and an average expenditure of $7,500 per pupil, public education spends $357 billion annually. IT spending accounts for only $8 billion annually -- a mere 2.2%.
An IT budget of 2.2% seems very small when you consider the information-intensive nature of education.
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I bet you read the 300 word article and just missed these 30 words:
"The water produced by the electricity-generating chemical reaction is used to dilute the fuel down to the right concentration, 3-6 per cent, needed for the reaction to take place."
Yes I did miss those 30 words, mea culpa, I should have RTFA more closely.
Yet dilution creates other problems. One of the articles suggests a 20% MeOH concentration. This suggests that with a 50 W device and a75% efficient fuel cell, the poor traveller would need to carry 1 pound of diluted fuel for every 8 hours of expected use. Since these fuel cells are not rechargable, the traveller would need to carry enough fuel to last an entire trip (at least until the cartridges become available in every over-priced hotel gift shop in the country).
Dilution solves the flammability threat, but creates usability issues.
I wonder how much methanol will be needed to keep modern laptops running? At 50 W power consumption, a laptop consumes about as much energy as half a person. With an energy content of 19.5 MJ/kg MeOH and assuming a 75% conversion efficiency, a laptop needs almost 100 gm of methanol for an 8 hour flight.
Something tells me that airlines and security people won't like the idea of people carrying 4 ounce cartridges of flammable pure methyl alcohol onboard flights. Even in a "secure" cartridge form factor, the liquid would seem to pose a hazard if a terrorist learns how to open the cartridge and set fire to the liquid.
I have never downloaded music, ripped a CD, or recorded copyrighted video. I have used hard disks for my files, bought DVD media for my backups, and bought flash memory for my digital cameras. Why would I have to pay this levy? And can I ask for a rebate if I only use the media for my own copyrighted files?
The EZ-Pass transponder comes with an anti-static bag which blocks transmission of signals to the device, in case you may wish to pay the toll by other means. The EZ-Pass instructions implore you to keep the bag in your glove compartment at all times.
I wonder if this really works? While in tin-foil hat mode one day, I put my cellphone in an antistatic bag to see if the metalized plastic would block the signal. No such luck -- it only reduced the signal strength from an unscientific 2-out-of-4 bars to 1-out-of-4. Obviously, the metalized bag can act as a weak antenna and couple capacitively with the cellphone inside. In a further fit of boredom, I found I could kill reception by holding the antistatic bag in one hand and the grounded shield of a USB connector in the other (OK, I was bored).
Tin foil hat wearers be warned. An ungrounded antistatic bg will attenuate, but not necessarily kill RF signals.
oh, that would assume that you actually kept the lists yourself and not just didn't buy the list off from shady dealer.
Good point, but harsher penalties for spam will change the behavior of list makers and list buyers. Were I a list buyer, I would want the list provider to gaurantee that I would not face legal headaches for using the names of that list. Thus, I wonder how long it will take list buyers to put spam indemnity clauses in list purchase contracts? Or, I might ask for list that has no UK names on it.
In either case, domains associated with spam-regulating jurisdictions would see a drop in spam.
These ground squirrels are probably deeply adapted in multidimensional ways to the low temperatures. In contrast, the biochemical pathways of people are all tuned to operate at normal body temperature. I doubt that there is an easy way to make the human body hiberate at low temperature. Too many systems would be affected or thrown out-of-balance by the cold.
/. already). Helping astronauts retain bone mass during zero-G would involve a less severe chemical rejiggering than creating full-fledged cold-body hibernation.
Nonetheless, we can learn from hibernating animals. One area that may be promising is how bears maintain bone density during hibernation (pardon my potential redundancy if this was posetd on
Most spam is intended to make the recipient visit some destination and do business of some kind. Perhaps anti-spam laws needs to target the businesses that use spam to create business - the destinations of all those links in all those spams. Any company that sells viagra, ink jet cartridges, cell phone plans, or mortgages will have a more vulnerable point of presense than a spammer does. Even porn and gambling sites could be vulnerable because they require more permaneance than does a spam operation. If those companies where held accountable for their marketing affiliate's spams, then they might not engage the services of spammers.
I wonder how many domains will move their registration/hosting to the UK (or some similar spam-regulated region). If I were a spammer, I would avoid sending stuff to countries that might create legal entanglements. If a quick whois reveals that the domain is in the UK (for example), then I might as well take that domain off my address lists (since the spammer's revenue per spam is low, they should be risk averse). Of course international spammers may think they are above the law.
I still use Kermit 0.9(40) to transfer things to and from my HP-48GX. I never did get it working on any new PPC Mac. Thus it is currently relegated to a Powerbook 190cs that I use for the retro applications that only run on a 68k Macintosh.
Giving someone a monopoly right to sell something also gives them the right to artificial scarcity to inflate prices, thereby denying the medicine to the poor (ie AIDS drugs for Africans)
This is an excellent point, but the situation is more complicated than just a matter of "denying the medicine to the poor." Two issues make the situation both better and worse than this statement.
First, all drugs go off-patent and quickly become priced at the cost-of-production when second-tier pharma manufacturers release generic versions of the drugs. Patent owners often try to add indications to extend the life of the patent, but AFAIK, they only get a year or two more. At worst, patents only delay, not deny, the poor's access to the latest medicines (I know that may be cold comfort to an AIDs orphan Africa, however).
Second, and worst of all, any attempts to offer tiered pricing will fail without onerous levels of policing in countries not known for their respect of the law. It may be tempting to let the rich countries pay one price that supports R&D and the poor pay a lower price that enables access to life-saving medicine. But the realities of internal corruption, black markets, and global trade make such tiered pricing unsustainable. If a person in a poor country can buy medicine at 10 cents a pill and ship it to another country and sell it for 10 dollars a pill, then that is what will happen. This even happens in developed world too. Look at the current issue with cheap Canadian drugs coming to the U.S. or the EU's issue with cheap drugs from Portugal being sold in high-cost Sweden.
I suspect that the technical limitation is that of delivering enough current across the span of the array. Unlike plasma displays, LEDs are low voltage beasties. And unlike LCDs, LEDs are high current devices. To get say 20 W of brightness, you will need to inject on the order of 10 Amps in (and that 10 Amps only gives you 11 microamps per LED in a 640 x 480 x 3 color display). Routing that much current along the array conductors(which are probably plated or grown on the glass substrate) with acceptably small voltage losses would seem to be very tricky.
That's just my guess as to the technical hurdles for high resolution LED displays. I'm sure some bright young soul will solve the problem, however.
Moore's actual Law does not require ever-shrinking transistors. It only requires that we put more of them into each chip. Double-sides chips, multi-die packaging, or 3-D layering of circuits would help increase the number of transistors in each "chip." You may think that multi-die chips is a cheat, but when it comes to packing in several billion transistors into a CPU, who cares how they do it.
I have found that a digital camera does a very good job of quickly capturing usable images of paper documents. A 5 megapixel camera provides over 200 ppi for 8.5 x 11 hardcopy and grabs the image faster than does most flatbed scanners. Given the scarcity of drivers for Unix, the only trick is finding a memory card reader that is compatible with your system.
;)
A good digital camera may seem like overkill for scanning in bills, but then the camera also doubles as a camera too.
The article suggests that Vega is only 350 million years old. Moreover, at about 3 times the mass of the Sun, the lifespan of Vega will only be about 1 billion years. Given that it took about 3.5 billion years for life to get going, it seems unlikely that planets around Vega have (or ever could have) interesting lifeforms, even if an Earth-like planet is present.
How do you simulate u-G?
You use a rotating test chamber as shown in a figure from the fulltext. By rotating the chamber, gavity never acts in the same direction for very long and nothing settles out of solution. A second rotating chamber is oriented to let gravity work, while duplicating the effects of spin.
Personally, I am skeptical that bacteria really experience gravity. Bacteria are too small -- at that scale most "fluids" are effectively the consistency of molasses in January. I wonder if something as simple as light impacted their experiment. We shall see.....
"Knowledge of harrassment" sounds like a formal complaint to me. That is, a piece of paper with a signature and specifics that would allow me to limit the search (and our exposure) rather severely. And even then, absent a court order, I'd want our counsel's opinion that we would be permitted to make such a search. We can be sued by *either party* if we do the wrong thing.
Excellent point. It appears that companies can be damned if they do, damned if they don't monitor. I got the sense that letting a U.S. worker surf porn sites on a U.S. company computer would be tantamount to letting them post such pictures on the lunchroom bulletin board -- creating a "hostile workplace" with potentially public displays of sexually suggestive material. Likewise, I would imagine that RIAA could make a case against the company if employees download copyrighted materials on company computers.
But your point about legal counsel is totally correct. As "deep pockets" companies can get sued both by those harmed by employee's misue of company IT and by those that who would abuse a company's IT systems. Perhaps all these conflicting regulations and case law precedents on the rights and responsibilities of companies is more about full employment program for lawyers.
I think I do see your point, but I guess a distinction can be made between tools, i.e. methods, reagents, protocols (and to some extent labware) that are necessary for basic science and the drug development process. In the end, cheap access to basic biotech techniques may be beneficial for big pharma, as well, cutting down research costs.
These are good points -- R&D tools are a bit more removed from the horrible economics of the new drug application process. (What is the success rate of new tools? What is the effective investment required to develop a new tool?). Yet I am sure that the companies that develop and use these tools see them as creating competative advantage. Moreover, I cannot help but think that the people that develop new tools and methods are not partially motivated by the financial windfall associated with sales of such tools.
In theory, true experimenters should have access to the patented processes under fair use ( citation of cases ). Unfortunately, I have read (at a link lost to the sands of time) that patent holders are disputing university researcher's fair use rights because of university IP policies. The trend of academic researchers or their universities selling or licensing the fruits of academic research knocks the legs out from under the researcher's claims to non-profit fair use.
Even open access for tools would have unintended consequences. If reagents were not covered by patents, production of these chemicals would move to low-cost producer countries such as China. This could be a good thing by further reducing the cost of supplies for research. Or it might be a very bad thing by bankrupting Western pharmaceutical tool companies.
It would seem that there are economic forces that would reduce tool innovation in the absense of patents/monopolies and forces that would increase pharmaceutical innovation based on depatented tools. Perhaps the short-term would see more drug innovation with wider access to tools and the long-term would see declines in innovation as funding for tool creation drops. I don't know the answer to that one, but you raise very good issues.
Open access to biotechnology may have unintended consequences that reduce the utility of the biotech knowledge. As much as people hate patents, they do serve a purpose. Giving someone a monopoly right to sell something gives them the incentive to spend money on development. Drug development is hideously expensive -- without some hope of a billion dollar blockbuster payoff, companies aren't going to invest anything in open-access pharmaceuticals.
Now if we could convince goverments to spend money on all aspects of pharma development, we might be OK. Unfortunately, I'd bet that the funding government would get cranky when other countries freely exploit the medicines that the one government paid for. Citizens of countries that fund pharma R&D might reasonably object to shouldering all the burden of developing new medicines for the whole world. Does anyone think the UN would be an effective body for funding the rapid development of new drugs?
Finally, patents are a form of open access (at least in the U.S.). Patents force companies to publish their inventions. This gives competitors a leg up in innovating around any new patented process. Its not as open as the proposed Biological Innovation for Open Society (BIOS) program, but the current system is not as closed as detractors would have you believe.
> As long as you carefully transfer old files and their corresponding applications
> to new storage media, you can hope that a emulator like this will give you access
> to otherwise lost data.
Hm, not always true.....Now, even if you were still to own the files, and the software, and the emulator to run it and view your files - how would that enable you to actually USE them?.....
Good point. This depends on the quality of the emulator. If the emulator supports any form of copy-paste, drag-n-drop, etc., then reuse is easy. And if the old application supports a save-as-text (or similar standard format) and the emulator supports movement of files between the host file system and emulated file system, then reuse is also possible. But you are right that these features are not gauranteed.
Fair warning, I'm going to ask questions here that I don't know the answers to (which isn't very fair). Feel free to pop in with answers, I'm honestly curious.
.... Now, what's left? .... That's the percentage of IT costs from funding available to "school programs" ...... That's a better percentage to look at, because it reflects more of the "discretionary" spending that IT really comes out of.
IMO, all questions are fair and the questions you ask are good ones.
A more proper "percent of spending" for IT in a school budget would be after taking out some other costs. Take out teacher/admin labor costs, building maintenance/construction costs, etc.
I'm not sure that I agree with the premise that IT is discretionary. Perhaps the real problem with computers in the classroom is that they are seen as a discretionary program -- a mere add-on to traditional pedagogical techniques. In contrast, many companies see IT as key infrastructure that lets the company do what the company needs to do. This IT infrastructure is critical to the productivity of manager and workers because it supports the effective accomplishment of the task at hand. Most companies would just as soon turn off the heating or electricity as they would turn off their computers.
I would argue that ubiquitous IT in classrooms (i.e., 1 computer per child in virtually every classroom) would improve education in the same way that it has improved business -- increasing productivity, accelerating processes, decreasing errors, and decreasing costs.
I think IT could improve the productivity of teachers in a myriad of ways -- either enhancing the amount of quality time a teacher can spend with each student or increasing the number of students a single teacher can handle with a given level of teaching quality. Under the current approach, the average teacher really has very little time for each student. Between lecturing, taking attendance, sitting quietly during tests, or while helping other students, each student probably gets less than 1 minute per class-hour of the teacher's undivided attention.
A computer could provide some level of individual attention the other 59 minutes of each class-hour. Although I freely admit that the computer's attention is a far cry from that of a teacher, it would help. Self-paced learning and self-paced testing would enable students to learn at their own pace, while the teacher spends more time coaching individual students. Classrooms could also adopt the management-by-exception principles that IT-enabled companies are starting to use. Rather than require the teacher to spend valuable time monitoring every student's work, the computer would do the routine monitoring and only alert the teacher to students have special problems. This would enable the teacher to focus their attention on the students that need the most help and could even inform the teacher to the likely nature of the problem (e.g., whether it is difficulty with a single concept or a more general malaise or personal problem).
The IT-is-discretionary viewpoint is valid if the costs of classroom IT prohibit its ubiquitous use. If school districts persist in spending $3k per computer, they will never be able to put a machine on every desk. If school districts think they need the latest tech at all times, they are missing the point of the technology. With suitable software, schools could use older, cheaper machines (or retain current machines for longer time periods).
Thanks for the question -- I'm sorry if my answer is indirect. Perhaps we all need to consider the role of IT in the classroom -- whether it is discretionary or infrastuctural.
Wouldn't blanket monitoring open the company to *increased* liability? Surely the way to go is to wait for a complaint/subpoena and then monitor *only* what is requested by the court.
"Don't ask, don't tell" may work in the U.S. Army, but a blind corporate eye may not be a sufficient defense in court. A 2000 article suggests that companies can be held liable for harassment in any media once any knowledge of harassment surfaces. A 2002 article suggests that many large companies can and do monitor email and surfing in the U.S.
Jurisdiction matters too, as other posts to this thread suggest, the EU has workplace privacy laws and personal data laws that forestall nonconsensual monitoring (the EU's personal data laws even complicate consensual monitoring). There are probably differences within the U.S., too. I would not be surprised if more liberal jurisdictions have both greater workplace privacy rules and hold companies to greater levels of liability for misconduct on company IT systems.
how is it legal to monitor IM sessions without the other parties consent?
Companies have the right to monitor all IM, e-mail, files on their premises. This is more than just an issue of "their house, their rules." If some employee is using IM/email to perpetrate a crime (e.g. sexual harassment, fraud, etc.), the company can be held liable for not doing something about it. Thus, at some level, companies have an obligation to monitor all IM, e-mail, files on their premises. If some companies choose not monitor, then it is because they are very trusting, foolish, or corrupt.
We have so much to learn from nature !!
An excellent point, but we need to be cautious. Although we have many medicines derived from natural sources, these natural substances require just as much scrutiny as man-made synthetic ones. Most natural medicines are derived from what amounts to chemical weapons created by organisms to either kill/disable prey or kill/sicken predators. As such, they can have nasty side-effects.
A blowfish, leech, or cannibis plant does not care if a person gets cancer 10 years later, suffers permanent neurological damage, or occasionally dies abruptly. In many cases, extreme toxic reactions are the entire point of the chemical. On the one hand, humans have millions of years of evolution to adapt to these natural chemicals. On the other hand, these organisms have had millions of evolution to create ever nastier defensive/offensive chemicals.
Even long-used natural medicines can be unsafe. Very few cultures have had the inclination and record-keeping skills to correlate medicine consumption with long-term illnesses like cancer, dementia, heart disease, liver disease, etc. Very few cultures have had the numerical sample size to detect medicines that might be fatal on a rare but consistent basis. Despite a multi-thousand-year history of use, it was only in the last few decades that we uncovered the link between willow bark (aspirin) and Reyes syndrome (which is rare but fatal for children).
Just because something is natural, does not make it safe. Whether blowfish toxin or leech saliva make a good medications will take millions of dollars of clinical research and then perhaps millions of patients to discover.
They don't need to tax the phone call per se. My guess is that they would regulate it at the ISP level -- a tax on consumer internet service that goes to pay for universal service, shared infrastructure, do-not-spam lists, etc. Another option is a per megabyte transfer tax is would be considered "more fair" for lower-income, less active internet users. Of course congress might (or might not) object to such an internet tax.
Personally I think taxes suck and hate that I currently shell out $30 a month in various telecom taxes. But if you buy the argument that web and e-mail access should be universal, then it suggests the need for some form of tax & subsidy scheme to provide that access to everyone.
The article makes a big deal out of the 80 billion spent on school computing just in the last decade -- it sounds like such an outrageous number. Yet with 47.6 million school children in the U.S. and an average expenditure of $7,500 per pupil, public education spends $357 billion annually. IT spending accounts for only $8 billion annually -- a mere 2.2%.
An IT budget of 2.2% seems very small when you consider the information-intensive nature of education.