Meth should be illegal because 99.9% of meth users eventually start stealing or killing to support their habit
As an ex totally legit chemist not involved even remotely in the amateur pharm trade, I none the less know that the cost of precursor chemicals would make legal meth roughly (very roughly) as expensive as your average OTC generic pharmaceutical. There's nothing in that chemical structure that should cost much more than psuedoephedrine cold medicine and its biologically active "around" that level. A couple days worth of the stuff, if legalized, would cost about as much as a weeks worth of cold medicine, in other words pretty damn cheap compared to the cost of food, etc.
When you have to steal copper cable every day to get one day's illegal supply society has a big problem. When the cost of a 6-pack of beer is more than the cost of a months supply then society has no real problem. It is true that scum occasionally kill for the cost of a soda, but its rare enough to be an outlier, thankfully.
It would be cheap enough that junkyards could give it away in order to improve their public image (hey general public, we don't accept stolen goods anymore because we give the addicts stuff for free, so stop blaming us for your stolen catalytic converters, mkay?)
Its much harder on the body than alcohol, so unlike drinking where you have senior citizen bums, meth heads, especially if given all-you-can-smoke-for-free would not live long, leading to a ridiculously lower total lifetime cost and a much smaller population.
A Maryland student was awarded the top prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair on Friday for developing a urine and blood test that detects pancreatic cancer with 90 percent accuracy.
Who did the work? I'm not thinking the kid did. He may have "developed" it in the same sense that modern americans talk about how they are "building a house" when they really mean cutting a check for someone else to build it.
I'm thinking most of the list is "This is what my dad does at work and this is what they did while I watched them".
Plausible projects that could actually be done by kids would be:
"Euglena: The Solution to Nanosilver Pollution" Nothing too unobtainable here, nothing requiring a weird environment, clearly possible in a basement, or in my basement anyway.
"Design and Creation of Small Wind-Power Engines for Low Wind Speeds Based on Magnus Effect" Totally designable and buildable by a kid, key word being "small" and "low speed"
"Repelling Effect of Plant Extracts on Bees-A Study on Preventing Bees from Pesticide Toxicity" Plenty of normal civilians keep bees, at least in rural areas, coincidentally same place plants to extract and pesticides to sample also reside. Totally believable that a smart hard working kid could do this alone.
"Effect of Food Types on Quantity and Nutritional Quality of Weaver Ant". Ants, we got em. Food, we got it too. Can we count? Yes we can. Sounds like good science doable by an actual kid.
Implausible projects that could not have been done by kids:
"A Study of the Endogenous Activity Rhythms of the Marine Isopod Exosphaeroma truncatitelson" Where does a kid get that and the testing environment necessary?
"Analysis of Photon-Mediated Entanglement between Distinguishable Matter Qubits" Oh come on. Well I'll head on over to home depot and get a can of qubits on the way home from school, and then...
"DNA Repair Mechanisms: Investigations of Base Excision Repair Pathway in Differentiated and Proliferative Neuronal CAD Cells" Oh come on. How big was the lab that did this work? 50 people and 10 million bucks of gear maybe?
"Synthesis of Trimethylguanosine Cap Analogues with the Potential Use in Gene Therapy" Oh come on
"Synthesis of Triazene Compounds and Their Application in Spectrophotometric Determination of Cadmium" Nobody's doing cadmium work outside a lab, at least without turning the basement into a "radioactive boyscout" situation. I would promote this to "possible" if and only if it were done as independent study at a high school chem lab.
FOV is 57 horizontally and 43, with a maximum range of about 20 ft. I don't know how much volume that is, but it's significantly larger than 8 cubic feet.
Come on/., lets do some redneck engineering estimating with VLM down here at the high tech redneck (server) farm.
Lets wiggle your numbers to something smaller because I'm a lazy SOB and assume kinect only gives you a square of 40 degrees and only 1 foot deep precisely at 20 feet. Kin we all take a swig of grannie's recipe outta mason jar even tho its kinda early in the morning and agree that my grotesque simplification is a profound lower bound? Its going to be way huger than this estimate.
So 40 degrees up and down is really two rather acute right triangles of 20 degrees at the pointy end and, as you say, 20 feet on the adjacent side. Essentially we wanna solve for opposite side, times two because there's two right triangles, and square it to get square feet, and call it good because we're only looking at the one foot wide layer at 20 feet away (the true volume is way the heck larger, this is just a lower bound).
OK, sstill with me here? trig, um, 30 years ago, thats what "soh cah toa" tangent is opposite over adjacent. So tangent 20 deg = x/20. Tangent of 20 degrees is about a third... you can either trust me on that because I'm old, or you can GOOG it. Some basic algebra shows 1/3 = x/20 is the same as 1/3*20 = x in other words its a bit more than 6 feet, 6 * 3 being about 18 and 6*4 being too big for 20. So times 2 because there's two triangles means 12 feet. 12 feet up n down by 12 feet left n right at that 20 foot distance is 12*12=144 square feet. So we know it looks at the whole volume (does it?) so considering just that 1 foot shell as a minimum is 144 cubic feet.
Lets think backwards here to check. So if I imagine around a 40 degree triangle flying outta my eye, and look 20 feet away, can I see the ceiling? Yeah, I guess so. So I probably did the math correctly.
As a ridiculous upper bound, the upper bound of this pyramid must be smaller than a cube of 12*12*20 feet, right? So its less than 144*20 = 1440*2 = 2880 cubic feet.
So a kinect looks at between 144 and 2880 cubic feet in volume. This took an old engineering mind about 10 seconds to figure out and 5 minutes to type. In summary yeah its way the heck larger than 8 cuft probably 2 orders of magnitude bigger. But not 3 orders of magnitude bigger.
I'm having trouble understanding exactly what kinds of technology this device is using to obtain accuracy on the level of 10 micrometers for $70. On the website they only state:
I'm having huge difficulty understanding how this is getting rolled out for video gaming instead of manufacturing.
A 3-d CAD "tasting" probe that goes in place of a cutting tool and touches what you're working on to measure its dimensions is about that accurate, very slow, requires some setup, and in manufacturing we pretty much don't care how much it costs (In a world of $100K milling machines and $30/hr CAM programmers, don't really care if its $70 one time cost or $7000)
If this isn't vaporware, how come I haven't heard about this tech destroying existing CAM monitoring/testing sensor systems?
Heck, 10 micrometers with low enough latency for gaming is enough to close the loop on a servo system.. imagine that, a CAM servo controller that doesn't need encoders. Weird but it could happen. Not to mention integrated OSHA detection of people entering the envelope or detection cataclysmic tool failure (snapped off).
I should be hearing about this making motor driver manufacturers and DRO manufacturers quake in their boots.
zerohedge has been crawling with a graph of myspace use, showing its vaguely bell shaped rise and fall, overlaid with facebooks rise, now topping, and presumably much like myspace, falling to zero in a couple years.
What will the next bubble be in? We've done housing, doing FUD security theater, doing higher education, doing internet anti-social media... my guess is food is the next bubble? In the tech field I'm thinking the natural bubble after cloudiness is true parallelism, local or remote doesn't matter, the point is its gonna be erlang (or similar) on 100000 cores.
A couple months ago there was a great hacker public radio episode where a linux dev told stories about working on accessibility and then cried for helpful volunteers because everyone in the corporate financed linux accessibility community is/was getting downsized. It was a recording of a speech at a con. It was an excellent talk, about average sound quality for HPR (in other words not great, but tolerable) and probably in the top 1% of HPR episodes WRT content. I can't successfully google for it, if someone else can find it, I'd recommend listening to it.
(Shamelessly copied from wikipedia, but lets be realistic, cobol is not exactly a language for the worlds unique snowflakes, on MVS everything above but line 2 always must look like that, in that exact order).
My client is trying to protect his family from scammers and other unsavory types, and isn't savvy in this matter, so i'm doing it for him.
combined with
After days of discussion with the client
LOL. If someone can't be educated in "days" then they simply can not be protected from themselves. By "unsavory types" I assume he means us/.ers, which makes it even funnier. Would you trust me with your 19 year old daughter? Thought so. Well, she'd probably kick my butt anyway so don't worry too much.
I must be the only guy in/. with little kids that click on every spam popup window and sign themselves up for anything because... they're little kids. That is why their monitor is in a public part of the house easily viewed about 5 feet from my home office desk. My wife and I have caught them doing all kinds of ridiculous stuff and have (mostly) calmly used those events as "teachable moments", with excellent results. We've caught them watching remarkably inappropriate youtube videos, applying to work at the local Culvers (he was only 7 at the time), installing all kinds of spyware toolbars and stuff (whats more evil than a kids TV show that only exists to sell toys? I know, a kids game that only exists to install spyware! ). I'm pretty close to wiping his machine and installing debian, but people keep buying him windoze only "educational software" to my intense annoyance.
Also I must be the only guy with elderly relatives with a known proven tendency to fall for telemarketing pitches (clean your furnace ductwork for $400? Hearing aid for $5000?).
There are reasons to block/track/examine/log things beyond trying to catch the wifey cheating with the pool boy, in fact keeping a really close eye on little kids and elders is being a nice civilized responsible guy, not a jerk. In comparison "easily read evidence" and "use as proof" is simply being a jerk.
I will suggest that printing this ask/. out and giving it to the client will probably be extremely educational for the client. Probably this is one of those "the client is a little overbearing and I need some backup in arguing with him" situations. We should demand a cut of the proceeds from the consultant; maybe a tithe to the EFF would be appropriate?
Where I work, we do not run ANYTHING that has not been approved by our legal department and gone through a vetting process.
Which brings us right back to the
which given his "highest levels of access" might mean he's authorized to authorized BTC sw, making it a bit complicated
Also I've worked at places where PHBs like to quote that kind of rule as a iron-fisted law, but when pressured they have no idea how the real world works or even what their demand means. End user visible application level changes, most of the time yes. Somebody wrote a two line shell script or the distribution maintainer upgraded the/bin/ls command, never. Internal/contracted software developers and sysadmins can write and run whatever they want, and pretty much install anything they want as a "dev or testing" tool, as long as its completely isolated from the active production servers.
Its kind of like confusing how only a handful of corporate officers and PR people are allowed to make official media statements, vs any rank and file guy can pick up any telephone and "make a statement" to his wife that he needs to stop and buy some mustard on the way home from work.
That inherently fuzzy boundary is probably how this guy got to play with a BTC miner for awhile.
Yeah that happens, and falls in the "do anything your boss allows but don't do anything stupid" superset of rules, although its also covered by the "don't do anything you wouldn't want your mom to see on the front page of the newspaper".
From personal experience, everyone seems to have heard some story about how a hot female recruiter got all the guys to sign up, but no one has anything more than "I heard" and a lot of wishful thinking / daydreaming.
I was thinking more along the lines of stories I've heard about recruiters driving kids with F-ed up families around so they can clear up their paperwork, like drive the kid to the DMV to get his ID card or to a Dr for an appointment to get an asthma waiver. I predict the level of this activity depends on how many applicants they get per slot and the state of the local economy, and especially the ratio of "recruits signed up this month" vs "monthly quota".
'Desires are out there,' said Cohen. 'We have to learn how to control ourselves.'
Why worry about internet pr0n when facebook, tv, shopping, and fattening foods are the exact same class of problem and more severe? Uncontrollable desires wasting lives, etc? I would have to look at a heck of a lot of pr0n to make up for watching TV for hours when I was a kid.
It seems to be a poorly prioritized concern. Once everyone is off FB, throws out their TV, skinny from a paleo/low carb diet, zeroed credit card and loan balances then it might be time to fret that someone out there might be having a good time and they've gotta stop it somehow.
So while someone may not get in trouble for using their FOUO car for groceries on the way home from work
That's almost the definition of why they give you a TDY car, not abuse of the system at all. Been there driven that. It was not a snazzy lexus but some POS falling apart compact chevy for me. The scandal is why its a lexus, not why its at the grocery store. Cheaper for the.gov to essentially be its own leasing company than for them to reimburse you for a rental or endless taxi. Also think about it... if you bring donuts to a official meeting at any time during your TDY, that grocery trip was now official business. Sgt merely told me not to do anything I wouldn't want my mom to see on the front page of the paper (now a days they probably say on facebook or whatever). This was nearly 20 years ago, things may be different now.
You end up in some pretty twisted logic if you give TDY people a car and pay them a TDY per-diem specifically for food that they can only spend on foot, or something weird like that.
Government issued cars with "For Official Use Only" would seem to be an exception to that. I've seen a Lexus around here with that stamped on it with a car seat and groceries piled in it. Sure, there could be an official reason for that but the odds are against it.
I can authoritatively comment on this, that a TDY car for all intents and purposes can be used almost exactly like a privately owned vehicle. TDY is the govt equivalent of a short to medium term business trip (maybe 1 day to I think a max 6 months). Basically its cheaper for the.gov to act like a car leasing company to itself, than to reimburse.gov employee for a rental car. Which is bizarre, you'd think Enterprise Rentacar would donate re-election funds to politicians to take over that apparently lucrative market, but they haven't done so... yet. Someday it might happen to eliminate the non-scandal scandal stories.
The law says something like "administrative discretion" so its one of those "character" tests where you can do anything your boss allows but don't do anything stupid. This is really the only rule for a govt car. It can be hard for outsiders to wrap their head around this concept of not having 1000 individual specific rules, and only having a general rule of don't do something your boss thinks is dumb. A remarkable amount of.mil paperwork and regulations to death the stupidest little things and also has no paperwork and regulations for some of the most complicated things. Discretion and good taste...
Get permission from boss to drop kid off at daycare, fine no problemo as long as you have that permission. Drive to an occupy-wall-street protest in a non-official role, or as a protester, um... that might be a problem. Food store/restaurant while on TDY, almost certainly OK, that's the whole point of giving you a TDY car. Dive bar while on TDY, could get you in hot water depending on your boss and local culture and especially your behavior (this can be an addition charge in a conduct unbecoming hearing, or it can just be ignored if the department memorial day party is held at the dive bar). Do anything as a recruiter however tangentially far fetched as long as it directly involves potential recruits, OK. Do almost anything as a recruiter alone in a car without obvious recruit involvement, probably a bad idea.
All the stories seem a little vague as to what he actually installed however — on one side he installed the software on a public facing websever, and the ABC itself admits 'As this software was for a short time embedded within pages on the ABC website, visitors to these pages may have been exposed to the Bitcoin software' and 'the Coalition (current Opposition Parties) was planning on quizzing the ABC further about the issue, including filing a request for the code that would have been downloaded to users' machines,' but on the other side there is no mention of the staffer trying to seed a Bitcoin mining botnet through the site, just that mining software had been installed.
Sounds like hopeless journalist-speak for "he had access only to/var/www not/usr/local, so... he put it in/var/www"
My guess is whatever they use to monitor their systems watches/usr/local and/usr/bin like a hawk but trying to watch/var/www would be chaos depending on what the marketing and graphics art dept uploaded this week or whatever, so they don't watch/var/www.
This does have a minor chilling effect in that I'm not a complete moron, so before commissioning any new hardware into production at work (or home) for years (decades?) I've run memtest86+ and bonnie++ (I'm old enough that I ran the original memtest86 and the original bonnie back in the day). I've occasionally considered that running a BTC miner would be a good CPU cooling test as a third item, but stories like this do kind of discourage me at work.
My suspicion is the practical financial matter of $. Back in ye olden days when I started BTC mining a CPU miner could generate quite a few BTC per month and over the past couple years the exchange rate has stabilized at $5/BTC so that is a substantial chunk of change per month. However for all practical purposes a software BTC miner is currently pointless, just warming up the CPU. I haven't checked the difficulty rating but I know its increased a bit from the mid double digits when I started in BTC. So as a disciplinary matter they probably couldn't decide to bust him for running unauthorized sw (which given his "highest levels of access" might mean he's authorized to authorized BTC sw, making it a bit complicated) or bust him for attempting to use govt property for personal gain but not actually getting any gain, or bust him for actually earning some BTC however unlikely that seems. Doesn't Australia have the same "might is right" style of employment laws we have in the US where they can just fire him for not being a team player or spending too much time in the can?
I do this. Is this really impossible for most Slashdotters? A year is nothing, really. I've waited longer than that for a game to come down to the price I care to pay. I also don't have to spend $400 every so often for the latest graphics cards.
99.99999% of TV is only watched because its trendy, because everyone else is doing it, because they can talk to everyone else about the show at the water cooler / while smoking / while on break / while trying to pick up a date
Yes, yes, last thursday I did watch "city on the edge of forever" from 40 years ago, because its good. And today I'm making a data verifier and importer system out of bear skins and stove knives at work. Actually I'm using Perl. Same difference. Anyway that doesn't mean that a week from now anyone will remember "Game of Thrones" or want to discuss it at the water cooler / smoke area / singles bar, much less a year later or 40 years later.
Whatever the youth are interested in will be demonized. 60 years ago it was Elvis's hips, 50 years ago rock n roll, 30 years ago dungeons and dragons, 20 years ago it was computers/video games, now its texting. Its basically "children will be seen not heard" extended into very young adulthood.
30 years ago if a guy was fumbling around with his 8 track player or screaming at the kids in the back seat and got in an accident, eh no proof, probably get a ticket for inattentive driving anyway. Now you can prove with digital precision that the guy was sending a text message. The ability to prove exactly how the guy was goofing off is supposed to invoke moral outrage in me. It fails.
Lets try an Einstein-ian thought experiment. Dude runs over your friend and kills them. Do you feel any different about your friend's death knowing dude was texting or trying to eat a fast food burger? We are being extremely heavily propagandized that death from texting is horrifically worse than death by burger/cd/radio/8 track/plain ole daydreaming/being lost/reading a old fashioned paper map/reading a GPS map.
I'm paying $50/month for 450 minutes and 500 texts.
Are you actually using 450/500 or are you paying for the option to use up to that amount but only using a fraction of that?
I was paying about $8 to $10/month for virgin mobile pay as I go.
You can calculate the crossover point of pay as you go vs contract and its really quite a bit of use, darn near a part time job. I'm convinced most contract people would be better off pay as you go. Not all, but most.
I've been using a widget called "data counter widget" (creative, huh?) on my android phone and its very unusual to go over 20 megs per day, which is only 600 megs per month. Most of my traffic is wifi. Some map lookup, some fooling around in the web browser, the occasional evernote upload, some runkeeper uploads, some email checking, some geocache application lookups, that's about all I do that requires cell data and can't be done better over wifi. I do all my app updating and podcast downloading over wifi (dogcatcher has a simple checkbox to only download podcasts over wifi).
My guess is all this is being tooled up in preparation for some kind of "sql slammer" type of worm. Get everything ready to mail out the overage charges, then release the 10 gigs per hour worm and watch the profits roll in.
I think this book is a must have for any serious biologist but it was probably unfair of me to try and approach it from completely outside that realm.
How do you get to be a serious biologist? read books...
To give a/. analogy I don't think a perl book without all that complicated computer stuff in it would teach me very much, so I wouldn't bother reading it. I've never learned anything from an easy book.
Good review though. Better than average/. reviews. Write more reviews.
But what if they start selling background check services to corporations? Or live monitoring of employees/customers/competitors/whatever? "Peeking" into teens life for parents (and teachers?) for a hefty fee. Fear sells! Market research is valuable (FB what car colors do people prefer? or whatever) Style. Like zynga's virtual stuff, maybe your fb profile can look like an old myspace page full of animations if you send FB $5 for each little animated taggy / yellow ribbon to show your support of Chinese yellow ribbon mfgrs or whatever that moronity is supposed to mean.
If you go newspaper model, then yeah all they have is ad sales. But they can sell a whole lot more than that.
Note I'm not buying and not seriously advocating, but paraphrasing a lot of sites I've seen:
1) If the stock price reflects a price per user around $120 each, which seems to be the consensus view, and the earnings per user is known to be about $1.40 per user per year, that's a 1% rate of return. I wish I had a bank account with that high of return. Of course when investing you need to worry about return OF capital before you worry about return ON capital, if you know what I mean...
2) Gaming on FB can probably do better than Zynga, can't it? I mean everyone seems to agree its awful, but its also popular, which implies they almost inevitably have to hit that out of the park someday, don't they?
3) Corporate background checks seem to run in the hundreds. IF FB can take over that market, or even a good hunk of that market, that $120/user is a great price if they get $200/user every time someone gets hired. Essentially a FB hiring tax will be imposed. "You hired someone without paying for a FB background check? Are you crazy?". Then people without FB profiles will need one to get hired, making them more valuable, etc.
4) A somewhat overly optimistic view that FB search might replace GOOG search someday. When the walled garden gets bigger than the wilderness, then... So a valuation around the size of the mighty GOOG seems reasonable, plus or minus an order of magnitude.
tinfoil ads. I look at it as I'm going to be spammed anyway, about a hundred spam per day in my gmail spam folder.
You know what I'd pay for? Real ads. Stuff I actually wanna buy.
GOOG please spam the heck out of me with cheap 3-d extruder printer/replicator thingies, new Spartan series FPGA boards, sales on 3/8 inch aluminum cutting endmills, books about scala and ruby, raspberry pi sellers who actually have the device and stock and aren't therefore gouging on price, everything Charlie Stross and Oreilly and Pragmatic and Jason Scott publishes and nothing packt publishes and add pr0n, lots of that. Hell I'd pay to receive advertising like that, in fact I do, that's basically make magazine a little more fine tuned to my interests thus I'd pay even more (well, its MAKE aside from the pr0n part... although as a gimmick they should start centerfolds) How come no one is willing to send me that kind of spam/advertisement/banner, its all junk ads?
I've got all this stuff up on G+, step up to the plate GOOG and send me the good spam, ok?
Don't know about selling data, but their astroturfing unit seems to be running at full steam.
Take a look at the original post. I SAID LOOK AT IT! Holy shit! IT'S FUCKING BEAUTIFUL. The grammar and punctuation is impeccable. It's the longest, most intensive, best edited FIRST POST! I've ever seen. Complete with embedded links! Almost as if he had it typed and ready to paste in advance of this story. Oh, and it's the only story ever commented on by a brand new ID. Get bent, astroturfer. We like Google better than you. Suck on it.
I can top that... google his name, it shows up nowhere on the entire internet except this/. story. If you're gonna astroturf, at least have the brains to use a name like "john doe" or "a5tr0turf3r".
Can someone with a FB account search for him on FB? I deleted my account well over a year ago so I can't search FB.
Slashcode ate that all up. F you/. my reply looks like shite also because of that and I can't be bothered to figure out how to post code without it being de-htmlized. Fix that, right after you fix UTF-8 mkay? I checked the link, in psuedocode its:
fromIndex has to be from 0 to toIndex toIndex has to be from fromIndex to arrayLength
Anybody else see a bug? I donno their array implementation, but it looks like they are zero indexed arrays while also allowing a "array's length" equal to the to index value. Classic noob array out of bounds mistake staring at me.
Lets make up moron array index 0 is first value index 1 is second value index 2 is third value
array length is 3, don't believe me, count the lines. I see 3 lines so thats a 3 long array. Set fromIndex to 1 and toIndex to 3. Does it pass fromIndex GT toIndex? Yes, indeed 1 GT 3 is false so no exception. Does it pass fromIndex LT 0? Yes indeed 1 LT 0 is false so no exception is thrown. Does it pass toIndex GT arrayLen? Yes indeed 3 GT 3 is false so no exception is thrown I'm imagining the next step, something somewhere accesses index 3, runtime says WTF are you doing we're only defined up to 2 here, kaboom.
Now I don't do java so I donno if GT LT are actually impled GTE LTE in java, or there is some extra code or purpose of this such that array(toIndex) will never be accessed, or there is some extra error code detection that handles out of bounds array access.
I just thought it was pretty funny looking when looked at completely out of context. Like when you see something like lparen x LT 2 vbar vbar x GT 10 rparen and you just know thats a bug because its obviously supposed to be AND not OR and they were probably trying to check an interval.
Slashdot Mirror
Meth should be illegal because 99.9% of meth users eventually start stealing or killing to support their habit
As an ex totally legit chemist not involved even remotely in the amateur pharm trade, I none the less know that the cost of precursor chemicals would make legal meth roughly (very roughly) as expensive as your average OTC generic pharmaceutical. There's nothing in that chemical structure that should cost much more than psuedoephedrine cold medicine and its biologically active "around" that level. A couple days worth of the stuff, if legalized, would cost about as much as a weeks worth of cold medicine, in other words pretty damn cheap compared to the cost of food, etc.
When you have to steal copper cable every day to get one day's illegal supply society has a big problem. When the cost of a 6-pack of beer is more than the cost of a months supply then society has no real problem. It is true that scum occasionally kill for the cost of a soda, but its rare enough to be an outlier, thankfully.
It would be cheap enough that junkyards could give it away in order to improve their public image (hey general public, we don't accept stolen goods anymore because we give the addicts stuff for free, so stop blaming us for your stolen catalytic converters, mkay?)
Its much harder on the body than alcohol, so unlike drinking where you have senior citizen bums, meth heads, especially if given all-you-can-smoke-for-free would not live long, leading to a ridiculously lower total lifetime cost and a much smaller population.
A Maryland student was awarded the top prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair on Friday for developing a urine and blood test that detects pancreatic cancer with 90 percent accuracy.
Who did the work? I'm not thinking the kid did. He may have "developed" it in the same sense that modern americans talk about how they are "building a house" when they really mean cutting a check for someone else to build it.
I'm thinking most of the list is "This is what my dad does at work and this is what they did while I watched them".
Plausible projects that could actually be done by kids would be:
"Euglena: The Solution to Nanosilver Pollution" Nothing too unobtainable here, nothing requiring a weird environment, clearly possible in a basement, or in my basement anyway.
"Design and Creation of Small Wind-Power Engines for Low Wind Speeds Based on Magnus Effect" Totally designable and buildable by a kid, key word being "small" and "low speed"
"Repelling Effect of Plant Extracts on Bees-A Study on Preventing Bees from Pesticide Toxicity" Plenty of normal civilians keep bees, at least in rural areas, coincidentally same place plants to extract and pesticides to sample also reside. Totally believable that a smart hard working kid could do this alone.
"Effect of Food Types on Quantity and Nutritional Quality of Weaver Ant". Ants, we got em. Food, we got it too. Can we count? Yes we can. Sounds like good science doable by an actual kid.
Implausible projects that could not have been done by kids:
"A Study of the Endogenous Activity Rhythms of the Marine Isopod Exosphaeroma truncatitelson" Where does a kid get that and the testing environment necessary?
"Analysis of Photon-Mediated Entanglement between Distinguishable Matter Qubits" Oh come on. Well I'll head on over to home depot and get a can of qubits on the way home from school, and then...
"DNA Repair Mechanisms: Investigations of Base Excision Repair Pathway in Differentiated and Proliferative Neuronal CAD Cells" Oh come on. How big was the lab that did this work? 50 people and 10 million bucks of gear maybe?
"Synthesis of Trimethylguanosine Cap Analogues with the Potential Use in Gene Therapy" Oh come on
"Synthesis of Triazene Compounds and Their Application in Spectrophotometric Determination of Cadmium" Nobody's doing cadmium work outside a lab, at least without turning the basement into a "radioactive boyscout" situation. I would promote this to "possible" if and only if it were done as independent study at a high school chem lab.
FOV is 57 horizontally and 43, with a maximum range of about 20 ft. I don't know how much volume that is, but it's significantly larger than 8 cubic feet.
Come on /., lets do some redneck engineering estimating with VLM down here at the high tech redneck (server) farm.
Lets wiggle your numbers to something smaller because I'm a lazy SOB and assume kinect only gives you a square of 40 degrees and only 1 foot deep precisely at 20 feet. Kin we all take a swig of grannie's recipe outta mason jar even tho its kinda early in the morning and agree that my grotesque simplification is a profound lower bound? Its going to be way huger than this estimate.
So 40 degrees up and down is really two rather acute right triangles of 20 degrees at the pointy end and, as you say, 20 feet on the adjacent side. Essentially we wanna solve for opposite side, times two because there's two right triangles, and square it to get square feet, and call it good because we're only looking at the one foot wide layer at 20 feet away (the true volume is way the heck larger, this is just a lower bound).
OK, sstill with me here? trig, um, 30 years ago, thats what "soh cah toa" tangent is opposite over adjacent. So tangent 20 deg = x/20. Tangent of 20 degrees is about a third... you can either trust me on that because I'm old, or you can GOOG it. Some basic algebra shows 1/3 = x/20 is the same as 1/3*20 = x in other words its a bit more than 6 feet, 6 * 3 being about 18 and 6*4 being too big for 20. So times 2 because there's two triangles means 12 feet. 12 feet up n down by 12 feet left n right at that 20 foot distance is 12*12=144 square feet. So we know it looks at the whole volume (does it?) so considering just that 1 foot shell as a minimum is 144 cubic feet.
Lets think backwards here to check. So if I imagine around a 40 degree triangle flying outta my eye, and look 20 feet away, can I see the ceiling? Yeah, I guess so. So I probably did the math correctly.
As a ridiculous upper bound, the upper bound of this pyramid must be smaller than a cube of 12*12*20 feet, right? So its less than 144*20 = 1440*2 = 2880 cubic feet.
So a kinect looks at between 144 and 2880 cubic feet in volume. This took an old engineering mind about 10 seconds to figure out and 5 minutes to type. In summary yeah its way the heck larger than 8 cuft probably 2 orders of magnitude bigger. But not 3 orders of magnitude bigger.
I'm having trouble understanding exactly what kinds of technology this device is using to obtain accuracy on the level of 10 micrometers for $70. On the website they only state:
I'm having huge difficulty understanding how this is getting rolled out for video gaming instead of manufacturing.
A 3-d CAD "tasting" probe that goes in place of a cutting tool and touches what you're working on to measure its dimensions is about that accurate, very slow, requires some setup, and in manufacturing we pretty much don't care how much it costs (In a world of $100K milling machines and $30/hr CAM programmers, don't really care if its $70 one time cost or $7000)
If this isn't vaporware, how come I haven't heard about this tech destroying existing CAM monitoring/testing sensor systems?
Heck, 10 micrometers with low enough latency for gaming is enough to close the loop on a servo system.. imagine that, a CAM servo controller that doesn't need encoders. Weird but it could happen. Not to mention integrated OSHA detection of people entering the envelope or detection cataclysmic tool failure (snapped off).
I should be hearing about this making motor driver manufacturers and DRO manufacturers quake in their boots.
ideally to fund expansion
That's the problem, what do they expand into?
zerohedge has been crawling with a graph of myspace use, showing its vaguely bell shaped rise and fall, overlaid with facebooks rise, now topping, and presumably much like myspace, falling to zero in a couple years.
What will the next bubble be in? We've done housing, doing FUD security theater, doing higher education, doing internet anti-social media... my guess is food is the next bubble? In the tech field I'm thinking the natural bubble after cloudiness is true parallelism, local or remote doesn't matter, the point is its gonna be erlang (or similar) on 100000 cores.
A couple months ago there was a great hacker public radio episode where a linux dev told stories about working on accessibility and then cried for helpful volunteers because everyone in the corporate financed linux accessibility community is/was getting downsized.
It was a recording of a speech at a con.
It was an excellent talk, about average sound quality for HPR (in other words not great, but tolerable) and probably in the top 1% of HPR episodes WRT content.
I can't successfully google for it, if someone else can find it, I'd recommend listening to it.
There's always cobol. Of course I haven't programmed in cobol in about 7 years but I remember PIC lines were pretty hellish
001 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
002 PROGRAM-ID. 'HELLO'.
003 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
004 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
005 SOURCE-COMPUTER. IBM-360.
006 OBJECT-COMPUTER. IBM-360.
(Shamelessly copied from wikipedia, but lets be realistic, cobol is not exactly a language for the worlds unique snowflakes, on MVS everything above but line 2 always must look like that, in that exact order).
My client is trying to protect his family from scammers and other unsavory types, and isn't savvy in this matter, so i'm doing it for him.
combined with
After days of discussion with the client
LOL. If someone can't be educated in "days" then they simply can not be protected from themselves. By "unsavory types" I assume he means us /.ers, which makes it even funnier. Would you trust me with your 19 year old daughter? Thought so. Well, she'd probably kick my butt anyway so don't worry too much.
I must be the only guy in /. with little kids that click on every spam popup window and sign themselves up for anything because... they're little kids. That is why their monitor is in a public part of the house easily viewed about 5 feet from my home office desk. My wife and I have caught them doing all kinds of ridiculous stuff and have (mostly) calmly used those events as "teachable moments", with excellent results. We've caught them watching remarkably inappropriate youtube videos, applying to work at the local Culvers (he was only 7 at the time), installing all kinds of spyware toolbars and stuff (whats more evil than a kids TV show that only exists to sell toys? I know, a kids game that only exists to install spyware! ). I'm pretty close to wiping his machine and installing debian, but people keep buying him windoze only "educational software" to my intense annoyance.
Also I must be the only guy with elderly relatives with a known proven tendency to fall for telemarketing pitches (clean your furnace ductwork for $400? Hearing aid for $5000?).
There are reasons to block/track/examine/log things beyond trying to catch the wifey cheating with the pool boy, in fact keeping a really close eye on little kids and elders is being a nice civilized responsible guy, not a jerk. In comparison "easily read evidence" and "use as proof" is simply being a jerk.
I will suggest that printing this ask /. out and giving it to the client will probably be extremely educational for the client. Probably this is one of those "the client is a little overbearing and I need some backup in arguing with him" situations. We should demand a cut of the proceeds from the consultant; maybe a tithe to the EFF would be appropriate?
Where I work, we do not run ANYTHING that has not been approved by our legal department and gone through a vetting process.
Which brings us right back to the
which given his "highest levels of access" might mean he's authorized to authorized BTC sw, making it a bit complicated
Also I've worked at places where PHBs like to quote that kind of rule as a iron-fisted law, but when pressured they have no idea how the real world works or even what their demand means. End user visible application level changes, most of the time yes. Somebody wrote a two line shell script or the distribution maintainer upgraded the /bin/ls command, never. Internal/contracted software developers and sysadmins can write and run whatever they want, and pretty much install anything they want as a "dev or testing" tool, as long as its completely isolated from the active production servers.
Its kind of like confusing how only a handful of corporate officers and PR people are allowed to make official media statements, vs any rank and file guy can pick up any telephone and "make a statement" to his wife that he needs to stop and buy some mustard on the way home from work.
That inherently fuzzy boundary is probably how this guy got to play with a BTC miner for awhile.
Yeah that happens, and falls in the "do anything your boss allows but don't do anything stupid" superset of rules, although its also covered by the "don't do anything you wouldn't want your mom to see on the front page of the newspaper".
From personal experience, everyone seems to have heard some story about how a hot female recruiter got all the guys to sign up, but no one has anything more than "I heard" and a lot of wishful thinking / daydreaming.
I was thinking more along the lines of stories I've heard about recruiters driving kids with F-ed up families around so they can clear up their paperwork, like drive the kid to the DMV to get his ID card or to a Dr for an appointment to get an asthma waiver. I predict the level of this activity depends on how many applicants they get per slot and the state of the local economy, and especially the ratio of "recruits signed up this month" vs "monthly quota".
'Desires are out there,' said Cohen. 'We have to learn how to control ourselves.'
Why worry about internet pr0n when facebook, tv, shopping, and fattening foods are the exact same class of problem and more severe? Uncontrollable desires wasting lives, etc? I would have to look at a heck of a lot of pr0n to make up for watching TV for hours when I was a kid.
It seems to be a poorly prioritized concern. Once everyone is off FB, throws out their TV, skinny from a paleo/low carb diet, zeroed credit card and loan balances then it might be time to fret that someone out there might be having a good time and they've gotta stop it somehow.
So while someone may not get in trouble for using their FOUO car for groceries on the way home from work
That's almost the definition of why they give you a TDY car, not abuse of the system at all. Been there driven that. It was not a snazzy lexus but some POS falling apart compact chevy for me. The scandal is why its a lexus, not why its at the grocery store. Cheaper for the .gov to essentially be its own leasing company than for them to reimburse you for a rental or endless taxi. Also think about it... if you bring donuts to a official meeting at any time during your TDY, that grocery trip was now official business. Sgt merely told me not to do anything I wouldn't want my mom to see on the front page of the paper (now a days they probably say on facebook or whatever). This was nearly 20 years ago, things may be different now.
You end up in some pretty twisted logic if you give TDY people a car and pay them a TDY per-diem specifically for food that they can only spend on foot, or something weird like that.
Government issued cars with "For Official Use Only" would seem to be an exception to that. I've seen a Lexus around here with that stamped on it with a car seat and groceries piled in it. Sure, there could be an official reason for that but the odds are against it.
I can authoritatively comment on this, that a TDY car for all intents and purposes can be used almost exactly like a privately owned vehicle. TDY is the govt equivalent of a short to medium term business trip (maybe 1 day to I think a max 6 months). Basically its cheaper for the .gov to act like a car leasing company to itself, than to reimburse .gov employee for a rental car. Which is bizarre, you'd think Enterprise Rentacar would donate re-election funds to politicians to take over that apparently lucrative market, but they haven't done so ... yet. Someday it might happen to eliminate the non-scandal scandal stories.
The law says something like "administrative discretion" so its one of those "character" tests where you can do anything your boss allows but don't do anything stupid. This is really the only rule for a govt car. It can be hard for outsiders to wrap their head around this concept of not having 1000 individual specific rules, and only having a general rule of don't do something your boss thinks is dumb. A remarkable amount of .mil paperwork and regulations to death the stupidest little things and also has no paperwork and regulations for some of the most complicated things. Discretion and good taste...
Get permission from boss to drop kid off at daycare, fine no problemo as long as you have that permission. Drive to an occupy-wall-street protest in a non-official role, or as a protester, um... that might be a problem. Food store/restaurant while on TDY, almost certainly OK, that's the whole point of giving you a TDY car. Dive bar while on TDY, could get you in hot water depending on your boss and local culture and especially your behavior (this can be an addition charge in a conduct unbecoming hearing, or it can just be ignored if the department memorial day party is held at the dive bar). Do anything as a recruiter however tangentially far fetched as long as it directly involves potential recruits, OK. Do almost anything as a recruiter alone in a car without obvious recruit involvement, probably a bad idea.
All the stories seem a little vague as to what he actually installed however — on one side he installed the software on a public facing websever, and the ABC itself admits 'As this software was for a short time embedded within pages on the ABC website, visitors to these pages may have been exposed to the Bitcoin software' and 'the Coalition (current Opposition Parties) was planning on quizzing the ABC further about the issue, including filing a request for the code that would have been downloaded to users' machines,' but on the other side there is no mention of the staffer trying to seed a Bitcoin mining botnet through the site, just that mining software had been installed.
Sounds like hopeless journalist-speak for "he had access only to /var/www not /usr/local, so ... he put it in /var/www"
My guess is whatever they use to monitor their systems watches /usr/local and /usr/bin like a hawk but trying to watch /var/www would be chaos depending on what the marketing and graphics art dept uploaded this week or whatever, so they don't watch /var/www.
This does have a minor chilling effect in that I'm not a complete moron, so before commissioning any new hardware into production at work (or home) for years (decades?) I've run memtest86+ and bonnie++ (I'm old enough that I ran the original memtest86 and the original bonnie back in the day). I've occasionally considered that running a BTC miner would be a good CPU cooling test as a third item, but stories like this do kind of discourage me at work.
My suspicion is the practical financial matter of $. Back in ye olden days when I started BTC mining a CPU miner could generate quite a few BTC per month and over the past couple years the exchange rate has stabilized at $5/BTC so that is a substantial chunk of change per month. However for all practical purposes a software BTC miner is currently pointless, just warming up the CPU. I haven't checked the difficulty rating but I know its increased a bit from the mid double digits when I started in BTC. So as a disciplinary matter they probably couldn't decide to bust him for running unauthorized sw (which given his "highest levels of access" might mean he's authorized to authorized BTC sw, making it a bit complicated) or bust him for attempting to use govt property for personal gain but not actually getting any gain, or bust him for actually earning some BTC however unlikely that seems. Doesn't Australia have the same "might is right" style of employment laws we have in the US where they can just fire him for not being a team player or spending too much time in the can?
Option 3 is wait a year for the DVD release.
I do this. Is this really impossible for most Slashdotters? A year is nothing, really. I've waited longer than that for a game to come down to the price I care to pay. I also don't have to spend $400 every so often for the latest graphics cards.
99.99999% of TV is only watched because its trendy, because everyone else is doing it, because they can talk to everyone else about the show at the water cooler / while smoking / while on break / while trying to pick up a date
Yes, yes, last thursday I did watch "city on the edge of forever" from 40 years ago, because its good. And today I'm making a data verifier and importer system out of bear skins and stove knives at work. Actually I'm using Perl. Same difference. Anyway that doesn't mean that a week from now anyone will remember "Game of Thrones" or want to discuss it at the water cooler / smoke area / singles bar, much less a year later or 40 years later.
Whatever the youth are interested in will be demonized. 60 years ago it was Elvis's hips, 50 years ago rock n roll, 30 years ago dungeons and dragons, 20 years ago it was computers/video games, now its texting. Its basically "children will be seen not heard" extended into very young adulthood.
30 years ago if a guy was fumbling around with his 8 track player or screaming at the kids in the back seat and got in an accident, eh no proof, probably get a ticket for inattentive driving anyway. Now you can prove with digital precision that the guy was sending a text message. The ability to prove exactly how the guy was goofing off is supposed to invoke moral outrage in me. It fails.
Lets try an Einstein-ian thought experiment. Dude runs over your friend and kills them. Do you feel any different about your friend's death knowing dude was texting or trying to eat a fast food burger? We are being extremely heavily propagandized that death from texting is horrifically worse than death by burger/cd/radio/8 track/plain ole daydreaming/being lost/reading a old fashioned paper map/reading a GPS map.
I'm paying $50/month for 450 minutes and 500 texts.
Are you actually using 450/500 or are you paying for the option to use up to that amount but only using a fraction of that?
I was paying about $8 to $10/month for virgin mobile pay as I go.
You can calculate the crossover point of pay as you go vs contract and its really quite a bit of use, darn near a part time job. I'm convinced most contract people would be better off pay as you go. Not all, but most.
I've been using a widget called "data counter widget" (creative, huh?) on my android phone and its very unusual to go over 20 megs per day, which is only 600 megs per month. Most of my traffic is wifi. Some map lookup, some fooling around in the web browser, the occasional evernote upload, some runkeeper uploads, some email checking, some geocache application lookups, that's about all I do that requires cell data and can't be done better over wifi. I do all my app updating and podcast downloading over wifi (dogcatcher has a simple checkbox to only download podcasts over wifi).
My guess is all this is being tooled up in preparation for some kind of "sql slammer" type of worm. Get everything ready to mail out the overage charges, then release the 10 gigs per hour worm and watch the profits roll in.
I think this book is a must have for any serious biologist but it was probably unfair of me to try and approach it from completely outside that realm.
How do you get to be a serious biologist? read books...
To give a /. analogy I don't think a perl book without all that complicated computer stuff in it would teach me very much, so I wouldn't bother reading it. I've never learned anything from an easy book.
Good review though. Better than average /. reviews. Write more reviews.
IF they never sell anything but advertising.
But what if they start selling background check services to corporations? Or live monitoring of employees/customers/competitors/whatever?
"Peeking" into teens life for parents (and teachers?) for a hefty fee. Fear sells!
Market research is valuable (FB what car colors do people prefer? or whatever)
Style. Like zynga's virtual stuff, maybe your fb profile can look like an old myspace page full of animations if you send FB $5 for each little animated taggy / yellow ribbon to show your support of Chinese yellow ribbon mfgrs or whatever that moronity is supposed to mean.
If you go newspaper model, then yeah all they have is ad sales. But they can sell a whole lot more than that.
what's the pro argument for fb shares?
Note I'm not buying and not seriously advocating, but paraphrasing a lot of sites I've seen:
1) If the stock price reflects a price per user around $120 each, which seems to be the consensus view, and the earnings per user is known to be about $1.40 per user per year, that's a 1% rate of return. I wish I had a bank account with that high of return. Of course when investing you need to worry about return OF capital before you worry about return ON capital, if you know what I mean...
2) Gaming on FB can probably do better than Zynga, can't it? I mean everyone seems to agree its awful, but its also popular, which implies they almost inevitably have to hit that out of the park someday, don't they?
3) Corporate background checks seem to run in the hundreds. IF FB can take over that market, or even a good hunk of that market, that $120/user is a great price if they get $200/user every time someone gets hired. Essentially a FB hiring tax will be imposed. "You hired someone without paying for a FB background check? Are you crazy?". Then people without FB profiles will need one to get hired, making them more valuable, etc.
4) A somewhat overly optimistic view that FB search might replace GOOG search someday. When the walled garden gets bigger than the wilderness, then... So a valuation around the size of the mighty GOOG seems reasonable, plus or minus an order of magnitude.
tinfoil ads. I look at it as I'm going to be spammed anyway, about a hundred spam per day in my gmail spam folder.
You know what I'd pay for? Real ads. Stuff I actually wanna buy.
GOOG please spam the heck out of me with cheap 3-d extruder printer/replicator thingies, new Spartan series FPGA boards, sales on 3/8 inch aluminum cutting endmills, books about scala and ruby, raspberry pi sellers who actually have the device and stock and aren't therefore gouging on price, everything Charlie Stross and Oreilly and Pragmatic and Jason Scott publishes and nothing packt publishes and add pr0n, lots of that. Hell I'd pay to receive advertising like that, in fact I do, that's basically make magazine a little more fine tuned to my interests thus I'd pay even more (well, its MAKE aside from the pr0n part... although as a gimmick they should start centerfolds) How come no one is willing to send me that kind of spam/advertisement/banner, its all junk ads?
I've got all this stuff up on G+, step up to the plate GOOG and send me the good spam, ok?
Don't know about selling data, but their astroturfing unit seems to be running at full steam.
Take a look at the original post. I SAID LOOK AT IT! Holy shit! IT'S FUCKING BEAUTIFUL. The grammar and punctuation is impeccable. It's the longest, most intensive, best edited FIRST POST! I've ever seen. Complete with embedded links! Almost as if he had it typed and ready to paste in advance of this story. Oh, and it's the only story ever commented on by a brand new ID. Get bent, astroturfer. We like Google better than you. Suck on it.
I can top that... google his name, it shows up nowhere on the entire internet except this /. story. If you're gonna astroturf, at least have the brains to use a name like "john doe" or "a5tr0turf3r".
Can someone with a FB account search for him on FB? I deleted my account well over a year ago so I can't search FB.
Slashcode ate that all up. F you /. my reply looks like shite also because of that and I can't be bothered to figure out how to post code without it being de-htmlized. Fix that, right after you fix UTF-8 mkay? I checked the link, in psuedocode its:
fromIndex has to be from 0 to toIndex
toIndex has to be from fromIndex to arrayLength
Anybody else see a bug? I donno their array implementation, but it looks like they are zero indexed arrays while also allowing a "array's length" equal to the to index value. Classic noob array out of bounds mistake staring at me.
Lets make up moron array
index 0 is first value
index 1 is second value
index 2 is third value
array length is 3, don't believe me, count the lines. I see 3 lines so thats a 3 long array.
Set fromIndex to 1 and toIndex to 3.
Does it pass fromIndex GT toIndex? Yes, indeed 1 GT 3 is false so no exception.
Does it pass fromIndex LT 0? Yes indeed 1 LT 0 is false so no exception is thrown.
Does it pass toIndex GT arrayLen? Yes indeed 3 GT 3 is false so no exception is thrown
I'm imagining the next step, something somewhere accesses index 3, runtime says WTF are you doing we're only defined up to 2 here, kaboom.
Now I don't do java so I donno if GT LT are actually impled GTE LTE in java, or there is some extra code or purpose of this such that array(toIndex) will never be accessed, or there is some extra error code detection that handles out of bounds array access.
I just thought it was pretty funny looking when looked at completely out of context.
Like when you see something like lparen x LT 2 vbar vbar x GT 10 rparen and you just know thats a bug because its obviously supposed to be AND not OR and they were probably trying to check an interval.