If only I had mod points...
I completely agree with you on that review for The Baroque Cycle. I read about 1/2 the first book because of a couple long flights and was never motivated to pick it up after I got off the airplane. About 6 months later I read the 2nd half. Two years down the road, I still haven't bought the next book. It has a few enjoyable moments mixed into layers and layers of muck, all begging for an editor.
TBH, I would expect a Thermostat to be working worldwide, too. It's fairly obvious that they forcefully locked it to work in the US only, that's kind of a dick move from the manufacturer, IMHO. They actually used resources for locking it down, instead of just let it work anywhere in the world.
They programmed it to use a US zip code database and to expect US times zones. This isn't forcefully locked, it is only marketed to the US. Maybe I should claim that it's a "dick move" from a European car company that they do not build all their diesel engines to meet US emissions regulations...?? I'd imagine that Nest is trying to establish a home market before adding the complication of standards compliance, packaging, languages, distribution, etc. for a whole new set of countries.
Assume we're just dealing with Carbon (molecular weight 12) here, and "well over 1 trillion tonnes" is actually 2 trillion tonnes:
number of molecules per gram = (Avogadro's Number) / 12 grams = 5.02E25 molecules/kg
2 trillion tonnes = 2E15 kg
(5.02E25 molecules / kg * 2E15 kg) = 1.004E41 molecules
Surface area of sphere with radius of 20 light years = 4.499E35 meters^2
1.004E41 molecules / 4.499 meters^2 = 223,091 molecules / meter^2 == 4.44 attograms of carbon per square meter.
This is a pretty thin layer of material to survive reentry on some 20 light year distant planet.
--------
Alternatively, from google:
((Avogadro's number / (12 grams)) * (2 trillion tonnes)) / (4 * pi * ((20 lightyears)^2)) = 0.223099739 kilometers per liter = 0.5 miles/US gallon, which means we totally need to collect some gas guzzler tax on this material
Maybe we can combine this with the preposterous scenes from The Day After Tomorrow where a wave of cold air chases the main characters down a hallway, freezing those who can't keep up!:)
Probability theory did not fail you. You failed at using probability theory. You provided garbage inputs to your probability of disaster, expected values of earthquake sizes, and expected costs of the disaster; so you have garbage results. These results provided you with false comfort in your low safety margins. End of story.
Your description equally fits two engineers who attended graduate school for PhDs and are working at startup companies. The engineers would be making good money (maybe starting at $100 to 120K), but I bet the doctors will be making 50% more. The time investment in education and work is a lifestyle choice -- it does not guarantee a starting salary, nor do they "deserve" a certain level of pay because of their work ethic. MD pay levels are one of many fundamental problems with the USA's medical & medical insurance industry.
Actually quite a few do have trouble, and are most definitely NOT rich.
It depends on your definition of "rich". I consider someone who makes $174,000+ per year to be rich unless they're forced to live in the most expensive parts of California or in Manhattan:
Undergraduate loans are not an excuse: everyone who goes to college can easily accrue undergraduate loans if they do not have special circumstances or an superior work ethic.
The cost of medical school is not an excuse: the average debt of a medical resident in 2009 was ~$160k, so lets round up to $200k for an MD. The loan payment on a 30 year, $200K loan is about $1100 per month. This leaves our poor doctor with a low $160K per year. This is still 3X the median household income in the United States.
Sure, medical doctors may have a few "tough" years of lower pay through a residency, but every graduate student working on a masters or PhD with some type of teaching or research assistantship face the same situation.
Fundamentally the medical profession believes, and is practically taught in medical school, that they demand more recognition / respect than your "average" profession. Society has a done a great job enforcing this idea: many more bright high school students aspire to be doctors and lawyers versus a science or technology career in the USA. Compare this to China and India, where the economy is driven by technology and you will see the opposite pattern.
I dunno. I have an HTPC and it's kinda a pain in the ass. If Apple can come out with a TV that has a built-in HD, a decent OS, and Siri, that could very well be the sweet spot for a lot of people, including me. "Siri, I'd like to watch the latest episode of Venture Brothers." Boom. Off ya go.
Now, what WILL be annoying is if their TV is iOS based.
Unfortunately, you left out a step for this hypothetical Apple TV:
1. "Siri, I'd like to watch the latest episode of the Venture Brothers."
2. Your iTunes account is charged $2 for SD or $3 for HD for a rental, *per episode*. (Since this is Apple, they will only allow you to get the latest content through iTunes. You may be able to stream older shows / seasons carried by Netflix, but this will not be integrated into the Siri search.)
This machine is a pure marketing gimmick -- it would play a good part in the "Security Theater" that we run in American airports, but it would be next to useless to detecting dangerous chemicals. It is based on Raman spectroscopy, using a special input probe to their spectrometer that lets them look into the depth of the bottle by a few millimeters. Raman spectroscopy tests are, unfortunately, very easy to deceive because the Raman signal emitted by a chemical is very tiny. If you mix a bit of fluorescent dye, or a chemical with strong Raman cross section (tylenol, for example), this machine would be worthless.
The drug bosses who want to smuggle things through customs do employ intelligent chemists who understand Raman spectroscopy, and will defeat these machines easily.
Newport has an ultrafast 400 fs laser with a claimed high repetition rate (http://www.newport.com/Spirit#tab_Specifications), but the rep rate is only 1 MHz. Who cares if you set a bit in 60 fs but then your laser can only write 1Mb/sec to disk. What's that, the speed of a Zip Disk?
I can't name a single new game that works properly on my laptop simply due to the copy protection.
How did this get modded to Score 5, Insightful?? This should either be -1 Flamebait or -1 Computer Illiterate. I find it much more likely that your laptop is either running linux or is too old to run modern games. You may not *want* to run games with DRM on your laptop, but I guarantee your laptop hardware is not stopping you from running 100% of new games you can buy in the store right now.
I bet that even a Best Buy Geek Squad employee could get a game running on your system if you're incapable of installing it yourself...
I believe that Apple knew full well what it was getting in to and the new plant in Brazil is an effort to distance themselves from Foxconn, but that's not enough.
The plant in Brazil *is* a Foxcon plant, so no, they are not distancing themselves from Foxcon. Foxcon is just building a new plant where they can source cheap labor and benefit from government tax subsidies. From PC World, "The Junai, Brazil factory was made possible through a partnership between China-based Apple manufacturer Foxconn and the Brazilian government."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392962,00.asp
That lady is going to be totally fucked when she leaves her carefully crafted bubble and enters into the real world someday. She'll likely fall apart completely right there on the sidewalk somewhere and require years of therapy.
Hold on, this is New Jersey. There are plenty of NJ residents who live there whole lives within their little suburban bubbles who think NYC is a dangerous place to visit and who are too scared to go outside of their social / cultural neighborhood. It's self-segregation at its finest.
Yeah this attitude drives me crazy. I have a friend who grew up in a dense suburb in the Northeastern US and have heard similar comments (i.e. "Wow it's really dark here, this is scary") when driving through a more rural area. We do *not* need street lights put up in front of every house in the US!!!
Most major cellular phone issues would disappear if we completely separated the phones from the contracts and let people swap carriers on a month-to-month basis. It would be great if the FCC would force cellular providers to separate a bill into the network connection bill and the phone loan. This would force the phone companies to compete on price and service rather than locking people into contracts
The £500 LG Optimus 3D, the world’s first 3D smartphone, has been delayed until June, possibly due to 3D on a phone being stupendously pointless rubbish that doesn’t work.
I'm not so sure the LG Optimus 3D is really the world's first... How do you define 3D smartphone? The HTC EVO 3D (http://www.htc.com/us/products/evo3d-sprint/) was available in June 2011. It is a pretty good phone, but the 3D is a useless gimmick.
For that matter, wasn't the LG Optimus 3D released in the UK around the same time?
Why is this even posted on the main page of Slashdot? He makes one good point: lumping the entire revenue of GE into the revenue of the big size media companies is disingenuous because GE does way more than run a media industry. The rest of the article is just Cliff Kuang saying, "Are the Big 6 media companies a big conspiracy??! I don't think so!"
The main point of the Frugal Dad Infographic stands: consolidating our audio and visual media (+the broadcast / network industry) into a few companies is going to continue driving everything toward the lowest common denominator drivel. Our future is staged-reality TV shows where celebrity* lawyers and police force investigate crime prisoners to sing to determine their punishment. We will call it Law and Crime Scene X-Factor. {*Note: by celebrity I mean semi-attractive wealthy people who are famous because of sex-tapes they release online.}
Project Summary: This project is based on a novel nanoplatform that is comprised of an iron oxide nanoparticle core, an amine-rich intermediate layer, and an outside coating layer made of human serum albumin. In this project, the iron oxide nanoplatform is loaded with a cocktail of therapeutic agents (paclitaxel, salinomycin, and tariquidar or siRNA that targets MDR-1 gene) and is used to treat breast cancer.
That's a good example. There are lots of people are in the field now. I referenced Halas because she was publishing on these therapeutic uses of nanoparticles 10 years ago.
Cuba is rather famous for having better healthcare then the US and a far lower infant death rate. If you are a dying infant, communism apparently can save your life but that life will be less free.
Allow me to post a counterargument from Wikipedia, emphasis from me:
According to Katharine Hirschfeld, criticizing the government is a crime in Cuba, and penalties are severe.[81] She noted that "Formally eliciting critical narratives about health care would be viewed as a criminal act both for me as a researcher, and for people who spoke openly with me".[81] According to Hirschfeld the Cuban Ministry of Health (MINSAP) sets statistical targets that are viewed as production quotas. The most guarded is infant mortality rate. The doctor is pressured to abort the pregnancy whenever screening shows that quotas are in danger.[81] Once a doctor decides to guard his quotas, patients have no right to refuse abortion.[81]
Sometimes I wonder if people have consumed a bit too much Michael Moore Kool-Aid when they start claiming that Cuba's health care system is the best in the world. Michael Moore does have many useful criticisms of the establishment within his work, but he pads it with a lot of manipulated fact / propaganda.
I don't want to minimize the achievement of this high school student, but it does look like she is repeating work that was published several years ago. (If this had been completely original work, I would expect her to already be a research professor instead of a HS student.)
Look at Naomi Halas at Rice University (http://chemistry.rice.edu/FacultyDetail.aspx?RiceID=863). Her group has been engineering nanoparticles for > 5 years for the exact same application, "The Halas Nanoengineering Group is actively pursuing applications of nanoshells in biomedicine, in applications relating to ultrafast immunoassays, optically triggerable drug delivery, early stage cancer detection and photothermal cancer therapy."
One other point: this student attends Oak Ridge High School. How much do you bet she has a parent (or at least a close adviser) who works at Oak Ridge National Lab within their biological systems division.
Other than simply being bad grammar, what does this quote from the article mean, "If the companies were to lose all of their video customers, the revenue decline would be more than offset by a lower programming fees and set-top box spending."
Does this mean that cable companies will decrease their cable fees if they lose customers, thereby increasing profits....????
How of the questions you ask Siri could by typed directly into Google or Wolfram Alpha and return the answer?... probably most of them except for a special few cases that require local knowledge from your GPS or address book.
IMO, this will not change anything related to our interaction with phones / computers unless it can respond to almost any question you ask it. This seems more like a job for IBM's Watson than an iphone.
While he does have some interesting things to say, the article reads like a sales pitch for some business strategy called "Radical Management" -- i.e. the author is trying to sell his book. Unfortunately he never explains what "Radical Management" is or how it will change the status quo.
Slashdot Mirror
If only I had mod points... I completely agree with you on that review for The Baroque Cycle. I read about 1/2 the first book because of a couple long flights and was never motivated to pick it up after I got off the airplane. About 6 months later I read the 2nd half. Two years down the road, I still haven't bought the next book. It has a few enjoyable moments mixed into layers and layers of muck, all begging for an editor.
TBH, I would expect a Thermostat to be working worldwide, too. It's fairly obvious that they forcefully locked it to work in the US only, that's kind of a dick move from the manufacturer, IMHO. They actually used resources for locking it down, instead of just let it work anywhere in the world.
They programmed it to use a US zip code database and to expect US times zones. This isn't forcefully locked, it is only marketed to the US. Maybe I should claim that it's a "dick move" from a European car company that they do not build all their diesel engines to meet US emissions regulations...?? I'd imagine that Nest is trying to establish a home market before adding the complication of standards compliance, packaging, languages, distribution, etc. for a whole new set of countries.
Assume we're just dealing with Carbon (molecular weight 12) here, and "well over 1 trillion tonnes" is actually 2 trillion tonnes:
number of molecules per gram = (Avogadro's Number) / 12 grams = 5.02E25 molecules/kg
2 trillion tonnes = 2E15 kg
(5.02E25 molecules / kg * 2E15 kg) = 1.004E41 molecules
Surface area of sphere with radius of 20 light years = 4.499E35 meters^2
1.004E41 molecules / 4.499 meters^2 = 223,091 molecules / meter^2 == 4.44 attograms of carbon per square meter.
This is a pretty thin layer of material to survive reentry on some 20 light year distant planet.
--------
Alternatively, from google: ((Avogadro's number / (12 grams)) * (2 trillion tonnes)) / (4 * pi * ((20 lightyears)^2)) = 0.223099739 kilometers per liter = 0.5 miles/US gallon, which means we totally need to collect some gas guzzler tax on this material
Maybe we can combine this with the preposterous scenes from The Day After Tomorrow where a wave of cold air chases the main characters down a hallway, freezing those who can't keep up! :)
Probability theory did not fail you. You failed at using probability theory. You provided garbage inputs to your probability of disaster, expected values of earthquake sizes, and expected costs of the disaster; so you have garbage results. These results provided you with false comfort in your low safety margins. End of story.
That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!
That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! The kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!
Of course, this has been known as the Streisand Effect for almost 10 years now.
Your description equally fits two engineers who attended graduate school for PhDs and are working at startup companies. The engineers would be making good money (maybe starting at $100 to 120K), but I bet the doctors will be making 50% more. The time investment in education and work is a lifestyle choice -- it does not guarantee a starting salary, nor do they "deserve" a certain level of pay because of their work ethic. MD pay levels are one of many fundamental problems with the USA's medical & medical insurance industry.
Actually quite a few do have trouble, and are most definitely NOT rich.
It depends on your definition of "rich". I consider someone who makes $174,000+ per year to be rich unless they're forced to live in the most expensive parts of California or in Manhattan:
Fundamentally the medical profession believes, and is practically taught in medical school, that they demand more recognition / respect than your "average" profession. Society has a done a great job enforcing this idea: many more bright high school students aspire to be doctors and lawyers versus a science or technology career in the USA. Compare this to China and India, where the economy is driven by technology and you will see the opposite pattern.
I dunno. I have an HTPC and it's kinda a pain in the ass. If Apple can come out with a TV that has a built-in HD, a decent OS, and Siri, that could very well be the sweet spot for a lot of people, including me. "Siri, I'd like to watch the latest episode of Venture Brothers." Boom. Off ya go.
Now, what WILL be annoying is if their TV is iOS based.
Unfortunately, you left out a step for this hypothetical Apple TV:
This machine is a pure marketing gimmick -- it would play a good part in the "Security Theater" that we run in American airports, but it would be next to useless to detecting dangerous chemicals. It is based on Raman spectroscopy, using a special input probe to their spectrometer that lets them look into the depth of the bottle by a few millimeters. Raman spectroscopy tests are, unfortunately, very easy to deceive because the Raman signal emitted by a chemical is very tiny. If you mix a bit of fluorescent dye, or a chemical with strong Raman cross section (tylenol, for example), this machine would be worthless. The drug bosses who want to smuggle things through customs do employ intelligent chemists who understand Raman spectroscopy, and will defeat these machines easily.
Newport has an ultrafast 400 fs laser with a claimed high repetition rate (http://www.newport.com/Spirit#tab_Specifications), but the rep rate is only 1 MHz. Who cares if you set a bit in 60 fs but then your laser can only write 1Mb/sec to disk. What's that, the speed of a Zip Disk?
I can't name a single new game that works properly on my laptop simply due to the copy protection.
How did this get modded to Score 5, Insightful?? This should either be -1 Flamebait or -1 Computer Illiterate. I find it much more likely that your laptop is either running linux or is too old to run modern games. You may not *want* to run games with DRM on your laptop, but I guarantee your laptop hardware is not stopping you from running 100% of new games you can buy in the store right now. I bet that even a Best Buy Geek Squad employee could get a game running on your system if you're incapable of installing it yourself...
I believe that Apple knew full well what it was getting in to and the new plant in Brazil is an effort to distance themselves from Foxconn, but that's not enough.
The plant in Brazil *is* a Foxcon plant, so no, they are not distancing themselves from Foxcon. Foxcon is just building a new plant where they can source cheap labor and benefit from government tax subsidies. From PC World, "The Junai, Brazil factory was made possible through a partnership between China-based Apple manufacturer Foxconn and the Brazilian government." http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392962,00.asp
That lady is going to be totally fucked when she leaves her carefully crafted bubble and enters into the real world someday. She'll likely fall apart completely right there on the sidewalk somewhere and require years of therapy.
Hold on, this is New Jersey. There are plenty of NJ residents who live there whole lives within their little suburban bubbles who think NYC is a dangerous place to visit and who are too scared to go outside of their social / cultural neighborhood. It's self-segregation at its finest.
Yeah this attitude drives me crazy. I have a friend who grew up in a dense suburb in the Northeastern US and have heard similar comments (i.e. "Wow it's really dark here, this is scary") when driving through a more rural area. We do *not* need street lights put up in front of every house in the US!!!
Most major cellular phone issues would disappear if we completely separated the phones from the contracts and let people swap carriers on a month-to-month basis. It would be great if the FCC would force cellular providers to separate a bill into the network connection bill and the phone loan. This would force the phone companies to compete on price and service rather than locking people into contracts
The £500 LG Optimus 3D, the world’s first 3D smartphone, has been delayed until June, possibly due to 3D on a phone being stupendously pointless rubbish that doesn’t work.
I'm not so sure the LG Optimus 3D is really the world's first ... How do you define 3D smartphone? The HTC EVO 3D (http://www.htc.com/us/products/evo3d-sprint/) was available in June 2011. It is a pretty good phone, but the 3D is a useless gimmick.
For that matter, wasn't the LG Optimus 3D released in the UK around the same time?
Why is this even posted on the main page of Slashdot? He makes one good point: lumping the entire revenue of GE into the revenue of the big size media companies is disingenuous because GE does way more than run a media industry. The rest of the article is just Cliff Kuang saying, "Are the Big 6 media companies a big conspiracy??! I don't think so!"
The main point of the Frugal Dad Infographic stands: consolidating our audio and visual media (+the broadcast / network industry) into a few companies is going to continue driving everything toward the lowest common denominator drivel. Our future is staged-reality TV shows where celebrity* lawyers and police force investigate crime prisoners to sing to determine their punishment. We will call it Law and Crime Scene X-Factor. {*Note: by celebrity I mean semi-attractive wealthy people who are famous because of sex-tapes they release online.}
Look at the work of Dr. Jin Xie, who appears to have won an award for EXACTLY this work in 2010. http://nano.cancer.gov/action/programs/pathway.asp
Project Summary: This project is based on a novel nanoplatform that is comprised of an iron oxide nanoparticle core, an amine-rich intermediate layer, and an outside coating layer made of human serum albumin. In this project, the iron oxide nanoplatform is loaded with a cocktail of therapeutic agents (paclitaxel, salinomycin, and tariquidar or siRNA that targets MDR-1 gene) and is used to treat breast cancer.
That's a good example. There are lots of people are in the field now. I referenced Halas because she was publishing on these therapeutic uses of nanoparticles 10 years ago.
Cuba is rather famous for having better healthcare then the US and a far lower infant death rate. If you are a dying infant, communism apparently can save your life but that life will be less free.
Allow me to post a counterargument from Wikipedia, emphasis from me:
According to Katharine Hirschfeld, criticizing the government is a crime in Cuba, and penalties are severe.[81] She noted that "Formally eliciting critical narratives about health care would be viewed as a criminal act both for me as a researcher, and for people who spoke openly with me".[81] According to Hirschfeld the Cuban Ministry of Health (MINSAP) sets statistical targets that are viewed as production quotas. The most guarded is infant mortality rate. The doctor is pressured to abort the pregnancy whenever screening shows that quotas are in danger.[81] Once a doctor decides to guard his quotas, patients have no right to refuse abortion.[81]
Sometimes I wonder if people have consumed a bit too much Michael Moore Kool-Aid when they start claiming that Cuba's health care system is the best in the world. Michael Moore does have many useful criticisms of the establishment within his work, but he pads it with a lot of manipulated fact / propaganda.
I don't want to minimize the achievement of this high school student, but it does look like she is repeating work that was published several years ago. (If this had been completely original work, I would expect her to already be a research professor instead of a HS student.)
Look at Naomi Halas at Rice University (http://chemistry.rice.edu/FacultyDetail.aspx?RiceID=863). Her group has been engineering nanoparticles for > 5 years for the exact same application, "The Halas Nanoengineering Group is actively pursuing applications of nanoshells in biomedicine, in applications relating to ultrafast immunoassays, optically triggerable drug delivery, early stage cancer detection and photothermal cancer therapy."
One other point: this student attends Oak Ridge High School. How much do you bet she has a parent (or at least a close adviser) who works at Oak Ridge National Lab within their biological systems division.
Other than simply being bad grammar, what does this quote from the article mean, "If the companies were to lose all of their video customers, the revenue decline would be more than offset by a lower programming fees and set-top box spending."
...????
Does this mean that cable companies will decrease their cable fees if they lose customers, thereby increasing profits.
How of the questions you ask Siri could by typed directly into Google or Wolfram Alpha and return the answer? ... probably most of them except for a special few cases that require local knowledge from your GPS or address book.
IMO, this will not change anything related to our interaction with phones / computers unless it can respond to almost any question you ask it. This seems more like a job for IBM's Watson than an iphone.
While he does have some interesting things to say, the article reads like a sales pitch for some business strategy called "Radical Management" -- i.e. the author is trying to sell his book. Unfortunately he never explains what "Radical Management" is or how it will change the status quo.