The answer is that since WWII signals intelligence has played a more and more important role in the way governments address issues of national security. In the past this kind of large scale surveillance didn't happen because it wasn't possible. Now that it is, it constitutes a powerful tool that if used properly can allow government agents to anticipate attacks and other criminal activities.
Citizens are rightly concerned that this kind of surveillance may be misused to settle personal vendettas or attack opponents the establishment. However, these concerns can only be addressed by requiring more transparency and public review of how the programs are used. If we were to roll back the programs themselves it would give terrorist organizations and foreign governments a distinct advantage in signals intelligence.
Apple doesn't have an advertising based business model (nor does Microsoft) so while they might be looking though your files, they aren't selling the information they glean to advertisers. They don't need to look through it for information to use in targeting ads to you they way Google does.
Apple, Google and MS all have their own browser to sell you.
Apple has their own browser because once upon a time their users were treated like second-class citizens and Apple need to write a fast browser themselves to keep up. Since then the situation has improved with Firefox and Crome, but Apple has continued to use their own browser. I've never seen any indication that Apple uses Safari to track their user's internet usage. That makes sense, because Apple would not have a good user for that data.
They all have an app store.
I've never seen a "recommended for you" feature on Apple's app store, and if they are tracking what apps I buy (other than simply to allow me to re-download apps) I haven't seen any indication of it. There is a feature in iTunes to recommend new songs to you, but it's off by default.
They all have preferred search engines
Apple has a default search engine, but the default is Google. It's easy to change it to Yahoo! or Bing.
and you can bet every one of them is selling every tiny piece of data it can track for every user
Again, I haven't seen any indication Apple is selling any of this information, and it appears they make an effort to respect their users' privacy. Perhaps the problem is that you are so used to getting things for "free" that you don't even realize there are companies out there who don't consider advertising to be a viable business model.
Look, the article you're commenting about says they're going to treat the water with their Advanced Liquid Processing System prior to discharge. That will take most of the radionuclides out. I know most people can't be bothered to do even basic research before making unfounded claims, but maybe you should consider it? In cases like this, where there are real risks, unfounded fear mongering will detract from those risks in the long-run.
That's true, but if your developer can't even make the schema, they were just going to fail anyway. At least this way you learn they're in over their heads before all the money is spent.
If insurance providers were willing to do away with lifetime maximum payouts, and accept maximum out of pocket expenses in order to comply with the ADA, they would probably be willing to comply with an API. Their only alternative is would be going out of business.
The thing is they could get it fixed if the people writing the ACA knew what they were doing. First of all, you don't need to meet their API spec, they need to meet yours. Secondly, if they can't meet your spec, they can't offer a health insurance product. How hard is that? But legislators don't even know what an API is, so they wouldn't know a good spec from a cookbook. That's why government agencies often botch this kind of thing (and they aren't the only ones).
The so-called cost savings of outsourcing projects are a lie too, but that's another rant.
The key is only outsourcing part of the project, not the whole thing. If you are working alongside your contractor, you have a better idea of what they are doing and they have a better understanding of your needs. But if you hand over the entire project to a contractor, and you just try to oversee it, you are likely to run into communication problems which will definitely lead to unnecessary costs.
This isn't rocket science. Grab example schema from a private insurance firm, adapt them to this task, and go from there.
This is almost certainly what was done, it's exactly the kind of hair brained scheme businessmen and politicians always want to try. It is needlessly conservative. Get a good developer and make a schema specifically for your project. Like you said, it isn't rocket-science. There isn't some dark magic involved in developing a schema. You make a list of all the data you need to track and then you find a good way to break it out into tables and normalize it.
Don't try to shoehorn some existing schema into your project, you'll end up tracking data you don't need and storing data you do need inefficiently.
Also, having worked with both NoSQL and relational databases, I'd suggest you not shy away from NoSQL simply because it is not as established. You can still develop and enforce a schema in a NoSQL database, but it is more versatile in terms of what you can store and less versatile in terms of what kind of queries can be run. You should chose the technology that is best suited to you application and not be afraid to explore technologies you haven't worked with before.
Do you understand that half of these rats will get cancer in their lifetime even if they are not exposed to any cancer-causing agents? They are extremely susceptible to cancer and they will get it very quickly if they are exposed to something that causes cancer. That is why researchers use them to see if something causes cancer. A short trial is what these rats have been bread for. After their time's up, you cut them open and see if there are any tumors. But if you wait too long, you will get tumors anyway and your experiment is ruined.
So your complaint is that they did a better job of finding out to what extent the product causes a problem with confounding problems baselined by another group.
You can see that they broke them up into groups and fed them increasing concentrations of GMO corn and roundup. With a carcinogen, there is a threshold minimum concentration where cancer appears, and increasing the concentration increases the odds an individual will get cancer. One problem with this study is doesn't show any relationship between concentration and cancer rates. Groups with higher concentrations showed lower rates of cancer than groups with lower concentrations. Many experimental groups showed lower rates of cancer than the control, in several cases the rats receiving the highest doses of supposed cancer causing agents had the lowest rates of cancer. So what's happened here is by chance the female control had less cancer than other female test groups. But in reality the data doesn't show a correlation between the concentration of roundup or roundup ready corn and cancer.
After 20 days of acclimatization, 100 male and 100 female animals were randomly assigned on a weight basis into 10 equivalent groups.
So, I can do a little math. Ten equivalent groups taken from 200 animals is 20 animals each. This isn't rocket science. Breaking them out by sex is even worse, since it means that each group had only 10 animals.
For each sex, one control group had access to plain water and standard diet from the closest isogenic non-transgenic maize control; six groups were fed with 11, 22 and 33% of GM NK603 maize either treated or not with R. The final three groups were fed with the control diet and had access to water supplemented with respectively 1.1 × 108% of R (0.1 ppb of R or 50 ng/L of glyphosate, the contaminating level of some regular tap waters), 0.09% of R (400 mg/kg, US MRL of glyphosate in some GM feed) and 0.5% of R (2.25 g/L, half of the minimal agricultural working dilution).
Here are the 10 (not 4) groups:
1) control (normal water, normal corn) 2) 11% GM corn, not treated with roundup, normal water 3) 11% GM corn, treated with roundup, normal water 4) 22% GM corn, not treated with roundup, normal water 5) 22% GM corn, treated with roundup, normal water 6) 33% GM corn, not treated with roundup, normal water 7) 33% GM corn, treated with roundup, normal water 8) normal corn, traces of roundup in water 9) normal corn, 0.09% roundup in water 10) normal corn, 0.5% roundup in water
So, I am speaking about this after having actually read and understood the paper. Why don't you give it a look?
You are wrong about sample size. Even though this study had 200 rats, they broke them up into groups of 20 for their experimentation and analysis (each group of 20 was treated separately). 20 is an unacceptably small sample size.
You can't do a lifetime study on these kind of rats because 50% of them will get cancer before they die. That means that there will be an unacceptably low signal to noise ratio. Suppose your control group is lucky and only 9 of the 20 rats in it get cancer, then another test group with 10 rats getting cancer would show a 11% higher risk of cancer when in reality they had the same risk of cancer and the group as a whole was just a little bit less lucky. This is actually what their results showed, differences to to simple chance.
Cancer studies use this kind of rat because they are very susceptible to cancer and do not take as long to get it in the presence of a cancer causing agent. If these GMOs caused cancer, you wouldn't need a lifetime study to show it.
You are totally wrong. It is easy to design an experiment to give you questionable results and this paper is an example of that. They choose small number rats that naturally get tumors all the time and then performed a lifetime study on them. The resulting data is exactly what you'd expect if you assumed the gmo food does not cause cancer. Nevertheless, the authors have presented a flawed statistical analysis to indicate the opposite. So even though they didn't fake the data, this is a good example of a paper that never should have been accepted for publication.
I could be wrong, but shouldn't the Windows default font be considered a reasonable choice? Not everybody is inclined to change the font. And even if they were, what is wrong with Arial?
i really think it's stupid that science is poking around into things like this
I think you're stupid because you don't want to learn anymore about this, and you don't want anyone else to either. The more you know the better, knowledge itself is never a bad thing.
If the government is going to start locking people up based on genetic factors, we are all totally screwed regardless of what kind of research goes into it anyway.
CGI officials argued that it would slow work because it was too unfamiliar. Government officials disagreed, and its configuration remains a serious problem.
Government officials like issuing "cost plus" contracts because they allow them to remain in control of the work while not doing any of it themselves. They probably wanted to use it because they had used it in other projects in the past. If the'd just issued a fixed pice contract and said "get it done" the contractor would have selected a database they know and everything would have been much easier for them.
He was trusted; he stripped our system; he had an opportunity—if what he was, was a whistle-blower—to pick up the phone and call the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and say I have some information
It wouldn't exactly be smart for a whistle blower to go the people he intends to blow the whistle on first. Not unless he wan't to go for a swim in a pair of concrete boots or something like that.
I hear this a lot. People tell me "everyone has to work" but what they really mean is everyone must have a job. And what they really, really mean is "I think I have to have a job, so in order for that to be fair you need one too." No, not everyone should have a job. And just because someone isn't willing to work for someone else doesn't mean they are a slacker. Take Steve Jobs as an example. He quite is job to start Apple Computer. Does that make him a slacker? Of course not. In reality, if you have an idea like that you should probably do the same. The world would be a better place if more people did.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is that since WWII signals intelligence has played a more and more important role in the way governments address issues of national security. In the past this kind of large scale surveillance didn't happen because it wasn't possible. Now that it is, it constitutes a powerful tool that if used properly can allow government agents to anticipate attacks and other criminal activities.
Citizens are rightly concerned that this kind of surveillance may be misused to settle personal vendettas or attack opponents the establishment. However, these concerns can only be addressed by requiring more transparency and public review of how the programs are used. If we were to roll back the programs themselves it would give terrorist organizations and foreign governments a distinct advantage in signals intelligence.
Apple doesn't have an advertising based business model (nor does Microsoft) so while they might be looking though your files, they aren't selling the information they glean to advertisers. They don't need to look through it for information to use in targeting ads to you they way Google does.
Apple has their own browser because once upon a time their users were treated like second-class citizens and Apple need to write a fast browser themselves to keep up. Since then the situation has improved with Firefox and Crome, but Apple has continued to use their own browser. I've never seen any indication that Apple uses Safari to track their user's internet usage. That makes sense, because Apple would not have a good user for that data.
I've never seen a "recommended for you" feature on Apple's app store, and if they are tracking what apps I buy (other than simply to allow me to re-download apps) I haven't seen any indication of it. There is a feature in iTunes to recommend new songs to you, but it's off by default.
Apple has a default search engine, but the default is Google. It's easy to change it to Yahoo! or Bing.
Again, I haven't seen any indication Apple is selling any of this information, and it appears they make an effort to respect their users' privacy. Perhaps the problem is that you are so used to getting things for "free" that you don't even realize there are companies out there who don't consider advertising to be a viable business model.
Look, the article you're commenting about says they're going to treat the water with their Advanced Liquid Processing System prior to discharge. That will take most of the radionuclides out. I know most people can't be bothered to do even basic research before making unfounded claims, but maybe you should consider it? In cases like this, where there are real risks, unfounded fear mongering will detract from those risks in the long-run.
That's true, but if your developer can't even make the schema, they were just going to fail anyway. At least this way you learn they're in over their heads before all the money is spent.
If insurance providers were willing to do away with lifetime maximum payouts, and accept maximum out of pocket expenses in order to comply with the ADA, they would probably be willing to comply with an API. Their only alternative is would be going out of business.
The thing is they could get it fixed if the people writing the ACA knew what they were doing. First of all, you don't need to meet their API spec, they need to meet yours. Secondly, if they can't meet your spec, they can't offer a health insurance product. How hard is that? But legislators don't even know what an API is, so they wouldn't know a good spec from a cookbook. That's why government agencies often botch this kind of thing (and they aren't the only ones).
The key is only outsourcing part of the project, not the whole thing. If you are working alongside your contractor, you have a better idea of what they are doing and they have a better understanding of your needs. But if you hand over the entire project to a contractor, and you just try to oversee it, you are likely to run into communication problems which will definitely lead to unnecessary costs.
This is almost certainly what was done, it's exactly the kind of hair brained scheme businessmen and politicians always want to try. It is needlessly conservative. Get a good developer and make a schema specifically for your project. Like you said, it isn't rocket-science. There isn't some dark magic involved in developing a schema. You make a list of all the data you need to track and then you find a good way to break it out into tables and normalize it.
Don't try to shoehorn some existing schema into your project, you'll end up tracking data you don't need and storing data you do need inefficiently.
Also, having worked with both NoSQL and relational databases, I'd suggest you not shy away from NoSQL simply because it is not as established. You can still develop and enforce a schema in a NoSQL database, but it is more versatile in terms of what you can store and less versatile in terms of what kind of queries can be run. You should chose the technology that is best suited to you application and not be afraid to explore technologies you haven't worked with before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPphyjkXnPc
Still not working for me.
Do you understand that half of these rats will get cancer in their lifetime even if they are not exposed to any cancer-causing agents? They are extremely susceptible to cancer and they will get it very quickly if they are exposed to something that causes cancer. That is why researchers use them to see if something causes cancer. A short trial is what these rats have been bread for. After their time's up, you cut them open and see if there are any tumors. But if you wait too long, you will get tumors anyway and your experiment is ruined.
You can see that they broke them up into groups and fed them increasing concentrations of GMO corn and roundup. With a carcinogen, there is a threshold minimum concentration where cancer appears, and increasing the concentration increases the odds an individual will get cancer. One problem with this study is doesn't show any relationship between concentration and cancer rates. Groups with higher concentrations showed lower rates of cancer than groups with lower concentrations. Many experimental groups showed lower rates of cancer than the control, in several cases the rats receiving the highest doses of supposed cancer causing agents had the lowest rates of cancer. So what's happened here is by chance the female control had less cancer than other female test groups. But in reality the data doesn't show a correlation between the concentration of roundup or roundup ready corn and cancer.
Ok, here is the actual paper. According to it:
So, I can do a little math. Ten equivalent groups taken from 200 animals is 20 animals each. This isn't rocket science. Breaking them out by sex is even worse, since it means that each group had only 10 animals.
Here are the 10 (not 4) groups:
1) control (normal water, normal corn)
2) 11% GM corn, not treated with roundup, normal water
3) 11% GM corn, treated with roundup, normal water
4) 22% GM corn, not treated with roundup, normal water
5) 22% GM corn, treated with roundup, normal water
6) 33% GM corn, not treated with roundup, normal water
7) 33% GM corn, treated with roundup, normal water
8) normal corn, traces of roundup in water
9) normal corn, 0.09% roundup in water
10) normal corn, 0.5% roundup in water
So, I am speaking about this after having actually read and understood the paper. Why don't you give it a look?
ANY number can be rounded to zero.
You are wrong about sample size. Even though this study had 200 rats, they broke them up into groups of 20 for their experimentation and analysis (each group of 20 was treated separately). 20 is an unacceptably small sample size.
You can't do a lifetime study on these kind of rats because 50% of them will get cancer before they die. That means that there will be an unacceptably low signal to noise ratio. Suppose your control group is lucky and only 9 of the 20 rats in it get cancer, then another test group with 10 rats getting cancer would show a 11% higher risk of cancer when in reality they had the same risk of cancer and the group as a whole was just a little bit less lucky. This is actually what their results showed, differences to to simple chance.
Cancer studies use this kind of rat because they are very susceptible to cancer and do not take as long to get it in the presence of a cancer causing agent. If these GMOs caused cancer, you wouldn't need a lifetime study to show it.
You are totally wrong. It is easy to design an experiment to give you questionable results and this paper is an example of that. They choose small number rats that naturally get tumors all the time and then performed a lifetime study on them. The resulting data is exactly what you'd expect if you assumed the gmo food does not cause cancer. Nevertheless, the authors have presented a flawed statistical analysis to indicate the opposite. So even though they didn't fake the data, this is a good example of a paper that never should have been accepted for publication.
Excellent work.
Have you ever tried this? It's actually one of the easier things to set on fire. . .
I could be wrong, but shouldn't the Windows default font be considered a reasonable choice? Not everybody is inclined to change the font. And even if they were, what is wrong with Arial?
I think you're stupid because you don't want to learn anymore about this, and you don't want anyone else to either. The more you know the better, knowledge itself is never a bad thing.
If the government is going to start locking people up based on genetic factors, we are all totally screwed regardless of what kind of research goes into it anyway.
The problem is this:
Government officials like issuing "cost plus" contracts because they allow them to remain in control of the work while not doing any of it themselves. They probably wanted to use it because they had used it in other projects in the past. If the'd just issued a fixed pice contract and said "get it done" the contractor would have selected a database they know and everything would have been much easier for them.
If you actually believe everyone stinks, you may be experiencing olfactory hallucinations, which are a common symptom of schizophrenia.
It wouldn't exactly be smart for a whistle blower to go the people he intends to blow the whistle on first. Not unless he wan't to go for a swim in a pair of concrete boots or something like that.
I'm not an objectivist by any means, but I am familiar enough with Atlas Shrugged to know what you were trying to say. Obviously, I disagree.
I hear this a lot. People tell me "everyone has to work" but what they really mean is everyone must have a job. And what they really, really mean is "I think I have to have a job, so in order for that to be fair you need one too." No, not everyone should have a job. And just because someone isn't willing to work for someone else doesn't mean they are a slacker. Take Steve Jobs as an example. He quite is job to start Apple Computer. Does that make him a slacker? Of course not. In reality, if you have an idea like that you should probably do the same. The world would be a better place if more people did.
What you do is you delete both and switch to an email provider who is less insane and has a better idea what you want.