Hepatitis C eats your liver. It's incurable and fatal.
Hepatitis C is curable. Depending on the variant, treatment with alfa interferon + ribavirin is effective in 50% to 90% of cases. I got it from a finger stick when I was working in neurosurgery. I was put on a 24 week treatment series. My viral load was zero after 16 weeks, but the treatment continued in case there were dormant viruses. I'll always carry the RNA of the virus, much like carrying the antibodies against a previous infection, but I am cured. There are people getting treated successfully after carrying Hep-C for 25 years or more. So, bottom line, you're as wrong as a football bat, which calls into doubt your other assertions.
Actually, no it doesn't, they're also wrong as a football bat on their own. This story is either mistaken, or complete bullshit. It says the life insurance was denied for pre-existing condition. Life insurance pay out does not depend on conditions, other than many not paying out for suicide, and if that's the case it's stated in the policy. It's health insurance claims that get turned down for that. TFA is not about a health insurance claim. The summary and the relevant portion of TFA is therefore crap, and so is any argumentation pro or con regarding its claims.
The company is not attempting to deny based on pre-existing, it is claiming the policy was obtained fraudulently because they were not informed that he had Hep-C. They can deny to insure or insure at a higher rate based on state of health, but must do so at the time, and the insuree must disclose such in the application or they're conducting fraud. The company can rightly negate the policy if they find out, no matter when (before or after death) or how (due to the undisclosed condition or something else), that it was obtained fraudulently.
The ABC writer should be canned for being a dipshit. He even says the company acknowledged denying for pre-existing, yet goes on to quote the company president explaining the denial based on fraudulent application. He has no clue what he's talking about, and is attracting a dogpile of similarly clueless respondents. The issue to be worked out is if he (or his wife if she was the applicant) knew about the Hep-C when applying. If, as it seems, the Hep-C was not known until the autopsy and there are no records he was tested or treated for it, she'll get her money. If he knew about it before, she'll get nothing. If she knew about it before, she could face jail time, but most likely won't.
I similar set of events occurred during the big tobacco lawsuits. Some testimony was sealed and later opened, some remains sealed. Some of the former was from the tobacco comany researcher Dr. Jeffery Wigand. His story is the basis for the movie "The Insider". NYT has an archive of articles from throughout the course of the suits at: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/jeffrey_wigand/index.html
Some of the latter was from another tobacco company researcher named Pele, who worked out the biochemical mechanism of nicotine addiction. After his employer quashed news of the results, he leaked the details to a news magazine (either Time or Newsweek, I forget which), Subsequently all his testimony and work was sealed, he was fired and prevented from working in that field any more.
After these and similar testimonies that were greatly damaging to the companies' claims, the lawsuits suddenly sped up and concluded with the companies paying out US$280Bn. It was speculated that had the testimony been public and the suits based on the claims therein (ie. they themselves had the proof of nicotine addiction, something they'd denied existed), the companies would have been fined a great deal more, or possibly forced to sell out.
We can only hope that what's been sealed and discussed is so damaging to the RIAA that the judge is telling them to defend against it would require perjury, and he's giving them a chance to back off, settle before it gets a lot worse for them, and go lick their wounds.
One thing you can be sure of, and happened in the tobacco suits, if the companies lose and are fined, the amount they pay out will be made up by price increases. All buyers will end up paying the fine. And once they've covered the cost of the fines, they'll leave the price where it was moved up to, and rake in even more.
Holographic Memories, Scientific American, November 1995, by Psaltis & Mok
A very good article on the principles involved in holographic storage. It focuses on solid state storage systems -- relatively large 3D lattices storage in a crystal or block of doped material. The robot that navigated its way around the lab using holographically stored images is very cool. The technology involved made use of a technique that the disks can't -- the playback beam is an image of a target, and produces an output beam from every storage cell being illuminated (up to all of them), the strength being proportional to the similarity to the target. Finding a match or closest-to is a simple matter of finding the strongest output and looking at it.
Much of the work examined was done at Stanford. They've continued developing the research, and recently announced that they holographically stored a 35 bit images "in the quantum space of a single electron" http://storagemojo.com/2009/02/03/quantum-holographic-storage/ (I assume they mean an electron's orbit). Like the 3D solid state devices before, it can stack holograms, storing two images in the same space.
In keeping with the device described in TFA, let's keep with as much current technology as possible. At 70 bit per electron, an iron atom could carry 227 bytes plus a 4 bit checksum. As iron oxide, each molecule would have 34 electrons, giving 297 bytes plus checksum. It would take 3367003367 molecules of iron oxide to carry a terabyte. What's the density of iron oxide on a disk in terms of molecules per given area? I can't find a reference, but I'm sure 3.4 billion molecules would be a tiny portion of the platter. A standard hard drive could carry enormous amounts, or disks could be made much smaller, such as the sub-inch drives (Ob/.SciFiRef) shown in Johnny Mnemonic.
As for the annoucement in TFA, there have been many such announcements from different companies for the last decade, prompting one respondent to one of the many articles to call holographic storage systems the Duke Nukem Forever of data storage. Doing a web search on various permutations of "holography" "holographic" "data" "storage" etc. produces a multitude of announcements, articles, mention of articles, second hand accountings of same, and so forth.
I've no doubt that sooner or later there will be some very expensive storage devices that a very few will be able to afford and even less make full use of. Government can afford such things and the health care industry has the cash flow plus tax write offs for business equipment. I've also no doubt the first adopters will end up stranded with expensive door stops. But these are the usual and apparently necessary steps before we can obtain the technology at more reasonable cost.
For once, an article that carries through the excellent understanding of the researchers. They have a very good grasp of the current state of cognition research. I've not seen the balance between focus (under control of executive function) and heuristic (purposefully instigated but unconsciously operating) cognition.
However, they answer has already been obtained. True nootropics (cognition enhancing drugs) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nootropics were first created/discovered over 50 years ago. If it weren't for the fact he discovered/created LSD, Albert Hoffmann would have been in line for a Nobel for Hydergine. It, and its many derivatives (the racetams), have been in use for more than half a century. Hoffmann himself credited hydergine for his longetivity (he died not long ago at age 103). These drugs are frequently reclassified, almost invariably downwards, to "possibly effective" in the US, and only recommended for late stage dementias. Elsewhere these drugs are used for all stages of cognitive decline as well as cases such as illustrated by TFA, desire for improved cognitive processing.
Despite widespread positive results, clinical and real life, in the US the FDA has been dragging its feet on approving these drugs so long that the patents on some are expiring. Their efforts have been so effective that Nobel winner Eric Kandel (major player in describing the dopamine system) announced that he would use his prize money to start a company to create the first nootropic, apparently unaware that he was at the time almost 50 years too late.
Thanks to the 1989 AIDS law, people in the US can obtain a 90 day supply of any drug approved anywhere in the world, as long as they can get a prescription for it. There are many non-US pharma companies willing to accept such prescriptions and ship the meds. I won't go as far as to suggest their use by others for any particular purpose, but I will state that despite the correlation/caustion problem in a single data point, I credit a 9 month course of hydergine and nootropil with a decade long suspension and even partial reversal in the progress of my Parkinsons. I only have a background in these nootropics as can be obtained by sources not under the influence of the FDA. I do have a professional research background in Parkinsons and other dopaminergic disorders and can find no other reason for such a lengthy remission and reversal of some symptoms beyond the frequent but under-reported medical observation of "inexplicable".
The use of drugs that force the system into a state of enhanced cognition will always prove futile and usually addictive in some sense. Drugs that promote natural enhancement have already proven effective.
'Moreover, even if US trademark laws somehow reached this noncommercial activity, the artists' use of the mark is an obvious fair use.'
Wikipedia is not non-commercial, it's non-profit (from their pages: "a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity").
Both non-profit and non-commercial entities can hold trade marks. Both can be held in violation of same.
Since they use the exact trade mark (again, from their pages: "Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.") rather than a generic derivative of it (ie. Wikiart) without obtaining permission, they are in violation. Specifically, by appearing as though they might be part of Wikipedia (disclaimers may follow but do not prevent prima facie assumption) Wikipedia's mark is subject to potential dilution. The law serves to protect against that specifically.
I blame Wikipediaart for the problem, even if it's due to ignorance. I doubt Wikipedia/Wikimedia wants to be seen doing this. However, they have to. Not to do so leaves them open to loss of protection should someone else do the same. Yes, it applies to trade mark as well as copyright. We've had the discussion before and references to the laws provided. A summary article with references can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.htm
Fair use does apply to trademark are well as copyright. However, it requires "non-imitative" use (http://www.publaw.com/fairusetrade.html ). The look and feel of Wikipediaart is such that it could be dropped whole into Wikipedia and look like it belongs. It is far too imitative. Furthermore, the use of material previously on Wikipedia can lead to "confusion", the point other than "dilution" that the protection exists for.
I'm disappointed in the EFF attorney. Assertions are being tossed about that are clearly contradicted by the law. I hope the organization doesn't hold the same opinions.
"If the [planet's] surface had just a collection of random chiral molecules, half would go left, half right," Germer says. "But life's self-assembly means they all would go one way. It's hard to imagine a planet's surface exhibiting handedness without the presence of self assembly."
He's not talking about life, he's talking about Earth life. We have only one data point to go by, which is too little to draw generalities from.
It is perfectly plausible that a biosphere could be bichiral. There could be parallel but non- or weakly-interacting ecosystems, or one ecosystem with organisms that exhibit both. False negative.
There could also be monochiral planetary surfaces due to the process of catalysis of organic but non-biological compounds. False positive.
It doesn't make sense to me to look for extraterrestrial life by looking only for the characteristics of terrestrial life, any more than we should look for extraterrestrial civilizations to be comprised of humanoids or even humans. "The problem with aliens is, they're alien." (Greg Benford? Larry Niven?)
It's gratifying to know that/. allows people with no background in the subject matter and no understanding of the classifications in mods to have an editorial voice in moderating, as well as giving them the freedom to not pay attention to the guidelines and definitions in "Moderation Help".
A troll is a false statement. What I said about both the administrations as well as the incestuous relationships between governance, agencies and business are a matter of public record. Several stories regarding NASA with just this plot line are included in the single most complete independent web site covering space program history, Encyclopedia Astronautica http://www.astronautix.com/ The statements I made are echoes of project managers and staff from axed programs over the last half century quoted in books, articles and personal interviews. There is no shortage of them because there are far more axed programs than successful ones. To support my assertions, look up the proposals NASA rejected for what has become the Constellation system and Ares launcher -- the early proposals from BigAero were based on existing or planned boosters such as upgraded Delta and Atlas.
Well, it is, but it's much more than that. It's conflict of interest. The judge and prosecutors should have recused themselves. They should be prosecuted for remaining on the case.
Planning a project and then cutting the budget is a common tactic used to divert more of the work and cash to contractors. In this case the intention was to cut the booster program and use already available hardware such as the Delta Heavy instead. This sort of behavior was an epidemic during the previous administration, but the present one showed signs of staying the course. Not long ago Obama was (mis)quoted as saying that possibly we should use available "military" hardware. The misquote, or possibly misstatement on his part, was in the fact the the hardware is used by the military, but comes from civilian sources that already supply the same to NASA.
Monsanto patented some corn strains. The patent covered any corn found to have their patented genome. They planted it, it grew and pollinated. The pollen drifted into nearby fields and pollinated the crops there. Monsanto got some of the resulting corn, tested it, found their genome, and sued the farmers for theft of intellectual property. I don't know if they finally won or not, but at the time they prevented the farmers from farming until it was resolved causing loss of income, as well as proving themselves to be willing to use the high cost of defending one's self in order to keep from losing. And that was in the US, just prior to them releasing the same strains in third world countries. The strain they distributed had the trait of not producing viable seed. They wanted all the farmers to have to buy seed every year rather than grow their own, and they feared cross pollination would produce a viable strain overriding the nonviability genes.
I can't accept the argument that a degree in Psychology is necessary to predict the future of higher education in the U. S.. You are questioning the credentials of a person on the basis of your particular perspective. It sounded snippish to me...and snobbish. I question the validity of your suggestion that he visit a neuroscience lab. The future of higher education will not be found there either. Wiley actually has pretty good credentials to say what he said.
You're right, it sounded that way. I apologize. I didn't mean for it to. I'll take the -1 flamebait mod. I first attempted to correct inaccuracies. The article does state he's a professor of "psychology and instructional technology" which is misleading.
However, I maintain he should visit hands on labs to see the simultaneous learning of subject and process. We use such technology as gives radio astronomers thousands or millions of "channels", bioelectric monitoring sensitive to 10 to 20 nanovolts (up to 256 simultaneous channels), and so forth. The complexity of the technology combined with the experimental design makes for incredibly complex experimental set ups and attendant errors which must be rooted out and corrected. You can't foresee every such problem and so you can't simulate the experience. I don;t think he's been exposed to such a situation. He should be. If not neuroscience, pick another hard science that uses such complex designs and technology.
Wiley is, according to TFA, a professor of psychology and instructional technology. He is not listed among BYU psychology faculty, even visiting. The department he belongs to is called "Instructional Psychology and Technology", which is academi-bloat for "education". His bio is sparse, not stating what his psychology background is. If he has any, it is almost certainly 'soft' psychology, rather than nuts & bolts research. Since one of his interests is in technology, I recommend he visit a working neuroscience lab. The width and depth of technology used in such work will certainly spin his wheels. But he'll also see the situations in which hands on research can't possibly be simulated realistically. As much problem solving goes into designing and getting running as into answering the question of interest -- things go wrong and the student has to learn to make them go right.
To his credit another of his interests in in intellectual property law and open source licensing. That doesn't erase the fact that he's speaking outside his own box when he claims face to face education is doomed.
> "smart American intelligence officer" - in > Georgia (country), Iraq (red zone) or 'near' > Pakistan or Latin America. > The rest are in the private sector.
They are civilians, not "private sector". Who their employer contracts to makes the difference. Civilian psyops specialists have always been a prominent part of theory and field work. The psyops 'bible' was written by a civilian: Dr. Paul "E.E. 'Doc' Smith" Linebarger.
As for the military intelligence people, what was said about planting false data about the plane applies to the external appearance of the intelligence community. You don't want the enemy to know how many troops you have and what their capabilities are. The same goes for your intelligence capabilities.
While the media reports various intelligence shortcomings and fuckups, and congress investigates same whether they happened or not, some of the smartest people you'll never meet are running around inside the Pentagon's various intelligence offices, and in and out of offices that same entirely different things on the door. Some of them are running an intelligence agency operating within the US, including field operations, that rivals the CIA in quantity and quality of results. Of course this can't be true because the US military is not allowed to conduct operations against US civilians without a federal decree of martial law, right?
Prior to my military stay I trained barefoot on old, broken city sidewalks. Never had a single injury. After joining I trained in boots. Again, no injury. Until I was issued a pair too narrow. It caused a pinched nerve in my foot. The right size fixed that. Once assigned to a unit, for our daily PT/run we had to wear running shoes. The frequent high impact without adequate protection caused the pinched nerve to flair up. It had to be removed, leaving the facing halves of two toes numb. The end of the nerve formed an inoperable stump, causing a permanent condition just like the injured nerve. It is a minor but permanent part of my service connected disability. "Minor" to the tune of $100+ a month for the rest of my life. Those running shoes are proving to be very expensive to US taxpayers. I can still run in hard soles, including my $10 all plastic Chinese cowboy boot knock offs.
I was going to post the suggestion that the inflammatory (though not inaccurate) headline would trip some triggers. We could then see how many not only didn't read TFA but didn't even read the summary. I posted this with only 26 replies ahead of mine, and it had already happened and the person got called on it. That post/reply and this comment shouldn't make any difference. If they're not reading the summary, they're certainly not reading replies. So let the games begin.
Set your microwave oven for full power, set the timer for an hour. Turn it on and wait until the hour's up or the oven burns out. Open it and feel how hot the air isn't. The microwave density inside it is orders of magnitude greater than one could expect being beamed down from orbit.
A patent doesn't require evidence to support the claims. Patents get awarded for all sorts of things that end up not working.
I told my wife about this while lying on the couch this evening...she got so pissed off that she emailed all 100 Euro MP's in for Germany in 3 hours...nice, now if she was only this keen in bed;(
You're lucky she's not. If she could take on 100 Euro MPs in 3 hours in bed, she'd *kill* you.
TFA makes a very good case that remote space science is better done by robots.
When people go, it is not for the science. They do science because they are there, but it's not the reason they go. We go because it's what we do. We have to do it. It's what we are.
If you were accused of a crime but your DNA record could clear you, would you want it on record? Many people have been cleared of crimes after having been found guilty, due to DNA evidence after the fact. In some of these cases wrongdoing by law enforcement was found and itself prosecuted or at least corrected.
If someone committed a crime against you or yours, and having their DNA on record would help catch and prosecute them, would you want it done?
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin. Unfortunately those constructs are absolutes and do not exist independently in real life. Life has always been a balance between the two, including being a matter of survival. Look again at those two questions and consider the fact that you might have one answer in the theoretical sense but when faced with an actual situation could have a very different attitude.
And, the benefits to having such a database are not restricted to questions of criminal activity. If a loved one came up missing, and a body was found, and their DNA record taken without arrest or even suspicion could prove that it was or wasn't them, would you want to know if they were alive or dead? Same if you were lost and your loved ones were trying to find you or might have you decreed dead.
As for references to GATTACA, that movie had far more to do with access to DNA evidence showing probability of genetically mediated disorders, something related to health care and especially in the US, insurance. We already have laws in place preventing prejudice in availability and cost of care based on genetic proclivities. On the other hand, such evidence is available to the individual. Having your DNA tested can tell you things about your possible future, and you might choose to live differently if you knew these. You might also be able to benefit from alterations to normal treatment based on your specific genetics. Having your DNA on record would allow for advanced testing for such eventualities.
These don't change the fact that being sampled without volunteering might erode privacy. But then being sampled, no matter the context in which it is done, could protect your privacy, freedom and even life. Besides, Ben Franklin gave up some freedoms to be a citizen of the country he helped form, and gave up more when he became a part of the government. I doubt he would have agreed that he didn't deserve whatever liberty or safety he had left.
"For the final stage of an Ariane 5 launcher, the conical sail would need to have an area of about 350 square metres and be supported by an inflatable mast 12 metres long."
And the expected time to reentry is 25 years.
Good luck on keeping something inflated in space for 25 years. And that's not even considering the probability that the the mast, and the much higher probability that the large sail, will be hit by orbiting debris during that time and torn to shreds
Remember when Microsoft pulled the stunt of changing MSN so it gave Opera users a broken page instead? Opera retaliated by releasing a version that went around Microsoft's block and rendered the MSN pages in the 'language' of the Muppet Show's Swedish Chef. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1584361
If Google still had a pair they could cause their search engine to detect when IE is being used and return all Microsoft related results with 'weasel weasel weasel' inserted in the summary and/or subsequent page views.
As for the earlier response that accused Google of being at fault for not following standards, we've heard that song before. It translates from MS-Marketoid to English and comes out as "not following what Microsoft says standards should be, which usually differs from what the rest of the world says." As for returning results with donkey porn, a Live Search for 'donkey porn' returns a t-short company that uses copulating donkeys as their logo, and shows t-shirts saying "You're F*cking Out" and "Jizz In My Pants". I take it Microsoft has decided that these results are suitable for kids. I don't know which is worse, the hypocrisy of allowing ads with donkeys fucking (though not of non-ad fucking donkeys; ads are too important to block I guess) or the paternalism they show in taking the decision out of the hands of parents of what is suitable for their kids and what is not.
Mythbusters confirmed (episodes 51 and 64) a story about using salami http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(season_4)#Salami_Rocket as fuel in a hybrid rocket motor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_rocket , with nitrous oxide as an oxidizer. Their contention was that it was or could have been done in the US civil war. It was done in fact by an amateur rocketer. Oxidizing hydrocarbons produces energy, whether it's kerosene/LOX (a common combination since the V2) or lipids/Nox.
The map is not the terrain. The model is not the phenomenon. No matter how detailed and accurate, this remains true. A particular model may describe something and have nothing to do with the real world.
Wishful thinking is far more easily, accurately and realistically described by the well proven phenomenon cognitive dissonance supporting another well understood function that causes rapid jumps to wrong conclusions, heuristic problem solving. When done in a social context, the primary attribution bias would definitely contribute.
The researchers in TFA, as psychologists, are certainly well aware of these facts. To present such an outlandish, unsupported and non-parsimonious construct when well understood and supported theory already explains more than their "model" (I find it highly unlikely they've actually constructed one) is to take science, dress it in miniskirt, knee high boots and too much make up, and send it out to walk the streets.
Slashdot Mirror
The other whistleblower was named Mele, not Pele.
Hepatitis C eats your liver. It's incurable and fatal.
Hepatitis C is curable. Depending on the variant, treatment with alfa interferon + ribavirin is effective in 50% to 90% of cases. I got it from a finger stick when I was working in neurosurgery. I was put on a 24 week treatment series. My viral load was zero after 16 weeks, but the treatment continued in case there were dormant viruses. I'll always carry the RNA of the virus, much like carrying the antibodies against a previous infection, but I am cured. There are people getting treated successfully after carrying Hep-C for 25 years or more. So, bottom line, you're as wrong as a football bat, which calls into doubt your other assertions.
Actually, no it doesn't, they're also wrong as a football bat on their own. This story is either mistaken, or complete bullshit. It says the life insurance was denied for pre-existing condition. Life insurance pay out does not depend on conditions, other than many not paying out for suicide, and if that's the case it's stated in the policy. It's health insurance claims that get turned down for that. TFA is not about a health insurance claim. The summary and the relevant portion of TFA is therefore crap, and so is any argumentation pro or con regarding its claims.
The company is not attempting to deny based on pre-existing, it is claiming the policy was obtained fraudulently because they were not informed that he had Hep-C. They can deny to insure or insure at a higher rate based on state of health, but must do so at the time, and the insuree must disclose such in the application or they're conducting fraud. The company can rightly negate the policy if they find out, no matter when (before or after death) or how (due to the undisclosed condition or something else), that it was obtained fraudulently.
The ABC writer should be canned for being a dipshit. He even says the company acknowledged denying for pre-existing, yet goes on to quote the company president explaining the denial based on fraudulent application. He has no clue what he's talking about, and is attracting a dogpile of similarly clueless respondents. The issue to be worked out is if he (or his wife if she was the applicant) knew about the Hep-C when applying. If, as it seems, the Hep-C was not known until the autopsy and there are no records he was tested or treated for it, she'll get her money. If he knew about it before, she'll get nothing. If she knew about it before, she could face jail time, but most likely won't.
I similar set of events occurred during the big tobacco lawsuits. Some testimony was sealed and later opened, some remains sealed. Some of the former was from the tobacco comany researcher Dr. Jeffery Wigand. His story is the basis for the movie "The Insider". NYT has an archive of articles from throughout the course of the suits at: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/jeffrey_wigand/index.html
Some of the latter was from another tobacco company researcher named Pele, who worked out the biochemical mechanism of nicotine addiction. After his employer quashed news of the results, he leaked the details to a news magazine (either Time or Newsweek, I forget which), Subsequently all his testimony and work was sealed, he was fired and prevented from working in that field any more.
After these and similar testimonies that were greatly damaging to the companies' claims, the lawsuits suddenly sped up and concluded with the companies paying out US$280Bn. It was speculated that had the testimony been public and the suits based on the claims therein (ie. they themselves had the proof of nicotine addiction, something they'd denied existed), the companies would have been fined a great deal more, or possibly forced to sell out.
We can only hope that what's been sealed and discussed is so damaging to the RIAA that the judge is telling them to defend against it would require perjury, and he's giving them a chance to back off, settle before it gets a lot worse for them, and go lick their wounds.
One thing you can be sure of, and happened in the tobacco suits, if the companies lose and are fined, the amount they pay out will be made up by price increases. All buyers will end up paying the fine. And once they've covered the cost of the fines, they'll leave the price where it was moved up to, and rake in even more.
Holographic Memories, Scientific American, November 1995, by Psaltis & Mok
A very good article on the principles involved in holographic storage. It focuses on solid state storage systems -- relatively large 3D lattices storage in a crystal or block of doped material. The robot that navigated its way around the lab using holographically stored images is very cool. The technology involved made use of a technique that the disks can't -- the playback beam is an image of a target, and produces an output beam from every storage cell being illuminated (up to all of them), the strength being proportional to the similarity to the target. Finding a match or closest-to is a simple matter of finding the strongest output and looking at it.
Much of the work examined was done at Stanford. They've continued developing the research, and recently announced that they holographically stored a 35 bit images "in the quantum space of a single electron" http://storagemojo.com/2009/02/03/quantum-holographic-storage/ (I assume they mean an electron's orbit). Like the 3D solid state devices before, it can stack holograms, storing two images in the same space.
In keeping with the device described in TFA, let's keep with as much current technology as possible. At 70 bit per electron, an iron atom could carry 227 bytes plus a 4 bit checksum. As iron oxide, each molecule would have 34 electrons, giving 297 bytes plus checksum. It would take 3367003367 molecules of iron oxide to carry a terabyte. What's the density of iron oxide on a disk in terms of molecules per given area? I can't find a reference, but I'm sure 3.4 billion molecules would be a tiny portion of the platter. A standard hard drive could carry enormous amounts, or disks could be made much smaller, such as the sub-inch drives (Ob/.SciFiRef) shown in Johnny Mnemonic.
As for the annoucement in TFA, there have been many such announcements from different companies for the last decade, prompting one respondent to one of the many articles to call holographic storage systems the Duke Nukem Forever of data storage. Doing a web search on various permutations of "holography" "holographic" "data" "storage" etc. produces a multitude of announcements, articles, mention of articles, second hand accountings of same, and so forth.
I've no doubt that sooner or later there will be some very expensive storage devices that a very few will be able to afford and even less make full use of. Government can afford such things and the health care industry has the cash flow plus tax write offs for business equipment. I've also no doubt the first adopters will end up stranded with expensive door stops. But these are the usual and apparently necessary steps before we can obtain the technology at more reasonable cost.
For once, an article that carries through the excellent understanding of the researchers. They have a very good grasp of the current state of cognition research. I've not seen the balance between focus (under control of executive function) and heuristic (purposefully instigated but unconsciously operating) cognition.
However, they answer has already been obtained. True nootropics (cognition enhancing drugs) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nootropics were first created/discovered over 50 years ago. If it weren't for the fact he discovered/created LSD, Albert Hoffmann would have been in line for a Nobel for Hydergine. It, and its many derivatives (the racetams), have been in use for more than half a century. Hoffmann himself credited hydergine for his longetivity (he died not long ago at age 103). These drugs are frequently reclassified, almost invariably downwards, to "possibly effective" in the US, and only recommended for late stage dementias. Elsewhere these drugs are used for all stages of cognitive decline as well as cases such as illustrated by TFA, desire for improved cognitive processing.
Despite widespread positive results, clinical and real life, in the US the FDA has been dragging its feet on approving these drugs so long that the patents on some are expiring. Their efforts have been so effective that Nobel winner Eric Kandel (major player in describing the dopamine system) announced that he would use his prize money to start a company to create the first nootropic, apparently unaware that he was at the time almost 50 years too late.
Thanks to the 1989 AIDS law, people in the US can obtain a 90 day supply of any drug approved anywhere in the world, as long as they can get a prescription for it. There are many non-US pharma companies willing to accept such prescriptions and ship the meds. I won't go as far as to suggest their use by others for any particular purpose, but I will state that despite the correlation/caustion problem in a single data point, I credit a 9 month course of hydergine and nootropil with a decade long suspension and even partial reversal in the progress of my Parkinsons. I only have a background in these nootropics as can be obtained by sources not under the influence of the FDA. I do have a professional research background in Parkinsons and other dopaminergic disorders and can find no other reason for such a lengthy remission and reversal of some symptoms beyond the frequent but under-reported medical observation of "inexplicable".
The use of drugs that force the system into a state of enhanced cognition will always prove futile and usually addictive in some sense. Drugs that promote natural enhancement have already proven effective.
'Moreover, even if US trademark laws somehow reached this noncommercial activity, the artists' use of the mark is an obvious fair use.'
Wikipedia is not non-commercial, it's non-profit (from their pages: "a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity").
Both non-profit and non-commercial entities can hold trade marks. Both can be held in violation of same.
Since they use the exact trade mark (again, from their pages: "Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.") rather than a generic derivative of it (ie. Wikiart) without obtaining permission, they are in violation. Specifically, by appearing as though they might be part of Wikipedia (disclaimers may follow but do not prevent prima facie assumption) Wikipedia's mark is subject to potential dilution. The law serves to protect against that specifically.
I blame Wikipediaart for the problem, even if it's due to ignorance. I doubt Wikipedia/Wikimedia wants to be seen doing this. However, they have to. Not to do so leaves them open to loss of protection should someone else do the same. Yes, it applies to trade mark as well as copyright. We've had the discussion before and references to the laws provided. A summary article with references can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.htm
Fair use does apply to trademark are well as copyright. However, it requires "non-imitative" use (http://www.publaw.com/fairusetrade.html ). The look and feel of Wikipediaart is such that it could be dropped whole into Wikipedia and look like it belongs. It is far too imitative. Furthermore, the use of material previously on Wikipedia can lead to "confusion", the point other than "dilution" that the protection exists for.
I'm disappointed in the EFF attorney. Assertions are being tossed about that are clearly contradicted by the law. I hope the organization doesn't hold the same opinions.
"If the [planet's] surface had just a collection of random chiral molecules, half would go left, half right," Germer says. "But life's self-assembly means they all would go one way. It's hard to imagine a planet's surface exhibiting handedness without the presence of self assembly."
He's not talking about life, he's talking about Earth life. We have only one data point to go by, which is too little to draw generalities from.
It is perfectly plausible that a biosphere could be bichiral. There could be parallel but non- or weakly-interacting ecosystems, or one ecosystem with organisms that exhibit both. False negative.
There could also be monochiral planetary surfaces due to the process of catalysis of organic but non-biological compounds. False positive.
It doesn't make sense to me to look for extraterrestrial life by looking only for the characteristics of terrestrial life, any more than we should look for extraterrestrial civilizations to be comprised of humanoids or even humans. "The problem with aliens is, they're alien." (Greg Benford? Larry Niven?)
It's gratifying to know that /. allows people with no background in the subject matter and no understanding of the classifications in mods to have an editorial voice in moderating, as well as giving them the freedom to not pay attention to the guidelines and definitions in "Moderation Help".
A troll is a false statement. What I said about both the administrations as well as the incestuous relationships between governance, agencies and business are a matter of public record. Several stories regarding NASA with just this plot line are included in the single most complete independent web site covering space program history, Encyclopedia Astronautica http://www.astronautix.com/ The statements I made are echoes of project managers and staff from axed programs over the last half century quoted in books, articles and personal interviews. There is no shortage of them because there are far more axed programs than successful ones. To support my assertions, look up the proposals NASA rejected for what has become the Constellation system and Ares launcher -- the early proposals from BigAero were based on existing or planned boosters such as upgraded Delta and Atlas.
Well, it is, but it's much more than that. It's conflict of interest. The judge and prosecutors should have recused themselves. They should be prosecuted for remaining on the case.
Planning a project and then cutting the budget is a common tactic used to divert more of the work and cash to contractors. In this case the intention was to cut the booster program and use already available hardware such as the Delta Heavy instead. This sort of behavior was an epidemic during the previous administration, but the present one showed signs of staying the course. Not long ago Obama was (mis)quoted as saying that possibly we should use available "military" hardware. The misquote, or possibly misstatement on his part, was in the fact the the hardware is used by the military, but comes from civilian sources that already supply the same to NASA.
-1 inefficient, you should only need a revolver for this job.
Why go with the minimum required when you can enjoy exploring the practical application of overkill? I'd love the chance to play with an AA-12 fully automatic 12 gauge shotgun. http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/guns/recoilless-auto-shotgun-fires-300-rounds-per-minute-no-cleaning-or-lube-required-324453.php
Monsanto patented some corn strains. The patent covered any corn found to have their patented genome. They planted it, it grew and pollinated. The pollen drifted into nearby fields and pollinated the crops there. Monsanto got some of the resulting corn, tested it, found their genome, and sued the farmers for theft of intellectual property. I don't know if they finally won or not, but at the time they prevented the farmers from farming until it was resolved causing loss of income, as well as proving themselves to be willing to use the high cost of defending one's self in order to keep from losing. And that was in the US, just prior to them releasing the same strains in third world countries. The strain they distributed had the trait of not producing viable seed. They wanted all the farmers to have to buy seed every year rather than grow their own, and they feared cross pollination would produce a viable strain overriding the nonviability genes.
I can't accept the argument that a degree in Psychology is necessary to predict the future of higher education in the U. S.. You are questioning the credentials of a person on the basis of your particular perspective. It sounded snippish to me...and snobbish. I question the validity of your suggestion that he visit a neuroscience lab. The future of higher education will not be found there either. Wiley actually has pretty good credentials to say what he said.
You're right, it sounded that way. I apologize. I didn't mean for it to. I'll take the -1 flamebait mod. I first attempted to correct inaccuracies. The article does state he's a professor of "psychology and instructional technology" which is misleading.
However, I maintain he should visit hands on labs to see the simultaneous learning of subject and process. We use such technology as gives radio astronomers thousands or millions of "channels", bioelectric monitoring sensitive to 10 to 20 nanovolts (up to 256 simultaneous channels), and so forth. The complexity of the technology combined with the experimental design makes for incredibly complex experimental set ups and attendant errors which must be rooted out and corrected. You can't foresee every such problem and so you can't simulate the experience. I don;t think he's been exposed to such a situation. He should be. If not neuroscience, pick another hard science that uses such complex designs and technology.
Wiley is, according to TFA, a professor of psychology and instructional technology. He is not listed among BYU psychology faculty, even visiting. The department he belongs to is called "Instructional Psychology and Technology", which is academi-bloat for "education". His bio is sparse, not stating what his psychology background is. If he has any, it is almost certainly 'soft' psychology, rather than nuts & bolts research. Since one of his interests is in technology, I recommend he visit a working neuroscience lab. The width and depth of technology used in such work will certainly spin his wheels. But he'll also see the situations in which hands on research can't possibly be simulated realistically. As much problem solving goes into designing and getting running as into answering the question of interest -- things go wrong and the student has to learn to make them go right.
To his credit another of his interests in in intellectual property law and open source licensing. That doesn't erase the fact that he's speaking outside his own box when he claims face to face education is doomed.
> "smart American intelligence officer" - in
> Georgia (country), Iraq (red zone) or 'near'
> Pakistan or Latin America.
> The rest are in the private sector.
They are civilians, not "private sector". Who their employer contracts to makes the difference. Civilian psyops specialists have always been a prominent part of theory and field work. The psyops 'bible' was written by a civilian: Dr. Paul "E.E. 'Doc' Smith" Linebarger.
As for the military intelligence people, what was said about planting false data about the plane applies to the external appearance of the intelligence community. You don't want the enemy to know how many troops you have and what their capabilities are. The same goes for your intelligence capabilities.
While the media reports various intelligence shortcomings and fuckups, and congress investigates same whether they happened or not, some of the smartest people you'll never meet are running around inside the Pentagon's various intelligence offices, and in and out of offices that same entirely different things on the door. Some of them are running an intelligence agency operating within the US, including field operations, that rivals the CIA in quantity and quality of results. Of course this can't be true because the US military is not allowed to conduct operations against US civilians without a federal decree of martial law, right?
Prior to my military stay I trained barefoot on old, broken city sidewalks. Never had a single injury. After joining I trained in boots. Again, no injury. Until I was issued a pair too narrow. It caused a pinched nerve in my foot. The right size fixed that. Once assigned to a unit, for our daily PT/run we had to wear running shoes. The frequent high impact without adequate protection caused the pinched nerve to flair up. It had to be removed, leaving the facing halves of two toes numb. The end of the nerve formed an inoperable stump, causing a permanent condition just like the injured nerve. It is a minor but permanent part of my service connected disability. "Minor" to the tune of $100+ a month for the rest of my life. Those running shoes are proving to be very expensive to US taxpayers. I can still run in hard soles, including my $10 all plastic Chinese cowboy boot knock offs.
I was going to post the suggestion that the inflammatory (though not inaccurate) headline would trip some triggers. We could then see how many not only didn't read TFA but didn't even read the summary. I posted this with only 26 replies ahead of mine, and it had already happened and the person got called on it. That post/reply and this comment shouldn't make any difference. If they're not reading the summary, they're certainly not reading replies. So let the games begin.
Set your microwave oven for full power, set the timer for an hour. Turn it on and wait until the hour's up or the oven burns out. Open it and feel how hot the air isn't. The microwave density inside it is orders of magnitude greater than one could expect being beamed down from orbit.
A patent doesn't require evidence to support the claims. Patents get awarded for all sorts of things that end up not working.
I told my wife about this while lying on the couch this evening...she got so pissed off that she emailed all 100 Euro MP's in for Germany in 3 hours...nice, now if she was only this keen in bed ;(
You're lucky she's not. If she could take on 100 Euro MPs in 3 hours in bed, she'd *kill* you.
TFA makes a very good case that remote space science is better done by robots.
When people go, it is not for the science. They do science because they are there, but it's not the reason they go. We go because it's what we do. We have to do it. It's what we are.
If you were accused of a crime but your DNA record could clear you, would you want it on record? Many people have been cleared of crimes after having been found guilty, due to DNA evidence after the fact. In some of these cases wrongdoing by law enforcement was found and itself prosecuted or at least corrected.
If someone committed a crime against you or yours, and having their DNA on record would help catch and prosecute them, would you want it done?
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin. Unfortunately those constructs are absolutes and do not exist independently in real life. Life has always been a balance between the two, including being a matter of survival. Look again at those two questions and consider the fact that you might have one answer in the theoretical sense but when faced with an actual situation could have a very different attitude.
And, the benefits to having such a database are not restricted to questions of criminal activity. If a loved one came up missing, and a body was found, and their DNA record taken without arrest or even suspicion could prove that it was or wasn't them, would you want to know if they were alive or dead? Same if you were lost and your loved ones were trying to find you or might have you decreed dead.
As for references to GATTACA, that movie had far more to do with access to DNA evidence showing probability of genetically mediated disorders, something related to health care and especially in the US, insurance. We already have laws in place preventing prejudice in availability and cost of care based on genetic proclivities. On the other hand, such evidence is available to the individual. Having your DNA tested can tell you things about your possible future, and you might choose to live differently if you knew these. You might also be able to benefit from alterations to normal treatment based on your specific genetics. Having your DNA on record would allow for advanced testing for such eventualities.
These don't change the fact that being sampled without volunteering might erode privacy. But then being sampled, no matter the context in which it is done, could protect your privacy, freedom and even life. Besides, Ben Franklin gave up some freedoms to be a citizen of the country he helped form, and gave up more when he became a part of the government. I doubt he would have agreed that he didn't deserve whatever liberty or safety he had left.
"For the final stage of an Ariane 5 launcher, the conical sail would need to have an area of about 350 square metres and be supported by an inflatable mast 12 metres long."
And the expected time to reentry is 25 years.
Good luck on keeping something inflated in space for 25 years. And that's not even considering the probability that the the mast, and the much higher probability that the large sail, will be hit by orbiting debris during that time and torn to shreds
Remember when Microsoft pulled the stunt of changing MSN so it gave Opera users a broken page instead? Opera retaliated by releasing a version that went around Microsoft's block and rendered the MSN pages in the 'language' of the Muppet Show's Swedish Chef. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1584361
If Google still had a pair they could cause their search engine to detect when IE is being used and return all Microsoft related results with 'weasel weasel weasel' inserted in the summary and/or subsequent page views.
As for the earlier response that accused Google of being at fault for not following standards, we've heard that song before. It translates from MS-Marketoid to English and comes out as "not following what Microsoft says standards should be, which usually differs from what the rest of the world says." As for returning results with donkey porn, a Live Search for 'donkey porn' returns a t-short company that uses copulating donkeys as their logo, and shows t-shirts saying "You're F*cking Out" and "Jizz In My Pants". I take it Microsoft has decided that these results are suitable for kids. I don't know which is worse, the hypocrisy of allowing ads with donkeys fucking (though not of non-ad fucking donkeys; ads are too important to block I guess) or the paternalism they show in taking the decision out of the hands of parents of what is suitable for their kids and what is not.
Mythbusters confirmed (episodes 51 and 64) a story about using salami http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(season_4)#Salami_Rocket as fuel in a hybrid rocket motor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_rocket , with nitrous oxide as an oxidizer. Their contention was that it was or could have been done in the US civil war. It was done in fact by an amateur rocketer. Oxidizing hydrocarbons produces energy, whether it's kerosene/LOX (a common combination since the V2) or lipids/Nox.
The map is not the terrain. The model is not the phenomenon. No matter how detailed and accurate, this remains true. A particular model may describe something and have nothing to do with the real world.
Wishful thinking is far more easily, accurately and realistically described by the well proven phenomenon cognitive dissonance supporting another well understood function that causes rapid jumps to wrong conclusions, heuristic problem solving. When done in a social context, the primary attribution bias would definitely contribute.
The researchers in TFA, as psychologists, are certainly well aware of these facts. To present such an outlandish, unsupported and non-parsimonious construct when well understood and supported theory already explains more than their "model" (I find it highly unlikely they've actually constructed one) is to take science, dress it in miniskirt, knee high boots and too much make up, and send it out to walk the streets.
http://www.humantruth.info/thinking_errors.html
http://www.experiencefestival.com/cognitive_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error