I know science. I do science. Microsoft security response is not science. It's the intelligent design contingent of the IT world. It can call itself science all it wants but it can't act like science. Sooner or later they'll tell you that you just have to believe them, while they're busily cooking up the next, more complicated batch of the same old same old and collecting more people with impressive credentials to preach it at you.
"She's not going after RIAA as such, she's going after everyone that makes up the RIAA, read the article: "Atlantic, Priority Records, Capitol Records, UMG and BMG -- the RIAA itself, the Settlement Support Center, and SafeNet"
Read the article, as well as the PDF linked from Groklaw, specifically the first page where it lists the plaintiff and defendents. She's suing the RIAA *and* the record companies involved.
Someone finally managed to post an article about quantum entanglement information transfer without cramming crap about matter transporters into it. They should get a reward. Of course that didn't keep people from making it their point of discussion. But then this is Slashdot, not PhysOrg.
On June 21 they canceled the Misty spysat program. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/ 06/21/national/w132025D93.DTL They've now got several billion in funding left over with which to pay the light bills. My guy feeling is they don't want people to think about their sudden funding surplus, a target for GAO surplus budget retrieval, hence their story about being short on their operating budget.
(For non-US folks, GAO = General Accounting Office, chief bean counters and appointed budgetary watchdogs for the US government.)
"Mars will be transformed into a shirt-sleeve, habitable world for humanity before century's end, made livable by thawing out the coldish climes of the red planet and altering its now carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere."
The most "coldish climes" are the poles. The polar ice of Mars is primarily carbon dioxide. Thawing them would result in more CO2.
I don't suggest the semi-cheap route either. Most of it's junk. The Phillips unit happens to be cheap non-junk. Most of the other DivX capable home units cost US$100 to US$300 more than the corresponding units from other manufacturers. I haven't tried them, either plain reader or reader/burner, so I can't evaluate them here. I can say that the output and durability of the Phillips unit is as good as I've seen anywhere. And I've been in electronics professionally. sales and repair, for 42 years off and on. The output is probably bettter than what the TV can show, unless it's a spectacular plasma or something.
Disk degradation has nothing to do with the unit. They'd degrade just sitting there. The link I provided pointer out objective testing on many disks and found only 1, the TY disks, to have a retention of 20 to 30 years, whereas most others had a 2 to 3 year retention. For RW disks, testing and comparison is here: http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specific.a spx?ArticleId=13934
Seems that first burning is crucual for subsequent burnings. Many disks degrade around the 5th nto 10th burn, but most of those recover in subsequent burnings, up to the limit of their tests, 100 burns (on in somr cases, 280 burns.
The first born, or surviving first born, has two people to interact with -- both adults. The next child has three to interact with, two adults and a child. Third child, two adults and two children. Throigh non-nuclear family in, and they're a constant, just as are parents.
This conclusion here is well know and proven,. and has been for many years. Chances are the study found something worthwhile, but when science gets rewritten for popular media, the important points get left off so there's room for supposedly surprising results. Sadly fopr the researchers, the people who do this rewriting rarely know anything about prior work.
Most DVRs are sealed and the storage is recycled. As long as you have your receiver in a different box, you can get a replaceable media DVR. Several manufacturers are making DivX compatible home DVD burners, Phillips being the cheapest right now. You can get 12+ hours of standard broadcast or 6 hours of HD material on a single DVD. You can rotate through a box of 10 DVD/RWs and get about the same storage you get with a satellite provider DVR unit, and you can permanently burn anything on regular DVDs (including multisession capability). I screwed up and got the read-only unit for $50. I could have gotten the burner for $150. I'm sorry I didn't, despite already owning a Dish Network receiver/DVR. As an added bonus with these units, you can load a single DVD with MP3s and get over 24 hours of continuous music. And it's worth noting that you can get format converters that will take pretty much any video format and convert it to any other, including DivX, so you can download eleventy seven gubbabytes of stuff and make it watchable on your home unit. For Winboxes DivX sells a passable converter, and eRightSoft gives away an absolutely jam packed converter (actually a front end for just about any OSS codec/format converter already available).
Any argument about DivX vs. another format is moot unless there's another format being built into home replaceable media recorders. And as for the false permanence of DVDs, if you follow the listing at http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=178622 you can get media that lasts 10 times longer than the commonly available 2 to 3 year lifetime disks.
We've known it's been in the works for a while. Several interim projects were specifically to test portions of the technology, such as the pure evil on the wing looking Bird of Prey (http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2002/q4/nr_02 1018m.html). The SR 72 design (often called Darkbird, though that's not official) is pretty much frozen. Air Force Times has an artists' rendering which is probably pretty close to the final result (http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2007/06/airforc e_sr72_070617/)
is planned obsolesence, pure and simple. By the time the technology has been milked through as many "upgrades" and "improvements" as possible, an entirely different and obviously superior technology takes its place on the planned obsolescence ladder.
You'll never see perfect, because then you won't want to buy the Next Best Thing like a good little consumerizing sheeple.
It's impossible for a person to go more than 30 MPH unprotected. The vacuum created will suck the air out of their lungs and kill them.
It's impossible for a bee to fly.
The fact is we don't know enough about it yet. All we've got is someone's best guess (and plenty of others equally good guesses) based on miserably little data. They should all be ashamed to come to a conclusion when they know about as much about the universe as a fly does about biology when it lands on a dung heap.
We'll name the first colonized planet "Charlie" so people can relate it to something from Star Trek, and besides "Stross" is a goofy name for a planet.
I give multiple choice exams with between 100 and 200 questions, and 4 possible answers. Wach correct answer is worth 2 points; they need to answer 50 correctly to get 100. They don't HAVE to answer any question, or any number of questions. If they can answer 30 questions, they can get a D. Any question answered incorrectly is -1 point. This serves two purposes. It prevents guessing, and it forces the student to consider whether they actually know the answer, or just think they do.
I typically give 4 of these per semester. After the first one I usually get several complaints because they're not used to testing in this way. After the second I usually get one or two stating they can't break the habit of answering every question. After the final, I get many compliments and high marks on my evaluations, and the students tell me they are much more confident in what they've learned than from any other class. I've had occasion to run across previous students from years past, and they claim they still remember more from my class than from others.
I've had administrators forbid me to do it this way. I did it anyway. When they saw the results, they relented, and many suggested the process to others.
If the money/manpower now going after preventing, and prosecuting occurences of violent crime, were diverted to piracy, how much would violent crime increase?
And how loud, for how long, do you think the populace will scream to get their law enforcement back on crimes that actually harm them and their property?
True, but you need cryogenic containment. It's difficult to do and requires much more expensive and heavy equipment. Pressure can be done cheaper than cold. It remains to be seen as to whether they've managed to develop the technology. If they have, they've lightened their power plant by at least 10%, maybe more, and that's how much more fuel they can carry.
To answer the posted question of "what's so special", it's the methane motor. NASA tested one, but nobody's flown with one yet.
All the major hydrocarbon fuels are within about 3% of each other in specific impulse. Methane, being readily available via natural gas, is very handy. However, it's a gas, compressed to liquid. That means its density is less than a liquid. The major liquid fuel (RP-1; pretty much JP-4/Jet A kerosene) is 22% more dense since it's a liquid. To make a methane engine worth putting into a human-rated craft will require a major step in pressure tank development. They'll need to cram a lot of gas in, and it'll have to fail safe (ie. not explode if it leaks). I suspect EADS made this part of their R&D for the project, or they'd have just gone with RP-1. For a comparison of fuels see http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/fuel_table. html
TFA sez : "Though they lack cognition and memory,"
Yet they go on to use many terms in the article that refer to behaviors (including that word itself) that imply intention, something plants are not capable of. Sort of turns the quoted sentence fragment into a contradicted disclaimer.
There are perfectly good terms from ecological and genetic biology that can be used. There's no need to try to dress it up with inapplicable psychological terms. It doesn't clarify anything, and it looks goofy.
The author assumes free access to the actual variables involved. Few people actually have access to the real reasons for pursuing combat. The majority get reasons that the few want them to have. Basing the statistics on these would produce invalid results. The few pursue combat for reasons of their own, and are willing to gamble on the outcome because they can arrange to benefit regardless of the outcome (Vietnam had its own Haliburtons; President Johnson was a major shareholder in two of them). They wouldn't use such a statistical method because they intend to change their reasons as the situation demands according to their own profit.
The author would benefit (or maybe throw her hands up in despair) from reading not only such writers and researchers of actual activity vs. public policy as Noam Chomsky, but also political analysis of decision makers and decision making as taught to those charged with carrying out the activities as taught in War College. The former provides the reader with the OMG! portion, the latter tells you who gets the ponies.
> Esther Dyson's editorial was a classic libertarian defense of the free market > as the arbiter of systems like Goodmail: "If it's a good model, it will > succeed and improve over time. If it's a bad model, it will fail. Why not > let the customers decide?"
If the user has to pay, "free market" pressures costs them.
Why should the user have to pay to find out it's bad? If a service is going to be offered, it should be shown to work as advertised and will be worth what's being charged. This market is only "free" to the companies that are getting users to finance their experiment.
The term "open market" is more applicable. Others could enter the market and compete. Users can stay in or go elsewhere, the former costing money and the latter costing time and effort. Coming and going makes it "open". Costing the user either way is not "free".
Yes, I know it's a "generally accepted term" (free as in speech, not beer, etc.). In this case it's explicitly misleading term, and the users deserve the chance to understand that.
> John Cramer is obviously a crackpot. But he is not alone.
Obviously not. Einstein, Rosen and Podosky obviously considered it. Kurt Godel provided a solution to Einstein's equations that showed if they universe rotated, you could fly around the universe and arrive where you started before you left. The mathematical solution is sound. Cramer has good company in his psychoceramicism.
There's also Paul Davies; I bought his "How To Build A Time Machine" years ago. It considers the necessary technology. Kip Thorne also developed a conceivably practical method. And Scientific American had an article a few years back on how time travel could be done could occur without the paradox problem without resorting to the excessively cumbersome many-worlds theory.
To paraphrase Heinlein, if a scientist says something is possible, they're almost certainly right. If a scientist says something is wrong, they're almost certainly wrong. I've left off the "young" and "old" in the quote, because in this field those saying one or the other aren't saying so based on their age and stolidity.
Time travel is inevitable because it's an extension of the way the universe works. It's our limited perception based on endothermic chemical reactions that govern our brains that prevents us from grasping the non-simultaneity built into the universe. Note that non-simultaneity and so time travel is a result of a universe with a limited speed of light that's an absolute barrier, not a violation of it.
P.I. has simply done what ACLU does frequently: jumped up on other peoples' high horses and ridden them, even if its legs are imaginary. Don't get me wrong, I fully support what ACLU stands for and what actions they do undertake. Unfortunately they very often go for PR by chiming in on many topics others happen to be making noise about (ie. getting media attention) even though they have no intention of taking action themselves. Look back through the media and see how many times you can find ACLU "condemning" something in the press, and that's all you hear from them on the subject. Then see how often that's a concern others have raised previously, valid or not.
P.I.'s report is a summary of accusations, pretty much all of which were raised by others well before they undertook this "study". It is not an empirical accounting of Google's policies or practices. They didn't examine these. They'd have had to do that from the inside. They made no effort to do so, as they had no intention of studying it objectively.
Note that this takes no stand on the reality of Google's policies and practices. I don't know what they really are from the inside any more than P.I. This is simply an observation and comparison of self-styled "watchdog" groups whose intent too often is more self-promotion than watchdogging.
Why is this under hardware? We may not have a wetware section, but surely this is a science article.
Now, this story relates a neat hack. They were able to account for the background of spontaneous firing and find their signal amid the noise. Very clever. Can't say as I see it being good for much other than having shown it can be done and supporting the Hebbian neural network theory. But then, science is about finding stuff out. This they did. Even if nothing practical comes of it, it's a win for the science team.
> DiVX demands your e-mail address to receive "reg key," then immediately sells > your e-mail address to [AHEM] > douche bag spammers.
That didn't happen when I got their free codec. It didn't happen when I got their free package with the player and converter. It didn't happen when I bought the Pro version with the VOB conversion extension. It didn't happen when I registered an account with their site. It didn't happen when I changed my registration to add the fact I got a DivX capable home DVD player. I didn't get any spam at the address I gave them.
But then, I'm not a douche bag. Sorry to hear of your problem.
And I thought the.sig was a dead give away. Obviously I have a doctorate in pythonology.
[Well placed reference re: Cohen et al. noted]
> And ACC didn't just activate because participants were paying attention. This was surely controlled for in a baseline control task and subtracted away.
Not likely. An fMRI box car (conditions A, B, A, B repeated many times, a few seconds or so each) experiment design compares two conditions, and they've said what they are. To have baselined out a non-condition would have been too much. First, because MRI time is very expensive.
Second, because analyzing a secondary condition would have hidden any results in the statistics. fMRI is analyzed by Statistical Probability Mapping (SPM). The results are given as t-tests of each voxel for the two conditions. But there are 10 to 20 thousand voxels, and that's a lot of simultaneous t-tests. In order to prevent false positives, a correction procedure such as Bonferoni has to be applied. In order to stay below a global p >.05 value, each voxel ends up about 10 or 12 digits down (p >.000000000000x, or up to two more zeros). Three conditions would make it an ANOVA and the correction procedures more stringent because they'd have to be applied to interactions, whether they're needed or not. Individual results would be shoved down to p >.000...(maybe 20 zeros)x.
If only it were as simple as subtraction. Perhaps a we can cross a talented statistician with an equally talented biophysicist and their offspring will be something more rational (pun originally unintended, but I'll take what I can get) than SPM, because it sucks. And I say that as someone who knows Peter Fox, the guy who started it. One of his prior students was a biophysicist collaborator of mine. I learned it from the ground (well, the physics) up, from people I greatly respect, and have used it extensively enough to come to understand it well. There's got to be better ways, but as yet nobody's found them.
As for the cost of MRI time, that's in the hands of the medical folks, and we KNOW they're not going to drop prices on that.
> According to the article, magnetic fields don't have any effect on the human body
An assertion completely invalidated by the use of "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation" (TMS). Stick those three words into PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) and you'll get lots of references (some false positives, but plenty of true ones).
It's presently being used to treat things like depression. Not because it does anything beneficial, but rather because it induces overload into the neural circuits under the coil, effectively shutting that area off from organized neural processing. Until we were able to get better focus and so use less power, about all it was good for was inducing seizures. That's still what it does, just on a scale that doesn't involve uncontrolled spreading of the over-activation. Even when the power is subcritical for inducing the localized overload, it still causes negative effects like massive headaches. No matter what frequency this widget runs at, there's brain processes that operate at that frequency. The brain is an EM pink noise generator from 1 Hz (EEG) to at least 4 GHz (water molecule "squidge" rate, an essential component of membrane reactivity).
I've been on both ends of a TMS coil in the lab. I wouldn't have this technology in my house until it was cleared by the FDA.
> They found activation in anterior cingulate cortex. Contemplate what this means.
It means they were paying attention to the something, probably the task. The subjects were doing something intentionally, as they should, or else they weren't following the instructions and their data is hosed. Since they obtained reports from the subjects as to the results of their memory task, we can safely assume they were in fact paying attention to it. Pity the fool who tests something involving attention and doesn't find AC activation. It's the measure I use to test purposeful disattention in negative hallucination hypnosis. This result is trivial with respect to an intentional memory test.
> This educational moment courtesy of those who know.
I don't think courtesy, or knowing, had a thing to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I know science. I do science. Microsoft security response is not science. It's the intelligent design contingent of the IT world. It can call itself science all it wants but it can't act like science. Sooner or later they'll tell you that you just have to believe them, while they're busily cooking up the next, more complicated batch of the same old same old and collecting more people with impressive credentials to preach it at you.
"She's not going after RIAA as such, she's going after everyone that makes up the RIAA, read the article: "Atlantic, Priority Records, Capitol Records, UMG and BMG -- the RIAA itself, the Settlement Support Center, and SafeNet"
Read the article, as well as the PDF linked from Groklaw, specifically the first page where it lists the plaintiff and defendents. She's suing the RIAA *and* the record companies involved.
Someone finally managed to post an article about quantum entanglement information transfer without cramming crap about matter transporters into it. They should get a reward. Of course that didn't keep people from making it their point of discussion. But then this is Slashdot, not PhysOrg.
On June 21 they canceled the Misty spysat program. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/ 06/21/national/w132025D93.DTL
They've now got several billion in funding left over with which to pay the light bills.
My guy feeling is they don't want people to think about their sudden funding surplus, a target for GAO surplus budget retrieval, hence their story about being short on their operating budget.
(For non-US folks, GAO = General Accounting Office, chief bean counters and appointed budgetary watchdogs for the US government.)
"Mars will be transformed into a shirt-sleeve, habitable world for humanity before century's end, made livable by thawing out the coldish climes of the red planet and altering its now carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere."
The most "coldish climes" are the poles. The polar ice of Mars is primarily carbon dioxide. Thawing them would result in more CO2.
I don't suggest the semi-cheap route either. Most of it's junk. The Phillips unit happens to be cheap non-junk. Most of the other DivX capable home units cost US$100 to US$300 more than the corresponding units from other manufacturers. I haven't tried them, either plain reader or reader/burner, so I can't evaluate them here. I can say that the output and durability of the Phillips unit is as good as I've seen anywhere. And I've been in electronics professionally. sales and repair, for 42 years off and on. The output is probably bettter than what the TV can show, unless it's a spectacular plasma or something.
a spx?ArticleId=13934
Disk degradation has nothing to do with the unit. They'd degrade just sitting there. The link I provided pointer out objective testing on many disks and found only 1, the TY disks, to have a retention of 20 to 30 years, whereas most others had a 2 to 3 year retention. For RW disks, testing and comparison is here: http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specific.
Seems that first burning is crucual for subsequent burnings. Many disks degrade around the 5th nto 10th burn, but most of those recover in subsequent burnings, up to the limit of their tests, 100 burns (on in somr cases, 280 burns.
The first born, or surviving first born, has two people to interact with -- both adults.
The next child has three to interact with, two adults and a child.
Third child, two adults and two children.
Throigh non-nuclear family in, and they're a constant, just as are parents.
This conclusion here is well know and proven,. and has been for many years. Chances are the study found something worthwhile, but when science gets rewritten for popular media, the important points get left off so there's room for supposedly surprising results. Sadly fopr the researchers, the people who do this rewriting rarely know anything about prior work.
Most DVRs are sealed and the storage is recycled. As long as you have your receiver in a different box, you can get a replaceable media DVR. Several manufacturers are making DivX compatible home DVD burners, Phillips being the cheapest right now. You can get 12+ hours of standard broadcast or 6 hours of HD material on a single DVD. You can rotate through a box of 10 DVD/RWs and get about the same storage you get with a satellite provider DVR unit, and you can permanently burn anything on regular DVDs (including multisession capability). I screwed up and got the read-only unit for $50. I could have gotten the burner for $150. I'm sorry I didn't, despite already owning a Dish Network receiver/DVR. As an added bonus with these units, you can load a single DVD with MP3s and get over 24 hours of continuous music. And it's worth noting that you can get format converters that will take pretty much any video format and convert it to any other, including DivX, so you can download eleventy seven gubbabytes of stuff and make it watchable on your home unit. For Winboxes DivX sells a passable converter, and eRightSoft gives away an absolutely jam packed converter (actually a front end for just about any OSS codec/format converter already available).
Any argument about DivX vs. another format is moot unless there's another format being built into home replaceable media recorders. And as for the false permanence of DVDs, if you follow the listing at http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=178622 you can get media that lasts 10 times longer than the commonly available 2 to 3 year lifetime disks.
We've known it's been in the works for a while. Several interim projects were specifically to test portions of the technology, such as the pure evil on the wing looking Bird of Prey (http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2002/q4/nr_02 1018m.html). The SR 72 design (often called Darkbird, though that's not official) is pretty much frozen. Air Force Times has an artists' rendering which is probably pretty close to the final result (http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2007/06/airforc e_sr72_070617/)
is planned obsolesence, pure and simple. By the time the technology has been milked through as many "upgrades" and "improvements" as possible, an entirely different and obviously superior technology takes its place on the planned obsolescence ladder.
You'll never see perfect, because then you won't want to buy the Next Best Thing like a good little consumerizing sheeple.
It's impossible for a person to go more than 30 MPH unprotected. The vacuum created will suck the air out of their lungs and kill them.
It's impossible for a bee to fly.
The fact is we don't know enough about it yet. All we've got is someone's best guess (and plenty of others equally good guesses) based on miserably little data. They should all be ashamed to come to a conclusion when they know about as much about the universe as a fly does about biology when it lands on a dung heap.
We'll name the first colonized planet "Charlie" so people can relate it to something from Star Trek, and besides "Stross" is a goofy name for a planet.
I don't care what they don't know.
I give multiple choice exams with between 100 and 200 questions, and 4 possible answers.
Wach correct answer is worth 2 points; they need to answer 50 correctly to get 100.
They don't HAVE to answer any question, or any number of questions. If they can answer 30 questions, they can get a D. Any question answered incorrectly is -1 point. This serves two purposes.
It prevents guessing, and it forces the student to consider whether they actually know the answer, or just think they do.
I typically give 4 of these per semester. After the first one I usually get several complaints because they're not used to testing in this way. After the second I usually get one or two stating they can't break the habit of answering every question. After the final, I get many compliments and high marks on my evaluations, and the students tell me they are much more confident in what they've learned than from any other class. I've had occasion to run across previous students from years past, and they claim they still remember more from my class than from others.
I've had administrators forbid me to do it this way. I did it anyway. When they saw the results, they relented, and many suggested the process to others.
If the money/manpower now going after preventing, and prosecuting occurences of violent crime, were diverted to piracy, how much would violent crime increase?
And how loud, for how long, do you think the populace will scream to get their law enforcement back on crimes that actually harm them and their property?
True, but you need cryogenic containment. It's difficult to do and requires much more expensive and heavy equipment. Pressure can be done cheaper than cold. It remains to be seen as to whether they've managed to develop the technology. If they have, they've lightened their power plant by at least 10%, maybe more, and that's how much more fuel they can carry.
To answer the posted question of "what's so special", it's the methane motor. NASA tested one, but nobody's flown with one yet.
. html
All the major hydrocarbon fuels are within about 3% of each other in specific impulse. Methane, being readily available via natural gas, is very handy. However, it's a gas, compressed to liquid. That means its density is less than a liquid. The major liquid fuel (RP-1; pretty much JP-4/Jet A kerosene) is 22% more dense since it's a liquid. To make a methane engine worth putting into a human-rated craft will require a major step in pressure tank development. They'll need to cram a lot of gas in, and it'll have to fail safe (ie. not explode if it leaks). I suspect EADS made this part of their R&D for the project, or they'd have just gone with RP-1. For a comparison of fuels see http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/fuel_table
TFA sez : "Though they lack cognition and memory,"
Yet they go on to use many terms in the article that refer to behaviors (including that word itself) that imply intention, something plants are not capable of. Sort of turns the quoted sentence fragment into a contradicted disclaimer.
There are perfectly good terms from ecological and genetic biology that can be used. There's no need to try to dress it up with inapplicable psychological terms. It doesn't clarify anything, and it looks goofy.
The author assumes free access to the actual variables involved. Few people actually have access to the real reasons for pursuing combat. The majority get reasons that the few want them to have. Basing the statistics on these would produce invalid results. The few pursue combat for reasons of their own, and are willing to gamble on the outcome because they can arrange to benefit regardless of the outcome (Vietnam had its own Haliburtons; President Johnson was a major shareholder in two of them). They wouldn't use such a statistical method because they intend to change their reasons as the situation demands according to their own profit.
The author would benefit (or maybe throw her hands up in despair) from reading not only such writers and researchers of actual activity vs. public policy as Noam Chomsky, but also political analysis of decision makers and decision making as taught to those charged with carrying out the activities as taught in War College. The former provides the reader with the OMG! portion, the latter tells you who gets the ponies.
> Esther Dyson's editorial was a classic libertarian defense of the free market
> as the arbiter of systems like Goodmail: "If it's a good model, it will
> succeed and improve over time. If it's a bad model, it will fail. Why not
> let the customers decide?"
If the user has to pay, "free market" pressures costs them.
Why should the user have to pay to find out it's bad? If a service is going to be offered, it should be shown to work as advertised and will be worth what's being charged. This market is only "free" to the companies that are getting users to finance their experiment.
The term "open market" is more applicable. Others could enter the market and compete. Users can stay in or go elsewhere, the former costing money and the latter costing time and effort. Coming and going makes it "open". Costing the user either way is not "free".
Yes, I know it's a "generally accepted term" (free as in speech, not beer, etc.). In this case it's explicitly misleading term, and the users deserve the chance to understand that.
MOBE2001 sez:
> John Cramer is obviously a crackpot. But he is not alone.
Obviously not. Einstein, Rosen and Podosky obviously considered it. Kurt Godel provided a solution to Einstein's equations that showed if they universe rotated, you could fly around the universe and arrive where you started before you left. The mathematical solution is sound. Cramer has good company in his psychoceramicism.
There's also Paul Davies; I bought his "How To Build A Time Machine" years ago. It considers the necessary technology. Kip Thorne also developed a conceivably practical method. And Scientific American had an article a few years back on how time travel could be done could occur without the paradox problem without resorting to the excessively cumbersome many-worlds theory.
To paraphrase Heinlein, if a scientist says something is possible, they're almost certainly right. If a scientist says something is wrong, they're almost certainly wrong. I've left off the "young" and "old" in the quote, because in this field those saying one or the other aren't saying so based on their age and stolidity.
Time travel is inevitable because it's an extension of the way the universe works. It's our limited perception based on endothermic chemical reactions that govern our brains that prevents us from grasping the non-simultaneity built into the universe. Note that non-simultaneity and so time travel is a result of a universe with a limited speed of light that's an absolute barrier, not a violation of it.
P.I. has simply done what ACLU does frequently: jumped up on other peoples' high horses and ridden them, even if its legs are imaginary. Don't get me wrong, I fully support what ACLU stands for and what actions they do undertake. Unfortunately they very often go for PR by chiming in on many topics others happen to be making noise about (ie. getting media attention) even though they have no intention of taking action themselves. Look back through the media and see how many times you can find ACLU "condemning" something in the press, and that's all you hear from them on the subject. Then see how often that's a concern others have raised previously, valid or not.
P.I.'s report is a summary of accusations, pretty much all of which were raised by others well before they undertook this "study". It is not an empirical accounting of Google's policies or practices. They didn't examine these. They'd have had to do that from the inside. They made no effort to do so, as they had no intention of studying it objectively.
Note that this takes no stand on the reality of Google's policies and practices. I don't know what they really are from the inside any more than P.I. This is simply an observation and comparison of self-styled "watchdog" groups whose intent too often is more self-promotion than watchdogging.
Why is this under hardware? We may not have a wetware section, but surely this is a science article.
Now, this story relates a neat hack. They were able to account for the background of spontaneous firing and find their signal amid the noise. Very clever. Can't say as I see it being good for much other than having shown it can be done and supporting the Hebbian neural network theory. But then, science is about finding stuff out. This they did. Even if nothing practical comes of it, it's a win for the science team.
> DiVX demands your e-mail address to receive "reg key," then immediately sells
> your e-mail address to
[AHEM]
> douche bag spammers.
That didn't happen when I got their free codec. It didn't happen when I got their free package with the player and converter. It didn't happen when I bought the Pro version with the VOB conversion extension. It didn't happen when I registered an account with their site. It didn't happen when I changed my registration to add the fact I got a DivX capable home DVD player. I didn't get any spam at the address I gave them.
But then, I'm not a douche bag. Sorry to hear of your problem.
A.C. replies
.sig was a dead give away. Obviously I have a doctorate in pythonology.
.05 value, each voxel ends up about 10 or 12 digits down (p > .000000000000x, or up to two more zeros). Three conditions would make it an ANOVA and the correction procedures more stringent because they'd have to be applied to interactions, whether they're needed or not. Individual results would be shoved down to p > .000...(maybe 20 zeros)x.
> Ear, nose, and throat?
And I thought the
[Well placed reference re: Cohen et al. noted]
> And ACC didn't just activate because participants were paying attention. This was surely controlled for in a baseline control task and subtracted away.
Not likely. An fMRI box car (conditions A, B, A, B repeated many times, a few seconds or so each) experiment design compares two conditions, and they've said what they are. To have baselined out a non-condition would have been too much. First, because MRI time is very expensive.
Second, because analyzing a secondary condition would have hidden any results in the statistics. fMRI is analyzed by Statistical Probability Mapping (SPM). The results are given as t-tests of each voxel for the two conditions. But there are 10 to 20 thousand voxels, and that's a lot of simultaneous t-tests. In order to prevent false positives, a correction procedure such as Bonferoni has to be applied. In order to stay below a global p >
If only it were as simple as subtraction. Perhaps a we can cross a talented statistician with an equally talented biophysicist and their offspring will be something more rational (pun originally unintended, but I'll take what I can get) than SPM, because it sucks. And I say that as someone who knows Peter Fox, the guy who started it. One of his prior students was a biophysicist collaborator of mine. I learned it from the ground (well, the physics) up, from people I greatly respect, and have used it extensively enough to come to understand it well. There's got to be better ways, but as yet nobody's found them.
As for the cost of MRI time, that's in the hands of the medical folks, and we KNOW they're not going to drop prices on that.
> According to the article, magnetic fields don't have any effect on the human body
An assertion completely invalidated by the use of "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation" (TMS). Stick those three words into PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) and you'll get lots of references (some false positives, but plenty of true ones).
It's presently being used to treat things like depression. Not because it does anything beneficial, but rather because it induces overload into the neural circuits under the coil, effectively shutting that area off from organized neural processing. Until we were able to get better focus and so use less power, about all it was good for was inducing seizures. That's still what it does, just on a scale that doesn't involve uncontrolled spreading of the over-activation. Even when the power is subcritical for inducing the localized overload, it still causes negative effects like massive headaches. No matter what frequency this widget runs at, there's brain processes that operate at that frequency. The brain is an EM pink noise generator from 1 Hz (EEG) to at least 4 GHz (water molecule "squidge" rate, an essential component of membrane reactivity).
I've been on both ends of a TMS coil in the lab. I wouldn't have this technology in my house until it was cleared by the FDA.
Anonymous Coward bleats:
> Dear pompous moron:
That's "Doctor pompous moron", Mister Coward.
> They found activation in anterior cingulate cortex. Contemplate what this means.
It means they were paying attention to the something, probably the task. The subjects were doing something intentionally, as they should, or else they weren't following the instructions and their data is hosed. Since they obtained reports from the subjects as to the results of their memory task, we can safely assume they were in fact paying attention to it. Pity the fool who tests something involving attention and doesn't find AC activation. It's the measure I use to test purposeful disattention in negative hallucination hypnosis. This result is trivial with respect to an intentional memory test.
> This educational moment courtesy of those who know.
I don't think courtesy, or knowing, had a thing to do with it.