JPL's calendar at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/calendar/ lists all known asteroid flybys. Why, just today (Nov. 15) there are two. Asteroid 2003 UO12 Near-Earth Flyby (0.048 AU) and Asteroid 1999 XN141 Near-Earth Flyby (0.082 AU).
There, THAT should pretty much crush any sense of security you might have been developing after reading the parent article. If it doesn't, keep in mind that they estimate they've located only about 10% of the potential Earth impacters, and lately they've been finding them just AFTER they've passed by. No matter when it happens, we might get no warning at all.
"God, Root, what is difference?" -- Pitr, User Friendly
We had one of those projects going: the Superconducting Supercollider. That went tango uniform as quick as you can say "policy shift".
All kinds of things can be announced for all kinds of reasons. Mostly the announcements are so you can hear the politicians make announcements and see what forward thinking people they are.
I don't even believe it when I'm told I've gotten my own grants -- not until I see the check has cleared the bank.
...about things that were invented/announced/promised and which were never delivered. What's more, these complaints are RIGHT.
This is the 21st century. Where's my nuclear powered flying family car? Where's my personal jet pack? Where's my silver jump suit with big pointy fins on the shoulders? I was supposed to be wearing it on my trip up to the orbital Interstellar House of Pancakes! By now we should be able to have EVERYTHING IMMEDIATELY, ALL THE TIME! They PROMISED!
I'm sick of being lied to. I say we put together a Slashdot Mobile Undercover Team (SMUT). Their job would be to attack the labs that announce these new things and demand "DELIVER, bonehead, or SHUT UP." And if they don't give a delivery date, we TAKE the widget and go play with it until it breaks. I've got me a 5 pound Craftsman ball peen Miraculous New Device Testing Tool, and I know how to use it.
rkaa sez: "The translation sounds a little weird. Is it taino for "tube" or "pipe"? To smoke a pipe makes perfect sense also in english."
I'm told it means "tube". It also refers to the alternate method they used to smoke, in which a small wad of dried leaves was shoved into the end of a hollow reed, set of fire, and the smoke inhaled (again, into the nose) through the reed. The reed was also called a "tube". In this case it would be far more likely it could be interperated as "pipe". A rolled up leaf, though, just doesn't quite fit, to my mind.
obHumor: I reckon I could call a joint a "bong", but if I did, someone would probably tell me "d00d! You've had enough!"
paxil sez: "Actually, MPTP is not involved in the pathophysiology of Parkinson's. MPTP is, however, very usefull for creating an animal model of Parkinson's disease, and has proven to be a very useful tool for the study of PD."
Fact is endogenous (ie. already in the body) MPTP conversion to the neurotoxic metabolite MPP+ via MAO in neural mitochondria is being examined as the (or at least, one) mechanism of apoptosis in Parky's. That's the process being studied as disruptable by TMN. References can be found starting with Castagnoli of Virginia Tech and following the trail from there. This wouldn't be the first time a substance thought to be exogenous was found to be an effective physiogenic agent, only to find later it was at least an analog for an endogenous substance, such as opioids (endophins/enkephalins) and recently, cannabinoids. In the case of MPTP, there's no doubt there's an endogenous level of it in everyone. At question is when/why it starts turning over to MPP+ at toxic levels, and conversely, why it doesn't in some.
stapedium sez: "What you fail to mention is that the protective effect of smoking is far outweighed by the increased chance of stroke, oral cancer, heart and lung disease."
I also failed to mention several other irrelevant facts. There is no reason to suppose that the level and methods of use of tobacco which result in such problems are necessary to obtain the benefits. The obove need only be stated for the sake of political correctness, a point on which I'll delay responding.*
and then he sez: "It is a current matter of debate among neurologists as to whether smoking is truly protective." [snippage: much stuff re: cholinergic mechanisms]
The debate among neuropharmacologists and electrophysiologists is not whether there is a neuroprotective factor in smoking, but rather on what its mechanism is. Everyone's pretty much agreed it's not cholinergic. The best evidence is it's dopaminergic as a primary activity and neuroprotective as a side benefit. My money is on the MAO inhibitor trimethyl naphthoquinone, but then I'm not the chemist that isolated it, I'm just the electrophysiologist that showed its dopaminergic effect on EEG.
and then he sez, he sez: "So once again, correlation does not prove causality, even when "mortality/comorbidity are accounted for."
But when these things are accounted for, it shows the correlation is stronger than if they weren't. That results in more confidence in the theory and justifies testing the hypothesis. That is being done by innoculating mice with TMN and lesioning them with the neurotoxin thought to cause Parkinson's apoptosis, MPTP. 60+% more mice survive the lesioning after TMN than without it.
* If I *were* intending to be politically correct, it would have taken a very different tone than the inevitable cliched "but it's still BAD for you". It would have been along the lines of: "Look. We've been trying to tell you people for over 500 years now that it's a medicinal plant if only you'd use it right, which you refuse to do, and then you try to blame the results on the plant instead of your own stubborn stupidity. I've got me a PhD now based in large part on WE TOLD YOU SO, but will you listen? Apparently only long enough to hear a pause so you can interject yet more blame against the plant rather than your selves. NOTHING is all good or all bad, and the largest factor in differentiating the two is what you do with it."
Guess that blows the shit out of "lack of radical bias", huh?
marko123 sez: "Setting fire to tobacco leaves and breathing in the smoke gave Nicotine, an innocent bystander (in moderation), with potential for improving the brain's concentration levels, a bad name."
A bad name is right.
When the Taino people discovered and rescued that lost Italian guy, Columbus, he saw that they took these dried leaves, rolled them up into a tube, lit them on fire, and breathed in the smoke through their nose. When he asked them what they called that, they replied "tobago".
Tobago is Taino for "tube". It started with a misunderstanding, and that continues to this day.
The original residents of North America have always considered tobacco to be a medicinal plant, to the point of being considered sacred. Science is now finding that nicotine is beneficial to several disorders. Furthermore, there's something in tobacco (other than nicotine) that prevents Parkinson's in two-thirds to three-quarters of people who use it. And yes, that's adjusted for mortality/comorbidity.
As with anything, it's a matter of using it appropriately, or bad things happen.
... is the particular alloy being used (and, I suppose, China's potential part in things).
Conduction phones have been a part of audiology equipment for decades. They're for differentiating conduction deafness from nerve deafness.
I first encountered a stereo-capable single contact (bridge of the nose) conduction transducer at the Lake County (Indiana) county fair around 1965. And many will probably recall the widely advertised "Bone Phone" from the 90's. Yes, the same technology could turn any surface into a speaker, although a free-floating surface (such as a panel suspended by wire) worked best.
seanadams.com sez: "By the way, how many Libraries of Congress can the cluster store?"
No idea, but it's about time we standardized things, so that when the answer arrives we can argue about it with both accuracy and precision.
Taking "Library of Congress 2005: A Digital Repository" (http://www.mit.edu/people/ecoder/6-033-dp2.html) as an arbitrary authority (meaning, pick your own if you like; I'm still not wrong) one LOC == 100 terabytes. The 120 gig drive in my workstation is 1.2 milliLOCs.
There you have it. Go forth and multiply, and don't forget the carry bit.
grasshoppa sez: "You want a group that has been, historically, non-conformists to agree on something so singular as a logo?"
The group that is the most actively and purposefully non-conformist has one. The Church of the SubGenius has J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the guy with the pipe found in the traditional screensaver in Slackware. If they can manage, you can too. If it's still a problem, just stand over there with the large crowd of other non-conformists, all making the same complaint.
Why yes, as a matter of fact I *am* a SubG preacher. How could you tell?
... their illogical behavior, tending towards the self-destructive, and their obviously impaired perception as evidenced by conflicting claims, supported by assertions later self-refuted, would be sufficient to get them labeled as incompetent to defend themselves. A psychiatric evaluation would probably result in a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. If corporations are to be considered as artificial entities, why isn't the public at large (including other artificial entities) afforded protection from them, as they would be from an obviously psychotic individual? This isn't an issue of intellectual property protection, it's a cry for help. My money says SCO wants Uncle IBM to forgive their tantrum and take them in, because they can't take care of themselves.
Despite the fact that subliminal advertising has been proven not to work, some major corporations continue to pay big bucks to have it added to their ads. Despite the fact that 90%+ of fMRI research claims to find the place in the brain that lights up when X happens (rather than more properly claiming they're seeing the location of the brain process that supports such phenomena as X) the suits are going to continue to believe that neuroscientists can narrow down the brain parts that make you prefer one cola over another, and pay big bucks for that. "Just In Case It Works". It'd be a great time to be a neuroscientist if you didn't have a conscience. Unfortunately I am, and I do.
Author's Guild claims the reviewed contracts from "major trade publishers", and concludes the publishers don't have the rights to do this. In that case they must have selectively reviewed contracts with no mention of assignation of e-rights. Most contracts explicitly cover these, and have for years. Most often the author is forced to sign over the e-rights to get the contract. Only the Tom Clancys and Stephen Kings have enough clout to call their own contractual shots and keep their e-rights. If the publisher is assigned the e-rights, they can do this. If the author kept them, the publisher can't without permission. If a contract doesn't specify e-rights, it's a shoddy piece of work, something which corporate publisher landsharks are not known for. For my money, the Author's Guild is pulling an ACLU: making a lot of noise about something which is of little import, strictly for the publicity. (Mind you the ACLU does SOME good things, but far more often they're in the news due to pure smoke).
The privacy invasion doesn't come with the kids having to wear the chips, it comes with someone accessing the data generated by reading them. Who gets to read the data, who decides who gets to read the data, and who decides what gets to be done about it?
Will the school's principal allow himself and his employees to be tagged? I'm betting he would. He sounds that gung ho in the article. Would he go for it if the data generated by reading his and his employees' chips were intended for public viewing? After all, it's to protect the kids from possible predators, right? If a teacher comes to work late, that could indicate a drinking problem. If a janitor leaves early, he might be going out to sell drugs at the bus stop. If the principal's record shows he was offline for half an hour, for all we know he may have been peeping into the kids' toilets, and didn't really just leave it on his desk when he went to lunch.
And of course if he changes his mind and decides he's not so hot on RFID after being asked to wear one himself, that only indicates he was really up to something untoward, rather than suddenly feeling like his own privacy was at stake.
Sure, fastest off the line, but how about pit stops?
"The tzero can only go 280 to 300 miles at 60 mph without recharging--even if it can recharge on any 120- or 240-V power socket. And if you accelerate it like an Italian exotic, or even take it on a hilly route, that range can decrease by up to about 20%."
Fine. My car goes 200 to 300 miles on a charge (a tank of gas). If I'm going that far or farther, I'm glad to stop and get out, if only to stretch my legs while filling up. Doing so takes me 5 minutes or less. That's enough for me, and I'm on my way: places to go, etc.
So how long will it take this thing to recharge to a "full tank"? If it's going to take an hour to get back on the road, it doesn't matter how fast it accelerates.
Shivetya sez: "Separating the genders has shown benefits in middle school classrooms. It also removes many barriers."
Studies have also shown that the preference/deference problems are reinforced and perpetuated by the teachers. Rather than igonring the "problem" by creating a situation which allows it to continue (although hidden by lack of interaction), it should be faced head on by people prepared not to allow that sort of thing to happen. When the focus becomes the job at hand, the kids become socialized to that. I know; I've done it.
Looks to me (from the white paper) they're more afraid that the kids will run off and do some self-directed biology research, causing some potential liability problems.
Try this at home. It's enormous fun, and who knows, you might make some money.
As soon as I determine they're about to launch into a sales pitch: "Thank you for calling. I'm an independent marketing consultant. My business is evaluating telemarketing sales technique and content. I would be happy to evaluate your work, and tell you whether or not I think it is effective. My fee is $200 per message evaluated. If you would like to continue, I'll need your billing address, and the address to send my evaluation to."
The inevitable sputtering and stammering is priceless. Often I have to repeat it because they can't fathom what's happening. Sometimes I get forwarded to a supervisor, and waste their time too. I've never been called again by the same marketer.
If I ever do get billing and reporting addresses, they'll get their report (containing my honest professional opinion) and the bill. If that ever happens, either I get $200, or I get to turn them over to a collection agency, which will do a job on their credit rating.
Yes, by the definitions of mechanics, the power grid is a machine. And by the definitions of computer science, it could be considered a computational device (a network being a device). Most germane to its continued operation, by the definitions of physics, it is a nonlinear dynamic complex system. By those rules, it is constantly fluctuating in a determined though seemingly random fashion, and subject to unpredictable catastrophic failure via the "butterfly effect". Of course, equally likely is the possibility of sudden, inexplicable surges in extremely high efficiency, but when it works right no one notices. Just be glad it's still as fragmented as it is. If it were better integrated, but still being run as it is, as massively multiple semi-dependent linear systems, the whole thing could crash instead of just parts of it.
The real and pertinent issues with respect to failures (vs. not) are effective control and feedback/foward systems, not regulation/deregulation.
There should be licensing for e-versions of written works, because the vast majority of authors need protection from losing their contracts with their publishers, or worse. When an author signs a book deal, they have to sign over certain rights. The publishers almost invariably insist on signing over e-rights, whether they plan on doing anything with them or not (unless you're a Stephen King or some such, and can call your own contractual shots). Once signed over, it remains the responsibility of the author to prevent dilution of these rights signed over to the publisher. If the author does not protect that which was signed over, the publisher can consider them in violation of the contract and annul it, demand return of payment, or anything else their legal dinks can think of with which to harass the author. For short story authors, often the only way to actually make any money is to sell reprint rights. If the work is found to be available for "free", an anthology editor isn't likely to pay an author for something that others are already getting without having to pay for it. It doesn't matter if the files are available on an umpteen million member P2P file sharing net, or on a half dozen collectors' FTP sites, the concept holds.
To my knoweldge, no publisher has yet cancelled any contracts over these terms. But many could, and could have for years (5 or 6 years ago there were far more unauthorized written works than music to be found online). Although the numbers are much smaller than for music trading, there are still file traders, FTP sites and usenet newsgroups specializing in e-books and the homemade equivalent, scanned hardcopy converted to text or PDF.
There's no group like RIAA protecting authors. (For that matter there's no group really protecting musicians; everyone's well aware RIAA is serving music publishers, and musicians rarely see any of the income RIAA claims it's protecting). Some specialists writers' groups, such as Science Fiction Writers of America, are trying to help authors come to grips with what for them really is a problem and could become far worse for reasons they can't control.
The up side is that authors tend to be far more imaginative than record labels. Many have been experimenting with alternatives to their "problem". There's no big breakthrough yet, but I'm confident that thyey'll come up with an alternative suitable to author and reader alike long before RIAA comes up with anything similarly acceptable. Actually, I doubt RIAA will ever come up with anything acceptable to musicians, because that's not who they work for.
Yes, it's long winded. Yes, I know more than a little about it. I set up a business doing for authors what BayTSP is doing for RIAA, tracking infringers. Although there was a lot of money to be lost by the authors, there was very little money to be made in helping them. Most of them don't make much, and the publishers themselves don't care. I could have made a lot of money working for RIAA instead. Unfortunately, I have a conscience; I shut down the business instead.
Slashdot Mirror
JPL's calendar at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/calendar/ lists all known asteroid flybys. Why, just today (Nov. 15) there are two. Asteroid 2003 UO12 Near-Earth Flyby (0.048 AU) and Asteroid 1999 XN141 Near-Earth Flyby (0.082 AU).
There, THAT should pretty much crush any sense of security you might have been developing after reading the parent article. If it doesn't, keep in mind that they estimate they've located only about 10% of the potential Earth impacters, and lately they've been finding them just AFTER they've passed by. No matter when it happens, we might get no warning at all.
"God, Root, what is difference?" -- Pitr, User Friendly
We had one of those projects going: the Superconducting Supercollider. That went tango uniform as quick as you can say "policy shift".
All kinds of things can be announced for all kinds of reasons. Mostly the announcements are so you can hear the politicians make announcements and see what forward thinking people they are.
I don't even believe it when I'm told I've gotten my own grants -- not until I see the check has cleared the bank.
...about things that were invented/announced/promised and which were never delivered. What's more, these complaints are RIGHT.
This is the 21st century.
Where's my nuclear powered flying family car?
Where's my personal jet pack?
Where's my silver jump suit with big pointy fins on the shoulders? I was supposed to be wearing it on my trip up to the orbital Interstellar House of Pancakes!
By now we should be able to have EVERYTHING IMMEDIATELY, ALL THE TIME! They PROMISED!
I'm sick of being lied to. I say we put together a Slashdot Mobile Undercover Team (SMUT). Their job would be to attack the labs that announce these new things and demand "DELIVER, bonehead, or SHUT UP." And if they don't give a delivery date, we TAKE the widget and go play with it until it breaks. I've got me a 5 pound Craftsman ball peen Miraculous New Device Testing Tool, and I know how to use it.
"We won't get fooled again!" -- St. Daltrey
Cohen was not the first. I know of at least 2 if not 3 virii for the Apple II prior to Cohen's work. Here's links to stories about some:
n d
http://www.cknow.com/vtutor/vtsladeapple.htm
a
http://www.skrenta.com/
... is the death rattle of another of the priests in the cathedral.
rkaa sez: "The translation sounds a little weird. Is it taino for "tube" or "pipe"? To smoke a pipe makes perfect sense also in english."
I'm told it means "tube". It also refers to the alternate method they used to smoke, in which a small wad of dried leaves was shoved into the end of a hollow reed, set of fire, and the smoke inhaled (again, into the nose) through the reed. The reed was also called a "tube". In this case it would be far more likely it could be interperated as "pipe". A rolled up leaf, though, just doesn't quite fit, to my mind.
obHumor: I reckon I could call a joint a "bong", but if I did, someone would probably tell me "d00d! You've had enough!"
paxil sez: "Actually, MPTP is not involved in the pathophysiology of Parkinson's. MPTP is, however, very usefull for creating an animal model of Parkinson's disease, and has proven to be a very useful tool for the study of PD."
Fact is endogenous (ie. already in the body) MPTP conversion to the neurotoxic metabolite MPP+ via MAO in neural mitochondria is being examined as the (or at least, one) mechanism of apoptosis in Parky's. That's the process being studied as disruptable by TMN. References can be found starting with Castagnoli of Virginia Tech and following the trail from there. This wouldn't be the first time a substance thought to be exogenous was found to be an effective physiogenic agent, only to find later it was at least an analog for an endogenous substance, such as opioids (endophins/enkephalins) and recently, cannabinoids. In the case of MPTP, there's no doubt there's an endogenous level of it in everyone. At question is when/why it starts turning over to MPP+ at toxic levels, and conversely, why it doesn't in some.
stapedium sez: "What you fail to mention is that the protective effect of smoking is far outweighed by the increased chance of stroke, oral cancer, heart and lung disease."
I also failed to mention several other irrelevant facts. There is no reason to suppose that the level and methods of use of tobacco which result in such problems are necessary to obtain the benefits. The obove need only be stated for the sake of political correctness, a point on which I'll delay responding.*
and then he sez: "It is a current matter of debate among neurologists as to whether smoking is truly protective." [snippage: much stuff re: cholinergic mechanisms]
The debate among neuropharmacologists and electrophysiologists is not whether there is a neuroprotective factor in smoking, but rather on what its mechanism is. Everyone's pretty much agreed it's not cholinergic. The best evidence is it's dopaminergic as a primary activity and neuroprotective as a side benefit. My money is on the MAO inhibitor trimethyl naphthoquinone, but then I'm not the chemist that isolated it, I'm just the electrophysiologist that showed its dopaminergic effect on EEG.
and then he sez, he sez: "So once again, correlation does not prove causality, even when "mortality/comorbidity are accounted for."
But when these things are accounted for, it shows the correlation is stronger than if they weren't. That results in more confidence in the theory and justifies testing the hypothesis. That is being done by innoculating mice with TMN and lesioning them with the neurotoxin thought to cause Parkinson's apoptosis, MPTP. 60+% more mice survive the lesioning after TMN than without it.
* If I *were* intending to be politically correct, it would have taken a very different tone than the inevitable cliched "but it's still BAD for you". It would have been along the lines of: "Look. We've been trying to tell you people for over 500 years now that it's a medicinal plant if only you'd use it right, which you refuse to do, and then you try to blame the results on the plant instead of your own stubborn stupidity. I've got me a PhD now based in large part on WE TOLD YOU SO, but will you listen? Apparently only long enough to hear a pause so you can interject yet more blame against the plant rather than your selves. NOTHING is all good or all bad, and the largest factor in differentiating the two is what you do with it."
Guess that blows the shit out of "lack of radical bias", huh?
marko123 sez: "Setting fire to tobacco leaves and breathing in the smoke gave Nicotine, an innocent bystander (in moderation), with potential for improving the brain's concentration levels, a bad name."
A bad name is right.
When the Taino people discovered and rescued that lost Italian guy, Columbus, he saw that they took these dried leaves, rolled them up into a tube, lit them on fire, and breathed in the smoke through their nose. When he asked them what they called that, they replied "tobago".
Tobago is Taino for "tube". It started with a misunderstanding, and that continues to this day.
The original residents of North America have always considered tobacco to be a medicinal plant, to the point of being considered sacred. Science is now finding that nicotine is beneficial to several disorders. Furthermore, there's something in tobacco (other than nicotine) that prevents Parkinson's in two-thirds to three-quarters of people who use it. And yes, that's adjusted for mortality/comorbidity.
As with anything, it's a matter of using it appropriately, or bad things happen.
... is the particular alloy being used (and, I suppose, China's potential part in things).
Conduction phones have been a part of audiology equipment for decades. They're for differentiating conduction deafness from nerve deafness.
I first encountered a stereo-capable single contact (bridge of the nose) conduction transducer at the Lake County (Indiana) county fair around 1965. And many will probably recall the widely advertised "Bone Phone" from the 90's. Yes, the same technology could turn any surface into a speaker, although a free-floating surface (such as a panel suspended by wire) worked best.
seanadams.com sez: "By the way, how many Libraries of Congress can the cluster store?"
No idea, but it's about time we standardized things, so that when the answer arrives we can argue about it with both accuracy and precision.
Taking "Library of Congress 2005: A Digital Repository" (http://www.mit.edu/people/ecoder/6-033-dp2.html) as an arbitrary authority (meaning, pick your own if you like; I'm still not wrong) one LOC == 100 terabytes. The 120 gig drive in my workstation is 1.2 milliLOCs.
There you have it. Go forth and multiply, and don't forget the carry bit.
grasshoppa sez: "You want a group that has been, historically, non-conformists to agree on something so singular as a logo?"
The group that is the most actively and purposefully non-conformist has one. The Church of the SubGenius has J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the guy with the pipe found in the traditional screensaver in Slackware. If they can manage, you can too. If it's still a problem, just stand over there with the large crowd of other non-conformists, all making the same complaint.
Why yes, as a matter of fact I *am* a SubG preacher. How could you tell?
... their illogical behavior, tending towards the self-destructive, and their obviously impaired perception as evidenced by conflicting claims, supported by assertions later self-refuted, would be sufficient to get them labeled as incompetent to defend themselves. A psychiatric evaluation would probably result in a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. If corporations are to be considered as artificial entities, why isn't the public at large (including other artificial entities) afforded protection from them, as they would be from an obviously psychotic individual? This isn't an issue of intellectual property protection, it's a cry for help. My money says SCO wants Uncle IBM to forgive their tantrum and take them in, because they can't take care of themselves.
Despite the fact that subliminal advertising has been proven not to work, some major corporations continue to pay big bucks to have it added to their ads. Despite the fact that 90%+ of fMRI research claims to find the place in the brain that lights up when X happens (rather than more properly claiming they're seeing the location of the brain process that supports such phenomena as X) the suits are going to continue to believe that neuroscientists can narrow down the brain parts that make you prefer one cola over another, and pay big bucks for that. "Just In Case It Works". It'd be a great time to be a neuroscientist if you didn't have a conscience. Unfortunately I am, and I do.
Author's Guild claims the reviewed contracts from "major trade publishers", and concludes the publishers don't have the rights to do this. In that case they must have selectively reviewed contracts with no mention of assignation of e-rights. Most contracts explicitly cover these, and have for years. Most often the author is forced to sign over the e-rights to get the contract. Only the Tom Clancys and Stephen Kings have enough clout to call their own contractual shots and keep their e-rights. If the publisher is assigned the e-rights, they can do this. If the author kept them, the publisher can't without permission. If a contract doesn't specify e-rights, it's a shoddy piece of work, something which corporate publisher landsharks are not known for. For my money, the Author's Guild is pulling an ACLU: making a lot of noise about something which is of little import, strictly for the publicity. (Mind you the ACLU does SOME good things, but far more often they're in the news due to pure smoke).
The privacy invasion doesn't come with the kids having to wear the chips, it comes with someone accessing the data generated by reading them. Who gets to read the data, who decides who gets to read the data, and who decides what gets to be done about it? Will the school's principal allow himself and his employees to be tagged? I'm betting he would. He sounds that gung ho in the article. Would he go for it if the data generated by reading his and his employees' chips were intended for public viewing? After all, it's to protect the kids from possible predators, right? If a teacher comes to work late, that could indicate a drinking problem. If a janitor leaves early, he might be going out to sell drugs at the bus stop. If the principal's record shows he was offline for half an hour, for all we know he may have been peeping into the kids' toilets, and didn't really just leave it on his desk when he went to lunch. And of course if he changes his mind and decides he's not so hot on RFID after being asked to wear one himself, that only indicates he was really up to something untoward, rather than suddenly feeling like his own privacy was at stake.
Sure, fastest off the line, but how about pit stops? "The tzero can only go 280 to 300 miles at 60 mph without recharging--even if it can recharge on any 120- or 240-V power socket. And if you accelerate it like an Italian exotic, or even take it on a hilly route, that range can decrease by up to about 20%." Fine. My car goes 200 to 300 miles on a charge (a tank of gas). If I'm going that far or farther, I'm glad to stop and get out, if only to stretch my legs while filling up. Doing so takes me 5 minutes or less. That's enough for me, and I'm on my way: places to go, etc. So how long will it take this thing to recharge to a "full tank"? If it's going to take an hour to get back on the road, it doesn't matter how fast it accelerates.
Shivetya sez: "Separating the genders has shown benefits in middle school classrooms. It also removes many barriers." Studies have also shown that the preference/deference problems are reinforced and perpetuated by the teachers. Rather than igonring the "problem" by creating a situation which allows it to continue (although hidden by lack of interaction), it should be faced head on by people prepared not to allow that sort of thing to happen. When the focus becomes the job at hand, the kids become socialized to that. I know; I've done it. Looks to me (from the white paper) they're more afraid that the kids will run off and do some self-directed biology research, causing some potential liability problems.
Try this at home. It's enormous fun, and who knows, you might make some money.
As soon as I determine they're about to launch into a sales pitch: "Thank you for calling. I'm an independent marketing consultant. My business is evaluating telemarketing sales technique and content. I would be happy to evaluate your work, and tell you whether or not I think it is effective. My fee is $200 per message evaluated. If you would like to continue, I'll need your billing address, and the address to send my evaluation to."
The inevitable sputtering and stammering is priceless. Often I have to repeat it because they can't fathom what's happening. Sometimes I get forwarded to a supervisor, and waste their time too. I've never been called again by the same marketer.
If I ever do get billing and reporting addresses, they'll get their report (containing my honest professional opinion) and the bill. If that ever happens, either I get $200, or I get to turn them over to a collection agency, which will do a job on their credit rating.
Yes, by the definitions of mechanics, the power grid is a machine. And by the definitions of computer science, it could be considered a computational device (a network being a device). Most germane to its continued operation, by the definitions of physics, it is a nonlinear dynamic complex system. By those rules, it is constantly fluctuating in a determined though seemingly random fashion, and subject to unpredictable catastrophic failure via the "butterfly effect". Of course, equally likely is the possibility of sudden, inexplicable surges in extremely high efficiency, but when it works right no one notices. Just be glad it's still as fragmented as it is. If it were better integrated, but still being run as it is, as massively multiple semi-dependent linear systems, the whole thing could crash instead of just parts of it.
The real and pertinent issues with respect to failures (vs. not) are effective control and feedback/foward systems, not regulation/deregulation.
There should be licensing for e-versions of written works, because the vast majority of authors need protection from losing their contracts with their publishers, or worse. When an author signs a book deal, they have to sign over certain rights. The publishers almost invariably insist on signing over e-rights, whether they plan on doing anything with them or not (unless you're a Stephen King or some such, and can call your own contractual shots). Once signed over, it remains the responsibility of the author to prevent dilution of these rights signed over to the publisher. If the author does not protect that which was signed over, the publisher can consider them in violation of the contract and annul it, demand return of payment, or anything else their legal dinks can think of with which to harass the author. For short story authors, often the only way to actually make any money is to sell reprint rights. If the work is found to be available for "free", an anthology editor isn't likely to pay an author for something that others are already getting without having to pay for it. It doesn't matter if the files are available on an umpteen million member P2P file sharing net, or on a half dozen collectors' FTP sites, the concept holds.
To my knoweldge, no publisher has yet cancelled any contracts over these terms. But many could, and could have for years (5 or 6 years ago there were far more unauthorized written works than music to be found online). Although the numbers are much smaller than for music trading, there are still file traders, FTP sites and usenet newsgroups specializing in e-books and the homemade equivalent, scanned hardcopy converted to text or PDF.
There's no group like RIAA protecting authors. (For that matter there's no group really protecting musicians; everyone's well aware RIAA is serving music publishers, and musicians rarely see any of the income RIAA claims it's protecting). Some specialists writers' groups, such as Science Fiction Writers of America, are trying to help authors come to grips with what for them really is a problem and could become far worse for reasons they can't control.
The up side is that authors tend to be far more imaginative than record labels. Many have been experimenting with alternatives to their "problem". There's no big breakthrough yet, but I'm confident that thyey'll come up with an alternative suitable to author and reader alike long before RIAA comes up with anything similarly acceptable. Actually, I doubt RIAA will ever come up with anything acceptable to musicians, because that's not who they work for.
Yes, it's long winded. Yes, I know more than a little about it. I set up a business doing for authors what BayTSP is doing for RIAA, tracking infringers. Although there was a lot of money to be lost by the authors, there was very little money to be made in helping them. Most of them don't make much, and the publishers themselves don't care. I could have made a lot of money working for RIAA instead. Unfortunately, I have a conscience; I shut down the business instead.