Quote 'The cost estimation [implies] that commons-based innovation must receive a higher level of official recognition...."
I don't think that is how the US system works, which is by market recognition.
It doesn't matter how hard you work or how much money you put into it; what matters is if people buy it.
That assumes, somewhat naively, that people are "rational economic actors" and that companies like MS and GOOgLE don't have massive FUD machines (aka marketing)
I work in a biotech startup with 12 people total.
We have several thousand pdfs, mostly of scientific publications downloaded from places like pubmed, along with some.ppts and.docs and other files.
We use a endnote, a program from the behemoth in this area, thompson research, which has most of hte software in this area.
see http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/procite
Based on what I have seen, there is a huge need for software that meets our needs; the thompson products are very $$ and , awfull - a classic case of crappy software with a lot of marketing.
Programs like endnote were created back in the 90s, for DOS machines, and they still look and feel like it, once you get past the pretty home page gui of the software that thompson has added on.
if anyone out there is serious about making a product to compete, give me a hollar
1) the health care debate is about how to ration care
currently, we ration care by income (largely) - good income, less rationing
you are working class, with problems, to bad for you bub.
single payers like me want to ration care fairly; basically on a doctor decided need to basis
for those of you about to howl about socialized medicine, you want some gov't doc rationing your care
or you want a private insurance company, which is what we have now
2) Costs are driven by technology
It is new technology, an aging population, and our changing standards of what is "good care"
that drives costs, eg, super $$ new drugs like those offered by Genzyme
all this discussion about how much money we are going tosave by having electronic records, or
making averyone use the same form, or better diets,
sure we will save some - maybe a lot - in the short term, but over the next 10-15 years, gains in
$$ technology will wipe out any of these savings
3) nurses will be replaced by robots
where is the cost ?
having a 60K a year RN take your temperture is ludicrous; you may laugh, but you heard it hear 1st
as soon as robots are available, nurses are going to be toast
as soon as better robots are available, doctors are toast
it will take a while, but given how much people costs , especially when you need them on call 24/7
they will be replaced - it is a question of when not if
(VCs, u listening, this is whre to put your money)
since you don't specify the countrys, it hard for/. readers to know if your comments are reasonable
as to your "solutions" without malpractice, what saves me from bad doctors - isn't malpractice the free market solution to bad care ?
your other cost savings ideas are good, but show a lack of understanding of true costs, which are driven by technology: it is not how (paperwork) that costs money, it is new technology and an aging population that are the true cost drivers; fixing forms will provide a temporary relief
and anyway, isn't making evryone use the same form sort of gov't control ? isn't the point of diff forms free market magic, diff companies try diff things ?
found here http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V61-4Y4XCTH-3&_user=10&_coverDate=02%2F15%2F2010&_rdoc=18&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%235801%232010%23997099998%231609118%23FLA%23display%23Volume)&_cdi=5801&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=26&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=ae24ceb289eae1dcc9bc6870f3192dc2
And this is the abstract
A slice of the Haverö meteorite which belongs to the ureilite class known to contain graphite and diamond was cut and then polished as a thin section using a diamond paste. We identified two carbonaceous areas which were standing out by more than 10 m in relief over the surface of the silicate matrix suggesting that the carbonaceous phases were not easily polishable by a diamond paste and would therefore imply larger polishing hardness. These areas were investigated by reflected light microscopy, high-resolution Field Emission SEM (FESEM), energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis, Raman spectroscopy, and were subsequently extracted for in situ synchrotron microbeam X-ray fluorescence (XRF), imaging and X-ray diffraction (XRD). We report here the natural occurrences of one new ultrahard rhombohedral carbon polymorph of the R3m space group which structure is very close to diamond but with a partial occupancy of some of the carbon sites. We also report the natural occurrence of the theoretically predicted 21R diamond polytype with lattice parameters very close to what has been modelized. These findings are of great interests for better understanding the world of carbon polymorphs and diamond polytypes giving new natural materials to investigate. These natural samples demonstrate that the carbon system is even more complex than what is currently thought based on ab initio static lattice calculations and high-pressure experiments since this new ultrahard polymorph has never been predicted nor synthesized.
hasn't that been the whole thrust of apple since the beginning - a gilded cage as one recent poster so aptly put it ?
The advertising campaing that apple = freedom from the MS/ big corporations / borg / 1984 is classic advertising
you say the opposite of reality.
eg, when your corporation has lousy customer service, you run an ad campaing touting your legendary customer service (citizen bank in boston); when you are a corporate evil doer, you run an ad capaign on Public Radio (archer daniels midland, mcneill leherer snoozehour)...when you are a major cause of pollution, you run ads touting your greeness (oil companies, toyota hybrids)
The whole history of apple has been restricting your freedom to do what only jobs wants you to do, so he can make a lot of money. People are ok with that, to paraphrase Mencked, no one ever lost money underestimating how much freedom the american consumer will give up for instant gratification
I believe that in most cases, most people don't "read" news (mostly TV in the US) to learn new things, but to confirm their already held prejudices. Their is a substantial body of psychology that says we discount things opposiste to our beliefs and pay attention to things that confirm our beliefs.
Here is a test: when was the last time facts in the "news' changed a core belief of yours; ie, to pick a controversial topic, how many/dotters have changed their veiws on abortion, or on the desirability of invading Iraq, or if Socialized medicine is a good idea ?
sure, we take in info on things that are peripheral, but on important stuff we don't read the news to learn www.vercaro.blogspot.com
The take home of your complaint seems to be that mozilla should be for all of the worst commercial aspects of the web. Fair enough, that is our opinion one of the great things about FF, that made me a FFFanboy and got me to get all my friends and family and cowerkers to switch from IE to FF - ipersonally and responsible for like 30 switches - is that the extensions did a lot of neat stuff; in particularl, they give you a tool to fight the companies that want to suck all you money out of your wallet and control the web. If you are on th side of the corporate leeches, that is your priveledge,
my complain about private browsing was not well worded; what i object to is the change in how the user can control privacy. in old FF, you got this menu on exit - do you want to clean stuff this is GOOD because it gives the user pos feedback; which users like new ff has automated this in a way that is not entirely, at least to me, satisfactory, cause i am not sure that it is happening
I notice you don't address my #1 whine, the bookmark gui. Are u conceding that it is bad ? Given how long FF has been around, and how much programming horserpower they have, that the can't get a critical user function like the book mark gui right says a lot.
1) Firefox does let you export bookmarks. Granted, it exports all of them, but how hard can it be to crack open the HTML file and strip out the ones you don't want to send? It's a matter of opinion, so there is no right or wrong, but I thought computers were supposed to reduce repetitive actions; surely the ability to click on a folder and export it is something that people need to do often.
2) "Not being a jerk about extensions"? In what way? Just go to the web page and look around, it's not like the add-ons window is the only place you can get them. I, and i imagine most people use the mozilla site (which is built into FF) to find extensions. It used to be that you could search that site prett easily and see all the diff extensions. Now, it is hard to see extensions beyond the "top rated" ones, tht is, mozilla has taken away people's freedom; for many people, having less choice is not doubt good; for many of us, and esp those of us who ar FF evangelists, it is bad - why should I have to do extra work to see thing mozilla doesn't trumpet ? and it is extra work.
3) "Letting the world know"? Am I being wooshed? You're saying they should beat their own chests? Maybe run some cocky TV commercials that says FF is cool and provide no actual info to back it up? what seperates geeks and nerds (which i am,and a poor speller to boot) from geeks and neerds who get htings done is the understanding that marketing, even the most stupid marketing, has value. What do you think the response of most people would be if they could test drive FF on www.yahoo.com with all the distracting stuff disabled ? they would say "WOW"
4) "give users control to wipe things clean": it's still there. Or just tap Ctrl+Shift+Del before you exit. but it is not as good as it use to be; they have made it less user friendly; they have given you and me less control; they could have done this in a manner that gave us a choic, but the they didn't
5) "SOB web collectors": who isn't these days? Personally, I'm tired of being warned that every food I can possibly eat is decreasing my life expectancy in some way. well, you are right that the media hypes stuff endlessly. However, we have an epidemic of diabetes in this country - as one doc put it, america dies on dunkins. as to web privacy, its a value issue; i, personally, think privacy, in and of itself, is valuable, and that optin should be the default value; if companies want to collect, for free, valuable marketing info on yuo, you should have to give your explicit permission
The GUI that pops up when you want to bookmark something - case study in bad design How about a real editor for bookmarks, with some minimal feature like export this folder (when you need to send someone a bunch of stuff) How about mozilla not being a jerk about extensions, and getting rid of the spam that makes it hard to see anything but the top 5 extensions big brother mozilla thinks you should have
How about a stable platform for extension developers
How about letting the world know how awesome FF+noscript+adblock is when you go to a site like YAHOO I hadn't been to YAHOO wihtout my little protectors, noscript/adblock/flashblock for some time and was astonished at how much ads have taken over the front page - how can people stand it
how about giving the users some control over privacy, so we have the wipe things clean on exit menu again
how about giving some users an idea of how much info the SOBs of the web, like google, are collecting
Many years ago, I read a serious genetics paper about this. The scientist managed to setup up a colony of fruit flys (drosophilia melanogaster) so that the females remained static - they did not evolve - and the males did. In fruit flys, multiple males mate with a female, so there is a lot of competition between the different sperm. What happened is that the males evolved their ejaculate to become more aggressive, to outcompete the other males; in some cases, the ejaculate became toxic to the females.
as grond noted, the actual amount is trivial beyond belief. However, there is another problem to this; the atual amount of radioactive material stored at plants, in total, is quite large; in the even of, say, a terrorist inspired meltdown, we would be looking at a lot of long lived alphas getting into the environment. the other issue is the relation between civilian nukes an atomic weapons. To build an atomic bomb, one needs a fairly serious and complex industrial infrastructure; take, say just monitoring workers - you have to have a reason for buying test equipment and so forth. If you have civilian nukes, you have a justification for building up tht infrastructure, eg, the specilized skills and equipment needed to transport highly radioactive material (fuel or weapons grade U) Thus this article is bad for two reasons, (a) hysteria about a trivial leak, and (b) it defocuses us from the real problems
For me , personally, virtually every change since FF2.0 has been for the worse; the gui has gotten harder to use, simple things i need are hidden, extensions are constantly breaking.... What has surprised me is that a group of devs hasn't forked to keep FF2 and all that was great in it, and try to add things that are really neat: how about a powerful business contacts manager, a la windows BCM, that is native in side FF How about video that actually works ? (vlc has never worked well for me)
how about serious privacy (its clear 'they" are getting new tricks faster then ff can stop them)
how about a decent calendar - the thunderbird type calendars suck..... instead we get all sorts of useless tinkering with the gui..
In a historical view, the post WWII, and in the longer view, the post industrial revolution era, are anomolous, in that there was an unusual conc of science in the us and western europe; for large swaths of human history, China was the dominant, or at least a co dominant science technology country. There are still living people who remember when Germany was THE leading science power, and if you were a serious scientitst, you went to Germany to finish your education; people like Willard Gibbs were celebrated precisely because genuwine US science hereos were so rare.
The post WWII period, when our wealth dominated world science, is coming to an end. So, the correct view is not that we are loosing our dominance, but that an unusual situtation, where an unusual amount of science was concentrated in the US, is coming to an end. That we offer free training at what are still the best universitys in the world, because of the specious theoretical economic arguments infavor of globiliazation (see samuleson) certainly doesn't help the US.
I don't know about physics or chemistry, but life science is a labor intensive field. Right now, I make a pretty good living as a PhD scientist in boston area biotech; how on earth am i going to compete with someone from china, just as smart and well educated, a lot hardworking, and a lot cheaper ? And this is not theory - it is happening; all of the major pharma and RnD firms (eg, Invitrogen) are setting up shop in china with large numbers of scientists.
One other point, which people outside of life science research may not understand. Life science research - basic science as practiced at our universitys - is almost a pyramid scheme; it is based on the idea that very hardworking, intelligent people willl spend 4-8 years at very low salary (graduate school/postdoc) and the carrot for this low wage job is that you can become an independent researcher - similar to the idea behind interns and residents. So, every university professor depends, critically, on having a group of graduate students to do the actual work; if you are a prof, you must find young people willing to work long hours at relatively low pay. The problem is that independent researchers are very exspensive, so most of the people who go into phd programs will wind up trashed - they will not have a career in science, at least not a good paying one. so a large part of the driver for chinese scientists at our universitys is as cheap labor that is "expendable" - you can send them back to china at the end of their grad work; I emphasize that this is driven by the selfish economic needs of university profs; basically, chinese and indian grad students are guest workers, and the great thing is, you can send them back, so you can get new pools of young, cheap labor. Thus, in the univeristy community, there is tremendous pressure to maintain the flow, and you have people claiming that there is a "shortage" of scientists; of course, in a free market system, by definition, a shortage means you are not paying enough..
Introduction. There is an ongoing debate around the existence of the G-spot—an allegedly highly sensitive area on the anterior wall of the human vagina. The existence of the G-spot seems to be widely accepted among women, despite the failure of numerous behavioral, anatomical, and biochemical studies to prove its existence. Heritability has been demonstrated in all other genuine anatomical traits studied so far.
Aim. To investigate whether the self-reported G-spot has an underlying genetic basis.
Methods. 1804 unselected female twins aged 22–83 completed a questionnaire that included questions about female sexuality and asked about the presence or absence of a G-spot. The relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors to variation in the reported existence of a G-spot was assessed using a variance components model fitting approach.
Main Outcome Measures. Genetic variance component analysis of self-reported G-spot.
Results. We found 56% of women reported having a G-spot. The prevalence decreased with age. Variance component analyses revealed that variation in G-spot reported frequency is almost entirely a result of individual experiences and random measurement error (>89%) with no detectable genetic influence. Correlations with associated general sexual behavior, relationship satisfaction, and attitudes toward sexuality suggest that the self-reported G-spot is to be a secondary pseudo-phenomenon.
Conclusions. To our knowledge, this is the largest study investigating the prevalence of the G-spot and the first one to explore an underlying genetic basis. A possible explanation for the lack of heritability may be that women differ in their ability to detect their own (true) G-spots. However, we postulate that the reason for the lack of genetic variation—in contrast to other anatomical and physiological traits studied—is that there is no physiological or physical basis for the G-spot. Burri AV, Cherkas L, and Spector TD. Genetic and environmental influences on self-reported G-spots in women: A twin study. J Sex Med **;**:**–**.
I happen to be a bit of an expert in this field - no shit
below is from memory; if people are really interested, i can pull out some references from the scientific literature that back all of this up MRSA stands for "methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus", and it was 1st detected in the UK in the (i think ) '60s
lets backup a bit
the human body is covered, inside and out, with bacteria, which can be harmful, neutral or beneficial - for instance, vitamin B12, a requirement for life, is made by bacteria. All humans carry Staphylococcus epidermidis; ~ 20% also carry S aureus, which prefers to live in moist places like the inside of the nose (anterior nares) throat, axilla, groin and rectum. Epidermidis is pretty harmless, except for people with implanted devices like catheters; since epi likes "surfaces" it tends to colonize the surface of catheters. Most people have either epi or aureus, but not both,and these two bugs are a small part of the total skin microflora.
In general, having S aureus on your skin or in your nose does not seem to be harmful; however, if you have a cut, and aureus gains entry to the bloodstream, this is a very serious matter. S aureus , whoose genome is sequenced, carrys a host of "virulence factors" that make it a particularly dangerous infection in the blood; in th era before antibiotics, the mortality rate for aureus septicemia was over 50%, and perhaps 80% in some hospitals (!).
That is, ify ou were a physcian in the most advanced medical center in the world in the 1940s, and a healthy patient got an aureus infection in the blood - perhaps due to infection of a surgical site , where the skin is open- there was a 50% chance that pateint would die. Aureus also tends to grow on the heartvalves, which is the disease known as endocarditis; i should think it obvious that having a film of bacteria on your heart valves is not a good idea.
It is easy to see how penicillin, which was very effective, was viewed as a miracle drug. However, within a few years, aureus became resistant to penicillin, and hospitals were starting to see epidemics of untreatable penicillin resistant aureus.
Luckily, the pharmaceutical compnaies and thier scientists had variations of penicillin - the first was methicillin; since then, dozens of beta lactam antibiotics, the mot advanced of which are the carbapenems and fifth generation cephalosporins (wikipedia is good here) have ben developed. Staph took 10-20 years to become resistant to methicillin; however, when staph do become resistant, they do so by aquisition of a virus like element (SCCmec) which often carries resistance to a whole host of other antibiotics, so that MRSA is actually a bug that is resistant to many drugs. (technically, SCCmec encodes a replacement for PBP2a, PBP2a', which has a lactam resistant transpeptidase function; but no transglycosylase). the origin of SCCmec is unkown.
The drugs of choice for MRSA are vancomycin, daptomycin and colistin; ceftobiprole, approved in canada and switzerland , is supposed to be very effective. Vancomycin is very $ and nephrotoxic; the others are worse.
If one looks at different countrys around the world, one sees that some countrys - in particular the netherlands and the scandanavian countrys - have very low rates of MRSA, that is most of the aureus is methicillin sensitive.
However, if you look in detail - and believe me, a lot of scientists have looked very hard - it is hard to find one particular reason why these countrys have low rates of MRSA; rather, it seems to be due to a "bundle" of practices. In general, these countrys have good antibiotic stewardship - drugs are not prescribed unless you need them; they spnd a lot on controlling outbreaks, and they are very carefull to test people from outside the country, who might hve MRSA, when they enter the hospital.
In the US, the statistics on how many people get MRSA and how many die have been compiled by several authors; the most well known is monica klevens of the CDC. Now it
Nuclear power is a really bad idea for two reasons
1) all the energy we need can come from solar and wind
Thorium may be "inherently safe" but having tons of super hot, possibly corrosive and toxic (HF, hydrofluoric acid is super corrosive and toxic) fluoride salts doesn't really sound like a good place to start.
so, if you had the control of how to spend, say,10 billion dollars (and that is probably a minimum to bring a new reactor technology on line) to develop new nukes, or better solar panels, which way would you go ?
2) it helps spread nuclear weapons technology
there is also an issue about nuclear weapons. Building the complex infrastructure to manufacture, test an store nuculear weapons requires a huge amount of expertise in how to handle radioactive materials. I think it obvious that it is easier to aquire this expertise if ou have a civilian nuclear power industry. Say for just storing vry radioactive waste - you need to know how to monitor it so workers are safe, you need special shielded drums, etc ect
Civilian nuclear power = more nuclear weapons
It is not clear if the net book is a good idea, but if you go down to bestbuy or microcenter, you find things that are almost as exspensive as a regular laptop, with cruddy features, poorly designed trackpads with the buttons on the side, tiny screens that need scrolling (is that a fubar or what)
and, since they don't run linux, they don't have the 30 second boot time that was one of the most desirable featues - turn it on, check the cloud, turn it off before the first windows splash screen
if u think polaroid ok, u not from boston
the shafting of the employees that occured in the 90s by the imperial ceo was one of the great untold monstrositys of the decade
sam walmart was , love or hate em, a genius
he figured out a much cheaper way to store and distribute goods to his stores; th other guys like kmart and sears wouldnt or coulndt copy him
the results was that walmart had lower costs, so they could sell for less
that they treat their employess like S*** is just a sideline
And , as an old tag says, there is no disputing taste
Seriously - I thought the ads were entertaining and fun; I didn't expect much in the way of info cause MS is a monopoly, and doens't need to sell its products,
ON the other hand, i don't expect much of gates; i'm quite happy with windows2000 both OS an office
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Quote 'The cost estimation [implies] that commons-based innovation must receive a higher level of official recognition...." I don't think that is how the US system works, which is by market recognition. It doesn't matter how hard you work or how much money you put into it; what matters is if people buy it. That assumes, somewhat naively, that people are "rational economic actors" and that companies like MS and GOOgLE don't have massive FUD machines (aka marketing)
I work in a biotech startup with 12 people total. We have several thousand pdfs, mostly of scientific publications downloaded from places like pubmed, along with some .ppts and .docs and other files.
We use a endnote, a program from the behemoth in this area, thompson research, which has most of hte software in this area.
see http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/procite
Based on what I have seen, there is a huge need for software that meets our needs; the thompson products are very $$ and , awfull - a classic case of crappy software with a lot of marketing.
Programs like endnote were created back in the 90s, for DOS machines, and they still look and feel like it, once you get past the pretty home page gui of the software that thompson has added on.
if anyone out there is serious about making a product to compete, give me a hollar
1) the health care debate is about how to ration care currently, we ration care by income (largely) - good income, less rationing you are working class, with problems, to bad for you bub. single payers like me want to ration care fairly; basically on a doctor decided need to basis for those of you about to howl about socialized medicine, you want some gov't doc rationing your care or you want a private insurance company, which is what we have now 2) Costs are driven by technology It is new technology, an aging population, and our changing standards of what is "good care" that drives costs, eg, super $$ new drugs like those offered by Genzyme all this discussion about how much money we are going tosave by having electronic records, or making averyone use the same form, or better diets, sure we will save some - maybe a lot - in the short term, but over the next 10-15 years, gains in $$ technology will wipe out any of these savings 3) nurses will be replaced by robots where is the cost ? having a 60K a year RN take your temperture is ludicrous; you may laugh, but you heard it hear 1st as soon as robots are available, nurses are going to be toast as soon as better robots are available, doctors are toast it will take a while, but given how much people costs , especially when you need them on call 24/7 they will be replaced - it is a question of when not if (VCs, u listening, this is whre to put your money)
since you don't specify the countrys, it hard for /. readers to know if your comments are reasonable
as to your "solutions" without malpractice, what saves me from bad doctors - isn't malpractice the free market solution to bad care ?
your other cost savings ideas are good, but show a lack of understanding of true costs, which are driven by technology: it is not how (paperwork) that costs money, it is new technology and an aging population that are the true cost drivers; fixing forms will provide a temporary relief
and anyway, isn't making evryone use the same form sort of gov't control ? isn't the point of diff forms free market magic, diff companies try diff things ?
This is a really complicated thing - defining "charity' and doing cross country comparisions the wikipedia article shows the us as having low official aid and high private aid however, see the thread here http://www.jonholato.com/2007/06/26/us-more-charitable-than-any-other-country/ for some perspective
found here
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V61-4Y4XCTH-3&_user=10&_coverDate=02%2F15%2F2010&_rdoc=18&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%235801%232010%23997099998%231609118%23FLA%23display%23Volume)&_cdi=5801&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=26&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=ae24ceb289eae1dcc9bc6870f3192dc2
And this is the abstract A slice of the Haverö meteorite which belongs to the ureilite class known to contain graphite and diamond was cut and then polished as a thin section using a diamond paste. We identified two carbonaceous areas which were standing out by more than 10 m in relief over the surface of the silicate matrix suggesting that the carbonaceous phases were not easily polishable by a diamond paste and would therefore imply larger polishing hardness. These areas were investigated by reflected light microscopy, high-resolution Field Emission SEM (FESEM), energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis, Raman spectroscopy, and were subsequently extracted for in situ synchrotron microbeam X-ray fluorescence (XRF), imaging and X-ray diffraction (XRD). We report here the natural occurrences of one new ultrahard rhombohedral carbon polymorph of the R3m space group which structure is very close to diamond but with a partial occupancy of some of the carbon sites. We also report the natural occurrence of the theoretically predicted 21R diamond polytype with lattice parameters very close to what has been modelized. These findings are of great interests for better understanding the world of carbon polymorphs and diamond polytypes giving new natural materials to investigate. These natural samples demonstrate that the carbon system is even more complex than what is currently thought based on ab initio static lattice calculations and high-pressure experiments since this new ultrahard polymorph has never been predicted nor synthesized.
hasn't that been the whole thrust of apple since the beginning - a gilded cage as one recent poster so aptly put it ? The advertising campaing that apple = freedom from the MS/ big corporations / borg / 1984 is
classic advertising
you say the opposite of reality.
eg, when your corporation has lousy customer service, you run an ad campaing touting your legendary customer service (citizen bank in boston); when you are a corporate evil doer, you run an ad capaign on Public Radio (archer daniels midland, mcneill leherer snoozehour)...when you are a major cause of pollution, you run ads touting your greeness (oil companies, toyota hybrids)
The whole history of apple has been restricting your freedom to do what only jobs wants you to do, so he can make a lot of money. People are ok with that, to paraphrase Mencked, no one ever lost money underestimating how much freedom the american consumer will give up for instant gratification
I believe that in most cases, most people don't "read" news (mostly TV in the US) to learn new things, but to confirm their already held prejudices.
Their is a substantial body of psychology that says we discount things opposiste to our beliefs and pay attention to things that confirm our beliefs.
Here is a test: when was the last time facts in the "news' changed a core belief of yours; ie, to pick a controversial topic, how many /dotters have changed their veiws on abortion, or on the desirability of invading Iraq, or if Socialized medicine is a good idea ?
sure, we take in info on things that are peripheral, but on important stuff we don't read the news to learn
www.vercaro.blogspot.com
The take home of your complaint seems to be that mozilla should be for all of the worst commercial aspects of the web.
Fair enough, that is our opinion
one of the great things about FF, that made me a FFFanboy and got me to get all my friends and family and cowerkers to switch from IE to FF - ipersonally and responsible for like 30 switches - is that the extensions did a lot of neat stuff; in particularl, they give you a tool to fight the companies that want to suck all you money out of your wallet and control the web.
If you are on th side of the corporate leeches, that is your priveledge,
my complain about private browsing was not well worded; what i object to is the change in how the user can control privacy.
in old FF, you got this menu on exit - do you want to clean stuff
this is GOOD because it gives the user pos feedback; which users like
new ff has automated this in a way that is not entirely, at least to me, satisfactory, cause i am not sure that it is happening
I notice you don't address my #1 whine, the bookmark gui. Are u conceding that it is bad ? Given how long FF has been around, and how much programming horserpower they have, that the can't get a critical user function like the book mark gui right says a lot.
1) Firefox does let you export bookmarks. Granted, it exports all of them, but how hard can it be to crack open the HTML file and strip out the ones you don't want to send?
It's a matter of opinion, so there is no right or wrong, but I thought computers were supposed to reduce repetitive actions; surely the ability to click on a folder and export it is something that people need to do often.
2) "Not being a jerk about extensions"? In what way? Just go to the web page and look around, it's not like the add-ons window is the only place you can get them.
I, and i imagine most people use the mozilla site (which is built into FF) to find extensions. It used to be that you could search that site prett easily and see all the diff extensions.
Now, it is hard to see extensions beyond the "top rated" ones, tht is, mozilla has taken away people's freedom; for many people, having less choice is not doubt good; for many of us, and esp those of us who ar FF evangelists, it is bad - why should I have to do extra work to see thing mozilla doesn't trumpet ? and it is extra work.
3) "Letting the world know"? Am I being wooshed? You're saying they should beat their own chests? Maybe run some cocky TV commercials that says FF is cool and provide no actual info to back it up?
what seperates geeks and nerds (which i am,and a poor speller to boot) from geeks and neerds who get htings done is the understanding that marketing, even the most stupid marketing, has value.
What do you think the response of most people would be if they could test drive FF on www.yahoo.com with all the distracting stuff disabled ? they would say "WOW"
4) "give users control to wipe things clean": it's still there. Or just tap Ctrl+Shift+Del before you exit.
but it is not as good as it use to be; they have made it less user friendly; they have given you and me less control; they could have done this in a manner that gave us a choic, but the they didn't
5) "SOB web collectors": who isn't these days? Personally, I'm tired of being warned that every food I can possibly eat is decreasing my life expectancy in some way.
well, you are right that the media hypes stuff endlessly. However, we have an epidemic of diabetes in this country - as one doc put it, america dies on dunkins.
as to web privacy, its a value issue; i, personally, think privacy, in and of itself, is valuable, and that optin should be the default value; if companies want to collect, for free, valuable marketing info on yuo, you should have to give your explicit permission
The GUI that pops up when you want to bookmark something - case study in bad design
How about a real editor for bookmarks, with some minimal feature like export this folder (when you need to send someone a bunch of stuff)
How about mozilla not being a jerk about extensions, and getting rid of the spam that makes it hard to see anything but the top 5 extensions big brother mozilla thinks you should have
How about a stable platform for extension developers
How about letting the world know how awesome FF+noscript+adblock is when you go to a site like YAHOO
I hadn't been to YAHOO wihtout my little protectors, noscript/adblock/flashblock for some time and was astonished at how much ads have taken over the front page - how can people stand it
how about giving the users some control over privacy, so we have the wipe things clean on exit menu again
how about giving some users an idea of how much info the SOBs of the web, like google, are collecting
Many years ago, I read a serious genetics paper about this. The scientist managed to setup up a colony of fruit flys (drosophilia melanogaster) so that the females remained static - they did not evolve - and the males did.
In fruit flys, multiple males mate with a female, so there is a lot of competition between the different sperm.
What happened is that the males evolved their ejaculate to become more aggressive, to outcompete the other males; in some cases, the ejaculate became toxic to the females.
as grond noted, the actual amount is trivial beyond belief.
However, there is another problem to this; the atual amount of radioactive material stored at plants, in total, is quite large; in the even of, say, a terrorist inspired meltdown, we would be looking at a lot of long lived alphas getting into the environment.
the other issue is the relation between civilian nukes an atomic weapons. To build an atomic bomb, one needs a fairly serious and complex industrial infrastructure; take, say just monitoring workers - you have to have a reason for buying test equipment and so forth. If you have civilian nukes, you have a justification for building up tht infrastructure, eg, the specilized skills and equipment needed to transport highly radioactive material (fuel or weapons grade U)
Thus this article is bad for two reasons, (a) hysteria about a trivial leak, and (b) it defocuses us from the real problems
if so, how many people still read keith laumer, and get the ref ?
For me , personally, virtually every change since FF2.0 has been for the worse; the gui has gotten harder to use, simple things i need are hidden, extensions are constantly breaking....
What has surprised me is that a group of devs hasn't forked to keep FF2 and all that was great in it, and try to add things that are really neat: how about a powerful business contacts manager, a la windows BCM, that is native in side FF
How about video that actually works ? (vlc has never worked well for me)
how about serious privacy (its clear 'they" are getting new tricks faster then ff can stop them)
how about a decent calendar - the thunderbird type calendars suck .....
instead we get all sorts of useless tinkering with the gui..
In a historical view, the post WWII, and in the longer view, the post industrial revolution era, are anomolous, in that there was an unusual conc of science in the us and western europe; for large swaths of human history, China was the dominant, or at least a co dominant science technology country.
There are still living people who remember when Germany was THE leading science power, and if you were a serious scientitst, you went to Germany to finish your education; people like Willard Gibbs were celebrated precisely because genuwine US science hereos were so rare.
The post WWII period, when our wealth dominated world science, is coming to an end. So, the correct view is not that we are loosing our dominance, but that an unusual situtation, where an unusual amount of science was concentrated in the US, is coming to an end.
That we offer free training at what are still the best universitys in the world, because of the specious theoretical economic arguments infavor of globiliazation (see samuleson) certainly doesn't help the US.
I don't know about physics or chemistry, but life science is a labor intensive field. Right now, I make a pretty good living as a PhD scientist in boston area biotech; how on earth am i going to compete with someone from china, just as smart and well educated, a lot hardworking, and a lot cheaper ?
And this is not theory - it is happening; all of the major pharma and RnD firms (eg, Invitrogen) are setting up shop in china with large numbers of scientists.
One other point, which people outside of life science research may not understand. Life science research - basic science as practiced at our universitys - is almost a pyramid scheme; it is based on the idea that very hardworking, intelligent people willl spend 4-8 years at very low salary (graduate school/postdoc) and the carrot for this low wage job is that you can become an independent researcher - similar to the idea behind interns and residents.
So, every university professor depends, critically, on having a group of graduate students to do the actual work; if you are a prof, you must find young people willing to work long hours at relatively low pay.
The problem is that independent researchers are very exspensive, so most of the people who go into phd programs will wind up trashed - they will not have a career in science, at least not a good paying one.
so a large part of the driver for chinese scientists at our universitys is as cheap labor that is "expendable" - you can send them back to china at the end of their grad work; I emphasize that this is driven by the selfish economic needs of university profs; basically, chinese and indian grad students are guest workers, and the great thing is, you can send them back, so you can get new pools of young, cheap labor.
Thus, in the univeristy community, there is tremendous pressure to maintain the flow, and you have people claiming that there is a "shortage" of scientists; of course, in a free market system, by definition, a shortage means you are not paying enough..
here http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123232355/abstract
abstract of article
Genetic and Environmental Influences on self-reported G-Spots in Women: A Twin Study
Andrea Virginia Burri, MSc, Lynn Cherkas, PhD, and Timothy D. Spector, MD
Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology, King's College London, London, UK
Correspondence to Andrea Burri, MSc, Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology, King's College London, St. Thomas' Hospital, Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 EH7, UK. Tel: 00447943802987; Fax: 004402071886718; E-mail: andrea.burri@kcl.ac.uk, tim.spector@kcl.ac.uk
Copyright © 2009 International Society for Sexual Medicine
KEYWORDS
G-Spot Twin Study Genetics Heritability
ABSTRACT
Introduction. There is an ongoing debate around the existence of the G-spot—an allegedly highly sensitive area on the anterior wall of the human vagina. The existence of the G-spot seems to be widely accepted among women, despite the failure of numerous behavioral, anatomical, and biochemical studies to prove its existence. Heritability has been demonstrated in all other genuine anatomical traits studied so far.
Aim. To investigate whether the self-reported G-spot has an underlying genetic basis.
Methods. 1804 unselected female twins aged 22–83 completed a questionnaire that included questions about female sexuality and asked about the presence or absence of a G-spot. The relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors to variation in the reported existence of a G-spot was assessed using a variance components model fitting approach.
Main Outcome Measures. Genetic variance component analysis of self-reported G-spot.
Results. We found 56% of women reported having a G-spot. The prevalence decreased with age. Variance component analyses revealed that variation in G-spot reported frequency is almost entirely a result of individual experiences and random measurement error (>89%) with no detectable genetic influence. Correlations with associated general sexual behavior, relationship satisfaction, and attitudes toward sexuality suggest that the self-reported G-spot is to be a secondary pseudo-phenomenon.
Conclusions. To our knowledge, this is the largest study investigating the prevalence of the G-spot and the first one to explore an underlying genetic basis. A possible explanation for the lack of heritability may be that women differ in their ability to detect their own (true) G-spots. However, we postulate that the reason for the lack of genetic variation—in contrast to other anatomical and physiological traits studied—is that there is no physiological or physical basis for the G-spot. Burri AV, Cherkas L, and Spector TD. Genetic and environmental influences on self-reported G-spots in women: A twin study. J Sex Med **;**:**–**.
you have to click on each one to read the story ? wtf? they couldnt put it all on one page ?
I happen to be a bit of an expert in this field - no shit
below is from memory; if people are really interested, i can pull out some references from the scientific literature that back all of this up
MRSA stands for "methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus", and it was 1st detected in the UK in the (i think ) '60s
lets backup a bit
the human body is covered, inside and out, with bacteria, which can be harmful, neutral or beneficial - for instance, vitamin B12, a requirement for life, is made by bacteria.
All humans carry Staphylococcus epidermidis; ~ 20% also carry S aureus, which prefers to live in moist places like the inside of the nose (anterior nares) throat, axilla, groin and rectum. Epidermidis is pretty harmless, except for people with implanted devices like catheters; since epi likes "surfaces" it tends to colonize the surface of catheters.
Most people have either epi or aureus, but not both,and these two bugs are a small part of the total skin microflora.
In general, having S aureus on your skin or in your nose does not seem to be harmful; however, if you have a cut, and aureus gains entry to the bloodstream, this is a very serious matter. S aureus , whoose genome is sequenced, carrys a host of "virulence factors" that make it a particularly dangerous infection in the blood; in th era before antibiotics, the mortality rate for aureus septicemia was over 50%, and perhaps 80% in some hospitals (!).
That is, ify ou were a physcian in the most advanced medical center in the world in the 1940s, and a healthy patient got an aureus infection in the blood - perhaps due to infection of a surgical site , where the skin is open- there was a 50% chance that pateint would die. Aureus also tends to grow on the heartvalves, which is the disease known as endocarditis; i should think it obvious that having a film of bacteria on your heart valves is not a good idea.
It is easy to see how penicillin, which was very effective, was viewed as a miracle drug. However, within a few years, aureus became resistant to penicillin, and hospitals were starting to see epidemics of untreatable penicillin resistant aureus.
Luckily, the pharmaceutical compnaies and thier scientists had variations of penicillin - the first was methicillin; since then, dozens of beta lactam antibiotics, the mot advanced of which are the carbapenems and fifth generation cephalosporins (wikipedia is good here) have ben developed.
Staph took 10-20 years to become resistant to methicillin; however, when staph do become resistant, they do so by aquisition of a virus like element (SCCmec) which often carries resistance to a whole host of other antibiotics, so that MRSA is actually a bug that is resistant to many drugs. (technically, SCCmec encodes a replacement for PBP2a, PBP2a', which has a lactam resistant transpeptidase function; but no transglycosylase). the origin of SCCmec is unkown.
The drugs of choice for MRSA are vancomycin, daptomycin and colistin; ceftobiprole, approved in canada and switzerland , is supposed to be very effective.
Vancomycin is very $ and nephrotoxic; the others are worse.
If one looks at different countrys around the world, one sees that some countrys - in particular the netherlands and the scandanavian countrys - have very low rates of MRSA, that is most of the aureus is methicillin sensitive.
However, if you look in detail - and believe me, a lot of scientists have looked very hard - it is hard to find one particular reason why these countrys have low rates of MRSA; rather, it seems to be due to a "bundle" of practices. In general, these countrys have good antibiotic stewardship - drugs are not prescribed unless you need them; they spnd a lot on controlling outbreaks, and they are very carefull to test people from outside the country, who might hve MRSA, when they enter the hospital.
In the US, the statistics on how many people get MRSA and how many die have been compiled by several authors; the most well known is monica klevens of the CDC.
Now it
Nuclear power is a really bad idea for two reasons 1) all the energy we need can come from solar and wind Thorium may be "inherently safe" but having tons of super hot, possibly corrosive and toxic (HF, hydrofluoric acid is super corrosive and toxic) fluoride salts doesn't really sound like a good place to start. so, if you had the control of how to spend, say,10 billion dollars (and that is probably a minimum to bring a new reactor technology on line) to develop new nukes, or better solar panels, which way would you go ? 2) it helps spread nuclear weapons technology there is also an issue about nuclear weapons. Building the complex infrastructure to manufacture, test an store nuculear weapons requires a huge amount of expertise in how to handle radioactive materials. I think it obvious that it is easier to aquire this expertise if ou have a civilian nuclear power industry. Say for just storing vry radioactive waste - you need to know how to monitor it so workers are safe, you need special shielded drums, etc ect Civilian nuclear power = more nuclear weapons
It is not clear if the net book is a good idea, but if you go down to bestbuy or microcenter, you find things that are almost as exspensive as a regular laptop, with cruddy features, poorly designed trackpads with the buttons on the side, tiny screens that need scrolling (is that a fubar or what) and, since they don't run linux, they don't have the 30 second boot time that was one of the most desirable featues - turn it on, check the cloud, turn it off before the first windows splash screen
if u think polaroid ok, u not from boston the shafting of the employees that occured in the 90s by the imperial ceo was one of the great untold monstrositys of the decade
sam walmart was , love or hate em, a genius he figured out a much cheaper way to store and distribute goods to his stores; th other guys like kmart and sears wouldnt or coulndt copy him the results was that walmart had lower costs, so they could sell for less that they treat their employess like S*** is just a sideline
The 1st thing that comes to my mind is electronic test equipment (VOMs, signal generators) where HP stands for High Priced
And , as an old tag says, there is no disputing taste Seriously - I thought the ads were entertaining and fun; I didn't expect much in the way of info cause MS is a monopoly, and doens't need to sell its products, ON the other hand, i don't expect much of gates; i'm quite happy with windows2000 both OS an office