Guy spends 200K on an election, it came from 5 people, who is he gonna listen to ?
Guy is beholden to someone
Guy gets elected and someone give his a hot prostitute to approve a chem waste site
u get the drift, or i gotta snow some more ?
PS: if you still believe what u posted, an u ain't a troll, got a bridge in Brooklyn, sell it 2 u cheap
When a person can pop out babies, does not have a job, but walks around with a real Louis Vuitton bag and a bunch of jewelry there is a problem.
How many people. How much do they spend. What % of some budget are these lazy people.
Is this number more or less then the amount spend on movie tickets, or the amount spend on the tax break for hedge fund people.
Furthermore, when illegal immigrants can come here, gain the benefit of our social programs, and not pay taxes, there is another problem.s.
Do they not contribute ? please, give us some real numbers so we can have an estimate as to the actual magnitude of the issue.
yes and no
I think if you ask people questions like, do you favor a ban on lifetime caps, an overwhelming majority are in favor of obama care
part of the problem was the incredibly bad job by obama pelosi and reid in selling the bill; I downloaded many of hte pdfs from the hose and senated during the debate, and there was no index, no table of contents, no bookmarks - I couldn't even find the section that talked about lifetime caps untill, totaly by accident, i found a seprate dem caucus guide, which gave me the right section
If you read that section, it was 3 pages of boiler plate (amend Section3(para3aii)... and about 100 words that were clear and concise.
I think pelosi did a really shitty job as speaker and deserved what she got - have you ever gone to eht house web site to try and find something ?
but back to the main point - I think if you asked people the right question, you would find that a majority are in favor of most of the provisions of obama care (at least in theory; my own idea is that just as we provide 4th rate legal care to the poor, to comply with gideon, obama care will result in 4th rate care to the poor, so limo liberals can say, look we did something....)
The detailed molecular mechanism has been know for sometime; what these workers did was to create a detailed 3D atom resolution model of the responsible protein perforin,
while this will certainly help in understanding how pore forming proteins, which are widespread and often act as agents of disease, work, it is not consistent with the title.
oh, overblown article headline , taken from PR pretending to be news, on slashdot. Why am I surprised ?
note - I coudn't get the DOI at the bottom of the article to work , so if this is not published, it is not even *science*
Here is a review by author whisstock
The structure and function of mammalian membrane-attack complex/perforin-like proteins.
Kondos SC, Hatfaludi T, Voskoboinik I, Trapani JA, Law RH, Whisstock JC, Dunstone MA.
Tissue Antigens. 2010 Sep 22. doi: 10.1111/j.1399-0039.2010.01566.x. [Epub ahead of print]PMID: 2086058
I am amazed that people think google is (a) a good search engine, rather then soemthing to generate profit for google, and (b) that as alarge corporation, google can be trusted to do anything other then max profits.
The idea that a large public company like google will do anything other then maximize profits is silly beyond belief;
There is one small exception: if a company is a quasi monopoly, as google is, then it can indulge in some luxuries, like sponsering summer of code; the epitome of this was the old Bell Labs research center in Murray HIll NJ (at least one Nobel Prize for fundamental science, microwave background).
PS google is willing to invade my privacy and yours with street view; can you do streetview for the personal residences of Page and Brin and the directors and senior executives of Google ?
why doesn't someone start a site, www.seehowitfeels.net, that is just devoted to giving Page and Brin the same privacy that ordinary people have.
Bet the lawsuits come soon and often
so the entire world's system of weights depends on this block of Pt-Ir in paris
Every now and then, they have to take it out of its sealed container, flushed with ultrapure He, and actually use it to verify a secondary std
trouble is, you have to clean it.
apparently, there is one old guy who is the only person in the world who can clean the Pt Ir cylinder without changing its weight by more then a few micrograms
So....there is a scientific conference, what do we do when this guy retires ?
as someone who makes a pretty decent living doing PCR and growing e coli and doing DNA sequencing, I ain't worried - DIY biotech is no more a threat to the industry then DIY computer chips: you could probably buy reject wafers and etch a circuit on it in you backyard, you ain't never gonna threaten INTEL or AMD
an airship that can lift 150 tons has a lot of crossectional area, even if a sphere
need some serious motors to keep it stable in crosswinds, updrafts etc
this was brought out in a great book by the new yorker write john mcphee, I think most of/. would love reading this book
I have the impression, without any data, that the number of scientific papers in leading journals with authors with a china affiliation is exploding - does anyone have any data ?
I see this particularly in chemistry journals like Analytical Chemistry, Langmuir and J of the American Chem Soc (all 3 published by Amer Chem Soc).
Less so in the top flight molecular and cell biology journals.
It would be really fascinating to get some data on this.
It is a commonplace that gov't is "wastefull" and "inefficient" and full of overpaid hacks,etc etc
But doesn't this describe most private biz, at least viewed in the eyes of/. and dilbert ?
why is private jets for CEOs no less wasteful then anything the gov't does ?
You could go a long way with this, but I think it is a Myth that large publicly traded companies are, on avg, more efficient then the gov't and there is a lot of evidence to support the opposite posistion, eg look at he amt spent on admin in the social sec administration.
To give an example: I work in a biotech lab. The other day, a guy comes in with a 400 dollar piece of equipment, "free".
What gives ?
well, "they" through out a whole pallet (maybe 50) of these jobbers cause the name of the company changed, and they didn't want to bother changing the logo on the equipment....
yet it is gov't that gets blamed for being wasteful.
I mean come on, this is/., is the gov't more wastefull the MS ? doesn't anyone remember the thread where there were some number of people >10 on the MS committee to figure out what was on the vista start menu ? not to implement it or anything like that, but just the list of what was on teh default menu....
std commercial ultracentrifuges, used in the life sciences, spin at 80 to 100 K, and the objects they rotate ("rotors" in the argot)are titanium cylinders or frustrated cones that weigh several kilos.
Centrifgues that went up to 50K were available in the 1970s, if not earlier; one limit was the strenght of hte "rotor", which were made of aluminum at the time; now they are made of Ti and carbon fiber.
As you can imagine, the manufacturers are carefull to stress safety; one thing that distinguishes a Beckman L50, which has a max speed of 50K, and a 90K instrument is the rating for the armor plate that surrounds the spinning object; basically, if a multi Kilo piece of metal rotating at 90K comes loose, the armor has to be able to prevent any projectile formation
PS: you know when it happens, cause you get a loud noise
https://www.beckmancoulter.com/eCatalog/CatalogItemDetails.do?productId=12210
(http://www.beckmancoulter.com/literature/Bioresearch/BR-9272A.pdf )
http://golgi.harvard.edu/Gaudet/Resources_Files/Beckman/PrepRT.pdf
uh....median income levels ?
sure the economy was booming: people were living on credit.
this is like the old joke about the man who jumps off the empire state building: as he passes the 20th floor, he yells out, so far so good...
I don't know your opinion of the New York Times, but few media are ALL bad. The times had a wonderful piece a year or so back, where they looked at the families in all the houses on a short cul de sac in CA - the reporter just went thru one house after the other, getting peoples stories.
and the take home? people were having a great time, spending way beyond their means, I mean doing really crazy stuff, like going to vegas on a home equity loan
The other side is, if you are worried about your job (say going to china) and your company cuts your pay, the profits go up, but is this "good" for the country ? If you can spout Laffer curve, I'm sure I could find a PhD economist or 3 who can show how lowering wages to maximize profits leads to bad things....
"no reactors" no commercial reactos, there are a lot of small RnD scale thorium reactors, or at leat that is what i get from the wiki page on "thorium fuel cycle" which has what looks like agood list of thorium reactors
"thorium reactors"
this may be true, but today, in 2010, there are NO actual operating thorium cycle reactors, and therefore, as a matter of fact, we don't really know how well they would perform, assuming they actually could be built economically.
as they say, in theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice they ain't
beyond this, there are two other significant issues with any nuclear power proposal: a, the associated technology (eg, how to handle high level waste safely) can serve as a cloak for related activities in bomb making; you just can't get away from this (eg, if you have a thorium reactor, you need emergency technology for dealing with very hot waste; this same technology, or related technology, is critical to bomb making, but is very rare, and hard to obtain and hide if you don't have a large civilian program)
b) ther are better alternatives; nuclear power is an intelligence test: if you say yest to nuclear, instead of solar/wind, you fail
(and don't give me that crap about fundamental physical contraints on solar/wind - people who say stuff like that are just ignorant)
I mean, I've been hearing about this stuff for what, 20 years ?
Eventually, one of em has to be right.
As to the "catastrophre"
In my neighborhood, people drive chevy suburbans half a mile to the supermarket for a bottle of bottled water, which you can get free from the tap (here in boston, we have pretty good water)
oil gets more $$, people will change their behavour.
For example, Those people who want to "get away from it all" and be "independent",and who live 30 miles up a dirt road, and depend totally on a truck built with parts from all over the world and mideast oil to get to a food store with food from all over the world - they are gonna move a little closer to town, or they will become really independent.
those incredibly wasteful people who take private jets ? gone
etc
I saw the stanford website several years ago, and thought it poorly written and incomprehensible to the non specialist at the time; revisiting the goedel link in the article does nothing to dispell that impression.
However, the editor of the stanford site is quite right, that academics and others with some expertise don't want to see their hardwork trashed on wiki; I personaly know a lot about molecular biology and DNA, but have stopped contributing because, (a) doofuses keep saying stuff that is wrong, and (b) the wiki copyright policy allows some else to steal my stuff *for profit*
I think the future does belong to closed, editor driven wikis, and we will see a lot more of them in the future - maybe the professors who torture their college students with super $$ textbooks can get together and write textbook wikis; you got 1,000 college profs who teach, say organic chem, surely 150 of 'em can write well, and surely 30 of those could contribute; you got 30 people to share the load, and a couple of interns from CompSci to setup the software and hardware, you could turn out a 1st rate organic chem text, and save college students millions, and stickit to the loathsome textbook publishers all at once.
here is claim 1
"
1. A computer readable storage medium storing computer-executable instructions for performing a method for shutting down an operating system, the method comprising the steps of: receiving a command to initiate operating system shut down; sending a shut down request to a graphical user interface application without a top level window; receiving no response to the shut down request with a predetermined period of time; determining that the graphical user interface application without the top level window is not hung; automatically terminating the graphical user interface application without the top level window; determining whether any graphical user interface applications with a top level window delay shut down; prompting a user for a user command to selectively shut down the graphical user interface applications with the top level window that delay shut down after determining that the graphical user interface applications with the top level window delay shut down; and then after the determining step, automatically terminating all running applications responsive to the user command received from the user that has been prompted. "
Does anyone skilled in the art see any obvious holes ?
1) It is quite a long story, for the Times, yet it doesn't mention that you can use things like disable cookies and ad blocker
2) if you have a subscription to the Times (I think it is requried to see the actual story) go on line and make a comment; tell people, specifically where they can go to learn about online privacy (to bad firefox has gotten worse in the privacy gui in every version since 2.0)
with poor spelling, the idea of RDBs or other stuff just sounds like a nonstarter.
(if you think install apache 1click, etc works, then you have no idea of what real scientists are like; perhaps this means that they don't have the training they should have, but I have used these one click installers, and they are way, way, waaaay to complex for me, and I am sure, for most scientists, for whom an excel pivot table or vlookup is the height of programming expertise)
The problem is that "scientific data" is often like the real world - messy, undefined stuff. It also , typically includes all sorts of things - images from cameras ranging from consumer point and clicks to peltier cooled 24bit CCDs, flat files uploaded from machines, complex propietary files uploaded, hand written notes, etc etc.
For instance, for a recent experiment I did, I have
".xad" files, which are a prop format from an agilent instrument
".nef" files from a Nikon consumer camera
several.txt files which need diff converters to put them into useful excel files
several.pngs
some of hte key.txt were imported into.xlsx, then imported into a specialized graphics program (Igor) which has its own propetary format...
my written notes on how to do the experiment (word doc with embedded excel minitables, which show calculations for things like how many grams of salt per liter of solution..)
propietary files from a nanodrop (don't ask) which can be opened with excel to get sort of usable data
hand entered data from a thermo electron conductivity meter (integers) a cheap balance, lot numbers of key reagents, pointers to previous experiments where i describe how key reagents were prepared, pointers to key experiments with background info
I don't think a single one of these files has the data organized in a really useful manner; all require extensie hand editing to get them into a form that is even understandable, let alone integrated.
not to mention the hideous problems of writing reports in word with embedded pictures, the loss of functionality in excel 2007 (x error bars hard to do, xy graph format reverts to line format without telling you,etc)
what this guy really wants is sort of the holy grail of web searching - the ability to do natural language queries on his data set.
Like, for growing fish, what is the effect of pH (acidity) and ionic strength (how much salt is in th water) on body length vs time
IN the meantime, what would help would be
1) if everyone complained to gates and ballmer,a nd got them to divert some miniscule fraction of their monopoly level profits from office, and put those profits to work making office usable for technically minded people
2) A way to keep track of files across changes in file name and directory name.
this is a huge problem; what would help is a way to embed a serial number into a file, and every time you use the file, the serial number goes with it, eg, you have a.tif, you crop it in image editor, import the crop into powerpoint, add text, export the mess into word, save the word doc, re edit it a year later, then two years later, looking at the re editied word doc, yo need to find the ORIGINAL.tiff, and in teh mean time, you ahve moved to a new computer, and have a different directory tree.....
It is not as easy as it sounds (sort of like programming....not as easy to turn out good maintainable code as it sounds..))
I sympathize with all the people who had bad teachers, and poorly led schools, and problems with rules.
But on the other hand, teaching is hard, esp when technology is constantly changing, you have to prepare a new lesson plan every year, and you have a wide range of students in the audience....
I think that rather then expecting the educational system to provide good comp sci classes for the very, very small number of students who want them , a better solution is comp sci clubs, with infrastructure (suggested books, contests, etc)supplied by some sort of foundation a la FSF; this way you get the teacher who wants to do it (its basically overtime, so you have a higher proportion of people who want to do it, as opposed to 9to5vers) and you only get the kids who want to do it, so you have fewer problems with people at all diff skill and interest levels.
I used tbird for over a year, and when I was laid off, and had to send out email that looked nice, and needed a good online calendar, I found that tbird didn't work for me.
it wasn't performance, it was features; for 40 bucks, you can get a copy of office 2003 off of ebay, and outlook has a lot more formatting features then tbird
not to mention the calendar; the calendar on tbird basically sucks bigtime
etc
YMMV; I just don't get why you would use tbird if you have the 40 bucks; I'm sure there are a lot people here who prefer tbird to outlook, but for me it was an inferior program.
Dear Geekoid
In response to your comment that their are fundamental physical barriers to widespead adoption of solar/wind/etc, by coincidence, there have been two related stories recently
this is from/. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/08/02/1826223/Stanfords-New-Solar-Tech-Harnesses-Heat-Light
there was also a story in the New York Times in the last week or so about large scale wind in places like Hawaii, and how the need for storage is stimulating entrepreneurial efforts in that area.
On a more philisophical note, for many years, rightly or wrongly, conservatives have been calling liberals naysayers, unwilling to unleash market forces to solve problems. Yet in the area of solar/wind, the shoe is reversed. funny that.
right on
the idea that an enzyme like photolyase, applied externally, would do some good, reveals a level of ignorance about basic biochemistry that is frightening
I don't suppose that anyone has mentioned that sunblock chemicals, which are tested by the australians, probably are made now in China, and has anyone looked at the quality of htese chemicals, to see if there are harmfull contaminants ?
1) today, in the us, nukes are economically unviable without huge gov't subsidys (aka welfare or socialism in other contexts) due to the potentially catastrophic nature of accidents
2) Civilian nukes help the spread of military nukes, because the sophisticated exotic technologys are, to some extent, fungible
3) and best of all
we have better options
The country that has the courage and foresight to turn away from nukes, and invest hundreds of billions in solar and wind and storage and mundane things like more efficient light bulbs and motors will be the economic powerhouse of hte 21st century.
Further,we know that huge decade long gov't investments in RnD pay off: its called aerospace, computers and biotech; each of these industrys, a standout in our economy, became realistic because of long term gov't investment in basic RnD
I sort of view nukes as an intelligence test for big picture thinking; since there are better alternatives, onlly someone who can't graps the big picture would bother to argue the technical merits.
The probably forgotten, but at the time well known comedian art buchwald had to sue hollywood for his royalties,wich were not % of gross, but % of net, and as i remember it, it was the same story - accounting that turned huge profits into losss
Slashdot Mirror
Guy spends 200K on an election, it came from 5 people, who is he gonna listen to ?
Guy is beholden to someone
Guy gets elected and someone give his a hot prostitute to approve a chem waste site
u get the drift, or i gotta snow some more ? PS: if you still believe what u posted, an u ain't a troll, got a bridge in Brooklyn, sell it 2 u cheap
When a person can pop out babies, does not have a job, but walks around with a real Louis Vuitton bag and a bunch of jewelry there is a problem.
How many people. How much do they spend. What % of some budget are these lazy people.
Is this number more or less then the amount spend on movie tickets, or the amount spend on the tax break for hedge fund people.
Furthermore, when illegal immigrants can come here, gain the benefit of our social programs, and not pay taxes, there is another problem.s.
Do they not contribute ? please, give us some real numbers so we can have an estimate as to the actual magnitude of the issue.
yes and no
I think if you ask people questions like, do you favor a ban on lifetime caps, an overwhelming majority are in favor of obama care
part of the problem was the incredibly bad job by obama pelosi and reid in selling the bill; I downloaded many of hte pdfs from the hose and senated during the debate, and there was no index, no table of contents, no bookmarks - I couldn't even find the section that talked about lifetime caps untill, totaly by accident, i found a seprate dem caucus guide, which gave me the right section If you read that section, it was 3 pages of boiler plate (amend Section3(para3aii)... and about 100 words that were clear and concise.
I think pelosi did a really shitty job as speaker and deserved what she got - have you ever gone to eht house web site to try and find something ?
but back to the main point - I think if you asked people the right question, you would find that a majority are in favor of most of the provisions of obama care (at least in theory; my own idea is that just as we provide 4th rate legal care to the poor, to comply with gideon, obama care will result in 4th rate care to the poor, so limo liberals can say, look we did something....)
The detailed molecular mechanism has been know for sometime; what these workers did was to create a detailed 3D atom resolution model of the responsible protein perforin, while this will certainly help in understanding how pore forming proteins, which are widespread and often act as agents of disease, work, it is not consistent with the title.
oh, overblown article headline , taken from PR pretending to be news, on slashdot. Why am I surprised ?
note - I coudn't get the DOI at the bottom of the article to work , so if this is not published, it is not even *science*
Here is a review by author whisstock The structure and function of mammalian membrane-attack complex/perforin-like proteins. Kondos SC, Hatfaludi T, Voskoboinik I, Trapani JA, Law RH, Whisstock JC, Dunstone MA. Tissue Antigens. 2010 Sep 22. doi: 10.1111/j.1399-0039.2010.01566.x. [Epub ahead of print]PMID: 2086058
I am amazed that people think google is (a) a good search engine, rather then soemthing to generate profit for google, and (b) that as alarge corporation, google can be trusted to do anything other then max profits.
The idea that a large public company like google will do anything other then maximize profits is silly beyond belief;
There is one small exception: if a company is a quasi monopoly, as google is, then it can indulge in some luxuries, like sponsering summer of code; the epitome of this was the old Bell Labs research center in Murray HIll NJ (at least one Nobel Prize for fundamental science, microwave background).
PS google is willing to invade my privacy and yours with street view; can you do streetview for the personal residences of Page and Brin and the directors and senior executives of Google ? why doesn't someone start a site, www.seehowitfeels.net, that is just devoted to giving Page and Brin the same privacy that ordinary people have. Bet the lawsuits come soon and often
so the entire world's system of weights depends on this block of Pt-Ir in paris Every now and then, they have to take it out of its sealed container, flushed with ultrapure He, and actually use it to verify a secondary std trouble is, you have to clean it. apparently, there is one old guy who is the only person in the world who can clean the Pt Ir cylinder without changing its weight by more then a few micrograms So....there is a scientific conference, what do we do when this guy retires ?
as someone who makes a pretty decent living doing PCR and growing e coli and doing DNA sequencing, I ain't worried - DIY biotech is no more a threat to the industry then DIY computer chips: you could probably buy reject wafers and etch a circuit on it in you backyard, you ain't never gonna threaten INTEL or AMD
an airship that can lift 150 tons has a lot of crossectional area, even if a sphere need some serious motors to keep it stable in crosswinds, updrafts etc this was brought out in a great book by the new yorker write john mcphee, I think most of /. would love reading this book
I have the impression, without any data, that the number of scientific papers in leading journals with authors with a china affiliation is exploding - does anyone have any data ?
I see this particularly in chemistry journals like Analytical Chemistry, Langmuir and J of the American Chem Soc (all 3 published by Amer Chem Soc). Less so in the top flight molecular and cell biology journals. It would be really fascinating to get some data on this.
It is a commonplace that gov't is "wastefull" and "inefficient" and full of overpaid hacks,etc etc /. and dilbert ? /., is the gov't more wastefull the MS ? doesn't anyone remember the thread where there were some number of people >10 on the MS committee to figure out what was on the vista start menu ? not to implement it or anything like that, but just the list of what was on teh default menu....
But doesn't this describe most private biz, at least viewed in the eyes of
why is private jets for CEOs no less wasteful then anything the gov't does ?
You could go a long way with this, but I think it is a Myth that large publicly traded companies are, on avg, more efficient then the gov't and there is a lot of evidence to support the opposite posistion, eg look at he amt spent on admin in the social sec administration.
To give an example: I work in a biotech lab. The other day, a guy comes in with a 400 dollar piece of equipment, "free". What gives ? well, "they" through out a whole pallet (maybe 50) of these jobbers cause the name of the company changed, and they didn't want to bother changing the logo on the equipment....
yet it is gov't that gets blamed for being wasteful.
I mean come on, this is
std commercial ultracentrifuges, used in the life sciences, spin at 80 to 100 K, and the objects they rotate ("rotors" in the argot)are titanium cylinders or frustrated cones that weigh several kilos. Centrifgues that went up to 50K were available in the 1970s, if not earlier; one limit was the strenght of hte "rotor", which were made of aluminum at the time; now they are made of Ti and carbon fiber. As you can imagine, the manufacturers are carefull to stress safety; one thing that distinguishes a Beckman L50, which has a max speed of 50K, and a 90K instrument is the rating for the armor plate that surrounds the spinning object; basically, if a multi Kilo piece of metal rotating at 90K comes loose, the armor has to be able to prevent any projectile formation PS: you know when it happens, cause you get a loud noise https://www.beckmancoulter.com/eCatalog/CatalogItemDetails.do?productId=12210 (http://www.beckmancoulter.com/literature/Bioresearch/BR-9272A.pdf ) http://golgi.harvard.edu/Gaudet/Resources_Files/Beckman/PrepRT.pdf
uh....median income levels ?
sure the economy was booming: people were living on credit. this is like the old joke about the man who jumps off the empire state building: as he passes the 20th floor, he yells out, so far so good...
I don't know your opinion of the New York Times, but few media are ALL bad. The times had a wonderful piece a year or so back, where they looked at the families in all the houses on a short cul de sac in CA - the reporter just went thru one house after the other, getting peoples stories.
and the take home? people were having a great time, spending way beyond their means, I mean doing really crazy stuff, like going to vegas on a home equity loan The other side is, if you are worried about your job (say going to china) and your company cuts your pay, the profits go up, but is this "good" for the country ? If you can spout Laffer curve, I'm sure I could find a PhD economist or 3 who can show how lowering wages to maximize profits leads to bad things....
"no reactors" no commercial reactos, there are a lot of small RnD scale thorium reactors, or at leat that is what i get from the wiki page on "thorium fuel cycle" which has what looks like agood list of thorium reactors
"thorium reactors" this may be true, but today, in 2010, there are NO actual operating thorium cycle reactors, and therefore, as a matter of fact, we don't really know how well they would perform, assuming they actually could be built economically. as they say, in theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice they ain't beyond this, there are two other significant issues with any nuclear power proposal: a, the associated technology (eg, how to handle high level waste safely) can serve as a cloak for related activities in bomb making; you just can't get away from this (eg, if you have a thorium reactor, you need emergency technology for dealing with very hot waste; this same technology, or related technology, is critical to bomb making, but is very rare, and hard to obtain and hide if you don't have a large civilian program) b) ther are better alternatives; nuclear power is an intelligence test: if you say yest to nuclear, instead of solar/wind, you fail (and don't give me that crap about fundamental physical contraints on solar/wind - people who say stuff like that are just ignorant)
I mean, I've been hearing about this stuff for what, 20 years ? Eventually, one of em has to be right. ,and who live 30 miles up a dirt road, and depend totally on a truck built with parts from all over the world and mideast oil to get to a food store with food from all over the world - they are gonna move a little closer to town, or they will become really independent.
As to the "catastrophre"
In my neighborhood, people drive chevy suburbans half a mile to the supermarket for a bottle of bottled water, which you can get free from the tap (here in boston, we have pretty good water)
oil gets more $$, people will change their behavour. For example, Those people who want to "get away from it all" and be "independent"
those incredibly wasteful people who take private jets ? gone
etc
I saw the stanford website several years ago, and thought it poorly written and incomprehensible to the non specialist at the time; revisiting the goedel link in the article does nothing to dispell that impression.
However, the editor of the stanford site is quite right, that academics and others with some expertise don't want to see their hardwork trashed on wiki; I personaly know a lot about molecular biology and DNA, but have stopped contributing because, (a) doofuses keep saying stuff that is wrong, and (b) the wiki copyright policy allows some else to steal my stuff *for profit*
I think the future does belong to closed, editor driven wikis, and we will see a lot more of them in the future - maybe the professors who torture their college students with super $$ textbooks can get together and write textbook wikis; you got 1,000 college profs who teach, say organic chem, surely 150 of 'em can write well, and surely 30 of those could contribute; you got 30 people to share the load, and a couple of interns from CompSci to setup the software and hardware, you could turn out a 1st rate organic chem text, and save college students millions, and stickit to the loathsome textbook publishers all at once.
here is claim 1 " 1. A computer readable storage medium storing computer-executable instructions for performing a method for shutting down an operating system, the method comprising the steps of: receiving a command to initiate operating system shut down; sending a shut down request to a graphical user interface application without a top level window; receiving no response to the shut down request with a predetermined period of time; determining that the graphical user interface application without the top level window is not hung; automatically terminating the graphical user interface application without the top level window; determining whether any graphical user interface applications with a top level window delay shut down; prompting a user for a user command to selectively shut down the graphical user interface applications with the top level window that delay shut down after determining that the graphical user interface applications with the top level window delay shut down; and then after the determining step, automatically terminating all running applications responsive to the user command received from the user that has been prompted. " Does anyone skilled in the art see any obvious holes ?
1) It is quite a long story, for the Times, yet it doesn't mention that you can use things like disable cookies and ad blocker 2) if you have a subscription to the Times (I think it is requried to see the actual story) go on line and make a comment; tell people, specifically where they can go to learn about online privacy (to bad firefox has gotten worse in the privacy gui in every version since 2.0)
with poor spelling, the idea of RDBs or other stuff just sounds like a nonstarter. (if you think install apache 1click, etc works, then you have no idea of what real scientists are like; perhaps this means that they don't have the training they should have, but I have used these one click installers, and they are way, way, waaaay to complex for me, and I am sure, for most scientists, for whom an excel pivot table or vlookup is the height of programming expertise) The problem is that "scientific data" is often like the real world - messy, undefined stuff. It also , typically includes all sorts of things - images from cameras ranging from consumer point and clicks to peltier cooled 24bit CCDs, flat files uploaded from machines, complex propietary files uploaded, hand written notes, etc etc. For instance, for a recent experiment I did, I have ".xad" files, which are a prop format from an agilent instrument ".nef" files from a Nikon consumer camera several .txt files which need diff converters to put them into useful excel files
several .pngs
some of hte key .txt were imported into .xlsx, then imported into a specialized graphics program (Igor) which has its own propetary format...
my written notes on how to do the experiment (word doc with embedded excel minitables, which show calculations for things like how many grams of salt per liter of solution..)
propietary files from a nanodrop (don't ask) which can be opened with excel to get sort of usable data
hand entered data from a thermo electron conductivity meter (integers) a cheap balance, lot numbers of key reagents, pointers to previous experiments where i describe how key reagents were prepared, pointers to key experiments with background info
I don't think a single one of these files has the data organized in a really useful manner; all require extensie hand editing to get them into a form that is even understandable, let alone integrated.
not to mention the hideous problems of writing reports in word with embedded pictures, the loss of functionality in excel 2007 (x error bars hard to do, xy graph format reverts to line format without telling you,etc)
what this guy really wants is sort of the holy grail of web searching - the ability to do natural language queries on his data set.
Like, for growing fish, what is the effect of pH (acidity) and ionic strength (how much salt is in th water) on body length vs time
IN the meantime, what would help would be
1) if everyone complained to gates and ballmer,a nd got them to divert some miniscule fraction of their monopoly level profits from office, and put those profits to work making office usable for technically minded people
2) A way to keep track of files across changes in file name and directory name.
this is a huge problem; what would help is a way to embed a serial number into a file, and every time you use the file, the serial number goes with it, eg, you have a .tif, you crop it in image editor, import the crop into powerpoint, add text, export the mess into word, save the word doc, re edit it a year later, then two years later, looking at the re editied word doc, yo need to find the ORIGINAL .tiff, and in teh mean time, you ahve moved to a new computer, and have a different directory tree.....
It is not as easy as it sounds (sort of like programming....not as easy to turn out good maintainable code as it sounds..)) I sympathize with all the people who had bad teachers, and poorly led schools, and problems with rules. But on the other hand, teaching is hard, esp when technology is constantly changing, you have to prepare a new lesson plan every year, and you have a wide range of students in the audience.... I think that rather then expecting the educational system to provide good comp sci classes for the very, very small number of students who want them , a better solution is comp sci clubs, with infrastructure (suggested books, contests, etc)supplied by some sort of foundation a la FSF; this way you get the teacher who wants to do it (its basically overtime, so you have a higher proportion of people who want to do it, as opposed to 9to5vers) and you only get the kids who want to do it, so you have fewer problems with people at all diff skill and interest levels.
I used tbird for over a year, and when I was laid off, and had to send out email that looked nice, and needed a good online calendar, I found that tbird didn't work for me. it wasn't performance, it was features; for 40 bucks, you can get a copy of office 2003 off of ebay, and outlook has a lot more formatting features then tbird not to mention the calendar; the calendar on tbird basically sucks bigtime etc YMMV; I just don't get why you would use tbird if you have the 40 bucks; I'm sure there are a lot people here who prefer tbird to outlook, but for me it was an inferior program.
Dear Geekoid In response to your comment that their are fundamental physical barriers to widespead adoption of solar/wind/etc, by coincidence, there have been two related stories recently this is from /. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/08/02/1826223/Stanfords-New-Solar-Tech-Harnesses-Heat-Light
there was also a story in the New York Times in the last week or so about large scale wind in places like Hawaii, and how the need for storage is stimulating entrepreneurial efforts in that area.
On a more philisophical note, for many years, rightly or wrongly, conservatives have been calling liberals naysayers, unwilling to unleash market forces to solve problems. Yet in the area of solar/wind, the shoe is reversed. funny that.
right on the idea that an enzyme like photolyase, applied externally, would do some good, reveals a level of ignorance about basic biochemistry that is frightening I don't suppose that anyone has mentioned that sunblock chemicals, which are tested by the australians, probably are made now in China, and has anyone looked at the quality of htese chemicals, to see if there are harmfull contaminants ?
1) today, in the us, nukes are economically unviable without huge gov't subsidys (aka welfare or socialism in other contexts) due to the potentially catastrophic nature of accidents 2) Civilian nukes help the spread of military nukes, because the sophisticated exotic technologys are, to some extent, fungible 3) and best of all we have better options The country that has the courage and foresight to turn away from nukes, and invest hundreds of billions in solar and wind and storage and mundane things like more efficient light bulbs and motors will be the economic powerhouse of hte 21st century. Further,we know that huge decade long gov't investments in RnD pay off: its called aerospace, computers and biotech; each of these industrys, a standout in our economy, became realistic because of long term gov't investment in basic RnD I sort of view nukes as an intelligence test for big picture thinking; since there are better alternatives, onlly someone who can't graps the big picture would bother to argue the technical merits.
The probably forgotten, but at the time well known comedian art buchwald had to sue hollywood for his royalties,wich were not % of gross, but % of net, and as i remember it, it was the same story - accounting that turned huge profits into losss