That's interesting, I didn't know that. I do know that a certain E-Sata 'hot swappable' card I installed a while ago *COULD NOT* be set to 'disable write caching' in XP. It was a mounted volume, and Damnit We're Going To Treat it As Such. I was a bit pissed about that. You know *MAYBE* I bought a hot-swappable E-Sata card so I could use it with a removable disk? Perhaps!? Thankfully there's a 3rd party program that flushes mounted volumes so you can 'eject' them - and Win7 handles it natively. But srsly.
The option being disabled makes a lot more sense now. I just kinda assumed (doh!) that it was Windows handling the caching.
Nope, no better. Windows 7 just likes to tell you that 'Disk cannot be removed: A file is open on one of the eighty thousand services and programs which windows starts at boot time. Please figure out which poorly written piece of shit failed to remove the file lock which it shouldn't have registered in the first place from the text file which you attached to an email sent three days ago, and try again.'
Only, were Windows even remotely close to that helpful I would have known to close Outlook. Though Outlook is FAR from the only program to lock files which it has zero business locking, and then failing to remove said locks.
I will admit that I'm surprised that WinXP enabled write-caching by default on a USB drive. Not because that would be an incredibly stupid default (Ha!), but because I thought I remembered having to turn it ON for a scratch drive a while ago.
Remember the portrait of the "Government Software Developer" painted in Snow Crash? This sounds like where you work.
If your higher ups won't let you make the decision to listen to music, or not, on your own, I simply cannot imagine that they are going to be handing you opportunities to stretch your development skills into valuable (pronounced 'marketable') new directions.
While the timing is horrible, I'd suggest you begin the search for a new job. Allow your current company to turn into HP without you.
"I know you might prefer to listen to music, but remember that is only a preference. If it becomes an essential part of your daily routine then you are not doing yourself any favours."
I have ADD. Music is not a preference. Period.
Furthermore, I would be stunned to find a single study that correlates your implied argument ( 'anyone can work through distractions, if they try / practice' ). Whereas I know that there are plenty of studies which show the opposite: distractions cost knowledge workers massive amounts of time - the numbers I've seen bandied about range from ~5 to 15 minutes of time lost for a single, simple interruption (change in primary focus).
-- Or Bernie Madoff, who stole BILLIONS of dollars - wiping out whole families, I suppose he should just get a slap on the wrist eh?
No, he should be forced to work until he dies, paying as much as can possibly be paid back to the people he swindled. This works better than us paying 40+K a year to keep him in prison.
-- The point of prison has never been to punish the prisoner. It may not have that effect, but the ultimate *stated* point of non-life prison sentences is punishment and deterrent.
-- The only real purpose of prison is to remove the people who harm society from the society they harm. If this were the case there would only be life-sentences. Removing an individual from society for a few years (at a cost ~40K a year) does *provably* far more harm than good, if you're only consideration is 'getting the off the streets'. Remember, that 40k does not include the benefit of having a productive member of society in jail. And most people who end up in jail for a year or so are generally not jobless, and almost certainly aren't jobless *and* stealing/doing 40K or so worth of damage/theft per year while out of prison.
-- So repeat after me What a disturbing phrase.
The reason our sentencing laws are so draconian is because too many people ignore them, and have never stopped to consider what would happen to their life if they spent even one week in jail on charge to which they'd been found guilty. A significant percentage of Americans would find that they'd been fired, can't get hired at a similar job, their credit has been affected, and that it's all legal. So they can't make their mortgage, can't pay their debt etc etc. Extrapolate the curve.
Prisons exist in America as they are today because we've allowed the prison industry to become profitable. The regulations now exist to serve the private prison industry, because the only industry that pays any attention to the prison system is the private prison industry. It is *NOT* that we don't have regulations in place. It is that normal Americans just aren't paying attention - as we are wont to do - and a capitalist response has filled the vacuum. I'm not against capitalism in any way, I'm just stating a fact. Also, I'm blaming 'us', the citizens who are not paying attention, not the corporations - despite the fact that I think every company I've every looked into which makes money off of prisons is disgusting.
I will admit that the advertising seen whenever a major prison bill comes up always appeals to exactly your viewpoint. The advertising paid for by the prison industry, that is.
To summarize: Prisons and draconian sentencing laws exist because of a desire for profits. The conditions which have allowed industry to add even more stupidly long sentencing has been, in order. - Citizen apathy. - A general lack of empathy in our society - we rarely attempt to 'put ourselves in their place' before making snap judgments, which we then stick to. - Voter ignorance, combined with. -- appeals to fear (get them off my streets!) -- appeals to vengeance (Punish those bastards! See second point also). -- 'not my problem', or worse -- 'MAKE THIS not my problem'.
I specify vengeance, not punishment or 'justice'. Nobody screams 'Punish them!' unless that which they truly desire is vengeance.
It is really easy to tell if you are punishing someone or are extracting vengeance: if you feel good about it, it's vengeance. Try punishing a three year old for trying to start across a street without looking if you don't believe me.
Portland (like most cities) uses a mix of HPS/Halide. I can't recall seeing any mercury vapor lamps, but sometimes they blend in pretty well. Mercury vapor tend to be in the lower power ranges, and I think PDX uses HPS preferentially.
The driving issue behind going LED has very little to do with efficiency, except perhaps as greenwashing. Yes, it almost certainly does save money on power, and without a doubt generates less CO2, in the long run. But Portland gets most of its power from hydro - particularly from ~8pm to 5am, aka offpeak. Percent savings due to power will be much lower than elsewhere (LA, for instance).
Beyond all the obvious benefits the largest cost savings comes from maintenance. HID lights don't really 'burn out', as such. They degrade. As they degrade, the current required to keep them lit hits point where the ballast can't keep up. Ahhh, then the magic! As the bulb cools, the current required to light it drops - presto! Annoying flickering street light.
All cities, to my knowledge, replace all the bulbs on a particular street on a schedule. This is expensive, but nothing compared to the cost of spot replacements. Sending a crew (perhaps a crew of one, but whatever) out to replace a single bulb on some random street will never cost less than a hundred bucks. For a four to forty dollar bulb. Chances are, when you take into account salary, cost of the lift equipment, drive time, aborted calls (the on-off cycle for a dying HID lamp can be hours), etc etc etc, you'll probably end up with somewhere around $300 bucks per spot-replacement. City lights. We won't be replacing those crazy gajillion candlepower highway interchange lamps with LEDs anytime soon. But you bet your @$$ it's going to be a couple of grand to drag out the equipment needed to reach and replace some lights on a 100 foot tall post.
With LEDs you've got hundreds of lamps per fixture. If you simply declare 'We replace lamps with 90 thousand hours (whole street replacement), bad ballasts (spot replacement), and lamps with less than 70% nominal output (spot, if reported). You've wiped out ALL aborted calls (either the ballast is dead or it isn't, either ~30% of the LEDs are dead or they aren't), and 99.5% of all spot replacements. That's a lot of bucks.
I am of course being somewhat sarcastic. But not much. If you ground a wire cage as described you'd be fine. The question I'm hazy about is what frequencies are being scanned. You may need something with a finer mesh than chicken wire. Now that I actually consider it, this might also just reduce the range of the scan, rather than eliminate the possibility. Any EE's care to enlighten?
Low earth orbit starts at ~200km:
Rleo1 = Re + 200km = 6,578km
Low earth orbit extends up to about 2000km ( it's debated. Using nice round numbers )
Rleo2 = Re + 2000km = 8,378km
4/3* PI * ( Rleo2^3 - Rleo1^3 ) = 1.271E12km^3
1.3 trillion cubic kilometers of space to sweep.
Assume a block of aerogel 10 meters on a side - so a frontal area of 100 m^2. That's pretty big, and it won't get any bigger unless we figure out how to manufacture the gel in space:
Agel = 100m^2
= 0.0001km^2
Velocity in leo is around 7.5km/second, relative to the ground.
Vgel = 7.5km/s
Let's assume that we are just trying to sweep the entire volume of space once, ignoring that things are moving etc. Even one sweep of the volume would certainly clean up a lot, if the orbit of the gel is tangent to the orbit of most of the junk. So we just pretend that the block of gel is flying down a tunnel, basically - frontal area times velocity * time equals volume cleaned:
Did you bother to read the article? How about with your personal biases shelved for two seconds?
"Of *course* healthy people don't get a significant personal benefit from being vaccinated."
Have you ever had the flu? I have. The actual flu. About once a decade so far. And I damned well would have given my car for a cure that worked, each time.
"Nobody ever said they did."
Every single 'get vaccinated' ad focuses on this.
"If all you care about is yourself, and you are healthy as an ox, then by all means don't get vaccinated. Not getting vaccinated is a great way to get your inheritance early. Just get H1N1, then visit your elderly uncle to cheer him up. You'll transmit the virus to him, he'll die, and you'll be rich. But if you want your elderly uncle to live, or, worse luck, he's already written you out of the will, then you might as well get vaccinated."
Ha, that's actually sorta funny. But if you have the flu, good luck getting your ass out of bed by the time you realize that you have a great opportunity to off your uncle.
"IOW, the point of the vaccine is to prevent the pandemic, not to protect you. So the *right* question to ask is, does the H1N1 vaccine confer any immunity to the recipient? This is a question that can readily be answered by an epidemiology study, and that can also be ethically studied in a double-blind study - just vaccinate half of a healthy population, don't vaccinate the other half, and see how many get H1N1 and how many don't. The problem is that if the vaccine works, you don't know until it's too late. So it's good for checking your work, but no good for making the decision as to whether to do mass vaccinations - mass vaccinations are pointless after the pandemic has run its course."
Congratulations! You accidentally stumbled upon the point of the article: Nobody with the power to implement them supports these studies, due to "common knowledge". Ranting Score: 100. Reading Comprehension: 0.
"I suspect that epidemiology studies are just as good for evaluating the efficacy of the vaccine *after* the pandemic has passed anyway, so that's probably why they don't do double blind studies. But I'm not a virologist, so that's just a WAG."
@See "Reading Comprehension: 0". And then maybe consider reading, oh, the first 1/8th of the article.
"What I really wish people would do would be to stop coming up with conspiracy theories about vaccines - these are really harmful. Information is what we need, not panicked hyperbole."
Gods. That you can compare the annual, untested flu-vaccine to the world-changing vaccines simply hurts my brain. Information is what those mentioned in the article are *trying to get*.
Agreed! Simply find a significant group of people, *none of whom* would otherwise have received the vaccine, and test away. Now you've taken your N study participants and provided N/2 with a dose of vaccine they otherwise wouldn't have taken.
And wow, how crappy would one feel if the half taking the vaccine had a higher likelihood of dying.
Personally I ( being healthy ) am mostly interested in the question of 'does this needle in the arm reduce my risk of getting the flu'. So few people seem to actually remember when they *really* have had *the* Flu. They get some mild fever and show up at work whining. No. The way you know you have the flu is that you WISH you had the energy to kill yourself. If you can drag your ass out to your car, you almost certainly don't have the flu.
From a business perspective the above (before the smart-assery) is incredibly important: My company schedules and pays for on-site flu shots each year. Family included. Free. That isn't cheap. But if it keeps even a few percent of us from getting the flu and being out for a week it pays for itself ten times over.
Ah, actually what was pointed out was that *those who tout flu vaccines as a panacea* are doing exactly what parent just claimed.
Dear god. I'm three beers in and even I realized at a glance that the parent post is denial / reactionary idiocy: "That people who got the shot...*gasp* likely got the shot the previous year and *shock* have some built up immunity due to the previous years shot." Immunity to WHAT? The reason you have to get shots every year is because the freak'n flu virus evolves so rapidly!
"The First Amendment doesn't protect you from being fired by your boss if your boss is a private individual who disagrees with your public acts of free speech. "
Errr, yes it does?
IINAL, but I have to say that you should check up on this one. Plenty a wrongful dismissal suit has been won along such grounds.
Satellites in orbit actually have to take into account solar pressure. Of course, IIRC that's almost exclusively solar wind pressure, not photon reflection pressure, but whatever.
*due to the heat difference* it would not move, which I think is confirming what you didn't mean. As to the reflection part - what I think you did mean - a silvered mirror in space that does basically what you described is called a solar sail. There are two types: one for reflecting light, and one for slowing down high-speed charged particles streaming out from the sun.
Your sail would have on the order of 100K times the area of your 'cabin'. To be more precise, the solar sail would need an area proportional to the mass which it would be dragging around, multiplied by the desired acceleration. etc etc.
The mag sail is even more awesome: it would just be a MASSIVE loop of superconducting wire with a charge running through it.
"Space Propulsion Analysis and Design" has a nice section on such interesting types of propulsion. Or search for magnetic sails or solar sails.
IANAL, but I believe that it would only become false advertising if the company referred to the site's comment board at a later date and said 'Look! Nobody has ever given us a bad review! Everybody at least likes our product!'
Other than that, the company can arbitrarily decide to post only reviews that have the word 'chipmunk' in them. For instance. They have to make an assertion (express or strongly implied) *in an advertisement* that is patently false for it to be false advertising. Lies by omission don't count.
Personally I think that such 'reviews' should be prominently titled 'testimonials' or some such. It *is* disgusting. But you should never trust a review on a site where the subject under review controls the content./shrug
Those maps, as he points out: "creative commons shows how it's done". Creative commons shows how it is done, to cater to morons who can't pick their state out on a map of the entire country. SERIOUSLY? Not having state abbreviations is an issue for this guy? Since when is 'fucking moron' classified as a disability? Does 508 cover it?
I hereby raise a middle finger to your vision of accessibility, Mr. Seth Grimes.
My TI 89 can ( thanks to my programming ) transform between Space-2, Space-3, Body-2 and Body-3 rotation sequences. It can transform any of those into a quaternion rotation sequence.
I have also written a function that will calculate a minimum energy transfer orbit. I don't remember the details, but it wasn't a simple Hohmann.
Hardly 'adding two integers'.
The guy who talks about ROMs has it. The TI-89 was more powerful than Mathematica when it came out. There is some incredible IP in there.
Anyone who puts their life on the line for an ideal is representing themselves. Or is a publicity whore with a gambling problem.
Though, you are correct in one thing: it is plausible that Washington would never have take the risk without the backing of tens ( I question hundreds, strongly ) of thousands of people.
[...]apparently felt that he was doing the right thing and wasn't able to distance himself from his own beliefs long enough to recognize that they were putting him in jeopardy
Yeah. History is full of those kind of people.
Washington. Franklin. Jefferson. Truman.
Stand up for what you believe. Or die know you compromised your beliefs to satisfy a bunch of know nothing idiots. It's a choice.
Most people choose not to make it, by living shallow, quiet, unobtrusive lives.
Including myself, actually! Life's a lot more fun when you don't have to run from the FBI. Or so I would imagine.
"But Jeff Hanley, who manages NASA's Constellation program that includes the Ares I, questioned the validity of the Air Force study because it relied on only one example. He said NASA had done its own study, using supercomputers to replicate the behavior of Ares I, that predicted a safe outcome."
Allow me to translate this:
"[...] He said NASA had done its own study, *USING NO EXAMPLES AT ALL WHATSOEVER*, that predicted the results that NASA required for further funding."
Show me that 'the supercomputers' model the Air Force's one example to within.5% of reality and I will consider apologizing to Mr. Hanley.
I am incredibly passionate about space flight. The incompetence and political gaming which has produced the fiasco that is the Ares has not caused me any surprise. From the moment NASA decided on solids for a manned vehicle I knew that, without question, the advancement of the state of the art was not going to come from NASA. Ares isn't about space travel. It's about government subsidies to existing aerospace contractors. Thiokol/ATK, I'm looking at you.
Slashdot Mirror
Any competitive advantage which relies on the silence of thousands of employees earning nearly-minimum wage with no benefits, isn't.
That's interesting, I didn't know that. I do know that a certain E-Sata 'hot swappable' card I installed a while ago *COULD NOT* be set to 'disable write caching' in XP. It was a mounted volume, and Damnit We're Going To Treat it As Such. I was a bit pissed about that. You know *MAYBE* I bought a hot-swappable E-Sata card so I could use it with a removable disk? Perhaps!? Thankfully there's a 3rd party program that flushes mounted volumes so you can 'eject' them - and Win7 handles it natively. But srsly.
The option being disabled makes a lot more sense now. I just kinda assumed (doh!) that it was Windows handling the caching.
Nope, no better. Windows 7 just likes to tell you that 'Disk cannot be removed: A file is open on one of the eighty thousand services and programs which windows starts at boot time. Please figure out which poorly written piece of shit failed to remove the file lock which it shouldn't have registered in the first place from the text file which you attached to an email sent three days ago, and try again.'
Only, were Windows even remotely close to that helpful I would have known to close Outlook. Though Outlook is FAR from the only program to lock files which it has zero business locking, and then failing to remove said locks.
I will admit that I'm surprised that WinXP enabled write-caching by default on a USB drive. Not because that would be an incredibly stupid default (Ha!), but because I thought I remembered having to turn it ON for a scratch drive a while ago.
Supposedly he invented the water bed in that book, too.
Remember the portrait of the "Government Software Developer" painted in Snow Crash? This sounds like where you work.
If your higher ups won't let you make the decision to listen to music, or not, on your own, I simply cannot imagine that they are going to be handing you opportunities to stretch your development skills into valuable (pronounced 'marketable') new directions.
While the timing is horrible, I'd suggest you begin the search for a new job. Allow your current company to turn into HP without you.
"I know you might prefer to listen to music, but remember that is only a preference. If it becomes an essential part of your daily routine then you are not doing yourself any favours."
I have ADD. Music is not a preference. Period.
Furthermore, I would be stunned to find a single study that correlates your implied argument ( 'anyone can work through distractions, if they try / practice' ). Whereas I know that there are plenty of studies which show the opposite: distractions cost knowledge workers massive amounts of time - the numbers I've seen bandied about range from ~5 to 15 minutes of time lost for a single, simple interruption (change in primary focus).
Noise canceling headphones FTW.
-- Or Bernie Madoff, who stole BILLIONS of dollars - wiping out whole families, I suppose he should just get a slap on the wrist eh?
No, he should be forced to work until he dies, paying as much as can possibly be paid back to the people he swindled. This works better than us paying 40+K a year to keep him in prison.
-- The point of prison has never been to punish the prisoner.
It may not have that effect, but the ultimate *stated* point of non-life prison sentences is punishment and deterrent.
-- The only real purpose of prison is to remove the people who harm society from the society they harm.
If this were the case there would only be life-sentences. Removing an individual from society for a few years (at a cost ~40K a year) does *provably* far more harm than good, if you're only consideration is 'getting the off the streets'. Remember, that 40k does not include the benefit of having a productive member of society in jail. And most people who end up in jail for a year or so are generally not jobless, and almost certainly aren't jobless *and* stealing/doing 40K or so worth of damage/theft per year while out of prison.
-- So repeat after me
What a disturbing phrase.
The reason our sentencing laws are so draconian is because too many people ignore them, and have never stopped to consider what would happen to their life if they spent even one week in jail on charge to which they'd been found guilty. A significant percentage of Americans would find that they'd been fired, can't get hired at a similar job, their credit has been affected, and that it's all legal. So they can't make their mortgage, can't pay their debt etc etc. Extrapolate the curve.
Prisons exist in America as they are today because we've allowed the prison industry to become profitable. The regulations now exist to serve the private prison industry, because the only industry that pays any attention to the prison system is the private prison industry. It is *NOT* that we don't have regulations in place. It is that normal Americans just aren't paying attention - as we are wont to do - and a capitalist response has filled the vacuum. I'm not against capitalism in any way, I'm just stating a fact. Also, I'm blaming 'us', the citizens who are not paying attention, not the corporations - despite the fact that I think every company I've every looked into which makes money off of prisons is disgusting.
I will admit that the advertising seen whenever a major prison bill comes up always appeals to exactly your viewpoint. The advertising paid for by the prison industry, that is.
To summarize:
Prisons and draconian sentencing laws exist because of a desire for profits.
The conditions which have allowed industry to add even more stupidly long sentencing has been, in order.
- Citizen apathy.
- A general lack of empathy in our society - we rarely attempt to 'put ourselves in their place' before making snap judgments, which we then stick to.
- Voter ignorance, combined with.
-- appeals to fear (get them off my streets!)
-- appeals to vengeance (Punish those bastards! See second point also).
-- 'not my problem', or worse
-- 'MAKE THIS not my problem'.
I specify vengeance, not punishment or 'justice'. Nobody screams 'Punish them!' unless that which they truly desire is vengeance.
It is really easy to tell if you are punishing someone or are extracting vengeance: if you feel good about it, it's vengeance. Try punishing a three year old for trying to start across a street without looking if you don't believe me.
Portland (like most cities) uses a mix of HPS/Halide. I can't recall seeing any mercury vapor lamps, but sometimes they blend in pretty well. Mercury vapor tend to be in the lower power ranges, and I think PDX uses HPS preferentially.
The driving issue behind going LED has very little to do with efficiency, except perhaps as greenwashing. Yes, it almost certainly does save money on power, and without a doubt generates less CO2, in the long run. But Portland gets most of its power from hydro - particularly from ~8pm to 5am, aka offpeak. Percent savings due to power will be much lower than elsewhere (LA, for instance).
Beyond all the obvious benefits the largest cost savings comes from maintenance. HID lights don't really 'burn out', as such. They degrade. As they degrade, the current required to keep them lit hits point where the ballast can't keep up. Ahhh, then the magic! As the bulb cools, the current required to light it drops - presto! Annoying flickering street light.
All cities, to my knowledge, replace all the bulbs on a particular street on a schedule. This is expensive, but nothing compared to the cost of spot replacements. Sending a crew (perhaps a crew of one, but whatever) out to replace a single bulb on some random street will never cost less than a hundred bucks. For a four to forty dollar bulb. Chances are, when you take into account salary, cost of the lift equipment, drive time, aborted calls (the on-off cycle for a dying HID lamp can be hours), etc etc etc, you'll probably end up with somewhere around $300 bucks per spot-replacement. City lights. We won't be replacing those crazy gajillion candlepower highway interchange lamps with LEDs anytime soon. But you bet your @$$ it's going to be a couple of grand to drag out the equipment needed to reach and replace some lights on a 100 foot tall post.
With LEDs you've got hundreds of lamps per fixture. If you simply declare 'We replace lamps with 90 thousand hours (whole street replacement), bad ballasts (spot replacement), and lamps with less than 70% nominal output (spot, if reported). You've wiped out ALL aborted calls (either the ballast is dead or it isn't, either ~30% of the LEDs are dead or they aren't), and 99.5% of all spot replacements. That's a lot of bucks.
It'll never run without Flarp.
a: Visit your local feed store.
b: Buy 100 meters of chicken wire.
c: Wrap voting booths.
I am of course being somewhat sarcastic. But not much. If you ground a wire cage as described you'd be fine. The question I'm hazy about is what frequencies are being scanned. You may need something with a finer mesh than chicken wire. Now that I actually consider it, this might also just reduce the range of the scan, rather than eliminate the possibility. Any EE's care to enlighten?
4/3 * PI * R^3
.0001km^2 * 7.5km/s * t(s)
Radius of the earth:
Re = 6,378 km
Low earth orbit starts at ~200km:
Rleo1 = Re + 200km = 6,578km
Low earth orbit extends up to about 2000km ( it's debated. Using nice round numbers )
Rleo2 = Re + 2000km = 8,378km
4/3* PI * ( Rleo2^3 - Rleo1^3 ) = 1.271E12km^3
1.3 trillion cubic kilometers of space to sweep.
Assume a block of aerogel 10 meters on a side - so a frontal area of 100 m^2. That's pretty big, and it won't get any bigger unless we figure out how to manufacture the gel in space:
Agel = 100m^2
= 0.0001km^2
Velocity in leo is around 7.5km/second, relative to the ground.
Vgel = 7.5km/s
Let's assume that we are just trying to sweep the entire volume of space once, ignoring that things are moving etc. Even one sweep of the volume would certainly clean up a lot, if the orbit of the gel is tangent to the orbit of most of the junk. So we just pretend that the block of gel is flying down a tunnel, basically - frontal area times velocity * time equals volume cleaned:
Vclean = Agel * Vgel
1.27E12km^3 =
t = 1.695E15 seconds
= 5.37018E7 years
= 53 million years.
Did you bother to read the article? How about with your personal biases shelved for two seconds?
"Of *course* healthy people don't get a significant personal benefit from being vaccinated."
Have you ever had the flu? I have. The actual flu. About once a decade so far. And I damned well would have given my car for a cure that worked, each time.
"Nobody ever said they did."
Every single 'get vaccinated' ad focuses on this.
"If all you care about is yourself, and you are healthy as an ox, then by all means don't get vaccinated. Not getting vaccinated is a great way to get your inheritance early. Just get H1N1, then visit your elderly uncle to cheer him up. You'll transmit the virus to him, he'll die, and you'll be rich. But if you want your elderly uncle to live, or, worse luck, he's already written you out of the will, then you might as well get vaccinated."
Ha, that's actually sorta funny. But if you have the flu, good luck getting your ass out of bed by the time you realize that you have a great opportunity to off your uncle.
"IOW, the point of the vaccine is to prevent the pandemic, not to protect you. So the *right* question to ask is, does the H1N1 vaccine confer any immunity to the recipient? This is a question that can readily be answered by an epidemiology study, and that can also be ethically studied in a double-blind study - just vaccinate half of a healthy population, don't vaccinate the other half, and see how many get H1N1 and how many don't. The problem is that if the vaccine works, you don't know until it's too late. So it's good for checking your work, but no good for making the decision as to whether to do mass vaccinations - mass vaccinations are pointless after the pandemic has run its course."
Congratulations! You accidentally stumbled upon the point of the article: Nobody with the power to implement them supports these studies, due to "common knowledge". Ranting Score: 100. Reading Comprehension: 0.
"I suspect that epidemiology studies are just as good for evaluating the efficacy of the vaccine *after* the pandemic has passed anyway, so that's probably why they don't do double blind studies. But I'm not a virologist, so that's just a WAG."
@See "Reading Comprehension: 0". And then maybe consider reading, oh, the first 1/8th of the article.
"What I really wish people would do would be to stop coming up with conspiracy theories about vaccines - these are really harmful. Information is what we need, not panicked hyperbole."
Gods. That you can compare the annual, untested flu-vaccine to the world-changing vaccines simply hurts my brain. Information is what those mentioned in the article are *trying to get*.
Agreed! Simply find a significant group of people, *none of whom* would otherwise have received the vaccine, and test away. Now you've taken your N study participants and provided N/2 with a dose of vaccine they otherwise wouldn't have taken.
And wow, how crappy would one feel if the half taking the vaccine had a higher likelihood of dying.
Personally I ( being healthy ) am mostly interested in the question of 'does this needle in the arm reduce my risk of getting the flu'. So few people seem to actually remember when they *really* have had *the* Flu. They get some mild fever and show up at work whining. No. The way you know you have the flu is that you WISH you had the energy to kill yourself. If you can drag your ass out to your car, you almost certainly don't have the flu.
From a business perspective the above (before the smart-assery) is incredibly important: My company schedules and pays for on-site flu shots each year. Family included. Free. That isn't cheap. But if it keeps even a few percent of us from getting the flu and being out for a week it pays for itself ten times over.
Ah, actually what was pointed out was that *those who tout flu vaccines as a panacea* are doing exactly what parent just claimed.
Dear god. I'm three beers in and even I realized at a glance that the parent post is denial / reactionary idiocy: "That people who got the shot...*gasp* likely got the shot the previous year and *shock* have some built up immunity due to the previous years shot." Immunity to WHAT? The reason you have to get shots every year is because the freak'n flu virus evolves so rapidly!
"The First Amendment doesn't protect you from being fired by your boss if your boss is a private individual who disagrees with your public acts of free speech. "
Errr, yes it does?
IINAL, but I have to say that you should check up on this one. Plenty a wrongful dismissal suit has been won along such grounds.
Satellites in orbit actually have to take into account solar pressure. Of course, IIRC that's almost exclusively solar wind pressure, not photon reflection pressure, but whatever.
*due to the heat difference* it would not move, which I think is confirming what you didn't mean. As to the reflection part - what I think you did mean - a silvered mirror in space that does basically what you described is called a solar sail. There are two types: one for reflecting light, and one for slowing down high-speed charged particles streaming out from the sun.
Your sail would have on the order of 100K times the area of your 'cabin'. To be more precise, the solar sail would need an area proportional to the mass which it would be dragging around, multiplied by the desired acceleration. etc etc.
The mag sail is even more awesome: it would just be a MASSIVE loop of superconducting wire with a charge running through it.
"Space Propulsion Analysis and Design" has a nice section on such interesting types of propulsion. Or search for magnetic sails or solar sails.
Cheers
IANAL, but I believe that it would only become false advertising if the company referred to the site's comment board at a later date and said 'Look! Nobody has ever given us a bad review! Everybody at least likes our product!'
/shrug
Other than that, the company can arbitrarily decide to post only reviews that have the word 'chipmunk' in them. For instance. They have to make an assertion (express or strongly implied) *in an advertisement* that is patently false for it to be false advertising. Lies by omission don't count.
Personally I think that such 'reviews' should be prominently titled 'testimonials' or some such. It *is* disgusting. But you should never trust a review on a site where the subject under review controls the content.
Hey, you're on to something.
Then it becomes unreported income, and they go to FEDERAL prison. SCORE! No more money drain on poor old CA.
Those maps, as he points out: "creative commons shows how it's done". Creative commons shows how it is done, to cater to morons who can't pick their state out on a map of the entire country. SERIOUSLY? Not having state abbreviations is an issue for this guy? Since when is 'fucking moron' classified as a disability? Does 508 cover it?
I hereby raise a middle finger to your vision of accessibility, Mr. Seth Grimes.
My TI 89 can ( thanks to my programming ) transform between Space-2, Space-3, Body-2 and Body-3 rotation sequences. It can transform any of those into a quaternion rotation sequence.
I have also written a function that will calculate a minimum energy transfer orbit. I don't remember the details, but it wasn't a simple Hohmann.
Hardly 'adding two integers'.
The guy who talks about ROMs has it. The TI-89 was more powerful than Mathematica when it came out. There is some incredible IP in there.
Anyone who puts their life on the line for an ideal is representing themselves. Or is a publicity whore with a gambling problem.
Though, you are correct in one thing: it is plausible that Washington would never have take the risk without the backing of tens ( I question hundreds, strongly ) of thousands of people.
[...]apparently felt that he was doing the right thing and wasn't able to distance himself from his own beliefs long enough to recognize that they were putting him in jeopardy
Yeah. History is full of those kind of people. Washington. Franklin. Jefferson. Truman.
Stand up for what you believe. Or die know you compromised your beliefs to satisfy a bunch of know nothing idiots. It's a choice.
Most people choose not to make it, by living shallow, quiet, unobtrusive lives.
Including myself, actually! Life's a lot more fun when you don't have to run from the FBI. Or so I would imagine.
... until Emacs becomes self aware.
Yes, that worked SO well with oil.
From TFA:
.5% of reality and I will consider apologizing to Mr. Hanley.
/ATK, I'm looking at you.
"But Jeff Hanley, who manages NASA's Constellation program that includes the Ares I, questioned the validity of the Air Force study because it relied on only one example. He said NASA had done its own study, using supercomputers to replicate the behavior of Ares I, that predicted a safe outcome."
Allow me to translate this:
"[...] He said NASA had done its own study, *USING NO EXAMPLES AT ALL WHATSOEVER*, that predicted the results that NASA required for further funding."
Show me that 'the supercomputers' model the Air Force's one example to within
I am incredibly passionate about space flight. The incompetence and political gaming which has produced the fiasco that is the Ares has not caused me any surprise. From the moment NASA decided on solids for a manned vehicle I knew that, without question, the advancement of the state of the art was not going to come from NASA. Ares isn't about space travel. It's about government subsidies to existing aerospace contractors. Thiokol