Keep these as reminders of a time when we still sent men into space, when the U.S. was a superpower, and when we thought we would always keep moving forward.
Thus, why I strongly suggest to NASA that they contract for 500 or so of the mars rovers and send them to the moon and mars en-masse. They are proven to be durable little buggers, and all the engineering work is done. They will be positively cheap compared to new designs and could really capture the public's interest.
Except that boosters don't scale quite as well. It would still be 'expensive'. But it was seriously considered as an option instead of pushing forward with the Mars Science Laboratory. If that one screws up, then there will be a lot of 'told you so' from the Fast and Furious proponents.
The first link in TFA is all about an additional approval process required for transmitters in the region so that they do not adversely affect the Radio Telescopes. The second link says basically the same thing.
Come back Taco.. we miss you.
We've had dupes for years. Now they're just in the same article. It's progress, you Luddite.
I'm pretty sure we have no idea what wifi, cellphones, etc. are doing to us.
Yes we do. We've studied it do death. At the absolute worst it might cause a tiny, tiny bit of increase in certain cancers and / or cause some local radiative effects near the antenna. It probably doesn't cause anything above the noise floor of people dying from the Usual Suspects. In other words, if you're worried about that cell phone, put down the damned cigarette first. And buckle your seat belt.
It's like how mercury was first treated... we all just think it's fine and laugh at anyone who says otherwise because we don't experience the problem or haven't seen it with our own eyes. But, we really have no idea.
Actually, Mercury was readily identified as an industrial poison soon after it became widely used (Mad as a Hatter).
I'm 45, and while the likes of the Internet and mass-media obviously provide significantly more information than we ever had in the past, I just don't remember so many people having food allergies, aversions, ADD, "sensitivities", or other maladies that are so abundant today. Is it because we are less ignorant and more informed of what were otherwise "hidden" issues, or have we physically evolved into people weaker constitutions?
Read up on the old medical literature (on the Internet of course). 'Hysteria', 'the vapours' and a host of other obviously psychosomatic maladies have been around for quite a long time. The current fad of blaming said problems on the environment (the 'sensitivities') is fairly recent. Previously the scapegoat was God, the Devil, Witches or similar malign influence. It's not surprising since we know that some of the many chemicals / radiations we're exposed to ARE really dangerous (pleased to step away from that tub of acetone if you don't mind). Just keep going along those lines and anything can be dangerous.
Actually, FTFA, they HAVE banned most of those things directly around the Radio Telescope. Still and all, the poor afflicted darlings have probably never heard of the inverse square law. Or inverses. Or squares.
AGW people have a sort of normalcy bias whereby they look at the last X number of years since we have been taking measurements and automatically assume that that is the "correct" climate, and that any variance from that must be because of something we have changed, rather than the result of natural climate cycles.
While that concept is common in the lay press, the scientific literature does not fall into that trap. Much of the climate change debate centers on trying to tease out anthropomorphic from non anthropomorphic climate change. The current consensus (which, of course, may not be correct) is that the recent rapid warming is faster / stronger than can be accounted for by natural phenomena (assuming humans aren't natural) and whose timing correlates well with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
In a very real sense, it makes little difference as long as we understand how fast / much the climate will change in a timeline relevant to extant humans. If the warm spot at the end of the tunnel is due to a bunch of oil being burned or cosmic rays changing the atmosphere, the data suggests an average temperature rise throughout the planet which will drastically change human economic, social and political activity. That's the bottom line. Ignore the cause if you like, just don't ignore the effect.
And if you're not a nuclear engineer, nuclear plant manager, or member of the NRC, then your opinion is based on nothing that remotely looks like scientific thought. In other words, it's pretty much the same as a Global Warming Denier, in that you know little or nothing about the subject, but are ready to assert that the experts are idiots... Additional ranting removed...
Got a little close there, didn't he? No, you don't need to be a nuclear engineer, nuclear plant manager or a member of the NRC (or TEPCO for that matter) to have a reasonable and considered opinion on commercial nuclear power. Consider this: Many of the people in the aforesaid categories have gone on record saying that nuclear power is safe, reliable and economically viable. There have been several high profile incidents where this has been called into question and a large body of literature from people who are nuclear engineers, (former) nuclear plant managers and (former) members of the NRC who have had significant, credible concerns about nuclear power. And similarly credentialed persons have worried about oil, solar and pretty much everything else that moves, beeps or squeaks.
The argument that you have to have a PhD in any given field to discuss it rationally is nonsense. No, I can't detail my concerns about nuclear power as well as I can detail my concerns about Monsanto's stupid attempts at genetic engineering as I know a lot more about the latter that the former, but I have enough of a technical background to follow the arguments about nuclear power fairly closely on an engineering level.
More importantly, the big issues about nucs isn't really the technology per se, it is how the technology is integrated into the sphere of human economic, political and military thought and practice that bring up the bigger issues.
So take a chill pill or at least switch to Decaf for the rest of the day. In terms of Climate Change the human race is in the unenviable position of asking a fairly new scientific discipline to tell the entire world Exactly What To Do - and to get it right, or else. If you have any experience in any scientific, political or social field, you understand that it's not going to happen that way. Not even close.
Well my semi humorous reply was to point out that there were troubleshooting tips for Time Machine. He didn't ask if there were any good tips. That said, I don't like TM. It's a nice concept, I've used it to restore a particular file that had been corrupted (which is why I don't touch Numbers anymore) but as far as bare metal backup it is too complicated and too flakey. Fortunately there is SuperDuper and CarbonCopy Cloner for that purpose.
you'd think that doctors could order up a set of tests based on their initial thoughts, input the results to a program, and have the program guide them with possibilities to try and narrow down the search of what may be wrong.
That assumes that we have enough data to link a test or a series of tests / symptoms / findings to a disease. That also assumes that we know the disease the patient has. Neither assumption is true. We've really just cleaned off the low hanging fruit in this respect.
IF Watson has enough data programmed into it then it might be the kind of system that could answer your question. However, it seems to be attempting the same thing that PKC dose and that system hasn't really been the breakthrough that it's inventors had hoped for.
There is just a lot of stuff about the human body that we don't know....
The nice thing is that its result is not just spat out of a black box--it gives a pretty accurate confidence measure, and actually links back to the articles that led it to each conclusion.
A question and a comment.
First, how do you know this? It really didn't say how it is going to get an 'accurate confidence measure'? Which leads me to my comment - the completely untested assumption here is that the answer lies in the current literature, if only you could wade through it. That isn't at all clear to me. Much of the 'best' data comes from double blinded placebo controlled studies. The big problem here is that the patients are typically carefully selected for having as few other co morbidities as possible. That's very useful from a research situation but makes the data poorly generalizable to the average patient on the street who has no particular interest in being 'simple' (or rational or compliant). The rest of the medical literature is basically crap. "Expert" opinion which turns out to be wrong as often as not. Observational studies which almost always inflate the efficacy of treatments and can only provide correlation. Much of medicine has really never been studied carefully at all.
Next, if they're using any insurance company's billing data, well you might just as well consult rabbit entrails. In the US the vast majority of that data is entered in an obfuscated, outdated and thoroughly whimsical system called ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases, version 9). The REST of the world with the possible exception of North Korea is on 10 - a system that is much more useful. But even using one of the more sophisticated medical database systems is still unlikely to give you the detail you need to actually treat someone.
Of course, there is little useful information on how this will work - whether the doc will consult this wonderful oracle or if the insurance company will send you a form letter six months after the patient died saying you should have done something different. If they are going to go through with this,, I hope to hell they are going to carefully monitor it's success (or lack thereof) over time. And do that honestly. My money is that it won't help all that much.
I can drain completely a brand new battery and destroy it quickly by leaving it discharged for a month.
This is one of the really annoying things about current tech. Nearly everything is made with a custom cell to maximize battery capacity. So if you have something battery powered that you don't use frequently, you have to plug the stupid thing in (along with dozens of other similar stupid little things) or deal with prematurely dead batteries. This leads to a rat's nest of little wall warts, tiny almost-but-not-quite-standard USB plugs and cables and cheap little plastic battery holders with 90 watt blue LEDs.
In the previous age, when Dinosaurs such as myself ruled the earth, everything was centered around the ubiquitous AA battery. A couple of smart chargers, a couple of extra cells and life was good. Even if George Bush was president.
No, not so much. You may disperse from my landscaping now. Thank you.
I assume lithium battery was licensed as well, yet we use it, if there is need for it it will be used. If Iphone can be thinner because of it i doubt that apple will let a patent get in the way of their new design,.. the world is craving for better batteries if they are worth the change,.. you will see the change.
Apple will probably make one with rounded corners and re-patent it.
No, that only works for Copyright. To patent it, they will have to put it in a mobile device.
There are several cool zombie like OS:es that is ripe for resurrection: AmigaOS, MorphOS, Plan 9 and Haiku. One could even put an OpenStep foundation on top of any of these or something more conventional OS like Linux or xBSD and tap some similarities with iOS.
OK, since you've opened up the Pandora's box of Ancient Code, what about:
CP/M - lightweight, simple. If it could run on a Z-80, think of what it will do on an A9. MS-DOS - yeah, a little clunky but if Microsoft complained about Copyright and stuff, you can just shift to FreeDOS. Hell, we could add QEMM and Quarterdeck for multitasking. OS/2 - Should be able to fly on modern hardware. Add a few big buttons and you're golden.
and maybe a couple of others. Make the hardware Steampunkish and you've got an entirely new marketing strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
You're just trying to get us arrested. Better luck next time, Mr. DEA agent....
Keep these as reminders of a time when we still sent men into space, when the U.S. was a superpower, and when we thought we would always keep moving forward.
Easier to watch reruns of "The Jetsons".
Thus, why I strongly suggest to NASA that they contract for 500 or so of the mars rovers and send them to the moon and mars en-masse. They are proven to be durable little buggers, and all the engineering work is done. They will be positively cheap compared to new designs and could really capture the public's interest.
Except that boosters don't scale quite as well. It would still be 'expensive'. But it was seriously considered as an option instead of pushing forward with the Mars Science Laboratory. If that one screws up, then there will be a lot of 'told you so' from the Fast and Furious proponents.
The first link in TFA is all about an additional approval process required for transmitters in the region so that they do not adversely affect the Radio Telescopes. The second link says basically the same thing.
Come back Taco .. we miss you.
We've had dupes for years. Now they're just in the same article. It's progress, you Luddite.
I'm pretty sure we have no idea what wifi, cellphones, etc. are doing to us.
Yes we do. We've studied it do death. At the absolute worst it might cause a tiny, tiny bit of increase in certain cancers and / or cause some local radiative effects near the antenna. It probably doesn't cause anything above the noise floor of people dying from the Usual Suspects. In other words, if you're worried about that cell phone, put down the damned cigarette first. And buckle your seat belt.
It's like how mercury was first treated... we all just think it's fine and laugh at anyone who says otherwise because we don't experience the problem or haven't seen it with our own eyes. But, we really have no idea.
Actually, Mercury was readily identified as an industrial poison soon after it became widely used (Mad as a Hatter).
I'm 45, and while the likes of the Internet and mass-media obviously provide significantly more information than we ever had in the past, I just don't remember so many people having food allergies, aversions, ADD, "sensitivities", or other maladies that are so abundant today. Is it because we are less ignorant and more informed of what were otherwise "hidden" issues, or have we physically evolved into people weaker constitutions?
Read up on the old medical literature (on the Internet of course). 'Hysteria', 'the vapours' and a host of other obviously psychosomatic maladies have been around for quite a long time. The current fad of blaming said problems on the environment (the 'sensitivities') is fairly recent. Previously the scapegoat was God, the Devil, Witches or similar malign influence. It's not surprising since we know that some of the many chemicals / radiations we're exposed to ARE really dangerous (pleased to step away from that tub of acetone if you don't mind). Just keep going along those lines and anything can be dangerous.
This is no joking matter. Have you ever had your ass probed by an alien? I suspect not, or you would temper your remarks.
Well, I once had my butt chewed off by a supervisor who was pretty damned odd by any measure. Does that count?
They've done exactly that and the results are exactly what you would expect.
Actually, FTFA, they HAVE banned most of those things directly around the Radio Telescope. Still and all, the poor afflicted darlings have probably never heard of the inverse square law. Or inverses. Or squares.
Too bad that the 'wireless quiet zone' only refers to a very narrow band of EM radiation.
Hopefully they've also banned TVs, VCRs, microwave ovens, cars, police and fire transmitters and church PA systems.
(Actually would be a nice place if they could do that).
AGW people have a sort of normalcy bias whereby they look at the last X number of years since we have been taking measurements and automatically assume that that is the "correct" climate, and that any variance from that must be because of something we have changed, rather than the result of natural climate cycles.
While that concept is common in the lay press, the scientific literature does not fall into that trap. Much of the climate change debate centers on trying to tease out anthropomorphic from non anthropomorphic climate change. The current consensus (which, of course, may not be correct) is that the recent rapid warming is faster / stronger than can be accounted for by natural phenomena (assuming humans aren't natural) and whose timing correlates well with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
In a very real sense, it makes little difference as long as we understand how fast / much the climate will change in a timeline relevant to extant humans. If the warm spot at the end of the tunnel is due to a bunch of oil being burned or cosmic rays changing the atmosphere, the data suggests an average temperature rise throughout the planet which will drastically change human economic, social and political activity. That's the bottom line. Ignore the cause if you like, just don't ignore the effect.
And if you're not a nuclear engineer, nuclear plant manager, or member of the NRC, then your opinion is based on nothing that remotely looks like scientific thought. In other words, it's pretty much the same as a Global Warming Denier, in that you know little or nothing about the subject, but are ready to assert that the experts are idiots. .. Additional ranting removed...
Got a little close there, didn't he? No, you don't need to be a nuclear engineer, nuclear plant manager or a member of the NRC (or TEPCO for that matter) to have a reasonable and considered opinion on commercial nuclear power. Consider this: Many of the people in the aforesaid categories have gone on record saying that nuclear power is safe, reliable and economically viable. There have been several high profile incidents where this has been called into question and a large body of literature from people who are nuclear engineers, (former) nuclear plant managers and (former) members of the NRC who have had significant, credible concerns about nuclear power. And similarly credentialed persons have worried about oil, solar and pretty much everything else that moves, beeps or squeaks.
The argument that you have to have a PhD in any given field to discuss it rationally is nonsense. No, I can't detail my concerns about nuclear power as well as I can detail my concerns about Monsanto's stupid attempts at genetic engineering as I know a lot more about the latter that the former, but I have enough of a technical background to follow the arguments about nuclear power fairly closely on an engineering level.
More importantly, the big issues about nucs isn't really the technology per se, it is how the technology is integrated into the sphere of human economic, political and military thought and practice that bring up the bigger issues.
So take a chill pill or at least switch to Decaf for the rest of the day. In terms of Climate Change the human race is in the unenviable position of asking a fairly new scientific discipline to tell the entire world Exactly What To Do - and to get it right, or else. If you have any experience in any scientific, political or social field, you understand that it's not going to happen that way. Not even close.
discutable. Today's special word!
French /dis.ky.tabl/
Pronunciation
IPA:
Adjective
discutable (epicene, plural discutables)
debatable, arguable
Antonyms
indiscutable
Derived terms
discutablement
Well my semi humorous reply was to point out that there were troubleshooting tips for Time Machine. He didn't ask if there were any good tips. That said, I don't like TM. It's a nice concept, I've used it to restore a particular file that had been corrupted (which is why I don't touch Numbers anymore) but as far as bare metal backup it is too complicated and too flakey. Fortunately there is SuperDuper and CarbonCopy Cloner for that purpose.
That link really didn't provide any evidence that AI has been useful in medical diagnosis. Just that people want it to be and expect it to be.
Got any real examples?
Even a simple db that cross references diseases to symptoms / blood work results (and other test results) doesn't seem to exist.
They do exist. See the Problem / Knowledge Coupler.
you'd think that doctors could order up a set of tests based on their initial thoughts, input the results to a program, and have the program guide them with possibilities to try and narrow down the search of what may be wrong.
That assumes that we have enough data to link a test or a series of tests / symptoms / findings to a disease. That also assumes that we know the disease the patient has. Neither assumption is true. We've really just cleaned off the low hanging fruit in this respect.
IF Watson has enough data programmed into it then it might be the kind of system that could answer your question. However, it seems to be attempting the same thing that PKC dose and that system hasn't really been the breakthrough that it's inventors had hoped for.
There is just a lot of stuff about the human body that we don't know....
The nice thing is that its result is not just spat out of a black box--it gives a pretty accurate confidence measure, and actually links back to the articles that led it to each conclusion.
A question and a comment.
First, how do you know this? It really didn't say how it is going to get an 'accurate confidence measure'? Which leads me to my comment - the completely untested assumption here is that the answer lies in the current literature, if only you could wade through it. That isn't at all clear to me. Much of the 'best' data comes from double blinded placebo controlled studies. The big problem here is that the patients are typically carefully selected for having as few other co morbidities as possible. That's very useful from a research situation but makes the data poorly generalizable to the average patient on the street who has no particular interest in being 'simple' (or rational or compliant). The rest of the medical literature is basically crap. "Expert" opinion which turns out to be wrong as often as not. Observational studies which almost always inflate the efficacy of treatments and can only provide correlation. Much of medicine has really never been studied carefully at all.
Next, if they're using any insurance company's billing data, well you might just as well consult rabbit entrails. In the US the vast majority of that data is entered in an obfuscated, outdated and thoroughly whimsical system called ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases, version 9). The REST of the world with the possible exception of North Korea is on 10 - a system that is much more useful. But even using one of the more sophisticated medical database systems is still unlikely to give you the detail you need to actually treat someone.
Of course, there is little useful information on how this will work - whether the doc will consult this wonderful oracle or if the insurance company will send you a form letter six months after the patient died saying you should have done something different. If they are going to go through with this,, I hope to hell they are going to carefully monitor it's success (or lack thereof) over time. And do that honestly. My money is that it won't help all that much.
Why not? You just did.
Except for when it does not. Then it is impossible to troubleshoot because it was expected to just work.
"Troubleshooting Time Machine" (Google)
About 5,720,000 Results (0.25 seconds)
Knock yourself out ...
I can drain completely a brand new battery and destroy it quickly by leaving it discharged for a month.
This is one of the really annoying things about current tech. Nearly everything is made with a custom cell to maximize battery capacity. So if you have something battery powered that you don't use frequently, you have to plug the stupid thing in (along with dozens of other similar stupid little things) or deal with prematurely dead batteries. This leads to a rat's nest of little wall warts, tiny almost-but-not-quite-standard USB plugs and cables and cheap little plastic battery holders with 90 watt blue LEDs.
In the previous age, when Dinosaurs such as myself ruled the earth, everything was centered around the ubiquitous AA battery. A couple of smart chargers, a couple of extra cells and life was good. Even if George Bush was president.
No, not so much. You may disperse from my landscaping now. Thank you.
Yes I have. And I've had to recharge them often too.
Quit shorting the terminals with your tongue. The battery and your brain will last longer.
I assume lithium battery was licensed as well, yet we use it, if there is need for it it will be used. If Iphone can be thinner because of it i doubt that apple will let a patent get in the way of their new design, .. the world is craving for better batteries if they are worth the change, .. you will see the change.
Apple will probably make one with rounded corners and re-patent it.
No, that only works for Copyright. To patent it, they will have to put it in a mobile device.
If it ain't ASCII, it's not good enough for Slashdot.
I'm glad I quit doing hallucinogens a long time ago. Reality is getting to be just too damned weird as it is.
There are several cool zombie like OS:es that is ripe for resurrection: AmigaOS, MorphOS, Plan 9 and Haiku. One could even put an OpenStep foundation on top of any of these or something more conventional OS like Linux or xBSD and tap some similarities with iOS.
OK, since you've opened up the Pandora's box of Ancient Code, what about:
CP/M - lightweight, simple. If it could run on a Z-80, think of what it will do on an A9.
MS-DOS - yeah, a little clunky but if Microsoft complained about Copyright and stuff, you can just shift to FreeDOS. Hell, we could add QEMM and Quarterdeck for multitasking.
OS/2 - Should be able to fly on modern hardware. Add a few big buttons and you're golden.
and maybe a couple of others. Make the hardware Steampunkish and you've got an entirely new marketing strategy.