I just read the paper, and wish I had mod points today. You are right, and your view seems very under-represented in this thread (though I am surprised that you are surprised that they released/held a press conference about a pre-print paper: even respectable researchers do that!).
The grant for the study was from CRIIGEN, a European nonprofit that exists to discredit genetically modified food: the research was certainly conceived with a conclusion already in mind. To be sure, Monsanto and others fund motivated studies of their own; this is a highly fraught and politicized area of research.
Considering the obvious bias of the researchers, I think their inability to point to any legitimate statistically significant effect of roundup or the corn is...significant. There were 9 experimental groups of 10 of each gender for a single control group, and while the food and water intake were "measured," the results of the measurements are not mentioned in the paper at all or correlated to the mortality. Instead of looking at the actual lifespan of the rats, the more dramatic binary condition of "mortality before mean life expectancy" was measured.
The vast majority of male rats died on their own, and majority of female rats were eventually euthanized due to massive tumors, something that can far more substantially be explained by the line of rat they used than by the experimental variables: they could have done a different study and as accurately declared that 80% of female rats fed only standard rat chow developed cancer. Among the 100 male rats, there was no even moderately significant result for mortality or tumors between the control and the experimental groups. Among the females, the Roundup groups showed the most tumors, but the GMO Corn + Roundup groups didn't vary significantly from the control! I don't think there is any consistent hypothesis that can adequately explain all of their results except for random variation, possibly modulated by food intake, but the researchers don't even try.
They devote a whole page to pictures of the most gross-looking rat tumors in the GM groups, and then a page to graphs of high-variation metabolic test results for the single experimental group female 33% GMO Corn v. the control. On the next page you see a table of selected blood tests between all 10 female groups, with the "significant" results highlighted. Unfortunately for the researchers, the variation is often "significant" both above and below the control group's numbers, and with no apparent correlation to the concentration of GM corn or roundup. Judging by the amount of apparent random variation between the experimental groups, there is no reason to believe that the control group's numbers represent anything like the real "mean" at all, so you would expect just what they got: a lot of variation from the control group in both directions, with some measures where it was the control group that was the outlier and thus the experimental groups are normally distributed on one side only. Just as with tumor count, the GMO+Roundup groups ironically had "better" numbers than either the groups on either GM Corn or Roundup alone.
I think that the paper can be summed up best by this rather apropos xkcd, with the difference that in this case it was the researchers themselves who made the headline. Their statistics, when even present, are crap, and they bring further discredit to the already-disreputable European anti-GM food movement. At the beginning of the paper, they claim that while glyphosate itself has been tested (negatively) for health effects, the total formulation of roundup has not, and its effects, if any, are unknown. Apparently, that condition still obtains.
Even on standby, using 4G you are lucky to get two days of life out of the battery...if you actually use it, you will have to charge more than once a day. Basically, it has performance like a laptop, and battery life like one too.
Actually, the study does not account for the elimimation of subordinate terrorists at all, only the effect of the removal of leaders on group longevity. We still have no clear idea as to the effect of killing random terrorists (and various other people) from time to time.
Having read the whole text of the study, I agree with your summary of the study's conclusion as: killing leaders hurts terrrorist groups. In fact, the death of the leader by any means was found to be correlated with group dissolution, though the effect lessened with the age of the group.
This really doesn't speak to the efficacy of drone campaigns, however, except to indicate that should, in the future, a terrrorist leader be killed by a drone, that event would make the dissolution of his group more likely than if he had instead survived.
It is beyond the scope of the study (as the author explicitly acknowledges) to say whether drone warfare and the killing of various mixtures of militants and civilians increases or decreases militancy or support for terrorism. Further, the study covers a period of over 30 years ending in 2008: drone strikes were not really a factor. The slashdot headline is indeed misleading.
As for the conclusion of the study being forgone, the author notes at the beginning of the paper that the three previous studies of the same question came to the opposite conclusion. He makes arguments as to the superiority of his own statistical methods, but the noisiness of the dataset plagues him as well. This paper will doubtless not be the last word on the topic.
I wouldn't say that the Stanford blogger was "go[ing] to bat for" Google, since his findings are that Google's statement is highly disingenuous and, in part, outright false. I doubt that his actual conclusions will increase your respect for Google either, but reading them would at least allow you to dislike Google for the right reasons.
It's also possible that there was a typo in the article and he is avoiding "up to $670 million" in taxes, which would be much closer to the actual capital gains tax he would have to pay in the U.S. Giving up your citizenship for only $67 million (out of a $4 billion gain) seems extreme.
I agree. I have a grandfathered plan and this news is somewhat alarming, but many times I have been with other people who have Sprint or AT&T that hit dead spots the moment they leave major metropolitan areas and the interstates. That was the reason I switched to Verizon in the first place. I can't really make a credible threat to leave Verizon, because even with whatever capped plan they introduce (the current ones are ~2GB only!) it is unlikely that Verizon will actually be worse in general than AT&T, etc.
Though I must brush past all of the grammatical errors, malapropisms and mystifying jargon, to me this seems to be describing some sort of version of Twitter (or combination of Twitter and Amazon's "Mechanical Turk," perhaps), with lots of people tagging things, except "peer to peer."
Reading the actual patent reveals that the abstract is only tangentially connected to the patent claims: nothing whatsoever is "distributed" or "p2p," and the "invention" described in the independent claims is a combination of Facebook and Twitter in which some users can be anonymous and the central server periodically pushes "content" on you based on calculated conjunction with your interests. In fact, the "UKID," the "expert human agents," the "multiple developers," the "Universal Desktop Search" and "black box search module" make no appearance whatsoever in the claims. The claims actually seem like something that a patent troll with a modicum of sanity remaining could have written. It describes some sort of facebook/twitter thing that may not be legitimately novel, but which one could at least grasp the nature of and imagine existing.
Perhaps the abstract was written by someone's monoglot Hindi cousin (with the aid of Google Translate) as a joke?
It turned out that the "description" is the real joke. The following passage seemed representative to me.
The present Human Service Network (HSN) providing plugging interface for human brain to machine for active participation and interaction via this communication media, wherein brain to brain communication is established via Human Operating System (HOS) thus forming Human Grid (HG) by means of systematically designed taxonomies, ontology and filtering mechanisms with plurality of ways of exploiting Human Services offered via plurality of accredited human agents or knowledge sources selection in terms of HSN Messenger, HSN Mail service and HSN online portal.
The entire section strongly reminds me of Alan Sokal's famous "Social Text" experiment, in which he carefully constructed a morass of contradictory, fallacious bullshit comprised mostly of postmodern humanities buzzwords and random physics terms, and then submitted it to a sociology journal, which reviewed and published it.
Indeed! I haven't been able to get through a sitcom or (gasp!) ecchi anime in years, but I had never thought about the pervasive thematic similarity between the most popular American television genre and the most socially retarded (not a small accomplishment) subgenre of Japanese anime.
In fairness, lately I have been quickly overwhelmed by the awfulness of every prime-time TV show. If it's not on HBO, Showtime, or AMC, you can probably forget it; I don't mean to imply that those channels are unending fonts of quality, either, though, just that they seem to have a monopoly on it. There are certain pervasive cliches that I refer to as "network TV *" (e.g. "network TV" sex, precious grade-schooler, teenager, submissive husband, etc.), and the sitcom seems to be the ultimate distillation of such tropes. I have not yet been married, but I feel fully qualified to write an average episode of an average marriage sitcom. Network TV police drama is a close second; I couldn't presume to write an episode of "The Wire" without at least as much research and experience as David Simon--and even then, I would have get years of practice with scriptwriting--but shows like "CSI" or "The Mentalist" or "NCIS" are another matter altogether.
Although I don't have enough evidence to make a claim about the general population (indeed, if anything, I only have counter-anecdotes), I personally seem to have a regulation mechanism for media consumption. After I watch enough exemplars of any TV or movie genre (the threshold seems to vary according to maturity and innate or early-childhood-born preferences for the core content of a genre: it took hundreds of action movies to sour me, a few dozen TV dramas, and a handful of sitcoms, but two ecchi animes were more than enough when I discovered anime at age 17), the banality and derivative quality of the writing become painfully apparent, and my enjoyment is lost.
While I'm not sure about the specific genesis of my system of morality (for that matter, I can't confidently and accurately describe what it is), at least I can say that repeated exposure to unsophisticated or redundant themes makes me want to avoid further experiences with them at all costs. This is true of books and video games as well, the greater diversity of those media (especially written media) just makes it less obvious. I feel I can be on somewhat firmer ground in claiming that the average "serious gamer" tires of violence for its own sake very quickly, and requires increasing levels of sophistication and novelty in gameplay as well. 7-14 year-olds (the subjects of the study) may not be too far advanced in such tastes yet, but they surely will be. I realize that coming to demand variety in one's violence is far from a refutation of the claim that early exposure to violence impairs the development of empathy, but it at least speaks to the improbability of some positive craving or tendency to violence being created.
Perhaps the best source of empirical data on (late adolescent and adult) violence conditioning comes from the experience of the U.S. armed forces over the past century. Especially since WWI, there has been a constant reevaluation and evolution of soldier training practices, the result of which has been that increasing percentages of infantry troops actually fire their weapons, and do so with increasing purposefulness, when contact with the enemy (militarily) demands it. Nothing close to a "perfect" regimen yet exists, however, since even after very rigorous modern training, a large portion of deployed soldiers end up with traumatic mental disorders after experiencing the actuality of combat and killing (even though there is very likely much less "baseline" empathy between a contemporary American soldier and an impoverished non-English-speaking Muslim irregular than there would be with, say, an average WWII Wehrmacht private or even a VK). It is almost certainly much harder to desensitize a soldier of eighteen or more than a seven year-old, but such data do d
Another Russian biologist, Nikolay Perumov also wrote a sequel to LoTR from the perspective of Sauron's side. I only know this, however, because I read about in The Book Barn's "That was the Worst Book Ever!" thread. Read it with caution: it was originally written as a fanfic (like TFA's work), which was later published.
Mine was also reinitialized to an improbable size. The "comment box size: rows" option, however, appears to work, and I have returned it to its original height, at least (though the width setting does nothing).
Assuming you keep your plugins updated, you are already sending the X-Do-Not-Track header with all of your requests. Since NoScript 2.0.9.x, it can be configured with noscript.DoNotTrack.{enabled, exceptions, forced}, and the default is enabled.
As stupid as it may sound (why parties who are interested in tracking you would comply?), a mean to clearly express your will of not being tracked is going to be useful, especially when backed by law or industry self-regulation, as explained here. Therefore it seems in the interest of NoScript users and privacy-concerned netizens in general to participate in this effort.
I'm not sure that I agree with the rationale (legislation about HTTP headers? No thank you!), but at least there is one. He also responded to the Firefox proposal.
It takes 20 images for each frame, at 30fps 1080p. You combine them yourself in post with the help of special software that can also apparently deduce the location and intensity of various light sources, allowing you to add rendered objects into the scene with realistic lighting.
Well, I read the full introduction of the paper, and the conclusion, skipping only the detailed plasma physics models & calculations. They do mention the strategy of putting an antenna through the plasma which can last as long as one fuel tank before it ablates, but they instead propose that (more elegantly) a small commercially-available 3 kW high frequency klystron amplifier (a lot less power than the radar) be placed at the surface of the aircraft, where it will disrupt a very small region of the plasma in a manner that will scatter ~.7 - 2% of the original incoming signal (which will resonates in a layer of the plasma) back to the aircraft; that is enough power for a 5 m. antenna and a commercially-available high sensitivity GPS receiver to pick it up. There is an analogous explanation for outgoing signals. They account for quite a few confounding plasma effects, acknowledge that there are some others that can't be modeled so clearly (or maybe they didn't think of), but predict that getting the system to work would be a not-so-difficult engineering challenge.
My first thought was, "Boy, I hope all the space opera authors read this preprint: no more signal attenuation from the plasma engines in the atmosphere!" Now there is one more area in which reality is exceeding a certain segment of--rather soft--science fiction (that I am only familiar with--AHEM--because of Baen's visionary no-DRM any-format ebook policy).
Well, the Fox story was truly awfully written, beginning with this gem,
How many different types of plants do you think there are on Earth? A few million? Ten million? Guess again.
Based on the statistics in the article itself, even if two thirds of species are redundant, we will still have a few million left. And then there was this sentence,
Despite the surprising lack of diversity among plant life, the botanists and scientists associated with the project all hailed it as a milestone achievement for many different reasons.
Despite the...WHAT? Now, science reporting is normally awful from any "mainstream" journalist, and even "science reporters," but botany is a lot harder to mess up than particle physics, and the Fox article was full of ridiculous misleading innuendo like the quotes I included. I wouldn't normally expect any better from the HuffPo (or the NYT, or Reuters, etc.), but in this case their article is simply more correct (though still not terribly informative), since it doesn't contain the extraneous uninformed bloviation--starting with the title.
Apparently the speech focused on one of those situations where "tradeoffs are inevitable." If Hassan and Shahzad were "inspired" by radical internet posts, I cannot conceive of any further investigative tradeoff that could have been made while still maintaining constitutionality. Even if they had made radical internet posts, they would have to be inciting imminent lawless action or alluding to their participation in criminal plots/conspiracies/etc. to justify a search warrant. The FBI is already on the lookout for people who post such things on public online forums.
Napolitano's comments suggest an effort by the Obama administration to reach out to its more liberal, Democratic constituencies to assuage fears that terrorist worries will lead to the erosion of civil rights.
I would hate to think that anyone liberal on civil rights would find these statements comforting...
"Her speech is sign of the maturing of the administration on this issue," said Stewart Baker, former undersecretary for policy with the Department of Homeland Security. "They now appreciate the risks and the trade-offs much more clearly than when they first arrived, and to their credit, they've adjusted their preconceptions."
Yes, I'm sure "liberals" will be relieved that Stewart Baker, former Assistant Secretary (nice research, AP) of the DHS for George W. Bush, approves of the Obama Administration's "security" policies. When Republican hawks talk about "mature" security policies, they mean the ones that Dick Cheney dreams about at night, the ones that Bush was trying to step back from in his final two years; they mean Obama's current policies.
In the federal courts, if both the prosecution and defense agree, any trial, even a felony trial, can be a bench trial. It is apparently a fairly controversial defense tactic, but I was reading an article the other day that contended that the conviction rates in bench trials had gone down during the period with federal mandatory minimum sentencing drug laws.
But barely a year after the introduction of federal sentencing guidelines, judges and juries began heading in different directions. In the 14 years from 1989 through 2002, the conviction rate of federal juries increased to 84 percent, while that of federal judges decreased to 55 percent. In 2006, jury conviction rates exceeded bench rates by 25 percentage points (89 percent to 64 percent, respectively).
The hypothesis is that while the jury is not allowed to know the weight of the sentence before convicting (and will thus convict fairly easily), the judge is much more careful about what constitutes a "reasonable doubt" in light of the certainty that he will be compelled to send some guy to prison for ten years for having a few pot plants.
First of all, I think that people do need a video to realize that war, and in particular the Iraq war, is tragic and disturbing. It's one thing to hear that lots of civilians are mistakenly killed in the course of our military occupations, it's another thing altogether to see some of the exact circumstances in which that occurs.
Do you recall the story that broke soon after the video, regarding a house that special forces stormed on bad intel, in which various people were killed, including two women that the soldiers apparently arranged deceptively so that they could claim in their report that they were previously killed in an "honor killing?" The incident that the commanding general of SOCOM had to fork over a wad of cash and apologize for? If there had been a video of that, with black-clad soldiers going "Oh shit! I think these people were just civilians!" and then digging out their rounds from the bodies, tying them up, artfully arranging them, and discussing their cover story, how do you think that would have gone over? Instead of everyone forgetting in a few weeks, we'd still be watching the congressional hearings on CSPAN.
Regarding the guncam video, do you find the destruction of the van, and the attack on the building with missiles while apparent bystanders walk by to be equally unavoidable as the deaths of the journalists? I am a little surprised that the video didn't at least make you wonder at all about the wisdom of the RoE they were operating under. You don't have to demonize the pilots and gunners personally to find fault in the incident. The military's reports found that the crewmen did make the right call in every case, and summarily declared all 20+ men killed in the various attacks "AIF" (Anti-Iraq Forces), so you can't write everything off as a tragic mistake; it was tragic official policy.
Even if all of these things are rendered "unavoidable" by our political need for near-airtight force protection (like the dozens of unarmed civilians killed at Afghan road checkpoints), many people are not aware that they occur. If everyone knew exactly what went on in Iraq and Afghanistan, they might not support the military missions there (or future hypothetical invasions) so much; war reporting certainly had that effect during Vietnam. If no one ever gets outraged, what motivation is there to avoid these entanglements, or even to try harder to avoid civilian casualties in the conflicts we are already fighting?
I can only imagine that all the random milita members on the streets with rifles and RPGs that day didn't realize that the helicopters ~1km away were or could be targeting them. I agree that the Reuters stringers took a foolish risk, and that the initial incident is not indefensible. Maybe "AIF" ambushes are always that ridiculously nonchalant. Everything that happens afterward, though...
Also keep in mind that the only reason anyone (any American) ever cared about this incident was that it was subsequently discovered that two of the "AIF" were Reuters stringers. Imagine how many incidents there must have been where people who didn't work for a major Western news organization were creatively classified as insurgents. I'm sure that some of them weren't pointing giant telephoto lenses at the Bradley convoy down the block, and would be harder to blame for their own demises.
Wikileaks hasn't posted anything except the Apache guncam video since March. Who knows what Assange is holding on to? The website wasn't even back up until a few weeks ago, supposedly because they needed $750,000 to pay their bandwidth bill and other expenses. Does most of that money go to support Assange's pointless paranoid nomadic lifestyle? I would think that frequently crossing national borders would make him more of a target. If I had something to leak, I wouldn't send it to Wikileaks, because I would have no confidence that it would ever be "leaked," just like these alleged embassy cables. They also have an awful, inaccessible web design.
That said, if Wikileaks does have the cables and was still "evaluating" them or something when the Manning story broke, lying about it now protects Manning from further (260,000 more) criminal charges. He can argue that the video should have been FOIAed in the first place, was shown to Reuters journalists, etc., but those arguments wouldn't get him very far with the diplomatic cables. Even if he can't dodge the charge for the video, there was only one video. Perhaps Wikileaks is merely trying to protect their source, and avoid foreclosing his legal defense that "I was just bragging and exaggerating to compensate for my deep sense of personal inadequacy; there were no cables."
You link to a shrill neo-prohibitionist website, which bases their entire claim of negative physiological effects on one page (25) in report from the Surgeon General, which in turn cites only a single human study which used fMRI on 34 adolescents (age 15-19) who had engaged in binge drinking.
Results: Adolescents with AUD [Alcohol Use Disorder] showed greater brain response to the spatial working memory task in bilateral parietal cortices, and diminished response in other regions including the left precentral gyrus and bilateral cerebellar areas (clusters >= 943 ul, p <.05), although groups did not differ on behavioral measures of task performance. The degree of abnormality was greater for teens who reported experiencing more withdrawl or hangover symptoms, and who consumed more alcohol.
As you can see, the single human study can be used to conclude...basically nothing. There may be a permanent link between alcohol use and brain structure...but that link might very well be causal in the other direction. This study won't give you much reason to lean in either direction. They didn't even find testable behavioral effects to go along with their fMRI statistical voodoo; it isn't really convincing evidence that a link exists in either direction. In the previous section of the report ("Personality Traits, Mental Disorders, and Adolescent Alcohol Use"), however, a much greater profusion of studies suggest that alcohol abuse is caused by mental disorders.
In that vein, other studies have shown that people with unmedicated ADHD are more likely to abuse alcohol and other drugs. Alcohol and other drugs, conversely, have not been shown to give people ADD.
If you're a neo-prohibitionist, though, you don't really give a shit about the science. You already have the solution, and just need to find a problem.
The formulas used to calculate the octane rating on the pump differ between continental Europe, where RON generally prevails, and the U.S./Canada, which use the (R+M)/2 method.
Unless you have one of the discontinued 4-wheel steering Yukons XLs! But seriously, the point of having a giant land-yacht isn't that you can offroad with it, but that it has vast amounts of room. You can only cram so much luggage or so many passengers into a Civic.
Sung said once they realized in around 2003 that the product was selling more as a toy than for medicinal purposes she started advertising it to both markets, despite her father's initial reluctance. One of their slogans is, “The sex toy that's good for you.”
They just have a problem with other companies selling similar products that compete with their own line of sex toys, allegedly infringing their patent.
The real news here is that the daughter (in the picture) is actually 35. Who would have guessed?
Slashdot Mirror
I just read the paper, and wish I had mod points today. You are right, and your view seems very under-represented in this thread (though I am surprised that you are surprised that they released/held a press conference about a pre-print paper: even respectable researchers do that!).
The grant for the study was from CRIIGEN, a European nonprofit that exists to discredit genetically modified food: the research was certainly conceived with a conclusion already in mind. To be sure, Monsanto and others fund motivated studies of their own; this is a highly fraught and politicized area of research.
Considering the obvious bias of the researchers, I think their inability to point to any legitimate statistically significant effect of roundup or the corn is...significant. There were 9 experimental groups of 10 of each gender for a single control group, and while the food and water intake were "measured," the results of the measurements are not mentioned in the paper at all or correlated to the mortality. Instead of looking at the actual lifespan of the rats, the more dramatic binary condition of "mortality before mean life expectancy" was measured.
The vast majority of male rats died on their own, and majority of female rats were eventually euthanized due to massive tumors, something that can far more substantially be explained by the line of rat they used than by the experimental variables: they could have done a different study and as accurately declared that 80% of female rats fed only standard rat chow developed cancer. Among the 100 male rats, there was no even moderately significant result for mortality or tumors between the control and the experimental groups. Among the females, the Roundup groups showed the most tumors, but the GMO Corn + Roundup groups didn't vary significantly from the control! I don't think there is any consistent hypothesis that can adequately explain all of their results except for random variation, possibly modulated by food intake, but the researchers don't even try.
They devote a whole page to pictures of the most gross-looking rat tumors in the GM groups, and then a page to graphs of high-variation metabolic test results for the single experimental group female 33% GMO Corn v. the control. On the next page you see a table of selected blood tests between all 10 female groups, with the "significant" results highlighted. Unfortunately for the researchers, the variation is often "significant" both above and below the control group's numbers, and with no apparent correlation to the concentration of GM corn or roundup. Judging by the amount of apparent random variation between the experimental groups, there is no reason to believe that the control group's numbers represent anything like the real "mean" at all, so you would expect just what they got: a lot of variation from the control group in both directions, with some measures where it was the control group that was the outlier and thus the experimental groups are normally distributed on one side only. Just as with tumor count, the GMO+Roundup groups ironically had "better" numbers than either the groups on either GM Corn or Roundup alone.
I think that the paper can be summed up best by this rather apropos xkcd, with the difference that in this case it was the researchers themselves who made the headline. Their statistics, when even present, are crap, and they bring further discredit to the already-disreputable European anti-GM food movement. At the beginning of the paper, they claim that while glyphosate itself has been tested (negatively) for health effects, the total formulation of roundup has not, and its effects, if any, are unknown. Apparently, that condition still obtains.
Even on standby, using 4G you are lucky to get two days of life out of the battery...if you actually use it, you will have to charge more than once a day. Basically, it has performance like a laptop, and battery life like one too.
Actually, the study does not account for the elimimation of subordinate terrorists at all, only the effect of the removal of leaders on group longevity. We still have no clear idea as to the effect of killing random terrorists (and various other people) from time to time.
Having read the whole text of the study, I agree with your summary of the study's conclusion as: killing leaders hurts terrrorist groups. In fact, the death of the leader by any means was found to be correlated with group dissolution, though the effect lessened with the age of the group.
This really doesn't speak to the efficacy of drone campaigns, however, except to indicate that should, in the future, a terrrorist leader be killed by a drone, that event would make the dissolution of his group more likely than if he had instead survived.
It is beyond the scope of the study (as the author explicitly acknowledges) to say whether drone warfare and the killing of various mixtures of militants and civilians increases or decreases militancy or support for terrorism. Further, the study covers a period of over 30 years ending in 2008: drone strikes were not really a factor. The slashdot headline is indeed misleading.
As for the conclusion of the study being forgone, the author notes at the beginning of the paper that the three previous studies of the same question came to the opposite conclusion. He makes arguments as to the superiority of his own statistical methods, but the noisiness of the dataset plagues him as well. This paper will doubtless not be the last word on the topic.
I wouldn't say that the Stanford blogger was "go[ing] to bat for" Google, since his findings are that Google's statement is highly disingenuous and, in part, outright false. I doubt that his actual conclusions will increase your respect for Google either, but reading them would at least allow you to dislike Google for the right reasons.
It's also possible that there was a typo in the article and he is avoiding "up to $670 million" in taxes, which would be much closer to the actual capital gains tax he would have to pay in the U.S. Giving up your citizenship for only $67 million (out of a $4 billion gain) seems extreme.
I agree. I have a grandfathered plan and this news is somewhat alarming, but many times I have been with other people who have Sprint or AT&T that hit dead spots the moment they leave major metropolitan areas and the interstates. That was the reason I switched to Verizon in the first place. I can't really make a credible threat to leave Verizon, because even with whatever capped plan they introduce (the current ones are ~2GB only!) it is unlikely that Verizon will actually be worse in general than AT&T, etc.
Reading the actual patent reveals that the abstract is only tangentially connected to the patent claims: nothing whatsoever is "distributed" or "p2p," and the "invention" described in the independent claims is a combination of Facebook and Twitter in which some users can be anonymous and the central server periodically pushes "content" on you based on calculated conjunction with your interests. In fact, the "UKID," the "expert human agents," the "multiple developers," the "Universal Desktop Search" and "black box search module" make no appearance whatsoever in the claims. The claims actually seem like something that a patent troll with a modicum of sanity remaining could have written. It describes some sort of facebook/twitter thing that may not be legitimately novel, but which one could at least grasp the nature of and imagine existing.
Perhaps the abstract was written by someone's monoglot Hindi cousin (with the aid of Google Translate) as a joke?
It turned out that the "description" is the real joke. The following passage seemed representative to me.
The entire section strongly reminds me of Alan Sokal's famous "Social Text" experiment, in which he carefully constructed a morass of contradictory, fallacious bullshit comprised mostly of postmodern humanities buzzwords and random physics terms, and then submitted it to a sociology journal, which reviewed and published it.
Indeed! I haven't been able to get through a sitcom or (gasp!) ecchi anime in years, but I had never thought about the pervasive thematic similarity between the most popular American television genre and the most socially retarded (not a small accomplishment) subgenre of Japanese anime.
In fairness, lately I have been quickly overwhelmed by the awfulness of every prime-time TV show. If it's not on HBO, Showtime, or AMC, you can probably forget it; I don't mean to imply that those channels are unending fonts of quality, either, though, just that they seem to have a monopoly on it. There are certain pervasive cliches that I refer to as "network TV *" (e.g. "network TV" sex, precious grade-schooler, teenager, submissive husband, etc.), and the sitcom seems to be the ultimate distillation of such tropes. I have not yet been married, but I feel fully qualified to write an average episode of an average marriage sitcom. Network TV police drama is a close second; I couldn't presume to write an episode of "The Wire" without at least as much research and experience as David Simon--and even then, I would have get years of practice with scriptwriting--but shows like "CSI" or "The Mentalist" or "NCIS" are another matter altogether.
Although I don't have enough evidence to make a claim about the general population (indeed, if anything, I only have counter-anecdotes), I personally seem to have a regulation mechanism for media consumption. After I watch enough exemplars of any TV or movie genre (the threshold seems to vary according to maturity and innate or early-childhood-born preferences for the core content of a genre: it took hundreds of action movies to sour me, a few dozen TV dramas, and a handful of sitcoms, but two ecchi animes were more than enough when I discovered anime at age 17), the banality and derivative quality of the writing become painfully apparent, and my enjoyment is lost.
While I'm not sure about the specific genesis of my system of morality (for that matter, I can't confidently and accurately describe what it is), at least I can say that repeated exposure to unsophisticated or redundant themes makes me want to avoid further experiences with them at all costs. This is true of books and video games as well, the greater diversity of those media (especially written media) just makes it less obvious. I feel I can be on somewhat firmer ground in claiming that the average "serious gamer" tires of violence for its own sake very quickly, and requires increasing levels of sophistication and novelty in gameplay as well. 7-14 year-olds (the subjects of the study) may not be too far advanced in such tastes yet, but they surely will be. I realize that coming to demand variety in one's violence is far from a refutation of the claim that early exposure to violence impairs the development of empathy, but it at least speaks to the improbability of some positive craving or tendency to violence being created.
Perhaps the best source of empirical data on (late adolescent and adult) violence conditioning comes from the experience of the U.S. armed forces over the past century. Especially since WWI, there has been a constant reevaluation and evolution of soldier training practices, the result of which has been that increasing percentages of infantry troops actually fire their weapons, and do so with increasing purposefulness, when contact with the enemy (militarily) demands it. Nothing close to a "perfect" regimen yet exists, however, since even after very rigorous modern training, a large portion of deployed soldiers end up with traumatic mental disorders after experiencing the actuality of combat and killing (even though there is very likely much less "baseline" empathy between a contemporary American soldier and an impoverished non-English-speaking Muslim irregular than there would be with, say, an average WWII Wehrmacht private or even a VK). It is almost certainly much harder to desensitize a soldier of eighteen or more than a seven year-old, but such data do d
Another Russian biologist, Nikolay Perumov also wrote a sequel to LoTR from the perspective of Sauron's side. I only know this, however, because I read about in The Book Barn's "That was the Worst Book Ever!" thread. Read it with caution: it was originally written as a fanfic (like TFA's work), which was later published.
It took /. D3 to finally get me using the <em> tag...
Mine was also reinitialized to an improbable size. The "comment box size: rows" option, however, appears to work, and I have returned it to its original height, at least (though the width setting does nothing).
Assuming you keep your plugins updated, you are already sending the X-Do-Not-Track header with all of your requests. Since NoScript 2.0.9.x, it can be configured with noscript.DoNotTrack.{enabled, exceptions, forced}, and the default is enabled.
The maintainer of NoScript says:
As stupid as it may sound (why parties who are interested in tracking you would comply?), a mean to clearly express your will of not being tracked is going to be useful, especially when backed by law or industry self-regulation, as explained here. Therefore it seems in the interest of NoScript users and privacy-concerned netizens in general to participate in this effort.
I'm not sure that I agree with the rationale (legislation about HTTP headers? No thank you!), but at least there is one. He also responded to the Firefox proposal.
It takes 20 images for each frame, at 30fps 1080p. You combine them yourself in post with the help of special software that can also apparently deduce the location and intensity of various light sources, allowing you to add rendered objects into the scene with realistic lighting.
Well, I read the full introduction of the paper, and the conclusion, skipping only the detailed plasma physics models & calculations. They do mention the strategy of putting an antenna through the plasma which can last as long as one fuel tank before it ablates, but they instead propose that (more elegantly) a small commercially-available 3 kW high frequency klystron amplifier (a lot less power than the radar) be placed at the surface of the aircraft, where it will disrupt a very small region of the plasma in a manner that will scatter ~.7 - 2% of the original incoming signal (which will resonates in a layer of the plasma) back to the aircraft; that is enough power for a 5 m. antenna and a commercially-available high sensitivity GPS receiver to pick it up. There is an analogous explanation for outgoing signals. They account for quite a few confounding plasma effects, acknowledge that there are some others that can't be modeled so clearly (or maybe they didn't think of), but predict that getting the system to work would be a not-so-difficult engineering challenge.
My first thought was, "Boy, I hope all the space opera authors read this preprint: no more signal attenuation from the plasma engines in the atmosphere!" Now there is one more area in which reality is exceeding a certain segment of--rather soft--science fiction (that I am only familiar with--AHEM--because of Baen's visionary no-DRM any-format ebook policy).
Well, the Fox story was truly awfully written, beginning with this gem,
How many different types of plants do you think there are on Earth? A few million? Ten million? Guess again.
Based on the statistics in the article itself, even if two thirds of species are redundant, we will still have a few million left. And then there was this sentence,
Despite the surprising lack of diversity among plant life, the botanists and scientists associated with the project all hailed it as a milestone achievement for many different reasons.
Despite the...WHAT? Now, science reporting is normally awful from any "mainstream" journalist, and even "science reporters," but botany is a lot harder to mess up than particle physics, and the Fox article was full of ridiculous misleading innuendo like the quotes I included. I wouldn't normally expect any better from the HuffPo (or the NYT, or Reuters, etc.), but in this case their article is simply more correct (though still not terribly informative), since it doesn't contain the extraneous uninformed bloviation--starting with the title.
Hannibal Lecter only pours Chianti in the movie for the benefit of the ignorant viewing public; in the original book, he sips an Amarone.
Apparently the speech focused on one of those situations where "tradeoffs are inevitable." If Hassan and Shahzad were "inspired" by radical internet posts, I cannot conceive of any further investigative tradeoff that could have been made while still maintaining constitutionality. Even if they had made radical internet posts, they would have to be inciting imminent lawless action or alluding to their participation in criminal plots/conspiracies/etc. to justify a search warrant. The FBI is already on the lookout for people who post such things on public online forums.
Napolitano's comments suggest an effort by the Obama administration to reach out to its more liberal, Democratic constituencies to assuage fears that terrorist worries will lead to the erosion of civil rights.
I would hate to think that anyone liberal on civil rights would find these statements comforting...
"Her speech is sign of the maturing of the administration on this issue," said Stewart Baker, former undersecretary for policy with the Department of Homeland Security. "They now appreciate the risks and the trade-offs much more clearly than when they first arrived, and to their credit, they've adjusted their preconceptions."
Yes, I'm sure "liberals" will be relieved that Stewart Baker, former Assistant Secretary (nice research, AP) of the DHS for George W. Bush, approves of the Obama Administration's "security" policies. When Republican hawks talk about "mature" security policies, they mean the ones that Dick Cheney dreams about at night, the ones that Bush was trying to step back from in his final two years; they mean Obama's current policies.
In the federal courts, if both the prosecution and defense agree, any trial, even a felony trial, can be a bench trial. It is apparently a fairly controversial defense tactic, but I was reading an article the other day that contended that the conviction rates in bench trials had gone down during the period with federal mandatory minimum sentencing drug laws.
But barely a year after the introduction of federal sentencing guidelines, judges and juries began heading in different directions. In the 14 years from 1989 through 2002, the conviction rate of federal juries increased to 84 percent, while that of federal judges decreased to 55 percent. In 2006, jury conviction rates exceeded bench rates by 25 percentage points (89 percent to 64 percent, respectively).
The hypothesis is that while the jury is not allowed to know the weight of the sentence before convicting (and will thus convict fairly easily), the judge is much more careful about what constitutes a "reasonable doubt" in light of the certainty that he will be compelled to send some guy to prison for ten years for having a few pot plants.
First of all, I think that people do need a video to realize that war, and in particular the Iraq war, is tragic and disturbing. It's one thing to hear that lots of civilians are mistakenly killed in the course of our military occupations, it's another thing altogether to see some of the exact circumstances in which that occurs.
Do you recall the story that broke soon after the video, regarding a house that special forces stormed on bad intel, in which various people were killed, including two women that the soldiers apparently arranged deceptively so that they could claim in their report that they were previously killed in an "honor killing?" The incident that the commanding general of SOCOM had to fork over a wad of cash and apologize for? If there had been a video of that, with black-clad soldiers going "Oh shit! I think these people were just civilians!" and then digging out their rounds from the bodies, tying them up, artfully arranging them, and discussing their cover story, how do you think that would have gone over? Instead of everyone forgetting in a few weeks, we'd still be watching the congressional hearings on CSPAN.
Regarding the guncam video, do you find the destruction of the van, and the attack on the building with missiles while apparent bystanders walk by to be equally unavoidable as the deaths of the journalists? I am a little surprised that the video didn't at least make you wonder at all about the wisdom of the RoE they were operating under. You don't have to demonize the pilots and gunners personally to find fault in the incident. The military's reports found that the crewmen did make the right call in every case, and summarily declared all 20+ men killed in the various attacks "AIF" (Anti-Iraq Forces), so you can't write everything off as a tragic mistake; it was tragic official policy.
Even if all of these things are rendered "unavoidable" by our political need for near-airtight force protection (like the dozens of unarmed civilians killed at Afghan road checkpoints), many people are not aware that they occur. If everyone knew exactly what went on in Iraq and Afghanistan, they might not support the military missions there (or future hypothetical invasions) so much; war reporting certainly had that effect during Vietnam. If no one ever gets outraged, what motivation is there to avoid these entanglements, or even to try harder to avoid civilian casualties in the conflicts we are already fighting?
I can only imagine that all the random milita members on the streets with rifles and RPGs that day didn't realize that the helicopters ~1km away were or could be targeting them. I agree that the Reuters stringers took a foolish risk, and that the initial incident is not indefensible. Maybe "AIF" ambushes are always that ridiculously nonchalant. Everything that happens afterward, though...
Also keep in mind that the only reason anyone (any American) ever cared about this incident was that it was subsequently discovered that two of the "AIF" were Reuters stringers. Imagine how many incidents there must have been where people who didn't work for a major Western news organization were creatively classified as insurgents. I'm sure that some of them weren't pointing giant telephoto lenses at the Bradley convoy down the block, and would be harder to blame for their own demises.
Wikileaks hasn't posted anything except the Apache guncam video since March. Who knows what Assange is holding on to? The website wasn't even back up until a few weeks ago, supposedly because they needed $750,000 to pay their bandwidth bill and other expenses. Does most of that money go to support Assange's pointless paranoid nomadic lifestyle? I would think that frequently crossing national borders would make him more of a target. If I had something to leak, I wouldn't send it to Wikileaks, because I would have no confidence that it would ever be "leaked," just like these alleged embassy cables. They also have an awful, inaccessible web design.
That said, if Wikileaks does have the cables and was still "evaluating" them or something when the Manning story broke, lying about it now protects Manning from further (260,000 more) criminal charges. He can argue that the video should have been FOIAed in the first place, was shown to Reuters journalists, etc., but those arguments wouldn't get him very far with the diplomatic cables. Even if he can't dodge the charge for the video, there was only one video. Perhaps Wikileaks is merely trying to protect their source, and avoid foreclosing his legal defense that "I was just bragging and exaggerating to compensate for my deep sense of personal inadequacy; there were no cables."
Results: Adolescents with AUD [Alcohol Use Disorder] showed greater brain response to the spatial working memory task in bilateral parietal cortices, and diminished response in other regions including the left precentral gyrus and bilateral cerebellar areas (clusters >= 943 ul, p < .05), although groups did not differ on behavioral measures of task performance. The degree of abnormality was greater for teens who reported experiencing more withdrawl or hangover symptoms, and who consumed more alcohol.
As you can see, the single human study can be used to conclude...basically nothing. There may be a permanent link between alcohol use and brain structure...but that link might very well be causal in the other direction. This study won't give you much reason to lean in either direction. They didn't even find testable behavioral effects to go along with their fMRI statistical voodoo; it isn't really convincing evidence that a link exists in either direction. In the previous section of the report ("Personality Traits, Mental Disorders, and Adolescent Alcohol Use"), however, a much greater profusion of studies suggest that alcohol abuse is caused by mental disorders.
In that vein, other studies have shown that people with unmedicated ADHD are more likely to abuse alcohol and other drugs. Alcohol and other drugs, conversely, have not been shown to give people ADD.
If you're a neo-prohibitionist, though, you don't really give a shit about the science. You already have the solution, and just need to find a problem.
The formulas used to calculate the octane rating on the pump differ between continental Europe, where RON generally prevails, and the U.S./Canada, which use the (R+M)/2 method.
Unless you have one of the discontinued 4-wheel steering Yukons XLs! But seriously, the point of having a giant land-yacht isn't that you can offroad with it, but that it has vast amounts of room. You can only cram so much luggage or so many passengers into a Civic.
Sung said once they realized in around 2003 that the product was selling more as a toy than for medicinal purposes she started advertising it to both markets, despite her father's initial reluctance. One of their slogans is, “The sex toy that's good for you.”
They just have a problem with other companies selling similar products that compete with their own line of sex toys, allegedly infringing their patent.
The real news here is that the daughter (in the picture) is actually 35. Who would have guessed?