tendencies to be happy, not to smoke, and not to become obese are passed between nodes in a directed graph
Wouldn't it be more likely that these people that are happy, athletic, and don't smoke tend to make friends with other people like them, as opposed to this suggestion of viral happiness? I mean it seems pretty obvious that people who don't smoke are going to have a higher percentage of friends that don't smoke than those who do smoke.
It's called a "lifestyle."
If you'd RTFA (and no, I'm not new here) you'd know that this effect is called homophily, and that one of the criticisms of the study is that the researchers efforts to account for it were insufficient.
I swear to God if anybody does that to me when I'm moving into the house they've sold, I'm turning up at their forwarding address and peeing in their letterbox.
Even if they leave you a very polite note explaining that since they paid $40 per bulb for their LED bulbs they (quite reasonably) wanted to take them with them?
(What I would do if swapping to LED bulbs would be to put the bulbs I take out in a box somewhere and reinstate them when leaving.)
I hope they put in some smarts so that it looks resistive rather than cutting off the peaks like a capacitor and bridge rectifier does.
If I remember correctly, power factor correction is a requirement nowadays (for European household electrical equipment, at least). So I would guess so.
The LED lights I've seen are too directed. They don't light up a room all that well. Whatever spot the LEDs are aimed at is more illuminated, and everywhere else less illuminated than with CFLs or incandescents.
This can usually be alleviated by a good design of emitter geometry, lens and diffuser. Unfortunately, designing good lenses is difficult, and fabricating and assembling the resulting complex shapes is expensive.
The idea is good because it would it that much harder to propagate botnets and even feasible, but the real problem is that almost all end users have no idea what malware is or how to stop it. Unless the enduser is supported in removing the malware, and in the case of rootkits this usually means reinstalling the OS, then it will only result in a huge number of complaints that the ISPs will not be able to cope with.
Most end users have no idea how to replace the spin motor on their washing machine, either.
I don't understand why people who are perfectly happy with getting knowledgeable technicians to work on almost all of their household equipment think that their PC is some sort of magical exception.
3 phase 220 V? And here I was thinking 3 phase was generally 400 V.
The EU standard for 3-phase end-user lines is 415 V if you measure the voltage from one live conductor to another. If you measure from one live conductor to ground, it's 235 V. So you're both correct.
Actually, the Firefly class is an in-system transport and doesn't have FTL capability. IIRC the various places the crew lands in the TV series are mostly moons around gas giants. (Happy to be corrected).
I won't comment on the changes to the SRBs/tank diameter (which appear to make no sense), but IIRC they switched from the SSME to the RS-68 because the unit cost of the SSME was too high to be used on a disposable stage...?
One interesting thing you could do with the flexible path is build a lunar space elevator with existing technology.
My back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest that this is impossible -- the moon rotates too slowly for an orbit to exist where a satellite is stationary relative to the surface.
On the other hand, we currently have the technology to build a Mars space elevator!
This treaty suggests that perhaps it's not possible currently (legally) to exploit the resources of other planets.
That seems to me to fall wholly within the purview of, "What yer gonna do?" The Chinese will most certainly exploit to the fullest extent, when (not if) they get there -- and I'll be cheering them on from the sidelines.
. People have been asking why are when spending $X (what seems like a really big number) on manned space flight when we've been there, done that, and have Y number of problems still back on earth.
Actually I think people are beginning to say why are we spending $X sending humans to do something a robot can do faster, cheaper and more reliably for one tenth the price.
Actually, robots do research more slowly, and less reliably for one tenth of the price. The two robots currently on Mars have so far done about 2 days work for an actual human geologist on site.
And in any case, is that really important? If we TRULY think exploring space is worthwhile for objective reasons, perhaps those objective reasons should be the driver and the inspiration, rather than the light and sound show of human space travel.
My reason is this: the human race has a choice between expanding across the solar system, and extinction. A species without the drive to explore and inhabit new territories is an evolutionary dead end, guaranteed to be superceded by a more aggressive species.
Or, another reason is that all our eggs, as a species, are in one fragile basket. All it takes is for a smallish asteroid to hit us[1], or a nuclear war to take place, or a virulent bioweapon to break loose, and our civilisation will become part of the fossil record.
[1] I note that your government has also been failing to sufficiently fund your country's asteroid detection and tracking programme.
Most of the coverage of this report thus far has been along the lines that NASA can not accomplish its goals within its available resources.
NASA gets slightly more than half of one percent (~00.6%) of the federal budget. Isn't it also worth debating if this is the right percentage of our tax dollars to spend on this endeavor and what other federal programs should be cut (or even taxes raised) to *properly* fund NASA?
I think the problem is that your government is setting targets, and then failing to provide sufficient funds to achieve those targets. Congress must either set targets that are achievable with the funds they are willing to provide, or provide funds sufficient to achieve the targets they want to set.
The report is not saying, "NASA needs more money."
Ah, Okay then. We'd be unable to get the highly refined alloys we'd need from NEOs anyway. Raw iron, nickel, etc, sure. A few big thick iron plates might be good for hiding from radiation, but other than that, there's no real need for bulk quantities of metals in space. We'd be better off with TransHab/Bigelow modules.
A couple of metres of crushed rock, held in place by netting, would be good for hiding from radiation (can't be bothered to find the relevant paper right now, sorry). Just the sort of thing that might be left over from an asteroid when you've extracted the useful metals you need!
Also, don't forget that one of the reasons we use 'highly refined alloys' in the space industry at the moment is because we need to keep mass down. If building an (essentially) stationary space station, the mass constraint could likely be weakened, and cheaper, less advanced, easier to manufacture materials may become a practical solution.
If we can get a simple manned craft at a Lagrange point, it would be an impressive feat of engineering but I'm afraid it's importance would be lost on the vast majority of the people paying for it.
You do realise that the importance of pretty much all publicly-funded research is lost on the vast majority of the people paying for it, right?
Why is a space program such a high priority? Manned missions to the moon are completely useless at this point. Unmanned missions are cheap. Pretty much anything would be a better use of money than moving a huge bubble of air and human to the moon and back so we can gawk and take pictures.
What happened to my species? Did someone give it an ambitionectomy?
We've reached the limit of what can be done by remotely-operated rovers. Take the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, for example: all of the results of that project so far, running for several years now, could have been achieved in about two days by a human geologist 'on site', as it were.
Finally, suggesting that the only reason to leave the Earth is to 'gawk and take pictures' is disingenuous at best. Or have I been trolled?
Don't hold yourself back because of what others might think about you. And if you want to justify it to yourself in some way, then consider there are far worse things you can spend your time and money on... cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, porn, guns and on and on.
What's wrong with spending your time and money on guns? Target rifle shooting is the safest sport you can do!
We'd be so damn busy trying to use emacs to read info docs that we wouldn't have time to map the human genome.
As a data point, when I was working at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in 2007, the bioinformatics people I spoke to were almost all using Emacs, vim or nano to write Perl scripts to run on Linux supercomputers.
Maybe you should stick to commenting on things you're not utterly clueless about?
My thoughts exactly! It's a Linux based phone for crying out loud. Why not support open codecs? Out of the box?!
I'm going to get an iRiver player just to support the fact that they support Vorbis formats.
I believe that Maemo uses GStreamer, so horror of horrors, you might need to install a package to provide Ogg support!
Oh wait, that would be absolutely unthinkable. Nokia are totally evil to not install the appropriate GStreamer backend by default. You would be much better taking your money elsewhere. </sarcasm>
Slashdot Mirror
tendencies to be happy, not to smoke, and not to become obese are passed between nodes in a directed graph
Wouldn't it be more likely that these people that are happy, athletic, and don't smoke tend to make friends with other people like them, as opposed to this suggestion of viral happiness? I mean it seems pretty obvious that people who don't smoke are going to have a higher percentage of friends that don't smoke than those who do smoke. It's called a "lifestyle."
If you'd RTFA (and no, I'm not new here) you'd know that this effect is called homophily, and that one of the criticisms of the study is that the researchers efforts to account for it were insufficient.
I swear to God if anybody does that to me when I'm moving into the house they've sold, I'm turning up at their forwarding address and peeing in their letterbox.
Even if they leave you a very polite note explaining that since they paid $40 per bulb for their LED bulbs they (quite reasonably) wanted to take them with them?
(What I would do if swapping to LED bulbs would be to put the bulbs I take out in a box somewhere and reinstate them when leaving.)
I hope they put in some smarts so that it looks resistive rather than cutting off the peaks like a capacitor and bridge rectifier does.
If I remember correctly, power factor correction is a requirement nowadays (for European household electrical equipment, at least). So I would guess so.
The LED lights I've seen are too directed. They don't light up a room all that well. Whatever spot the LEDs are aimed at is more illuminated, and everywhere else less illuminated than with CFLs or incandescents.
This can usually be alleviated by a good design of emitter geometry, lens and diffuser. Unfortunately, designing good lenses is difficult, and fabricating and assembling the resulting complex shapes is expensive.
Here's a picture of a dupe, complete with comments.
It's not a dupe -- that was a different story, as you would know if you had compared TFA from each story.
The idea is good because it would it that much harder to propagate botnets and even feasible, but the real problem is that almost all end users have no idea what malware is or how to stop it. Unless the enduser is supported in removing the malware, and in the case of rootkits this usually means reinstalling the OS, then it will only result in a huge number of complaints that the ISPs will not be able to cope with.
Most end users have no idea how to replace the spin motor on their washing machine, either.
I don't understand why people who are perfectly happy with getting knowledgeable technicians to work on almost all of their household equipment think that their PC is some sort of magical exception.
"Universities are not intended to provide vocational training."
Why do so many people seem to have forgotten this?
3 phase 220 V? And here I was thinking 3 phase was generally 400 V.
The EU standard for 3-phase end-user lines is 415 V if you measure the voltage from one live conductor to another. If you measure from one live conductor to ground, it's 235 V. So you're both correct.
Perhaps they would if they rode in a Firefly.
Actually, the Firefly class is an in-system transport and doesn't have FTL capability. IIRC the various places the crew lands in the TV series are mostly moons around gas giants. (Happy to be corrected).
That is precisely what the Ares V design is not
There. Fixed that for you.
I stand corrected.
I won't comment on the changes to the SRBs/tank diameter (which appear to make no sense), but IIRC they switched from the SSME to the RS-68 because the unit cost of the SSME was too high to be used on a disposable stage...?
One interesting thing you could do with the flexible path is build a lunar space elevator with existing technology.
My back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest that this is impossible -- the moon rotates too slowly for an orbit to exist where a satellite is stationary relative to the surface.
On the other hand, we currently have the technology to build a Mars space elevator!
This treaty suggests that perhaps it's not possible currently (legally) to exploit the resources of other planets.
That seems to me to fall wholly within the purview of, "What yer gonna do?" The Chinese will most certainly exploit to the fullest extent, when (not if) they get there -- and I'll be cheering them on from the sidelines.
. People have been asking why are when spending $X (what seems like a really big number) on manned space flight when we've been there, done that, and have Y number of problems still back on earth.
Actually I think people are beginning to say why are we spending $X sending humans to do something a robot can do faster, cheaper and more reliably for one tenth the price.
Actually, robots do research more slowly, and less reliably for one tenth of the price. The two robots currently on Mars have so far done about 2 days work for an actual human geologist on site.
And in any case, is that really important? If we TRULY think exploring space is worthwhile for objective reasons, perhaps those objective reasons should be the driver and the inspiration, rather than the light and sound show of human space travel.
My reason is this: the human race has a choice between expanding across the solar system, and extinction. A species without the drive to explore and inhabit new territories is an evolutionary dead end, guaranteed to be superceded by a more aggressive species.
Or, another reason is that all our eggs, as a species, are in one fragile basket. All it takes is for a smallish asteroid to hit us[1], or a nuclear war to take place, or a virulent bioweapon to break loose, and our civilisation will become part of the fossil record.
[1] I note that your government has also been failing to sufficiently fund your country's asteroid detection and tracking programme.
Most of the coverage of this report thus far has been along the lines that NASA can not accomplish its goals within its available resources.
NASA gets slightly more than half of one percent (~00.6%) of the federal budget. Isn't it also worth debating if this is the right percentage of our tax dollars to spend on this endeavor and what other federal programs should be cut (or even taxes raised) to *properly* fund NASA?
I think the problem is that your government is setting targets, and then failing to provide sufficient funds to achieve those targets. Congress must either set targets that are achievable with the funds they are willing to provide, or provide funds sufficient to achieve the targets they want to set.
The report is not saying, "NASA needs more money."
Ah, Okay then. We'd be unable to get the highly refined alloys we'd need from NEOs anyway. Raw iron, nickel, etc, sure. A few big thick iron plates might be good for hiding from radiation, but other than that, there's no real need for bulk quantities of metals in space. We'd be better off with TransHab/Bigelow modules.
A couple of metres of crushed rock, held in place by netting, would be good for hiding from radiation (can't be bothered to find the relevant paper right now, sorry). Just the sort of thing that might be left over from an asteroid when you've extracted the useful metals you need!
Also, don't forget that one of the reasons we use 'highly refined alloys' in the space industry at the moment is because we need to keep mass down. If building an (essentially) stationary space station, the mass constraint could likely be weakened, and cheaper, less advanced, easier to manufacture materials may become a practical solution.
If we can get a simple manned craft at a Lagrange point, it would be an impressive feat of engineering but I'm afraid it's importance would be lost on the vast majority of the people paying for it.
You do realise that the importance of pretty much all publicly-funded research is lost on the vast majority of the people paying for it, right?
What's costly is bringing fuel to Mars just to burn it on the return, but if we had that chemical rockets would do just fine.
Look up Zubrin and Bakers 'Mars Direct' mission architecture. It proposes in-situ production of propellant for the return journey.
Why is a space program such a high priority? Manned missions to the moon are completely useless at this point. Unmanned missions are cheap. Pretty much anything would be a better use of money than moving a huge bubble of air and human to the moon and back so we can gawk and take pictures.
What happened to my species? Did someone give it an ambitionectomy?
We've reached the limit of what can be done by remotely-operated rovers. Take the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, for example: all of the results of that project so far, running for several years now, could have been achieved in about two days by a human geologist 'on site', as it were.
Finally, suggesting that the only reason to leave the Earth is to 'gawk and take pictures' is disingenuous at best. Or have I been trolled?
Why not just pull the engines out of the shuttle, stick them underneath the external tank, and put the Orion module on top?
That is precisely what the Ares V design is.
Atheists realize that every species becomes either space-faring, or extinct.
I'm a Christian (a Catholic, in fact), and I don't see how this is incompatible with Christianity.
Don't hold yourself back because of what others might think about you. And if you want to justify it to yourself in some way, then consider there are far worse things you can spend your time and money on... cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, porn, guns and on and on.
What's wrong with spending your time and money on guns? Target rifle shooting is the safest sport you can do!
We'd be so damn busy trying to use emacs to read info docs that we wouldn't have time to map the human genome.
As a data point, when I was working at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in 2007, the bioinformatics people I spoke to were almost all using Emacs, vim or nano to write Perl scripts to run on Linux supercomputers.
Maybe you should stick to commenting on things you're not utterly clueless about?
My thoughts exactly! It's a Linux based phone for crying out loud. Why not support open codecs? Out of the box?!
I'm going to get an iRiver player just to support the fact that they support Vorbis formats.
I believe that Maemo uses GStreamer, so horror of horrors, you might need to install a package to provide Ogg support!
Oh wait, that would be absolutely unthinkable. Nokia are totally evil to not install the appropriate GStreamer backend by default. You would be much better taking your money elsewhere. </sarcasm>
It's a low-powered FM transmitter, so that you can use it to play music over your in-car stereo without needing an interface cable.
/. has a large tin foil hat contingency, so this should come as no great shock.
I think you mean 'constituency' or 'contingent'.