the cost of vaccinating an american child for hepatitis B and A works out at ~$120 delivered. $7 million would vaccinate an entire generation in many states.
saving, i might add, considerably more than $7 million down the track when the tiny percentage of those vaccinated who would have caught one of these diseases and needed incredibly expensive liver treatments and transplants *don't* catch hep B or A.
There's been a device on the market for several years in Japan that does straight out blocking. Works by blocking the initial cell network -> handset 'are you there' signal rather than the carrier. Cost, from memory was ~US$500 per unit, and effective blocking range was in the 5-10 metre range. Very popular with restraunts, who advertise that they are genuinely a cellphone free space.
Too true. I've seen both pubmed and current contents list the same paper multiple times with differences ranging from punctuation to reversing the order of the first two authors.
I'd like to see the authors of the paper look up some of these misquoted references in the relevant citation index - I'd bet money some of the 'erroneous references'are being propogated by the indexes.
The article mentioned this almost as an aside, but as someone who works in government, the ability of these guys to purchase secondhand from ebay is truly revolutionary.
Hell, I can't even buy reconditioned palms with manufacturer warranty direct from palm - not only is palm not an "approved vendor" for purchasing palms from (go figure..), but our purchasing policies explicitly ban reconditioned or secondhand items. As for *ebay*..
Well done to Largo for giving these guys the ability to use a little flexibility and common sense.
We should, of course, only allow older, bitter, grumpier developers to have a say in the direction of the organisations that steer our collective future.
Boundless idealism and energy, as frequently espoused by the youth of today, have no place *at all* in the boundlessly idealistic open source movement.
uh.. read the article. it's not 'building a g4 from scratch' so much as 'getting an apple mobo & other random g4 parts off ebay and mounting them in a pc case with some noisy fans', primarily because "it's impossible to use a Zip drive, CD-ROM, and DVD-ROM together in the same machine with any G4 that Apple has ever shipped".
this is a glorified case-mod project for a specific end use, not 'building a g4 from scratch'.
.. and has anyone else been completely screwed by the htmlization of email leading to 'unrecognized tags' being dropped. so your tag at the end of an otherwise harsh-seeming sentence gets dropped, completely changing the meaning of the text.
I've taken to using { brackets to be on the safe side - as in {sarcasm} {/sarcasm} when i don't know what email client the recipient is using. yuk.
"Unfortunately, they will be placing "fake" files on gnutella....the question being, are those fake files worth the gain of having a major isp on "our" side?"
Yes, but fake files of top 100 songs. Who gives a shit if there's hundreds of fake britney files out there?
I work on large, US taxpayer-funded research projects. We gather *huge* amounts of data, and use less than a third of it ourselves. Some of it will eventually be datamined by other projects, and all of it has potential for future researchers. Perhaps in a year or two; perhaps in 20 years. It's that kind of data.
I couldn't actually give a shit about open source vs closed sorce *software* - in a given week I switch back & forth between MacOS, NT, and Linux, and use both proprietary and open source tools on all three depending entirely on what best suits the task is at hand. But having the data I work with in an open format which can be used by multiple tools from multiple vendors across all three of the platforms I use is essential. And in the longer term, making absolutely sure the data I work with is and will remain available to other researchers is critical.
We, the taxpayers, pay for an incredible amount of extremely expensive research, and to deliberately lock the products of this research up in proprietary formats which may not be accessible to later researchers (eg the 1960's census data debacle) is criminal stupidity.
I use endnote with OpenOffice every time I publish - on windows though. And there's one more manual step involved in turning the temp citation markers into final citations if you're using anything but wordperfect or word, but that hasn't been enough of a problem to stop most of my non-geek colleagues migrating slowly over to OO as we run out of msoffice licenses and/or word second-guesses someone once too often and they snap.. : )
I've emailed ISI (or thompson or whatever they're calling themselves these days) and asked them to consider making a plugin for OO & describing the migration to OO in my field, & received a nice (if noncommittal) reply from them.
Of course, none of this helps you much if youre using OO under linux. I do most of my writing under linux & reboot to a windows partition for that final run through the paper to swap out my notes about references ("dig out one of those italian papers done last year to cover this.." etc) for the real thing, but that's because other tools I want to be able to toggle to while writing (like some custom data manipulation & query tools) are only on linux. It also meant I had to download & install both the windows & linux versions of OO.
But anyway, you might consider writing a nice note to ISI mentioning your burning desire to see a linux version. And the fact your department is considering a wholesale switch to sixpack : )
Also on wired (and greplaw for that matter) is the mention that the school intends to introduce thumbprint scanners for security purposes. (http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,53912,00. html)
Having your thumbprint taken at the beginning of the semester will be compulsory. I'm not entirely sure I'd want my thumbprint in a subphoenable database for all time because of where I went to school..
"There is also a very interesting history of tetris online"
Oh God, my *eyes* - how anyone could read through enough of that bright lavender text on black background to work out that the content is actually "interesting" is beyond me.
Someone miror it and convert it to something readable, before we blind an entire generation of geeks.
"Actually, 1 cc of water weighs about 1/100 of a newton, and one calorie will raise the cc of water by 1 degree celcius (about 4.2 joules)."
newtons are a measure of force - m.kg.s^-2. or are you getting technical about weight vs mass? but I stand corrected about the 4.2 joules bit. that'll teach me to post on the basis of 15 year old memories of high school physics. : )
well, at least the metric system is internally consistent (unlike that other thing): 1 cm cubed of water weighs 1 gram and it takes 1 joule of energy to raise its temerature by 1 degree celcius. nice, huh.
"They require you to hold them in your hand. Why? Is your hand talking?"
OK, so this is way offtopic, but fuck it. Karma is meaningless in these post-'the post' days anyway.
Older Australian readers will remember "red phones" - public phones rolled out the front of small stores etc. Ever wondered why the handsets on those things were as heavy as shit? Telecom wanted people to keep calls short so the next victim could deposit their 20 cents - did some research & decided the simplest solution was to stick great slabs of lead in the handset. Heavy handset => short phone call.
"The telephone isn't all that simple and yet more basic than you give it credit for."
No shit. My sister in law asked if we had a phone where she could make a 'private' phone call last week; I directed her to the back bedroom where we still have a rotary phone. 3 minutes later she was back asking "so how do I use this thing?"
In many states in the US you can specifically opt out of receiving calls from jails/prisons. In california the recorded message you get when 'snake' calls by mistake offers a kind of 'press one to not receive calls from jail again'.
What they don't tell you is this is permanent & it's a complete bitch to get this block removed - some secretary at my workplace pressed one once - and we provide social services to people just out of jail and we ended up having to get a new line because people about to get out couldn't call us and the state *refused* to unblock the number.
Anyway, that glitch sounds relatively irrelevant to your situation (hope you don't have teenage kids : ) so try calling your local dept. of corrections and asking about it if it's really driving you (and poor snake) nuts.
I wondered when cellphones first started to become more common how long it'd be before people made the transition from "guy (apparently) talking to himself on the street -> immediate assumption is he's crazy, followed by the realization he was actually talking on a phone" to "guy (apparently) talking to himself on the street -> must be having a phone conversation, followed by the realization he's actually jabbering shit to himself".
The transition for me personally started to happen when hands free phones started becoming common & the hardware was a bit less obvious. I'm curious to see what we'll start assuming about people who are 'talking to themselves' with no visible hardware when this kind of thing gets common..
Dunno if this one is true, but it stuck in my head as being deliciously elegant..
Supposedly, shortly before WWII German scientists were trying to work out the best shape to use for U-Boats. The solution was as follows:
freeze a big long slab of ice with a rope embedded in it. Store it in a shed beside a long canal during winter. Wait for a day where the temerature of the water in the canal is zero degrees [everything in celsius, for the no-scientific americans among us] but has not frozen.
On the magic day, drop the block of ice in the canal, & start towing it down the canal at the speed you're interested in having your u-boat move at. The friction created by being towed through water creates sufficient energy to crack the latent heat of freezing, the only thing differentiating the zero degree block of ice from the zero degree water around it, & the edges of the ice start to melt, causing the ice to start taking on the optimal minimum drag shape for the speed it's moving through the water at.
Once the shape of the ice seems to have stabilized, you pull the block of ice out of the canal & measure its shape. Voila - you now have the optimal minimum drag shape for your u-boat.
Slashdot Mirror
the cost of vaccinating an american child for hepatitis B and A works out at ~$120 delivered. $7 million would vaccinate an entire generation in many states.
saving, i might add, considerably more than $7 million down the track when the tiny percentage of those vaccinated who would have caught one of these diseases and needed incredibly expensive liver treatments and transplants *don't* catch hep B or A.
There's been a device on the market for several years in Japan that does straight out blocking. Works by blocking the initial cell network -> handset 'are you there' signal rather than the carrier. Cost, from memory was ~US$500 per unit, and effective blocking range was in the 5-10 metre range. Very popular with restraunts, who advertise that they are genuinely a cellphone free space.
it's the 'war on terror' concept that really screws with my head - declaring war on a *technique*? way to make sure you never have to stop..
Too true. I've seen both pubmed and current contents list the same paper multiple times with differences ranging from punctuation to reversing the order of the first two authors.
I'd like to see the authors of the paper look up some of these misquoted references in the relevant citation index - I'd bet money some of the 'erroneous references'are being propogated by the indexes.
The article mentioned this almost as an aside, but as someone who works in government, the ability of these guys to purchase secondhand from ebay is truly revolutionary.
Hell, I can't even buy reconditioned palms with manufacturer warranty direct from palm - not only is palm not an "approved vendor" for purchasing palms from (go figure..), but our purchasing policies explicitly ban reconditioned or secondhand items. As for *ebay*..
Well done to Largo for giving these guys the ability to use a little flexibility and common sense.
no wonder the nazis liked him so much.. : ) but thanks for the tip, hadn't heard of that one.
oooh! is speilberg going to start at the series beginning with the deeply racist, pro-nazi, occupation-era 'tintin in the congo'? heh.
We should, of course, only allow older, bitter, grumpier developers to have a say in the direction of the organisations that steer our collective future.
Boundless idealism and energy, as frequently espoused by the youth of today, have no place *at all* in the boundlessly idealistic open source movement.
Signed, a 34 year old Bitter.
Idiot.
"If this isn't abused by users [something good happens]... Am I missing something here"?
/. for at least 4 years.. {grin}
I can't believe these two snippets were written by someone who's been on
You can delete step 3 I think.. : )
uh.. read the article. it's not 'building a g4 from scratch' so much as 'getting an apple mobo & other random g4 parts off ebay and mounting them in a pc case with some noisy fans', primarily because "it's impossible to use a Zip drive, CD-ROM, and DVD-ROM together in the same machine with any G4 that Apple has ever shipped".
this is a glorified case-mod project for a specific end use, not 'building a g4 from scratch'.
.. and has anyone else been completely screwed by the htmlization of email leading to 'unrecognized tags' being dropped. so your tag at the end of an otherwise harsh-seeming sentence gets dropped, completely changing the meaning of the text.
I've taken to using { brackets to be on the safe side - as in {sarcasm} {/sarcasm} when i don't know what email client the recipient is using. yuk.
"Unfortunately, they will be placing "fake" files on gnutella....the question being, are those fake files worth the gain of having a major isp on "our" side?"
Yes, but fake files of top 100 songs. Who gives a shit if there's hundreds of fake britney files out there?
I work on large, US taxpayer-funded research projects. We gather *huge* amounts of data, and use less than a third of it ourselves. Some of it will eventually be datamined by other projects, and all of it has potential for future researchers. Perhaps in a year or two; perhaps in 20 years. It's that kind of data.
I couldn't actually give a shit about open source vs closed sorce *software* - in a given week I switch back & forth between MacOS, NT, and Linux, and use both proprietary and open source tools on all three depending entirely on what best suits the task is at hand. But having the data I work with in an open format which can be used by multiple tools from multiple vendors across all three of the platforms I use is essential. And in the longer term, making absolutely sure the data I work with is and will remain available to other researchers is critical.
We, the taxpayers, pay for an incredible amount of extremely expensive research, and to deliberately lock the products of this research up in proprietary formats which may not be accessible to later researchers (eg the 1960's census data debacle) is criminal stupidity.
I use endnote with OpenOffice every time I publish - on windows though. And there's one more manual step involved in turning the temp citation markers into final citations if you're using anything but wordperfect or word, but that hasn't been enough of a problem to stop most of my non-geek colleagues migrating slowly over to OO as we run out of msoffice licenses and/or word second-guesses someone once too often and they snap.. : )
I've emailed ISI (or thompson or whatever they're calling themselves these days) and asked them to consider making a plugin for OO & describing the migration to OO in my field, & received a nice (if noncommittal) reply from them.
Of course, none of this helps you much if youre using OO under linux. I do most of my writing under linux & reboot to a windows partition for that final run through the paper to swap out my notes about references ("dig out one of those italian papers done last year to cover this.." etc) for the real thing, but that's because other tools I want to be able to toggle to while writing (like some custom data manipulation & query tools) are only on linux. It also meant I had to download & install both the windows & linux versions of OO.
But anyway, you might consider writing a nice note to ISI mentioning your burning desire to see a linux version. And the fact your department is considering a wholesale switch to sixpack : )
Also on wired (and greplaw for that matter) is the mention that the school intends to introduce thumbprint scanners for security purposes. (http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,53912,00. html)
Having your thumbprint taken at the beginning of the semester will be compulsory. I'm not entirely sure I'd want my thumbprint in a subphoenable database for all time because of where I went to school..
"There is also a very interesting history of tetris online"
Oh God, my *eyes* - how anyone could read through enough of that bright lavender text on black background to work out that the content is actually "interesting" is beyond me.
Someone miror it and convert it to something readable, before we blind an entire generation of geeks.
"Actually, 1 cc of water weighs about 1/100 of a newton, and one calorie will raise the cc of water by 1 degree celcius (about 4.2 joules)."
newtons are a measure of force - m.kg.s^-2. or are you getting technical about weight vs mass? but I stand corrected about the 4.2 joules bit. that'll teach me to post on the basis of 15 year old memories of high school physics. : )
well, at least the metric system is internally consistent (unlike that other thing): 1 cm cubed of water weighs 1 gram and it takes 1 joule of energy to raise its temerature by 1 degree celcius. nice, huh.
"The potential for being beaten on the streets is just amazing!"
No shit. I'd beat up some nintendo smurf to get my hands on a large flatscreen version of the latest & greatest console.
"They require you to hold them in your hand. Why? Is your hand talking?"
OK, so this is way offtopic, but fuck it. Karma is meaningless in these post-'the post' days anyway.
Older Australian readers will remember "red phones" - public phones rolled out the front of small stores etc. Ever wondered why the handsets on those things were as heavy as shit? Telecom wanted people to keep calls short so the next victim could deposit their 20 cents - did some research & decided the simplest solution was to stick great slabs of lead in the handset. Heavy handset => short phone call.
"The telephone isn't all that simple and yet more basic than you give it credit for."
No shit. My sister in law asked if we had a phone where she could make a 'private' phone call last week; I directed her to the back bedroom where we still have a rotary phone. 3 minutes later she was back asking "so how do I use this thing?"
She's 23. I feel old.
In many states in the US you can specifically opt out of receiving calls from jails/prisons. In california the recorded message you get when 'snake' calls by mistake offers a kind of 'press one to not receive calls from jail again'.
What they don't tell you is this is permanent & it's a complete bitch to get this block removed - some secretary at my workplace pressed one once - and we provide social services to people just out of jail and we ended up having to get a new line because people about to get out couldn't call us and the state *refused* to unblock the number.
Anyway, that glitch sounds relatively irrelevant to your situation (hope you don't have teenage kids : ) so try calling your local dept. of corrections and asking about it if it's really driving you (and poor snake) nuts.
I wondered when cellphones first started to become more common how long it'd be before people made the transition from "guy (apparently) talking to himself on the street -> immediate assumption is he's crazy, followed by the realization he was actually talking on a phone" to "guy (apparently) talking to himself on the street -> must be having a phone conversation, followed by the realization he's actually jabbering shit to himself".
The transition for me personally started to happen when hands free phones started becoming common & the hardware was a bit less obvious. I'm curious to see what we'll start assuming about people who are 'talking to themselves' with no visible hardware when this kind of thing gets common..
Dunno if this one is true, but it stuck in my head as being deliciously elegant..
Supposedly, shortly before WWII German scientists were trying to work out the best shape to use for U-Boats. The solution was as follows:
freeze a big long slab of ice with a rope embedded in it. Store it in a shed beside a long canal during winter. Wait for a day where the temerature of the water in the canal is zero degrees [everything in celsius, for the no-scientific americans among us] but has not frozen.
On the magic day, drop the block of ice in the canal, & start towing it down the canal at the speed you're interested in having your u-boat move at. The friction created by being towed through water creates sufficient energy to crack the latent heat of freezing, the only thing differentiating the zero degree block of ice from the zero degree water around it, & the edges of the ice start to melt, causing the ice to start taking on the optimal minimum drag shape for the speed it's moving through the water at.
Once the shape of the ice seems to have stabilized, you pull the block of ice out of the canal & measure its shape. Voila - you now have the optimal minimum drag shape for your u-boat.