My implication was that any publicly funded research could be labeled "military" and suppressed, which is a subversion of the entire "academic commons" of scientific research and independent validation.
What the found was that this third strain, if it developed in a certain way, was an order of magnitude worse than either one alone. Prevention and treatment regimens are going to need a new paradigm to attack a disease like this, and it was totally responsible of the researchers to warn the medical industry of this fact.
Are you sure this was responsible research and not just the result of a bunch of "scientists" passing a bong around while watching 24 season 3?
âoeexperimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.â
But the whole point of science is to see if results can be replicated or not.
When the hypothesis is: "A modified strain of flu virus can kill half of all living homo-sapiens within a 2 year time-span." I don't want the science to be tested, replicated, verified, or published any more than I do Newt's hypothesis of "A single EMP over the central United States will knock all of civilization back to the Middle Ages."
Personally, I think the first is achievable and the second is overstating things, but I am happy enough to live my life without experts "testing" either of them. Any "scientific testing" of these things is speculative extrapolation, at best.
Perhaps - although, after everybody gets a $500-600 tablet, I think the small sub $400 notebook market will revive. Tablets are the cool thing for people that don't have them. Somebody gave me an iPad, it's great for the kids to surf YouTube on, but absolutely sucks for typing - and, thanks to iOS - is not a replacement for a PC that can do things like Flash based websites. (Who needs that? Start with: Ticket to Read, SpellingCity.com, etc.)
My Gen1 PS3 consumes 250+W in STANDBY, 300-350 during gameplay, and I think in the high 200s for Netflix streaming. I believe then Gen2 PS3s might shave 150W off of those numbers, but that's still 100W standby. My WDTV streams video at less than 20 watts, and is something like 5W standby.
If you leave something on 24-7-365, and you pay $0.11/kwh, that will cost you the same in dollars per year as the average watts it consumes. Gen1 PS3, costing $275ish per year to run continuously, WDTV, more like 7. Even if you only use it 4 hours a day, it doesn't take long to pay for a WDTV with the power savings.
even simpler than that: if a game was fun to play 5 years ago when it was new, but I never got around to playing that one, why would it not be fun today?
Dude, you obviously don't understand the NEED to get that iPhone 5 / Verizon Galaxy Nexus / Tesla Roadster.
the person who shoves work off onto other coworkers (like your boss is doing)
Unfortunately, in the real world, a boss who does things themselves is a poor boss. Richard Branson is wildly successful, mostly because he's incompetent at most basic business skills, except: delegation.
It's crazy to think wall street is sucking up all the science brainpower.
Agreed, but I think it's less crazy to think that wall street is sucking up all the economic "free will" of the government/99% of people and leaving space exploration and other "fun" endeavors in the hands of the 0.001%
On a three person team, metrics are irrelevant - personality and politics are 100% more important than technical skill.
If you've got 15-20 people and it's time for a 10% downsizing, or (less realistically), performance based bonus or advancement, then metrics start to be something worth looking at.
When I had to choose between 2, my boss asked me who was my choice, I told him, he agreed, I started to tell him why, he stopped me and said: "it doesn't matter why, I'm just glad that we came up with the same answer."
We use FPGAs to do custom video pipelines alongside our processor cores, we don't, as a general rule, reconfigure them very often, because that takes lots and lots of testing to make sure you haven't screwed up, but the flexibility does allow us to move forward without fully specifying the hardware at an early stage.
What they are after is minimal lag in computation - at some point, the FPGAs will win this over standard CPUs or GPUs, all you need is cubic dollars to fund them, and, if you haven't noticed, cubic dollars is their business.
Ah, so JP Morgan is labotamizing them upon termination. Now that is evil !
I've seen some contracts to that effect (not work for any competing firm or use, in any way, technology developed at the company for a period of 10 years after termination)... they told me it was standard, I told them it was my standard policy to not sign idiotic crap like that, they hired me anyway.
These banks aren't just siphoning money, they are also siphoning talent away from more important projects. The people working on these things could be brilliant physicists or engineers, if they weren't sucked into the dark side.
But, the dark side is filled with shiny baubles - why take a conventional job for $85K when you can start with a financial firm at $135K? That's a Porsche in the garage on day one, upgraded to a Ferrari after the 2 year lease is up. With conspicuous consumption like that, the vacuous model types start paying attention to you - what 20-something genius doesn't want that?
So they can project how much money to borrow from the Federal Government the next time they have lent beyond sane limits to property speculators or invested in schemes even Mandelbrot wouldn't be able to simulate.
No, it's just fun building excessively expensive crap to justify your trading profits and look like you're "cutting edge." The only edge they are cutting is any shred of "all men are created equal" left in this country.
I'm sure a few trips to the ER were caused somewhere or another due to this toy,
I totally burned the shit out of my thumb when I was a kid, by melting some glass with my dad's propane torch and generally being an idiot.
You don't need "tools" or "toys" - when I was 5, I tested what this "it's HOT! you'll BURN YOURSELF!" stuff was all about with my index finger on an iron. Lost the fingerprint on the tip of that finger - and yet, I lived.
I can't speak to what other people like/dislike about Netflix. In my family, we have had a 3 disc at a time subscription since we bought our first DVD player in 1990-something. Around about 2003-ish, we started paying for a 3 disc at a time subscription for one set of parents (who live in a trailer park with no broadcast TV and are too cheap/poor to purchase cable.) When I was laid off a couple of years ago, and Netflix had been "streaming for free" for awhile, we reduced both subscriptions to 2 discs + streaming, which is a pretty comparable value to 3, maybe 4 discs at a time, depending on how picky you are about your content.
$20 per month to Netflix beats the crap out of anything the cable company has ever provided, up to and including $120/month mega-channel plans, in our opinion. We watch cable when traveling in hotels, no cable or broadcast capability on the home TV.
The recent proposed split of the plans sounded like a royal pain to us, especially the part where they talked about having to rebuild our queues - it took a long time to backlog selection of 500+ movies we'd like to see someday (approaching 1000, now that we have two separate queues, one for each disc out at a time), killing that was the most offensive proposition coming out of Netflix. $25/month would have been understandable and o.k., though pushing it down to $15 would be appreciated, especially with $1/night Redbox out there for competition.
Netflix had a chance to win here. They could have just been honest outright and said "Last year we paid $50,000,000 for this content. Now we're being asked to pay $300,000,000[1] for it. We unfortunately have to raise our fees in order to keep bringing you the same excellent service that we always have been."
[1] Numbers from the department of pulling figures out of my ass
I can imagine a severe "anti-defamation" clause in their contract with the content producers, something to the effect of: "Purchaser of license shall never directly or indirectly disclose the cost of license in any manner not strictly required by law, and then only in a positive light. Any comment attributable to purchaser of license which in any way may be construed to imply that license is not an absolute bargain, and wonderful value will be grounds for retro-active tripling of said license purchase price up to 5 years prior to the release of such comment, payable immediately. If, at any time, purchaser of license does not agree to these terms, they are free to immediately cease and desist use of all licensed content and, upon written notice of such election, will only be responsible for payment of the balance of the next 12 month's projected licensing fees."
My current startup is two years old and going strong with less than $30K at its start, and I financed its unprofitable beginning using my savings. And I moved out of my mom's basement during the first.com boom!
Congratulations - at the risk of sounding condescending, I'd like to point out that dozens of people per month win millions in the various lotteries around the country. I really wish that "our system" allowed more startups to succeed like you have. My first job out of school was with a $10M funded startup, it sputtered along and re-invented itself at least two times in the ensuing 12 years, I ended up leaving when it went to "volunteer only status" in 2003. It didn't manage to hook into.com cash directly, but.com did give it an infusion that ran it until 2003. I keep telling myself that what I do has better odds than playing the lottery, but I think if I actually ran the numbers, it's a close thing. At least I've had decent salaries along the way - that's another thing that keeps me out of the basically un-funded startups.
One of my customers is Y-Combinator darling Heroku, who did quite well on their small bit of seed money. I'm more of a fan of the web based startup nowadays, have actually had worse luck at the $1M+ startups. But I can see your point that a single patent wouldn't be very expensive if you're in that environment, and that success on a small budget is pretty unlikely for most companies.
There's obviously a line, I think bare minimum file-it-yourself patent costs are $5K (used to be in 1995 when I last checked, at least.), and if your total operating budget is $50K, that's a huge chunk. Once you've gotten to the $1M round, it _might_ be time to think about patents.
Thanks for the flame-free discussion, can't remember the last time I went several messages deep into something at Slashdot without a condescending message to be found.
That won't work for an upper division Physics class. You begin to dream the mathematics you are studying so much. GE and less stress courses, much more likely.
The last Physics class I took taught Greens functions and two other mathematical concepts whose names I have forgotten in the ensuing decades - textbook sharing would have worked quite well in there, if I had had my traditional study partner with me in the class, since the work was 99% concept, the book was not terribly helpful. Actually, I don't remember clearly if there was a book, there were a lot of lecture notes, sketches, etc.
Any startup I have been involved with needed at least 5 people to hang in for at least two years, with an average head cost of $100K per year. Sure, not everybody took home that kind of money, but there's always at least one or two who do, and one or two who are road warriors burning up the airfare, hotel, meals, etc. So, at bare minimum, $1M to get the idea anywhere near enough traction to have some value. If you burn $30K in patent costs, that's 3% well spent to have the "patent protected" talking points with the next round investors.
I suppose two guys in mom's basement can start the next Google while eating Ramen noodles and working at Starbucks for spending money, but I've never gotten involved with that kind of startup, and I'm not familiar with any startups that have had anything resembling success with less than a $1M initial bankroll, on the contrary, I know plenty of $10M+ startups that have sputtered.
Y-combinator and the like start web based startups with something like $30K first-round seed money, these are a different kind of animal, and some do succeed (while moving so fast that patents are nearly irrelevant), but I think the micro-incubators go through more than 35 of these first-round starts before they find a nugget worth developing, so it's just a different way of slicing the pie.
Slashdot Mirror
My implication was that any publicly funded research could be labeled "military" and suppressed, which is a subversion of the entire "academic commons" of scientific research and independent validation.
What the found was that this third strain, if it developed in a certain way, was an order of magnitude worse than either one alone. Prevention and treatment regimens are going to need a new paradigm to attack a disease like this, and it was totally responsible of the researchers to warn the medical industry of this fact.
Are you sure this was responsible research and not just the result of a bunch of "scientists" passing a bong around while watching 24 season 3?
This is research that has a military application and as such should perhaps have been more restrictive to start with.
All research has a military application.
âoeexperimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.â
But the whole point of science is to see if results can be replicated or not.
When the hypothesis is: "A modified strain of flu virus can kill half of all living homo-sapiens within a 2 year time-span." I don't want the science to be tested, replicated, verified, or published any more than I do Newt's hypothesis of "A single EMP over the central United States will knock all of civilization back to the Middle Ages."
Personally, I think the first is achievable and the second is overstating things, but I am happy enough to live my life without experts "testing" either of them. Any "scientific testing" of these things is speculative extrapolation, at best.
iPad killed the netbook market.
Perhaps - although, after everybody gets a $500-600 tablet, I think the small sub $400 notebook market will revive. Tablets are the cool thing for people that don't have them. Somebody gave me an iPad, it's great for the kids to surf YouTube on, but absolutely sucks for typing - and, thanks to iOS - is not a replacement for a PC that can do things like Flash based websites. (Who needs that? Start with: Ticket to Read, SpellingCity.com, etc.)
Like every 9 year old on MySpace ever did... just put in the wrong birthyear and everything stays cool.
O.K. - so the slim costs $125 to run, compared to a "dedicated media streamer" for $7.
My Gen1 PS3 consumes 250+W in STANDBY, 300-350 during gameplay, and I think in the high 200s for Netflix streaming. I believe then Gen2 PS3s might shave 150W off of those numbers, but that's still 100W standby. My WDTV streams video at less than 20 watts, and is something like 5W standby.
If you leave something on 24-7-365, and you pay $0.11/kwh, that will cost you the same in dollars per year as the average watts it consumes. Gen1 PS3, costing $275ish per year to run continuously, WDTV, more like 7. Even if you only use it 4 hours a day, it doesn't take long to pay for a WDTV with the power savings.
even simpler than that:
if a game was fun to play 5 years ago when it was new, but I never got around to playing that one, why would it not be fun today?
Dude, you obviously don't understand the NEED to get that iPhone 5 / Verizon Galaxy Nexus / Tesla Roadster.
Neither do I .
Plenty of people inherit fortunes - the ones that try to build on that using their own skills tend to do worse than he did.
the person who shoves work off onto other coworkers (like your boss is doing)
Unfortunately, in the real world, a boss who does things themselves is a poor boss. Richard Branson is wildly successful, mostly because he's incompetent at most basic business skills, except: delegation.
It's crazy to think wall street is sucking up all the science brainpower.
Agreed, but I think it's less crazy to think that wall street is sucking up all the economic "free will" of the government/99% of people and leaving space exploration and other "fun" endeavors in the hands of the 0.001%
One of you is getting fired
On a three person team, metrics are irrelevant - personality and politics are 100% more important than technical skill.
If you've got 15-20 people and it's time for a 10% downsizing, or (less realistically), performance based bonus or advancement, then metrics start to be something worth looking at.
When I had to choose between 2, my boss asked me who was my choice, I told him, he agreed, I started to tell him why, he stopped me and said: "it doesn't matter why, I'm just glad that we came up with the same answer."
We use FPGAs to do custom video pipelines alongside our processor cores, we don't, as a general rule, reconfigure them very often, because that takes lots and lots of testing to make sure you haven't screwed up, but the flexibility does allow us to move forward without fully specifying the hardware at an early stage.
What they are after is minimal lag in computation - at some point, the FPGAs will win this over standard CPUs or GPUs, all you need is cubic dollars to fund them, and, if you haven't noticed, cubic dollars is their business.
Ah, so JP Morgan is labotamizing them upon termination. Now that is evil !
I've seen some contracts to that effect (not work for any competing firm or use, in any way, technology developed at the company for a period of 10 years after termination)... they told me it was standard, I told them it was my standard policy to not sign idiotic crap like that, they hired me anyway.
These banks aren't just siphoning money, they are also siphoning talent away from more important projects. The people working on these things could be brilliant physicists or engineers, if they weren't sucked into the dark side.
But, the dark side is filled with shiny baubles - why take a conventional job for $85K when you can start with a financial firm at $135K? That's a Porsche in the garage on day one, upgraded to a Ferrari after the 2 year lease is up. With conspicuous consumption like that, the vacuous model types start paying attention to you - what 20-something genius doesn't want that?
So they can project how much money to borrow from the Federal Government the next time they have lent beyond sane limits to property speculators or invested in schemes even Mandelbrot wouldn't be able to simulate.
No, it's just fun building excessively expensive crap to justify your trading profits and look like you're "cutting edge." The only edge they are cutting is any shred of "all men are created equal" left in this country.
I'm sure a few trips to the ER were caused somewhere or another due to this toy,
I totally burned the shit out of my thumb when I was a kid, by melting some glass with my dad's propane torch and generally being an idiot.
You don't need "tools" or "toys" - when I was 5, I tested what this "it's HOT! you'll BURN YOURSELF!" stuff was all about with my index finger on an iron. Lost the fingerprint on the tip of that finger - and yet, I lived.
Do the QT 4 dance!
"beyond embarrassing"
I can't speak to what other people like/dislike about Netflix. In my family, we have had a 3 disc at a time subscription since we bought our first DVD player in 1990-something. Around about 2003-ish, we started paying for a 3 disc at a time subscription for one set of parents (who live in a trailer park with no broadcast TV and are too cheap/poor to purchase cable.) When I was laid off a couple of years ago, and Netflix had been "streaming for free" for awhile, we reduced both subscriptions to 2 discs + streaming, which is a pretty comparable value to 3, maybe 4 discs at a time, depending on how picky you are about your content.
$20 per month to Netflix beats the crap out of anything the cable company has ever provided, up to and including $120/month mega-channel plans, in our opinion. We watch cable when traveling in hotels, no cable or broadcast capability on the home TV.
The recent proposed split of the plans sounded like a royal pain to us, especially the part where they talked about having to rebuild our queues - it took a long time to backlog selection of 500+ movies we'd like to see someday (approaching 1000, now that we have two separate queues, one for each disc out at a time), killing that was the most offensive proposition coming out of Netflix. $25/month would have been understandable and o.k., though pushing it down to $15 would be appreciated, especially with $1/night Redbox out there for competition.
Netflix had a chance to win here. They could have just been honest outright and said "Last year we paid $50,000,000 for this content. Now we're being asked to pay $300,000,000[1] for it. We unfortunately have to raise our fees in order to keep bringing you the same excellent service that we always have been."
[1] Numbers from the department of pulling figures out of my ass
I can imagine a severe "anti-defamation" clause in their contract with the content producers, something to the effect of: "Purchaser of license shall never directly or indirectly disclose the cost of license in any manner not strictly required by law, and then only in a positive light. Any comment attributable to purchaser of license which in any way may be construed to imply that license is not an absolute bargain, and wonderful value will be grounds for retro-active tripling of said license purchase price up to 5 years prior to the release of such comment, payable immediately. If, at any time, purchaser of license does not agree to these terms, they are free to immediately cease and desist use of all licensed content and, upon written notice of such election, will only be responsible for payment of the balance of the next 12 month's projected licensing fees."
My current startup is two years old and going strong with less than $30K at its start, and I financed its unprofitable beginning using my savings. And I moved out of my mom's basement during the first .com boom!
Congratulations - at the risk of sounding condescending, I'd like to point out that dozens of people per month win millions in the various lotteries around the country. I really wish that "our system" allowed more startups to succeed like you have. My first job out of school was with a $10M funded startup, it sputtered along and re-invented itself at least two times in the ensuing 12 years, I ended up leaving when it went to "volunteer only status" in 2003. It didn't manage to hook into .com cash directly, but .com did give it an infusion that ran it until 2003. I keep telling myself that what I do has better odds than playing the lottery, but I think if I actually ran the numbers, it's a close thing. At least I've had decent salaries along the way - that's another thing that keeps me out of the basically un-funded startups.
One of my customers is Y-Combinator darling Heroku, who did quite well on their small bit of seed money. I'm more of a fan of the web based startup nowadays, have actually had worse luck at the $1M+ startups. But I can see your point that a single patent wouldn't be very expensive if you're in that environment, and that success on a small budget is pretty unlikely for most companies.
There's obviously a line, I think bare minimum file-it-yourself patent costs are $5K (used to be in 1995 when I last checked, at least.), and if your total operating budget is $50K, that's a huge chunk. Once you've gotten to the $1M round, it _might_ be time to think about patents.
Thanks for the flame-free discussion, can't remember the last time I went several messages deep into something at Slashdot without a condescending message to be found.
You too.
That won't work for an upper division Physics class. You begin to dream the mathematics you are studying so much. GE and less stress courses, much more likely.
The last Physics class I took taught Greens functions and two other mathematical concepts whose names I have forgotten in the ensuing decades - textbook sharing would have worked quite well in there, if I had had my traditional study partner with me in the class, since the work was 99% concept, the book was not terribly helpful. Actually, I don't remember clearly if there was a book, there were a lot of lecture notes, sketches, etc.
Any startup I have been involved with needed at least 5 people to hang in for at least two years, with an average head cost of $100K per year. Sure, not everybody took home that kind of money, but there's always at least one or two who do, and one or two who are road warriors burning up the airfare, hotel, meals, etc. So, at bare minimum, $1M to get the idea anywhere near enough traction to have some value. If you burn $30K in patent costs, that's 3% well spent to have the "patent protected" talking points with the next round investors.
I suppose two guys in mom's basement can start the next Google while eating Ramen noodles and working at Starbucks for spending money, but I've never gotten involved with that kind of startup, and I'm not familiar with any startups that have had anything resembling success with less than a $1M initial bankroll, on the contrary, I know plenty of $10M+ startups that have sputtered.
Y-combinator and the like start web based startups with something like $30K first-round seed money, these are a different kind of animal, and some do succeed (while moving so fast that patents are nearly irrelevant), but I think the micro-incubators go through more than 35 of these first-round starts before they find a nugget worth developing, so it's just a different way of slicing the pie.