I've watched "the experts" stand around and scratch various body parts while they tried to explain the mercury concentration in the Florida Everglades, explanations like "naturally occuring" and "gee, we just don't know" were floated for about 10 years after the top predators started dying of mercury poisioning. After enough of that nonsense, somebody finally got the "clean" waste incinerators in the neighboring counties to just shut down, and miracle of miracles, mercury levels dropped and the alligators stopped dying with toxic loads of it in their brains.
High enough levels of non-ionizing radiation are definitely deadly, marginally lower levels cannot really be called "safe" in long-term exposure, and the "science" involved in declaring certain levels safe isn't really all that scientific. I still use cell-phones, live in a city, etc. and I don't think that it's going to kill me, but some common sense precaution is also called for.
I agree that treatments are improving, at least for the 5 year horizon, pretty sure I don't want my toddlers receiving radiation or chemo as a "cure" unless they're about to die anyway.
Yeah, by the 1980s we had lead in the air, 30 years of ozone depletion from aerosol cans and all kinds of other goodness that we finally started to reverse - some things are actually getting better.
True enough - though one might question the value of those degrees, and whether quality of life is improved if you also have to deal with HMO paperwork?
The meter is a very good idea, and continuous metering with an alarm threshold for "over limit for more than 10 seconds" would be even better.
Having said that, I'd take the FCC limits for "safe exposure to the public" and reduce them by a factor of 10, if possible - I don't know what kind of ambient radiation you get on the streets of Manhattan, but I certainly wouldn't accept sleeping in a bedroom that took 100x that exposure all night long.
This subject (non ionizing radiation) has been studied ad-nauseum since the 1960s, and nobody can seem to come to a conclusion that satisfies "the other side." There are effects, an MRI is "non-ionizing radiation", and MRI scans have been shown to relieve depression due to real, measurable neurostim effects (mostly the high dB/dT during imaging). Take it down to lower levels and there's "probably" nothing going on, except that we don't really understand the fundamental mechanisms of neuroscience well enough to know if there's an effect or not. Just because it's a mystery doesn't prove there's an insidious link, but it does make it virtually impossible to prove there is not.
All in all, breathing Manhattan air and exposing yourself to the sea of humanity and pathogens that are there, not to mention the political tension, potential for terror strike, etc. is certainly a bigger concern than the cell tower by several orders of magnitude, but it would be a shame to survive all the normal big Apple health challenges and then have the tower get you.
And, on the other side, 50 years of trying and nobody can show it is safe, either - rates of cancer acquisition aren't exactly falling in the "modern world."
Yeah, I bought some land in 1998 and had to make repeated trips to the courthouse to research recent sales, ownership histories, etc. It took days and weeks, hundreds of road miles, time off from work, etc. Now we can get the same information from virtually any county in the United States 24/7/365, for free, from our bedroom. Great for us if we ever do another land deal, but you're talking about dropping the "cost" of that information by many orders of magnitude, it has to have messed up the playing field for some people.
I was thinking about near-future tech applications a few years back (maybe 2004), and I came up with the idea of mounting belly-cams in commercial jetliners. These could be trained on interstate highways and read license plates in favorable weather. Miami-LAX flights could monitor I-10, Miami-NY could watch I-95, etc. Not much investment or operating expense in exchange for a tremendous amount of near real-time information about who is traveling the long-distance highways.
It isn't "if", it's "when" this tech is deployed. On the one hand, I'd like to have a camera pointed out my front window recording every license tag that passes my house - on the other hand, I'd really rather not be called in for questioning just because I drove by the scene of a crime around the same time it supposedly happened.
And I could get 8 bit micros going from cold to running state in microseconds - just skip the OS and start doing your useful work directly. Yeah, you have to do everything by hand and can't leverage much existing code, but it does switch on like a lightbulb.
The problem is organization - corporations have it, independents don't. If the independents could organize and lobby, their numbers and voting / contribution power would swamp the corporate interests, even today. Alas, independents are independent - and who has time and money to waste on a (presently) losing game? Even most corporations don't, but enough of them do to slant things in their direction.
The rancher / farmer's lobby is a good example of people with time on their hands to bend the ears of their legislators - when's the last time a big land holder paid big property taxes?
Arguably, if the community cared, they would have kept the patches alive elsewhere - Geocities and Angelfire weren't the only possible hosting sites.
Sometimes, a hack like that is interesting when it's done, and hopelessly boring later, not even worth the time to preserve. Other times, copyright laws grind slowly away at "illegal works," maybe not suppressing them when they're popular, but getting them in the end anyway.
Cloud is nice, and I have been very appreciative of Yahoo and Google archiving my e-mail for the last 10+ years without losing any (as opposed to my local copies), but a massive redundant system is no guarantee of future service in the face of bankruptcy, war, etc.
The post Roman era dark age was brought about by the collapse of society - the next time we manage to do that (and, in geologic time, it's coming soon), it's going to be quite the mess. At least there wasn't much difference between the Romans and the Barbarians, just picture today's world with no organized energy (electricity, oil, etc) distribution systems...
They aren't archiving everything the way they used to... I've been trying to convince them to archive a couple of sites for 2 years now and they still haven't shown up. I think they're allergic to Wordpress weblogs...
Yeah, they're shipping alpha software, because it's the most "cost effective" thing to do.
Arguably, management that ships alpha software should be the ones whose butt's are on the line for any failures, since they are the screwballs who underbid the contract in the first place. There are processes that can mitigate risk, I have worked in industries where they are mandated (medical), and now work in a shop where they are not... this shop is a little envious of the "luxury" of those processes, since they are in a competitive field where the other guys bid projects without those safety layers, they have to play that way too, or lose contracts. Nobody has died as a result, yet.
Some industries have adopted the quality processes voluntarily, automotive used to do it just to save money, though Toyota still seems to have let some things slip lately. The "big players" have more to lose from the occasional spectacular screw-up, so they take the time to be more careful. But little guys who may or may not be in business a couple of years from now regardless, have little incentive to play it safer.
I think people have a hard time coming to grips with the new DSM V "Spectrum Disorder" regime, we are all somewhere on the autism spectrum, and OCD, and paranoiac, etc. What needs defining are the limits where it becomes a problem. You can't just slap a number on it because it's high order multi-dimensional, plus the social environment you live in has more to do with whether its a problem than your own personal "symptoms."
If they could come up with a single number, I think you would see the histogram growing on the "problematic" side of the limit, but that limit could move considerably if society learns to cope with people who have the symptoms. Things like tantrums usually come when the rest of us are being insensitive clods, stop doing that and the kids will have fewer tantrums.
Even starting with the premise that the vaccine does have a 0.1% chance of causing autism, measles has a mortality rate much higher than that, especially in undeveloped countries. And it is HIGHLY contagious.
You're missing some key points:
0.1% overall risk can be 0.0001% risk in the general population combined with 10% risk in 1% of the population. If you have reason to believe you're in the 1%, is 10% a good risk to take with your child?
In developed countries, herd immunity protects the non-immunized.
Underdeveloped countries (those without pollution and "modern" conveniences like a diet of HFCS and factory raised GM beef) don't have the same autism risk as the developed world.
Yeah, I'm showing loony markers, but anyone who takes a moment to consider Western society objectively should come to the conclusion that we're all a bunch of loonies.
No, their behavior was programmed at birth, senses were limited to about 60 "floating point channels" which sounds like a lot, but in reality isn't much to observe the world with. They could potentially learn neural net style from painful experiences, but I didn't go that way- a successful program would replicate better than an unsuccessful one, kind of a circular success criteria, but, that's life too.
Yeah, but it makes cool footage to put on the 6 o'clock news. Geeks doing stuff on computer screens is one thing, but when they've got tangible toys they're much more accessible.
Nothing special about neural networks... I achieved similar results with a made up scheme of decision weight equations that were "genetically developed" in a big breeding tank.
Basically, behavior that allows greater procreation tends to appear spontaneously, and behavior that cuts procreation short tends to disappear. My "bugs" exhibited a clear shift in behavior to collision avoidance because collisions resulted in death for one of them. I was watching for "sniper bugs" that got good at colliding without getting themselves killed in the process, but I never managed to make the reward high enough for that trait to emerge, probably because there wasn't strong "species differentiation" built in, cross breeding was a matter of choice, and most of the randomly evolved bugs seemed not to be picky about mating, so without species, predators became self defeating.
Agreed that laws will be broken, but on the other hand, experimental observation strongly suggests that extreme FTL travel (like > Warp 10 or 1000c) isn't practiced in our universe by any exponentially expanding phenomenon like life. If it is happening, they are 100% stealthy to (most of) us.
Sure, we could be the first - but that kind of thinking is more aligned with the Earth being the center of the universe, one of those "laws" that most people have given up on.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the #1 cause of death is birth...
I've watched "the experts" stand around and scratch various body parts while they tried to explain the mercury concentration in the Florida Everglades, explanations like "naturally occuring" and "gee, we just don't know" were floated for about 10 years after the top predators started dying of mercury poisioning. After enough of that nonsense, somebody finally got the "clean" waste incinerators in the neighboring counties to just shut down, and miracle of miracles, mercury levels dropped and the alligators stopped dying with toxic loads of it in their brains.
High enough levels of non-ionizing radiation are definitely deadly, marginally lower levels cannot really be called "safe" in long-term exposure, and the "science" involved in declaring certain levels safe isn't really all that scientific. I still use cell-phones, live in a city, etc. and I don't think that it's going to kill me, but some common sense precaution is also called for.
I agree that treatments are improving, at least for the 5 year horizon, pretty sure I don't want my toddlers receiving radiation or chemo as a "cure" unless they're about to die anyway.
Yeah, by the 1980s we had lead in the air, 30 years of ozone depletion from aerosol cans and all kinds of other goodness that we finally started to reverse - some things are actually getting better.
True enough - though one might question the value of those degrees, and whether quality of life is improved if you also have to deal with HMO paperwork?
I didn't say how many microseconds... but perception wise, by the time your finger is off the power switch, it's up to speed.
And, yeah, the kernel code needs to be a pre-initialized library, not something that gets "warmed up" every time the system is switched on.
The meter is a very good idea, and continuous metering with an alarm threshold for "over limit for more than 10 seconds" would be even better.
Having said that, I'd take the FCC limits for "safe exposure to the public" and reduce them by a factor of 10, if possible - I don't know what kind of ambient radiation you get on the streets of Manhattan, but I certainly wouldn't accept sleeping in a bedroom that took 100x that exposure all night long.
This subject (non ionizing radiation) has been studied ad-nauseum since the 1960s, and nobody can seem to come to a conclusion that satisfies "the other side." There are effects, an MRI is "non-ionizing radiation", and MRI scans have been shown to relieve depression due to real, measurable neurostim effects (mostly the high dB/dT during imaging). Take it down to lower levels and there's "probably" nothing going on, except that we don't really understand the fundamental mechanisms of neuroscience well enough to know if there's an effect or not. Just because it's a mystery doesn't prove there's an insidious link, but it does make it virtually impossible to prove there is not.
All in all, breathing Manhattan air and exposing yourself to the sea of humanity and pathogens that are there, not to mention the political tension, potential for terror strike, etc. is certainly a bigger concern than the cell tower by several orders of magnitude, but it would be a shame to survive all the normal big Apple health challenges and then have the tower get you.
And, on the other side, 50 years of trying and nobody can show it is safe, either - rates of cancer acquisition aren't exactly falling in the "modern world."
A tinfoil hat should help....
Yeah, I bought some land in 1998 and had to make repeated trips to the courthouse to research recent sales, ownership histories, etc. It took days and weeks, hundreds of road miles, time off from work, etc. Now we can get the same information from virtually any county in the United States 24/7/365, for free, from our bedroom. Great for us if we ever do another land deal, but you're talking about dropping the "cost" of that information by many orders of magnitude, it has to have messed up the playing field for some people.
I was thinking about near-future tech applications a few years back (maybe 2004), and I came up with the idea of mounting belly-cams in commercial jetliners. These could be trained on interstate highways and read license plates in favorable weather. Miami-LAX flights could monitor I-10, Miami-NY could watch I-95, etc. Not much investment or operating expense in exchange for a tremendous amount of near real-time information about who is traveling the long-distance highways.
It isn't "if", it's "when" this tech is deployed. On the one hand, I'd like to have a camera pointed out my front window recording every license tag that passes my house - on the other hand, I'd really rather not be called in for questioning just because I drove by the scene of a crime around the same time it supposedly happened.
And I could get 8 bit micros going from cold to running state in microseconds - just skip the OS and start doing your useful work directly. Yeah, you have to do everything by hand and can't leverage much existing code, but it does switch on like a lightbulb.
The problem is organization - corporations have it, independents don't. If the independents could organize and lobby, their numbers and voting / contribution power would swamp the corporate interests, even today. Alas, independents are independent - and who has time and money to waste on a (presently) losing game? Even most corporations don't, but enough of them do to slant things in their direction.
The rancher / farmer's lobby is a good example of people with time on their hands to bend the ears of their legislators - when's the last time a big land holder paid big property taxes?
Arguably, if the community cared, they would have kept the patches alive elsewhere - Geocities and Angelfire weren't the only possible hosting sites.
Sometimes, a hack like that is interesting when it's done, and hopelessly boring later, not even worth the time to preserve. Other times, copyright laws grind slowly away at "illegal works," maybe not suppressing them when they're popular, but getting them in the end anyway.
Yeah, what could go wrong...
Cloud is nice, and I have been very appreciative of Yahoo and Google archiving my e-mail for the last 10+ years without losing any (as opposed to my local copies), but a massive redundant system is no guarantee of future service in the face of bankruptcy, war, etc.
The post Roman era dark age was brought about by the collapse of society - the next time we manage to do that (and, in geologic time, it's coming soon), it's going to be quite the mess. At least there wasn't much difference between the Romans and the Barbarians, just picture today's world with no organized energy (electricity, oil, etc) distribution systems...
They aren't archiving everything the way they used to... I've been trying to convince them to archive a couple of sites for 2 years now and they still haven't shown up. I think they're allergic to Wordpress weblogs...
Yeah, you're right - and all of them should be made into examples of what not to do with public trust.
On the other hand, most voters will be more interested in what "improper behavior in the home" was, rather than why your government knows about it.
In my experience, out of work Americans will sign almost anything to get a paycheck.
Yeah, they're shipping alpha software, because it's the most "cost effective" thing to do.
Arguably, management that ships alpha software should be the ones whose butt's are on the line for any failures, since they are the screwballs who underbid the contract in the first place. There are processes that can mitigate risk, I have worked in industries where they are mandated (medical), and now work in a shop where they are not... this shop is a little envious of the "luxury" of those processes, since they are in a competitive field where the other guys bid projects without those safety layers, they have to play that way too, or lose contracts. Nobody has died as a result, yet.
Some industries have adopted the quality processes voluntarily, automotive used to do it just to save money, though Toyota still seems to have let some things slip lately. The "big players" have more to lose from the occasional spectacular screw-up, so they take the time to be more careful. But little guys who may or may not be in business a couple of years from now regardless, have little incentive to play it safer.
$49 as in "$529 + $1680 is only $2160 +$49."
That's not quite $49, and not even getting into the issue of NPV (net present value).
If your bank is paying 0.4% apr like mine, NPV is pretty flat these days.
I think people have a hard time coming to grips with the new DSM V "Spectrum Disorder" regime, we are all somewhere on the autism spectrum, and OCD, and paranoiac, etc. What needs defining are the limits where it becomes a problem. You can't just slap a number on it because it's high order multi-dimensional, plus the social environment you live in has more to do with whether its a problem than your own personal "symptoms."
If they could come up with a single number, I think you would see the histogram growing on the "problematic" side of the limit, but that limit could move considerably if society learns to cope with people who have the symptoms. Things like tantrums usually come when the rest of us are being insensitive clods, stop doing that and the kids will have fewer tantrums.
>
Even starting with the premise that the vaccine does have a 0.1% chance of causing autism, measles has a mortality rate much higher than that, especially in undeveloped countries. And it is HIGHLY contagious.
You're missing some key points:
0.1% overall risk can be 0.0001% risk in the general population combined with 10% risk in 1% of the population. If you have reason to believe you're in the 1%, is 10% a good risk to take with your child?
In developed countries, herd immunity protects the non-immunized.
Underdeveloped countries (those without pollution and "modern" conveniences like a diet of HFCS and factory raised GM beef) don't have the same autism risk as the developed world.
Yeah, I'm showing loony markers, but anyone who takes a moment to consider Western society objectively should come to the conclusion that we're all a bunch of loonies.
Bird flu, swine flu... swing flu sounds much more interesting!
No, their behavior was programmed at birth, senses were limited to about 60 "floating point channels" which sounds like a lot, but in reality isn't much to observe the world with. They could potentially learn neural net style from painful experiences, but I didn't go that way- a successful program would replicate better than an unsuccessful one, kind of a circular success criteria, but, that's life too.
Yeah, but it makes cool footage to put on the 6 o'clock news. Geeks doing stuff on computer screens is one thing, but when they've got tangible toys they're much more accessible.
Nothing special about neural networks... I achieved similar results with a made up scheme of decision weight equations that were "genetically developed" in a big breeding tank.
Basically, behavior that allows greater procreation tends to appear spontaneously, and behavior that cuts procreation short tends to disappear. My "bugs" exhibited a clear shift in behavior to collision avoidance because collisions resulted in death for one of them. I was watching for "sniper bugs" that got good at colliding without getting themselves killed in the process, but I never managed to make the reward high enough for that trait to emerge, probably because there wasn't strong "species differentiation" built in, cross breeding was a matter of choice, and most of the randomly evolved bugs seemed not to be picky about mating, so without species, predators became self defeating.
Agreed that laws will be broken, but on the other hand, experimental observation strongly suggests that extreme FTL travel (like > Warp 10 or 1000c) isn't practiced in our universe by any exponentially expanding phenomenon like life. If it is happening, they are 100% stealthy to (most of) us.
Sure, we could be the first - but that kind of thinking is more aligned with the Earth being the center of the universe, one of those "laws" that most people have given up on.