Actually, increasingly we don't plough or plow in Australia as a large proportion of dryland agriculture has shifted to no till / direct drill. Which has massively improved soil health.
A consequence of which is that injecting exhaust would be difficult for many arable farmers here.
Incidentally, I lived for a number of years within a few miles of where this guy is. In that region generally no nitrogen fertiliser is used and phosphorous is a) only applied every couple of years or so, and b) generally applied greatly in excess. So the reports that no fertiliser has been used without an impact on the crop for two seasons aren't really much evidence of anything yet...
A VERY close relative of mine works in compliance in the finance industry. He worked for a credit card company that was going under and cooking the books. He told the truth in his report to the regulators but nothing happens very quickly. The company was then taken over by ex-management of another credit card company who quickly discovered the real situation.
Now they could have used him to help them sort things out, but instead of that they started cooking the books themselves, realised he knew too much and made him redundant. He fought it as unfair dismissal but didn't get very far, he had a case but would have ended up costing as much as he would get.
The irony is that he now works in compliance at the company where the new management of his previous company had escaped from, where part of his job is uncovering what the previous lot were up to.
My take on all this is that the financial services industry is rotten from one end to the other.
This is a reason that is always trotted out at times like this, but is it a myth? I've worked at a number of institutions and the place where I am currently at (note I don't work in IT), has over 6,000 employees and a very varied software set up for the various parts of the organisation. The only time, either here or at a previous job, I have ever heard of anyone receiving training in software use, or access to paid support from a vendor is when we recently went to SAP (funnily enough the training was useless).
It may be that all the training/support is provided to the IT department so they can support us I guess, but generally they only provide support for installation and desktop use, so I doubt it.
I have two partitions, a small one formatted as FAT32, on which I keep a copy of of Ext2 IFS for windows (www.fs-driver.org), which I find to be the best of the free ext2 drivers for windows, then I have the rest of the USB disk as a partition with an ext3 filesystem. The only thing you have to watch out for is the ext2 IFS software only works with certain inode sizes, so when you make the partition, check the defaults.
Of course if you can't install on the target windows system then you really have no choice except FAT anyway. In which case, just copy the file you need onto the FAT partition temporarily.
Yeah, thanks for that mod. I'd like to hear your reasoning for it. I think you'll find it's well documented that many of the early programmers were women and that women only make up a small proportion of programmers now.
Seeing that old gear is great. It's amazing the ingenuity used in the 40s and 50s.
My mother-in-law used to program a CDC, which always seems quite crazy as she can't even use SMS on her phone! Of course in those days doing punch cards was so tedious men didn't want the jobs. It would be interesting to compare the ratios of female:male programmers and correlate it with the improvement in tech over time.
Don't forget he wrote it on an old typewriter (see his own blog: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2006_10_01_archive.asp )and was well known for NOT being a computer nerd. I love the book (got it in the 80s and have read it a number of times. I don't think he as trying to predict anything. He was trying to write a good story in a new way and he did both of those things.
Whilst it's not directly relevant to the decision in quashing the report it's interesting to look at who is pushing this. The file is hosted at by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an right-wing think tank who "seeks to overturn government regulations that the CEI regards as inappropriate, such as regulations pertaining to drug safety, rent control, and automobile fuel efficiency" See info at http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Competitive_Enterprise_Institute
They get significant corporation funding, including from the likes of Texaco.
However, I suspect that the reality of this is that the EPA commissioned a report under the previous government and chose someone who would give them the line the White house wanted, then with the change of President they cancelled it. It's politics. Don't let that stop any conspiracy theories though.
Most of these reports are poor, whether they support your point of view or not. They are intended to take a large body of primary material understandable only by experts and make it easy for politicians to get ideas from. Usually this results in an unacceptable simplification of that primary material.
I'll check out Veusz (I hadn't come across it before), from the screenshots it looks like it does most of the plot types I use. The main things for me are to be able to put multiple plots on the same axis, not always the same type (ie line over bar etc), multiple y axes, and the ability to manipulate individual elements easily (e.g. change the colour/style of a single bar/line in a multiple bar/line graph, alter font/font size). That sort of thing. I use stats software to do stats, so I don't care about that, but curve fitting (to the data) is essential. I also need to be able to add elements (e.g. text box), to a figure.
As mentioned in a comment above, the paid for competition here is SigmaPlot. I remember first using Sigmaplot over ten years ago and the output of that version was head and shoulders above this. In fact there isn't any open source competition for Sigmaplot. Grace used to style itself as a SigmaPlot alternative, but hasn't been updated in a very long time and as never a match anyway.
As a scientist who primarily uses a Linux desktop I am fed up with rebooting to Windows just to run Sigmaplot (or SPSS for that matter - whilst there are plenty of stats software for unix, there are no easy to use but powerful GUI based packages for those of us that have to use stats every day but aren't statisticians). I'd happily pay for a Linux version of SigmaPlot, but I'd much rather use open source software. It's not about the money (my employer pays) it's about being able to access my own files and results in five years time. Unfortunately there are some areas where open-source doesn't come close to proprietory software and this is one of them.
Firstly, I am a scientist, I have a number of papers published in journals significant to my field (plant biology) and have 200+ citations to date. This scheme is pointless, it amazes me how many stories along the lines of 'we can make scientific publishing work better' that get on Slashdot.
In general the peer review process works extremely well: a journal gets multiple reviews on a submitted manuscript, the authors don't know who they are by, the editor makes a decision based on those reviews, if the authors have a legitimate grievance about a rejected manuscript they are able to make that to the editor, if the manuscript is accepted it is almost always in the form of 'accept on minor revision', whereby the authors have to address the reviewers comments prior to publication. The paper gets published and it sinks or swims. If it is a good paper then it gets citations and is seen as such, if it isn't a good paper it doesn't gets citations and is seen as such. Of course some good papers don't get citations because they are of interest to very few and some bad papers get citations from people refuting it. In the former case, no social networking process is going to help, in the latter everyone knows the reason why it has citations and they don't tend to last for long anyway.
Adding a social networking layer over the top will do nothing, simply show which researcher has the most mates. In general, scientists don't care whether a paper is by someone known to them or not, though of course a reputation will colour the way you approach a paper.
The main problem scientific publishing has is reconciling the increasing desire for open publishing with the need to maintain some funding, without publishing everything that comes across their desks willy nilly. There is no prblem of trust.
Mod parent up. This is all part of Telstra's brinkmanship with the government here. They tried the same thing with ADSL2, where they wanted permission to exclude/charge higher prices to competitors (despite having a monopoly on the 'last mile', so delayed making ADSL2 available to the public. In the end, the main competitors got together and put their own ADSL2 DSLAMS in place, so Telstra were forced to start allowing users onto their ADSL2 network after all.
In this case Telstra claim no one else can do it other than them, so have refused to put a proper bid in in the hope they can get more out of the government.
It wasn't a hoax and the French immunologist involved still believes it is correct. He thinks he was totally shafted by the magician (Randi) who was employed to test their results. However, Randi's theatrics aside (and they would have pissed me off), there was little evidence that when the samples were analysed double-blind there was no evidence for water memory.
Not really true if you look beyond the recent past. Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers and in pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer communities reaching 70+ wasn't uncommon. There's plenty of documentation on the health and lifespan on Australian Aborigines (prior to the almost entirely negative effects of Westerners spreading through their country). Plus, the general rule was that the culturally more powerful older men had most of the women with the younger men largely having to wait their turn. You're right about the women having kids young though.
Personally, I don't know about the changes to this system affecting evolution, but I suspect there isn't much going on in humans. Look how we're breeding fertility problems into our species by the use of IVF (not that I oppose the use of IVF). Plus, most evolution is mainly viewed as a punctuated equilibrium these days, so we need a major change in our environment to push significant evolution.
I've used Gmail (and Google Calendar and reader etc) with Firefox on Linux for some years and never ever had a problem that required what you describe. Perhaps you want to be a bit more specific about the problem or post some links to other reports like it. Otherwise......
In this case it isn't so much the summary that is misleading as the original article. If you read the actual paper (assuming you have a Nature subscription), which doesn't appear to be linked from Nature's own news article, you will find that they aren't quite saying that leaf temp is maintained at 21C. Firstly, the 18O data actually mean that the sugars used to construct the cellulose measured were built at 21C, not that photosynthesis occurs at 21C. Secondly, this is an AVERAGE temperature over the lifetime of the tree! Thirdly, it relies on a model, which I'm not about to go through here. But I did work in the lab with people that have spent a lot of time working on this area (they are cited multiple times by the authors here) and I suspect that the conclusion as presented is probably a vast simplification.
Mod parent down. This is absolute rubbish, how did it get to +5 informative? I assume it's there as a joke so it should only be +5 funny, or possibly now, +5 fooled Slashdot. I am a plant physiologist, there are three basic types of chlorophyll in land plants, a,b & c. They have slightly different spectra, but they are not blue and yellow, they all have minimal absorbance in the green part of the spectrum and thus look green. The yellows and reds in senescing leaves are from carotenoids and anthocyanins.
I was going to mod you up, but I'll comment instead. Right now I've got mod points and I get them on roughly a weekly basis with 3 days to use them. Without intending this to be a flame, in that time I rarely manage to find enough good posts to use them positively, and end up having to use them negatively (there are plenty of trolls....) which always seems a bit of a waste. I understand why mod points are taken back if not used in a short time, but it really is an encouragement to mod up posts that really aren't 'insightful' or 'informative'.
Why has the parent post been modded funny? It represents the first post in this entire thread that actually makes a valid point as to why one might wish to protect a lifeless environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Synergy? I think that is a sign of stagnation, get with the times old man. At my workplace we have moved on and only deal in "synergies" now. *sigh*
Actually, increasingly we don't plough or plow in Australia as a large proportion of dryland agriculture has shifted to no till / direct drill. Which has massively improved soil health.
A consequence of which is that injecting exhaust would be difficult for many arable farmers here.
Incidentally, I lived for a number of years within a few miles of where this guy is. In that region generally no nitrogen fertiliser is used and phosphorous is a) only applied every couple of years or so, and b) generally applied greatly in excess. So the reports that no fertiliser has been used without an impact on the crop for two seasons aren't really much evidence of anything yet...
A VERY close relative of mine works in compliance in the finance industry. He worked for a credit card company that was going under and cooking the books. He told the truth in his report to the regulators but nothing happens very quickly. The company was then taken over by ex-management of another credit card company who quickly discovered the real situation.
Now they could have used him to help them sort things out, but instead of that they started cooking the books themselves, realised he knew too much and made him redundant. He fought it as unfair dismissal but didn't get very far, he had a case but would have ended up costing as much as he would get.
The irony is that he now works in compliance at the company where the new management of his previous company had escaped from, where part of his job is uncovering what the previous lot were up to.
My take on all this is that the financial services industry is rotten from one end to the other.
This is a reason that is always trotted out at times like this, but is it a myth? I've worked at a number of institutions and the place where I am currently at (note I don't work in IT), has over 6,000 employees and a very varied software set up for the various parts of the organisation. The only time, either here or at a previous job, I have ever heard of anyone receiving training in software use, or access to paid support from a vendor is when we recently went to SAP (funnily enough the training was useless).
It may be that all the training/support is provided to the IT department so they can support us I guess, but generally they only provide support for installation and desktop use, so I doubt it.
I have two partitions, a small one formatted as FAT32, on which I keep a copy of of Ext2 IFS for windows (www.fs-driver.org), which I find to be the best of the free ext2 drivers for windows, then I have the rest of the USB disk as a partition with an ext3 filesystem. The only thing you have to watch out for is the ext2 IFS software only works with certain inode sizes, so when you make the partition, check the defaults.
Of course if you can't install on the target windows system then you really have no choice except FAT anyway. In which case, just copy the file you need onto the FAT partition temporarily.
Yeah, thanks for that mod. I'd like to hear your reasoning for it. I think you'll find it's well documented that many of the early programmers were women and that women only make up a small proportion of programmers now.
Seeing that old gear is great. It's amazing the ingenuity used in the 40s and 50s.
My mother-in-law used to program a CDC, which always seems quite crazy as she can't even use SMS on her phone! Of course in those days doing punch cards was so tedious men didn't want the jobs. It would be interesting to compare the ratios of female:male programmers and correlate it with the improvement in tech over time.
What are you taking about, don't you shower standing on your head like the rest of us?
Don't forget he wrote it on an old typewriter (see his own blog: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2006_10_01_archive.asp )and was well known for NOT being a computer nerd. I love the book (got it in the 80s and have read it a number of times. I don't think he as trying to predict anything. He was trying to write a good story in a new way and he did both of those things.
Whilst it's not directly relevant to the decision in quashing the report it's interesting to look at who is pushing this. The file is hosted at by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an right-wing think tank who "seeks to overturn government regulations that the CEI regards as inappropriate, such as regulations pertaining to drug safety, rent control, and automobile fuel efficiency" See info at http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Competitive_Enterprise_Institute
They get significant corporation funding, including from the likes of Texaco.
However, I suspect that the reality of this is that the EPA commissioned a report under the previous government and chose someone who would give them the line the White house wanted, then with the change of President they cancelled it. It's politics. Don't let that stop any conspiracy theories though.
Most of these reports are poor, whether they support your point of view or not. They are intended to take a large body of primary material understandable only by experts and make it easy for politicians to get ideas from. Usually this results in an unacceptable simplification of that primary material.
I'll check out Veusz (I hadn't come across it before), from the screenshots it looks like it does most of the plot types I use. The main things for me are to be able to put multiple plots on the same axis, not always the same type (ie line over bar etc), multiple y axes, and the ability to manipulate individual elements easily (e.g. change the colour/style of a single bar/line in a multiple bar/line graph, alter font/font size). That sort of thing. I use stats software to do stats, so I don't care about that, but curve fitting (to the data) is essential. I also need to be able to add elements (e.g. text box), to a figure.
As mentioned in a comment above, the paid for competition here is SigmaPlot. I remember first using Sigmaplot over ten years ago and the output of that version was head and shoulders above this. In fact there isn't any open source competition for Sigmaplot. Grace used to style itself as a SigmaPlot alternative, but hasn't been updated in a very long time and as never a match anyway.
As a scientist who primarily uses a Linux desktop I am fed up with rebooting to Windows just to run Sigmaplot (or SPSS for that matter - whilst there are plenty of stats software for unix, there are no easy to use but powerful GUI based packages for those of us that have to use stats every day but aren't statisticians). I'd happily pay for a Linux version of SigmaPlot, but I'd much rather use open source software. It's not about the money (my employer pays) it's about being able to access my own files and results in five years time. Unfortunately there are some areas where open-source doesn't come close to proprietory software and this is one of them.
Firstly, I am a scientist, I have a number of papers published in journals significant to my field (plant biology) and have 200+ citations to date. This scheme is pointless, it amazes me how many stories along the lines of 'we can make scientific publishing work better' that get on Slashdot.
In general the peer review process works extremely well: a journal gets multiple reviews on a submitted manuscript, the authors don't know who they are by, the editor makes a decision based on those reviews, if the authors have a legitimate grievance about a rejected manuscript they are able to make that to the editor, if the manuscript is accepted it is almost always in the form of 'accept on minor revision', whereby the authors have to address the reviewers comments prior to publication. The paper gets published and it sinks or swims. If it is a good paper then it gets citations and is seen as such, if it isn't a good paper it doesn't gets citations and is seen as such. Of course some good papers don't get citations because they are of interest to very few and some bad papers get citations from people refuting it. In the former case, no social networking process is going to help, in the latter everyone knows the reason why it has citations and they don't tend to last for long anyway.
Adding a social networking layer over the top will do nothing, simply show which researcher has the most mates. In general, scientists don't care whether a paper is by someone known to them or not, though of course a reputation will colour the way you approach a paper.
The main problem scientific publishing has is reconciling the increasing desire for open publishing with the need to maintain some funding, without publishing everything that comes across their desks willy nilly. There is no prblem of trust.
Mod parent up. This is all part of Telstra's brinkmanship with the government here. They tried the same thing with ADSL2, where they wanted permission to exclude/charge higher prices to competitors (despite having a monopoly on the 'last mile', so delayed making ADSL2 available to the public. In the end, the main competitors got together and put their own ADSL2 DSLAMS in place, so Telstra were forced to start allowing users onto their ADSL2 network after all.
In this case Telstra claim no one else can do it other than them, so have refused to put a proper bid in in the hope they can get more out of the government.
It wasn't a hoax and the French immunologist involved still believes it is correct. He thinks he was totally shafted by the magician (Randi) who was employed to test their results. However, Randi's theatrics aside (and they would have pissed me off), there was little evidence that when the samples were analysed double-blind there was no evidence for water memory.
Not really true if you look beyond the recent past. Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers and in pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer communities reaching 70+ wasn't uncommon. There's plenty of documentation on the health and lifespan on Australian Aborigines (prior to the almost entirely negative effects of Westerners spreading through their country). Plus, the general rule was that the culturally more powerful older men had most of the women with the younger men largely having to wait their turn. You're right about the women having kids young though.
Personally, I don't know about the changes to this system affecting evolution, but I suspect there isn't much going on in humans. Look how we're breeding fertility problems into our species by the use of IVF (not that I oppose the use of IVF). Plus, most evolution is mainly viewed as a punctuated equilibrium these days, so we need a major change in our environment to push significant evolution.
So then:
Falcon 1: $7 million/1,000kg = $7,000/kg
Russian Proton: $85 million/21,600kg = $4,302/kg
Better, but still not looking so good.... especially given that a lot of what goes up is over 1,000 kg.
Though as you say, if they sort out the reusability it will bring it somewhat closer - can't see it halving the price though.
I've used Gmail (and Google Calendar and reader etc) with Firefox on Linux for some years and never ever had a problem that required what you describe. Perhaps you want to be a bit more specific about the problem or post some links to other reports like it. Otherwise......
In this case it isn't so much the summary that is misleading as the original article. If you read the actual paper (assuming you have a Nature subscription), which doesn't appear to be linked from Nature's own news article, you will find that they aren't quite saying that leaf temp is maintained at 21C. Firstly, the 18O data actually mean that the sugars used to construct the cellulose measured were built at 21C, not that photosynthesis occurs at 21C. Secondly, this is an AVERAGE temperature over the lifetime of the tree! Thirdly, it relies on a model, which I'm not about to go through here. But I did work in the lab with people that have spent a lot of time working on this area (they are cited multiple times by the authors here) and I suspect that the conclusion as presented is probably a vast simplification.
Mod parent down. This is absolute rubbish, how did it get to +5 informative? I assume it's there as a joke so it should only be +5 funny, or possibly now, +5 fooled Slashdot. I am a plant physiologist, there are three basic types of chlorophyll in land plants, a,b & c. They have slightly different spectra, but they are not blue and yellow, they all have minimal absorbance in the green part of the spectrum and thus look green. The yellows and reds in senescing leaves are from carotenoids and anthocyanins.
I was going to mod you up, but I'll comment instead. Right now I've got mod points and I get them on roughly a weekly basis with 3 days to use them. Without intending this to be a flame, in that time I rarely manage to find enough good posts to use them positively, and end up having to use them negatively (there are plenty of trolls....) which always seems a bit of a waste. I understand why mod points are taken back if not used in a short time, but it really is an encouragement to mod up posts that really aren't 'insightful' or 'informative'.
Stellarium is what you are thinking of, at www.stellarium.org Multi-platform, and used professionally, needs a 3D card though.
Cheeky sods.
Why has the parent post been modded funny? It represents the first post in this entire thread that actually makes a valid point as to why one might wish to protect a lifeless environment.
Oil came from plant material not animals. Look around at the countryside, do you see a greater mass of animals or plants? WHich holds the most carbon?