Outside of search & rescue, the military, and research, would seeing beyond the visible range of light be useful enough to warrant implants that are probably twice as large? And what would be the risks associated with overclocking the optic nerve and occipital lobe? It's not like we even really process that much of what our eyes "see" anyway.
That's what happens when people learn "facts" rather than concepts. For history it'd be like spending all your time learning names, places, and dates and only having a very superficial level of knowledge. OTOH, now I'm curious at to what the 1080s proved...
Except that Google's DNS makes a point of returning proper NXDOMAIN records.
How does Google Public DNS handle non-existent domains?
If you issue a query for a domain name that does not exist, Google Public DNS always returns an NXDOMAIN record, as per the DNS protocol standards. The browser should show this response as a DNS error. If, instead, you receive any response other than an error message (for example, you are redirected to another page), this could be the result of the following:
A client-side application such as a browser plug-in is displaying an alternate page for a non-existent domain.
Some ISPs may intercept and replace all NXDOMAIN responses with responses that lead to their own servers. If you are concerned that your ISP is intercepting Google Public DNS requests or responses, you should contact your ISP.
Will Google Public DNS be used to serve ads in the future?
No. We are committed to preserving the integrity of the DNS protocol. Google Public DNS will never return the address of an ad server for a non-existent domain.
So what you're saying is that we should keep space exploration because while it's primary goal is of limited usefulness, the technology developed in achieving it is quite useful? But on the other hand, neither the military's primary goal (i.e. keeping civilians alive) nor the technology developed (e.g. rockets, nuclear physics, computers, the internet) are worth what we spend on it? How's that consistent?
(You may have a point about Iraq, but that's getting into specifics and would require being completely off-topic to logically support or refute, thus making it a fairly cheap shot.)
Exactly. It seems like every week or so I hear someone declaring privacy to be dead. Privacy can't die, if it did then everyone would know everything about you, which is impossible. But repeatedly chanting "privacy is dead" serves to weaken resistance to further erosion.
7 years * 12 months/year * 10,000 GB/month = 840 TB of data written/deleted
10,000 Erases * 128 GB = 1280 TB of data written/deleted
It seems like any SSD of appropriate capacity will do that. 10,000 erases is actually extremely conservative, most SSDs advertise 2-3 orders of magnitude more than that. It'd take continuous writing at maximum speed for more than a decade* to kill most modern SSDs. Or at least that's the theory, I'm sure someone has gotten a defective one that died in a month or something.
The first beta of the laser targeting system wasn't as specific. This "problem" became apparent when the engineers showed the device to the blood sucking lawyers. OTOH, Intellectual Ventures seems to be doing a lot better now.
Atheists: Spirituality associated with having less brain matter!
Theists: The devil's cortex discovered and removed!
Slightly more physical theists: Sin found to be a cancer of the mind!
Neurologist: The parietal cortex seems to inhibit the attachment of meaning to mundane events.
IMHO, businesses should act like businesses and maximize profits. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of emotional money wasting with this kind of thing.
I agree. Autoimmunity seems like it'll kill this idea unless they take some pretty extreme measures to get around it. Each person is genetically different. There are a lot of potential antigens for an antibody to recognize. With our own immune system there are (imperfect) mechanisms to kill any B or T cell that recognizes something inappropriate. With genetically engineered antibodies, this step is skipped entirely. In fact, I suspect this step is why we don't form natural antibodies to some diseases... especially since our immune cells are obviously capable of doing so in a test tube.
That reminds me of a story that one of my organic chemistry professors told about the other. You see, he devised a compound that worked exactly like fluoride, but bound to teeth much more strongly. He'd verified that it worked as intended in his lab and sent a batch off to the medical school for animal testing. Well, a few weeks later he received a call about the experiment.
"I have some good news and some bad news..."
"Well, what's the good news?"
"We've been feeding the rats a diet of pure sucrose and not a single one has a cavity."
"That's great! What's the bad news?"
"Well, we'd like to have your permission to go ahead and euthanize them, they're all dying horrible deaths."
At this point the professor goes ghost white and rushes home. A few days later my other professor inquires about why he did that. It turns out that he was so confident in his invention that he'd been brushing his own teeth with the stuff! A long story short, it turns out that arsenic was used in one of the synthesis steps, and he'd failed to remove all of it from the final product.
Everyone always reports relative risks, since that's the biggest number. It's a little sad that so many people forget that if something has a high absolute risk and it's serious, then everyone would know about it. Like how car accidents and cardiovascular disease are bad for your health. Cell phones obviously don't do much harm, if any. It'd take a very large study to find the risk, and even then, would it really change people's habits? I mean, most people still drive cars and avoid exercise.
Protein folding relies heavily on very lower energy Van der Waals interactions, ionic interactions, and even the hydration shell. Theoretically, the perfect type of low energy radiation could denature tumor suppressant proteins in a nucleated keratinocyte and generate a squamous cell carcinoma.
That said, possible doesn't mean practical. The probability of 2 GHz being that perfect frequency, of denaturing a single type of tumor suppressant protein causing unchecked DNA replication, and that replication introducing a cancerous change is negligibly low. Plus, researchers would've sounded the alarm ages ago if a common/well studied cancer like SCC increased in incidence in a specific area of the body. Deeper tissue wouldn't get as much radiation exposure, and a non-skin cancer on the thigh is kinda rare (blood vessel, muscle, bone, and fat cancers have prevalences of ~.1% - 1%).
Any processor built in the last decade should be able to handle most flash (certain games and h264 excluded... for processors made back around 2000). It doesn't exactly require 3 gigaflops to draw a triangle. People forget how powerful modern computers actually are, and mistake a woeful lack of optimization for irreducible complexity. Heck, a modern computer can do more work in a second than 20 people can do in a lifetime, which kinda makes one go WTF when they take >200 ms to do something.
Essentially this is a high capacity "bulk storage" drive and a fast "working" drive. So the potential customers seem to be either those who are too lazy to copy their data from "storage" to "working" manually, or those so predictable that that a computer program can cache stuff before they ask for it. My guess is that the predictive algorithm is basically "the user asked for this a second ago, let's copy it to the SSD in case the user has a short term memory deficiency".
OTOH, this would help with some stupid programs that are unable to cope with multiple drives/partitions. E.g. my last laptop's TV tuner insisted upon storing everything on an NTFS D:\, so either I could map D:\ to a USB harddrive and not use it when I was traveling, or limit myself to the few gigabytes I had to spare on my laptop's internal drive.
I was repeating the GP's figure without checking it. I think you're completely right though. Of course, at the end of the day a mandatory expense is basically a tax.
Lithium ion batteries lose capacity for several reasons. First is the age from manufacture. In this case, a two-year old laptop might've gotten a battery that had been sitting in a warehouse for a few years. Second is the temperature. A battery in a desktop replacement laptop that's never below 60 degrees Celsius will degrade at an astounding rate, whereas a battery sitting in a plastic bag in the refrigerator will hardly degrade at all. Third is the number of charge cycles (rather straight forward). Fourth is how long the battery spent completely discharged. Modern batteries will shut down before before being completely depleted, but if this fails or if you don't immediately recharge them then some cells might die. Fifth is how long a battery was kept at high charge levels. A battery kept at 100% charge won't last nearly as long as one kept at 80%, 60% or 40%.
So, the best situation for a lithium battery is sitting in a plastic bag in a refrigerator at 40% charge, where it'll lose ~2% capacity per year. The worst case is being kept at 0% charge in hot temperatures which can make it useless in no time, and the next worse is 100% at hot temperatures (e.g. a laptop on a desk), which can lose a staggering 87% of its capacity in a year. (Yes, that's three hours down to twenty minutes.)
I expect this issue to turn out being that installing Windows 7 reset the manufacturer selected power scheme and probably disabled any charging control software. My own laptop had the "critical" battery level decreased, and the "only charge to 80%" software needed an update from the manufacturer (though in my case it still kinda worked, it just would nag with "Only use Sony batteries" and try to hibernate).
Most of this is from memory, but here's the source for the rest of it.
Including the supplemental spending brings it to only $900 billion to $1 trillion. It's still a fraction of what's spent on health care. But even that's biased, since the military keeps research classified, so all of the research dollars are included in its budget. Medical research comes from many sources, so the $2.5 trillion doesn't include the supplemental spending.
But why bother comparing them? They exist for exactly the same reason: to keep US citizens alive and healthy. Plus, military spending often helps medicine (although the converse isn't as true since we don't use biological or chemical weapons so much anymore). Anthrax research is done by the military. Novoseven (probably one of the most expensive drugs) was developed to stop soldiers from bleeding to death. The military will pay for a doctor's training for a 4 year active, 4 year reserve duty commitment. And army doctors are probably the best at trauma related injuries... which they use for both our soldiers and local civilians.
A phone is optimized for holding it close to your ear and talking. A gaming device is optimized for repetitive, rapid and precise button presses, while maintaining screen visibility. These are very different requirements and compromise leaves you with a device that sucks at both. It'd be quite difficult to come up with a design that's better than essentially taping a phone to the back of a game controller. You could make a general purpose device that can do anything (e.g. a flat touchscreen with software buttons), which has been done, but it's not really great at anything either. It's similar to how a cellphone can tell time, but a wristwatch is better.
Combine that with the fact that US cell phones are typically locked to a single network and you've got an expensive to design device with a small potential user base and no guarantee that this novel device can fill the "gaming phone" niche, if it even exists. It doesn't surprise me that no gaming company has invested into that idea.
The US doesn't have that restriction as far as I can tell. We used to limit coins to $10, but the coinage act of 1965 made all currency legal tender in all amounts (perhaps unintentionally). Legal tender cannot be refused if it's to pay a debt. Businesses can refuse to do business with anyone though, so if a debt hasn't been incurred they can simply refuse to sale something. The law is ambiguous, and I think there's case law where a judge ordered someone to pay with a check instead of pennies, but it seems like this is a legal way for someone to be a dick under US law. I have heard about people paying their taxes in pennies, although the "count it twice in front of the payer" policy came back to haunt them.
That seems like it'd be a good idea, and I bet a lot of people would donate a box of pennies to help. Legally, I think they are obligated to accept it since it's legal currency being used to pay a debt. Just for fun I calculated what that'd be:
One penny has a radius of 0.0095 m, and a height of 0.00143 m, leading to a volume of 4.054 * 10^-7 m^3.
Cylinders have a packing efficiency of about 90%, so each penny occupies at least 4.5 * 10^-7 m^3
Thus $25,000 in pennies would take up about 1.125 cubic meters (40 cubic feet).
A penny weighs 2.5 grams, so that's 6250 kg (~7 tons).
That's possible to transport, although now I'm curious as to whether the law permits delivery of said pennies by trebuchet or railgun...
Pharmaceuticals divvy up their revenue equally among research, marketing, and administration. Marketing obviously generates more revenue than it costs, so cutting that would increase vaccine costs (although there are still ethical issues with marketing). The administration costs can't be cut, because MBAs aren't going to work for free or less than they can get elsewhere.
Drugs are expensive, but what can you really do? It costs about a billion dollars and ten years to develop a single useful drug (this includes all the drug failures). Without patents there wouldn't be a hope to recoup the development costs, so drugs would need to be funded by grants from the government. Which would put you at ~$500 Million with research and administration costs and marginal drug manufacturing costs would be what you'd pay at the pharmacy. Of course, the expense wouldn't go away, so taxes would need to be increased, thus making Americans foot the bill for most of the drug research in the world, rather than those who actually take the drug.
I suppose the only real way to provide $1 vaccines to the developing world would be to give pharmaceutical companies a tax break for manufacturing them at cost for humanitarian causes. But they wouldn't do that if there was any potential for selling those vaccines above cost to humanitarian organizations.
Slashdot Mirror
Outside of search & rescue, the military, and research, would seeing beyond the visible range of light be useful enough to warrant implants that are probably twice as large? And what would be the risks associated with overclocking the optic nerve and occipital lobe? It's not like we even really process that much of what our eyes "see" anyway.
That's what happens when people learn "facts" rather than concepts. For history it'd be like spending all your time learning names, places, and dates and only having a very superficial level of knowledge. OTOH, now I'm curious at to what the 1080s proved...
How does Google Public DNS handle non-existent domains?
If you issue a query for a domain name that does not exist, Google Public DNS always returns an NXDOMAIN record, as per the DNS protocol standards. The browser should show this response as a DNS error. If, instead, you receive any response other than an error message (for example, you are redirected to another page), this could be the result of the following:
Will Google Public DNS be used to serve ads in the future?
No. We are committed to preserving the integrity of the DNS protocol. Google Public DNS will never return the address of an ad server for a non-existent domain.
So what you're saying is that we should keep space exploration because while it's primary goal is of limited usefulness, the technology developed in achieving it is quite useful? But on the other hand, neither the military's primary goal (i.e. keeping civilians alive) nor the technology developed (e.g. rockets, nuclear physics, computers, the internet) are worth what we spend on it? How's that consistent?
(You may have a point about Iraq, but that's getting into specifics and would require being completely off-topic to logically support or refute, thus making it a fairly cheap shot.)
I have to wonder why they don't use normal browser cookies... Is having 100k of storage so important as to reinvent the wheel?
Exactly. It seems like every week or so I hear someone declaring privacy to be dead. Privacy can't die, if it did then everyone would know everything about you, which is impossible. But repeatedly chanting "privacy is dead" serves to weaken resistance to further erosion.
7 years * 12 months/year * 10,000 GB/month = 840 TB of data written/deleted
10,000 Erases * 128 GB = 1280 TB of data written/deleted
It seems like any SSD of appropriate capacity will do that. 10,000 erases is actually extremely conservative, most SSDs advertise 2-3 orders of magnitude more than that. It'd take continuous writing at maximum speed for more than a decade* to kill most modern SSDs. Or at least that's the theory, I'm sure someone has gotten a defective one that died in a month or something.
* 5,000,000 Erases * (256 GB / 100 MB/sec) = 405 years
The first beta of the laser targeting system wasn't as specific. This "problem" became apparent when the engineers showed the device to the blood sucking lawyers. OTOH, Intellectual Ventures seems to be doing a lot better now.
It's all framing:
Atheists: Spirituality associated with having less brain matter!
Theists: The devil's cortex discovered and removed!
Slightly more physical theists: Sin found to be a cancer of the mind!
Neurologist: The parietal cortex seems to inhibit the attachment of meaning to mundane events.
Why not piss away another pile of cash?
IMHO, businesses should act like businesses and maximize profits. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of emotional money wasting with this kind of thing.
I agree. Autoimmunity seems like it'll kill this idea unless they take some pretty extreme measures to get around it. Each person is genetically different. There are a lot of potential antigens for an antibody to recognize. With our own immune system there are (imperfect) mechanisms to kill any B or T cell that recognizes something inappropriate. With genetically engineered antibodies, this step is skipped entirely. In fact, I suspect this step is why we don't form natural antibodies to some diseases... especially since our immune cells are obviously capable of doing so in a test tube.
That reminds me of a story that one of my organic chemistry professors told about the other. You see, he devised a compound that worked exactly like fluoride, but bound to teeth much more strongly. He'd verified that it worked as intended in his lab and sent a batch off to the medical school for animal testing. Well, a few weeks later he received a call about the experiment.
"I have some good news and some bad news..."
"Well, what's the good news?"
"We've been feeding the rats a diet of pure sucrose and not a single one has a cavity."
"That's great! What's the bad news?"
"Well, we'd like to have your permission to go ahead and euthanize them, they're all dying horrible deaths."
At this point the professor goes ghost white and rushes home. A few days later my other professor inquires about why he did that. It turns out that he was so confident in his invention that he'd been brushing his own teeth with the stuff! A long story short, it turns out that arsenic was used in one of the synthesis steps, and he'd failed to remove all of it from the final product.
Everyone always reports relative risks, since that's the biggest number. It's a little sad that so many people forget that if something has a high absolute risk and it's serious, then everyone would know about it. Like how car accidents and cardiovascular disease are bad for your health. Cell phones obviously don't do much harm, if any. It'd take a very large study to find the risk, and even then, would it really change people's habits? I mean, most people still drive cars and avoid exercise.
Protein folding relies heavily on very lower energy Van der Waals interactions, ionic interactions, and even the hydration shell. Theoretically, the perfect type of low energy radiation could denature tumor suppressant proteins in a nucleated keratinocyte and generate a squamous cell carcinoma.
That said, possible doesn't mean practical. The probability of 2 GHz being that perfect frequency, of denaturing a single type of tumor suppressant protein causing unchecked DNA replication, and that replication introducing a cancerous change is negligibly low. Plus, researchers would've sounded the alarm ages ago if a common/well studied cancer like SCC increased in incidence in a specific area of the body. Deeper tissue wouldn't get as much radiation exposure, and a non-skin cancer on the thigh is kinda rare (blood vessel, muscle, bone, and fat cancers have prevalences of ~.1% - 1%).
Any processor built in the last decade should be able to handle most flash (certain games and h264 excluded... for processors made back around 2000). It doesn't exactly require 3 gigaflops to draw a triangle. People forget how powerful modern computers actually are, and mistake a woeful lack of optimization for irreducible complexity. Heck, a modern computer can do more work in a second than 20 people can do in a lifetime, which kinda makes one go WTF when they take >200 ms to do something.
I wouldn't be so sure... Apparently, even if you disappear from a boat during the night and live in a tent 6,000 feet up in the Alps, you can be found. OTOH, nobody would bother if you don't owe $5 million.
That's why I'm a little more careful and named my password file "nul". Too bad I can never remember where I keep that file...
Essentially this is a high capacity "bulk storage" drive and a fast "working" drive. So the potential customers seem to be either those who are too lazy to copy their data from "storage" to "working" manually, or those so predictable that that a computer program can cache stuff before they ask for it. My guess is that the predictive algorithm is basically "the user asked for this a second ago, let's copy it to the SSD in case the user has a short term memory deficiency".
OTOH, this would help with some stupid programs that are unable to cope with multiple drives/partitions. E.g. my last laptop's TV tuner insisted upon storing everything on an NTFS D:\, so either I could map D:\ to a USB harddrive and not use it when I was traveling, or limit myself to the few gigabytes I had to spare on my laptop's internal drive.
I was repeating the GP's figure without checking it. I think you're completely right though. Of course, at the end of the day a mandatory expense is basically a tax.
Lithium ion batteries lose capacity for several reasons. First is the age from manufacture. In this case, a two-year old laptop might've gotten a battery that had been sitting in a warehouse for a few years. Second is the temperature. A battery in a desktop replacement laptop that's never below 60 degrees Celsius will degrade at an astounding rate, whereas a battery sitting in a plastic bag in the refrigerator will hardly degrade at all. Third is the number of charge cycles (rather straight forward). Fourth is how long the battery spent completely discharged. Modern batteries will shut down before before being completely depleted, but if this fails or if you don't immediately recharge them then some cells might die. Fifth is how long a battery was kept at high charge levels. A battery kept at 100% charge won't last nearly as long as one kept at 80%, 60% or 40%.
So, the best situation for a lithium battery is sitting in a plastic bag in a refrigerator at 40% charge, where it'll lose ~2% capacity per year. The worst case is being kept at 0% charge in hot temperatures which can make it useless in no time, and the next worse is 100% at hot temperatures (e.g. a laptop on a desk), which can lose a staggering 87% of its capacity in a year. (Yes, that's three hours down to twenty minutes.)
I expect this issue to turn out being that installing Windows 7 reset the manufacturer selected power scheme and probably disabled any charging control software. My own laptop had the "critical" battery level decreased, and the "only charge to 80%" software needed an update from the manufacturer (though in my case it still kinda worked, it just would nag with "Only use Sony batteries" and try to hibernate).
Most of this is from memory, but here's the source for the rest of it.
Including the supplemental spending brings it to only $900 billion to $1 trillion. It's still a fraction of what's spent on health care. But even that's biased, since the military keeps research classified, so all of the research dollars are included in its budget. Medical research comes from many sources, so the $2.5 trillion doesn't include the supplemental spending.
But why bother comparing them? They exist for exactly the same reason: to keep US citizens alive and healthy. Plus, military spending often helps medicine (although the converse isn't as true since we don't use biological or chemical weapons so much anymore). Anthrax research is done by the military. Novoseven (probably one of the most expensive drugs) was developed to stop soldiers from bleeding to death. The military will pay for a doctor's training for a 4 year active, 4 year reserve duty commitment. And army doctors are probably the best at trauma related injuries... which they use for both our soldiers and local civilians.
A phone is optimized for holding it close to your ear and talking. A gaming device is optimized for repetitive, rapid and precise button presses, while maintaining screen visibility. These are very different requirements and compromise leaves you with a device that sucks at both. It'd be quite difficult to come up with a design that's better than essentially taping a phone to the back of a game controller. You could make a general purpose device that can do anything (e.g. a flat touchscreen with software buttons), which has been done, but it's not really great at anything either. It's similar to how a cellphone can tell time, but a wristwatch is better.
Combine that with the fact that US cell phones are typically locked to a single network and you've got an expensive to design device with a small potential user base and no guarantee that this novel device can fill the "gaming phone" niche, if it even exists. It doesn't surprise me that no gaming company has invested into that idea.
The US doesn't have that restriction as far as I can tell. We used to limit coins to $10, but the coinage act of 1965 made all currency legal tender in all amounts (perhaps unintentionally). Legal tender cannot be refused if it's to pay a debt. Businesses can refuse to do business with anyone though, so if a debt hasn't been incurred they can simply refuse to sale something. The law is ambiguous, and I think there's case law where a judge ordered someone to pay with a check instead of pennies, but it seems like this is a legal way for someone to be a dick under US law. I have heard about people paying their taxes in pennies, although the "count it twice in front of the payer" policy came back to haunt them.
That seems like it'd be a good idea, and I bet a lot of people would donate a box of pennies to help. Legally, I think they are obligated to accept it since it's legal currency being used to pay a debt. Just for fun I calculated what that'd be:
One penny has a radius of 0.0095 m, and a height of 0.00143 m, leading to a volume of 4.054 * 10^-7 m^3.
Cylinders have a packing efficiency of about 90%, so each penny occupies at least 4.5 * 10^-7 m^3
Thus $25,000 in pennies would take up about 1.125 cubic meters (40 cubic feet).
A penny weighs 2.5 grams, so that's 6250 kg (~7 tons).
That's possible to transport, although now I'm curious as to whether the law permits delivery of said pennies by trebuchet or railgun...
Pharmaceuticals divvy up their revenue equally among research, marketing, and administration. Marketing obviously generates more revenue than it costs, so cutting that would increase vaccine costs (although there are still ethical issues with marketing). The administration costs can't be cut, because MBAs aren't going to work for free or less than they can get elsewhere.
Drugs are expensive, but what can you really do? It costs about a billion dollars and ten years to develop a single useful drug (this includes all the drug failures). Without patents there wouldn't be a hope to recoup the development costs, so drugs would need to be funded by grants from the government. Which would put you at ~$500 Million with research and administration costs and marginal drug manufacturing costs would be what you'd pay at the pharmacy. Of course, the expense wouldn't go away, so taxes would need to be increased, thus making Americans foot the bill for most of the drug research in the world, rather than those who actually take the drug.
I suppose the only real way to provide $1 vaccines to the developing world would be to give pharmaceutical companies a tax break for manufacturing them at cost for humanitarian causes. But they wouldn't do that if there was any potential for selling those vaccines above cost to humanitarian organizations.