Zero. Children getting free lunches netted my county's school food program more money than the full paid children. A neighboring county that was a bit higher percentage-wise for Free (or Reduced Price) VS Full Paid was able to go to 100% free lunches (i.e. eat the loss for the non-free kids). So the school food program is acceptably compensated to feed low income children.
The grants from the federal budget that helped fund this research (or the background research) didn't change that. Nor is it like a kid will go hungry because their parent can't afford to pay for school lunches (many poor kids only get to eat at school, not at home except during the summer and weekends).
I still think it is funny that Linux is considered "bloatware" when Windows will still use several times the same resources as Linux. For instance, take any desktop distro (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc...) and a complete installation including multiple desktop environments, browsers, office suites, etc... still takes up less disk space, memory and CPU than does a bare installation of Windows Vista/7.
I don't think that's something to be particularly proud of. Installation size has undergone geometric growth for every iteration of windows except for 7. Win98 took ~200 MB, 2K took ~400 MB, XP took ~3 GB, Vista takes ~15 GB. Linux can be a resource hog and still be "better than Windows". IMHO, the people saying it's bloated are more concerned with improving the OS than the Windows fixation that some in the Linux community have.
Exactly the reason I'm cautious despite overall optimism about this idea. Although it's not quite true that nothing is known. I personally don't know much, but two things come to mind.
First, in the human body (IIRC) 1.6 degrees Celsius is the difference between normal, a fever or hypothermia. Fortunately, we're adapted to external temperature changes, so we can tolerate something like twenty degree changes in the environment fairly easily. Marine creatures have no reason to have developed this adaptation. Combine temperature sensitivity with looking for a variety of other factors (salinity, light, current, prey/predators, etc.) and I'd imagine small changes to the ocean temperature would kill a lot of sea life in an area.
The second thing is that ocean currents move based on temperature and salinity (related to temperature) differences. A staggeringly huge amount of water moves this way, and I'm not sure I'd want countless tons of slightly warm water to flood toward a coastline because the temperature switched from being slightly cooler to slightly warmer. Not to mention the effect on weather stuff like this has (e.g. why the UK is relatively warm).
Realistically though, changing the ocean's temperature by a single degree would take a very long time and involve a tremendous amount of energy. IMHO something like that would be a few orders of magnitude worse than global warming. Local changes of that magnitude are possible though.
Presumably because there simply aren't enough eyes to watch everything that people want watched. And even if there were, who would be left to watch the watchmen?
Best case scenario: this technology is used to draw the security guard's attention away from late night TV when something actually happens.
Worst case scenario: pick your nose in an alley and have the police automatically alerted.
Very interesting, and with obvious profound implications. Although I suppose the million dollar question would then be, when answering yes/no, are they right? I.e. are they responding to a stimuli in an intelligent/autonomous, consistent but arbitrary, or random manner?
I agree that MSG should be listed, but things like rat turds and low grade beef, while disgusting at an emotional level, are not really worrisome. Beef grade affects taste more than anything, and fast food obviously tastes decent given its popularity. Rat turds are fairly natural, and probably part of a natural human diet (as would be rats). The latter might cause illness if they don't cook the beef well enough, but it's not going to do much to a person long-term. We actually get eat pound or two of chopped insect parts mixed with our vegetables every year. It's healthy since insects are also a natural part of our diet (beyond the handful of spiders we unwittingly eat in our sleep).
I'm split on whether ingredient lists should be more inclusive or not. Realistically, if everything was listed if it could be detected then ingredient lists would be books. OTOH, a person needs to know what they're ordering (from a capitalist/free market perspective). In practical terms, almost nobody is going to care about the vast majority of ingredients, and several are in such low amounts as to be ignorable. Nothing's a poison and everything's a poison after all. I suppose a decent compromise is to list everything that's detected in a chemical analysis if it has a known biological effect at that concentration. Trivia: did you that McDonald's french fries contain acrylamide? It's not an ingredient but is produced in situ during preparation. People tend to forget that cooking is a chemical reaction, and the ingredients list is simply the starting point.
As for using Google, I think you can ask for the ingredients list at the restaurants. Realistically, there's too much information to keep on top of for most things, even common stuff like sucrose or fructose. I doubt that all the effects of those two compounds are even known (empirically we know that sucrose is mostly harmless, whereas HFCS is sorta bad if you eat a lot over a long time).
I'd be amused if the calculator itself was used to factor the key. Then it becomes a copyright circumvention tool, and thus illegal if TI wanted to make a DMCA claim. (Not that such a thing would pan out in real life given lawyers, but I can still pretend for the sake of amusement.)
A quick Google search reveals that isn't the case. Skimming over the list of ingredients doesn't reveal any surprises, nor does it seem to be abridged since MSG and trans-fats are in there. Surely you realize that fast food isn't inherently different than any other kind of food... It may be fairly processed, but KFC does serve chicken and McDonalds does serve beef. No major differences from what you'd find in a supermarket, albeit most people wouldn't cook such high fat/Calorie food very often.
If you're worried about "unpronounceable chemicals" I'd recommend a course in organic chemistry and biochemistry. No claims that fast food is healthy, but at least it becomes "the devil you know". After all, you wouldn't want to freak out about dihydrogen monoxide in your food, would you?
It also seems borderline reckless to do this kind of research. Obviously, the family of someone in a vegetative state would cling to any hope that their loved one might recover. Telling them that their loved one can learn will make their decision about continuing life support all the more difficult. I seriously doubt many physicians would follow up with "which puts them at the mental capacity of a gnat", even though a layman's concept of "learning" would make them assume a much higher level of intelligence. All-together a pointless observation IMHO, albeit one that can cause a lot of unnecessary pain for families.
For the last major test I took that involved an essay (the MCAT), I had to type it. Back in college I had only a couple teachers that used essay type questions, and was at no disadvantage by using manuscript since far more time was spent thinking about what to write than actually writing it. For note-taking, it's rare for me to see someone use cursive, although it doesn't seem like people are struggling with keeping up. I couldn't imagine (nor ever seen) anyone using a notepad for note-taking, which leads me to think that your field is very different from mine.
While cursive, if forced upon youngsters for about a decade (less and they'll revert to manuscript), is probably faster, manuscript is held to be more legible. IMHO, that's far more important since about 7,000 people die each year because fast handwriting is favored over legible handwriting. For that reason I eagerly await the death of cursive writing.
Walking is apparently a spinal reflex. Back in the days before there were strict guidelines on animal research/cruelty some researchers verified this using an experiment. Basically, they had a cat on a treatmill and rigged a device (I'm picturing something from Saw) that severed its spinal cord without knocking it over. The cat kept walking! Since spinal reflexes are preserved if they're below the level of damage, this bodes well for this type of research. Balance would probably be an issue though, since the cerebellum is thought to play a pretty significant role in that. Given, it's unassisted walking, but I'm not convinced many paraplegics would stand for wearing large gyroscopes. Ah, that brings me to the other major hurdle with this technology: standing.
Interestingly enough, I'm wondering what'll happen if laser rifles ever became reality, or perhaps entered hard science fiction. How weird would it be for a patrolling guard to get shot in the head, but keep on walking...
I decided I didn't give a crap, but I have everything set to 'friends only' and I don't use apps or quizzes. Reasonable compromise for a non-tin-foil-hatter.
Don't forget to opt out of the Facebook App API. Otherwise your friend's apps can still basically pull in all of your information (probably recursively extended to their friends). Also, take note that just leaving a name and no picture/picture of your dog as the only information non-friends can see makes your profile fairly useless to people that know you in real life. "Is this the Sparticus I know, or some random dude that lives a thousand miles away?" Perhaps that's the desired effect, but it kinda makes having a Facebook profile pointless in the first place.
IMHO it's better to only put information that you don't care to share up on Facebook rather than locking down your profile. I personally couldn't care less if someone knows my favorite books or TV shows, or a selection of my favorite quotes. It reveals a bit about my personality—whether through complex mathematics or a human's common sense—but far less than reading my slashdot postings or meeting me in the physical world. Relying on Facebook's privacy settings to limit the spread of sensitive information seems fraught with peril, given that they're in the business of sharing information.
Stuff I keep off of Facebook entirely, or at least keep hidden: Religion, Politics, Blog/Twitter-like updates, a selective list of my actual close friends (I friend all acquaintances) and Tagged Photos. I can think of no benefit from sharing that information.
The thing about choices are that you are allowed to make poor ones. Making a few bad choices will eventually teach people to make better ones in the future. That said, block the application from the network and make the warning simple to understand. Ethically, people have a right to autonomy over beneficence. Legally, I doubt kill switches would be tolerated if used very often/visibly given the doctrine of first sale.
I realize you're simply stating what most users would do, and I don't really disagree. I just figure that if someone is allowed to make bad choices with important stuff like their health or finances, that they should have that right with technology as well. Perhaps it's blind optimism in thinking that they'd show at least level 3 of 5 animal intelligence (association -- dog/cat level) and learn that disregarding scary messages correlates with bad things happening.
Cells generally respond to being overworked by either hypertrophy (increase in number) or hyperplasia (increase in number). Realistically, most cells do both, although one method may dominate. Some Googling reveals that hyperplasia definitely happens in human smooth and cardiac muscle, and probably happens to some extent in skeletal muscle (animal studies demonstrate it). As far as neurons go, your olfactory neurons (responsible for smell) are actually constantly dividing as well (turn-over time of a couple weeks IIRC).
Something interesting about fat cells (adipocytes)... As they swell they secrete leptin, which reduces hunger and aims to keep one at a healthy body fat level. If a person becomes fat enough that the adipocytes have to divide (probably related to maximum surface area to volume ratio), then they have more adipocytes and thus more leptin produced. But, the clincher is that losing that fat becomes more difficult, since you don't get rid of the fat cells. What happens is that each cell is forced to become unnaturally small, which lowers the amount of leptin secreted. On top of that, the more leptin that floods the leptin receptors in the brain, the more resistant to leptin the receptors become (much like a Type II Diabetic is resistant to insulin). Less leptin receptor activation causes more hunger, and thus more difficulty in losing fat. Apparently, high levels of fructose accelerate this process. (All that said, fat levels are basically a matter of calories in/out due to the laws of physics; hunger just makes it more difficult to eat less and exercise more.)
I don't think I'd agree that jargon makes things more concise. It makes them more precise. Concision, OTOH, tends to be overlooked in academics. For example, scientific papers are written in the passive voice, which is considerably more verbose than the active. They also tend to elaborate on anything that isn't standard for the field (e.g. 'DNA' won't be defined, but 'ADO' would be). Plus, remarkably, almost all research articles are similar in length, despite vastly different subject matter.
But, I do agree that it's impossible to completely explain what you've been doing for the last several months/years to someone in three sentences unless they are familiar with the subject. A basic explanation should be possible though. Metaphors tend to be too verbose and often wildly inaccurate, so this ability hinges on using general terms that are still correct. 'PCR', for example, can be called 'copying a gene', which a layman should understand. Detail is lost, but it's still fairly accurate. No clue how one'd describe pulmonary edema without making it sound like a pneumothorax though, so the three sentence thing might not be possible for all studies. I'm especially doubtful about how a mathematician could do this, but I haven't studied mathematics enough to say one way or the other.
Perhaps the reason I heard that challenge is because of the field I'm in. I'm a medical student, and part of our curriculum is how to explain complex illnesses to patients in terms that they'll understand. It's a physician's responsibility, so nobody even asks whether it's possible or not. OTOH, the last exercise was trying to explain sickle cell anemia/beta thalassemia to someone who didn't know what a cell was... that was painful...
I've heard someone make the claim that if you understand your research well enough you should be able to accurately describe it to a layman in three sentences or less. I'm not entirely sure I'd agree, unless you relax the term "layman" to mean that they at least remember their introductory course to the subject (e.g. Biology, Chemistry, Physics).
In my own experience, I've seen the full spectrum of jargon use, but it certainly didn't correlate with knowledge or specialization. One of the most knowledgeable people I've seen (some of the research equipment is named after him) used virtually no jargon, but I've also seen many graduate students that can only speak of their research in technical terms. My hypothesis is that the better you understand something, the more ways you can accurately describe it. From there, some people merely choose to use the simplest description.
For that reason, I don't think it's unreasonable at all to expect scientists to write about their research in layman's terms. If this is a weak point for them, then they need more practice. Who knows, maybe it'll give them another perspective. In any case, it'll definitely improve their teaching ability.
If you're a Linux user who does specialized stuff with your system, try figuring out how to do that stuff in Windows. Can't find it in the UI or configuration files? No problem. Just read the documentation. Wow. What language does Microsoft write their documentation in? While it may not be quite as bad as another language, the jargon of the Windows world is definitely different from the jargon of the Linux world. This adds time and frustration to the process of learning a new technology.
Beyond that, you can become quite skilled at Windows without reading any help files or documentation. I'd venture a guess and say most power users learned that way. In Linux, doing basic stuff is easy, and there's documentation on doing hard stuff. The thing is, you can't figure out how to do the hard stuff on your own, like many adventurous Windows users are used to.
I remember one of my first moments of post-installation Linux frustrations was figuring out how to do the opposite of mount. There wasn't a flag for mount I could use, 'dismount' didn't exist, 'unmount' didn't exist, so I had to read about 10 pages of man pages before learning the command was 'umount'. Basically, my Windows strategy of "play around until something works" wasn't useful in Linux. That remains one of my main gripes with Linux. Linux doesn't really have a learning curve so much as a learning cliff that's impossible to climb without reading documentation. So, the issue of lack of familiarity extends well beyond the application level. I would think most Windows users are realistic enough to expect that Linux operates differently, they just don't account for nearly none of their computer skills carrying over.
While changing the half life is a little silly*, biological processes could be used to reduce the effective gamma ray emission. Some fungi can use radiation essentially like light for photosynthesis. Not surprising, since it's an energy source after all. The pigments the fungi use to absorb the gamma radiation would effectively act as shields, while conveying a selective advantage and reason for the fungi to amass around the radiation source. It wouldn't block all of the radiation, but perhaps the fungi could reduce it to a non-dangerous level. Similar to how a rain forest keeps 98% of sunlight from hitting the ground.
* OTOH, fungi are a little scary... it wouldn't surprise me if they evolve the capacity to use nuclear reactions to derive energy in a century or two.
10,000 PCs is a small sample size, try a few million. You might have a sampling error there if they are not randomly picked.
I think you misunderstand the details of sampling a population. If the 10,000 PCs were randomly selected then that provides a 99% confidence interval of +/- 1% for 3 billion computers (my random guess of the number of computers in the world). So if it says Vista is on 30% of computers, there's a 99% chance the true percentage is between 29-31%. Therefore, it's an excessively huge sample size.
Of course, these PCs are not randomly picked at all, so that nullifies any validity the sampling had.
As opposed to when humans are hit by explosives... Probably one of the touted advantages of the "armored exoskeleton" is increased maneuverability (e.g. ability to avoid some RPGs) as compared to tanks, while retaining their bullet resistant nature.
But we're only considering half the equation: The average human response time for auditory or visual input is 160--220ms. This increases as we age.
People that play twitch-type games are hardly average, now are they? Besides, that would decrease with sympathetic nervous system stimulation (also inherent in games), and is basically only limited by nerve conduction speed (20+ m/s in humans, so the minimum reaction time is around 50 ms). Visual processing and decision making add to that, but both are going to be very quick in a gamer as compared to someone off the street. I always sucked at FPS games, but back when I played them my reaction time used to be around 100 ms after a couple of trials using the ruler drop test. I'd expect that people who were actually good at such games could do even better.
That said, humans can perceive things that occur more quickly than they can react to. Your optic nerve+tract is only a few inches long, so there's 10 ms visual lag (plus processing time). I doubt that's even the lower limit, since vision is likely asynchronous. Video frame rates are ~30 fps and CRT monitors refresh at ~60 Hz for a reason.
Ah! So that's what was happening... On my last laptop I could hear something at the very limits of my hearing at times. For a while I thought I was just going crazy, until I recognized a radio commercial. The paranoid in me wanted to start claiming that the government was letting advertisers use their brain control radio waves, but I decided that since my laptop had crummy EM isolation (to the point that it'd shock me if my hands were damp) it was probably just picking up AM radio somehow. I'm a bit glad to know for sure that my first two hypothesis are unlikely. The exact equipment in question was a Sony Vaio PCG-GRT360ZG with some ER-6i canalphones.
Strange, by "stop building burglar alarms" that would mean that Symantec is leaving the antivirus industry. I find that unlikely, which makes it a very odd thing for the senior vice-president for consumer products to say. I'm hoping he was misquoted, but can't really imagine a context where that statement works. I suppose he could be attempting to simplify for the media, but in that case he clearly doesn't understand his point well enough to correctly simplify it. If someone that high up in management can't say what they mean, or at least say something that makes sense, in a single quoted sentence is there really any hope for that company? Or is it that the general populace simply doesn't parse what people say but instead focuses on how they say it?
Users probably hate it, but don't understand it well enough to know what they hate. If each application's UI is different, you have to learn hundreds of different UIs. Most users would probably prefer learning one system well and sticking to it. IMHO that's the biggest reason for a lack of computer literacy in some people.
I would imagine they'd want to so they have a future. Sure, not planning ahead is cheaper in the short term, but it's obviously a quick path to failure. If an intranet application isn't cross browser then it was probably written back when IE4 to IE6 were the only major choices. As hardware advances it'll eventually drop Windows XP compatibility, and after that point the only choices are to attempt to maintain legacy hardware with increasingly more expensive replacement parts, or use a virtualized version of XP on each new computer. Either way, legally acquiring additional XP licenses will become more difficult, so both options restrict company growth. IMHO, replacing the IE-only applications is more a question of "when" than "why". The expense of doing so is more the repercussion of an obviously poor business decision.
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Zero. Children getting free lunches netted my county's school food program more money than the full paid children. A neighboring county that was a bit higher percentage-wise for Free (or Reduced Price) VS Full Paid was able to go to 100% free lunches (i.e. eat the loss for the non-free kids). So the school food program is acceptably compensated to feed low income children.
The grants from the federal budget that helped fund this research (or the background research) didn't change that. Nor is it like a kid will go hungry because their parent can't afford to pay for school lunches (many poor kids only get to eat at school, not at home except during the summer and weekends).
I still think it is funny that Linux is considered "bloatware" when Windows will still use several times the same resources as Linux. For instance, take any desktop distro (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc...) and a complete installation including multiple desktop environments, browsers, office suites, etc... still takes up less disk space, memory and CPU than does a bare installation of Windows Vista/7.
I don't think that's something to be particularly proud of. Installation size has undergone geometric growth for every iteration of windows except for 7. Win98 took ~200 MB, 2K took ~400 MB, XP took ~3 GB, Vista takes ~15 GB. Linux can be a resource hog and still be "better than Windows". IMHO, the people saying it's bloated are more concerned with improving the OS than the Windows fixation that some in the Linux community have.
Exactly the reason I'm cautious despite overall optimism about this idea. Although it's not quite true that nothing is known. I personally don't know much, but two things come to mind.
First, in the human body (IIRC) 1.6 degrees Celsius is the difference between normal, a fever or hypothermia. Fortunately, we're adapted to external temperature changes, so we can tolerate something like twenty degree changes in the environment fairly easily. Marine creatures have no reason to have developed this adaptation. Combine temperature sensitivity with looking for a variety of other factors (salinity, light, current, prey/predators, etc.) and I'd imagine small changes to the ocean temperature would kill a lot of sea life in an area.
The second thing is that ocean currents move based on temperature and salinity (related to temperature) differences. A staggeringly huge amount of water moves this way, and I'm not sure I'd want countless tons of slightly warm water to flood toward a coastline because the temperature switched from being slightly cooler to slightly warmer. Not to mention the effect on weather stuff like this has (e.g. why the UK is relatively warm).
Realistically though, changing the ocean's temperature by a single degree would take a very long time and involve a tremendous amount of energy. IMHO something like that would be a few orders of magnitude worse than global warming. Local changes of that magnitude are possible though.
Presumably because there simply aren't enough eyes to watch everything that people want watched. And even if there were, who would be left to watch the watchmen?
Best case scenario: this technology is used to draw the security guard's attention away from late night TV when something actually happens.
Worst case scenario: pick your nose in an alley and have the police automatically alerted.
Very interesting, and with obvious profound implications. Although I suppose the million dollar question would then be, when answering yes/no, are they right? I.e. are they responding to a stimuli in an intelligent/autonomous, consistent but arbitrary, or random manner?
I agree that MSG should be listed, but things like rat turds and low grade beef, while disgusting at an emotional level, are not really worrisome. Beef grade affects taste more than anything, and fast food obviously tastes decent given its popularity. Rat turds are fairly natural, and probably part of a natural human diet (as would be rats). The latter might cause illness if they don't cook the beef well enough, but it's not going to do much to a person long-term. We actually get eat pound or two of chopped insect parts mixed with our vegetables every year. It's healthy since insects are also a natural part of our diet (beyond the handful of spiders we unwittingly eat in our sleep).
I'm split on whether ingredient lists should be more inclusive or not. Realistically, if everything was listed if it could be detected then ingredient lists would be books. OTOH, a person needs to know what they're ordering (from a capitalist/free market perspective). In practical terms, almost nobody is going to care about the vast majority of ingredients, and several are in such low amounts as to be ignorable. Nothing's a poison and everything's a poison after all. I suppose a decent compromise is to list everything that's detected in a chemical analysis if it has a known biological effect at that concentration. Trivia: did you that McDonald's french fries contain acrylamide? It's not an ingredient but is produced in situ during preparation. People tend to forget that cooking is a chemical reaction, and the ingredients list is simply the starting point.
As for using Google, I think you can ask for the ingredients list at the restaurants. Realistically, there's too much information to keep on top of for most things, even common stuff like sucrose or fructose. I doubt that all the effects of those two compounds are even known (empirically we know that sucrose is mostly harmless, whereas HFCS is sorta bad if you eat a lot over a long time).
I'd be amused if the calculator itself was used to factor the key. Then it becomes a copyright circumvention tool, and thus illegal if TI wanted to make a DMCA claim. (Not that such a thing would pan out in real life given lawyers, but I can still pretend for the sake of amusement.)
A quick Google search reveals that isn't the case. Skimming over the list of ingredients doesn't reveal any surprises, nor does it seem to be abridged since MSG and trans-fats are in there. Surely you realize that fast food isn't inherently different than any other kind of food... It may be fairly processed, but KFC does serve chicken and McDonalds does serve beef. No major differences from what you'd find in a supermarket, albeit most people wouldn't cook such high fat/Calorie food very often.
If you're worried about "unpronounceable chemicals" I'd recommend a course in organic chemistry and biochemistry. No claims that fast food is healthy, but at least it becomes "the devil you know". After all, you wouldn't want to freak out about dihydrogen monoxide in your food, would you?
It also seems borderline reckless to do this kind of research. Obviously, the family of someone in a vegetative state would cling to any hope that their loved one might recover. Telling them that their loved one can learn will make their decision about continuing life support all the more difficult. I seriously doubt many physicians would follow up with "which puts them at the mental capacity of a gnat", even though a layman's concept of "learning" would make them assume a much higher level of intelligence. All-together a pointless observation IMHO, albeit one that can cause a lot of unnecessary pain for families.
For the last major test I took that involved an essay (the MCAT), I had to type it. Back in college I had only a couple teachers that used essay type questions, and was at no disadvantage by using manuscript since far more time was spent thinking about what to write than actually writing it. For note-taking, it's rare for me to see someone use cursive, although it doesn't seem like people are struggling with keeping up. I couldn't imagine (nor ever seen) anyone using a notepad for note-taking, which leads me to think that your field is very different from mine.
While cursive, if forced upon youngsters for about a decade (less and they'll revert to manuscript), is probably faster, manuscript is held to be more legible. IMHO, that's far more important since about 7,000 people die each year because fast handwriting is favored over legible handwriting. For that reason I eagerly await the death of cursive writing.
Walking is apparently a spinal reflex. Back in the days before there were strict guidelines on animal research/cruelty some researchers verified this using an experiment. Basically, they had a cat on a treatmill and rigged a device (I'm picturing something from Saw) that severed its spinal cord without knocking it over. The cat kept walking! Since spinal reflexes are preserved if they're below the level of damage, this bodes well for this type of research. Balance would probably be an issue though, since the cerebellum is thought to play a pretty significant role in that. Given, it's unassisted walking, but I'm not convinced many paraplegics would stand for wearing large gyroscopes. Ah, that brings me to the other major hurdle with this technology: standing.
Interestingly enough, I'm wondering what'll happen if laser rifles ever became reality, or perhaps entered hard science fiction. How weird would it be for a patrolling guard to get shot in the head, but keep on walking...
I decided I didn't give a crap, but I have everything set to 'friends only' and I don't use apps or quizzes. Reasonable compromise for a non-tin-foil-hatter.
Don't forget to opt out of the Facebook App API. Otherwise your friend's apps can still basically pull in all of your information (probably recursively extended to their friends). Also, take note that just leaving a name and no picture/picture of your dog as the only information non-friends can see makes your profile fairly useless to people that know you in real life. "Is this the Sparticus I know, or some random dude that lives a thousand miles away?" Perhaps that's the desired effect, but it kinda makes having a Facebook profile pointless in the first place.
IMHO it's better to only put information that you don't care to share up on Facebook rather than locking down your profile. I personally couldn't care less if someone knows my favorite books or TV shows, or a selection of my favorite quotes. It reveals a bit about my personality—whether through complex mathematics or a human's common sense—but far less than reading my slashdot postings or meeting me in the physical world. Relying on Facebook's privacy settings to limit the spread of sensitive information seems fraught with peril, given that they're in the business of sharing information.
Stuff I keep off of Facebook entirely, or at least keep hidden: Religion, Politics, Blog/Twitter-like updates, a selective list of my actual close friends (I friend all acquaintances) and Tagged Photos. I can think of no benefit from sharing that information.
The thing about choices are that you are allowed to make poor ones. Making a few bad choices will eventually teach people to make better ones in the future. That said, block the application from the network and make the warning simple to understand. Ethically, people have a right to autonomy over beneficence. Legally, I doubt kill switches would be tolerated if used very often/visibly given the doctrine of first sale.
I realize you're simply stating what most users would do, and I don't really disagree. I just figure that if someone is allowed to make bad choices with important stuff like their health or finances, that they should have that right with technology as well. Perhaps it's blind optimism in thinking that they'd show at least level 3 of 5 animal intelligence (association -- dog/cat level) and learn that disregarding scary messages correlates with bad things happening.
Cells generally respond to being overworked by either hypertrophy (increase in number) or hyperplasia (increase in number). Realistically, most cells do both, although one method may dominate. Some Googling reveals that hyperplasia definitely happens in human smooth and cardiac muscle, and probably happens to some extent in skeletal muscle (animal studies demonstrate it). As far as neurons go, your olfactory neurons (responsible for smell) are actually constantly dividing as well (turn-over time of a couple weeks IIRC).
Something interesting about fat cells (adipocytes)... As they swell they secrete leptin, which reduces hunger and aims to keep one at a healthy body fat level. If a person becomes fat enough that the adipocytes have to divide (probably related to maximum surface area to volume ratio), then they have more adipocytes and thus more leptin produced. But, the clincher is that losing that fat becomes more difficult, since you don't get rid of the fat cells. What happens is that each cell is forced to become unnaturally small, which lowers the amount of leptin secreted. On top of that, the more leptin that floods the leptin receptors in the brain, the more resistant to leptin the receptors become (much like a Type II Diabetic is resistant to insulin). Less leptin receptor activation causes more hunger, and thus more difficulty in losing fat. Apparently, high levels of fructose accelerate this process. (All that said, fat levels are basically a matter of calories in/out due to the laws of physics; hunger just makes it more difficult to eat less and exercise more.)
I don't think I'd agree that jargon makes things more concise. It makes them more precise. Concision, OTOH, tends to be overlooked in academics. For example, scientific papers are written in the passive voice, which is considerably more verbose than the active. They also tend to elaborate on anything that isn't standard for the field (e.g. 'DNA' won't be defined, but 'ADO' would be). Plus, remarkably, almost all research articles are similar in length, despite vastly different subject matter.
But, I do agree that it's impossible to completely explain what you've been doing for the last several months/years to someone in three sentences unless they are familiar with the subject. A basic explanation should be possible though. Metaphors tend to be too verbose and often wildly inaccurate, so this ability hinges on using general terms that are still correct. 'PCR', for example, can be called 'copying a gene', which a layman should understand. Detail is lost, but it's still fairly accurate. No clue how one'd describe pulmonary edema without making it sound like a pneumothorax though, so the three sentence thing might not be possible for all studies. I'm especially doubtful about how a mathematician could do this, but I haven't studied mathematics enough to say one way or the other.
Perhaps the reason I heard that challenge is because of the field I'm in. I'm a medical student, and part of our curriculum is how to explain complex illnesses to patients in terms that they'll understand. It's a physician's responsibility, so nobody even asks whether it's possible or not. OTOH, the last exercise was trying to explain sickle cell anemia/beta thalassemia to someone who didn't know what a cell was... that was painful...
I've heard someone make the claim that if you understand your research well enough you should be able to accurately describe it to a layman in three sentences or less. I'm not entirely sure I'd agree, unless you relax the term "layman" to mean that they at least remember their introductory course to the subject (e.g. Biology, Chemistry, Physics).
In my own experience, I've seen the full spectrum of jargon use, but it certainly didn't correlate with knowledge or specialization. One of the most knowledgeable people I've seen (some of the research equipment is named after him) used virtually no jargon, but I've also seen many graduate students that can only speak of their research in technical terms. My hypothesis is that the better you understand something, the more ways you can accurately describe it. From there, some people merely choose to use the simplest description.
For that reason, I don't think it's unreasonable at all to expect scientists to write about their research in layman's terms. If this is a weak point for them, then they need more practice. Who knows, maybe it'll give them another perspective. In any case, it'll definitely improve their teaching ability.
If you're a Linux user who does specialized stuff with your system, try figuring out how to do that stuff in Windows. Can't find it in the UI or configuration files? No problem. Just read the documentation. Wow. What language does Microsoft write their documentation in? While it may not be quite as bad as another language, the jargon of the Windows world is definitely different from the jargon of the Linux world. This adds time and frustration to the process of learning a new technology.
Beyond that, you can become quite skilled at Windows without reading any help files or documentation. I'd venture a guess and say most power users learned that way. In Linux, doing basic stuff is easy, and there's documentation on doing hard stuff. The thing is, you can't figure out how to do the hard stuff on your own, like many adventurous Windows users are used to.
I remember one of my first moments of post-installation Linux frustrations was figuring out how to do the opposite of mount. There wasn't a flag for mount I could use, 'dismount' didn't exist, 'unmount' didn't exist, so I had to read about 10 pages of man pages before learning the command was 'umount'. Basically, my Windows strategy of "play around until something works" wasn't useful in Linux. That remains one of my main gripes with Linux. Linux doesn't really have a learning curve so much as a learning cliff that's impossible to climb without reading documentation. So, the issue of lack of familiarity extends well beyond the application level. I would think most Windows users are realistic enough to expect that Linux operates differently, they just don't account for nearly none of their computer skills carrying over.
While changing the half life is a little silly*, biological processes could be used to reduce the effective gamma ray emission. Some fungi can use radiation essentially like light for photosynthesis. Not surprising, since it's an energy source after all. The pigments the fungi use to absorb the gamma radiation would effectively act as shields, while conveying a selective advantage and reason for the fungi to amass around the radiation source. It wouldn't block all of the radiation, but perhaps the fungi could reduce it to a non-dangerous level. Similar to how a rain forest keeps 98% of sunlight from hitting the ground.
* OTOH, fungi are a little scary... it wouldn't surprise me if they evolve the capacity to use nuclear reactions to derive energy in a century or two.
10,000 PCs is a small sample size, try a few million. You might have a sampling error there if they are not randomly picked.
I think you misunderstand the details of sampling a population. If the 10,000 PCs were randomly selected then that provides a 99% confidence interval of +/- 1% for 3 billion computers (my random guess of the number of computers in the world). So if it says Vista is on 30% of computers, there's a 99% chance the true percentage is between 29-31%. Therefore, it's an excessively huge sample size.
Of course, these PCs are not randomly picked at all, so that nullifies any validity the sampling had.
As opposed to when humans are hit by explosives... Probably one of the touted advantages of the "armored exoskeleton" is increased maneuverability (e.g. ability to avoid some RPGs) as compared to tanks, while retaining their bullet resistant nature.
But we're only considering half the equation: The average human response time for auditory or visual input is 160--220ms. This increases as we age.
People that play twitch-type games are hardly average, now are they? Besides, that would decrease with sympathetic nervous system stimulation (also inherent in games), and is basically only limited by nerve conduction speed (20+ m/s in humans, so the minimum reaction time is around 50 ms). Visual processing and decision making add to that, but both are going to be very quick in a gamer as compared to someone off the street. I always sucked at FPS games, but back when I played them my reaction time used to be around 100 ms after a couple of trials using the ruler drop test. I'd expect that people who were actually good at such games could do even better.
That said, humans can perceive things that occur more quickly than they can react to. Your optic nerve+tract is only a few inches long, so there's 10 ms visual lag (plus processing time). I doubt that's even the lower limit, since vision is likely asynchronous. Video frame rates are ~30 fps and CRT monitors refresh at ~60 Hz for a reason.
Ah! So that's what was happening... On my last laptop I could hear something at the very limits of my hearing at times. For a while I thought I was just going crazy, until I recognized a radio commercial. The paranoid in me wanted to start claiming that the government was letting advertisers use their brain control radio waves, but I decided that since my laptop had crummy EM isolation (to the point that it'd shock me if my hands were damp) it was probably just picking up AM radio somehow. I'm a bit glad to know for sure that my first two hypothesis are unlikely. The exact equipment in question was a Sony Vaio PCG-GRT360ZG with some ER-6i canalphones.
Strange, by "stop building burglar alarms" that would mean that Symantec is leaving the antivirus industry. I find that unlikely, which makes it a very odd thing for the senior vice-president for consumer products to say. I'm hoping he was misquoted, but can't really imagine a context where that statement works. I suppose he could be attempting to simplify for the media, but in that case he clearly doesn't understand his point well enough to correctly simplify it. If someone that high up in management can't say what they mean, or at least say something that makes sense, in a single quoted sentence is there really any hope for that company? Or is it that the general populace simply doesn't parse what people say but instead focuses on how they say it?
Users probably hate it, but don't understand it well enough to know what they hate. If each application's UI is different, you have to learn hundreds of different UIs. Most users would probably prefer learning one system well and sticking to it. IMHO that's the biggest reason for a lack of computer literacy in some people.
I would imagine they'd want to so they have a future. Sure, not planning ahead is cheaper in the short term, but it's obviously a quick path to failure. If an intranet application isn't cross browser then it was probably written back when IE4 to IE6 were the only major choices. As hardware advances it'll eventually drop Windows XP compatibility, and after that point the only choices are to attempt to maintain legacy hardware with increasingly more expensive replacement parts, or use a virtualized version of XP on each new computer. Either way, legally acquiring additional XP licenses will become more difficult, so both options restrict company growth. IMHO, replacing the IE-only applications is more a question of "when" than "why". The expense of doing so is more the repercussion of an obviously poor business decision.