... I don't get these numbers; around here (wild East Europe) we had cars and busses running on LPG for some 25 years at least; converting a gasoline car to run with LPG costs 700$ including VAT, and you can switch back to gasoline with the push of a button...
Second, you sound like you personally invested in development of FTL engine at CERN and now found out it was a fraud.
CERN is spending money that governments could use to finance other research projects, so yes, I can understand that he feels personally invested.
First it was the magnets, then it was a bird dropping bread on a transformer, now it's something else about the equipment... while billions of € are pouring in. Maybe it's time the fine scientists at CERN fire somebody in management ?
intel just lied a lot or let the others lie for them, for example about the vista ready cards or about power consumption... I will not buy Intel if I have a choice, for what I need AMD and Nvidia processors deliver enough power and the price is way lower.
as long as it does not cost 500$ initial investment + 100$ yearly maintenance
I used to live on 50$ per month, but I had electricity and could use a 20$ radiator for cooking
I don't live in India, so I don't know first hand how things are going there, but I suspect that the number of people connected to the grid is growing faster than the population is growing, and soon the same people, which now both cry their eyes out about the poor and complain when the poot outbid them for jobs, would cry their eyes out about being betrayed by [insert your favorite conspiracy theory here] and not being the center of the world any more.
So, in which regulated economy there was no boom-bust cycle ? Even the Communist economies in Eastern Europe had those because they were connected to the world market, but when the last one came the whose system crashed instead of only some companies crashing.
The "boom-bust cycle" is given exaggerated importance: the variations were, for the last 200 years and with very few exceptions, about 7 percent but the overall curve was ascending.
If you cant tell me when I start getting return on my investment in your software then I don't invest in it.
same as with manufacturing, there are two types of software development (and a gray area between those two, but let's consider the extremes):
one is the "have done it before" situation: you need a WP template, or a new module or a new report for the CRM software you use. There are not many unknowns, the required operations are known from start, you can get a firm deadline and there will be few surprises; this is similar with building a house using the same plan you already used when building other homes, or building yet another Ford Focus.
the other is "let's do something nobody did before": if the deadline is tight, you have to prioritize your objectives: if you're lucky some targets will be hit and some will be delayed, because nobody can foresee what complications you'll have to face; in manufacturing this will count as research, and I bet there are as many research projects failed in manufacturing as there are in software development.
If you're worried when you're going to see return on your investment, better don't invest in software startups, put your money in a company that already has an established product and either sells extensions or gradual improvements.
This is not widely understood: I used to work for a French company where the new owners decided to cut the development time for the current projects by 40%, because the old records showed them that the ERP team was always meeting the deadlines, and they thought the team leader was cheating. The fact was that the team was doing "more of the same" projects, and the new management was accustomed with "something new every time" projects.
"Dave has X issue yesterday, this is how he fixed it." "We're expecting high volumes over the coming week." "There's a new UAT manager in Y."
We're doing this in the smoke breaks... not everybody smokes, but everybody shows up at least once a day and the information spreads; have indentified and fixed bugs this way, information collating when dev, support, SEO or management bitch together randomly about random stuff and minor anoyances, and collating in ways that would not have worked in formal meetings.
- birds leaving bread on electrical transformers serving hi-power installations (such as LHC), causing shorts and needing million €s in repairs
or please remember this, if your reading comprehension is suffering: the methods used by the Dutch researchers cannot be used to create dangerous virii
To determine whether H5N1 viruses could be transmitted between humans, my team generated viruses that combined the H5 haemagglutinin (HA) gene with the remaining genes from a pandemic 2009 H1N1 influenza virus. Avian H5N1 and human pandemic 2009 viruses readily exchange genes in experimental settings, and those from a human virus may facilitate replication in mammals. Indeed, we identified a mutant H5 HA/2009 virus that spread between infected and uninfected ferrets (used as models to study the transmission of influenza in mammals) in separate cages via respiratory droplets in the air. Thus viruses possessing an H5 HA protein can transmit between mammals.
Our results also show that not all transmissible H5 HA-possessing viruses are lethal. In ferrets, our mutant H5 HA/2009 virus was no more pathogenic than the pandemic 2009 virus — it did not kill any of the infected animals. And, importantly, current vaccines and antiviral compounds are effective against it.
depressing... ScyFy (and sci-fi too) should be forbidden and mandatory science + reading comprehension examinations be passed before getting the right to vote... yeah, probably lethal viruses can be engineered (though I have not yet heard of any research that succeeded in doing it, probably my fault), but not using their methods
there was another thread about this same subject a few weeks ago, and there was no "new strain of the virus", just a virus sharing one of the proteins that help the virii attach to cells
while we have lots of resistant bacterias living in our hospitals (and by our mean "all the hospitals in the world"), we're getting hype over this... not sure any more it's hysterics or histrionics... maybe Netherlands needs pretexts to wipe out chicken farms somewhere...
Scientists appear to be responsible for the hype surrounding this experiment. Fouchier called it ‘one of the most dangerous viruses you can make’. Paul Keim, chair of NSABB, ‘can’t think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one’, and Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University says the experiment should not have been done. Martin Enserink writing in ScienceInsider says that the virus could change world history, and similar proclamations of doom can be found in the popular press.
Passage of viruses in a different host is one strategy for reducing the virulence in humans. This concept is explained in this passage from Principles of Virology:
Less virulent (attenuated) viruses can be selected by growth in cells other than those of the normal host, or by propagation at nonphysiological temperatures. Mutants able to propagate better under these selective conditions arise during viral replication. When such mutants are isolated, purified, and subsequently tested for pathogenicity in appropriate models, some may be less pathogenic than their parent.
The possibility that passage of the H5N1 virus in ferrets will attenuate its virulence in humans has been ignored.
they did not create anything... just proved that a virus that shares _one protein_ with the "bird flu" virus can infect mammals... this is not news and this is not dangerous information...
Dear AC, computing machinery was build before any government showed any interest in it. Cryptography and balistic rockets did give a boost to interest in automated computing, but large companies already had big rooms filled with "computers", meaning real people doing pen-and-paper computations, working on all sorts of computations, so there was no need for "initial seeds", because the need was there. We might have had even computers able to deal with numbers with arbitrary precision sooner.... but we'll never know:) the govt. took money from your grandparents (or grand-grandparents) and paid IBM and others pork barrel rates for something they would have done with their own capital.
We already have flying cars: they're called planes... oh, you mean flying cars with rockets ? Soon, baby, soon:)
Private companies are forbidden by law (the space treaty) from running moonbases, or anything else above Earth orbit.
eh, we'll never know what would have happened if the government did not intervene... before electronic computers insurance companies, banks and other private firms that needed large scale computations just hired a whole lot of women (and men too, but it was a "woman's job" ) to sit at tables and do computations... they were called "computers":); IBM was building computing machinery even before 1939 and before cryptography and trajectories for balistic rockets pushed the US govt. sponsor electronic computers, so I guess the private companies would have built their own internets, that would have looked quite different, but we'll never know.
Everybody loathes Shakespeare, whether they were forced to read in school or not... it's bloody hard to read. Most just don't acknowledge this.
Kids grow up hating almost everything they do in school... well, not all kids, we that that had more fun during Literature or Inorganic Chemistry or GeoScience than during breaks are very few and our genotype will probably be weeded out;).
Programming is a calling, not a profession. Let them try programming as soon as possible, get those with the calling identified and cultivate their ability.
Yes, most of them probably won't get a CS degree... so what ? Domain knowledge is as important as knowing algorithms, if not more important. There is need for accountants-programmers, linguists-programmers, geologists-programmers etc. Computer Science degrees are for those that want to write compilers, operating systems, new DB engines, routing algorithms etc. For the rest, the (probably innate, not educated) ability to stay stuck to a chair 10h/day running lines of code in the virtual machine in your head and having fun while doing it, logical thinking, basic algorithms and domain knowledge are more important.
+ had my Humble Bundle games in my account
+ Fallout 1 is in their list
+ very easy to install the games
- Fallout 1 is more expensive than on GOG...
- trouble with two monitors: the few games I tried see them as only one in full screen
- yeah, 1€ = 1$... come on, guys, really ?
Our society has been optimized based on the way things were
in which year exactly ? I've seen winters lasting 6 months, and winters lasting 2 months during the last 20 years... very hot and dry summers and very wet and rather cold summers too...
quoth one of the fine article: "investigators have proved that viruses possessing a haemagglutinin (HA) protein from highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza viruses can become transmissible in ferrets"... translation: haemagglutinin are proteins found on the surface of the virus and which help them bind to the attacked cell; they managed to get some viruses to infect a mammal, not H5N1, but _other virus_ that have _one_ of the "attack proteins" in common with the H5N1 virus.
So, how come that the H5N1 virus did not infect foxes, dogs, cats or whatever hunts birds in the area where the virus in found ? How come they find the virus only in Anatidae when they want to wipe out poultry farms in some unimportant country far away ?
I call this "desperate plea for more funding because we're getting nowhere with it but the job is cozy" or "let's keep the marks scared stiff and coughing money".
If it was real they would do epidemiological studies among predators, but that means you have to go outside in unpleasant places and try to catch toothed animals that don't want to be caught, and risk discovering that H5N1 in it's wild and pristine form does not mutate in the wild enough to infect mammals.
Slashdot Mirror
in which country is stem cell research banned or restricted ?
Second, you sound like you personally invested in development of FTL engine at CERN and now found out it was a fraud.
CERN is spending money that governments could use to finance other research projects, so yes, I can understand that he feels personally invested.
First it was the magnets, then it was a bird dropping bread on a transformer, now it's something else about the equipment ... while billions of € are pouring in. Maybe it's time the fine scientists at CERN fire somebody in management ?
large bags of sand ...
intel just lied a lot or let the others lie for them, for example about the vista ready cards or about power consumption ... I will not buy Intel if I have a choice, for what I need AMD and Nvidia processors deliver enough power and the price is way lower.
as long as it does not cost 500$ initial investment + 100$ yearly maintenance
I used to live on 50$ per month, but I had electricity and could use a 20$ radiator for cooking
I don't live in India, so I don't know first hand how things are going there, but I suspect that the number of people connected to the grid is growing faster than the population is growing, and soon the same people, which now both cry their eyes out about the poor and complain when the poot outbid them for jobs, would cry their eyes out about being betrayed by [insert your favorite conspiracy theory here] and not being the center of the world any more.
yes, and they're ready to go and eat cake
However almost all are Microsoft related.
no, really ? let's check dice.com, searching by keyword/title/company:
Javascript: 9526
Perl: 4800
PHP: 3495
Python: 3080
linux: 11315
centos: 331
these are only those that are clearly either Microsoft-unrelated.
enough said ...
or maybe you need to move to a larger town
Anthont Watts thoughroghly descredited claims
and what claims were discredited ?
independence, which is increasingly difficult given consolidation in the insurance industry
so, is the insurance industry the root of the problem, or not ?
So, in which regulated economy there was no boom-bust cycle ? Even the Communist economies in Eastern Europe had those because they were connected to the world market, but when the last one came the whose system crashed instead of only some companies crashing.
The "boom-bust cycle" is given exaggerated importance: the variations were, for the last 200 years and with very few exceptions, about 7 percent but the overall curve was ascending.
If you cant tell me when I start getting return on my investment in your software then I don't invest in it.
same as with manufacturing, there are two types of software development (and a gray area between those two, but let's consider the extremes):
one is the "have done it before" situation: you need a WP template, or a new module or a new report for the CRM software you use. There are not many unknowns, the required operations are known from start, you can get a firm deadline and there will be few surprises; this is similar with building a house using the same plan you already used when building other homes, or building yet another Ford Focus.
the other is "let's do something nobody did before": if the deadline is tight, you have to prioritize your objectives: if you're lucky some targets will be hit and some will be delayed, because nobody can foresee what complications you'll have to face; in manufacturing this will count as research, and I bet there are as many research projects failed in manufacturing as there are in software development.
If you're worried when you're going to see return on your investment, better don't invest in software startups, put your money in a company that already has an established product and either sells extensions or gradual improvements.
This is not widely understood: I used to work for a French company where the new owners decided to cut the development time for the current projects by 40%, because the old records showed them that the ERP team was always meeting the deadlines, and they thought the team leader was cheating. The fact was that the team was doing "more of the same" projects, and the new management was accustomed with "something new every time" projects.
"Dave has X issue yesterday, this is how he fixed it." "We're expecting high volumes over the coming week." "There's a new UAT manager in Y."
We're doing this in the smoke breaks ... not everybody smokes, but everybody shows up at least once a day and the information spreads; have indentified and fixed bugs this way, information collating when dev, support, SEO or management bitch together randomly about random stuff and minor anoyances, and collating in ways that would not have worked in formal meetings.
oh, that was it ... missed the point ... my bad
please add to your list:
- birds leaving bread on electrical transformers serving hi-power installations (such as LHC), causing shorts and needing million €s in repairs
or please remember this, if your reading comprehension is suffering: the methods used by the Dutch researchers cannot be used to create dangerous virii
I am telling you that the research that was done on N5H1 is misreported
from http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/481443a.html :
viruses possessing a haemagglutinin (HA) protein from highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza viruses can become transmissible in ferrets
that is all, viruses with one of the proteins ( a type of largish organic molecule) that H5N1 is using to attack cells can also attack cells ...
this one has more details about how they got viruses with that particular protein http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10884.html, with my emphasis added
To determine whether H5N1 viruses could be transmitted between humans, my team generated viruses that combined the H5 haemagglutinin (HA) gene with the remaining genes from a pandemic 2009 H1N1 influenza virus. Avian H5N1 and human pandemic 2009 viruses readily exchange genes in experimental settings, and those from a human virus may facilitate replication in mammals. Indeed, we identified a mutant H5 HA/2009 virus that spread between infected and uninfected ferrets (used as models to study the transmission of influenza in mammals) in separate cages via respiratory droplets in the air. Thus viruses possessing an H5 HA protein can transmit between mammals.
Our results also show that not all transmissible H5 HA-possessing viruses are lethal. In ferrets, our mutant H5 HA/2009 virus was no more pathogenic than the pandemic 2009 virus — it did not kill any of the infected animals. And, importantly, current vaccines and antiviral compounds are effective against it.
depressing ... ScyFy (and sci-fi too) should be forbidden and mandatory science + reading comprehension examinations be passed before getting the right to vote ... yeah, probably lethal viruses can be engineered (though I have not yet heard of any research that succeeded in doing it, probably my fault), but not using their methods
there was another thread about this same subject a few weeks ago, and there was no "new strain of the virus", just a virus sharing one of the proteins that help the virii attach to cells
while we have lots of resistant bacterias living in our hospitals (and by our mean "all the hospitals in the world"), we're getting hype over this ... not sure any more it's hysterics or histrionics ... maybe Netherlands needs pretexts to wipe out chicken farms somewhere ...
here you go, mandatory link to non-brain-damaged content ... http://www.virology.ws/2011/12/06/ferreting-out-influenza-h5n1/
Scientists appear to be responsible for the hype surrounding this experiment. Fouchier called it ‘one of the most dangerous viruses you can make’. Paul Keim, chair of NSABB, ‘can’t think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one’, and Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University says the experiment should not have been done. Martin Enserink writing in ScienceInsider says that the virus could change world history, and similar proclamations of doom can be found in the popular press.
Passage of viruses in a different host is one strategy for reducing the virulence in humans. This concept is explained in this passage from Principles of Virology:
Less virulent (attenuated) viruses can be selected by growth in cells other than those of the normal host, or by propagation at nonphysiological temperatures. Mutants able to propagate better under these selective conditions arise during viral replication. When such mutants are isolated, purified, and subsequently tested for pathogenicity in appropriate models, some may be less pathogenic than their parent.
The possibility that passage of the H5N1 virus in ferrets will attenuate its virulence in humans has been ignored.
getting tired of this ...
they did not create anything ... just proved that a virus that shares _one protein_ with the "bird flu" virus can infect mammals ... this is not news and this is not dangerous information ...
Dear AC, computing machinery was build before any government showed any interest in it. Cryptography and balistic rockets did give a boost to interest in automated computing, but large companies already had big rooms filled with "computers", meaning real people doing pen-and-paper computations, working on all sorts of computations, so there was no need for "initial seeds", because the need was there. We might have had even computers able to deal with numbers with arbitrary precision sooner. ... but we'll never know :) the govt. took money from your grandparents (or grand-grandparents) and paid IBM and others pork barrel rates for something they would have done with their own capital.
We already have flying cars: they're called planes ... oh, you mean flying cars with rockets ? Soon, baby, soon :)
Private companies are forbidden by law (the space treaty) from running moonbases, or anything else above Earth orbit.
eh, we'll never know what would have happened if the government did not intervene ... before electronic computers insurance companies, banks and other private firms that needed large scale computations just hired a whole lot of women (and men too, but it was a "woman's job" ) to sit at tables and do computations ... they were called "computers" :); IBM was building computing machinery even before 1939 and before cryptography and trajectories for balistic rockets pushed the US govt. sponsor electronic computers, so I guess the private companies would have built their own internets, that would have looked quite different, but we'll never know.
the government(s) created less than 1% of the networks that now are "the internet", and hardly any of the software now in use ...
Everybody loathes Shakespeare, whether they were forced to read in school or not ... it's bloody hard to read. Most just don't acknowledge this.
Kids grow up hating almost everything they do in school ... well, not all kids, we that that had more fun during Literature or Inorganic Chemistry or GeoScience than during breaks are very few and our genotype will probably be weeded out ;).
Programming is a calling, not a profession. Let them try programming as soon as possible, get those with the calling identified and cultivate their ability.
Yes, most of them probably won't get a CS degree ... so what ? Domain knowledge is as important as knowing algorithms, if not more important. There is need for accountants-programmers, linguists-programmers, geologists-programmers etc. Computer Science degrees are for those that want to write compilers, operating systems, new DB engines, routing algorithms etc. For the rest, the (probably innate, not educated) ability to stay stuck to a chair 10h/day running lines of code in the virtual machine in your head and having fun while doing it, logical thinking, basic algorithms and domain knowledge are more important.
just installed Desura:
+ had my Humble Bundle games in my account
+ Fallout 1 is in their list
+ very easy to install the games
- Fallout 1 is more expensive than on GOG ... ... come on, guys, really ?
- trouble with two monitors: the few games I tried see them as only one in full screen
- yeah, 1€ = 1$
Our society has been optimized based on the way things were
in which year exactly ? I've seen winters lasting 6 months, and winters lasting 2 months during the last 20 years ... very hot and dry summers and very wet and rather cold summers too ...
quoth one of the fine article: "investigators have proved that viruses possessing a haemagglutinin (HA) protein from highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza viruses can become transmissible in ferrets" ... translation: haemagglutinin are proteins found on the surface of the virus and which help them bind to the attacked cell; they managed to get some viruses to infect a mammal, not H5N1, but _other virus_ that have _one_ of the "attack proteins" in common with the H5N1 virus.
So, how come that the H5N1 virus did not infect foxes, dogs, cats or whatever hunts birds in the area where the virus in found ? How come they find the virus only in Anatidae when they want to wipe out poultry farms in some unimportant country far away ?
I call this "desperate plea for more funding because we're getting nowhere with it but the job is cozy" or "let's keep the marks scared stiff and coughing money".
If it was real they would do epidemiological studies among predators, but that means you have to go outside in unpleasant places and try to catch toothed animals that don't want to be caught, and risk discovering that H5N1 in it's wild and pristine form does not mutate in the wild enough to infect mammals.