OK, two extremely valuable reasons to JB the 4.x iphone:
1- wireless sync (yes this is coming to IOS 5) 2- tethering. This is rather valuable. my phone company wants to charge me $40 a month for 1GB limited tethering.
OSX absolutely is Unix standard compliant. This means it does have X11, and all the POSIX layers, yes, and we like that very very much. The other stuff you can choose not to run. AFAIK the kernel (XNU) is still open-source and there is an effort called puredarwin aiming at producing a full distribution based on darwin.
Come on, this is Slashdot, how about a little math and reasoning? All you need is a tax rate that is a continuous, monotonically increasing function with revenue. It can be 0% at some level and then strictly positive at some other end. It needs to be continuous so that there isn't any threshold effect like you describe, but a flat tax rate for everyone is not the only solution.
Now the state requires X revenue. We have x taxpayers, We can't all pay the same *amount*. If we all pay the same *rate*, do the math, you will find that the rate is totally punitive, like 30%. The only solution is then for some to pay much less otherwise they don't eat, and for others to pay much more, like 60%, because they are rich anyway. This is exactly the current situation.
Now the top rate is not that high because rich guys can afford accountant who know the tax code and will find ways to avoid paying too much. A much fairer system would be for extremely rich people to contribute extreme amounts of tax, but they can avoid it, so the solution is some kind of middle ground that varies according to who is in power.
And we have exactly the current situation. Improving it while making it fair and workable is a lot harder than 'a flat rate'.
No, the quoted numbers represent pollution in terms of SOx only. Cars in the US emit very little of those in the air, as this is the stuff the catalytic converter traps. However you will find that US cars emit a whole lot more CO2 than 3 or 15 ships. CO2 emission are also pollution.
Of course on Slashdot patents=bad ; and of course as well no one is going to read the Fine Article, particularly if it is in french. The google "translation" and the various interpretations in english people have put out are not helping. Nowhere in the article is it written that this institution will massively collect stupid patents for little money and sue companies like Microsoft.
First you have to admit that patents have at least on principle some validity. Someone has an idea for a commercial new product, describes it in a patent and get some limited protection. It is totally unfair of large company to read such patents and implement the idea at a lower cost without paying licenses.
The idea here is to allow small-to-medium companies to benefit from patents as well. While a small company can certainly file for patent, they do not have the resources to defend them in court or otherwise, so basically they are more or less moot, except as bargaining chips for acquisition. The French government puts out a lot of money (think NSF-like grants but also industrialization grants) and they are not seeing as many industrial success as hoped. One reason, they reason, is that small companies cannot defend their ideas against larger companies, both in Europe and overseas. Other nations have government-based patent protection. Do you think the CSIRO patents for 802.11a/g were trolling?
So this institution will help small-to-medium French companies defend their portfolio. The initial idea is no to collect patents but to propose services. Indeed they will put together defensible cases by polling patents in some cases, but the stated aim is to get licenses income for the companies, not for this new institution by itself. This is not the same as trolling I think.
Essentially the French government doesn't want to see its industrialization monies get wasted too much. What's bad about this ?
Are you serious? How are you going to transfer to the cloud the typical 200 GB of data a medium length HD amateur family film represents this day? When we now have the GPUs that do the rendering locally in minutes? Even when people have fiber it will not be able to compare.
Have you ever done any video editing of any consequence (not like suppressing a few frames on your iPhone) ? They are probably now the most data-oriented, CPU and GPU hungry computation people do on their computers.
First you say heavy computation is being pushed to GPU, allowing CPUs to be less powerful and less power-hungry, and then you write that now small, less powerful are becoming a lot more so and simultaneously more power-hungry.
The reality is that GPU programming is tough, specific and cannot replace general computing. Think of a GPU as becoming the FPU of yesteryear. Sure every processor is going to have one, sure it's going to be useful, but no it will not displace everything.
6-8 GPU computers have existed for a while now, since 4-way SLI with dual-GPU card : here is an example.
Basically, most modern password protection techniques work like this: they take a password, say "my nice password" and transform it into a hash, say:"uq10ajg901a0##". Now only the hash is stored on the system. There is no way to go from the hash to the password. Classical hash functions are MD4, MD5 and SHA1. NTLM users MD4. Linux mostly uses MD5. There are added niceties likes salt, etc. You can look these up if you want.
When users enter their password, they are hashed again, and the *hash* are compared, not the passwords. If you enter the right password, no matter whether this is a nice word or sentence or jumbled letters, the system lets you in.
Crackers simply assume that the *hash* is available. It is in fact very easy to get it if you have access to the console, both for Linux or Windows. They then generate any and all combination of letters, signs, symbols and so on as input as potential password, they compute their hash, and they compare it to the hashes they know. If there is a match, bingo, they have found the password.
So the upshot is it doesn't really matter what the input password look like as long as the crackers can generate it and compute their hash. If the crackers know that you have used only letters, however, they can cut down dramatically on the numbers passwords they have to generate and save time.
So in some sense you are right but not for the reason you mention.
Microsoft seems in the throes of a fully developed bout of Peter's principle (everyone promoted to their level of incompetence). Bringing back BG would not help that.
They have lost, perhaps temporarily, the edge they once had, because they do not know what to do in the post-PC era (tablets, readers, smartphones). Even though W7 is halfway decent, the platform is no longer the moneymaker it once was for developers. For once too, they cannot buy they way out so easily now by purchasing the smart new guy on the block, they cannot strongarm (haha) vendors, they are losing their most valued partners exclusive relationship (Intel, Dell, etc). Their developer tools are turning crappy (Visual Studio 2010 anyone?) and no one is really looking at them for direction.
Now Android is everywhere in that space. I wish this was really good news, but I'm not so sure.
This map is in galactic coordinates, this means our own galaxy runs along the equator of this map. It is also obscuring the view, hence the lack of data in this area of the map.
Ray tracing is not an exact reproduction of the real world (very far from it, it does not reproduce quantum effects for instance), it is just a better, but still very crude model.
What the parent means is that except for rare cases involving lots of transparency, ray tracing images are not worth it.
Just a small correction: we don't really know how many victims Chernobyl made. The '50 fatalities' figure was at some point an official Soviet figure, which included only about 47 workers who died of acute radiation poisoning, and is hopelessly optimistic.
The WHO and the AEIA estimates the number of direct victims of Chernobyl to 4,000, but this figure is suspected to be low, as the AEIA has vested interests in the nuclear industry.
The TORCH report (The Other Report of CHernobyl), commissioned by the European Green Party, estimate about 60,000 extra cancers deaths due to Chernobyl. This figure does not include non-fatal cancers, which still have notable effect on victims.
A recent book, written by reputed scientists and based over 5,000 survey, puts the number of victims at about one million. Of course, some people disagree with this figure, however, there is no doubt that the scope of the accident was massive, and continues to make victims today.
The Ukrainian government has claimed in 2006 that more than 2.4 million people, including 500,000 children, have suffered adverse health effects from the Chernobyl disaster. This does not include the effect on people displaced due to the disaster. Of course the Ukrainian people are the ones left with the very hot potato and they would dearly like some help.
Also you may want to take a look a this photo essay and reflect on your "50 victims" figure. The bottom line is that there were definitely way more victims than the 50 you claim, and quite possibly way way more.
I'm right now totally in favor of nuclear energy, but we need to all understand the very significant risks, and try to mitigate them as much as possible.
I'm pretty sure you will find that the average MIT graduate is not nearly as successful as Bose. Sure, they'll earn money, but I don't see how some of it has to be channelled back to their alma mater. People make their own success and money, college education is only a part of it. College is only 4 years, what about all the 12 years of school before? Don't they deserve any kudos?
To get the "message" that they are losing money on every students, Universities pull accounting tricks worthy of Hollywood. They take all of their expenses, including research and administrative related ones on the one hand, they take what students pay on the other, totally ignoring donations, and they say, "eh, student tuition is only one third of our income, therefore student are actually not paying much at all".
In reality, some studies have shown that top-level college education really costs no more than about $40k per year per student for engineering, about $80k for medicine, and sometimes as lows as $10k for maths or philosophy. Law is also cheap. If students pay $200k over 4 years, they are totally covering that. In most of Europe, students typically pay less than $10k per year, sometimes much less. Oxford and Cambridge charge about $15k per year. They seem to be doing quite well nonetheless. As it was reported here not so long ago, even top-level US-universities pay their professors a relative pittance compared with other professionals with similar qualifications.
If universities stopped admitting, they would immediately lose 1/3 of their funding, and so would have to let go of a corresponding share of their staff. They would lose their status and soon all of their donations, losing another 1/3, later they would lose all of their network and influence obtained through alumni, professors would not be needed for teaching and soon the place would be an empty, nearly pointless shell. That doesn't sound like being better off financially.
The morals is that Universities are there for teaching, and students are at the very center of their mission. Research and whatnot is indeed nice, but it is there to attract funding and top-level researcher, ensuring the quality of the teaching because beginner teachers want to join their teams and so work hard to get tenure. A few top-level researchers are also dedicated and excellent teachers, which is very nice from the university point of view, because they get to write the classical textbooks on their field, ensuring more revenues. Students and alumni are not the only teaching-related income universities get. There are many other things to say, but I'll stop.
However, saying that universities would be better off without students is utter bollocks, to be polite.
The more aggressive text by Greenspun was written in 2006, and by someone who is not by an academic. Although he makes some good points, there are several elements in his narrative I don't agree with, foremost his description of a "successful" scientist. An even moderately successful scientist gets his/her Phd at 26, does 1-2 years of Postdoc and has tenure or a permanent position in some lab or institution before age 30. Not in physic, not at MIT or Harvard, for sure, but at some perfectly reasonable research university in some engineering-related field, like robotics or materials science. Then this scientist does earn a relatively meager base salary compared with other professionals, but typically goes on to earn millions in various grants, employs many people, gets to choose his/her own work content and his/her workload, and can supplement his/her salary with any amount of consulting. If this person has any teaching gifts, they can go on to make a huge difference in a lot of young people in terms of careers and prospects. If they have any research gift, the sky is literally the limit. They don't necessarily aspire to retire by age 45 and go on to do a second career because their first career is just about perfect. They can choose to do what they want, to travel as much as they want, and they get paid for that. If they are truly stellar scholars, MIT or Harvard might make them a tenured offer at some point, if not, who cares.
So academics is still a great career, and it's great for women too, just be smart where and with whom you do your PhD and subsequent formative years, find good coauthors, and foremost don't chase tenure at supposedly top universities where they just pressure people because they can. If you feel this is too hard in the States, go to Europe or Australia. Academics do work hard, especially the successful ones, but this is because it is so much fun.
I'm sure other careers can be fun too, in finance, medicine or as various professionals, however I see a lot of people around me complain about their work content and the way they are treated. Academics as above, not so much.
I think Greenspun has a limited viewpoint because he mostly knows MIT, and while this is a great place to visit, you wouldn't want to live there.
Sorry, when Linux (and all the X11-based OSes) have the very very basic right, i.e. proper font management and display, we can talk again. Just spend a day with Linux and another with OSX and open your eyes. I can actually work on a 13" screen in OSX. I can barely stand a 24" screen with four virtual screens in Linux.
Under Linux/Gnome (KDE 4 is still worse in my opinion, at least for the moment), the screen is designed for huge widgets. Menus are enormous, fonts are very large, and even with antialiasing, still looks full of jaggies. The result is an inefficient use of screen space. OSX uses space much more efficiently. Do I need to point out there is only one menu at a time ?
At least Linux has made lots of progress. Maybe in a few years it will be alright. Meanwhile the latest UI faces from Apple are not very interesting, I agree with you.
Interesting to hear Jocelyn Bell in this short video.
She is the lady, who as a grad student discovered pulsars. Her supervisor, Anthony Hewish, got awarded the Nobel prize for it together with Martin Ryle, but not she. To be fair, Hewish had co-invented the radio-telescope modality (aperture synthesis) that made the discovery possible. Nonetheless this spectacular discovery certainly contributed to his Nobel prize.
Ms Bell is quite famous in radioastronomy circles and has done lots of good work.
Hello, my experience is the following: after also extensive travels and living and working in several countries, I must say Rio is the only city where I was actually scared.
The locals seems to indeed know where to step, but the problem was that most of the tourist areas were effectively where the likelihood of crime was highest. I came to Rio for an international conference that lasted 2 weeks. At the end of the conference everybody including ourselves had their little story where they got attacked, robbed or mugged in some way, including indeed on the beach. This was in 2007 BTW. Couple that with the spectacular images of the police helicopter actually gunned down by the local crime lords about 2 years ago, and I think the reputation of the city as a dangerous one is not usurped.
I'm told things are improving due to a combination of the Olympics, proximity police and the economy improving. Good to hear. I look forward to visiting the city again.
Of course, we can agree on the definition. The problem seems to be that, from what I read, the women were worried about unprotected sex after the fact. In Sweden, apparently you can consent to sex, but later change your mind.
I don't know about iPads, but iPhones definitely are not toys. Until the recent crop of android phones, there was nothing even remotely like it in the marketplace.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, two extremely valuable reasons to JB the 4.x iphone:
1- wireless sync (yes this is coming to IOS 5)
2- tethering. This is rather valuable. my phone company wants to charge me $40 a month for 1GB limited tethering.
OSX absolutely is Unix standard compliant. This means it does have X11, and all the POSIX layers, yes, and we like that very very much. The other stuff you can choose not to run. AFAIK the kernel (XNU) is still open-source and there is an effort called puredarwin aiming at producing a full distribution based on darwin.
Come on, this is Slashdot, how about a little math and reasoning? All you need is a tax rate that is a continuous, monotonically increasing function with revenue. It can be 0% at some level and then strictly positive at some other end. It needs to be continuous so that there isn't any threshold effect like you describe, but a flat tax rate for everyone is not the only solution.
Now the state requires X revenue. We have x taxpayers, We can't all pay the same *amount*. If we all pay the same *rate*, do the math, you will find that the rate is totally punitive, like 30%. The only solution is then for some to pay much less otherwise they don't eat, and for others to pay much more, like 60%, because they are rich anyway. This is exactly the current situation.
Now the top rate is not that high because rich guys can afford accountant who know the tax code and will find ways to avoid paying too much. A much fairer system would be for extremely rich people to contribute extreme amounts of tax, but they can avoid it, so the solution is some kind of middle ground that varies according to who is in power.
And we have exactly the current situation. Improving it while making it fair and workable is a lot harder than 'a flat rate'.
No, the quoted numbers represent pollution in terms of SOx only. Cars in the US emit very little of those in the air, as this is the stuff the catalytic converter traps. However you will find that US cars emit a whole lot more CO2 than 3 or 15 ships. CO2 emission are also pollution.
Of course on Slashdot patents=bad ; and of course as well no one is going to read the Fine Article, particularly if it is in french. The google "translation" and the various interpretations in english people have put out are not helping. Nowhere in the article is it written that this institution will massively collect stupid patents for little money and sue companies like Microsoft.
First you have to admit that patents have at least on principle some validity. Someone has an idea for a commercial new product, describes it in a patent and get some limited protection. It is totally unfair of large company to read such patents and implement the idea at a lower cost without paying licenses.
The idea here is to allow small-to-medium companies to benefit from patents as well. While a small company can certainly file for patent, they do not have the resources to defend them in court or otherwise, so basically they are more or less moot, except as bargaining chips for acquisition. The French government puts out a lot of money (think NSF-like grants but also industrialization grants) and they are not seeing as many industrial success as hoped. One reason, they reason, is that small companies cannot defend their ideas against larger companies, both in Europe and overseas. Other nations have government-based patent protection. Do you think the CSIRO patents for 802.11a/g were trolling?
So this institution will help small-to-medium French companies defend their portfolio. The initial idea is no to collect patents but to propose services. Indeed they will put together defensible cases by polling patents in some cases, but the stated aim is to get licenses income for the companies, not for this new institution by itself. This is not the same as trolling I think.
Essentially the French government doesn't want to see its industrialization monies get wasted too much. What's bad about this ?
Are you serious? How are you going to transfer to the cloud the typical 200 GB of data a medium length HD amateur family film represents this day? When we now have the GPUs that do the rendering locally in minutes? Even when people have fiber it will not be able to compare.
Have you ever done any video editing of any consequence (not like suppressing a few frames on your iPhone) ? They are probably now the most data-oriented, CPU and GPU hungry computation people do on their computers.
Read again, he didn't buy a xeon-based computer, just the vanilla one-cpu / quad core standard. Of course this is cheaper, but who cares ?
Your very post contradicts itself, it's a marvel.
First you say heavy computation is being pushed to GPU, allowing CPUs to be less powerful and less power-hungry, and then you write that now small, less powerful are becoming a lot more so and simultaneously more power-hungry.
The reality is that GPU programming is tough, specific and cannot replace general computing. Think of a GPU as becoming the FPU of yesteryear. Sure every processor is going to have one, sure it's going to be useful, but no it will not displace everything.
6-8 GPU computers have existed for a while now, since 4-way SLI with dual-GPU card : here is an example.
It doesn't work like you think it does.
Basically, most modern password protection techniques work like this: they take a password, say "my nice password" and transform it into a hash, say :"uq10ajg901a0##". Now only the hash is stored on the system. There is no way to go from the hash to the password. Classical hash functions are MD4, MD5 and SHA1. NTLM users MD4. Linux mostly uses MD5. There are added niceties likes salt, etc. You can look these up if you want.
When users enter their password, they are hashed again, and the *hash* are compared, not the passwords. If you enter the right password, no matter whether this is a nice word or sentence or jumbled letters, the system lets you in.
Crackers simply assume that the *hash* is available. It is in fact very easy to get it if you have access to the console, both for Linux or Windows. They then generate any and all combination of letters, signs, symbols and so on as input as potential password, they compute their hash, and they compare it to the hashes they know. If there is a match, bingo, they have found the password.
So the upshot is it doesn't really matter what the input password look like as long as the crackers can generate it and compute their hash. If the crackers know that you have used only letters, however, they can cut down dramatically on the numbers passwords they have to generate and save time.
So in some sense you are right but not for the reason you mention.
Hope this helps.
Microsoft seems in the throes of a fully developed bout of Peter's principle (everyone promoted to their level of incompetence). Bringing back BG would not help that.
They have lost, perhaps temporarily, the edge they once had, because they do not know what to do in the post-PC era (tablets, readers, smartphones). Even though W7 is halfway decent, the platform is no longer the moneymaker it once was for developers. For once too, they cannot buy they way out so easily now by purchasing the smart new guy on the block, they cannot strongarm (haha) vendors, they are losing their most valued partners exclusive relationship (Intel, Dell, etc). Their developer tools are turning crappy (Visual Studio 2010 anyone?) and no one is really looking at them for direction.
Now Android is everywhere in that space. I wish this was really good news, but I'm not so sure.
This map is in galactic coordinates, this means our own galaxy runs along the equator of this map. It is also obscuring the view, hence the lack of data in this area of the map.
Ray tracing is not an exact reproduction of the real world (very far from it, it does not reproduce quantum effects for instance), it is just a better, but still very crude model.
What the parent means is that except for rare cases involving lots of transparency, ray tracing images are not worth it.
Just a small correction: we don't really know how many victims Chernobyl made. The '50 fatalities' figure was at some point an official Soviet figure, which included only about 47 workers who died of acute radiation poisoning, and is hopelessly optimistic.
The WHO and the AEIA estimates the number of direct victims of Chernobyl to 4,000, but this figure is suspected to be low, as the AEIA has vested interests in the nuclear industry.
The TORCH report (The Other Report of CHernobyl), commissioned by the European Green Party, estimate about 60,000 extra cancers deaths due to Chernobyl. This figure does not include non-fatal cancers, which still have notable effect on victims.
A recent book, written by reputed scientists and based over 5,000 survey, puts the number of victims at about one million. Of course, some people disagree with this figure, however, there is no doubt that the scope of the accident was massive, and continues to make victims today.
The Ukrainian government has claimed in 2006 that more than 2.4 million people, including 500,000 children, have suffered adverse health effects from the Chernobyl disaster. This does not include the effect on people displaced due to the disaster. Of course the Ukrainian people are the ones left with the very hot potato and they would dearly like some help.
Also you may want to take a look a this photo essay and reflect on your "50 victims" figure. The bottom line is that there were definitely way more victims than the 50 you claim, and quite possibly way way more.
I'm right now totally in favor of nuclear energy, but we need to all understand the very significant risks, and try to mitigate them as much as possible.
At least those of the people imprisoned at Guantanamo and were later found to be innocent.
I'm pretty sure you will find that the average MIT graduate is not nearly as successful as Bose. Sure, they'll earn money, but I don't see how some of it has to be channelled back to their alma mater. People make their own success and money, college education is only a part of it. College is only 4 years, what about all the 12 years of school before? Don't they deserve any kudos?
To get the "message" that they are losing money on every students, Universities pull accounting tricks worthy of Hollywood. They take all of their expenses, including research and administrative related ones on the one hand, they take what students pay on the other, totally ignoring donations, and they say, "eh, student tuition is only one third of our income, therefore student are actually not paying much at all".
In reality, some studies have shown that top-level college education really costs no more than about $40k per year per student for engineering, about $80k for medicine, and sometimes as lows as $10k for maths or philosophy. Law is also cheap. If students pay $200k over 4 years, they are totally covering that. In most of Europe, students typically pay less than $10k per year, sometimes much less. Oxford and Cambridge charge about $15k per year. They seem to be doing quite well nonetheless. As it was reported here not so long ago, even top-level US-universities pay their professors a relative pittance compared with other professionals with similar qualifications.
If universities stopped admitting, they would immediately lose 1/3 of their funding, and so would have to let go of a corresponding share of their staff. They would lose their status and soon all of their donations, losing another 1/3, later they would lose all of their network and influence obtained through alumni, professors would not be needed for teaching and soon the place would be an empty, nearly pointless shell. That doesn't sound like being better off financially.
The morals is that Universities are there for teaching, and students are at the very center of their mission. Research and whatnot is indeed nice, but it is there to attract funding and top-level researcher, ensuring the quality of the teaching because beginner teachers want to join their teams and so work hard to get tenure. A few top-level researchers are also dedicated and excellent teachers, which is very nice from the university point of view, because they get to write the classical textbooks on their field, ensuring more revenues. Students and alumni are not the only teaching-related income universities get. There are many other things to say, but I'll stop.
However, saying that universities would be better off without students is utter bollocks, to be polite.
1992 hardware did not require as much cooling as it does now.
The more aggressive text by Greenspun was written in 2006, and by someone who is not by an academic. Although he makes some good points, there are several elements in his narrative I don't agree with, foremost his description of a "successful" scientist. An even moderately successful scientist gets his/her Phd at 26, does 1-2 years of Postdoc and has tenure or a permanent position in some lab or institution before age 30. Not in physic, not at MIT or Harvard, for sure, but at some perfectly reasonable research university in some engineering-related field, like robotics or materials science. Then this scientist does earn a relatively meager base salary compared with other professionals, but typically goes on to earn millions in various grants, employs many people, gets to choose his/her own work content and his/her workload, and can supplement his/her salary with any amount of consulting. If this person has any teaching gifts, they can go on to make a huge difference in a lot of young people in terms of careers and prospects. If they have any research gift, the sky is literally the limit. They don't necessarily aspire to retire by age 45 and go on to do a second career because their first career is just about perfect. They can choose to do what they want, to travel as much as they want, and they get paid for that. If they are truly stellar scholars, MIT or Harvard might make them a tenured offer at some point, if not, who cares.
So academics is still a great career, and it's great for women too, just be smart where and with whom you do your PhD and subsequent formative years, find good coauthors, and foremost don't chase tenure at supposedly top universities where they just pressure people because they can. If you feel this is too hard in the States, go to Europe or Australia. Academics do work hard, especially the successful ones, but this is because it is so much fun.
I'm sure other careers can be fun too, in finance, medicine or as various professionals, however I see a lot of people around me complain about their work content and the way they are treated. Academics as above, not so much.
I think Greenspun has a limited viewpoint because he mostly knows MIT, and while this is a great place to visit, you wouldn't want to live there.
Yes, basically interesting but very far from production-ready (slow, buggy).
Sorry, when Linux (and all the X11-based OSes) have the very very basic right, i.e. proper font management and display, we can talk again. Just spend a day with Linux and another with OSX and open your eyes. I can actually work on a 13" screen in OSX. I can barely stand a 24" screen with four virtual screens in Linux.
Under Linux/Gnome (KDE 4 is still worse in my opinion, at least for the moment), the screen is designed for huge widgets. Menus are enormous, fonts are very large, and even with antialiasing, still looks full of jaggies. The result is an inefficient use of screen space. OSX uses space much more efficiently. Do I need to point out there is only one menu at a time ?
At least Linux has made lots of progress. Maybe in a few years it will be alright. Meanwhile the latest UI faces from Apple are not very interesting, I agree with you.
Interesting to hear Jocelyn Bell in this short video.
She is the lady, who as a grad student discovered pulsars. Her supervisor, Anthony Hewish, got awarded the Nobel prize for it together with Martin Ryle, but not she. To be fair, Hewish had co-invented the radio-telescope modality (aperture synthesis) that made the discovery possible. Nonetheless this spectacular discovery certainly contributed to his Nobel prize.
Ms Bell is quite famous in radioastronomy circles and has done lots of good work.
Hello, my experience is the following: after also extensive travels and living and working in several countries, I must say Rio is the only city where I was actually scared.
The locals seems to indeed know where to step, but the problem was that most of the tourist areas were effectively where the likelihood of crime was highest. I came to Rio for an international conference that lasted 2 weeks. At the end of the conference everybody including ourselves had their little story where they got attacked, robbed or mugged in some way, including indeed on the beach. This was in 2007 BTW. Couple that with the spectacular images of the police helicopter actually gunned down by the local crime lords about 2 years ago, and I think the reputation of the city as a dangerous one is not usurped.
I'm told things are improving due to a combination of the Olympics, proximity police and the economy improving. Good to hear. I look forward to visiting the city again.
Of course, we can agree on the definition. The problem seems to be that, from what I read, the women were worried about unprotected sex after the fact. In Sweden, apparently you can consent to sex, but later change your mind.
911 is not the police.
I don't know about iPads, but iPhones definitely are not toys. Until the recent crop of android phones, there was nothing even remotely like it in the marketplace.