Soap will actually kill Gram-negative bacteria, by dissolving their cell membranes. Gram-positive bacteria, yeast, fungi, etc are going to be harder to kill by soap. Any spores will be completely resistant. This however is not the point. You use the soap not to kill the bugs, but to wash them away.
The fact that soap kills bacteria is largely irrelevant. Soap's mode of action, as for any other detergent, is to remove the impurities from the surface. Whether the said impurities are dead or alive makes no difference to the persons washing their hands as long as their are washed away. What is relevant is that the wide use anti-bactericidal additives has two unintended consequences:
1. Creates resistance, which will become a problem in cases were you don't have the option to wash a surface but have to rely on killing the buggers.
2. Creates false sense of security, because they kill only live bacteria. These compounds will have absolutely no effect on spores. This is probably more relevant to the hand sanitizers which have become exceedingly popular.
Wasn't this argument made kind of obsolete with the advent of boomer submarines, and other mobile launching systems. The Russians even had ballistic missile trains. It is mostly irrelevant if couple bunker get blown before they can launch their missiles.
Nah, the way it looks the C.I.A. and other American spy agencies, as well as the Pentagon have gone like:
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Now here is the scary part: Dr Strangelove is still as relevant as it was when it was made. You would think by now it would just be funny, and not scarily funny.
Gasoline and electric cars catch fire for different reasons. In two of the cases of Tesla fires the damage was from road debris hitting the car from below (possibly lifted by the tires?). This is relatively frequent event on the road, so there is a good reason at the very east to look at the details of the incidents and consider the possibility of adding a new safety test for electric vehicles. Gasoline cars typically shrug off hits to the undercarriage, because while they have fuel and break lines running under neat, these are small targets and are typically well shielded.
Tesla claims to have a 1/4 inch metal shielding for the battery. They have either been extremely unlucky to have in a short period of time two unusually powerful impacts to the bottom of the car or there is something very wrong with their choice of metal for the shield. Having said that if a something capable of piercing 1/4 inch metal plate is coming at high speed towards the parts of my body facing the pavement, I would rather have the battery take the impact. I
Recently a bunch of political hacks have started trolling slashdot. We desperately need an option for moderating the articles. Look at this one. Just reading the title should have given the editors big enough clue. "Why can't big government launch a website?". Really? Unless you lived on Mars in the past 30 years, you should be well aware of large number of government web sites. And what is it with the "Big" qualifier. Big relative to what? The size of the country? Do you have a specific branch of the government that you think is too big? Say for example is the parks service sucking the life blood of the economy (I will give you the defense department though). May be the original article should have privoded some more detail on this particular website. For example how the website has to implement all the requirements of a law that has become increasingly byzantine due to bickering from one particular party and the insurance industry. How it requires interfacing with databases which may or may not have suitable API (IRS for example to determine eligibility). How there was not enough time to properly plan in part because of the delays in passing the law and defending it in court, in part due to its complexity and in part because of the desire of the current administration to prevent future repeal by having it implementing and running before its term is over.
You are making a good point. The antidote would be a neutralizing antibody. The authors of the paper already tried to make one, but it doesn't seem to work very well. So it may not be a trivial task. Even if they had a good antibody it will take years to do safety trials and scale up production. And here comes the kicker, there is absolutely no incentive to actually produce an antidote. We are dealing with a rare offshoot of a condition that itself is very rare, especially in the western world. There is no commercially viable market for the antidote.To me it seems that the only way to make the antidote is to provide public subsidy to the pharma industry. The odds of this happening are not terribly high, unless there is a clear threat. I guess the plan is to keep the sequence secret until it surfaces in some other way (which it surely will, especially with the current drive to sequence environmental samples). Then depending on how threatened we will feel we may move ahead with making the antidote.
You don't specify the scientific field. My experience is from biology and what i can recommend is Python (look at the numpy and BioPython modules) and R (www.cran.org), which is an excellent statistics and data mining tool (again on the biology side it has the bioconductor toolset). MySQL may also come handy to store data depending on the project. I find myself writing some pieces in R, some in Python and using the Rpy2 python module to glue them together. MySQL can also be accessed from both python and R.
Good idea, but isn't Best Buy and other retailers complaining about the "showroom effect?" How's that going to work when car dealers are just giant test drive outlets?
They also get payed for servicing the sold vehicles (my local dealership for the brand I drive has excellent service department and absolutely disgusting sales people). The current practice where the dealers are incentivized to gouge the client on the sales price, useless options and on financing, is cutting into the potential profits for the manufacturers and is doing horrible damage to their brands. I am surprised that the car makers together with online merchants have not pushed harder at the dealers. I hope that Tesla will succeed in braking the current sales model.
I have used this tactic to buy three cars over the past 10 years and it works like a charm. There is the added bonus of seeing he dealers try and fail at a series of lies, pressure tactics and bait-and switch moves, which often work when you are in the showroom, but fail miserably when you have the option to check the facts, think things over and delay your response indefinitely. The key is never to get in face-to-face contact with the dealer before they commit to a price in writing. E-mail works best. Phone works too as long as you do it over voice mail (don't pick up their calls and don't call them during business hours), and ensure that they either fax or e-mail the price to which they commit. You need to have either cash or pre-arranged financing to do it. It also takes some patience, especially in an area where the competition is not too hot (another poster rightfully noted that often "competing" dealrships belong to the same owner). Even with fixed price you will still get the runaround, stuff like extended warranty, extra-options and made up fees. If you are not ready to walk away the moment you start getting this crap this tactic is not for you.
Noting that beer is safer than contaminated water, Bodzianowski note that beer could be useful “in future civilization as an emergency backup hydration and medical source."
Yeah, nothing is safer in a confined zero-G environment full of electronics, than a liquid electrolyte pressurized with toxic gas. Don't believe me? Here, have a beer and we can go ever the details.
Mod parent up please! This is probably the most insightful post in the whole thread. The original article is obviously posted from a political hack that lacks not only basic expertise but even common sense.
Color scheme looks nice. Too much wasted space both on white-space and useless and very large pics. You should know that most of your readers come to the website not because of the looks, but because of the content. Don't dilute the content with wasted space.
Wasn't internet designed around the idea to route around damage? Places where spying on everybody and his sister is the norm certainly looks like something to be avoided. But then again, we don't want the terrorists to win. Right?
Oh get a clue please. Unlike any of the patent trolls you quote, the guy has developed a working prototype and a business plan to commercialize it. The five MBA's on the other hand have nothing without his invention. Here is how they describe their contribution (emphasis is mine):
Our disruptive social enterprise, Aspire, aims to improve access to edible insects worldwide. We develop and distribute affordable and sustainable insect farming technologies for countries with established histories of entomophagy, or insect-consumption. Our farming solutions stabilize the supply of edible insects year-round, drastically improving and expanding the economic ecosystem surrounding insect consumption in the regions serviced. Not only do our durable farming units create income stability for rural farmers, they have a wider social impact by lowering the price of edible insects. This is central to our mission of increasing access to highly nutritious edible insects amongst the poorest, and therefore neediest, members of society.
Take out Jacub Dzamba's technology and their contribution comes down to a bunch of hollow sentences.
The dispute will not prevent the McGill team from competing for the Hult Prize. While the origins of the cricket farm device are in dispute, Michael Lu, a vice president at Hult International Business School, which sponsors the competition, says the judges focus more on the business model than the device itself. Hult organizers believe “the designs provided are not central to the McGill team’s business idea and therefore did not contribute to them either winning the Boston regional round or their prospects of winning the $1 million prize,” Lu says.
Translation: Screw the guy who made things happen, this is a prize designed to reword the assholes who are best at stealing.
I am very interested to learn how would the so called "business model" work without the actual invention? Is it something like we collect the investors money, split them between ourselves and go play some golf.
"With scanners able turn objects into printable files and peer-to-peer file sharing sites able to distribute product schematics, 3D printing could make intellectual property laws impossible or impractical to enforce. At the Inside 3D Printing Conference in San Jose this week, industry experts compared the rise of 3D printing to digital music and Napster. Private equity consultant Peer Munck noted that once users start sharing CAD files with product designs, manufacturers may be forced to find legal and legislative avenues to prevent infringement. But, he also pointed out that it's nearly impossible to keep consumers from printing whatever they want in the privacy of their homes. IP attorney John Hornick said, 'Everything will change when you can make anything. Future sales may be of designs and not products.'"
Let's see if we can do tongue-in-cheek test of this statement by replacing "make" and "print" with "brew", and "peer-to-peer file sharing service" with "US postal service"
"With people able to write down brewing recipes and US postal service able to distribute those recipes, home brewing could make intellectual property laws impossible or impractical to enforce. At the Inside brewing Conference in San Jose this week, industry experts compared the rise of home brewing to digital music and Napster. Private equity consultant Peer Munck noted that once users start sharing recipes with brewing procedures, industrial brewers may be forced to find legal and legislative avenues to prevent infringement. But, he also pointed out that it's nearly impossible to keep consumers from brewing whatever they want in the privacy of their homes. IP attorney John Hornick said, 'Everything will change when you can brew anything. Future sales may be of recipes and not alcohol.'"
Unless alcohol sales US are suffering terribly from the advent of home brewing, the statement of this lawyer is a bag full of sh*t aimed at creating legislature that will only benefit IP lawyers.
That's really bizarre. If GCHQ wanted to listen to any communication in an EU country all they needed to do is come up with a somewhat plausible reason and simply ask for access. It is beyond me why would they risk exposing their employees for two pages worth of paperwork. Well, unless they were actually spying on their allies, that is.
Slashdot Mirror
The only number that i need to count in binary on my fingers is 4: oo1oo
Soap will actually kill Gram-negative bacteria, by dissolving their cell membranes. Gram-positive bacteria, yeast, fungi, etc are going to be harder to kill by soap. Any spores will be completely resistant. This however is not the point. You use the soap not to kill the bugs, but to wash them away.
The fact that soap kills bacteria is largely irrelevant. Soap's mode of action, as for any other detergent, is to remove the impurities from the surface. Whether the said impurities are dead or alive makes no difference to the persons washing their hands as long as their are washed away. What is relevant is that the wide use anti-bactericidal additives has two unintended consequences:
1. Creates resistance, which will become a problem in cases were you don't have the option to wash a surface but have to rely on killing the buggers.
2. Creates false sense of security, because they kill only live bacteria. These compounds will have absolutely no effect on spores. This is probably more relevant to the hand sanitizers which have become exceedingly popular.
Why have nuclear weapons in the first place?
Wasn't this argument made kind of obsolete with the advent of boomer submarines, and other mobile launching systems. The Russians even had ballistic missile trains. It is mostly irrelevant if couple bunker get blown before they can launch their missiles.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Now here is the scary part: Dr Strangelove is still as relevant as it was when it was made. You would think by now it would just be funny, and not scarily funny.
Gasoline and electric cars catch fire for different reasons. In two of the cases of Tesla fires the damage was from road debris hitting the car from below (possibly lifted by the tires?). This is relatively frequent event on the road, so there is a good reason at the very east to look at the details of the incidents and consider the possibility of adding a new safety test for electric vehicles. Gasoline cars typically shrug off hits to the undercarriage, because while they have fuel and break lines running under neat, these are small targets and are typically well shielded. Tesla claims to have a 1/4 inch metal shielding for the battery. They have either been extremely unlucky to have in a short period of time two unusually powerful impacts to the bottom of the car or there is something very wrong with their choice of metal for the shield. Having said that if a something capable of piercing 1/4 inch metal plate is coming at high speed towards the parts of my body facing the pavement, I would rather have the battery take the impact. I
Recently a bunch of political hacks have started trolling slashdot. We desperately need an option for moderating the articles. Look at this one. Just reading the title should have given the editors big enough clue. "Why can't big government launch a website?". Really? Unless you lived on Mars in the past 30 years, you should be well aware of large number of government web sites. And what is it with the "Big" qualifier. Big relative to what? The size of the country? Do you have a specific branch of the government that you think is too big? Say for example is the parks service sucking the life blood of the economy (I will give you the defense department though). May be the original article should have privoded some more detail on this particular website. For example how the website has to implement all the requirements of a law that has become increasingly byzantine due to bickering from one particular party and the insurance industry. How it requires interfacing with databases which may or may not have suitable API (IRS for example to determine eligibility). How there was not enough time to properly plan in part because of the delays in passing the law and defending it in court, in part due to its complexity and in part because of the desire of the current administration to prevent future repeal by having it implementing and running before its term is over.
You are making a good point. The antidote would be a neutralizing antibody. The authors of the paper already tried to make one, but it doesn't seem to work very well. So it may not be a trivial task. Even if they had a good antibody it will take years to do safety trials and scale up production. And here comes the kicker, there is absolutely no incentive to actually produce an antidote. We are dealing with a rare offshoot of a condition that itself is very rare, especially in the western world. There is no commercially viable market for the antidote.To me it seems that the only way to make the antidote is to provide public subsidy to the pharma industry. The odds of this happening are not terribly high, unless there is a clear threat. I guess the plan is to keep the sequence secret until it surfaces in some other way (which it surely will, especially with the current drive to sequence environmental samples). Then depending on how threatened we will feel we may move ahead with making the antidote.
You don't specify the scientific field. My experience is from biology and what i can recommend is Python (look at the numpy and BioPython modules) and R (www.cran.org), which is an excellent statistics and data mining tool (again on the biology side it has the bioconductor toolset). MySQL may also come handy to store data depending on the project. I find myself writing some pieces in R, some in Python and using the Rpy2 python module to glue them together. MySQL can also be accessed from both python and R.
You missed the major selling point for the Cadillac, which is touted in an unbelievable series of cliches ("sexy sophistication" anyone?) here/a>. It has whopping 207hp and 295 lb of torque vs. the meager 416hp and 443lb of the Tesla. That's going to make people looking for an expensive sports car run to G with bundles.
Good idea, but isn't Best Buy and other retailers complaining about the "showroom effect?" How's that going to work when car dealers are just giant test drive outlets?
They also get payed for servicing the sold vehicles (my local dealership for the brand I drive has excellent service department and absolutely disgusting sales people). The current practice where the dealers are incentivized to gouge the client on the sales price, useless options and on financing, is cutting into the potential profits for the manufacturers and is doing horrible damage to their brands. I am surprised that the car makers together with online merchants have not pushed harder at the dealers. I hope that Tesla will succeed in braking the current sales model.
I have used this tactic to buy three cars over the past 10 years and it works like a charm. There is the added bonus of seeing he dealers try and fail at a series of lies, pressure tactics and bait-and switch moves, which often work when you are in the showroom, but fail miserably when you have the option to check the facts, think things over and delay your response indefinitely. The key is never to get in face-to-face contact with the dealer before they commit to a price in writing. E-mail works best. Phone works too as long as you do it over voice mail (don't pick up their calls and don't call them during business hours), and ensure that they either fax or e-mail the price to which they commit. You need to have either cash or pre-arranged financing to do it. It also takes some patience, especially in an area where the competition is not too hot (another poster rightfully noted that often "competing" dealrships belong to the same owner). Even with fixed price you will still get the runaround, stuff like extended warranty, extra-options and made up fees. If you are not ready to walk away the moment you start getting this crap this tactic is not for you.
Noting that beer is safer than contaminated water, Bodzianowski note that beer could be useful “in future civilization as an emergency backup hydration and medical source."
Yeah, nothing is safer in a confined zero-G environment full of electronics, than a liquid electrolyte pressurized with toxic gas. Don't believe me? Here, have a beer and we can go ever the details.
He keeps using that word, but I don't think it means what he thinks it means.
Mod parent up please! This is probably the most insightful post in the whole thread. The original article is obviously posted from a political hack that lacks not only basic expertise but even common sense.
Color scheme looks nice. Too much wasted space both on white-space and useless and very large pics. You should know that most of your readers come to the website not because of the looks, but because of the content. Don't dilute the content with wasted space.
Women are not allowed to ride on camels. Camels are too precious for that. In fact women are supposed to carry the camel when it gets tired.
Wasn't internet designed around the idea to route around damage? Places where spying on everybody and his sister is the norm certainly looks like something to be avoided. But then again, we don't want the terrorists to win. Right?
Our disruptive social enterprise, Aspire, aims to improve access to edible insects worldwide. We develop and distribute affordable and sustainable insect farming technologies for countries with established histories of entomophagy, or insect-consumption. Our farming solutions stabilize the supply of edible insects year-round, drastically improving and expanding the economic ecosystem surrounding insect consumption in the regions serviced. Not only do our durable farming units create income stability for rural farmers, they have a wider social impact by lowering the price of edible insects. This is central to our mission of increasing access to highly nutritious edible insects amongst the poorest, and therefore neediest, members of society.
Take out Jacub Dzamba's technology and their contribution comes down to a bunch of hollow sentences.
The dispute will not prevent the McGill team from competing for the Hult Prize. While the origins of the cricket farm device are in dispute, Michael Lu, a vice president at Hult International Business School, which sponsors the competition, says the judges focus more on the business model than the device itself. Hult organizers believe “the designs provided are not central to the McGill team’s business idea and therefore did not contribute to them either winning the Boston regional round or their prospects of winning the $1 million prize,” Lu says.
Translation: Screw the guy who made things happen, this is a prize designed to reword the assholes who are best at stealing.
I am very interested to learn how would the so called "business model" work without the actual invention? Is it something like we collect the investors money, split them between ourselves and go play some golf.
Yeah, what have RMS and GNU ever done for us.
"With scanners able turn objects into printable files and peer-to-peer file sharing sites able to distribute product schematics, 3D printing could make intellectual property laws impossible or impractical to enforce. At the Inside 3D Printing Conference in San Jose this week, industry experts compared the rise of 3D printing to digital music and Napster. Private equity consultant Peer Munck noted that once users start sharing CAD files with product designs, manufacturers may be forced to find legal and legislative avenues to prevent infringement. But, he also pointed out that it's nearly impossible to keep consumers from printing whatever they want in the privacy of their homes. IP attorney John Hornick said, 'Everything will change when you can make anything. Future sales may be of designs and not products.'"
Let's see if we can do tongue-in-cheek test of this statement by replacing "make" and "print" with "brew", and "peer-to-peer file sharing service" with "US postal service"
"With people able to write down brewing recipes and US postal service able to distribute those recipes, home brewing could make intellectual property laws impossible or impractical to enforce. At the Inside brewing Conference in San Jose this week, industry experts compared the rise of home brewing to digital music and Napster. Private equity consultant Peer Munck noted that once users start sharing recipes with brewing procedures, industrial brewers may be forced to find legal and legislative avenues to prevent infringement. But, he also pointed out that it's nearly impossible to keep consumers from brewing whatever they want in the privacy of their homes. IP attorney John Hornick said, 'Everything will change when you can brew anything. Future sales may be of recipes and not alcohol.'"
Unless alcohol sales US are suffering terribly from the advent of home brewing, the statement of this lawyer is a bag full of sh*t aimed at creating legislature that will only benefit IP lawyers.
Nah, that one is pretty good in the context of EU.
That's really bizarre. If GCHQ wanted to listen to any communication in an EU country all they needed to do is come up with a somewhat plausible reason and simply ask for access. It is beyond me why would they risk exposing their employees for two pages worth of paperwork. Well, unless they were actually spying on their allies, that is.