I'm not aware of any successful major terrorist attack after 9/11
I don't know if I'm even aware of a major (publicized) terrorist attack attempt post 9-11 that COULD have been successful. We had a guy with a binary explosive in his shoes, the Christmas fellow, that group of fellows on the east coast (I want to say) a few years back that the media tried to play up as a threat, and then the Times Square fellow who didn't know what he was doing at all despite being trained.
The senate is not likely to vote against such a judge based on those criteria at all. Let's face it: a nominee's ideas on IP law are going to be the last worries during confirmation proceedings. It's "degree of judicial activism" on the right. I don't know what it is on the left. Haven't heard the buzzwords from that side just yet.
Does nobody else realize that the clerk attempted to scan the poor child? Didn't you people see the movie? I know that I would probably be scarred for life if someone tried to explode my head.
That shouldn't be a surprise, despite what people think about police being everywhere. The average cop has a service per person of somewhere between 400:1 to 2200:1, you don't get solid enforcement like that. But anytime there's economic problems the first areas to get cuts are Fire/EMS/Police.
From my experience, the last thing that gets cut is rescue services, right after schools. The first thing that gets cut is the local library, citizen's programs, parks & recreation, etc. Perhaps this is different elsewhere.
Generally, in cases such as these, people are really mean to badmouth the government, and they accidentally sound like they're badmouthing everyday [insert nationality here] citizens.
This is the exact same reason that, in articles about the Chinese and their government, indignant natives post nearly the same kind of posts. We really aren't talking about you, personally. We know the average Chinese, Russian, American, Brit, whatever probably isn't the problem. We are nearly always talking about your government.
A factor of 8 is almost a factor of ten, and that's a whole order of magnitude.
There's a pretty big difference between a dose of 1 Sv and 0.1 Sv. Even ten doses of 0.1 Sv and one 1 Sv dose aren't the same thing, depending on how long you wait between the split doses.
Still, even 100 mSv is a lot of radiation for one CT scan. This wasn't really a typical CT. Typical head CT should give more like 1 mSv, I think.
Doctors are woefully unaware or unwilling to admit that CT scans do involve some risk because they very well can give appreciable radiation dose, often far more than that of standard radiography. They are largely viewed as harmless given the excellent volume of anatomical information they provide, and while they do offer immense benefit, it is vital that the radiation hazard be comprehended. I hope that doctors and technologists will take away from this the lesson that they do need to be aware of radiation safety and radiation risk (and some basic medical physics) even if radiation is not their primary specialty. It's not just the health or medical physicist's problem.
If you already have cancer, then developing another type of it one or two decades down the road is the least of your worries.
However, if the cancer is well controlled by current treatments, this could give someone the idea that they can control it even better. For young patients, this could lead to irresponsible treatments as oncologists try to balance out remission and recurrence/radiologically-induced cancers.
Thankfully, medical doctors are notoriously conservative. I worry about radiation workers (e.g. power plant operators) who might be administered this drug to allow more routine high doses; health physicists do not have a thorough understanding of quantitative risks of inducing cancer. Physics and medicine lack robust models for predicting cancer risk for low and moderate radiation doses--political and commercial pressure to throw a "miracle drug" like this one into this poorly-understood mix could well result in a health disaster.
TF2 is a strange case. There's a lot of voice material in the game that you rarely or never hear. If you open the.gcf container files, you can see that--even in the early days of the game--there were a number of taunts recorded that, even now, you never seem to hear. One example off the top of my head is the Sniper's line about "fruit-shop owners". There are some that you hear only very rarely.
The "problem" (if you call it a problem) has gotten worse in recent days since Valve adds more situational jokes--but you only hear them rarely, if ever. For instance, if a spy dominates a scout, he has a few lines that he can say. Problem is, that doesn't happen every day, and the randomness of which line is chosen means that most people may not even hear his "well, time to visit your mother!" jab--which is really very funny if you've watched Meet The Spy. But you might never hear it in-game.
This seems to kinda be an endemic problem with the game at the moment. If the payload cart starts to reverse course, it always seems to be a heavy or sniper or scout that says something about it. Maybe only those classes have those lines recorded, but it seems like the kind of thing that would be an improvement, if they were to record those lines for each class. Then again, voice acting costs money--and Valve is wasting quite a bit of that acting by locking it up behind rare game conditions.
I understand that Valve is trying to keep the humor from wearing thin, and think that it is a worthwhile goal. However, I think they haven't reached a proper balance yet: you get really sick of the Heavy whining about the cart going backwards, and you hardly ever hear the domination lines.
I've never understood what was supposed to be more "user friendly" about looking several inches over on the screen to figure out what kind of file you're looking at. It's possible, I suppose, that most people are either still not accustomed to the standard file types--and therefore need the long descriptions over in that column--or just don't mind the clunky design. Then again, I think the default display type for Windows is still "Large Icons," isn't it? With that view, I really don't even know how people keep their unrecognized-type files apart, other than perhaps memorizing their icons and re-learning them whenever they install a new program.
The way a person interacts with a computer (that they'll use for any length of time) is very much an individual preference, possibly as much as the seat and mirror positions in a car. Maybe even more so. One of the first things any of us does when we set up a new system for our own use is to go in and set up the preferences we are used to using, making up the aliases we're accustomed to use, and so on. And then we largely forget about it.
Perhaps scientists are also trying to avoid the negative connotations of the words "animal experimentation" out of fear for having their labs destroyed, houses firebombed, or so on. I don't know if that alone would stop the sort of people who commit those kinds of crimes, but it might just garner public sympathy (or at least stop propagating the negative images of researchers who use animals).
I'd suggest that a more appropriate example would be laetrile, if we're talking about people exporting their health care. People went to Mexico for that one, despite that it is apparently ineffective for treating cancer. Those people paid plenty of money and put their health at (further) risk for something unlikely to provide any benefit. Even undergoing currently accepted chemotherapy regimens is placing one's health at risk--but there is generally expected to be a benefit that outweighs that risk, since we have confidence that our chemotherapy regimens can actually provide that benefit.
Laypeople are not and really can't be expected to be health care experts, in general, and so it's somewhat unreasonable to expect that the average person is sufficiently knowledgeable to solely determine what kind of treatment will be effective for his major illnesses. That is one of the reasons we have medical doctors and researchers, after all. Health and health care have a connection that is so nebulous that it's very difficult to make informed choices without well-organized bodies, ones which do, compile, and disseminate the kind of intensive research necessary to provide the information that enables people to make sound medical choices.
Simply because there is a market for fake cancer cures, for instance, does it then become ethical to let people exploit that market and make money off of the completely natural ignorance of the lay public? However, it'd be hard to stop people from going to Mexico to get these "cures," so I guess perhaps we have to ask ourselves--assuming that we can't dissuade people from wanting these fake cures--if we would rather have them getting them in the States or in Mexico. Honestly, that's a dimension of the problem I hadn't really thought of until I was writing this comment today.
My comment was more along the lines of asking if becoming rich really turns a person into a sophomoric frat boy, or if it's possible that type of person will do well in the Wall Street club anyhow. Regardless, I don't think it's necessarily that we can simply say that "becoming rich makes people into wall-pissing douchebags" or that everyone has some kind of "douchebag price" that tips them over into a socially irresponsible idiot once they've made it. The article seems to imply that these people were "corrupted" by the money, whereas it could've been that they were simply enabled to act in that way because of the general laxity of attitudes brought about by their prosperity. I mean, sure, it's easy to see that if you're finally making enough money to hire a housekeeper, then anyone might care a bit less about splashing up on the rim, but that's not really what went on here.
This is what $2 million of bonus can do to grown men.
I wanted desperately to try to argue that perhaps the kind of person who can position himself to make that kind of money is simply the kind of person who would be amenable to literal pissing contests and so on, rather than money itself changing what were previously normal people.
Well, if you do manage to invent the nuclear damper and accelerate the 1/2 life decay of carbon-14, let me know. I can think of a lot of people who'd be interested in forcing accelerated decay of stuff like plutonium.
Under certain conditions the half-lives of beta-emitters (of which class C-14 is a member) have been reduced in the lab. A quick search of Google produced a Health Physics Society letter that points us towards Bosch et al, "Observation of Bound-State (Beta)- Decay of Fully Ionized 187Re: 187Re-187Os Cosmochronometry", Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 5190 - 5193 (1996).
Of course it requires fully ionizing the radioactive atom, and perhaps the reduction in half-life wouldn't be significant for a light atom like C-14, so you're not going to spoof the age of your beverages with this technique.
(From the same source, electron capture decay can be accelerated by placing atoms inside buckyballs, which basically pushes the shell electrons closer to the nucleus and increases the likelihood of capture. Of course, that requires putting atoms inside buckyballs.)
Optical: uses light
Time domain: travel time
Reflect: uses reflections
Meter: measures something
So we have a thing that sends out a pulse of light and measures how long it takes to return after reflecting off the other end of the fiber.
Working with these things in undergrad was neat. You'd have to have a good bit of a spool of fiber sitting there in order to get useful signal times for the sort of simple (undergrad) stuff we'd do with it. It feels a little silly, since you could have your "break" and your entry point a foot apart, and then you have to make the light bounce down all those meters of fiber.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not aware of any successful major terrorist attack after 9/11
I don't know if I'm even aware of a major (publicized) terrorist attack attempt post 9-11 that COULD have been successful. We had a guy with a binary explosive in his shoes, the Christmas fellow, that group of fellows on the east coast (I want to say) a few years back that the media tried to play up as a threat, and then the Times Square fellow who didn't know what he was doing at all despite being trained.
naturally laugh at the mere suggestion of dickless booting.
The senate is not likely to vote against such a judge based on those criteria at all. Let's face it: a nominee's ideas on IP law are going to be the last worries during confirmation proceedings. It's "degree of judicial activism" on the right. I don't know what it is on the left. Haven't heard the buzzwords from that side just yet.
Does nobody else realize that the clerk attempted to scan the poor child? Didn't you people see the movie? I know that I would probably be scarred for life if someone tried to explode my head.
Wait. A BARCODE scanner?
That shouldn't be a surprise, despite what people think about police being everywhere. The average cop has a service per person of somewhere between 400:1 to 2200:1, you don't get solid enforcement like that. But anytime there's economic problems the first areas to get cuts are Fire/EMS/Police.
From my experience, the last thing that gets cut is rescue services, right after schools. The first thing that gets cut is the local library, citizen's programs, parks & recreation, etc. Perhaps this is different elsewhere.
You'd better put that paragraph back when you're done, and hope nobody notices that you stole it.
Generally, in cases such as these, people are really mean to badmouth the government, and they accidentally sound like they're badmouthing everyday [insert nationality here] citizens.
This is the exact same reason that, in articles about the Chinese and their government, indignant natives post nearly the same kind of posts. We really aren't talking about you, personally. We know the average Chinese, Russian, American, Brit, whatever probably isn't the problem. We are nearly always talking about your government.
Perhaps the IMAX version is more expensive, thus limiting the movie's message to the people presumably less receptive to it?
Maybe the real problem with modern MMOs is that they either encourage or cultivate a player culture obsessed with maximum statistical performance?
A factor of 8 is almost a factor of ten, and that's a whole order of magnitude.
There's a pretty big difference between a dose of 1 Sv and 0.1 Sv. Even ten doses of 0.1 Sv and one 1 Sv dose aren't the same thing, depending on how long you wait between the split doses.
Still, even 100 mSv is a lot of radiation for one CT scan. This wasn't really a typical CT. Typical head CT should give more like 1 mSv, I think.
Doctors are woefully unaware or unwilling to admit that CT scans do involve some risk because they very well can give appreciable radiation dose, often far more than that of standard radiography. They are largely viewed as harmless given the excellent volume of anatomical information they provide, and while they do offer immense benefit, it is vital that the radiation hazard be comprehended. I hope that doctors and technologists will take away from this the lesson that they do need to be aware of radiation safety and radiation risk (and some basic medical physics) even if radiation is not their primary specialty. It's not just the health or medical physicist's problem.
what
If you already have cancer, then developing another type of it one or two decades down the road is the least of your worries.
However, if the cancer is well controlled by current treatments, this could give someone the idea that they can control it even better. For young patients, this could lead to irresponsible treatments as oncologists try to balance out remission and recurrence/radiologically-induced cancers.
Thankfully, medical doctors are notoriously conservative. I worry about radiation workers (e.g. power plant operators) who might be administered this drug to allow more routine high doses; health physicists do not have a thorough understanding of quantitative risks of inducing cancer. Physics and medicine lack robust models for predicting cancer risk for low and moderate radiation doses--political and commercial pressure to throw a "miracle drug" like this one into this poorly-understood mix could well result in a health disaster.
If it's the end of the world, then it's really more of a Grey Goose scenario.
TF2 is a strange case. There's a lot of voice material in the game that you rarely or never hear. If you open the .gcf container files, you can see that--even in the early days of the game--there were a number of taunts recorded that, even now, you never seem to hear. One example off the top of my head is the Sniper's line about "fruit-shop owners". There are some that you hear only very rarely.
The "problem" (if you call it a problem) has gotten worse in recent days since Valve adds more situational jokes--but you only hear them rarely, if ever. For instance, if a spy dominates a scout, he has a few lines that he can say. Problem is, that doesn't happen every day, and the randomness of which line is chosen means that most people may not even hear his "well, time to visit your mother!" jab--which is really very funny if you've watched Meet The Spy. But you might never hear it in-game.
This seems to kinda be an endemic problem with the game at the moment. If the payload cart starts to reverse course, it always seems to be a heavy or sniper or scout that says something about it. Maybe only those classes have those lines recorded, but it seems like the kind of thing that would be an improvement, if they were to record those lines for each class. Then again, voice acting costs money--and Valve is wasting quite a bit of that acting by locking it up behind rare game conditions.
I understand that Valve is trying to keep the humor from wearing thin, and think that it is a worthwhile goal. However, I think they haven't reached a proper balance yet: you get really sick of the Heavy whining about the cart going backwards, and you hardly ever hear the domination lines.
I've never understood what was supposed to be more "user friendly" about looking several inches over on the screen to figure out what kind of file you're looking at. It's possible, I suppose, that most people are either still not accustomed to the standard file types--and therefore need the long descriptions over in that column--or just don't mind the clunky design. Then again, I think the default display type for Windows is still "Large Icons," isn't it? With that view, I really don't even know how people keep their unrecognized-type files apart, other than perhaps memorizing their icons and re-learning them whenever they install a new program.
The way a person interacts with a computer (that they'll use for any length of time) is very much an individual preference, possibly as much as the seat and mirror positions in a car. Maybe even more so. One of the first things any of us does when we set up a new system for our own use is to go in and set up the preferences we are used to using, making up the aliases we're accustomed to use, and so on. And then we largely forget about it.
Perhaps scientists are also trying to avoid the negative connotations of the words "animal experimentation" out of fear for having their labs destroyed, houses firebombed, or so on. I don't know if that alone would stop the sort of people who commit those kinds of crimes, but it might just garner public sympathy (or at least stop propagating the negative images of researchers who use animals).
I'd suggest that a more appropriate example would be laetrile, if we're talking about people exporting their health care. People went to Mexico for that one, despite that it is apparently ineffective for treating cancer. Those people paid plenty of money and put their health at (further) risk for something unlikely to provide any benefit. Even undergoing currently accepted chemotherapy regimens is placing one's health at risk--but there is generally expected to be a benefit that outweighs that risk, since we have confidence that our chemotherapy regimens can actually provide that benefit.
Laypeople are not and really can't be expected to be health care experts, in general, and so it's somewhat unreasonable to expect that the average person is sufficiently knowledgeable to solely determine what kind of treatment will be effective for his major illnesses. That is one of the reasons we have medical doctors and researchers, after all. Health and health care have a connection that is so nebulous that it's very difficult to make informed choices without well-organized bodies, ones which do, compile, and disseminate the kind of intensive research necessary to provide the information that enables people to make sound medical choices.
Simply because there is a market for fake cancer cures, for instance, does it then become ethical to let people exploit that market and make money off of the completely natural ignorance of the lay public? However, it'd be hard to stop people from going to Mexico to get these "cures," so I guess perhaps we have to ask ourselves--assuming that we can't dissuade people from wanting these fake cures--if we would rather have them getting them in the States or in Mexico. Honestly, that's a dimension of the problem I hadn't really thought of until I was writing this comment today.
My comment was more along the lines of asking if becoming rich really turns a person into a sophomoric frat boy, or if it's possible that type of person will do well in the Wall Street club anyhow. Regardless, I don't think it's necessarily that we can simply say that "becoming rich makes people into wall-pissing douchebags" or that everyone has some kind of "douchebag price" that tips them over into a socially irresponsible idiot once they've made it. The article seems to imply that these people were "corrupted" by the money, whereas it could've been that they were simply enabled to act in that way because of the general laxity of attitudes brought about by their prosperity. I mean, sure, it's easy to see that if you're finally making enough money to hire a housekeeper, then anyone might care a bit less about splashing up on the rim, but that's not really what went on here.
This is what $2 million of bonus can do to grown men.
I wanted desperately to try to argue that perhaps the kind of person who can position himself to make that kind of money is simply the kind of person who would be amenable to literal pissing contests and so on, rather than money itself changing what were previously normal people.
Well, if you do manage to invent the nuclear damper and accelerate the 1/2 life decay of carbon-14, let me know. I can think of a lot of people who'd be interested in forcing accelerated decay of stuff like plutonium.
Under certain conditions the half-lives of beta-emitters (of which class C-14 is a member) have been reduced in the lab. A quick search of Google produced a Health Physics Society letter that points us towards Bosch et al, "Observation of Bound-State (Beta)- Decay of Fully Ionized 187Re: 187Re-187Os Cosmochronometry", Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 5190 - 5193 (1996).
Of course it requires fully ionizing the radioactive atom, and perhaps the reduction in half-life wouldn't be significant for a light atom like C-14, so you're not going to spoof the age of your beverages with this technique.
(From the same source, electron capture decay can be accelerated by placing atoms inside buckyballs, which basically pushes the shell electrons closer to the nucleus and increases the likelihood of capture. Of course, that requires putting atoms inside buckyballs.)
Well, let's drill down through it.
Optical: uses light
Time domain: travel time
Reflect: uses reflections
Meter: measures something
So we have a thing that sends out a pulse of light and measures how long it takes to return after reflecting off the other end of the fiber.
Working with these things in undergrad was neat. You'd have to have a good bit of a spool of fiber sitting there in order to get useful signal times for the sort of simple (undergrad) stuff we'd do with it. It feels a little silly, since you could have your "break" and your entry point a foot apart, and then you have to make the light bounce down all those meters of fiber.
Oh crap it's spreading!
http://www.spamusement.com/
Not really a webcomic, not really updated any longer, and I'm unsure if it's completely safe for work.
Considering how quickly and effectively we managed to slashdot this helpful site, It's pretty obvious that we are the worms.