Er...I don't recall saying anything about a new detector. The fact that it's not wholly new technology is irrelevant to the question of whether this machine -- or rather, as I actually said, this general area of development -- is a significant overall technological advance. Shrinking your minimum feature size on a chip from 150 to 60 nm may not involve brand-new tech, but it's still a major technological advance, and enables lots of stuff you couldn't do before.
You're right about the use of contrast, I made a (minor) mistake, and thanks for the correction.
Finally, your statement that the X-ray dose is a lot higher in the old machines is my second major point, because the newer generation of machines are supposed to help that: from TFA "A new scanner has been unveiled which can produce 3D body images of unprecedented clarity while reducing radiation by as much as 80%.") I realize this is/. and all, where we shoot from the hip, but did you actually read what I wrote?
I dunno about losing the dynamic info, either. In the first place, I was talking about screening not precise diagnostics on someone who's already a candidate for intense therapy. I doubt you need such detailed information to rule CAD in or out for most of your middle-aged population with a BMI above 28 and elevated LDL. For those who don't pass the initial screen, you can go on to do catheter angiography or whatever. Secondly, TFA suggests that it's possible near real-time imaging is coming within reach, and then you will have the dynamic information, too.
I don't disagree the breathlessness of TFA is overdone, but then that's always the case with journalists. They're an excitable lot. (Something to bear in mind next time they screech about an imminent danger of fascism or ecocide.) But suggesting the whole field of technological effort is nothing more than the equivalent of changing the chrome grill style on this model year's Camry is equally ignorant, IMHO.
You're right about the contrast material, so thanks for the correction.
Yes, it's already being done, but unfortunately as another commenter notes, and I said, it now involves a lot of radiation, so the ability to get it done at much lower doses is significant news.
Balls to the stupid car analogy. You might as well say the Pentium was merely adding chrome and tailfins to the 486.
I don't think it's so important how long it takes for a cargo to get somewhere so much as it's important that it get there when it's scheduled to do so, not earlier and not later. Modern manufacturing, to say nothing of port operations, rail schedules, et cetera, are pretty reliant on things being delivered at a certain hour on a certain day. If a boat happens to come in a day late or something, everything is flung out of synchrony -- you have to pay workers who are doing nothing, because the boat isn't there yet, and you have to hire other guys at overtime rates when the boat does come in, and meanwhile you've missed your rail connection and your factory has run out of raw materials or your showroom has run out of the popular new model of widget...
TFA doesn't mention it, but if you were older you'd probably realize this is a big deal. Maybe not this particular machine, but the general approach.
What this replaces is not an MRI or a CAT scan, but an angiogram. That's the nasty procedure where they inject dye into your coronary arteries through a catheter threaded up through your femoral artery while they image your heart, so they can see whether you have CAD (coronary artery disease, where the arteries supplying the heart are narrowed or blocked, the immediate precursor to a heart attack). This is an unpleasant experience, to say the least. It's also expensive, since it requires a skilled operator to thread the catheter up to your heart. Then there's the possibility of complications, from infection at the site where your artery got punctured to the formation of micro-clots from damage to the artery walls that might cause a heart attack, or stroke.
These newfangled detectors promise to be able to image the heart in such exquisite 3D detail that your cardiologist can basically just look at your heart and see whether you have CAD, and how far along it is. And all you need to do is lie on the X-ray table for a few minutes. No dye, no catheters, no expensive trained personnel, zero risk of complications, far lower cost, and a much briefer time in the hospital.
The other important news here is the lower X-ray exposure. Existing machines that can do this kind of imaging of the heart have given you such a blast of X-rays that they don't justify the increased risk of e.g. cancer unless you are already seen as fairly high-risk for CAD. When they get the X-ray exposure down, it will become possible to screen lower-risk people for CAD, perhaps even the general public.
Right now, all we can do to screen the general populace for CAD is monitor iffy surrogate measures, like your lipid profile (your "cholesterol"), your family history, your weight, et cetera. On the basis of these measures we prescribe many $billions of drugs (e.g. Lipitor) and further, more invasive testing.
But we know these surrogate measures are only somewhat and very generally correlated with CAD. How much better it would be if we could easily and cheaply monitor not the possible precursors to CAD but CAD itself -- the actual narrowing of the coronary arteries. It could be a public-health breakthrough. Plenty of people have CAD without having the classic warning signs (especially women), and plenty of people with sky-high cholesterol et cetera have no CAD at all. It's worth remembering that even in these modern times, the first symptom of coronary heart disease in some 30% of cases is a fatal heart attack.
All they need is to have a moderately strong, steady wind that is abaft the beam. Plus good enough weather that they don't risk the kite and its hardware. If you sail the traditional sail-era trade routes the wind is abaft the beam quite a bit more than 50% of the time, the wind is steady at 1000' in the open ocean pretty much always as long as the weather is good, and you can supply your own finagle factor for how often the weather is good.
Frankly, I think the major limitation on any kind of sail power has been crew cost. Big freighters run with tiny crews these days, and often not very well trained and not especially reliable, except for the top few officers. Getting a crew that can handle a big sail competently, without endangering the cost of the apparatus, sounds expensive. But maybe they've got a robotic, computerized control system that can eliminate that problem.
Think this through a little more carefully. Where do you find weapons-grade fissionables? Iranian centrifuges notwithstanding, it's still very difficult to enrich uranium unless you're a fairly wealthy country with a biggish industrial plant devoted to the cause (which then makes you a tempting target for IDF air raids, cf. Syria, recent mystery raid into). And to make Pu, you need a working nuclear reactor, plus some decent chemists on staff. Not likely if you're al-Wacko, the latest crazed Islamic suicide squad.
No, the best place to find weapons-grade fissionables is in the First World, especially now that tons of nuclear weapons are being decommissioned, and when e.g. Russian weapons security is (1) laughably inadequate, and (2) reliant on the purity of motives of drastically underpaid and often embittered ex-Red Army apparatchiks.
So, yeah, finding good technological means to monitor the possible exit points of fissionables from First World sources is indeed not a bad way to throw a monkey wrench in the plans of would-be nuclear terrorists. Consider it the equivalent of having a security camera in a gun-dealer's shop. It's not there to monitor the dealer or his customers, but rather to prevent hoodies from breaking into the shop and making off with some useful hardware.
ARRRRGH! Stop the music, I want to get off!
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RIAA Afraid of Harvard
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
Is there any other tech/geek/nerd topic out there other than the fucking RIAA and the fate of college downloaders?
Christ, this must be the 65th 'story' on this that's been on the/. main page. Is there any remaining conceivable nuance and flame that hasn't been explored, yet?
This is starting to seem like an experiment in Pavlovian reflex training. Soon, someone will come out with a nice little Firefox add-on, where as soon as you type in http://yro.slashdot.org/ and without needing to actually send out the TCP SYN packet, the screen will immediately fill with rants about the RIAA, lawyers, conspiracy theories of this and that, Ron Paul and Iraq, et cetera, already formatted and modded up 'n' down.
I used Multics for a while at MIT, and even wrote some user documentation for it.
From that point of view, it sure looked like a research OS. They were tinkering with the damn thing all the time, and it would have interesting new flaws and idiosyncrasies regularly, as well as be out of service at random intervals while they upgraded from version 35.6a to 35.6ab. If you wanted stability and reliability, you were expected to use the IBM CMS system.
I don't say that Honeywell didn't try to sell it as a regular system -- I vaguely recall Ford used it at one point -- but that may have been more of a bread on the waters, what the heck kind of thing to try to recoup some of their investments costs. My impression is that the people actually working on the system at MIT, at least, did not regard keeping the thing running and reliable as their top priority. If they thought of something new and nifty to try, they would.
The problem is not the halogen atoms themselves, but the chemical reactivity a carbon atom gets when it's bonded to a halogen atom. That is, an organic compound that contains carbon-chlorine bonds is obnoxious not because of the chlorine atoms, but because the chlorine atoms "activate" the carbon atoms to which they're bonded (more precisely they make it far easier for nucleophilic and radical reactions to happen at the carbon atom) so that the carbon atom can do chemistry inside you (or inside some other animal) that you really don't want to happen, e.g. mutating your DNA. This is why chlorinated organic compounds (e.g. PCBs, perc, carbon tet) tend to be tightly regulated.
The halogens themselves (Cl_2 et cetera) and the halogen-oxygen compounds you find in swimming pools (e.g. hypochlorite anions) are merely noxiously caustic, like acid. At high enough concentrations they might scar your lungs and skin, or kill you, but they won't seep into your tissues and do insidious chemistry that gives you cancer or lupus, and they're quite harmless at low concentrations (e.g. what you find in your pool, or in seawater).
I know a lot of people will advise you to consult a lawyer, but my advice, as one who has consulted lawyers far more often than I'd wish to have had, is not to.
First of all, the law is not nearly as clear-cut as geeky programmer types think it is. As a rule, the law is roughly speaking some mash-up of what the legislature wrote, what the judge thinks ought to be so, and what a jury of random folks majoring in theater and journalism at the local community college think it ought to be. Hence a good lawyer is probably not going to be able to give you an precise and definitive answer on all your what-if scenarios. Instead, he'll probably agree with you on general grounds that the contract is evil, vicious, and you are a noble person dreadfully wronged blah blah (this is just advertising, an appeal to your vanity, so you won't forget him when you someday need a lawyer). If you press him on specifics, the most he's likely to do is tell you roughly how he would argue the case against the contract if he needed to, but he's unlikely to guarantee it will work.
Secondly, aside from satisfying your injured pride, what would be the result of asking a lawyer and setting yourself back $500 or so? Suppose the lawyer agrees it's a smelly contract, and a court might rule this or that aspect unenforceable, if push came to shove? What are you going to do with this information? Go to your boss and say Ha! All your base are belong us! and he's just going to say Curses! Foiled again! and tear up the NDA, maybe give you a raise for showing initiative and helpfully pointing out the folly of the company's ways? I mean, as opposed to marking you down as a pain in the ass who needs to be shitcanned at the first opportunity, like maybe right now? Your feelings would probably be more effectively soothed if you spent that $500 buying pretty girls drinks in a club.
Finally, if you just have enough mental discipline to keep your mouth shut when you need to, this doesn't matter anyway. Suppose you do have some kick-ass wonderful idea while you're working for this bunch, and you decide you want to take it elsewhere. All you need to do is not keep notes on your idea in your office (duh), not work on it using company computers and networks (duh), not talk boastfully about it around the water cooler -- this is the hard part -- and just generally keep your thoughts to yourself as long as you work there and for six months afterward. When your killer idea takes the world by storm it's going to be up to your former employers to prove in court that you had the idea eight months earlier, when you still worked for them. But without the evidence you've carefully avoided providing, they're screwed. They can't read your mind.
As for the ethics involved: anyone who gives you a contract like that to sign has made their lack of morals completely clear. You owe them no consideration in return whatsoever. Indeed, if you used them to pay your rent while secretly working out your brilliant idea at home, they'd have only gotten what they deserve.
Actually, maybe the problem is the theory that top-notch computing work can be done for free, without paying the people who do it, because they just love the fame. This was a reasonable proposition once upon a time, when programming up a Web browser was an amazing trick and could get you widely recognized, leading perhaps to an interesting (and well-paying) job. But is that true any more? Are top-quality programmers willing to work on Mozilla -- and by "work" I don't mean just program, but also manage the beast, do market research to see what the users want, fix bugs, yadda yadda -- for free, just for the glory of it? I'm thinking maybe not so much any more.
Which means Mozilla could consider a third evil and join the nasty capitalist system by figuring out exactly what value they are providing to their customers, and charging for it. Instead of trying to figure out for which rich aristrocrat (e.g. Google or MS) they want to be the bought mistress.
I'm really sympathetic to this idea. Personally, it'd be great. When I was on a university faculty, I never thought twice about access to papers. If the journal had an online version, it was pretty much guaranteed that the university had a subscription and (thanks the magic of IP mapped subscription) I could just access the stuff from my office computer.
Now, in private industry, it's a whole 'nother ballgame. If I don't want to trudge down to the God-damned library to read papers, which is very expensive in terms of my time, I'm screwed. I work for a small company, and there's no way we could afford subscriptions to all the journals I might like to occasionally read an article or two from.
But on the other hand...who is going to pay the salaries of all the people who collect and publish scientific papers? I realize we don't have so many typesetters and draftsmen and layout artists needed, since stuff can be distributed right from the author's PDF file. But that just means we have to pay for server bandwidth, people to set up good security so that the server doesn't get hacked and start spewing a billion penis-pill ads, people to program a simple but robust user interface so people can upload and download papers, pay other (expensive) people to maintain a database and good search engine so you can find what you're looking for, et cetera and so forth. No way it won't cost loads of money to distribute high-quality work broadly.
So who's going to pay for this? Should the taxpayers just take on this cost, too? The gummint set up a big server and run it? Is it really fair that all taxpayers pay for a service that a relatively miniscule number (mostly research scientists in academia and industry) are going to use? Or should it be some kind of overhead charged to each grant? (But in that case what happens to the private industry researcher not supported by a grant?)
It's a nice academic-minded wish, that stuff should just be free, but it misses the ugly fact of TANSTAAFL that all of us outside the ivory tower understand all too well. "Free" just means you personally don't pay the cost, which means some other poor schlub is paying his cost and yours. (Indeed, the fact of the matter right now is that university researchers get virtually free access to scientific journals, since the subscription fees are typically paid by the university with tax-free money, and the massive cost of providing that is paid for my researchers in the private sector, who pay enormous fees out of taxable income for their subscriptions.)
I don't have any good simple answers, and I agree something should be done, as the present system is Byzantine and unfair, and probably needlessly expensive -- but a blind mandate from Congress that research results should be "freely" available, unless accompanied by some plausible, fully-funded plan to pay for making it available, is just more unreal lawyerly crap like legislating that all children must test above average, declaring poverty and stupidity illegal, requiring all cars to get a billion miles per gallon by 2025, or defining pi as 3.
I think people that starve themselves thin are the exception. Most that get thin do so by eating better and exercise.
Well, fair enough, but I think you're crazy. I see very few thin people who are as fit as their weight would suggest. They don't look like marathon runners, they look like runway models. Go to a national park and watch "normal" weight people over age 25 or so hike up trails. Most get about 500 yards before they start puffing and thinking about taking a break. Given that our remote ancestors routinely walked 20 miles a day cross country, this is not good news. We weren't designed for such a low energy output lifestyle. It's like driving a Ferarri in 1st gear all the time.
Also, women carry more fat so 35% may not be unhealthy at all
Nope. Try here, or do a little googling. For women anything over 32% body fat is bad news. For men it should be under 25%. Optimal is about 5-10% for men, 15-20% for women.
I don't think it's that putting on weight when you're very old keeps you healthy. It's more that if you are keeping the weight when you're old then you're probably healthy.
Generally when you get very old a lot of stuff stops working well, including your digestion, your kidneys, liver, and so forth. That makes it harder for you to extract what you need from your diet and keep your weight up. Your thyroid and testosterone start slacking off, too, which depresses your energy level and causes your muscles to start wasting away. Finally, if you've got a cancer that will, for unknown reasons, generally cause you to lose weight. (Most men over 85 have a slow-growing prostate cancer, for example.)
So I suspect in this case weight is just a proxy for general good health. It's sort of like how a low heart rate is a proxy for general good health when you're young, but it would be nuts to take steps (like consuming barbiturates) to deliberate slow the heart rate in the mistaken notion that this causes good health.
As others have pointed out, BMI is an excellent shorthand for the average person. All you really need to do is recognize that there are plenty of individual variations that you need to think about. Well, duh.
But to add to your comment, I believe a further limitation of the BMI is that people of appropriate weight often have an unhealthy amount of fat nevertheless. The reason is probably because modern humans normally achieve a lower weight by eating less, but not by eating better, or by more exercise. So there are plenty of girls out there who are skinny, "normal" BMI, but are also 35% fat by weight, which is not healthy.
I saw an interesting Nova show the other day about 12 total couch potatoes training for the Boston Marathon. At the beginning they all got a very complete sports physical, which involved a lot more careful measurement of their general fitness than any of us ever gets, fancy MRIs and treadmill tests and all. (Got to avoid someone dying on the show and letting WGBH in for some hideous lawsuit.) What they found, somewhat to their surprise, was that a lot of people were of "normal" BMI but had unhealthily high fat percentages and terrible cardiovascular fitness. Others were actually technically overweight, but for random reasons (probably mostly genetics) had decent cardiovascular fitness and not all that much fat. The bottom line is that knowing your true individual level of fitness can only begin with the BMI.
Even fat percentage has its limitations. I hear that what kind of fat you have matters a lot. Men don't want the kind of fat that adds to your belly, because it's more associated with CAD (coronary artery disease, the precursor to the heart attack). I hear girls should prefer fat that adds to their ass or cottage cheeses their thighs, rather than gives them big tits, which seems a bit heartless of Mother Nature.
Er, on what basis? You can't sue someone for wrongful termination just because you don't like why you were fired, and then hope the jury sees it your way. There isn't some principle written into the law that says you can only be fired if a jury of your peers agrees it was "fair."
In essence, there are some very narrowly and specifically defined grounds for a wrongful termination suit, namely discrimination based on your sex, race or age, or if you were fired in retaliation for "whistle-blowing" to any of several government agencies. There may be others, too. But the point is that unless a legislature has defined specific grounds for a wrongful termination suit, you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all, and you have zero recourse unless the company failed to honor your employment contract.
Especially when, as is probable in this case, the guy agreed when he was hired -- in writing, or by the act of showing up for his first day of work -- that he would abide by certain clearly-stated corporate principles, e.g. not boffing people who report to you, and then was caught not doing so. A lawsuit that can't allege sex or race discrimination, and which has to overcome violation of his conditions of employment, probably won't even come before a jury -- a judge would toss it as soon as the defendant asked him to.
I remember noticing this "feature" of ext3 when it first came out, and as a consequence I've held on to ext2 ever since. Probably that's a non-starter for servers and such, but for a personal computer it seems to work OK. The very rare fsck file repair needed when the power fails has never been a problem. No doubt someday the power will fail and the filesystem will be corrupted beyond repair, but, well (1) it hasn't happened to me yet in 10+ years of using Linux, and (2) that's what backup is for anyway.
I mean, now that we know it's difficult to work with high-energy equipment, can we stop thinking NASA is a bunch of dunderheads for having the three very bad days (Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia) across half a century of otherwise amazing success?
Quite right. God help us if scientists ruled the world -- and I say that as one. When it comes to their knowledge of and skills in social behaviour, as opposed to physics or biology, scientists are very often retarded. They are often terrible at forging consensus among competing interests or finding workable compromises, and they have no skill at all with using social myths to hold interest groups together. Often they're intellectual imperialists, and would cheerfully jam The Truth (whatever they see it to be) down everyone's throat by force in the misguided belief that all disagreement is merely the result of ignorance, and can be cured by a little (force-fed if necessary) education.
Fact is, humans specialize, and people good in one field (politics or science) are generally awful in another. Yes, politicians are typically stupid when it comes to science, and a debate like this would expose that, for all of us better-informed about science to have a good laugh.
But if you asked a roomful of scientists -- or even of the/. crowd here -- to get together and agree on every word of the text of a law on an important subject (IP law, education, national security) that would also garner enough support from everyday folks to, say, pass Congress, then I expect you'd get a big laugh too.
Instead of trying to ridicule politicians for not knowing enough science (while they smirk behind their hands at the political naivete of scientists and engineers), maybe we could try respecting each others' specialized skills? Maybe the politicians could learn to respect the scientists' grasp of what Mother Nature allows and does not allow, and the scientists could learn to respect the politicians' grasp of what human nature allows and does not allow?
But why is it more likely to see stuff that isn't there when you're tired? That's curious, is it not?
Daniel Dennett has an interesting point about visual processing in one of his book that might explain it. He points out that we process images not in the naive way, which is crudely summarized as: eye collects all the pixels, transmits it via Neuron Transfer Protocol to the visual cortex, which then studies the assembled image and notifies the consciousness of what the eye has seen.
Instead, he suggests it's a continuous back and forth process: specialized cells in the eye and visual cortex detect elements of the image -- a smooth border here, a bit of movement there -- and pass it up to a cloud of hysterical obsessive meaningfulness agents who are primed to "detect" various kinds of visual meaningfulness, such as a creature moving in our field of view, or a known face, or a known object, et cetera. This generates a small cloud of eurekas, which are then sent back down to the specialized cells for confirmation or refutation. That is, a group of cells sends up a message "movement in sector 32A" and several agents reply with "That's a mouse!", "That's just a floater in the eye you idiot," and "That's a moving shadow from the fan." Then the lower level cells match the theory (mouse, floater, shadow) against more raw data from the retina and send confirmation or refutation back up (no, maybe, maybe). The process continues until a consensus is reached, and then consciousness is informed.
Clearly when the brain is tired, however, it's possible for the process to not work out so well, and half-baked not well-confirmed hypotheses about what's in the visual field can bubble up to consciousness. So we see things. But it's very interesting that we see things, and don't just experience random glitches -- streaks, lights, shadows -- in the visual field.
Well, alas you get more and more of them as you get older. When I was in my 20s and 30s I didn't notice them much. Now they're there all the time. Oh well. Here's hoping the rejuvenation technology we were promised in 1970s sf starts taking off soon...
One theory I have about why they are more noticeable now, however, is that people slowly stop using binocular vision as you get older. Your lens clouds up and it gets hard to do the focussing required for genuine binocular vision anyhow, so my theory is that your brain starts to just abandon the technology and ignoring the input from the non-dominant eye. (You don't start running into things because your brain still uses the technique of comparing the apparent size of objects with their known, memorized actual sizes, e.g. the distance of a car is computed by comparing the apparent size with its known actual size. And by the time you're middle-aged, your mental "library" of objects is so complete that you practically never run across an object the size of which your brain doesn't already know.)
See, what I've noticed is that the floaters are more noticeable in the non-dominant eye. They're really the shadows of things on the retina, and if the eye is not busy looking at something, wandering slightly, and is slightly defocussed to boot, then the shadows are larger and less stationary -- hence, more noticeable.
For months I saw something that seemed to be a person moving just at the edge of my vision, on rare occasion, usually late at night when I was alone reading a book. But when I got up to look carefully, no one was there, or could possibly have been there.
Ghosts!
Or...maybe not. I went to the optometrist for my regular check-up, and she found a bunch of "floaters" in my eye. If I look at a blank wall, I can see them sometimes, they drift in and out of my field of view, and if I look steadily, the optic system edits them out and they vanish.
So, of course, when it was late at night and I was already tired, and moved my eyes after staring at something steadily (the book) a floater would sometimes wander into view briefly, and I'd "see" a moving shadow for a second or two.
That is, why do we have this superelaborate expensive annoying structure, the only purpose of which is to translate one string (the hostname) into another (the IP address)? Sure, a nice 32 bit number (0x4a7d1368) is easier for programs to work with than a variable-length alphanumeric string ("www.l.google.com").
But so what? The only legitimate purpose of technology is to make our lives easier, not to serve as a temple in which we practice the complicated correct forms of worship. My 2007 Odyssey is way more complicated under the hood than my 1968 Volkswagen was (and of course that means car designers and car mechanics have a much more complicated and demanding job these days), but the 2007 car is much easier for the user to drive and take care of than the 1968 car. That's as it should be. Technology should be designed and evolve so that the ease and convenience of the user is the first priority. How easy or cool it is to implement should be a distant secondary goal only. (But programmers should not complain, because the more complicated and difficult a scheme is to implement, the better-paid the job of implementer is.)
The alphanumeric string that human beings find easy to remember and use should be the "real" address of an Internet host, and it should be up to the robots and programs behind the scenes to cope with the complexity of correcting routing packets to the destination using only this string.
More fundamentally, the idea of making one giant and (literally) global hash in which each host is mapped to a unique ID tag is violently contradictory to the way people naturally think. We naturally think in terms of local variables and namespaces. It perfectly possible for a bookstore in Liverpool to have the same name as a bookstore in Atlanta, because human beings consider the bookstore name a local variable and use the context ("Am I in England or Georgia?") to figure out the correct global meaning. Internet hostnames should work in a similar way; it should be possible for the Liverpool and Atlanta bookstores to have the same name on the Internet, too, with some method of choosing context to resolve ambiguity. Yes, I realize the dotted aspects of hostnames was supposed to do something like that ("foo.bar.com" versus "foo.baz.com"), but it clearly didn't work out that way. Perhaps because it was designed by people for whom the world was broken up into a few very large organizations (.mit.edu,.af.mil,...) containing a nice orderly heirarchy (.mit.edu ->.ee.mit.edu ->.rle.ee.mit.edu -> myhost.rle.ee.mit.edu). The real world doesn't look like that at all, which is why most people these days couldn't even tell you why there are dots in the URL and what purpose they were supposed to serve.
I also know lots of schemes that rely on the present madness would be broken. Tant pis. Can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.
Slashdot Mirror
...then marine insurance rates would almost certainly go down.
Er...I don't recall saying anything about a new detector. The fact that it's not wholly new technology is irrelevant to the question of whether this machine -- or rather, as I actually said, this general area of development -- is a significant overall technological advance. Shrinking your minimum feature size on a chip from 150 to 60 nm may not involve brand-new tech, but it's still a major technological advance, and enables lots of stuff you couldn't do before.
/. and all, where we shoot from the hip, but did you actually read what I wrote?
You're right about the use of contrast, I made a (minor) mistake, and thanks for the correction.
Finally, your statement that the X-ray dose is a lot higher in the old machines is my second major point, because the newer generation of machines are supposed to help that: from TFA "A new scanner has been unveiled which can produce 3D body images of unprecedented clarity while reducing radiation by as much as 80%.") I realize this is
I dunno about losing the dynamic info, either. In the first place, I was talking about screening not precise diagnostics on someone who's already a candidate for intense therapy. I doubt you need such detailed information to rule CAD in or out for most of your middle-aged population with a BMI above 28 and elevated LDL. For those who don't pass the initial screen, you can go on to do catheter angiography or whatever. Secondly, TFA suggests that it's possible near real-time imaging is coming within reach, and then you will have the dynamic information, too.
I don't disagree the breathlessness of TFA is overdone, but then that's always the case with journalists. They're an excitable lot. (Something to bear in mind next time they screech about an imminent danger of fascism or ecocide.) But suggesting the whole field of technological effort is nothing more than the equivalent of changing the chrome grill style on this model year's Camry is equally ignorant, IMHO.
You're right about the contrast material, so thanks for the correction.
Yes, it's already being done, but unfortunately as another commenter notes, and I said, it now involves a lot of radiation, so the ability to get it done at much lower doses is significant news.
Balls to the stupid car analogy. You might as well say the Pentium was merely adding chrome and tailfins to the 486.
I don't think it's so important how long it takes for a cargo to get somewhere so much as it's important that it get there when it's scheduled to do so, not earlier and not later. Modern manufacturing, to say nothing of port operations, rail schedules, et cetera, are pretty reliant on things being delivered at a certain hour on a certain day. If a boat happens to come in a day late or something, everything is flung out of synchrony -- you have to pay workers who are doing nothing, because the boat isn't there yet, and you have to hire other guys at overtime rates when the boat does come in, and meanwhile you've missed your rail connection and your factory has run out of raw materials or your showroom has run out of the popular new model of widget...
TFA doesn't mention it, but if you were older you'd probably realize this is a big deal. Maybe not this particular machine, but the general approach.
What this replaces is not an MRI or a CAT scan, but an angiogram. That's the nasty procedure where they inject dye into your coronary arteries through a catheter threaded up through your femoral artery while they image your heart, so they can see whether you have CAD (coronary artery disease, where the arteries supplying the heart are narrowed or blocked, the immediate precursor to a heart attack). This is an unpleasant experience, to say the least. It's also expensive, since it requires a skilled operator to thread the catheter up to your heart. Then there's the possibility of complications, from infection at the site where your artery got punctured to the formation of micro-clots from damage to the artery walls that might cause a heart attack, or stroke.
These newfangled detectors promise to be able to image the heart in such exquisite 3D detail that your cardiologist can basically just look at your heart and see whether you have CAD, and how far along it is. And all you need to do is lie on the X-ray table for a few minutes. No dye, no catheters, no expensive trained personnel, zero risk of complications, far lower cost, and a much briefer time in the hospital.
The other important news here is the lower X-ray exposure. Existing machines that can do this kind of imaging of the heart have given you such a blast of X-rays that they don't justify the increased risk of e.g. cancer unless you are already seen as fairly high-risk for CAD. When they get the X-ray exposure down, it will become possible to screen lower-risk people for CAD, perhaps even the general public.
Right now, all we can do to screen the general populace for CAD is monitor iffy surrogate measures, like your lipid profile (your "cholesterol"), your family history, your weight, et cetera. On the basis of these measures we prescribe many $billions of drugs (e.g. Lipitor) and further, more invasive testing.
But we know these surrogate measures are only somewhat and very generally correlated with CAD. How much better it would be if we could easily and cheaply monitor not the possible precursors to CAD but CAD itself -- the actual narrowing of the coronary arteries. It could be a public-health breakthrough. Plenty of people have CAD without having the classic warning signs (especially women), and plenty of people with sky-high cholesterol et cetera have no CAD at all. It's worth remembering that even in these modern times, the first symptom of coronary heart disease in some 30% of cases is a fatal heart attack.
All they need is to have a moderately strong, steady wind that is abaft the beam. Plus good enough weather that they don't risk the kite and its hardware. If you sail the traditional sail-era trade routes the wind is abaft the beam quite a bit more than 50% of the time, the wind is steady at 1000' in the open ocean pretty much always as long as the weather is good, and you can supply your own finagle factor for how often the weather is good.
Frankly, I think the major limitation on any kind of sail power has been crew cost. Big freighters run with tiny crews these days, and often not very well trained and not especially reliable, except for the top few officers. Getting a crew that can handle a big sail competently, without endangering the cost of the apparatus, sounds expensive. But maybe they've got a robotic, computerized control system that can eliminate that problem.
Think this through a little more carefully. Where do you find weapons-grade fissionables? Iranian centrifuges notwithstanding, it's still very difficult to enrich uranium unless you're a fairly wealthy country with a biggish industrial plant devoted to the cause (which then makes you a tempting target for IDF air raids, cf. Syria, recent mystery raid into). And to make Pu, you need a working nuclear reactor, plus some decent chemists on staff. Not likely if you're al-Wacko, the latest crazed Islamic suicide squad.
No, the best place to find weapons-grade fissionables is in the First World, especially now that tons of nuclear weapons are being decommissioned, and when e.g. Russian weapons security is (1) laughably inadequate, and (2) reliant on the purity of motives of drastically underpaid and often embittered ex-Red Army apparatchiks.
So, yeah, finding good technological means to monitor the possible exit points of fissionables from First World sources is indeed not a bad way to throw a monkey wrench in the plans of would-be nuclear terrorists. Consider it the equivalent of having a security camera in a gun-dealer's shop. It's not there to monitor the dealer or his customers, but rather to prevent hoodies from breaking into the shop and making off with some useful hardware.
Is there any other tech/geek/nerd topic out there other than the fucking RIAA and the fate of college downloaders?
/. main page. Is there any remaining conceivable nuance and flame that hasn't been explored, yet?
Christ, this must be the 65th 'story' on this that's been on the
This is starting to seem like an experiment in Pavlovian reflex training. Soon, someone will come out with a nice little Firefox add-on, where as soon as you type in http://yro.slashdot.org/ and without needing to actually send out the TCP SYN packet, the screen will immediately fill with rants about the RIAA, lawyers, conspiracy theories of this and that, Ron Paul and Iraq, et cetera, already formatted and modded up 'n' down.
I used Multics for a while at MIT, and even wrote some user documentation for it.
From that point of view, it sure looked like a research OS. They were tinkering with the damn thing all the time, and it would have interesting new flaws and idiosyncrasies regularly, as well as be out of service at random intervals while they upgraded from version 35.6a to 35.6ab. If you wanted stability and reliability, you were expected to use the IBM CMS system.
I don't say that Honeywell didn't try to sell it as a regular system -- I vaguely recall Ford used it at one point -- but that may have been more of a bread on the waters, what the heck kind of thing to try to recoup some of their investments costs. My impression is that the people actually working on the system at MIT, at least, did not regard keeping the thing running and reliable as their top priority. If they thought of something new and nifty to try, they would.
The problem is not the halogen atoms themselves, but the chemical reactivity a carbon atom gets when it's bonded to a halogen atom. That is, an organic compound that contains carbon-chlorine bonds is obnoxious not because of the chlorine atoms, but because the chlorine atoms "activate" the carbon atoms to which they're bonded (more precisely they make it far easier for nucleophilic and radical reactions to happen at the carbon atom) so that the carbon atom can do chemistry inside you (or inside some other animal) that you really don't want to happen, e.g. mutating your DNA. This is why chlorinated organic compounds (e.g. PCBs, perc, carbon tet) tend to be tightly regulated.
The halogens themselves (Cl_2 et cetera) and the halogen-oxygen compounds you find in swimming pools (e.g. hypochlorite anions) are merely noxiously caustic, like acid. At high enough concentrations they might scar your lungs and skin, or kill you, but they won't seep into your tissues and do insidious chemistry that gives you cancer or lupus, and they're quite harmless at low concentrations (e.g. what you find in your pool, or in seawater).
I know a lot of people will advise you to consult a lawyer, but my advice, as one who has consulted lawyers far more often than I'd wish to have had, is not to.
First of all, the law is not nearly as clear-cut as geeky programmer types think it is. As a rule, the law is roughly speaking some mash-up of what the legislature wrote, what the judge thinks ought to be so, and what a jury of random folks majoring in theater and journalism at the local community college think it ought to be. Hence a good lawyer is probably not going to be able to give you an precise and definitive answer on all your what-if scenarios. Instead, he'll probably agree with you on general grounds that the contract is evil, vicious, and you are a noble person dreadfully wronged blah blah (this is just advertising, an appeal to your vanity, so you won't forget him when you someday need a lawyer). If you press him on specifics, the most he's likely to do is tell you roughly how he would argue the case against the contract if he needed to, but he's unlikely to guarantee it will work.
Secondly, aside from satisfying your injured pride, what would be the result of asking a lawyer and setting yourself back $500 or so? Suppose the lawyer agrees it's a smelly contract, and a court might rule this or that aspect unenforceable, if push came to shove? What are you going to do with this information? Go to your boss and say Ha! All your base are belong us! and he's just going to say Curses! Foiled again! and tear up the NDA, maybe give you a raise for showing initiative and helpfully pointing out the folly of the company's ways? I mean, as opposed to marking you down as a pain in the ass who needs to be shitcanned at the first opportunity, like maybe right now? Your feelings would probably be more effectively soothed if you spent that $500 buying pretty girls drinks in a club.
Finally, if you just have enough mental discipline to keep your mouth shut when you need to, this doesn't matter anyway. Suppose you do have some kick-ass wonderful idea while you're working for this bunch, and you decide you want to take it elsewhere. All you need to do is not keep notes on your idea in your office (duh), not work on it using company computers and networks (duh), not talk boastfully about it around the water cooler -- this is the hard part -- and just generally keep your thoughts to yourself as long as you work there and for six months afterward. When your killer idea takes the world by storm it's going to be up to your former employers to prove in court that you had the idea eight months earlier, when you still worked for them. But without the evidence you've carefully avoided providing, they're screwed. They can't read your mind.
As for the ethics involved: anyone who gives you a contract like that to sign has made their lack of morals completely clear. You owe them no consideration in return whatsoever. Indeed, if you used them to pay your rent while secretly working out your brilliant idea at home, they'd have only gotten what they deserve.
Actually, maybe the problem is the theory that top-notch computing work can be done for free, without paying the people who do it, because they just love the fame. This was a reasonable proposition once upon a time, when programming up a Web browser was an amazing trick and could get you widely recognized, leading perhaps to an interesting (and well-paying) job. But is that true any more? Are top-quality programmers willing to work on Mozilla -- and by "work" I don't mean just program, but also manage the beast, do market research to see what the users want, fix bugs, yadda yadda -- for free, just for the glory of it? I'm thinking maybe not so much any more.
Which means Mozilla could consider a third evil and join the nasty capitalist system by figuring out exactly what value they are providing to their customers, and charging for it. Instead of trying to figure out for which rich aristrocrat (e.g. Google or MS) they want to be the bought mistress.
I'm really sympathetic to this idea. Personally, it'd be great. When I was on a university faculty, I never thought twice about access to papers. If the journal had an online version, it was pretty much guaranteed that the university had a subscription and (thanks the magic of IP mapped subscription) I could just access the stuff from my office computer.
Now, in private industry, it's a whole 'nother ballgame. If I don't want to trudge down to the God-damned library to read papers, which is very expensive in terms of my time, I'm screwed. I work for a small company, and there's no way we could afford subscriptions to all the journals I might like to occasionally read an article or two from.
But on the other hand...who is going to pay the salaries of all the people who collect and publish scientific papers? I realize we don't have so many typesetters and draftsmen and layout artists needed, since stuff can be distributed right from the author's PDF file. But that just means we have to pay for server bandwidth, people to set up good security so that the server doesn't get hacked and start spewing a billion penis-pill ads, people to program a simple but robust user interface so people can upload and download papers, pay other (expensive) people to maintain a database and good search engine so you can find what you're looking for, et cetera and so forth. No way it won't cost loads of money to distribute high-quality work broadly.
So who's going to pay for this? Should the taxpayers just take on this cost, too? The gummint set up a big server and run it? Is it really fair that all taxpayers pay for a service that a relatively miniscule number (mostly research scientists in academia and industry) are going to use? Or should it be some kind of overhead charged to each grant? (But in that case what happens to the private industry researcher not supported by a grant?)
It's a nice academic-minded wish, that stuff should just be free, but it misses the ugly fact of TANSTAAFL that all of us outside the ivory tower understand all too well. "Free" just means you personally don't pay the cost, which means some other poor schlub is paying his cost and yours. (Indeed, the fact of the matter right now is that university researchers get virtually free access to scientific journals, since the subscription fees are typically paid by the university with tax-free money, and the massive cost of providing that is paid for my researchers in the private sector, who pay enormous fees out of taxable income for their subscriptions.)
I don't have any good simple answers, and I agree something should be done, as the present system is Byzantine and unfair, and probably needlessly expensive -- but a blind mandate from Congress that research results should be "freely" available, unless accompanied by some plausible, fully-funded plan to pay for making it available, is just more unreal lawyerly crap like legislating that all children must test above average, declaring poverty and stupidity illegal, requiring all cars to get a billion miles per gallon by 2025, or defining pi as 3.
I think people that starve themselves thin are the exception. Most that get thin do so by eating better and exercise.
Well, fair enough, but I think you're crazy. I see very few thin people who are as fit as their weight would suggest. They don't look like marathon runners, they look like runway models. Go to a national park and watch "normal" weight people over age 25 or so hike up trails. Most get about 500 yards before they start puffing and thinking about taking a break. Given that our remote ancestors routinely walked 20 miles a day cross country, this is not good news. We weren't designed for such a low energy output lifestyle. It's like driving a Ferarri in 1st gear all the time.
Also, women carry more fat so 35% may not be unhealthy at all
Nope. Try here, or do a little googling. For women anything over 32% body fat is bad news. For men it should be under 25%. Optimal is about 5-10% for men, 15-20% for women.
I don't think it's that putting on weight when you're very old keeps you healthy. It's more that if you are keeping the weight when you're old then you're probably healthy.
Generally when you get very old a lot of stuff stops working well, including your digestion, your kidneys, liver, and so forth. That makes it harder for you to extract what you need from your diet and keep your weight up. Your thyroid and testosterone start slacking off, too, which depresses your energy level and causes your muscles to start wasting away. Finally, if you've got a cancer that will, for unknown reasons, generally cause you to lose weight. (Most men over 85 have a slow-growing prostate cancer, for example.)
So I suspect in this case weight is just a proxy for general good health. It's sort of like how a low heart rate is a proxy for general good health when you're young, but it would be nuts to take steps (like consuming barbiturates) to deliberate slow the heart rate in the mistaken notion that this causes good health.
As others have pointed out, BMI is an excellent shorthand for the average person. All you really need to do is recognize that there are plenty of individual variations that you need to think about. Well, duh.
But to add to your comment, I believe a further limitation of the BMI is that people of appropriate weight often have an unhealthy amount of fat nevertheless. The reason is probably because modern humans normally achieve a lower weight by eating less, but not by eating better, or by more exercise. So there are plenty of girls out there who are skinny, "normal" BMI, but are also 35% fat by weight, which is not healthy.
I saw an interesting Nova show the other day about 12 total couch potatoes training for the Boston Marathon. At the beginning they all got a very complete sports physical, which involved a lot more careful measurement of their general fitness than any of us ever gets, fancy MRIs and treadmill tests and all. (Got to avoid someone dying on the show and letting WGBH in for some hideous lawsuit.) What they found, somewhat to their surprise, was that a lot of people were of "normal" BMI but had unhealthily high fat percentages and terrible cardiovascular fitness. Others were actually technically overweight, but for random reasons (probably mostly genetics) had decent cardiovascular fitness and not all that much fat. The bottom line is that knowing your true individual level of fitness can only begin with the BMI.
Even fat percentage has its limitations. I hear that what kind of fat you have matters a lot. Men don't want the kind of fat that adds to your belly, because it's more associated with CAD (coronary artery disease, the precursor to the heart attack). I hear girls should prefer fat that adds to their ass or cottage cheeses their thighs, rather than gives them big tits, which seems a bit heartless of Mother Nature.
Er, on what basis? You can't sue someone for wrongful termination just because you don't like why you were fired, and then hope the jury sees it your way. There isn't some principle written into the law that says you can only be fired if a jury of your peers agrees it was "fair."
In essence, there are some very narrowly and specifically defined grounds for a wrongful termination suit, namely discrimination based on your sex, race or age, or if you were fired in retaliation for "whistle-blowing" to any of several government agencies. There may be others, too. But the point is that unless a legislature has defined specific grounds for a wrongful termination suit, you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all, and you have zero recourse unless the company failed to honor your employment contract.
Especially when, as is probable in this case, the guy agreed when he was hired -- in writing, or by the act of showing up for his first day of work -- that he would abide by certain clearly-stated corporate principles, e.g. not boffing people who report to you, and then was caught not doing so. A lawsuit that can't allege sex or race discrimination, and which has to overcome violation of his conditions of employment, probably won't even come before a jury -- a judge would toss it as soon as the defendant asked him to.
Yep. Google Harry Stonecipher, former CEO of Boeing.
I remember noticing this "feature" of ext3 when it first came out, and as a consequence I've held on to ext2 ever since. Probably that's a non-starter for servers and such, but for a personal computer it seems to work OK. The very rare fsck file repair needed when the power fails has never been a problem. No doubt someday the power will fail and the filesystem will be corrupted beyond repair, but, well (1) it hasn't happened to me yet in 10+ years of using Linux, and (2) that's what backup is for anyway.
I mean, now that we know it's difficult to work with high-energy equipment, can we stop thinking NASA is a bunch of dunderheads for having the three very bad days (Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia) across half a century of otherwise amazing success?
I would not want Albert Einstein as President.
/. crowd here -- to get together and agree on every word of the text of a law on an important subject (IP law, education, national security) that would also garner enough support from everyday folks to, say, pass Congress, then I expect you'd get a big laugh too.
Quite right. God help us if scientists ruled the world -- and I say that as one. When it comes to their knowledge of and skills in social behaviour, as opposed to physics or biology, scientists are very often retarded. They are often terrible at forging consensus among competing interests or finding workable compromises, and they have no skill at all with using social myths to hold interest groups together. Often they're intellectual imperialists, and would cheerfully jam The Truth (whatever they see it to be) down everyone's throat by force in the misguided belief that all disagreement is merely the result of ignorance, and can be cured by a little (force-fed if necessary) education.
Fact is, humans specialize, and people good in one field (politics or science) are generally awful in another. Yes, politicians are typically stupid when it comes to science, and a debate like this would expose that, for all of us better-informed about science to have a good laugh.
But if you asked a roomful of scientists -- or even of the
Instead of trying to ridicule politicians for not knowing enough science (while they smirk behind their hands at the political naivete of scientists and engineers), maybe we could try respecting each others' specialized skills? Maybe the politicians could learn to respect the scientists' grasp of what Mother Nature allows and does not allow, and the scientists could learn to respect the politicians' grasp of what human nature allows and does not allow?
But why is it more likely to see stuff that isn't there when you're tired? That's curious, is it not?
Daniel Dennett has an interesting point about visual processing in one of his book that might explain it. He points out that we process images not in the naive way, which is crudely summarized as: eye collects all the pixels, transmits it via Neuron Transfer Protocol to the visual cortex, which then studies the assembled image and notifies the consciousness of what the eye has seen.
Instead, he suggests it's a continuous back and forth process: specialized cells in the eye and visual cortex detect elements of the image -- a smooth border here, a bit of movement there -- and pass it up to a cloud of hysterical obsessive meaningfulness agents who are primed to "detect" various kinds of visual meaningfulness, such as a creature moving in our field of view, or a known face, or a known object, et cetera. This generates a small cloud of eurekas, which are then sent back down to the specialized cells for confirmation or refutation. That is, a group of cells sends up a message "movement in sector 32A" and several agents reply with "That's a mouse!", "That's just a floater in the eye you idiot," and "That's a moving shadow from the fan." Then the lower level cells match the theory (mouse, floater, shadow) against more raw data from the retina and send confirmation or refutation back up (no, maybe, maybe). The process continues until a consensus is reached, and then consciousness is informed.
Clearly when the brain is tired, however, it's possible for the process to not work out so well, and half-baked not well-confirmed hypotheses about what's in the visual field can bubble up to consciousness. So we see things. But it's very interesting that we see things, and don't just experience random glitches -- streaks, lights, shadows -- in the visual field.
Well, alas you get more and more of them as you get older. When I was in my 20s and 30s I didn't notice them much. Now they're there all the time. Oh well. Here's hoping the rejuvenation technology we were promised in 1970s sf starts taking off soon...
One theory I have about why they are more noticeable now, however, is that people slowly stop using binocular vision as you get older. Your lens clouds up and it gets hard to do the focussing required for genuine binocular vision anyhow, so my theory is that your brain starts to just abandon the technology and ignoring the input from the non-dominant eye. (You don't start running into things because your brain still uses the technique of comparing the apparent size of objects with their known, memorized actual sizes, e.g. the distance of a car is computed by comparing the apparent size with its known actual size. And by the time you're middle-aged, your mental "library" of objects is so complete that you practically never run across an object the size of which your brain doesn't already know.)
See, what I've noticed is that the floaters are more noticeable in the non-dominant eye. They're really the shadows of things on the retina, and if the eye is not busy looking at something, wandering slightly, and is slightly defocussed to boot, then the shadows are larger and less stationary -- hence, more noticeable.
For months I saw something that seemed to be a person moving just at the edge of my vision, on rare occasion, usually late at night when I was alone reading a book. But when I got up to look carefully, no one was there, or could possibly have been there.
Ghosts!
Or...maybe not. I went to the optometrist for my regular check-up, and she found a bunch of "floaters" in my eye. If I look at a blank wall, I can see them sometimes, they drift in and out of my field of view, and if I look steadily, the optic system edits them out and they vanish.
So, of course, when it was late at night and I was already tired, and moved my eyes after staring at something steadily (the book) a floater would sometimes wander into view briefly, and I'd "see" a moving shadow for a second or two.
Why have domain name service at all?
.af.mil,...) containing a nice orderly heirarchy (.mit.edu -> .ee.mit.edu -> .rle.ee.mit.edu -> myhost.rle.ee.mit.edu). The real world doesn't look like that at all, which is why most people these days couldn't even tell you why there are dots in the URL and what purpose they were supposed to serve.
That is, why do we have this superelaborate expensive annoying structure, the only purpose of which is to translate one string (the hostname) into another (the IP address)? Sure, a nice 32 bit number (0x4a7d1368) is easier for programs to work with than a variable-length alphanumeric string ("www.l.google.com").
But so what? The only legitimate purpose of technology is to make our lives easier, not to serve as a temple in which we practice the complicated correct forms of worship. My 2007 Odyssey is way more complicated under the hood than my 1968 Volkswagen was (and of course that means car designers and car mechanics have a much more complicated and demanding job these days), but the 2007 car is much easier for the user to drive and take care of than the 1968 car. That's as it should be. Technology should be designed and evolve so that the ease and convenience of the user is the first priority. How easy or cool it is to implement should be a distant secondary goal only. (But programmers should not complain, because the more complicated and difficult a scheme is to implement, the better-paid the job of implementer is.)
The alphanumeric string that human beings find easy to remember and use should be the "real" address of an Internet host, and it should be up to the robots and programs behind the scenes to cope with the complexity of correcting routing packets to the destination using only this string.
More fundamentally, the idea of making one giant and (literally) global hash in which each host is mapped to a unique ID tag is violently contradictory to the way people naturally think. We naturally think in terms of local variables and namespaces. It perfectly possible for a bookstore in Liverpool to have the same name as a bookstore in Atlanta, because human beings consider the bookstore name a local variable and use the context ("Am I in England or Georgia?") to figure out the correct global meaning. Internet hostnames should work in a similar way; it should be possible for the Liverpool and Atlanta bookstores to have the same name on the Internet, too, with some method of choosing context to resolve ambiguity. Yes, I realize the dotted aspects of hostnames was supposed to do something like that ("foo.bar.com" versus "foo.baz.com"), but it clearly didn't work out that way. Perhaps because it was designed by people for whom the world was broken up into a few very large organizations (.mit.edu,
I also know lots of schemes that rely on the present madness would be broken. Tant pis. Can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.