For what it is worth, I think this is the "overheadprojector" that John McCain cited in a presidential debate as a $3 million example of government earmark abuse by Obama. Gosh, it's amazing what ordinary office equipment is capable of these days! It's nice to know the government has absolutely no interest in inspiring and educating children, advancing technology, and attracting tourism.
(By the way, that earmark, and the bill it was attached to, never became law)
I agree. The whole purpose of having a NYTimes app was to make accessing articles faster and look cleaner than via the website. (Yes, the NYT's motivation is also to enforce the paywall, but let's stick with my needs). But while I appreciate the articles showing up better than the website's rendering, that really is only of any use if I can actually get the app to load and show the articles. When the app takes forever to load, refresh its article listings, and display said articles, then it is of negative use to me.
So I stick with the website, which has the added bonus of making paywall circumvention a snap.
You are thinking of efficiency in terms of how much (electrical) energy you can get out from the (mostly heat) energy you can create in a fusion reaction. That is not the same as how rocket designers think of it. They think of efficiency in terms of: how much umph can you supply (in theory and in practice) for a given mass of fuel X using process Y. If you have 1 kg of propellant mass and shoot it away from you at 10 m/s, you aren't using it as efficiently as you would if you could shoot it away at 1000 m/s. They sum this up in a single number called specific impulse. Isp is measured in units of time, usually seconds. A conventional chemical rocket manages an Isp of a few hundred seconds. Ion engines in use today are a few thousand seconds. What the article is getting at is that this process could yield a specific impulse up to 40x conventional thruster propellants: for the same mass of fuel, you get 40x the change in spacecraft energy (kinetic and gravitational potential energies).
People still do that. However, for boards where you can have relatively thick traces (25 mils trace and space, say), I have heard good things about the laser-printer toner transfer method.
This is the major reason why the military has been investing heavily in green tech. A gallon of diesel fuel at the front lines in Afghanistan costs the military something like $400 because it first needs to be shipped in-country, then trucked through hostile territory on roads, and sometimes lashed to a mule and packed in. Plus, supply convoys are ripe targets - casualties due to roadside bombs these days are comparable, if not higher, than actual combat. The military realized this a couple of years ago, looking at the single-walled canvas tents they are cooling with A/C run from diesel generators in a 110 F desert. Being one of the biggest users of, well, everything in this world, their economies of scale and opportunities for savings at home and in theater are huge. They havebeenworkingon it, but it's a huge infrastructure and logistical change to undertake. If anything, it should give us all pause to realize how big a job the rest of the world will have to change our own infrastructure and habits to become more efficient.
While I use keyboard shortcuts for a whole lot of things in my day-to-day computing, it would not be possible for me to do my work without a mouse. Why? I do a fair bit of CAD, using software like Pro/E and Solidworks. Quite simply, there is no way to create or manipulate those 3D objects without a mouse. You could get far with the keyboard for viewing objects, and both of those CAD applications make extensive use of (heavily customizable) shortcuts for creating and executing features, but a lot of core operations (sketching, selecting, etc.) can only be done with a mouse.
If it were an open marketplace like, say, refrigerators, you could slap a green sticker on it and perhaps differentiate yourself. But that's not what is going on here. A tremendous problem in the particular case of these devices is that very few of them are sold directly to consumers: they are sold by the millions to cable companies, who then sell/lease them to their consumers with the myth that "If you want cable, you must use this box". The cable companies don't give a damn about how much power the boxes use: they aren't paying the bill. The consumers are largely oblivious, because it isn't their equipment, and they just want their insipid reality TV shows. Everyone with half a brain can look at this situation and say: gee, this is stupid, let's make the boxes use less power. But there is no incentive for any party to do it on their own. This is a clear case where government regulation makes a lot of sense.
If your goal is simply to build a device that can tick off the seconds for 10,000 years, then perhaps your design has merit. But the whole point of building this is to create a human experience, not merely an horologic device. People need to be able to experience the clock and, where possible, interact with it. That experience and interaction, and the reflection about time and civilization that comes with it, is what these people are trying to create. Without the human element, the clock is just an artifact that can be easily lost or forgotten. If you put it far out into orbit, then you completely remove it from humanity, and what value can it then have? Even in this day and age, no one will be able to visit it. If civilization collapses sometime in the next 10,000 years - not inconceivable if you ask me - then no one will even know that it's there. In both cases it may as well not exist. If you build it as you describe and put it here on Earth, radioactive concerns aside, what will visitors see: a big hot ingot connected to a bunch of (possibly) indecipherable equipment, attached to a bunch of indecipherable "chips" (if they'd even be recognized as such) that would be difficult if not impossible to grasp except by someone with 20th+ century knowledge and tools. And that doesn't even begin to dive into maintenance or repair.
Chances are pretty good that, even once it blows, the supernova remnant will be bright enough for long enough that Orion will still be recognizable as such. It won't be as bright, for certain, but there'll be a visible pinprick of light that will maintain the constellation for a while. Over hundreds and thousands of years it'll diminish, but we'll all be long dead by then.
You do realize that diesel engines require oxygen to run, right? Think about the thermodynamics of it: burning diesel in an enriched oxygen environment is much better (more efficient, cleaner burning, hotter burning) than burning it in atmosphere. The nitrogen in the atmosphere only gets in the way: it reduces the flame temperature of the burn, because some of the heat of the reaction goes to heating the nitrogen. Some of that heat is lost in the production of NxOx compounds. Lowered temperature == lowered efficiency. I expect that the power required to run the oxygen concentrator is outweighed by the improved engine performance.
But now one is comparing a hypothetical - that Apple is seeking to make Apple-branded TVs, which then somehow come to dominate the marketplace, so that Apple can then crush the competition by abusing that monopoly - to the historical events of Microsoft first coming to dominate in one sector (operating systems) and then using that to utterly crush a nascent competitor in a different sector (web browsing).
For the situations to be analogous, AppleTV would first have to become more-or-less ubiquitous among TVs, and then Apple would need to use that position to force TV manufacturers to not include other company's net-top hardware/software, or to limit the kinds of content that AppleTVs could access, or in some other way abuse its monopoly. Since AppleTVs exist in a tiny portion of homes that have TVs, and the CNN article is only discussing the possibility of an Apple-branded TV, and neither of those represent a monopoly, and Apple hasn't yet done anything with said hypothetical monopoly, the whole discussion is mighty disingenuous.
Bundling the browser was not, in and of itself, the problem. A main thrust of the problem was Microsoft then going to computer OEMs and saying "if you want Windows on your machine (and, being the overwhelmingly dominant OS on the market, you must), then you cannot bundle any other browser". There were many other aspects to the case against Microsoft, but that's probably the one you were aiming at.
In this case, Apple does not have a monopoly on making TVs or net-connected set-top boxes, nor even on internet-delivered content for those set-top boxes. Yes, they are a vertically-integrated walled garden, but there are plenty of wide-open meadows out there, and there isn't anything that Apple delivers that can't also be had from half a dozen other solutions. So they don't have a dominant position there to abuse.
You would have more luck in chasing the "impenetrable fortress garden" of iPhone/iPad, iOS, iTunes, and the App Store. But given the plethora of similar alternative devices, you'd have a hard time even there.
The greek bondholders (French and German banks) are being bailed out.
Yes, and when I declare bankruptcy, only my creditors (Visa, Mastercard, the bank holding my mortgage) are negatively affected. I, however, walk away whole and entirely unscathed.
Who to? At this point all the U.S. carriers have capped data plans that cost (gouge) more or less the same. Time goes on and you get less for paying more no matter who you are with (I'm looking at you: $0.20 per SMS). It almost as though they are in collusion! But that's ridiculous - everyone knows that capitalism and competition invariably leads to a consumer's utopia.
Many, many engineering problems cannot be solved without massive amounts of real-life data. GM developed test vehicles, pilot programs, etc., which gave them enough information to shape the production vehicle with an expectation that it would meet customer needs. But customer habits and usage patterns vary wildly, especially considering that this will be a driving experience a bit different than a conventional automobile.
And, yeah, if you can take a pile of data, determine that such and such component (e.g., battery pack) is over-engineered or could be made better/smaller/lighter/cheaper and in all other ways more in-line with its real-world needs, that can be worth a whole shitload to both manufacturers and consumers, and is worthy of compensation.
Rather than write out life long prescriptions, Drs end up writing out prescriptions for some period of months. This forces people to return to the Dr, paying the cost of the visit, every few months just for the Dr write a new prescription. This is an unnecessary cost that should not have to be incurred.
The majority of such conditions - those that require lifelong medication - are also those that most require followup and management. Who expects to take the exact same drug in the exact same way for the whole of their lives? Some of those lifelong drugs need to have their dosages adjusted over time, either due to tolerance, changes in weight, progression of the disease, changes in formulation, switching to generics, etc. Most of the prescriptions that are given out today are for drugs that were only discovered in the last decade or two. All drugs have side effects that, though rare, are serious, and may be subtle enough that the patients themselves don't see them coming on. Some side effects can only be revealed by tests sampled regularly over months and years, and interpreted by people trained medical personnel. These are things that patients, as a population, are simply not capable of doing on their own. Yes, even those highly educated individuals who get their medical information from the Internet. Many patients can get good at managing their own illness and prescriptions, in which case docs will schedule greater time between follow-up visits. But the notion that docs should be handing out lifelong prescriptions to medication is simply ludicrous: no physician, drug manufacturer, or regulatory body would take on such a risk.
Speaking as one who is intimately familiar with primary care in the United States: there is no money to be made in office visits for $4 prescriptions. No primary care practice can survive on that kind of crap. It's a tiny, miniscule fraction of the overall costs of medicine, the majority of which are tied with expensive diagnostics, surgical procedures, in-patient hospital care, and inefficient administrative bureaucracy. Although doctor salaries are skewed out of reality, the simple fact remains that they are among the most highly educated and trained workers in the world, go through 10 years of underpaid and overworked hell before they can practice, and are responsible for people's lives. A doctor has a bad day: a patient dies and the doctor is sued into oblivion. Most people have a bad day: they miss a deadline, get yelled at, have a beer, and move on.
Are you proposing that anyone be able to buy any prescription medication they want?
And I'll wager that, even though there are 85,000 unemployed engineers, there are probably a tens of thousands of open engineering positions searching for someone to hire. Even during boom times, the unemployment rate across all industries never even gets close to zero: a few percent is the best you'll get. Consider it a residual inefficiency of the labor market. This year's Nobel in economics was granted for this very subject: why can't the market do a better job of matching the unemployed with open positions? It is not unusual for someone to spend 5% of their professional careers unemployed if, for example, they across the country so a spouse can follow their career, or they switch careers entirely.
The article title is "... One Month Late". I ask though: "late" by what standard? By what time, legally, does citibank need to disclose such a breach? Because that is, unfortunately, the only standard that they'd care about. And as long as the penalties for permitting this kind of breach and not disclosing it quickly are laughably small, then there really is no "late".
I raise this semantic quibble not to take potshots at the submitter and editors, nor to let citibank off the hook for such lax practices, but rather to reinforce the message that until regulations regarding these kinds of breaches are tightened and actually have some teeth to them, banks simply aren't going to change their practices. Remember: Citibank is a business whose job is to look after itself - not necessarily its customers. One would think that those interests would tend to align with the customers'. But since this kind of crap keeps happening, that clearly is not the case. While having 200,000 breached sounds like a big number, it's only 1% of citibank's total.
I ask because I don't see a case of 'cool to be stupid'
Actually, I see an awful lot of that. Look at some of the drivel that comes from, say, Michelle Bachmann, and it's pretty easy to discern the following attitude: "I'm going to assert something I believe is true, and you should believe it's true, too. I don't have any persuasive evidence for this assertion. I don't know all the facts, I don't care about the facts, and you shouldn't care whether I know them, either." And for this, they are somehow idolized for sticking it to those eggheaded Commies from the Ivy League that always lord it over the common man. As though there is no difference between being an intelligent, well informed person and an elitist jackass! I've met plenty of smartasses from top-tier colleges, and plenty of self-taught geniuses, and there's plenty of space for everyone in between.
I'd forgotten how awful the USPTO's interface is for searching, viewing, and downloading patent and trademark materials (why the hell are tiffs the format of choice, and why the hell is it so difficult to get a decent tiff viewer?) I've been using Google Patents almost exclusively for quite a while now - much easier to search things out, patents are cross-referenced with hyperlinks, and it takes just one click to get a searchable PDF. But Google Patents doesn't handle patent applications, and so I can't use it here.
I'm skeptical. Most clinical MRI scanners have a main field strength around 0.7-1.5 Tesla. If the effect these researchers claim is so significant (lowering viscosity by 30%), then I think that we would have seen a huge number of internal bleeds, ischemic events, etc. associated with undergoing a scan. I (who have worked in hospital settings and around MRI scanners as part of my work) have never heard any evidence like that, even anecdotal. The evidence of the last two decades of MRI use indicate that exposure to the magnetic field has no significant effect on the body.
This was one thing that came to light when Toyota's very public troubles with unintentional acceleration surfaced last year. Yes, many vehicles have data recorders, but the kind of data collected is not standardized across makes, models, or model years. Furthermore, the quality and validity of the data is not assured (i.e., if the recorder says that the vehicle is traveling at 75 mph, how do we know that's true?), because the collection system hasn't been extensively tested and verified. Finally, the format of the data, and the electromechanical interface to access the data (i.e., what cable and software to use) is about as proprietary as they come. Think it was bad that every cell phone had to have their own unique wall wart with their own unique connector? That's nothing compared to automotive data recorders.
Personally, I think that this kind of data is invaluable: it leads to safer vehicles and provides critical answers to how and why an accident occurred. That might sound like it only benefits the government, law enforcement, insurance companies, and auto manufacturers, but consumers also benefit. If you are in an accident because some asshat was doing 80 mph, in the rain, without his headlights on, and was too distracted by his cellphone to hit the brakes before broadsiding you, a data recorder will help you stick it to him. Got rear ended, and think that the guy was riding your ass beforehand? A data recorder will show how long both your and his brakes were applied before impact. Think it was Toyota's fault that your corolla pegged 100 mph all on its own and ignored the brake? A proper data recorder would provide important proof one way or the other. But right now, because the technology is so scattershot, unverifiable, and open to interpretation, it is of only marginal use. In a court it's about as good as anecdote, rather than hard data. Having rules and open standards is the first step to improving this.
A proper data recorder, combined with an extensive testing and verification program, is a significant expense: one that a company isn't going to add to a vehicle unless mandated to do so. If we want this data to exist at all and be reliable (see above for why I think this is good), then a mandate and uniform standards is the way to make it happen. As for whose data it is exactly, and under what circumstances it can be accessed, that is a much more important debate to have. For while I am in favor of this information being available to all parties after an accident, I am not at all keen on letting Progressive Insurance install and monitor a tracking device in my car in order to get cheaper insurance rates.
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For what it is worth, I think this is the "overhead projector" that John McCain cited in a presidential debate as a $3 million example of government earmark abuse by Obama. Gosh, it's amazing what ordinary office equipment is capable of these days! It's nice to know the government has absolutely no interest in inspiring and educating children, advancing technology, and attracting tourism.
(By the way, that earmark, and the bill it was attached to, never became law)
I agree. The whole purpose of having a NYTimes app was to make accessing articles faster and look cleaner than via the website. (Yes, the NYT's motivation is also to enforce the paywall, but let's stick with my needs). But while I appreciate the articles showing up better than the website's rendering, that really is only of any use if I can actually get the app to load and show the articles. When the app takes forever to load, refresh its article listings, and display said articles, then it is of negative use to me.
So I stick with the website, which has the added bonus of making paywall circumvention a snap.
You are thinking of efficiency in terms of how much (electrical) energy you can get out from the (mostly heat) energy you can create in a fusion reaction. That is not the same as how rocket designers think of it. They think of efficiency in terms of: how much umph can you supply (in theory and in practice) for a given mass of fuel X using process Y. If you have 1 kg of propellant mass and shoot it away from you at 10 m/s, you aren't using it as efficiently as you would if you could shoot it away at 1000 m/s. They sum this up in a single number called specific impulse. Isp is measured in units of time, usually seconds. A conventional chemical rocket manages an Isp of a few hundred seconds. Ion engines in use today are a few thousand seconds. What the article is getting at is that this process could yield a specific impulse up to 40x conventional thruster propellants: for the same mass of fuel, you get 40x the change in spacecraft energy (kinetic and gravitational potential energies).
People still do that. However, for boards where you can have relatively thick traces (25 mils trace and space, say), I have heard good things about the laser-printer toner transfer method.
This is the major reason why the military has been investing heavily in green tech. A gallon of diesel fuel at the front lines in Afghanistan costs the military something like $400 because it first needs to be shipped in-country, then trucked through hostile territory on roads, and sometimes lashed to a mule and packed in. Plus, supply convoys are ripe targets - casualties due to roadside bombs these days are comparable, if not higher, than actual combat. The military realized this a couple of years ago, looking at the single-walled canvas tents they are cooling with A/C run from diesel generators in a 110 F desert. Being one of the biggest users of, well, everything in this world, their economies of scale and opportunities for savings at home and in theater are huge. They have been working on it, but it's a huge infrastructure and logistical change to undertake. If anything, it should give us all pause to realize how big a job the rest of the world will have to change our own infrastructure and habits to become more efficient.
While I use keyboard shortcuts for a whole lot of things in my day-to-day computing, it would not be possible for me to do my work without a mouse. Why? I do a fair bit of CAD, using software like Pro/E and Solidworks. Quite simply, there is no way to create or manipulate those 3D objects without a mouse. You could get far with the keyboard for viewing objects, and both of those CAD applications make extensive use of (heavily customizable) shortcuts for creating and executing features, but a lot of core operations (sketching, selecting, etc.) can only be done with a mouse.
If it were an open marketplace like, say, refrigerators, you could slap a green sticker on it and perhaps differentiate yourself. But that's not what is going on here. A tremendous problem in the particular case of these devices is that very few of them are sold directly to consumers: they are sold by the millions to cable companies, who then sell/lease them to their consumers with the myth that "If you want cable, you must use this box". The cable companies don't give a damn about how much power the boxes use: they aren't paying the bill. The consumers are largely oblivious, because it isn't their equipment, and they just want their insipid reality TV shows. Everyone with half a brain can look at this situation and say: gee, this is stupid, let's make the boxes use less power. But there is no incentive for any party to do it on their own. This is a clear case where government regulation makes a lot of sense.
If your goal is simply to build a device that can tick off the seconds for 10,000 years, then perhaps your design has merit. But the whole point of building this is to create a human experience, not merely an horologic device. People need to be able to experience the clock and, where possible, interact with it. That experience and interaction, and the reflection about time and civilization that comes with it, is what these people are trying to create. Without the human element, the clock is just an artifact that can be easily lost or forgotten. If you put it far out into orbit, then you completely remove it from humanity, and what value can it then have? Even in this day and age, no one will be able to visit it. If civilization collapses sometime in the next 10,000 years - not inconceivable if you ask me - then no one will even know that it's there. In both cases it may as well not exist. If you build it as you describe and put it here on Earth, radioactive concerns aside, what will visitors see: a big hot ingot connected to a bunch of (possibly) indecipherable equipment, attached to a bunch of indecipherable "chips" (if they'd even be recognized as such) that would be difficult if not impossible to grasp except by someone with 20th+ century knowledge and tools. And that doesn't even begin to dive into maintenance or repair.
Chances are pretty good that, even once it blows, the supernova remnant will be bright enough for long enough that Orion will still be recognizable as such. It won't be as bright, for certain, but there'll be a visible pinprick of light that will maintain the constellation for a while. Over hundreds and thousands of years it'll diminish, but we'll all be long dead by then.
You do realize that diesel engines require oxygen to run, right? Think about the thermodynamics of it: burning diesel in an enriched oxygen environment is much better (more efficient, cleaner burning, hotter burning) than burning it in atmosphere. The nitrogen in the atmosphere only gets in the way: it reduces the flame temperature of the burn, because some of the heat of the reaction goes to heating the nitrogen. Some of that heat is lost in the production of NxOx compounds. Lowered temperature == lowered efficiency. I expect that the power required to run the oxygen concentrator is outweighed by the improved engine performance.
But now one is comparing a hypothetical - that Apple is seeking to make Apple-branded TVs, which then somehow come to dominate the marketplace, so that Apple can then crush the competition by abusing that monopoly - to the historical events of Microsoft first coming to dominate in one sector (operating systems) and then using that to utterly crush a nascent competitor in a different sector (web browsing).
For the situations to be analogous, AppleTV would first have to become more-or-less ubiquitous among TVs, and then Apple would need to use that position to force TV manufacturers to not include other company's net-top hardware/software, or to limit the kinds of content that AppleTVs could access, or in some other way abuse its monopoly. Since AppleTVs exist in a tiny portion of homes that have TVs, and the CNN article is only discussing the possibility of an Apple-branded TV, and neither of those represent a monopoly, and Apple hasn't yet done anything with said hypothetical monopoly, the whole discussion is mighty disingenuous.
Bundling the browser was not, in and of itself, the problem. A main thrust of the problem was Microsoft then going to computer OEMs and saying "if you want Windows on your machine (and, being the overwhelmingly dominant OS on the market, you must), then you cannot bundle any other browser". There were many other aspects to the case against Microsoft, but that's probably the one you were aiming at.
In this case, Apple does not have a monopoly on making TVs or net-connected set-top boxes, nor even on internet-delivered content for those set-top boxes. Yes, they are a vertically-integrated walled garden, but there are plenty of wide-open meadows out there, and there isn't anything that Apple delivers that can't also be had from half a dozen other solutions. So they don't have a dominant position there to abuse.
You would have more luck in chasing the "impenetrable fortress garden" of iPhone/iPad, iOS, iTunes, and the App Store. But given the plethora of similar alternative devices, you'd have a hard time even there.
Yes, and when I declare bankruptcy, only my creditors (Visa, Mastercard, the bank holding my mortgage) are negatively affected. I, however, walk away whole and entirely unscathed.
Who to? At this point all the U.S. carriers have capped data plans that cost (gouge) more or less the same. Time goes on and you get less for paying more no matter who you are with (I'm looking at you: $0.20 per SMS). It almost as though they are in collusion! But that's ridiculous - everyone knows that capitalism and competition invariably leads to a consumer's utopia.
I think most biblical theologians would say that the expulsion from paradise did not corrupt our physical form, just our nature.
Many, many engineering problems cannot be solved without massive amounts of real-life data. GM developed test vehicles, pilot programs, etc., which gave them enough information to shape the production vehicle with an expectation that it would meet customer needs. But customer habits and usage patterns vary wildly, especially considering that this will be a driving experience a bit different than a conventional automobile.
And, yeah, if you can take a pile of data, determine that such and such component (e.g., battery pack) is over-engineered or could be made better/smaller/lighter/cheaper and in all other ways more in-line with its real-world needs, that can be worth a whole shitload to both manufacturers and consumers, and is worthy of compensation.
Mutations, smutations! Everyone knows that evolution is bunk and that humans were created in their current, perfect form just 6000 years ago.
The majority of such conditions - those that require lifelong medication - are also those that most require followup and management. Who expects to take the exact same drug in the exact same way for the whole of their lives? Some of those lifelong drugs need to have their dosages adjusted over time, either due to tolerance, changes in weight, progression of the disease, changes in formulation, switching to generics, etc. Most of the prescriptions that are given out today are for drugs that were only discovered in the last decade or two. All drugs have side effects that, though rare, are serious, and may be subtle enough that the patients themselves don't see them coming on. Some side effects can only be revealed by tests sampled regularly over months and years, and interpreted by people trained medical personnel. These are things that patients, as a population, are simply not capable of doing on their own. Yes, even those highly educated individuals who get their medical information from the Internet. Many patients can get good at managing their own illness and prescriptions, in which case docs will schedule greater time between follow-up visits. But the notion that docs should be handing out lifelong prescriptions to medication is simply ludicrous: no physician, drug manufacturer, or regulatory body would take on such a risk.
Speaking as one who is intimately familiar with primary care in the United States: there is no money to be made in office visits for $4 prescriptions. No primary care practice can survive on that kind of crap. It's a tiny, miniscule fraction of the overall costs of medicine, the majority of which are tied with expensive diagnostics, surgical procedures, in-patient hospital care, and inefficient administrative bureaucracy. Although doctor salaries are skewed out of reality, the simple fact remains that they are among the most highly educated and trained workers in the world, go through 10 years of underpaid and overworked hell before they can practice, and are responsible for people's lives. A doctor has a bad day: a patient dies and the doctor is sued into oblivion. Most people have a bad day: they miss a deadline, get yelled at, have a beer, and move on.
Are you proposing that anyone be able to buy any prescription medication they want?
And I'll wager that, even though there are 85,000 unemployed engineers, there are probably a tens of thousands of open engineering positions searching for someone to hire. Even during boom times, the unemployment rate across all industries never even gets close to zero: a few percent is the best you'll get. Consider it a residual inefficiency of the labor market. This year's Nobel in economics was granted for this very subject: why can't the market do a better job of matching the unemployed with open positions? It is not unusual for someone to spend 5% of their professional careers unemployed if, for example, they across the country so a spouse can follow their career, or they switch careers entirely.
The article title is "... One Month Late". I ask though: "late" by what standard? By what time, legally, does citibank need to disclose such a breach? Because that is, unfortunately, the only standard that they'd care about. And as long as the penalties for permitting this kind of breach and not disclosing it quickly are laughably small, then there really is no "late".
I raise this semantic quibble not to take potshots at the submitter and editors, nor to let citibank off the hook for such lax practices, but rather to reinforce the message that until regulations regarding these kinds of breaches are tightened and actually have some teeth to them, banks simply aren't going to change their practices. Remember: Citibank is a business whose job is to look after itself - not necessarily its customers. One would think that those interests would tend to align with the customers'. But since this kind of crap keeps happening, that clearly is not the case. While having 200,000 breached sounds like a big number, it's only 1% of citibank's total.
Actually, I see an awful lot of that. Look at some of the drivel that comes from, say, Michelle Bachmann, and it's pretty easy to discern the following attitude: "I'm going to assert something I believe is true, and you should believe it's true, too. I don't have any persuasive evidence for this assertion. I don't know all the facts, I don't care about the facts, and you shouldn't care whether I know them, either." And for this, they are somehow idolized for sticking it to those eggheaded Commies from the Ivy League that always lord it over the common man. As though there is no difference between being an intelligent, well informed person and an elitist jackass! I've met plenty of smartasses from top-tier colleges, and plenty of self-taught geniuses, and there's plenty of space for everyone in between.
I'd forgotten how awful the USPTO's interface is for searching, viewing, and downloading patent and trademark materials (why the hell are tiffs the format of choice, and why the hell is it so difficult to get a decent tiff viewer?) I've been using Google Patents almost exclusively for quite a while now - much easier to search things out, patents are cross-referenced with hyperlinks, and it takes just one click to get a searchable PDF. But Google Patents doesn't handle patent applications, and so I can't use it here.
I'm skeptical. Most clinical MRI scanners have a main field strength around 0.7-1.5 Tesla. If the effect these researchers claim is so significant (lowering viscosity by 30%), then I think that we would have seen a huge number of internal bleeds, ischemic events, etc. associated with undergoing a scan. I (who have worked in hospital settings and around MRI scanners as part of my work) have never heard any evidence like that, even anecdotal. The evidence of the last two decades of MRI use indicate that exposure to the magnetic field has no significant effect on the body.
This was one thing that came to light when Toyota's very public troubles with unintentional acceleration surfaced last year. Yes, many vehicles have data recorders, but the kind of data collected is not standardized across makes, models, or model years. Furthermore, the quality and validity of the data is not assured (i.e., if the recorder says that the vehicle is traveling at 75 mph, how do we know that's true?), because the collection system hasn't been extensively tested and verified. Finally, the format of the data, and the electromechanical interface to access the data (i.e., what cable and software to use) is about as proprietary as they come. Think it was bad that every cell phone had to have their own unique wall wart with their own unique connector? That's nothing compared to automotive data recorders.
Personally, I think that this kind of data is invaluable: it leads to safer vehicles and provides critical answers to how and why an accident occurred. That might sound like it only benefits the government, law enforcement, insurance companies, and auto manufacturers, but consumers also benefit. If you are in an accident because some asshat was doing 80 mph, in the rain, without his headlights on, and was too distracted by his cellphone to hit the brakes before broadsiding you, a data recorder will help you stick it to him. Got rear ended, and think that the guy was riding your ass beforehand? A data recorder will show how long both your and his brakes were applied before impact. Think it was Toyota's fault that your corolla pegged 100 mph all on its own and ignored the brake? A proper data recorder would provide important proof one way or the other. But right now, because the technology is so scattershot, unverifiable, and open to interpretation, it is of only marginal use. In a court it's about as good as anecdote, rather than hard data. Having rules and open standards is the first step to improving this.
A proper data recorder, combined with an extensive testing and verification program, is a significant expense: one that a company isn't going to add to a vehicle unless mandated to do so. If we want this data to exist at all and be reliable (see above for why I think this is good), then a mandate and uniform standards is the way to make it happen. As for whose data it is exactly, and under what circumstances it can be accessed, that is a much more important debate to have. For while I am in favor of this information being available to all parties after an accident, I am not at all keen on letting Progressive Insurance install and monitor a tracking device in my car in order to get cheaper insurance rates.