it was tempting to feel sorry for you after your rant last week defending the editorial integrity of slashdot; on the hand, your being so lazy that you can't even be bothered to perform the most basic of editorial duties ('arguement') makes it awfully hard to think you deserve any slack.
Digg.com deserves the title as the new premier tech news site.
I agree with this. While I do enjoy watching the show (and I am not a big fan at all of science fiction) I think the low rewatchability stems at least in part from the complex plot and rigid timeline. Watching and enjoying a random episode means recalling all the details of the different storylines, putting them in context, suspending disbelief stemming from knowing the outcomes of these storylines, and so forth.
These same attributes are what make the show good though. It's a very different beast from your standard, self-contained Simpsons, Seinfeld or even old BattleStar Galactica episode. I would think of it more as a soap opera in space, and soap operas are very poor at doing the rerun thing.
Slightly OT, but does anyone have any hard information about what Google does with the personal information it acquires? It could easily associate a particular IP with a list of queries over time, information that could be accessed years, perhaps decades into the future to see a particular person's interests.
It wouldn't be hard to tie the IP to a particular person after all. All it would take would be a GMail account.
There should be some concern about what Google is doing with all this information. Storage is dirt cheap and only getting cheaper. It probably costs them next to nothing to continually compile this sort of information.
Good question. I've thought about this problem a bit (you need something to think about when you're waiting in a freezing cold bus shelter), and concluded that the costs would be minimal. The price of a city bus is around $100K, so the addition of a $200 GPS unit is peanuts. From there, the data just needs to transmitted (via CDMA or GSM cell link perhaps?) back to a central computer ($1K PC) and then sent to the Google servers via the Internet.
It's not a technological or cost problem. It's a political problem involving getting enough people to push for it and overcoming some narrowminded resistance from some vested interests.
"There was a big scandal in Boston not too long ago about just that happening with (sometimes private contracted) snow plow drivers - they started putting GPS on the plows & let's just say there was a lot of sleeping on the job going on & contracted routes just plain not getting plowed."
Funny. About a year ago, the unions were protesting putting GPS on school buses. You should have seen the TV newscast. The union head was frothing at the mouth about 'Big Brother' and John Ashcroft, when all people wanted was a way to improve the on-time performance and allow parents know where the kids were. See:
I think this is great. A big reason people don't use public transport in urban areas is that often it is just too much of hassle to figure out the schedule, especially when you're going somewhere new.
What they need to do next is to work with the municipalities* to integrate GPS tracking on all city buses so anyone, anywhere, can get real time info on when the next bus will arrive. No more waiting at the bustop in the rain!
*This probably won't happen, at least in cities like Boston, where the unions have a stranglehold on the public transport system. They are dead set against GPS tracking. They would no longer be able to cover up just how inefficient and horrible they really are. They last thing want is somebody to start compiling databases about their on-time percentages.
"That's a problem with the approval process, which the pharma companies obviously like since it's a huge barrier to entry. "
That's absurd. Every day a drug spends in development averages out to $1 million dollars in lost revenue before the drug goes off patent.
The drug companies invest tens of billions and are working day night to figure out new ways to shorten the drug development cycle. They hate that it costs so much and takes so long. If it were to cost less they would make, much, much, more money.
I hope the AC who made this comment will forgive me for quoting him (I wanted to make sure it was heard):
"Sorry, you need to read "Prevention" Magazine. It's for people who want "natural" remedies, but they're the first ones to say that 90% of the "herbal" remedies are fraudulent."
This really does get a the crux of the issue. A good chunk of the money that is spent on a drug development involves insuring its effectiness and safety. This means large clinical trials involving thousands of patients, hundreds of scientists, extensive animal testing, and critical review by the FDA. Even with this, some drugs still slip through that prove to hurt some of the people they are meant to help. That's what we do here in the West, far different from how things are done in, say, India. That's why 800 million is spent to make sure that 'mint' pill that help your upset stomach also won't eat away at the gastric lining over time.
Without this, it's all snake-oil saleman's and old wive's tales. This is how it was a hundred years ago in the US. This is what we have worked to get away from.
I didn't read the article, but this is a cautionary note on patents with regards to developing new drugs.
In the pharma industry, it is a well known fact that no drug company will touch a treatment or compound that doesn't have firm patent protection. Why? To take a starting compound through all the necessary testing and development stages requires 800 million dollars on average. Even for a compound which looks relatively safe and effective, it still costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to get through clinical trial testing and FDA approval stages. By design, it's not a cheap or easy process by any means.
If a drug company doesn't think it has iron-clad patent protection that will stand up in court, it won't risk these huge sums of money, and consequently, the drug will never get developed.
If any new drugs are treatments stand to be developed from traditional treatments, working to prevent patents based on them is not the way to promote new cures.
This is not meant to start an argument. It's a simple observation: FireFox is easily the biggest resource hog on my computer.
I've seen it chew up 400-500MB of memory with only a handful of web pages open.
Why do people give this program a pass? Is it simply because it's open source and thus not polite to criticize it shortcomings?
I'm going through the exact same thing as you. I will never, ever buy anything fron Buy.com again.
Just so more people are aware, Buy.com has subbed out their cellular sales to a thouroughly evil little company called Inphonic. Inphonic is also known as Wirefly. This is not clear at all when initially purchasing the phone that you are dealing with a company other than Buy.com.
The rebate is a scam. In fact, Inphonics business model is to offer extremely generous rebates and not honor then. Check out yahoo shopping, resellerratings, or Bizrate for Wirefly or Inphonic. I have never seen a company have such irate customers. The OP's description of the horrendous rebate process is correct except he is leaving out the bit about where they refuse the rebate even though everything is correct. The stories are rampant about customers who correctly waited until the 30 day window to send in the rebate and still get a rejection letter stating that the rebate was not sent in at the appropriate time. Since they require the original UPC code, get ready to spend several hours on the phone if you want to get a (small) chance to clear things up.
They are absolute bastards. The original story is a crock.
Great. Just make sure when you 'balance our need for energy with the size of the threat to the enviroment' you take into account the far more serious effects that traditional energy sources all ready do pose to the enironment and wildlife.
No serious person can argue that windfarms aren't far more friendly to wildlife in general (and when you take into account habitat destruction from oil spills, deforestation, etc... to even birds in particular.)
And even if windfarms did pose a danger to birds, the benefits of a clean, sustainable energy source so far outweigh the downside of a few dead pigeons here and there, that it's silly to even contemplate the matter.
I'll also chime in and give a big thumbs up to the Treo 650. I am defintely not one of those persons who puts up with semi-functional gadgets either. I insist that they work well.
Mine is rock solid with regards to stability, has great battery life (~18 hour or so of music playback), great phone reception, gorgeous screen, good image viewer, and the unlimited dial up networking plan for Sprint at $15/month is fantastic. The built in web browser is great in a pinch also for looking something up on Google or reading news. (Real time weather radar images too!).
I was going to get a NanoPod, but I opted for a $125 2GB SD card from Newegg instead, and $15 for PocketTunes.
Eventually all-in-one devices are going to take over. They haven't so far because few manufactures have integrated the funtions well. The Treo 650 is the first phone/pda which comes close. (I had a Dell Axim and hated it for comparison.)
I think we are now only two product cycles away from having extremely well-designed and functional integrated devices. They are the future.
I unfortuntely agree with this also.
For instance, imagine the returns we could realize if we invested these huge sums of money on advanced propulsion systems instead.
While the first thoughts are that both the astronauts and anyone on the ground will not be hurt, this could be positive news.
This year NASA is spending $6.7 Billion on the ISS and the Shuttle program. This is a lot of money that could be far better invested in a new manned space programs that could give us a sustainable manned presence in space. The scientific rewards from the Shuttle and the ISS have been meager at best, certainly once you consider the amount of money that was spent, and have done very little to make it easier to access orbit.
It's not an admission of failure or a rejection of manned space exploration to acknowledge that both the Shuttle and the ISS were ill-thought out programs, driven primarily by changing, flaky congressional mandates and pork politics.
I doubt it will actually come down, but if it does, it is most likely a net positive for the US manned space program
Slashdot Mirror
it was tempting to feel sorry for you after your rant last week defending the editorial integrity of slashdot; on the hand, your being so lazy that you can't even be bothered to perform the most basic of editorial duties ('arguement') makes it awfully hard to think you deserve any slack.
Digg.com deserves the title as the new premier tech news site.
I agree with this. While I do enjoy watching the show (and I am not a big fan at all of science fiction) I think the low rewatchability stems at least in part from the complex plot and rigid timeline. Watching and enjoying a random episode means recalling all the details of the different storylines, putting them in context, suspending disbelief stemming from knowing the outcomes of these storylines, and so forth.
These same attributes are what make the show good though. It's a very different beast from your standard, self-contained Simpsons, Seinfeld or even old BattleStar Galactica episode. I would think of it more as a soap opera in space, and soap operas are very poor at doing the rerun thing.
Slightly OT, but does anyone have any hard information about what Google does with the personal information it acquires? It could easily associate a particular IP with a list of queries over time, information that could be accessed years, perhaps decades into the future to see a particular person's interests.
It wouldn't be hard to tie the IP to a particular person after all. All it would take would be a GMail account.
There should be some concern about what Google is doing with all this information. Storage is dirt cheap and only getting cheaper. It probably costs them next to nothing to continually compile this sort of information.
Good question. I've thought about this problem a bit (you need something to think about when you're waiting in a freezing cold bus shelter), and concluded that the costs would be minimal. The price of a city bus is around $100K, so the addition of a $200 GPS unit is peanuts. From there, the data just needs to transmitted (via CDMA or GSM cell link perhaps?) back to a central computer ($1K PC) and then sent to the Google servers via the Internet.
It's not a technological or cost problem. It's a political problem involving getting enough people to push for it and overcoming some narrowminded resistance from some vested interests.
"There was a big scandal in Boston not too long ago about just that happening with (sometimes private contracted) snow plow drivers - they started putting GPS on the plows & let's just say there was a lot of sleeping on the job going on & contracted routes just plain not getting plowed."
Funny. About a year ago, the unions were protesting putting GPS on school buses. You should have seen the TV newscast. The union head was frothing at the mouth about 'Big Brother' and John Ashcroft, when all people wanted was a way to improve the on-time performance and allow parents know where the kids were. See:
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/article
I think this is great. A big reason people don't use public transport in urban areas is that often it is just too much of hassle to figure out the schedule, especially when you're going somewhere new.
What they need to do next is to work with the municipalities* to integrate GPS tracking on all city buses so anyone, anywhere, can get real time info on when the next bus will arrive. No more waiting at the bustop in the rain!
*This probably won't happen, at least in cities like Boston, where the unions have a stranglehold on the public transport system. They are dead set against GPS tracking. They would no longer be able to cover up just how inefficient and horrible they really are. They last thing want is somebody to start compiling databases about their on-time percentages.
"That's a problem with the approval process, which the pharma companies obviously like since it's a huge barrier to entry. "
That's absurd. Every day a drug spends in development averages out to $1 million dollars in lost revenue before the drug goes off patent.
The drug companies invest tens of billions and are working day night to figure out new ways to shorten the drug development cycle. They hate that it costs so much and takes so long. If it were to cost less they would make, much, much, more money.
I hope the AC who made this comment will forgive me for quoting him (I wanted to make sure it was heard): "Sorry, you need to read "Prevention" Magazine. It's for people who want "natural" remedies, but they're the first ones to say that 90% of the "herbal" remedies are fraudulent." This really does get a the crux of the issue. A good chunk of the money that is spent on a drug development involves insuring its effectiness and safety. This means large clinical trials involving thousands of patients, hundreds of scientists, extensive animal testing, and critical review by the FDA. Even with this, some drugs still slip through that prove to hurt some of the people they are meant to help. That's what we do here in the West, far different from how things are done in, say, India. That's why 800 million is spent to make sure that 'mint' pill that help your upset stomach also won't eat away at the gastric lining over time. Without this, it's all snake-oil saleman's and old wive's tales. This is how it was a hundred years ago in the US. This is what we have worked to get away from.
I didn't read the article, but this is a cautionary note on patents with regards to developing new drugs.
In the pharma industry, it is a well known fact that no drug company will touch a treatment or compound that doesn't have firm patent protection. Why? To take a starting compound through all the necessary testing and development stages requires 800 million dollars on average. Even for a compound which looks relatively safe and effective, it still costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to get through clinical trial testing and FDA approval stages. By design, it's not a cheap or easy process by any means.
If a drug company doesn't think it has iron-clad patent protection that will stand up in court, it won't risk these huge sums of money, and consequently, the drug will never get developed.
If any new drugs are treatments stand to be developed from traditional treatments, working to prevent patents based on them is not the way to promote new cures.
This is not meant to start an argument. It's a simple observation: FireFox is easily the biggest resource hog on my computer. I've seen it chew up 400-500MB of memory with only a handful of web pages open. Why do people give this program a pass? Is it simply because it's open source and thus not polite to criticize it shortcomings?
I'm going through the exact same thing as you. I will never, ever buy anything fron Buy.com again.
Just so more people are aware, Buy.com has subbed out their cellular sales to a thouroughly evil little company called Inphonic. Inphonic is also known as Wirefly. This is not clear at all when initially purchasing the phone that you are dealing with a company other than Buy.com.
The rebate is a scam. In fact, Inphonics business model is to offer extremely generous rebates and not honor then. Check out yahoo shopping, resellerratings, or Bizrate for Wirefly or Inphonic. I have never seen a company have such irate customers. The OP's description of the horrendous rebate process is correct except he is leaving out the bit about where they refuse the rebate even though everything is correct. The stories are rampant about customers who correctly waited until the 30 day window to send in the rebate and still get a rejection letter stating that the rebate was not sent in at the appropriate time. Since they require the original UPC code, get ready to spend several hours on the phone if you want to get a (small) chance to clear things up.
They are absolute bastards. The original story is a crock.
Beware consumers!!
Great. Just make sure when you 'balance our need for energy with the size of the threat to the enviroment' you take into account the far more serious effects that traditional energy sources all ready do pose to the enironment and wildlife. No serious person can argue that windfarms aren't far more friendly to wildlife in general (and when you take into account habitat destruction from oil spills, deforestation, etc... to even birds in particular.)
According to this study reported by the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4072756.stm) windfarms pose a low risk to birds. I believe buildings in general are far more of a threat.
And even if windfarms did pose a danger to birds, the benefits of a clean, sustainable energy source so far outweigh the downside of a few dead pigeons here and there, that it's silly to even contemplate the matter.
I'll also chime in and give a big thumbs up to the Treo 650. I am defintely not one of those persons who puts up with semi-functional gadgets either. I insist that they work well. Mine is rock solid with regards to stability, has great battery life (~18 hour or so of music playback), great phone reception, gorgeous screen, good image viewer, and the unlimited dial up networking plan for Sprint at $15/month is fantastic. The built in web browser is great in a pinch also for looking something up on Google or reading news. (Real time weather radar images too!). I was going to get a NanoPod, but I opted for a $125 2GB SD card from Newegg instead, and $15 for PocketTunes. Eventually all-in-one devices are going to take over. They haven't so far because few manufactures have integrated the funtions well. The Treo 650 is the first phone/pda which comes close. (I had a Dell Axim and hated it for comparison.) I think we are now only two product cycles away from having extremely well-designed and functional integrated devices. They are the future.
I unfortuntely agree with this also. For instance, imagine the returns we could realize if we invested these huge sums of money on advanced propulsion systems instead.
While the first thoughts are that both the astronauts and anyone on the ground will not be hurt, this could be positive news. This year NASA is spending $6.7 Billion on the ISS and the Shuttle program. This is a lot of money that could be far better invested in a new manned space programs that could give us a sustainable manned presence in space. The scientific rewards from the Shuttle and the ISS have been meager at best, certainly once you consider the amount of money that was spent, and have done very little to make it easier to access orbit. It's not an admission of failure or a rejection of manned space exploration to acknowledge that both the Shuttle and the ISS were ill-thought out programs, driven primarily by changing, flaky congressional mandates and pork politics. I doubt it will actually come down, but if it does, it is most likely a net positive for the US manned space program