Here in Michigan, where the law says utilities must produce 10% of electricity from renewable sources by 2015 (a low standard compared to other states) I am constantly offered an opportunity to pay extra for my energy to be renewable. Since the utilities are ramping up to the 10% minimum anyway they'll produce no more renewable energy if I pay the premium and no less if I don't. They produced about 4% from renewable sources in 2013. Hence, all the surcharges are is a marketing gimmick and all subscribing does is allow them to sell me the same power at a higher profit margin.
Given the fact that the OP says "She can't breathe on her own," I assume that she is still in the hospital and they are not asking for a home based solution. Researchers are attempting to replicate the fMRI results using EEG, but for now it is still hospital based. http://www.nature.com/news/neu...
fMRI looks at what regions of the brain are active (by looking at which the rate at which different regions consume oxygen) and has been used to communicate with patients that can not otherwise communicate. First the patient is told to imagine two different activities (one at a time) like walking through a house and playing tennis. The pattern of brain activation is different for each thing but consistent between trials. Then, you can ask questions like "imagine playing tennis if X or walking through the house if not X" The results have been widely replicated. It has been widely used in MCS (minimally conscious state) but no reason it should not work in locked in patients. You can google it and find lots of article. Here are a couple.
http://www.medscape.com/viewar...http://www.safar.pitt.edu/arch...
Their fake vaccine programme that preceded their extra judicial murder of Osama Bin Laden is what has caused the distrust.
In fact, there have been problems with Muslim opposition to vaccination, including opposition from the Taliban since long before the U.S. killed Bin Laden.
But even with the express support of political leaders, polio workers have been kidnapped, beaten, and assassinated.[57] In February 2007, physician Abdul Ghani, who was in charge of polio immunizations in a key area of disease occurrence in northern Pakistan, was killed in a terrorist bombing.
In fact Muslim suspicion of vaccines has been a problem for over a decade, causing vaccinations programs to be suspended repeatedly.
However, even if the U.S. disguising an intelligence worker was the cause of the suspicion, would you excuse the killing of firemen by AQ if the U.S. had disguised somebody as a fireman or do people have an obligation to support society and civilization?
even if the problem was not oversimplified. The problem is less that productivity increased but more that political power is more concentrated.
I get micropayments for some of my content now, using Google's adsense. It's not enough to buy a cup of coffee a day and I've worked at it. Fundamentally, the problem is how society is structured and the balance between the power of labor and capital. We've seen other great revolutions in productivity from the agricultural to the industrial revolutions. When society distributes those gains more equitably, civilization flourishes and standards of living go up.
You take a young researcher who has put 7 years into a PhD and 3 into a postdoc, have them write grants that on average grant 20% of applicants funding, and give them a mandate to publish or kiss their career goodbye. They can't take a chance on looking at a hypothesis that has a small chance of revolutionizing their field, because if it doesn't pan out they are screwed. So, the researcher chooses a hypothesis that is safe. They spend a year or two gathering data at great expense. Now, if that data comes back and is ambiguous there is a strong incentive to use the data set to test other hypotheses. The problem with that is eventually you find a hypothesis that gives significant results just by chance. Some of the solutions are to:
1. Evaluate based on more than just publications. Look at what the scientist did, why they did it, and how they did it.
2. Get journals to publish negative results. That way if you test a theory and find it is wrong, it still counts as successful research.
3. Set aside 20% of research funds to fund replication of published studies. Right now there is no downside to publishing a result that is likely spurious because nobody is likely to figure it out for decades. If a researcher knows that there is a 20% chance his study will be replicated the following year it will make him very careful to do things right. Make reproducing experiments count toward career progression.
4. Include grant applications with the papers that they produce. That way readers can see if the hypothesis tested in the paper is actually the one that the scientist set out to test. If not, there should be information on why and on how many alternate hypotheses were tested.
Obama and his people delayed the rules for Obamacare so they would not come out before the 2012 elections. That delayed the writing of the code for the website and they continued to issue changes right before the site was about to be released.
Actually, a lot of that delay was to try to accommodate Republican state legislatures and Governors in the hopes that they would step up to the plate and create state run exchanges. In my state (Michigan) the Republican Governor fought the Republican Legislature to be able to build our own exchange but lost.
So you are advocating that journalists keep all their data on computer because we all know that if data is encrypted that computers are impregnable fortresses of data security -NOT. When data brokerage services, hundreds of U.S. companies, the Iranian nuclear program, and banks are hacked, botnets run wild, not to mention the NSA spying I would argue that even if you had an IT security department you might be safer keeping only paper records.
E-mail is fundamentally insecure. SMTP is easily spoofed because it has no authentication mechanism. By default every message travels unencrypted and nobody bothers to correct that. I can not remember the last time I got an e-mail that was encrypted. Sure gmail may provide me with an ssl connection to read my mail but any message in my inbox could have bounced all over the net in the clear. Every large e-mail provider has been repeatedly hacked. If you have are using a set of insecure protocols with no encryption adding another possibly insecure service doesn't change things much.
Might be true but if you are a US corporation you should be more afraid of China since they are interested in stealing your trade secrets and handing it to their businesses:
According to this year's annual report on cyber-crime, Verizon found 96 percent of the world's cyber-espionage, stealing trade secrets and intellectual property, came from one country: China.
Security specialists say China is using theft as a national development strategy, pilfering software for wind turbines, fiberoptic cable technology, blueprints for weapons systems like the Joint Strike Fighter.
Despite all the revelations of NSA spying they are not gathering trade secrets and handing them to American companies. Since neither Cisco nor Huawei is focused on the consumer market your argument takes the wrong perspective.
If you read a bit more than the review article you find that scores on the test of scientific literacy they used is highly correlated with years of education. Since the tea party is heavily skewed toward older white males you'd expect them to have more years of education than the general population. Years of education was not controlled for.
largest deficits in history are currently held by....Obama
Yes, but what you leave out is that he got an economy in freefall, because of a financial crisis so bad that his opponent (McCain) had to suspend his Presidential campaign to head back to Washington to vote on a bailout for the financial system (he even wanted to skip out on the debates). His predecessor had turned the Clinton surpluses into deficits with tax cuts and two wars. So, he started with huge deficits and an economy shedding about 200,000 jobs a month and had a choice between austerity and stimulus. He chose stimulus and now we have anemic job growth and deficits that are headed back down. I've been to Greece recently and am grateful that he didn't choose austerity. Now, faced with a weak economy the GOP is shutting down the Government because they can't repeal the Affordable Care Act and they'll shave a couple tenths of a percent off GDP growth, making deficit reduction that much harder.
The existing implementation looks complex because it codifies hundreds of special business rules, such as discounts for the boss's friends, special commission arrangements with a particular salesperson, etc. You can't just throw out those rules, so you end up maintaining the old system simultaneously with trying to implement the new system. But your resources are split between these two tasks, so requests for fixes get backlogged, while the new implementation drags on for years.
I've seen both sides of this argument. I have seen companies try to replace a system and be unable to replicate the functionality that they need in a new system. On the other hand I've seen companies decide after trying to replicate poorly documented business rules in new software that they need to take a long hard look at all the rules and jettison most of the software customization that is unique to the business. Some of it is there for reasons that no longer apply. Some customization is no longer used. Some customization is counterproductive. The trick is to identify which customizations are worthwhile and having somebody at the top who says no to customization that isn't really necessary so that it doesn't grow endlessly. Ask yourself how different your business is and how critical the customization is. An IT guy, especially a new one needs to get buy in from the top because he will not be able to say no to requests to keep and add business rules.
Losing your credit card and getting a new number won't solve the problem because the ID thieves can just open an account or take out a loan in your name since they have your name, social security number, date of birth and all the other information a bank uses to confirm that the person opening the account is you.
Linked in claims that it won't send e-mail to your contacts on your behalf without your permission. What they don't say is that they won't send e-mail to their existing members that happen to be in your contact list. They also don't claim that they won't exploit the knowledge that I am both in your contact list and an existing member. So, I have had a number of e-mails and web pages that list a particular individual as "somebody you may know" because she once answered a classified ad from her yahoo address and linked in has access to her yahoo e-mail account. I am nearly certain that she never asked linked in to connect us; if she had the message from linked in would say "Person X has requested a connection." Instead, for three years they have kept suggesting that I may know person X, and given that I have no other connection than a couple of e-mails in response to an advertisement, they are exploiting her e-mail contacts in a way that they don't make clear to their users when they are granted access to e-mail accounts.
If we ever hit the point where most products can be reproduced essentially for free
No worries, the more complex the product the more complex the printer will need to be and the less efficient doing it on a small scale will be. We could all produce many things at home now but we don't. In part, it is more efficient to produce things in mass quantities. Then there is the up front cost. In part it is the complexity of producing certain components. There is a reason IC plants are so expensive; you can't print a chip without a lot complex machinery, a specific environment, etc. So, even if somebody comes up with a printer that can print a laptop it will have a large up front cost, require maintenance, and not be cheaper than paying a company that specializes in making laptops for many decades to come.
Many here have hit the nail on the head. The political right pushes issues that embed religion and patriotism. The left pushes issues that help the teachers unions. The evidence that supports change that doesn't help one side of that debate or the other gets ignored. DARE doesn't work, kids learn language like native speakers before the age of 12, high school age children do better with later school starts times. If you taught language early, started high school late, and dropped DARE you'd save money and achieve better outcomes. http://moderatelyliberal.blogspot.com/2011/05/lip-service-to-education.html
I second Second Life. It goes beyond virtual dancing and virtual sex. You can create virtual objects, write scripts that control the behavior of those objects, play in world games (often hunting for clues or prizes), explore others creations, practice another language, hear live music (some of it truly great) and develop a complete online social circle.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in Michigan, where the law says utilities must produce 10% of electricity from renewable sources by 2015 (a low standard compared to other states) I am constantly offered an opportunity to pay extra for my energy to be renewable. Since the utilities are ramping up to the 10% minimum anyway they'll produce no more renewable energy if I pay the premium and no less if I don't. They produced about 4% from renewable sources in 2013. Hence, all the surcharges are is a marketing gimmick and all subscribing does is allow them to sell me the same power at a higher profit margin.
I wonder if this has applications in solar power. If you have 100% of light absorbed, the energy has to go somewhere - presumably it heats up.
Given the fact that the OP says "She can't breathe on her own," I assume that she is still in the hospital and they are not asking for a home based solution. Researchers are attempting to replicate the fMRI results using EEG, but for now it is still hospital based. http://www.nature.com/news/neu...
fMRI looks at what regions of the brain are active (by looking at which the rate at which different regions consume oxygen) and has been used to communicate with patients that can not otherwise communicate. First the patient is told to imagine two different activities (one at a time) like walking through a house and playing tennis. The pattern of brain activation is different for each thing but consistent between trials. Then, you can ask questions like "imagine playing tennis if X or walking through the house if not X" The results have been widely replicated. It has been widely used in MCS (minimally conscious state) but no reason it should not work in locked in patients. You can google it and find lots of article. Here are a couple. http://www.medscape.com/viewar... http://www.safar.pitt.edu/arch...
You surely realize that all of his suggestions were sarcastic, don't you?
Their fake vaccine programme that preceded their extra judicial murder of Osama Bin Laden is what has caused the distrust.
In fact, there have been problems with Muslim opposition to vaccination, including opposition from the Taliban since long before the U.S. killed Bin Laden.
But even with the express support of political leaders, polio workers have been kidnapped, beaten, and assassinated.[57] In February 2007, physician Abdul Ghani, who was in charge of polio immunizations in a key area of disease occurrence in northern Pakistan, was killed in a terrorist bombing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_eradication
In fact Muslim suspicion of vaccines has been a problem for over a decade, causing vaccinations programs to be suspended repeatedly.
However, even if the U.S. disguising an intelligence worker was the cause of the suspicion, would you excuse the killing of firemen by AQ if the U.S. had disguised somebody as a fireman or do people have an obligation to support society and civilization?
even if the problem was not oversimplified. The problem is less that productivity increased but more that political power is more concentrated. I get micropayments for some of my content now, using Google's adsense. It's not enough to buy a cup of coffee a day and I've worked at it. Fundamentally, the problem is how society is structured and the balance between the power of labor and capital. We've seen other great revolutions in productivity from the agricultural to the industrial revolutions. When society distributes those gains more equitably, civilization flourishes and standards of living go up.
because I can't imagine the scenario in which they uncovered that plot by looking at the metadata from American cellphones.
Obama and his people delayed the rules for Obamacare so they would not come out before the 2012 elections. That delayed the writing of the code for the website and they continued to issue changes right before the site was about to be released.
Actually, a lot of that delay was to try to accommodate Republican state legislatures and Governors in the hopes that they would step up to the plate and create state run exchanges. In my state (Michigan) the Republican Governor fought the Republican Legislature to be able to build our own exchange but lost.
So you are advocating that journalists keep all their data on computer because we all know that if data is encrypted that computers are impregnable fortresses of data security -NOT. When data brokerage services, hundreds of U.S. companies, the Iranian nuclear program, and banks are hacked, botnets run wild, not to mention the NSA spying I would argue that even if you had an IT security department you might be safer keeping only paper records.
E-mail is fundamentally insecure. SMTP is easily spoofed because it has no authentication mechanism. By default every message travels unencrypted and nobody bothers to correct that. I can not remember the last time I got an e-mail that was encrypted. Sure gmail may provide me with an ssl connection to read my mail but any message in my inbox could have bounced all over the net in the clear. Every large e-mail provider has been repeatedly hacked. If you have are using a set of insecure protocols with no encryption adding another possibly insecure service doesn't change things much.
According to this year's annual report on cyber-crime, Verizon found 96 percent of the world's cyber-espionage, stealing trade secrets and intellectual property, came from one country: China.
Security specialists say China is using theft as a national development strategy, pilfering software for wind turbines, fiberoptic cable technology, blueprints for weapons systems like the Joint Strike Fighter.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec13/cybercrime_07-08.html
Despite all the revelations of NSA spying they are not gathering trade secrets and handing them to American companies. Since neither Cisco nor Huawei is focused on the consumer market your argument takes the wrong perspective.
If you read a bit more than the review article you find that scores on the test of scientific literacy they used is highly correlated with years of education. Since the tea party is heavily skewed toward older white males you'd expect them to have more years of education than the general population. Years of education was not controlled for.
largest deficits in history are currently held by....Obama
Yes, but what you leave out is that he got an economy in freefall, because of a financial crisis so bad that his opponent (McCain) had to suspend his Presidential campaign to head back to Washington to vote on a bailout for the financial system (he even wanted to skip out on the debates). His predecessor had turned the Clinton surpluses into deficits with tax cuts and two wars. So, he started with huge deficits and an economy shedding about 200,000 jobs a month and had a choice between austerity and stimulus. He chose stimulus and now we have anemic job growth and deficits that are headed back down. I've been to Greece recently and am grateful that he didn't choose austerity. Now, faced with a weak economy the GOP is shutting down the Government because they can't repeal the Affordable Care Act and they'll shave a couple tenths of a percent off GDP growth, making deficit reduction that much harder.
The existing implementation looks complex because it codifies hundreds of special business rules, such as discounts for the boss's friends, special commission arrangements with a particular salesperson, etc. You can't just throw out those rules, so you end up maintaining the old system simultaneously with trying to implement the new system. But your resources are split between these two tasks, so requests for fixes get backlogged, while the new implementation drags on for years.
I've seen both sides of this argument. I have seen companies try to replace a system and be unable to replicate the functionality that they need in a new system. On the other hand I've seen companies decide after trying to replicate poorly documented business rules in new software that they need to take a long hard look at all the rules and jettison most of the software customization that is unique to the business. Some of it is there for reasons that no longer apply. Some customization is no longer used. Some customization is counterproductive. The trick is to identify which customizations are worthwhile and having somebody at the top who says no to customization that isn't really necessary so that it doesn't grow endlessly. Ask yourself how different your business is and how critical the customization is. An IT guy, especially a new one needs to get buy in from the top because he will not be able to say no to requests to keep and add business rules.
Losing your credit card and getting a new number won't solve the problem because the ID thieves can just open an account or take out a loan in your name since they have your name, social security number, date of birth and all the other information a bank uses to confirm that the person opening the account is you.
Linked in claims that it won't send e-mail to your contacts on your behalf without your permission. What they don't say is that they won't send e-mail to their existing members that happen to be in your contact list. They also don't claim that they won't exploit the knowledge that I am both in your contact list and an existing member. So, I have had a number of e-mails and web pages that list a particular individual as "somebody you may know" because she once answered a classified ad from her yahoo address and linked in has access to her yahoo e-mail account. I am nearly certain that she never asked linked in to connect us; if she had the message from linked in would say "Person X has requested a connection." Instead, for three years they have kept suggesting that I may know person X, and given that I have no other connection than a couple of e-mails in response to an advertisement, they are exploiting her e-mail contacts in a way that they don't make clear to their users when they are granted access to e-mail accounts.
If we ever hit the point where most products can be reproduced essentially for free
No worries, the more complex the product the more complex the printer will need to be and the less efficient doing it on a small scale will be. We could all produce many things at home now but we don't. In part, it is more efficient to produce things in mass quantities. Then there is the up front cost. In part it is the complexity of producing certain components. There is a reason IC plants are so expensive; you can't print a chip without a lot complex machinery, a specific environment, etc. So, even if somebody comes up with a printer that can print a laptop it will have a large up front cost, require maintenance, and not be cheaper than paying a company that specializes in making laptops for many decades to come.
There is a difference between spending money to come see me and sending me a check.
You are wrong on two fronts. First, there are plenty of scientifically documented benefits to music and arts education. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2012/08/21/even-a-few-years-of-music-training-benefits-the-brain/ http://www.nasaa-arts.org/Research/Key-Topics/Arts-Education/critical-evidence.pdf Despite the overwhelming evidence, my son's school system just fired all their elementary school music, art, and PE teachers. http://www.nasaa-arts.org/Research/Key-Topics/Arts-Education/critical-evidence.pdf
Many here have hit the nail on the head. The political right pushes issues that embed religion and patriotism. The left pushes issues that help the teachers unions. The evidence that supports change that doesn't help one side of that debate or the other gets ignored. DARE doesn't work, kids learn language like native speakers before the age of 12, high school age children do better with later school starts times. If you taught language early, started high school late, and dropped DARE you'd save money and achieve better outcomes. http://moderatelyliberal.blogspot.com/2011/05/lip-service-to-education.html
I second Second Life. It goes beyond virtual dancing and virtual sex. You can create virtual objects, write scripts that control the behavior of those objects, play in world games (often hunting for clues or prizes), explore others creations, practice another language, hear live music (some of it truly great) and develop a complete online social circle.
What makes the fancy scientists think that this will be any different? I've given my wife 5,000 excuses for not going to the gym. They never work.
I can't get an online subscription
I'm not sure why you can't. They offer a number of options.