Right. That's why I said that orbit was a bit much to ask. I suppose I could have been clearer when I said that "it's a long way to orbit from [60 miles]"; I meant "long way in terms of total effort to get to orbital velocity" rather than "a long way up".
Orbit is a bit much to ask, though I think that 60 miles would be newsworthy. The amateur rocketeers have already been there, but accomplishing it on the cheap would be remarkable.
To get there from 20 miles would still require a considerable rocket, though, and I'd be very surprised to see them pull that off for under US$2k. That additional 40 miles is still a considerable event in amateur rocketry, even with the wind essentially eliminated, and that's from a standing start.
And it's a very, very long way to orbit from there (though somewhat easier if you're not planning to get whatever it is back down safely).
As usual, the press-release writers have sold an interesting event ("nice pictures taken from high up cheap") and tried to spin it into a big deal ("we're going to space!"). I imagine the actual engineers are shaking their heads.
According to the sellers, that book is in German. I suppose Beowulf may well translate into German better than English.
As I understand it, Tolkein's contribution to Beowulf wasn't so much the translation but an essay called The Monsters And The Critics, back in the 30s. Apparently it was the first time anybody had looked at Beowulf as a thing with literary merit, rather than just a piece of linguistic evidence.
Slashdot had a story some time ago that they'd found a copy of Beowulf translated by Tolkien at the bottom of a box of his papers in the Oxford library. Supposedly they were going to publish them as soon as they'd deciphered his terrible handwriting. But I haven't heard of it since.
It's a very badly written press release. In fact the actual science has zilch to do with birds and everything to do with plants using the same molecule. They described the way light and magnetic fields interact to change the way the plant stem grows, except in plants without the cryptochrome molecule.
Which is just basic, everyday scientific advancement: a very small and excruciatingly dull thing, presented with a tie-in to something more interesting in an attempt to look sexier and get funding. Scientists hate doing it, but if you want to keep doing science, that's what you do.
This article IS news, but only in the narrowest sense: new information. But after you take that new information, tie it in to something more interesting but only indirectly related (which you put at the front of the press release, and the actual new stuff at the end), then summarize it for Slashdot (skipping the stuff at the end), "news" becomes "olds".
One final note: when I call the work "small", I don't mean to dis the grad students who worked thousands of hours tending the plants, measuring them, putting that data into the computer, analyzing that data, probably cutting them open and measuring that... such immense grunt work for a minor advance [promptly blown up into something irrelevant by university's press department] is the heavy-lifting of science. It's gotta be done but it's not glamorous or even interesting.
They don't teach falling-down-on-your-own-sword in the business schools anymore.
I'm not convinced they ever did. It may be honorable, but it's rarely profitable, and "profit" has trumped "honor" in every history book I've ever read.
Everything except the CAPCHA solution can be automated. In theory if you put a delay in, they just create twelve times as many processes signing up for accounts, all routing their CAPCHAs through a single human.
They're most likely doing that already. They'd have to increase the number of processes, but I suspect that they wouldn't even have to increase the number of computers, if you're just adding a delay to the process.
And if you got to pick your partner, that would make the game prone to trolling.
I wonder if, perhaps, you could narrow down your partner-search a little. Perhaps "somebody with enough points that they at least know how to do this" or "only show me pictures from sites that might be related to some subject I'm interested in". Though that opens the possibility of not finding anybody at all.
Or perhaps to gaming the system again, as you and your troll partner pick some unlikely but existing set of key words.
Re:It's harder than you might at first think
on
Diebold Flops in Alaska
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Paper has other important failure modes. The marks can be made in an ambiguous fashion; electronic voting machines can prevent that.
Also, paper ballots can only present the choices one way, so there's no possibility for a second-chance "These are the votes you're casting. Are you sure?" step. That's particularly important when the ballot design itself is confusing.
Both of these factors made big news in Florida in 2000, and arguably swung the presidential race. Not that these problems outweigh the problems with electronic machines, but building a fix for old symptoms without solving the underlying problem is a time-honored tradition in the US.
Whoa, dude. The bit about the politicians was exactly the point I was making. Maybe comparing Apple employees to Donald Rumsfeld is a little harsh, but it was clearly intended to be humorous. It strikes me that "reprehensible" is a pretty serious charge to be leveling at me over a three-sentence joke, and assuming you know anything about my ethical system from a single post on Slashdot seems uncalled for.
Since "responsibility" was part of the thing I was defining, that would have made the definition circular, which would have made the joke less funny (since "circular definitions" are their own joke, and if you cross two jokes they sort of interfere with each other, at least in my opinion of joke-telling).
The term "accepting responsibility" has taken something of a beating lately. The new definition is "admitting guilt but denying any repercussions". Please update your dictionaries.
That's much more apt than the "bunch of tubes" analogy.
Re:Walk into the room
on
Computer Voodoo?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Or they've been skipping some step that they figure is useless and they're sure they've done already but it didn't help. When demonstrating it for the techie they throw that step in just to save time. They're certain that when it doesn't work the techie will tell them they missed a step and make them do it all over including that step; it still wouldn't work and it would be a waste of time.
Except that the step WAS crucial, and now it works. They had some other problem, and they'd fixed it, but now by skipping that step they still get the problem.
I wish I could attribute that just to dumb users, but I've made that mistake myself. "Yes, I TRIED rebooting the router... oh, it worked this time. Never mind."
I'd be very interested in knowing what comes of this. The Post is my daily paper, and I've had occasion to fire off letters to Ms. Howell on a couple of occasions. Both times she's responded to me, and on one the subject (if not my letter) made it into her column. I believe she'll take your charge seriously.
Ajax runs on IE; XUL doesn't. That's going to increase its "installed base" by an order of magnitude.
Ajax also lacks an installation step. As far as I can tell you always had to download and approve XUL code before it could run, and sometime requires you to reboot your browser.
Availability is always going to trump elegance when it comes to environments.
I'm not a lawyer either, but are you sure? I think what you're describing is "contingency", where you work for free if you lose and take a cut of the winnings if you win.
As far as I can tell "pro bono" really is "for free". At least in the US it's not common for the judge to award legal fees; it has a chilling effect on poor people suing rich people. It's SOP in Great Britian, IIRC, but IANAL.
The early history of the universe is complicated. It had an early "inflationary period" in which things moved a lot faster than light. (That's why it's more than 30 billion light years across, to answer the question a lot of people have asked in this thread already.)
Understanding the way the rules of the universe have changed over time is crucial to understanding what happened at the big bang. And, perhaps more importantly, what happened to make the early universe "clumpy", rather than smooth, which is what gave rise to galaxies, planets, and you.
Relatively small changes in the values like "how old is the universe" have a tendency to scrap some theories about how that happened and reinforce others. It's not like this changes what you're going to have for lunch today, but an awful lot of physicists are skipping lunch entirely trying to figure out what this means.
Welcome to August. The US Congress is out of session, grinding one of America's main news sources to a halt. France basically shuts down, and much of Europe follows its lead. August is vacation time, and nobody makes news, at least in the West.
If it weren't for those hard-working Middle Easterners busily killing each other, the presses would have to shut down entirely.
I'm not sure that answers the question. Many die within months, but we're talking about only 2 out of 18 to make it three years. Curves have tails, and knowing that the mean is only a few months doesn't tell us how many would be expected to live for 3 years.
The Journal of Neuroscience (google cache, the site appears to be down) says that "more than half die within 18 months". Presumably that's with standard treatment. If half were to die every 18 months, that would still leave 1/4 of the patients, around 4, after two years.
I'm sure that's not the right curve to draw; Wikipedia says "few patients survive beyond three years". Is "few" more or less than 2 out of 18? Probably less, but I'm still not at all clear on whether this treatment is actually better than the standard treatment.
The first caucuses of the Presidential campaign season are always in Iowa. It's always the first news of the season, and the winner of Iowa gets huge amounts of free, positive press coverage.
Iowa is where the corn comes from. No politician who ever expects to run for President can afford to piss off Iowa. Even if you're not running today, if it's even on your mind, you vote the way Archer Daniels Midland (the immense agribusiness that can ruin your political life in the farm belt) tells you to vote.
We wouldn't even be talking about ethanol if it weren't for that little quirk of politics. I'd love to see some party say, "Ya know what? Let's make Iowa third rather than first and see what happens." We might still be talking ethanol, but we sure wouldn't be talking about getting it from corn.
Perhaps you were asleep for a couple of months in 2000. The manual votes were extremely dubious. There were many different ways for a vote to be vague (partially punched, incompletely filled in) and the paper ballots don't have any "Are you absolutely sure you meant to vote for Pat Buchanan?" feature.
It sounds like we've swapped one evil for another. I think that most slashdotters would agree that we made a lousy trade. The manual ballots led to a few problems (some of which could be fixed simply by better standards of ballot design), and in a very close election the failures were enough to swing the election. The electronic ones, however, are prone to massive undetectable fraud, and I think most people would say that's worse.
But don't go pining for the good old days of manual ballots without remembering that it was manual ballots that got us our current President in the first place.
The bill leaves way too much to the FCC, out of the hands of elected officials. But if the FCC decides that Amazon and Slashdot are under interdict, I'd expect Jeff Bezos and the EFF to sue the bejeezus out of them.
To come under this bill you have to meet a bunch of requirements, including "elicits highly personalized information from users" (which Slashdot doesn't do) and "enables communication among users" (and you'd have to be really perverse to believe that describes Amazon).
This is a stupid bill, and I need to look up the names of the 15 non-stupid Congressmen who voted against it. (Probably not mine, I'm afraid; he's not stupid but he's not that brave, either.) Even the intended purpose of the bill, banning MySpace access, is of dubious merit. In a sense I hope they'd start with Amazon and Slashdot, because that'll make the court challenge that much more obvious. But I'm pretty sure they won't, for precisely that reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. That's why I said that orbit was a bit much to ask. I suppose I could have been clearer when I said that "it's a long way to orbit from [60 miles]"; I meant "long way in terms of total effort to get to orbital velocity" rather than "a long way up".
Orbit is a bit much to ask, though I think that 60 miles would be newsworthy. The amateur rocketeers have already been there, but accomplishing it on the cheap would be remarkable.
To get there from 20 miles would still require a considerable rocket, though, and I'd be very surprised to see them pull that off for under US$2k. That additional 40 miles is still a considerable event in amateur rocketry, even with the wind essentially eliminated, and that's from a standing start.
And it's a very, very long way to orbit from there (though somewhat easier if you're not planning to get whatever it is back down safely).
As usual, the press-release writers have sold an interesting event ("nice pictures taken from high up cheap") and tried to spin it into a big deal ("we're going to space!"). I imagine the actual engineers are shaking their heads.
According to the sellers, that book is in German. I suppose Beowulf may well translate into German better than English.
As I understand it, Tolkein's contribution to Beowulf wasn't so much the translation but an essay called The Monsters And The Critics, back in the 30s. Apparently it was the first time anybody had looked at Beowulf as a thing with literary merit, rather than just a piece of linguistic evidence.
Slashdot had a story some time ago that they'd found a copy of Beowulf translated by Tolkien at the bottom of a box of his papers in the Oxford library. Supposedly they were going to publish them as soon as they'd deciphered his terrible handwriting. But I haven't heard of it since.
It's a very badly written press release. In fact the actual science has zilch to do with birds and everything to do with plants using the same molecule. They described the way light and magnetic fields interact to change the way the plant stem grows, except in plants without the cryptochrome molecule.
Which is just basic, everyday scientific advancement: a very small and excruciatingly dull thing, presented with a tie-in to something more interesting in an attempt to look sexier and get funding. Scientists hate doing it, but if you want to keep doing science, that's what you do.
This article IS news, but only in the narrowest sense: new information. But after you take that new information, tie it in to something more interesting but only indirectly related (which you put at the front of the press release, and the actual new stuff at the end), then summarize it for Slashdot (skipping the stuff at the end), "news" becomes "olds".
One final note: when I call the work "small", I don't mean to dis the grad students who worked thousands of hours tending the plants, measuring them, putting that data into the computer, analyzing that data, probably cutting them open and measuring that... such immense grunt work for a minor advance [promptly blown up into something irrelevant by university's press department] is the heavy-lifting of science. It's gotta be done but it's not glamorous or even interesting.
They don't teach falling-down-on-your-own-sword in the business schools anymore.
I'm not convinced they ever did. It may be honorable, but it's rarely profitable, and "profit" has trumped "honor" in every history book I've ever read.
Everything except the CAPCHA solution can be automated. In theory if you put a delay in, they just create twelve times as many processes signing up for accounts, all routing their CAPCHAs through a single human.
They're most likely doing that already. They'd have to increase the number of processes, but I suspect that they wouldn't even have to increase the number of computers, if you're just adding a delay to the process.
And if you got to pick your partner, that would make the game prone to trolling.
I wonder if, perhaps, you could narrow down your partner-search a little. Perhaps "somebody with enough points that they at least know how to do this" or "only show me pictures from sites that might be related to some subject I'm interested in". Though that opens the possibility of not finding anybody at all.
Or perhaps to gaming the system again, as you and your troll partner pick some unlikely but existing set of key words.
Paper has other important failure modes. The marks can be made in an ambiguous fashion; electronic voting machines can prevent that.
Also, paper ballots can only present the choices one way, so there's no possibility for a second-chance "These are the votes you're casting. Are you sure?" step. That's particularly important when the ballot design itself is confusing.
Both of these factors made big news in Florida in 2000, and arguably swung the presidential race. Not that these problems outweigh the problems with electronic machines, but building a fix for old symptoms without solving the underlying problem is a time-honored tradition in the US.
Whoa, dude. The bit about the politicians was exactly the point I was making. Maybe comparing Apple employees to Donald Rumsfeld is a little harsh, but it was clearly intended to be humorous. It strikes me that "reprehensible" is a pretty serious charge to be leveling at me over a three-sentence joke, and assuming you know anything about my ethical system from a single post on Slashdot seems uncalled for.
Since "responsibility" was part of the thing I was defining, that would have made the definition circular, which would have made the joke less funny (since "circular definitions" are their own joke, and if you cross two jokes they sort of interfere with each other, at least in my opinion of joke-telling).
The term "accepting responsibility" has taken something of a beating lately. The new definition is "admitting guilt but denying any repercussions". Please update your dictionaries.
It's like the world's largest junior high school.
That's much more apt than the "bunch of tubes" analogy.
Or they've been skipping some step that they figure is useless and they're sure they've done already but it didn't help. When demonstrating it for the techie they throw that step in just to save time. They're certain that when it doesn't work the techie will tell them they missed a step and make them do it all over including that step; it still wouldn't work and it would be a waste of time.
Except that the step WAS crucial, and now it works. They had some other problem, and they'd fixed it, but now by skipping that step they still get the problem.
I wish I could attribute that just to dumb users, but I've made that mistake myself. "Yes, I TRIED rebooting the router... oh, it worked this time. Never mind."
I'd be very interested in knowing what comes of this. The Post is my daily paper, and I've had occasion to fire off letters to Ms. Howell on a couple of occasions. Both times she's responded to me, and on one the subject (if not my letter) made it into her column. I believe she'll take your charge seriously.
That would be blockhackrs.
Ajax runs on IE; XUL doesn't. That's going to increase its "installed base" by an order of magnitude.
Ajax also lacks an installation step. As far as I can tell you always had to download and approve XUL code before it could run, and sometime requires you to reboot your browser.
Availability is always going to trump elegance when it comes to environments.
I'm not a lawyer either, but are you sure? I think what you're describing is "contingency", where you work for free if you lose and take a cut of the winnings if you win.
As far as I can tell "pro bono" really is "for free". At least in the US it's not common for the judge to award legal fees; it has a chilling effect on poor people suing rich people. It's SOP in Great Britian, IIRC, but IANAL.
The early history of the universe is complicated. It had an early "inflationary period" in which things moved a lot faster than light. (That's why it's more than 30 billion light years across, to answer the question a lot of people have asked in this thread already.)
Understanding the way the rules of the universe have changed over time is crucial to understanding what happened at the big bang. And, perhaps more importantly, what happened to make the early universe "clumpy", rather than smooth, which is what gave rise to galaxies, planets, and you.
Relatively small changes in the values like "how old is the universe" have a tendency to scrap some theories about how that happened and reinforce others. It's not like this changes what you're going to have for lunch today, but an awful lot of physicists are skipping lunch entirely trying to figure out what this means.
Welcome to August. The US Congress is out of session, grinding one of America's main news sources to a halt. France basically shuts down, and much of Europe follows its lead. August is vacation time, and nobody makes news, at least in the West.
If it weren't for those hard-working Middle Easterners busily killing each other, the presses would have to shut down entirely.
I'm not sure that answers the question. Many die within months, but we're talking about only 2 out of 18 to make it three years. Curves have tails, and knowing that the mean is only a few months doesn't tell us how many would be expected to live for 3 years.
The Journal of Neuroscience (google cache, the site appears to be down) says that "more than half die within 18 months". Presumably that's with standard treatment. If half were to die every 18 months, that would still leave 1/4 of the patients, around 4, after two years.
I'm sure that's not the right curve to draw; Wikipedia says "few patients survive beyond three years". Is "few" more or less than 2 out of 18? Probably less, but I'm still not at all clear on whether this treatment is actually better than the standard treatment.
The first caucuses of the Presidential campaign season are always in Iowa. It's always the first news of the season, and the winner of Iowa gets huge amounts of free, positive press coverage.
Iowa is where the corn comes from. No politician who ever expects to run for President can afford to piss off Iowa. Even if you're not running today, if it's even on your mind, you vote the way Archer Daniels Midland (the immense agribusiness that can ruin your political life in the farm belt) tells you to vote.
We wouldn't even be talking about ethanol if it weren't for that little quirk of politics. I'd love to see some party say, "Ya know what? Let's make Iowa third rather than first and see what happens." We might still be talking ethanol, but we sure wouldn't be talking about getting it from corn.
Perhaps you were asleep for a couple of months in 2000. The manual votes were extremely dubious. There were many different ways for a vote to be vague (partially punched, incompletely filled in) and the paper ballots don't have any "Are you absolutely sure you meant to vote for Pat Buchanan?" feature.
It sounds like we've swapped one evil for another. I think that most slashdotters would agree that we made a lousy trade. The manual ballots led to a few problems (some of which could be fixed simply by better standards of ballot design), and in a very close election the failures were enough to swing the election. The electronic ones, however, are prone to massive undetectable fraud, and I think most people would say that's worse.
But don't go pining for the good old days of manual ballots without remembering that it was manual ballots that got us our current President in the first place.
Here are the representatives who voted against the bill:
Conyers, John; Michigan, 14th
Grijalva, Raul M.; Arizona, 7th
Hinchey, Maurice D.; New York, 22nd
Honda, Michael M.; California, 15th
Kucinich, Dennis J.; Ohio, 10th
Lee, Barbara; California, 9th
Lofgren, Zoe; California, 16th
McDermott, Jim; Washington, 7th
Payne, Donald M.; New Jersey, 10th
Schakowsky, Janice D.; Illinois, 9th
Scott, Robert C.; Virginia, 3rd
Serrano, Jose E.; New York, 16th
Stark, Fortney Pete; California, 13th
Watson, Diane E.; California, 33rd
Woolsey, Lynn C.; California, 6th
All Democrats, I believe. If your representative's name isn't on the list, it's time for you to make a phone call.
The bill leaves way too much to the FCC, out of the hands of elected officials. But if the FCC decides that Amazon and Slashdot are under interdict, I'd expect Jeff Bezos and the EFF to sue the bejeezus out of them.
To come under this bill you have to meet a bunch of requirements, including "elicits highly personalized information from users" (which Slashdot doesn't do) and "enables communication among users" (and you'd have to be really perverse to believe that describes Amazon).
This is a stupid bill, and I need to look up the names of the 15 non-stupid Congressmen who voted against it. (Probably not mine, I'm afraid; he's not stupid but he's not that brave, either.) Even the intended purpose of the bill, banning MySpace access, is of dubious merit. In a sense I hope they'd start with Amazon and Slashdot, because that'll make the court challenge that much more obvious. But I'm pretty sure they won't, for precisely that reason.