This is a misconception. While many scientists may not be good a making small talk at parties, we are paid lecturers you know. You don't teach to a class of freshmen and present at meetings six times a year without learning a thing or two about public speaking. Within the narrow confines of explaining their research, scientists can be very eloquent. It helps that this site is aimed at a technical to semi-technical audience.
And as for peer review, SciVee only accepts submissions from well respected peer reviewed journals. It's not like youtube where anyone can post anything they want. First you have to have published the paper in one of the accepted journals (you can only present your own work). Your coauthors have to review it and certify that it is an accurate representation of the work. Etc.
It currently only takes papers from the PLOS family of journals. Most of the PLOS journals have a biological bent because they were started by a group of Biologists/Biochemists at UC Berkley and their editorial staff is mostly biology centric. PLOS One is a general subject journal and accepts publications from any field of science. You pay to publish in PLOS journals because they are open access. PLOS does not sell subscriptions or charge for access to articles, instead it charges authors a small fee (few thousand dollars, small for science) to help defray the costs of hosting, editing, etc. Then it publishes them on the web and allows access to anyone. If you do not have the research funds available to pay for publication and can prove such, they will wave the publication fee. All PLOS journals are rigorously Peer Reviewed, it's not like you can buy access or anything. My group has an article published in PLOS One, check it out if you want http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action ?articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.00 00467.
Re:And all of a sudden....
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You think Microsoft is the epitome of corporate evil? They may be ruthless and nasty monopolists, but they don't dump toxic chemicals into the water supply of small third world villages, the don't sell weapons to dictators, they don't run any sweatshops, and they don't sell toys with lead paint to children. They use unfair marketing and business practices to push a mediocre product that has some security and privacy concerns. On a corporate evil scale of 1-10 MS is maybe a 3. A low 3, and I'm willing to call it even seeing as how much of the profits Gates has plowed back into research on third world diseases that nobody else seems to care about.
Re:Fair??? Language, please...
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And they havn't been put up against a wall and shot either. Nor should they be.
Haven't seen eureka, but stargate is total space opera. The technology is mostly technobabel. Fundamental conflict between good and evil (or us and them if you prefer). The plot is driven by a "go" drive (push the button and it goes, no explanation of how it works). And with the exception of the actual movie, everybody in the fucking universe speaks english.
Anyway, I've seen Macs crash plenty of times. Less than Windows, sure, but more than Linux. Interesting. I've been using linux for about 5 yrs now and I bought a macbook last year. I've noticed that my linux system crashes quite a bit more frequently than my macbook, despite the mac getting more use. I suspect it has to do with the different tasks one has to perform on them. I never have to recompile my kernel on the mac, or screw around with source code to resolve compatibility issues based on the advise of someone on a forum. I suspect that linux is somewhat more stable than osx on average, but it needs to be because we ask so much more of it. Of course, I use mandriva, so YMMV.
A comunity that can expend so much wasted energy debating the relative merits of vi vs emacs, or the one true brace, simply isn't built to co-operate like that. Part of the passion which drives the better technicians is an inability to compromise. Our individual strengths are our collective weaknesses Absolutely. I mean, isn't it obvious that emacs is better than vi? Why waste our time fighting about it?
Bullshit. Uunless you are a visual arts or CS major, there is no homework you will not be able to do on this machine. And if you're not running the fancy-but-useless graphics interface in vista (which you won't be with an integrated graphics chip) then it won't take up so much system. Serously, there is nothing your standard english lit or communications major needs to run that won't run on three year old hardware.
Actually, if you let a plant die, most of it's carbon is released through the process of decay. Only if the plant is buried in something like a peat bog or the ocean or some other preservative media will the carbon be preserved and eventually become coal or oil or some other fossil fuel. This generally only happens with very large plants that decay slowly.
The pathetic thing about the pirate bay in general is they're doing immature things that aren't worth risking your freedom for. People are meant to risk their lives and freedom for ideals worth protecting, not the freedom to download copies of the latest far from essential Hollywood trash without paying for it. Absolutely, people should never do silly things like protesting unfair copyright laws or tea taxes. All civil disobedience should always be based on high minded intellectual ideals and never on actual concrete things that piss people off like unfair taxes, or the price of bread. Thank you for revealing to us what people are meant to risk their lives for. People are obviously too stupid to make that sort of decision and we have desperately needed someone like you to come along and tell us what ideals are worth fighting for.
except that they aren't getting said royalties. New Orleans and Chicago are full of old jazz composers who have never seen a cent of royalty payments. Is it because no one plays their songs? Is it because the cruel coppyright violators refuse to pay? No, it's because there is no requirement for the money collectors (read RIAA, BMI, etc) to actually give the money to the artists. They just have to keep it in an "account" in the artists name. "Fees" charged for "administering" the account accrue over time and the money is absorbed by the various agencies. There was a story about this a while back on NPR
Pat Robertson works to spread a strict view of christianity throughout the world. Does that, in and of itself, qualify him as a terrorist? Is everyone who subscribes to a strict view of Islam a terrorist? It seems that you have fallen into the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. ie, "If A then B, B, therefor A". "All Islamic terrorists subscribe to a strict view of Islam, This guy subscribes to a strict view of Islam, Therefor he is an Islamic terrorist." This is not a valid assumption.
I didn't mean to be temporally pedantic, I think the important distinction here is that the crime did not occur during the course of his official duties. It strictly dealt with his private life. Therefor there isn't much implication of a quid pro quo, he could not be lying to protect his boss or his boss' associates.
Actually, you only need to do distillation if you want the alcohol to be for human consumption. My recollection is that there is a chemical process you can use to purify alcohol to 95% (which is fine for burning in cars), but it has the problem that the alcohol is unsafe for consumption afterwards. I think there was an article that mentioned this a few weeks ago in Chemistry and Engineering News. Also, they have developed strains of yeast that will ferment up to 20% alcohol and there are people working to push that higher.
The problem is that after 10 years of some of the best minds thinking about this problem, we have yet to come up with a viable scheme for making H2 that doesn't involve putting in more energy then you will eventually get out of it. On the other hand, we know how to do this ethanol thing and it looks like it will be relatively easy. So lets do that while we're waiting for someone to solve the H2 problem. It's not like we're stopping hydrogen research in this country to work on ethanol. Also, ethanol is cleaner than hydrogen if you do it right. Hell, you can use ethanol to run fuel cells.
Seriously, why? Why bother with all this expensive "synthetic biology" or (worse) growing and using perfectly good corn to make something that's less effective than gasoline when you can just grow an imperial fuckton of algae, render them down for biofuel, and use that? Carbon neutral, and you get something more akin to good ol' diesel fuel than ethanol. We are doing that. Why not do this too? Why carry all your eggs in one basket? Besides, you make it sound like biofuel from algae is easy. I know people who work in this field and the fact is that algae don't contain enough convertable lipids to make harvesting biofuel from them viable at large scales. There are people working to engineer strains of algae with a higher lipid content, but it will probably take at least as much engineering as what this project proposes.
You should take a look at inflation theory. It posits a universe much like you describe, with the majority of the universe stuck in a state of inflation (super inflation driven by a scalar field, not simple expansion like is still taking place) with local areas where the inflation field collapses to a lower energy state creating mass/energy and an expanding spacetime like our experiment. It is a common theory of the "multiverse" variety.
I often hear this kind of reasoning, that the government is too incompetent to keep something like this secret. I find this an odd defense, seeing as if it did happen then the government obviously was not able to keep it secret. Otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it.
Sure biohackers are creating new organisms, but it isn't the same as creating it from scratch and understanding both the system and how the system interact with other systems If you page down a few stories here you will find an article on how Creig Venture is trying to create the first organism designed from the bottom up, giving us a biotechnological platform where we understand and purposely included all elements involved. It is not an unreasonable extrapolation to assume that in the future biohackers will have access to which are thoroughly understood.
because they see Democrats as some sort of alien species, a sort of talking vermin. (And there are Democrats who feel the same way, let's be clear.) The problem with the democrats is that there are far too many of them who see Democrats as some sort of alien species, a sort of talking vermin. Nobody is better at hating the democrats than the democrats.
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This is a misconception. While many scientists may not be good a making small talk at parties, we are paid lecturers you know. You don't teach to a class of freshmen and present at meetings six times a year without learning a thing or two about public speaking. Within the narrow confines of explaining their research, scientists can be very eloquent. It helps that this site is aimed at a technical to semi-technical audience. And as for peer review, SciVee only accepts submissions from well respected peer reviewed journals. It's not like youtube where anyone can post anything they want. First you have to have published the paper in one of the accepted journals (you can only present your own work). Your coauthors have to review it and certify that it is an accurate representation of the work. Etc.
It currently only takes papers from the PLOS family of journals. Most of the PLOS journals have a biological bent because they were started by a group of Biologists/Biochemists at UC Berkley and their editorial staff is mostly biology centric. PLOS One is a general subject journal and accepts publications from any field of science. You pay to publish in PLOS journals because they are open access. PLOS does not sell subscriptions or charge for access to articles, instead it charges authors a small fee (few thousand dollars, small for science) to help defray the costs of hosting, editing, etc. Then it publishes them on the web and allows access to anyone. If you do not have the research funds available to pay for publication and can prove such, they will wave the publication fee. All PLOS journals are rigorously Peer Reviewed, it's not like you can buy access or anything. My group has an article published in PLOS One, check it out if you want http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action ?articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.00 00467.
You think Microsoft is the epitome of corporate evil? They may be ruthless and nasty monopolists, but they don't dump toxic chemicals into the water supply of small third world villages, the don't sell weapons to dictators, they don't run any sweatshops, and they don't sell toys with lead paint to children. They use unfair marketing and business practices to push a mediocre product that has some security and privacy concerns. On a corporate evil scale of 1-10 MS is maybe a 3. A low 3, and I'm willing to call it even seeing as how much of the profits Gates has plowed back into research on third world diseases that nobody else seems to care about.
And they havn't been put up against a wall and shot either. Nor should they be.
Filtering removes particulate matter and bacteria. Not toxic chemicals or heavy metals.
OSX isn't the memory hog that windows is. You don't need as much RAM
Haven't seen eureka, but stargate is total space opera. The technology is mostly technobabel. Fundamental conflict between good and evil (or us and them if you prefer). The plot is driven by a "go" drive (push the button and it goes, no explanation of how it works). And with the exception of the actual movie, everybody in the fucking universe speaks english.
Bullshit. Uunless you are a visual arts or CS major, there is no homework you will not be able to do on this machine. And if you're not running the fancy-but-useless graphics interface in vista (which you won't be with an integrated graphics chip) then it won't take up so much system. Serously, there is nothing your standard english lit or communications major needs to run that won't run on three year old hardware.
Actually, if you let a plant die, most of it's carbon is released through the process of decay. Only if the plant is buried in something like a peat bog or the ocean or some other preservative media will the carbon be preserved and eventually become coal or oil or some other fossil fuel. This generally only happens with very large plants that decay slowly.
except that they aren't getting said royalties. New Orleans and Chicago are full of old jazz composers who have never seen a cent of royalty payments. Is it because no one plays their songs? Is it because the cruel coppyright violators refuse to pay? No, it's because there is no requirement for the money collectors (read RIAA, BMI, etc) to actually give the money to the artists. They just have to keep it in an "account" in the artists name. "Fees" charged for "administering" the account accrue over time and the money is absorbed by the various agencies. There was a story about this a while back on NPR
Honestly, I'm surprised Ron Paul didn't make the list. He wins all internet polls.
Pat Robertson works to spread a strict view of christianity throughout the world. Does that, in and of itself, qualify him as a terrorist? Is everyone who subscribes to a strict view of Islam a terrorist? It seems that you have fallen into the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. ie, "If A then B, B, therefor A". "All Islamic terrorists subscribe to a strict view of Islam, This guy subscribes to a strict view of Islam, Therefor he is an Islamic terrorist." This is not a valid assumption.
I didn't mean to be temporally pedantic, I think the important distinction here is that the crime did not occur during the course of his official duties. It strictly dealt with his private life. Therefor there isn't much implication of a quid pro quo, he could not be lying to protect his boss or his boss' associates.
Actually, you only need to do distillation if you want the alcohol to be for human consumption. My recollection is that there is a chemical process you can use to purify alcohol to 95% (which is fine for burning in cars), but it has the problem that the alcohol is unsafe for consumption afterwards. I think there was an article that mentioned this a few weeks ago in Chemistry and Engineering News. Also, they have developed strains of yeast that will ferment up to 20% alcohol and there are people working to push that higher.
The problem is that after 10 years of some of the best minds thinking about this problem, we have yet to come up with a viable scheme for making H2 that doesn't involve putting in more energy then you will eventually get out of it. On the other hand, we know how to do this ethanol thing and it looks like it will be relatively easy. So lets do that while we're waiting for someone to solve the H2 problem. It's not like we're stopping hydrogen research in this country to work on ethanol. Also, ethanol is cleaner than hydrogen if you do it right. Hell, you can use ethanol to run fuel cells.
You should take a look at inflation theory. It posits a universe much like you describe, with the majority of the universe stuck in a state of inflation (super inflation driven by a scalar field, not simple expansion like is still taking place) with local areas where the inflation field collapses to a lower energy state creating mass/energy and an expanding spacetime like our experiment. It is a common theory of the "multiverse" variety.
None of those 140 worked for him or committed their crimes while acting in their capacity as a public official.
I often hear this kind of reasoning, that the government is too incompetent to keep something like this secret. I find this an odd defense, seeing as if it did happen then the government obviously was not able to keep it secret. Otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it.
Woosh! The sound of sarcasm passing completely over your head.