You could get 1 GB RAM from HP for $9 (look at the rebate form: it really is a $40 rebate on a $49 item). A used power supply costs $5. I never pay for a monitor, mouse or keyboard; too many are being thrown or given away these days in the rush to flat screens and wireless mice.
The article conclude that low body weight causes death. What the study really shows is that impending death is correlated with (and indeed causes, via various mechanisms) low body weight/BMI.
When people become ill and die of certain diseases (Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, infections, lung disease, etc.) they lose their appetite and/or ability to eat and consequently lose weight.
A person's weight at death will tend to be below average, especially if they were of average weight to begin with. If they were overweight before they became ill, they will most likely still be overweight at death, but less so. In summary the distribution of a population's weight at death is shifted left (to lower values) from a distribution of the same population's weight while alive.
The correct interpretation is "dying people lose weight." This isn't news but the misinterpretation of it is news.
pursuing enemies of the United States. Undoubtedly they also have determined where Osama Bin Laden is hiding?
I am soooo pleased that we now have tens of thousands of otherwise unemployed white-collar workers working diligently to pursue terrorists such as this woman. If only one such terrorist is found by the trillions of dollars then I think the "War on Terror" must be declared a wild success.
The posting is an attempt to gather clicks for Information Week.
The article nonsensically claims that companies building web 2.0 apps are a threat to in-house developers. Their evidence: one company's newly-hired CTO who, upon taking charge, laid off 1 of 5 of his workers and contracted with a web 2.0 vendor to do some mashups.
Peter DeBono was right: news media have a horizon of less than 24 hours and will do anything, _anything_, to make life-as-usual look like news.
I developed graphics workstation software in the period 1970-1990. There is an abundance of prior art for these claimed patents. Windowing and the idea of multiple views of a single workspace on a single display was commonplace during that period.
There were many academic papers and conferences; ACM SIGGRAPH publications go back to 1967 at least. By the time SIGGRAPH organized, the field of computer graphics was already well-established: many proprietary graphics systems were already in use in private industry and government. Newman and Sproull published their landmark text Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics in 1973.
Other especially good veins to mine for prior art are satellite imaging software for both government use (spy satellites) and for oil prospecting. Another active area was geophysical processing workstation software. The major oil companies were the non-military non-spy pioneers in these areas.
Otherwise potential alien overlords could beam electromagnetic energy into our crania to convince us that they are here to help us. Only the tinhats would be free.
Imagine George Bush using the "God beam" on U.S. citizens: the cognitive dissonance would generate mass hysterical laughter, then everyone's brains would explode.
My high school also had a multi-hundred-thousand dollar "foreign language computer lab". In middle school French class, common activities were listening to educational cassettes and conversing with fellow students in French. At my high school, we would go to the foreign language computer lab, put on headsets and... listen to educational cassettes and converse with fellow students in French - but over headsets attached to computers!
Maybe you weren't using the language lab correctly.
A "Language lab's" primary use is to provide the student feedback. E.g., you listen to a recording of a Italian phrase spoken by a native Italian speaker, then try to repeat it (while recording yourself) and then you listen to what you just said. Repeat the procedure until what you say is indistinguishable from what the native Italian speaker says.
Two things happen as you do this:
you hear the differences between Italian and English,
you change your pronunciation to the proper Italian form.
This is done alone. Other students would only be a distraction.
I spent many hours alone in my university's humble language laboratory doing rote exercises. The result is that my Italian pronunciation is excellent and I learned to think in Italian.
The CEO of a successful firm selling intellectual property in mathematics ventures his (rather strong) opinion on education, proving that he is certainly overqualified to teach or to manage teachers or to be involved in education in any manner whatsoever.
How can you teach a 12-year old to multiply when he's on his cellphone or playing with a GameBoy?
Before you can walk, you must crawl. Before you learn algebra, you must learn arithmetic. To do these tasks most children must focus, focus, focus. Bringing electronics into the classroom only distracts students.
In later news, Tim Berners-Lee revealed in an exclusive interview with Womens' Magazine that he was frustrated with the absence of women in IT, especially those who thought the Semantic Web was fascinating and would bring a New Millenium to mankind.
"Stupid male geeks are alienating smarter women with whom I had intended to procreate, build the Semantic Web and take over the WWW." However in a brief unguarded moment, TBL revealed to interviewer Lisa Likalot that "I'm not getting any. In fact my last girlfriend left me for a delivery-truck driver. She said I was out of shape. She did not have the ability to appreciate my beautiful mind."
Deposits are traced and surveillance photos taken at all deposit points and ATMs. Getting mortgage account information is not trivial; unusual payments are noted and the presumed payer questioned. Photoshopping is trivially obvious; any attempt would not correspond to reality and would most likely be held up for laughter. To put pedophilia on someone's computer you must first possess pedophelia(a crime). How do you gain access to their office computer? Most internet access is logged, so how did the pics get there? (Ans., someone put them there, i.e., you)
Your suggestions are laughably adolescent. There's not always a way to blackmail someone. Possibly embarrass, but not blackmail. To blackmail someone, you must find something that really happened that the victim really, truly doesn't want revealed.
And it is dangerous to attempt blackmail. Almost everyone has a "friend" or "acquaintance" who could be counted on to remove a blackmail threat permanently. Only a tightly-knit organization can effectively blackmail. Even that is iffy and more a matter of nerves and a question of the willingness to risk and endure harm than anything else.
Blackmailers get little sympathy from law enforcement, living as they do near the bottom rung of crime, below pedophiles, just under identity thieves.
" The TLC claims that the technology will not be used to invade drivers' privacy but will provide real-time maps and help passengers recover lost property."
Cornhole's Law:
Every system, no matter it's original intended purpose, will eventually be put to use in a manner conducive to the organization's goals [e.g., profit, faster response, etc.] and detrimental to the worker. The "real-time maps" and "helping passengers recover lost property" are transparent excuses. What is sought is a system that can monitor drivers' productivity and efficiency, so that the most profitable drivers can be kept and the least profitable driven out of the business.
In many cities, taxicab drivers own their vehicles and are independent contractors. They must buy their cab from the taxi company. Regardless of the arrangement, taxi companies are in the business of wringing as much money as possible out of the drivers and into their own pockets.
This system will allow the company to determine when the taxi driver stops for coffee, picks up clothes at the cleaners, visits his girlfriend, and takes a leak. Most people would judge such a system at the least as "intrusive". But when it is used to hire and fire drivers, it becomes a matter of some legal importance.
Note that police officers also oppose GPS and other monitoring systems on their vehicles for the same reasons.
I see an incredible opportunity here for recycling the drugs (hey, they already recycle the other shit!) from a municipality's waste system:
Remove drugs from waste byproducts,
Fractionate drugs into their pure forms (e.g., cocaine, ibufprofen, penicillin, insulin, MAOs, etc.)
Re-package and sell at a discount,
Profit!
[But wouldn't this threaten the entire (legal and illegal) drug industry? It might be reasonable to ask who would off you first: a cocaine dealer or a Big Pharma hitman.]
I worked for a decade in the IT division of one of the largest and most automated police departments. I know whereof I speak.
So one day a lieutenant with visibility gets the idea of buying a mapping and data-mining system and pushes it up the chain with gee-whiz descriptions (like those in the OP) of how crime can be predicted. I did simulation and analysis of the proposals and concluded that there was little to no value in the proposed projects. Everything that could be predicted by the system was already being done by experienced cops and detectives. But nobody wanted to hear that: they wanted a show-and-tell for the public.
$20 million later what do they have to show for it? A system that prints slides of criminal incidents for the chief to show when he meets neighborhood associations. Despite throwing systems and people into prediction, they have come up with absolutely nothing new.
Unless your entire police force is composed of total morons, such systems are not cost-effective.
Right.......... That seems completely illogical to me. And the attempt at evading the specifics just illustrates how much of a PR flak he is.
OK, smartass. Here are the specifics, or enough of them to explain why he's right:
You can't just throw chemicals into a sink and cause a terrific explosion (sufficient to do any significant damage to anything other than yourself). Instead, while mixing various chemicals to make explosives, you must mix them
very slowly,
while stirring,
at a controlled temperature (e.g., chill the mixing bowl in ice),
in a non-reactive container,
with a non-reactive stirrer,
while avoiding breathing the (usually irritating, possibly toxic) fumes.
To add to this nightmare, you often must slowly dry the result of the reaction afterward, a process requiring hours. Of course, the exact details vary depending on what you're cooking up.
If you don't follow directions _exactly_ you will get one of
a dud reaction,
a boil over (excessive heating or fuming),
a fire, or
a small explosion,
none of which will be sufficient to do damage to anything other than yourself.
The graceful upshot of it all is that some fool can't just pour various ingredients into a sink and blow up a plane. Making explosives takes knowledge, training, laboratory equipment and time to do properly. And even then it is highly likely to fail (that's why chemistry departments still have laboratories).
When I was a kid amateur rocketry was all the rage, so I read up on everything available. This was in the 50's and 60's when people were mixing their own propellants. Just reading about the procedures gave me the heebie-jeebies. During that period more than a few adventuresome rocketeers lost a hand, an eye or worse making rockets. My conclusion was that theory was better than practice: I left the experimental rocketry to more adventurous souls and studied physics instead.
Mixing up explosives in an airplane sink is a recipe for arriving in Paradise six agonizing hours after your nuts have already passed through the pearly gates. Somehow I don't think the alloted 72 virgins would be pleased.
You're missing my point: separating the research and the teaching would improve both.
Research institutes already do the best research. And universities could better focus on teaching if they were not also distracted by the extremely costly and distracting need to attract researchers and research grants.
FWIW a little economics helps to understand the utility of specialization and division of labor.
Moreover, they seemed to enjoy teaching as much as research, and several had written or were in the process of writing textbooks.
"Seemed" is the keyword here. Only a few university professor that I have asked would choose teaching over pure research if they were given the choice. You might do your own poll.
Of course, when you _must_ take time to teach, you accomodate your attitude to that and rationalize that things must be done in this way. Life is not supposed to be easy.
Slashdot Mirror
You could get 1 GB RAM from HP for $9 (look at the rebate form: it really is a $40 rebate on a $49 item). A used power supply costs $5. I never pay for a monitor, mouse or keyboard; too many are being thrown or given away these days in the rush to flat screens and wireless mice.
The article conclude that low body weight causes death. What the study really shows is that impending death is correlated with (and indeed causes, via various mechanisms) low body weight/BMI.
When people become ill and die of certain diseases (Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, infections, lung disease, etc.) they lose their appetite and/or ability to eat and consequently lose weight .
A person's weight at death will tend to be below average, especially if they were of average weight to begin with. If they were overweight before they became ill, they will most likely still be overweight at death, but less so. In summary the distribution of a population's weight at death is shifted left (to lower values) from a distribution of the same population's weight while alive.
The correct interpretation is "dying people lose weight." This isn't news but the misinterpretation of it is news.
pursuing enemies of the United States. Undoubtedly they also have determined where Osama Bin Laden is hiding?
I am soooo pleased that we now have tens of thousands of otherwise unemployed white-collar workers working diligently to pursue terrorists such as this woman. If only one such terrorist is found by the trillions of dollars then I think the "War on Terror" must be declared a wild success.
Sheesh!
The posting is an attempt to gather clicks for Information Week.
The article nonsensically claims that companies building web 2.0 apps are a threat to in-house developers. Their evidence: one company's newly-hired CTO who, upon taking charge, laid off 1 of 5 of his workers and contracted with a web 2.0 vendor to do some mashups.
Peter DeBono was right: news media have a horizon of less than 24 hours and will do anything, _anything_, to make life-as-usual look like news.
as the next target for positron emissions testing.
I just want to find out if the little shit will still bark it's yap off at midnight while it's glowing in the dark.
Granular, of course.
is to refuse coverage for anyone who tests positive for Alzheimer's disease.
The rush to bring this to market is purely from insurance companies, so they can "cherry-pick" only healthy clients and reduce their costs.
I developed graphics workstation software in the period 1970-1990. There is an abundance of prior art for these claimed patents. Windowing and the idea of multiple views of a single workspace on a single display was commonplace during that period.
There were many academic papers and conferences; ACM SIGGRAPH publications go back to 1967 at least. By the time SIGGRAPH organized, the field of computer graphics was already well-established: many proprietary graphics systems were already in use in private industry and government. Newman and Sproull published their landmark text Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics in 1973.
Other especially good veins to mine for prior art are satellite imaging software for both government use (spy satellites) and for oil prospecting. Another active area was geophysical processing workstation software. The major oil companies were the non-military non-spy pioneers in these areas.
Otherwise potential alien overlords could beam electromagnetic energy into our crania to convince us that they are here to help us. Only the tinhats would be free.
Imagine George Bush using the "God beam" on U.S. citizens: the cognitive dissonance would generate mass hysterical laughter, then everyone's brains would explode.
Maybe you weren't using the language lab correctly.
A "Language lab's" primary use is to provide the student feedback . E.g., you listen to a recording of a Italian phrase spoken by a native Italian speaker, then try to repeat it (while recording yourself) and then you listen to what you just said . Repeat the procedure until what you say is indistinguishable from what the native Italian speaker says.
Two things happen as you do this:
This is done alone. Other students would only be a distraction.
I spent many hours alone in my university's humble language laboratory doing rote exercises. The result is that my Italian pronunciation is excellent and I learned to think in Italian.
The CEO of a successful firm selling intellectual property in mathematics ventures his (rather strong) opinion on education, proving that he is certainly overqualified to teach or to manage teachers or to be involved in education in any manner whatsoever.
How can you teach a 12-year old to multiply when he's on his cellphone or playing with a GameBoy?
Before you can walk, you must crawl. Before you learn algebra, you must learn arithmetic. To do these tasks most children must focus, focus, focus. Bringing electronics into the classroom only distracts students.
SAS's CEO is an idiot.
Wow, OK now.
Have we discovered the origin of Life yet?
are all the thrills I need.
In later news, Tim Berners-Lee revealed in an exclusive interview with Womens' Magazine that he was frustrated with the absence of women in IT, especially those who thought the Semantic Web was fascinating and would bring a New Millenium to mankind.
"Stupid male geeks are alienating smarter women with whom I had intended to procreate, build the Semantic Web and take over the WWW." However in a brief unguarded moment, TBL revealed to interviewer Lisa Likalot that "I'm not getting any. In fact my last girlfriend left me for a delivery-truck driver. She said I was out of shape. She did not have the ability to appreciate my beautiful mind."
We can't get a good economic forecast six months out!
10 years?? Fugetaboutit!
Well, yes you can. I don't recall hearing much from Carthage in the last 2000 years.
We've already won any war in Iraq. We should not have overstayed our welcome, however.
Everything you mentioned is traced:
Deposits are traced and surveillance photos taken at all deposit points and ATMs. Getting mortgage account information is not trivial; unusual payments are noted and the presumed payer questioned. Photoshopping is trivially obvious; any attempt would not correspond to reality and would most likely be held up for laughter. To put pedophilia on someone's computer you must first possess pedophelia(a crime). How do you gain access to their office computer? Most internet access is logged, so how did the pics get there? (Ans., someone put them there, i.e., you)
Your suggestions are laughably adolescent. There's not always a way to blackmail someone. Possibly embarrass, but not blackmail. To blackmail someone, you must find something that really happened that the victim really, truly doesn't want revealed.
And it is dangerous to attempt blackmail. Almost everyone has a "friend" or "acquaintance" who could be counted on to remove a blackmail threat permanently. Only a tightly-knit organization can effectively blackmail. Even that is iffy and more a matter of nerves and a question of the willingness to risk and endure harm than anything else.
Blackmailers get little sympathy from law enforcement, living as they do near the bottom rung of crime, below pedophiles, just under identity thieves.
Cornhole's Law: Every system, no matter it's original intended purpose, will eventually be put to use in a manner conducive to the organization's goals [e.g., profit, faster response, etc.] and detrimental to the worker.
The "real-time maps" and "helping passengers recover lost property" are transparent excuses. What is sought is a system that can monitor drivers' productivity and efficiency, so that the most profitable drivers can be kept and the least profitable driven out of the business.
In many cities, taxicab drivers own their vehicles and are independent contractors. They must buy their cab from the taxi company. Regardless of the arrangement, taxi companies are in the business of wringing as much money as possible out of the drivers and into their own pockets.
This system will allow the company to determine when the taxi driver stops for coffee, picks up clothes at the cleaners, visits his girlfriend, and takes a leak. Most people would judge such a system at the least as "intrusive". But when it is used to hire and fire drivers, it becomes a matter of some legal importance.
Note that police officers also oppose GPS and other monitoring systems on their vehicles for the same reasons.
[But wouldn't this threaten the entire (legal and illegal) drug industry? It might be reasonable to ask who would off you first: a cocaine dealer or a Big Pharma hitman.]
Give H1-Bs to 100,000 Indian Graduates and let them do the teaching. Much cheaper and they will be more grateful.
and spend money.
I worked for a decade in the IT division of one of the largest and most automated police departments. I know whereof I speak.
So one day a lieutenant with visibility gets the idea of buying a mapping and data-mining system and pushes it up the chain with gee-whiz descriptions (like those in the OP) of how crime can be predicted. I did simulation and analysis of the proposals and concluded that there was little to no value in the proposed projects. Everything that could be predicted by the system was already being done by experienced cops and detectives. But nobody wanted to hear that: they wanted a show-and-tell for the public.
$20 million later what do they have to show for it? A system that prints slides of criminal incidents for the chief to show when he meets neighborhood associations. Despite throwing systems and people into prediction, they have come up with absolutely nothing new.
Unless your entire police force is composed of total morons, such systems are not cost-effective.
OK, smartass. Here are the specifics, or enough of them to explain why he's right:
You can't just throw chemicals into a sink and cause a terrific explosion (sufficient to do any significant damage to anything other than yourself). Instead, while mixing various chemicals to make explosives, you must mix them
To add to this nightmare, you often must slowly dry the result of the reaction afterward, a process requiring hours. Of course, the exact details vary depending on what you're cooking up.
If you don't follow directions _exactly_ you will get one of
- a dud reaction,
- a boil over (excessive heating or fuming),
- a fire, or
- a small explosion,
none of which will be sufficient to do damage to anything other than yourself.The graceful upshot of it all is that some fool can't just pour various ingredients into a sink and blow up a plane. Making explosives takes knowledge, training, laboratory equipment and time to do properly. And even then it is highly likely to fail (that's why chemistry departments still have laboratories).
When I was a kid amateur rocketry was all the rage, so I read up on everything available. This was in the 50's and 60's when people were mixing their own propellants. Just reading about the procedures gave me the heebie-jeebies. During that period more than a few adventuresome rocketeers lost a hand, an eye or worse making rockets. My conclusion was that theory was better than practice: I left the experimental rocketry to more adventurous souls and studied physics instead.
Mixing up explosives in an airplane sink is a recipe for arriving in Paradise six agonizing hours after your nuts have already passed through the pearly gates. Somehow I don't think the alloted 72 virgins would be pleased.
You're missing my point: separating the research and the teaching would improve both. Research institutes already do the best research. And universities could better focus on teaching if they were not also distracted by the extremely costly and distracting need to attract researchers and research grants. FWIW a little economics helps to understand the utility of specialization and division of labor.
Of course, when you _must_ take time to teach, you accomodate your attitude to that and rationalize that things must be done in this way. Life is not supposed to be easy.