Consider this: How did Slashdot become a medical web site?
Slashdot has always been a science and technology website; science includes medicine. Search Google including the term site:slashdot.org. You'll find plenty of medical stories on the site from 10 years ago and earlier.
Police reaction to speeding in the UK and US is often quite different. The last time I took the wheel in the UK I made a 220 km journey, over mostly M roads, in an hour and got no tickets despite passing several marked police cars. I presume it's because I always stayed left except to pass, was diligent about signaling and generally being polite in my driving behavior aside from the speed.
In contrast, a co-worker of mine received a ticket for 2 mph over the limit last year in the US.
Are you sure it was police you passed and not Highways Agency traffic officers? Their vehicles are marked similarly, but the traffic officers are there to attend to accidents on the motorways, maintain traffic flow etc., and not to arrest people. If you passed the police whilst travelling at 137 mph (almost double the maximum speed limit in the UK), it is very unlikely that you'd be spared a trip to court.
Oh wait... isn't it the government who receives the payment for the fine?
All this does is shift money. The government is just paying itself. It doesn't cost the taxpayer any more.
To some extent.
However, in the UK the police are funded partially through central government funds and partially through local council funds. People here pay income tax, which goes to central government, and a smaller amount of 'council' tax, which is for use on local services, police, fire departments etc.
What these fines do, in effect, is to take money that residents of the area have paid to police the local area and give it back to central government. The health service is currently fighting a similar £325,000 (over $500,000) fine.
These organisations should be held accountable for privacy breaches, but taking money away from residents and patients is not the answer.
Blacks do not innovate.
$60 a year for doing what? Nothing? Surely marking a number as unlisted in the subscriber database is a once-off 30 activity of at most 5 minutes. So who's being paid $720 an hour for doing it?
I doubt it's even a 5 minute job. I work for a large telco in Europe. If a customer over here asks for their number not to be printed, we have to honour that request and we're not allowed (by law) to charge a cent for doing so. The phone directory is based on a database, which is linked to our customer care software. If a customer asks for their number to be removed from the phone book, a customer care agent clicks the button on their screen and the database is updated overnight. Factoring in a staff member's time, overheads for running the call centre etc., a call like this costs on average the equivalent of just over $4. Charging $60 per year is outrageous.
Indeed, on nature.com I would have expected something clearer like exponential notation. Eric's answer to the first comment is even weirder:"It would be in Celsius. We’re metric around here. Cheers, Eric" I'm pretty sure they work in Kelvin, for a US audience it would of course have been expressed as Rankin.
I believe the last record was reported in short-scale, so 4 trillion = 4 x 10^12
So I suspect this one must be 5 x 10^12 unless they've broken the record by a significant amount.
I've gone all the way up to calculus 3 (vectors, multi-dimensional functions, and doing differentials and integrals therein) and I've yet to see calculus applied by any programming. I am curious how one actually implements it though, in what (limited) programming I've done, I haven't seen any clear way to calculate say an integral using something like c++ or c#.
Is it typically library/api driven and you just feed an equation to those functions? Or do most programmers hardcode them?
I'd like to see some code examples. I'd probably never have a use for it, but I am curious.
I haven't tried it, but it appears that the GNU Scientific Library contains functions for linear algebra, numerical differentiation, differential equations etc. You can download it here, and it's also in the standard Debian repositories (and I suspect also included with most other Linux distros).
School taught 68hc11 assembly language, which is a great education, but poor training as supposedly everyone does microcontrollers in C, or at least the people that talk loudly do, I donno what people who actually write code do.
When I learned about Microcontrollers in my EE course, we were first taught how to code in assembly language, and only later taught C. I think the idea is that the learning of assembly language can help the students to think about the inner workings of the chip (i.e. moving values into registers etc.), so teaching assembly language is a good first step before moving onto C.
Sory to post this here, but it seems that SLASHCODE'S CSS HAS CHANGED IN A WAY THAT IT NO LONGER OBEYS CHROMIUM'S MAGNIFICATION COMMAND.
I am sight impaired and CANNOT READ unles with high magnification.
Please fix this!
You should probably email feedback at slashdot.org (see the footer of this page) instead of posting this in a random thread; maybe they can fix it for you.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're running BitTorrent you deserve to go to prison. I'm not sure why ISPs don't just monitor for BT traffic and report those users to the police right away. This technology has only ever been used for piracy. I've never encountered a legit use for it.
a hhttp://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
