WaPo stops short of outright *saying* she committed suicide, but that's certainly the conclusion they're leading their readers to.

There's a reason the press shies away from it. Mental health organizations have guidelines and recommendations on how to report responsibly on suicides.

The absolute worst is reporting on the contents of, or even mentioning, a note, because then people who are on the edge / suicidal think "Ah, I can get my letter published too!"

This sounds absurd, but it's well demonstrated that suicides are "infectious", and reports in the media about a suicide can cause others who are close to do it themselves. It's one of the reasons, after a suicide in a school/workplace/community, you see an immediate effort made to make resources available to everyone else.

Maybe someone ELSE should re-read the words and note the difference between "inter" and "intra."

to more accurately ensure they spend most of their time accounting for the 2 cents it cost to use the device?

I assure you that there is very, very little scientific equipment which costs "2 cents to use." There's often both a substantial capital and operating expenditure. Depreciation isn't that bad on some stuff (a centrifuge, for example, I believe) but can be absurd on something like a new microscope system, as better optics and digital camera modules come out.

Microscopes are probably the most common equipment with horrible opex, aside from maybe genetics sequencing equipment. They're easily damaged, regularly need cleaning, their light sources are expensive and have limited lifetime, etc. Oh yeah, and MRIs...the LN2 and LHe bills, training, insurance, re-shimming for changes in the building that affect the magnetic field, etc...crazy.

" Swipe card to leave." To enforce this requires using a locking mechanism works in both directions, like a magnetic plate lock. In order to maintain security in a power failure, you need battery backup for the plate lock. In order to maintain fire code, you need to have a tie-in with the building fire system, among other things. It's really not that simple.

To people who haven't worked in labs:

First off, generally the issue isn't tracking usage for the purposes of billing, or actual inventory (ie preventing people from walking off with things.) Most expensive stuff can and is plated and then cabled down to tables. The issue is often more tracking down who screwed up something so they're told not to do it again/given additional instruction, or their lab/PI is billed for the repair.

Why? All manner of equipment isn't cleaned after use, or toxic stuff is used on equipment that can't be cleaned of it easily, or equipment that is shared with other experiments that would be damaged by certain chemicals or contaminants. Centrifuges have the wrong rotors installed or mis-balanced loads, destroying the bearings or worse. Cryo vacuum traps don't get cleaned and can accumulate liquid gas and explode. Microscope objectives get damaged from impacting the slide or overuse of oil for immersion objectives. Microscope light sources get left on and burn out (some of them have lifetimes measured in hundreds or a few thousand hours.) The list goes on.

You can't always control power, because a number of instruments have long warm-up times before they stabilize, or require a bunch of parameters be entered on power-on.

Access control via keycards works until you discover that someone left the lab, dropped off their ID, security for some reason never cancelled their card, and now it's become a shared resource in the lab. This happens so often it's not funny, except in places that take access control VERY seriously, like hospitals that have research groups. Or people swipe others in.

It often really comes down to solving people problems with people, not technology...and having a culture of following procedures and policies. If someone can't follow procedure, lies, cheats, etc - they're a liability/danger to your lab/center/school reputation because they could be (and probably are) doing the same thing in their research. Why are you still employing/collaborating with them? Kick their ass to the curb.

That said, a lot of equipment manufacturers could recognize this need, and provide lockout contacts that can be interfaced with various access control and logging solutions.

Lastly, a reminder to Slashdotters: please think critically about the solutions you offer. If some random guy can think up a "solution", then chances are it's occurred to, and maybe even been tried by, someone with actual experience. At least recognize that possibility...

Tire-drive systems are useless in the wet.

If you're impling that shops are taking advantage of people and selling them a new entire wheel, that's way, way down the "low" scale. I don't know a bike shop around that would replace rear wheel instead of replacing the tube and tire, unless the person damaged the rim by riding on it for too long with a flat tire; if you chew up the edge of the rim, it'll slowly destroy the sidewall of the tire.

Another reason rear wheel replacements can become necessary: most inexperienced cyclists brake exclusively with their rear brake, falsely believing that braking with the front brake will result in instant death/them being thrown from the bike. On bicycles with rim brakes, braking wears the edge of the rim, especially in places where it rains or snows (road sand etc.) Eventually the rim wears past the safety limit (on most modern wheels, there is a machined notch half-way on the brake track. If you can't feel it, your rim is too worn.) If you're the second or third owner and a bike is a decade old, having to replace a rim isn't unreasonable, as it's one of the wear components, just like the brake rotors on your car.

If you've got a nice hub and spokes, you can have a shop just replace the rim. Labor can start to become a factor, although a hand-built wheel is usually better built than a lot of machine-built wheels (ie what they'll pull off the rack.)

For example, if I were to destroy the rim on my bike (in a way that wouldn't have damaged the spokes), which has a generator hub to power the lights, and double-butted spokes...I would almost certainly just have the shop buy a new rim and re-lace everything to the new rim.

Facebook doesn't make stupid posts, people make stupid posts.

Are kitchen knives a really dumb idea after you cut off your finger while making dinner?

Exactly. And so this (her actions) are her parent's responsibility. And so the fact that the information they agreed to keep private was out in public is the fault of the parents, and they are suffering exactly the consequences that they agreed to suffer for doing that exact thing.

The point in this case is that they're suggesting that we're seeing evidence not just of water, but of biological activity. You are able to see the difference, right? It's like discovering that bears not only shit in the woods, but that they also have toilet paper and elaborate sewage treatment facilities hidden in their caves. Or would be, if this evidence actually points to more-than-just-water conclusion.

Actually it is like that. Because nothing we've sent there can look inside a good-sized rock with that degree of non-destructive precision and delicacy.

I live in a Faraday cage, you insensitive clod!

P.S.

I approve of the name AllSee... well... except that they should drop the stupid CamalCase on the 'S'.... and the two l's might be a bit redundant.

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I've got some experience sorting huge stacks of pages. You basically want to maximize the work done per trivial-human-step. If you stick with some algorithm based on binary-comparisons you're missing out on some of the work a brain can do essentially for free.

If you're sorting based on a number, it's a pretty quick easy step to drop the current paper in one of ten piles. If you're sorting by alphabetical then you can do one pass 26 piles (bulky but workable) or two pass (first pass A-F, G-M, N-S, T-Z, second pass sort into individual letters). This provides you with more than one bit-comparison of sorting per action. If you're sorting by date then year, month, first-digit-day, second-digit-day make excellent radix values.

Merge sort isn't bad, but it's probably less efficient. If you work with two-stack merge you're only getting one bit of work per step. If you work with more than two stacks you have to scan the tops of the stacks to figure out which page to pick up. Contrast this with radix sort - it's quicker/easier to look at one page and drop it in one of N piles than it is to scan N piles to find which one to pick up.

I see a lot of people mentioning bubble sort and related sorts, but I doubt those people ever had to deal with a few hundred pages. Those sorts are O(N^2), inherently worse. And shuffling the order of pages in a stack is a much messier and slower physical operation than simply dropping pages on the top of stack.

All the other sorting algorithms I can think of seem to suffer from smaller work per step and/or messy physical manipulation. I'm open to other suggestions, but Radix sort seems to be best suited to human work. I had great success with it.

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No, their software kept getting confused from Batman.

(I promise, SFW, not a rickroll, etc. Just a guy with a Batman costume blowing some minds on CR.)

Seriously, what the fuck difference does it make what sex, race or religion you are to be in IT??!?!

It makes a difference when the path to the field, and the field itself, is hostile to non-straight, white, men. Reading through the comments here there's a lot of really angry, hostile, dismissive posts. Which certainly doesn't help counter the argument by TFA.

Hell, the NBA is really lacking of white college educated women....are we freaking out and trying to induce them with $100 to work to get into the NBA (and god help them if the teams discrimate!!).

Aside from the fact that a sports league has nothing to do with IT, when's the last time you watched a WNBA game? Can you name a SINGLE WNBA player playing this season? How about a single hall-of-famer? Can you name your area's WNBA team? When was the last time you even accidentally came up on an WNBA game on TV? (hint: rarely, because they're not televised nearly as often.) Or how about this: why doesn't the NBA sanction both men's and women's leagues, ie, why did the WNBA need to be formed in the first place? Answer: because the NBA refused to allow women's teams.

So, women don't get the same TV coverage, sponsorship, press, etc.

The gender bias in professional sports *is* a huge problem. And it's a problem in scholastic/collegiate areas as well, which is the whole point behind Title 9 - all the money for scholastic and collegiate athletics was going to men's sports.

. The biggest question I have is, will there be a STANDARD connector for quick charging batteries so that after driving 200 miles, can we re-charge the batteries in a few minutes no matter what brand of car we're driving?

Why do people keep harping on this? This was the top rated comment last time a Tesla was mentions as well. Is it really that hard to go to Tesla's website and click on "charging"? The Tesla comes with a couple of standard plugs, including the common SAE plug. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The standard plugs it comes with include a 110/120V plug, and a plug or two for 220/240V outlets; they sell about 2-3 dozen other plugs on their website. If you're visiting a friend and they have an electric dryer plug near the garage - that's more than enough juice to top it up while you're all asleep, and since the car tracks how much energy it used charging, it's easy enough to compensate your host in some way. It's about $10, maybe $15 in electricity for a full 80kW charge, by my rough math.

So, probably the best investment a Tesla owner who visits people a lot can make...is in a 220/240V extension cable. Looks like you can get 'em on Amazon for about $2/foot; Home Depot certainly carries them as well.