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Comment Anecdotal Evidence (Score 1) 206

How freaky is it come from home from an appointment with the neurologist and see this at the top of the Slashdot?

So, some anecdotal evidence supporting this. My wife and I are foster parents. You have no idea how bad some kids have it until you see it first hand. We have a foster child with us that has been professionally diagnosed as being 'developmentally delayed'. This means not being able to do the things that a baby of his age should be able to do. Crawl, eat soft food, roll over, mimic a caregiver, make vowel sounds, sit without falling over. A month ago when this child arrived, he could do none of them. As of today, he can do all but crawl and roll over, but he's almost doing that now too.

The neurologist today examined him and feels strongly that all of his developmental delays are due to extreme neglect. Not feeding your child properly, not playing with him, not 'conversing' with him, leaving him in a car seat all day. These are all basic examples of neglect that add up to extreme neglect.

For those that commented "Isn't this well known already?", yes, it is. The therapist see the developmental delays. They get the child checked by a geneticist and neurologist, ruling out brain issues and things like down syndrome. This process of elimination points directly at extreme neglect.

Again, anecdotal evidence, but evidence just the same.

Comment Rules and Numbers (Score 2) 304

Not that this is being perfectly implemented at the company I work at, (we're working on it) I suggest changing the rules for your prioritization.

Rule 1: Projects will be prioritized with numbers, not words. No more 'high', 'medium', 'low', 'if you have time'. Projects will be assigned a priority number. The lower the number, the higher the priority.

Rule 2: Projects cannot have the same priority number. Got five projects ranked 1? Somebody has to decide which one is really project 1, and which are really 2, 3, 4, and 5. It doesn't matter who makes the decisions, as long as someone makes them.

If you're IT department doesn't set rules for non-IT departments regarding priority, and enforce them, then you will have the standard chaos.

Comment X-Prize (Score 4, Informative) 147

Nice, the Iranian version of the Ansari X-Prize.

What people don't realize is that even with all the sanctions, hostility, and generally crazy behavior, Iran IS NOT Iraq or Afghanistan. Right now, American casualties are seen as unacceptable, which is leading our drive towards more drones. If we pick a fight with the Iranians, or let them pick a fight with the US, there will be American casualties. They have the ability to sink U.S. war ships. That have the support of Russia and China. Granted, they probably didn't ground that RQ-170, but that doesn't mean it isn't feasible in the near future.

We all know that quite a large chunk of the young adults in Iran don't like the current regime, but do you know what they like even less? The United States. Whether we start the fight or they do, it will cause Iran to solidify behind that common dislike of the U.S., and we will have a real fight on our hands.

Comment Re:Prions: Bunch of Hooey (Score 4, Insightful) 116

After 15+ years of this "ice 9" business I'm still waiting for results that in any way meet Koch's Postulates.

OK, this one will cover a lot of ground. Weber P et al. Cell-free formation of misfolded prion protein with authentic prion infectivity. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci USA 2006 October 24; 103(43): 15818–15823. It's open-access, so no excuses about being stuck behind a paywall.

Making claims that biochemists working on prions "don't like to get dirty" is both insulting and disingenuous. Animal models are, in fact, used here to demonstrate that purified PrPsc (misfolded prion protein) is infectious in live hosts, in addition to triggering misfolding in vitro. No one uses farm animals because they're large, expensive, and there's no compelling reason to incur that cost when simpler model animals (here, hamsters) will do.

why not entertain the notion that this is a slow virus and that the symptomatic misfolded protein is a mere phenotype, possibly detrimental, but not causal

Well, because the linked paper was able to amplify the infective population of PrPsc in a cell-free system, which would not be conducive to the amplification of a virus.

I understand the appeal of an underdog hypothesis, but unless you can present a better argument that isn't comprised of ad hominems, vague conspiracy theories, and a smattering of scientific claims answered by 5-year-old literature, I'm not convinced.

Linux

Submission + - cde: Making Linux Portability Easy (stanford.edu)

ihaque writes: A Stanford researcher, Philip Guo, has developed a tool called cde to automatically package up a Linux program and all its dependencies (including system-level libraries, fonts, etc!) so that it can be run out of the box on another Linux machine without a lot of complicated work setting up libraries and program versions or dealing with dependency version hell. He's got binaries, source code, and a screencast up. Looks to be really useful for large cluster/cloud deployments as well as program sharing. Says Guo,

CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, and Environment involved in running any Linux command so that it can execute identically on another computer without any installation or configuration. The only requirement is that the other computer have the same hardware architecture (e.g., x86) and major kernel version (e.g., 2.6.X) as yours. CDE allows you to easily run programs without the dependency hell that inevitably occurs when attempting to install software or libraries. You can use CDE to allow your colleagues to reproduce and build upon your computational experiments, to quickly deploy prototype software to a compute cluster, and to submit executable bug reports.


Comment Lesser of two evils.. (Score 2, Interesting) 344

Full disclosure: I work for a company that uses these types of ads.

We use Akamai to serve up these kinds of ads. Believe it or not, most internet traffic goes through Akamai at some point, so when they decide to cookie you, they can find you just about anywhere. From the advertiser's point of view, it makes sense. Only between 2% and 5% of visits result in sales. So, by hitting you with these ads, they're trying to get a second chance at that business.

But if the question whether is whether I'd rather see an ad for some random diet that doesn't work, or some other scam, or to see an ad for a website that I willingly chose to go to, I'll take the latter any day.

As for the particular case of that woman and the pair of shoes, I wouldn't advertise for a particular pair of shoes, but then again, being a shoe company, they may have a better insight into the shopping mind of a woman.

Just be glad that these ads are being served up based on some fact. The fact that you visited that site previously. I think that's better than them trying to build a profile of me based on sites I've visited, and then trying to sell me running gear or viagra.

~Aero2600

Comment Youngest? (Score 4, Insightful) 711

simply for being the youngest and therefore least mature in their classes.

A million misdiagnosed just because they're younger? Wait until they start looking into how many kids are misdiagnosed because they're too smart and not being challenged by our schools that are set up to cater to the lowest common denominator.

I was misdiagnosed with ADD as a kid. Turns out, I was just bored out of my fucking skull. Second, third, and fourth grades were the hardest for me because the material should have been covered in one year, not three. Some schools have realized this and starting pulling the smart kids out of 'general population' and putting them in their own curriculum track which is much more challenging.

That's what they should look into

Aero2600

Comment Re:Google Chrome Frame (Score 1) 483

This point arrived roughly eleven months ago..

I'm going to have to disagree with this, caveats aside. Whether or not you can assume your web users have HTML5 and CSS3 depends on your website's specific traffic. For example, I work for a fairly popular e-commerce store. We averaged in excess of 100k+ visits a day in the past month. 20.1% of that traffic was using IE7 or IE6, and 5.2% of our traffic was specifically IE6. That's over half a million visits in the past month from users running IE6 or IE7. Can we assume that our users have HTML5 and CSS3? Only if we can tell them to fuck off and that we really don't want their money. IE6 and IE7 will have to be less than 1% combined of our traffic before we can start using HTML5 and CSS3, in our individual case.

~Aero2600

Comment Handheld (Score 4, Informative) 337

I used to be a certified electronics calibration technician, and I've never noticed a difference between the analog and the digital.

If $2k is your budget, and not having any idea what you're going to be using it for, I highly recommend a handheld Fluke. They were just as reliable as the old analog ones, but with more features.

This is the model I'm referring to:

Fluke 125
Official Fluke 125 page

aero2600

Comment Serious Advice (Score 3, Insightful) 842

The answer to your question depends on your boss, actually. I've found that there are generally two types of bosses: The better kind that are intelligent, do things right, and get shit done; and the crap kind, whom are generally idiots, don't care about doing things right, and are only out to make themselves look good.

So, if you have an intelligent boss, here's your advice:
An intelligent boss respects good communication and honesty. If you inform your boss enough about the projects and solutions you are working on, he'll have a better idea of the status of whatever project you are working on. If he can answers basic questions from the 'customer' without having to bother you, you're doing it right. I find my boss greatly enjoys that I keep him informed enough about my projects that he lets me operate pretty much unsupervised. Second, always be honest, especially with your boss. If you're having a problem with someone's crap code, make sure he knows about your impediment. If you've run into a tricky problem that will take time to figure out, or you've made a mistake that's going to cause to take longer on your project, be honest with him. A late project with an honest explanation is so much better than a late project with no explanation or an on-time project that has subtle flaws that will inevitably cause problems. Lastly, be flexible. We all know it's difficult to drop what you're doing and work on something else, but your boss is generally not the one setting priorities. If he asks you to drop what you're doing, do it, and if the change of direction will cost time, let him know, politely.

Now, if you have a crap boss, here's some advice:
Keep your mouth shut, keep your head down, do what you're told, and if your boss hasn't been replaced with a better one after two years, get those resumes out. A shitty boss will do everything in his power to make sure you can't advance.

That's all I got.
~Aero

Comment It's about Money, with a capital 'M' (Score 1) 512

I'm a web developer for a top 100 online retailer. I hate IE6 like most of you. I realize that IE6 has caused millions of man-hours lost on a global scale. I also know that I was hired and paid well because of my expertise in working around IE6's many flaws. But it what boils down to is money.

In the past month, according to our Google Analytics, we have had 5,279,955 visits. That's visits, not pageviews. Of those 5.2m visits, 3,716,805, or 70.39% were users running some form of IE with javascript enabled. (no javascript, no countie) Of that 70.39%, 12.73% were running IE6. That's 473,168 visits from customers using IE6 in the past month. That's about 8.96% of our total traffic. Would we like to stop supporting IE6? Certainly. Would we like to encourage IE6 users to upgrade to a better browser? Certainly. Can we tell 473,168 users that we don't want their fucking money? Absolutely fucking not.

So, as much as we hate IE6, we'll make damn sure that our stores look good in IE6 because it's about the money.

-- aero2600

Comment Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score 4, Interesting) 541

Hold on.

You don't have to support IE? I must know what this job is. Please? I do not wish to become known as the IE Developer Serial Killer. What do you do for a living? Seriously. I would take a 20% pay cut to not have to support IE.

Aero

P.S. I can't believe anyone still uses table for layouts. GP is a troll.

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