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Comment: Re: Obvious Answer (Score 1) 683

by tlambert (#46491569) Attached to: Measles Outbreak In NYC

How would your glorious libertarian utopia deal with bad parents?

Well, since Daniel Logan played Boba Fett, I assume we'd send cloned bounty hunters after them...

It looks like Michael York is still around, so with a sample of his DNA, we could send Logan 7 the Sandman after them if they are over 30, and they run...

Comment: Brilliant! (Score 1) 121

by tlambert (#46491529) Attached to: Hungarian Law Says Photogs Must Ask Permission To Take Pictures


I see two things coming out of this:

(1) Get a bunch of your friends together; stand all around in photogenic places so it's impossible to get a shot without you or one of your friends in it; charge to sign the release

(2) Be about to do something that will end your political career, like going to see one of your 6 baby mamas or going to meet someone to pick up your bribe; have a large security detail; have them arrive first, and stand all around so it's impossible to get a shot without one of them in the picture; have them refuse to sign the release

The first should be a wonderful drag on the tourist industry, while the second should be an effective way to prevent people from taking embarrassing pictures.

Comment: A power switch (Score 1) 79

by tlambert (#46491445) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Management Interface On an IT Appliance?

A power switch

If you need UI beyond that, then there is something wrong with the default settings for your device.

For a networking or storage appliance, it should get on the network using stateless autoconfiguration.

If a system on your network wants to use it, it should find the services the device offers via service discovery.

If you need access controls, the device itself should find your directory service on your network via service discovery.

The only thing you should possibly have to deal with explicitly is pairing with the directory service, and if that's necessary so that you can't be MITM'ed by someone making unauthorized use of your network, it should be a momentary contact button and an LED other than the power LED on the front of the device, combined with a serial number affixed to the device. Think "Bluetooth keyboard/headset pairing".

If you administer anything at all, it should be your directory server, mostly to establish accounts, and ACLs for the accounts, which are then used to authenticate the machines that consume services advertised by the appliances and servers on your network, and on the peer machines/clients which establish authentication sessions after you hit ctrl-alt-del, or login to the login window after boot.

Comment: Re:Dumb (Score 3, Interesting) 300

by tlambert (#46490053) Attached to: EU Votes For Universal Phone Charger

If the source can support it, the cable will handle it just fine.

Not necessarily. Some cheap cables don't have enough conductors to safely carry 2A. Also USB-PD is a power delivery extension that allows cables to identify their current limit using the ID pin originally added for OTG. These cables have the standard USB2 or 3 icon enclosed in a "battery" outline.

There is a bug in the downstream power standard Intel chipset when used for USB-PD. You can't actually run it at 2A, or you have to only run it that way in ports that won't let you charge and communicate with the device at the same time, as a hard-wired option. We found this out designing the initial ChromeBox, which is why two of the back USB ports are not really that useful for charging.

If you're using something other than an Intel chipset in your PC, yeah; the TI USB-PD/OTG implementation works, although I don't think there's any laptop hardware or desktop hardware that uses it. I think it's mostly used in drives and drive enclosures.

Apple tends to get away with it because they use discrete electronics separate from the USB controller to handle downstream charging; of course, this makes their hardware more expensive, but it works, which some people value.

I'm not sure how many power bricks are intelligent enough to do the USB-PD negotiations.

There's some rather nifty drawing board plans for 100W power deliver for things like monitors, but so far, they've only been been demonstrates as FPGAs, rather than someone spinning them into silicon. The article on it is here: http://www.theinquirer.net/inq...

Comment: Re:Herd Immunity... (Score 1) 683

by tlambert (#46489987) Attached to: Measles Outbreak In NYC

Is there data available on how many people got measles in the bay area outbreak? How many were vaccinated, etc?

3 cases requiring hospitalization, 14 cases total, not all of them traceable to the same patient zero U.C. Berkeley student; 5 more cases traceable to recent travelers returning from the Philippines.

Generally stats are not published until after the quarter is over, and then it requires some time for the reporting window to close.

U.S. Immunization rates for measles by age 1 is 92%, according to WHO: http://gamapserver.who.int/gho...

I typically would not expect them to publish stats on vaccination failures to non-medical professionals, so no idea if any of the 14 cases so far were persons who were vaccinated. According to PubMed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... published in 1996, the apparent failure rate is http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... published in 2004.

It also appears that about 70% of the people actually contracting measles are accounted for as vaccine failures, if this NIH report from 1987 is to be believed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

The numbers are within an order of magnitude of what you'd expect for a 92% vaccination rate, with a 10% failure rate (leaving the unvaccinated 8% to account for the other 30% of cases, since one would expect them to be predominantly rurally and regionally isolated at about that a 2.8x rate compared to "vaccinated, but failed").

Of course, failure rates vary by vaccine, as this 1988 Lancet article points out comparing the Edmonston-Zagreb vaccine to the Schwartz vaccine in 4-6 month year olds: http://www.thelancet.com/journ...

So we can guess that out of the 14 total cases, we can guess ~10 are vaccine failures, and ~4 are non-vaccinated, with about a 4% margin of error allowing a 9/5 split instead.

Like I said, they really do not like to publish numbers like this, and in a small sample like this, there are HIPPA considerations to publishing such data, since it would violate medical privacy for those who were vaccinated, but in whom the disease occurred anyway.

Comment: Re:The USA isn't synonymous with efficiency (Score 1) 218

by tlambert (#46489903) Attached to: U.S. Aims To Give Up Control Over Internet Administration

The difference is that "AllahIsFalse" is political/opinion speech, while "MegaUpload" is engaging in commerce and/or barely free speech.

Yes, Free Speech is Free Speech.... but political speech -- ie, "meta speech" -- is more deserving and in more need of free speech protections than your torrents are.

Technically, MegaUpload was political in the same way that MPAA donations to U.S. senatorial campaigns are political. It was an argument by implementation against a politically supported business model which would not still exist, were it not politically supported by things like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Otherwise, most of the content which is enforced against because of copyright would be off copyright already.

Comment: Got it, loud and clear. (Score 1) 300

by tlambert (#46488609) Attached to: EU Votes For Universal Phone Charger

The last thing I want is some politician locking me in to some similar BS desgn.

Got it, loud and clear.

So who, other than a politician, do you want locking you into a similar BS design, because you're going to get a BS design, whether you want one or not.

"We have established what you are, madam. We are now merely haggling over the price." -- G.B. Shaw

Comment: Re:Dumb (Score 2) 300

by tlambert (#46488569) Attached to: EU Votes For Universal Phone Charger

BTW, isn't micro-USB limited to some ridiculously small Amp compared to the 2A / 5A / 15A that new devices draw from the cable now ?


The way you negotiate over 500ma in power is you have special docking cable with resistors on it that say to the device "I am a special docking cable with resistors of the right values on these pins; you should feel free to do a data negotiation over my ordinarily not connected data lines to talk the charger into giving you more amps". To do that, your special docking connector, like the one on the Zune and the one on Apple devices has to have more than the 4 pins in a standard USB connector. It kind of also needs the extra pins if you are going to do something like "audio out" or "video out" or "volume control by the speakerbox/charger combo that looks like a boombox" over a single power/data connector.

Then the devices talks down the data pin and says "Hi, I am a special device who knows how to talk to an embedded chip in Mr. Charger Brick; are you Mr. Charger Brick?".

If it's Mr. Charger Brick on the other end of the cable, it says "Yes, I am Mr. Charger Brick".

Then the device says "Oh thank God! I thought I was going to have to talk to a standard power-over-USB charger, and those things are stupid as a box of rocks, and can only handle a 500ma current draw; since I now have someone intelligent to talk to instead, can you tell me how much power I can pull?".

Then Mr. Charger Brick says "I can give you up to 5A".

Then the device says "Yay! Please give me 4A (because that's all I can handle), so I can charge 16X faster than I would if I were talking to one of those stupid as a box of rocks charging bricks!".

Comment: Re:Dumb (Score 3, Interesting) 300

by tlambert (#46488471) Attached to: EU Votes For Universal Phone Charger

Wait, isn't this the SECOND time this standard was imposed, and didn't apple get a pass last time?

Why will it be different this time?

I'm betting Apple will issue another "E-waste" adapter to their ridiculous 30pin, and thumb their nose at this rule just like the last time.

You are aware that by using the native adapter, Apple is able to operate outside the power ranges which the power-over-USB folks were willing to support because it would have been more expensive to make the power adapters smart enough to negotiate amperage with the device up to the levels Apple runs at, right?

In other words, the power-over-USB standard is pretty stupidly low powered, if you want to support faster charge cycles, so using this universal adapter and the "E-waste" adapter dongle is just going to mean Apple devices charge a lot slower in Europe than they do in the rest of the world. Just like all non-Apple devices don't tend to support fast charging, for lack of the ability to negotiate a much higher amperage between the charger and the device.

So it's not "thumbing their nose", so much as it is "can't you power-over-USB people ever agree on a useful standard?".

Comment: Re: Obvious Answer (Score 1) 683

by tlambert (#46487021) Attached to: Measles Outbreak In NYC

You seem to believe the State has both authority and responsibility to evaluate your practices raising your children, and should exercise its power to either compel you to raise them a certain way, or when take them from you if they disprove of your practices.

I kind of have to agree with the GP. We haven't achieved this glorious day yet, but at some point in the future (the near future, god willing!), all children will be taken away from parents and raised in state run creches until they hit the age of majority, and can become useful, productive members of the hive. You know, until we can get rid of the parents altogether, once we have working clone vats; I'm sure Daniel Logan's DNA is on file somewhere...

Comment: Re: ** moron (Score 1) 683

by tlambert (#46486971) Attached to: Measles Outbreak In NYC

Hey, AC... How does me not vaccinating my child put your vaccinated child at risk?

Even if his child have been vaccinated, and thus will not become a zombie if bitten by a zombie, if your unvaccinated child becomes a zombie and bites his child, or in the worst possible case, eats his child's brains, his child suffers from your child not having been vaccinated. Even if it's just a zombie bite, it could become infected by some other bacteria (human mouths are fairly dirty, compared to say a dog's mouth, and zombie mouths are worse).

Comment: Prophylactic natal allergy tests not recommended (Score 1) 683

by tlambert (#46486867) Attached to: Measles Outbreak In NYC

Honest question, should I have taken my newborn for allergy tests before they gave her vaccinations?

Prophylactic natal allergy tests not recommended

Unless you have a family history of various allergies, such testing is usually not done. A familial tendency towards allergies speaks to a difference in the histamine complex on chromosome 6 as an inheritable trait, and unless it's dominant (i.e. everyone who marries into the family without the allergy has children with the allergy), then it's likely not a problem.

That said, a newborn's immune system is largely a legacy from the mother until it's trained up on its own, and the child forms its own T-helper cells which are involved in IgE production, which is where histamine reactions originate. Typically we do not vaccinate newborns immediately for most things (see the CDC site for vaccination schedules for various vaccinations).

Typically, after the newborns own immune system takes over is when you want to vaccinate in any case, since doing so prior to that point will not "train" the newborns immune system to react to the protein you are attempting to train it to react to.

Childhood vaccinations vary. For example, it's common to wait until the child is no longer a newborn to vaccinate for most things. There are also exogenous training factors which should be taken into account, though most are dietary.

If you have a diet containing horse meat (for example), of which the child partakes, then you may find that the child reacts badly to horse serum derived vaccines, such as those commonly used for Tetanus or Diphtheria. You may also find that they would react badly to tratment for exposure to Botulism Antitoxin, which is also derived from horse serum. There was an entire M.A.S.H. episode based on the use of a horse-serum derived Tetanus immunization program in the Korean war that ran into the problem that horse meat was a common component of the Korean diet at the time. This episode was based on historical incidents.

For someone with a large amount of familial allergies, the typical problem is overgeneralization of the IgE response of the immune system. It's unclear whether this is a genetic predisposition, or whether it's a matter of exposure to a large degree of immunological challenges; evidence tends to support a predisposition to certain classes of allergies are genetic (e.g. peanuts, penicillin, etc.), but for them to trigger, you need a second exposure to the allergen after an initial exposure "primes" the response.

We see this same issue present in so-called "Rh babies", where an Rh factor difference between the mother and the baby resulted in the first pregnancy running to term, and spontaneous miscarriages due to the immune interaction with the mother for subsequent pregnancies. It's actually one of the original reasons for state blood tests for marriage licenses, and thus state involvement in approval or disapproval of marriages (the other state involvement reason being the close relation marriage taboo, which until allele testing was possible, didn't show up on the blood tests the way a mother/father Rh factor mismatch would).

I believe the best common practice for this, if you are concerned, is to sit down with your child's doctor *well before* it's time to make a "yes/no" decision -- i.e. don't do it on "shot day" -- and discuss the issues and your concerns and family medical history with her or him; most frequently, the rational decision, when you aren't forcing it in the heat of the moment, is usually to do the vaccination.

Comment: Neither. (Score 4, Informative) 62

by tlambert (#46486529) Attached to: The Earth As a Gravitational Wave Detector


What they did is say is basically "We now have a detector 10^9 times more sensitive, which is capable of detecting gravitational waves up to 10^9 times smaller than previous detectors, if there are waves. We didn't see any waves with this detector. Therefore if they exist, they are smaller than what our new detector can detect".

In other words, if there are gravitational waves, they are smaller magnitude than they are able to detect with the new detection system. This doesn't rule them out, it just blacks out a potential energy/amplitude range in which they might have existed before nothing was seen in that search band.

They've more or less reduced the probability set, and pissed in a number of esoteric theories cheerios, but not done a lot else to prove or disprove gravity waves.

It's the difference between having to look for a lost item in an entire warehouse, or having to look for it in a crackerjack bix sized area of the warehouse - albeit it'll take a lot more expensive and redesigned equipment to even look in part of the crackerjack box.

Frankly, if we threw 4 ten ton spheres into relatively deep space (e.g. solar orbit), arranged them at the vertices of a tetrahedron, and then used laser interferometry between the spheres, and then threw another ten ton sphere across the solar system at a non-trivial speed, and through the tetrahedron, not intersecting a face or the body center, we could pretty much say once and for all if there were gravity waves or not, based on delay (or non-delay) of the effect of the moving sphere being "not there, then suddenly there, then suddenly not there", at least to about 1/2 the wavelength used by the interferometers (hence the need for a "non-trivial speed" for what is, in effect, a gravitational probe inserted into the system, to do the experiment).

Doing the more or less definitive experiment would be expensive (as in "on the order of the cost of the LHC").

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