Slashdot Mirror

The snowblower was invented in Montreal, for a good reason: they get lots of snow, and it stays in place until March. Hence the city has come up with an almost militaristic solution. It involves giant snowblowers, dump trucks, blinking red lights, and looking for your car (which is not where you parked it) after the city crews come up your street: http://chicagomontreal.blogspot.com/2006/01/snow-removal-in-montreal.html

You could get a nasty case of sunstroke from that thing.

Are you referring to this guy?

Nobody investigated me.
http://epistolatory.blogspot.com/2011/01/piercing-through-egyptian-internet-void.html :-)

On the other hand, ATT could claim they are not responsible for Phones sending data, and the user should have checked into that prior to signing-up. Just like the old Dialup ISPs said they are not responsible for long-distance charges incurred.

Reminds me of this story - Verizon Can't Do Math - The operator quoted "point zero zero two cents per kilobyte" * 35,500 KB == 71 cents
Verizon charged 71 dollars.
http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html

It's like a student cheating on his homework by copying the smart kid. It will only work as long as the smart kid sticks around.

Except, it's more like taking a statistical survey across all the schools in the state, and then Willy Watkins from class 7B in Bloggsville School says "some of my data is in your survey -- therefore you're copying my results! He then carefully finds a tiny number of searches where there are very few data points other than his, so his data is prominent. But there aren't enough of those so he invents some fake data -- words like "hiybbprqag" -- creates some links for them in a bogus results page, and pays people to install Bing's toolbar and click on the links so the data of them clicking on that link with a referrer URL including the search term "hiybbprqag" will be sent to Bing. He then complains bitterly that Bing, which has just seen a gazillion reported web requests for that URL and with a referrer URL including "search...q=hiybbprqag", thinks that gee maybe that URL might have something to do with "hiybbprqag". He contacts the media and gives them the headline "Bing copies Willy Watkins!"

Bing treats toolbar-reported clicks-on-links as evidence of relevance, just as every search engine including Google's treats page links themselves as evidence of relevance. With Google being the second most visited site on the planet, of course some of the click data is likely to have ended up being from search results pages. Just as some of Google's link data will have come from Microsoft properties like msn.com. And some will come from Slashdot, and maybe even a tiny trillionth of a percentage will come from my blog. And perhaps if I make up a word, say "znapgipslacaragilgar", and put a link with that in the title on my blog, my blog link will eventually turn up in Google's search results for that term. Would that mean Google shut put a "powered by Will's insignificant blog" button on their homepage, or I that I should get headlines saying they copied me? The proportions may end up being different, but the situation is the same: in search everybody is copying everybody's data. While Google may own their search results page, they do not own the user's click on a link. And it appears to be that -- the user's click on a link -- not the search results page that Bing is using.

2 *million* people are marching for their freedom. In passerby interviews they keep repeating that they want a peaceful protest, as they want the rest of the world to stand behind them and see they really want this change.

Despite that, people got killed from police gunfire, live rounds and rubber bullets included.

Sure there are a few looters, some suspected of being undercover police to instill FUD in the crowds, a tactic not beyond the past 30 years of tyranny.

The army publicly announced they will _not_ fire on the people as long as the protest stays peaceful.

Google's official blog explains a new technology developed by a group of tech geeks who wanted to contribute positively to the current situation in Egypt.

This is not just middle east anymore, this is humanity coming together.

Check it out :-) http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

And http://stop404.org/682 :-)

Also, there is some weak indication in the data that those sticking with IE probably are die-hard and will sink as the OS-ship sinks, no sooner.

Riiiight, nothing new or interesting in the iPad. No innovation in the Chevy Volt or the Nissan Leaf either.

I'll grant you, Microsoft can make and market a better toy. But they can't invent one. "Microsoft Innovation" is an oxymoron.

If you recall, the Kinect was invented at Carnegie Mellon three years ago by a grad student who _later_ went to work at Microsoft:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist)

Oops, Johnny Chung Lee left Microsoft already. He just went to Google:
http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/01/hi-google-my-name-is-johnny.html

Yet another high profile exit from Microsoft, I guess.

with a new post, his first in about four months. He was so quiet after Muglia's departure that I was beginning to suspect he was Muglia! As usual, check out the entertaining and informative bitching^H^H^H^H^H^H^H posts from readers, who seem to be mostly Softies, ex-Softies, along with some trolls pretending to be same. It's the public online version of Redmond's water color.

To sum up, he thinks that Windows President Steve Sinofsky is waiting in the wings for Ballmer's eventual departure.

Here's an entire blog, spanning several years, of obsolete tools and other objects. Some are quite fascinating.

Vermont appears to be embracing the doctrine of efficiency. . . and they're probably about to lose the State's largest private employer - IBM has given warning that if the price of electricity rises the 25% which is expected when they shut down the state's only nuclear power plant next year, IBM will shut down their Vermont facility and move elsewhere. Meanwhile, a Vermont State Senator who sits on key committees related to this issue is on the record saying that the idea that everyone can have all the energy they want is "outdated".

I'm not exactly an "anti-efficiency" person (I use CFL bulbs at home, I try to minimize unnecessary driving, I live with the heat set kind of cool in my apartment and wear sweaters, etc), but you can't just hand-wave over the problem and say you just need more efficiency. Let's work on efficiency, but in the meantime, let's also work on making sure there's enough energy supply for everyone. Like the other poster mentioned, efficiency *and* increased generation, until the efficiency gains make it unnecessary to add more generation.

Also, there's one other thing to keep in mind. Nuclear energy, at least, is NOT SCARCE. There's really not a strong argument for saving a resource which is abundant. We can't possibly exhaust all the nuclear energy available in the world, at least in the time left before the Sun dies, and consumes the earth in fire (which is estimated to be in about 500 Million years, and we know about nuclear energy resources to last something like 700 Million years) - and that's just with fission.

Assuming we crack the fusion 'nut', then not only do we have 700 Million years worth of fission energy, but also Billions (maybe Trillions?) of years' worth of fusion energy.

Efficiency is looking to solve a problem we don't have - energy scarcity. I mean, *yes*, RIGHT NOW, in a world economy largely dependent on fossil fuels, we have energy scarcity problems. But, people resist the very solution to that problem - Molten Salt Reactors running on Thorium can make energy scarcity very much a problem of the past. They are inherently safe, clean, and should be very cheap (compared to current fission plant designs), as well.

As already written on fd mailing list I have post something more about this attack. Is interesting show how from a skeptical point of view of someone now finally is better understanding of the scope of this attack. My post about: "the sourceforge entry point seems still active" http://extraexploit.blogspot.com/2011/01/sourceforge-entry-point-seems-still.html and "some considerations on Ettercap source code repository breach" http://extraexploit.blogspot.com/2010/12/some-considerations-on-ettercap-source.html (about 1 month ago before the recently admission of sourceforge team). Regards.

As already written on fd mailing list I have post something more about this attack. Is interesting show how from a skeptical point of view of someone now finally is better understanding of the scope of this attack. My post about: "the sourceforge entry point seems still active" http://extraexploit.blogspot.com/2011/01/sourceforge-entry-point-seems-still.html and "some considerations on Ettercap source code repository breach" http://extraexploit.blogspot.com/2010/12/some-considerations-on-ettercap-source.html (about 1 month ago before the recently admission of sourceforge team). Regards.

fAny advanced technology appears as magic to a suficiently primitive culture Unicorns are real: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_49Bcbuc6ngM/S-bkerpX2uI/AAAAAAAAA5k/RYeAmEeP_L8/s1600/Narwhal+8.jpg Not sure about voodoo. LOL http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2010/09/experiment-to-test-string-theory.html String theory is now and will become increasingly testable. Deepak chokra is an idiot that has nothing to do with theoretical physics. There may be just one electron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe Richard feynman who postulated the one electron theory won a nobel peace prize in physics. What credential do you have to mock him with your "one atom" rant?

People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

Download.

Ah, fair enough.

Along those lines, I read a great analysis of RIM a while back that looked at their margins on devices and compared it to Apple's bad period. Great read that supports the revenue != success.

The 60's style protests don't work because of the lack of stamina of the protestors. What I mean by that is the people protest for one day and think they've made their point. This guy's blog post makes the point better.

to get online: FidoNet

I've been writing about approval voting for over two years now. /.ers should love it; approval is the kid-sister of range voting (approval is range, with a range of 0-1), which is used for by Fedora, and extensive computer simulations have shown that it's a better system than the Condorcet method used by Debian and Wikimedia.

Arrow's theorem only applies to rank-order based methods. Approval is not a rank-order based method, and, under a naive extension of his axioms to cover non-rank-order methods (including range voting and approval voting), approval satisfies all of them. In beats the impossibility theorem. Now, it's still not perfect, but it's probably the best.

Alan Eustace, Senior VP of Google Engineering & Research, started off 2010 by touting Google's 'guiding Privacy Principles', but would later have to apologize for the company's Street View privacy breach, saying that the company was 'mortified' by the 'mistake'. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Google gave Eustance a $10 million equity award in 2010 for his efforts.

Alan Eustace, Senior VP of Google Engineering & Research, started off 2010 by touting Google's 'guiding Privacy Principles', but would later have to apologize for the company's Street View privacy breach, saying that the company was 'mortified' by the 'mistake'. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Google gave Eustance a $10 million equity award in 2010 for his efforts.

Some idiots were broadcasting passwords and other private info that got picked up. Google wasn't looking for that data, doesn't care about that data, and promised to destroy the data.
Google fitted their cars world wide with wifi, signed off on the code that was used and kept the data collected.
Parts of the world do have laws protecting any network from any 3rd party keeping data and google understood local laws about wifi capture.
Recall http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2010/04/data-collected-by-google-cars.html
"Is it, as the German DPA states, illegal to collect WiFi network information? We do not believe it is illegal--this is all publicly broadcast information which is accessible to anyone with a WiFi-enabled device. Companies like Skyhook have been collecting this data cross Europe for longer than Google, as well as organizations like the German Fraunhofer Institute."
A cute "If the president does it, it's not illegal" idea?
Google was collecting as much data location data as it could in one pass.
"barely a story to begin with" would have been a few cars in one city. As for "anti-google shills", if Google gets a free pass to suck up and keep any data it likes from any network it can find, data protection and privacy laws become very weak.

wow that alot's money http://agushome.blogspot.com/

Then I say, "The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil!"

I can see them stir, thinking, "What? No science? This is absolutely crazy! We have all these classes."

So I tell them that one of the first things to strike men when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it's amazing you don't find many physicists in Brazil - why is that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.

Feynman on education in Brazil

and I guess that's why Google released r5 of their NDK - which basically offers native development for Android (focussed on games, but "you can now build an entire Android application without writing a single line of Java.")

Then they sit back and have the nerve to tell us that Android is "open" while users are forced to jailbreak and deal with vendors that try to cripple devices so they can leverage later versions as a selling point for the next carrier contract.

Not quite forced. Agreed that this ability to gain root access should be mandatory across the platform, but at least Google is doing the right thing in this case, and publicly defending it too.

Do you have any reputable citations showing professional climatologists engaging in groupthink or responding badly to reasoned criticism? I ask because, once again, your description of the climatology community sounds like a description of a cult... [Dumb Scientist]

You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered? For example: [ShakaUVM]

“This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.” [RealClimate]

Presumably you meant to say that scientists in general are circling wagons and responding badly to reasoned criticism.

Or you can just read the editor’s comments left in the response sections of RC.org. Just skimming through that above article, here’s an interplay between Pielke and Stefan. [ShakaUVM]

Coincidentally, Pielke Jr. had similar things to say about that interplay. That's the interplay where he asked a bunch of 'questions' like "Was it appropriate for the IPCC to make stuff up about my views?". Then Stefan replied:

Clearly there are different views on this, which is why we called this graph "debatable". But let's keep things in perspective: we're discussing Supplementary Material and a response to one of those 90,000 review comments now, not even the report itself. You've been working hard to scandalize your personal quibbles with IPCC here - how consistent is this with your self-proclaimed role as "honest broker"? Stefan

That link leads to an in-depth comment, and neither seem to constitute "responding badly to reasoned criticism." In fact, it's not clear that Pielke's rant counts as "reasoned criticism" in the first place. As far as I can tell, he's got

Do you have any reputable citations showing professional climatologists engaging in groupthink or responding badly to reasoned criticism? I ask because, once again, your description of the climatology community sounds like a description of a cult... [Dumb Scientist]

You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered? For example: [ShakaUVM]

“This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.” [RealClimate]

Presumably you meant to say that scientists in general are circling wagons and responding badly to reasoned criticism.

Or you can just read the editor’s comments left in the response sections of RC.org. Just skimming through that above article, here’s an interplay between Pielke and Stefan. [ShakaUVM]

Coincidentally, Pielke Jr. had similar things to say about that interplay. That's the interplay where he asked a bunch of 'questions' like "Was it appropriate for the IPCC to make stuff up about my views?". Then Stefan replied:

Clearly there are different views on this, which is why we called this graph "debatable". But let's keep things in perspective: we're discussing Supplementary Material and a response to one of those 90,000 review comments now, not even the report itself. You've been working hard to scandalize your personal quibbles with IPCC here - how consistent is this with your self-proclaimed role as "honest broker"? Stefan

That link leads to an in-depth comment, and neither seem to constitute "responding badly to reasoned criticism." In fact, it's not clear that Pielke's rant counts as "reasoned criticism" in the first place. As far as I can tell, he's got

http://garyfromoshkosh.blogspot.com/2006/02/huber-law-reflection.html

really, what part of it did you violate?

We aren't losing manufacturing capacity, just manufacturing jobs.

As a native Swede I have enjoyed reading Hairy Swedes blog.
It is written by an American who moved to Sweden for a while.
It contains a lot of information about the nice and not so nice things about Sweden. It also has guides on what to bring, how to deal with the metric system and how to pass the Swedish citizenship test.

If the point to leaking documents is to get information to the public about wrongdoing by powerful institutions like governments and large corporations so that the public can do something about it, The New York Times is not where I'd send the information.

The Times had evidence of the Bush Administration program to illegally wiretap American Citizens but, at the urging of the White House, sat on the story for a year until after the 2004 elections before publishing. The public might have taken action to punish the perpetrators of this crime by voting them out of office. But the Times made sure that the powerful lawbreakers avoided any accountability for their crimes.

Go ahead and leak information about crimes to The New York Times. But if that information implicates powerful people or institutions in the US, don't expect them to publish until the criminals have safely gotten away with it.

Android is becoming more open with each update. If you look at some of Gingerbread's new features, they allow for more developers to code the way they want to, specifically you can now write a Android application completely in C and C++. The NDK has become much more evolved and allows for greater access to Google's Android. Chris Pruett has a great article on what Google has done with this latest update, particularly with the NDK. http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gingerbread-ndk-awesomeness.html

There was also this: http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-know-where-youve-been.html

http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2008/03/login-detection-whose-problem-is-it.html

> most technically knowledgeable film editors and sound designers
Clearly optics isn't one of his strengths.

Anything beyond around 20 feet in a dark theater is infinity focus for the human eye and more like 6 feet in daylight.

What this means is your eye focuses the same for any objects 20 feet away or further, Such as when sitting in a theater.

So as long as the 3D isn't projecting images out of the screen at you, your eyes aren't going to notice anything unusual in focusing.

So it's all up to how the 3D content was shot.

Technical details:

What we want to know is the hyper focal distance of the eye,.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocal_distance The closest point of focus at a given aperture, at which infinity falls within the Depth of Field

Optics of the human eye By David A. Atchison, George Smith PG 214 has a nice graph on this.
http://books.google.com/books?id=MHgx-jBA0TAC&lpg=PP11&ots=DGJxkLC644&dq=depth%20of%20field%20human%20eye&lr&pg=PA214#v=onepage&q=depth%20of%20field&f=false

Astronomers the maximum iris opening is 7mm this gives a max aperture is f/3.5.
Wikipedia says f/2.1 to f/8.3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apertures

The focal length of the eye is 17 mm http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/JuliaKhutoretskaya.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocal_distance
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertseber/2372620675/ Optimal Aperture For Foreground Sharpness With Infinity Focus
http://www.dofmaster.com/charts.html
http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/technical/dofcalc.html

I have some article on my blog about 3D content issues.
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2010/08/thx-and-blufocus-join-forces-to-certify.html
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-bad-3d-not-3d-glasses-gives-you.html

> most technically knowledgeable film editors and sound designers
Clearly optics isn't one of his strengths.

Anything beyond around 20 feet in a dark theater is infinity focus for the human eye and more like 6 feet in daylight.

What this means is your eye focuses the same for any objects 20 feet away or further, Such as when sitting in a theater.

So as long as the 3D isn't projecting images out of the screen at you, your eyes aren't going to notice anything unusual in focusing.

So it's all up to how the 3D content was shot.

Technical details:

What we want to know is the hyper focal distance of the eye,.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocal_distance The closest point of focus at a given aperture, at which infinity falls within the Depth of Field

Optics of the human eye By David A. Atchison, George Smith PG 214 has a nice graph on this.
http://books.google.com/books?id=MHgx-jBA0TAC&lpg=PP11&ots=DGJxkLC644&dq=depth%20of%20field%20human%20eye&lr&pg=PA214#v=onepage&q=depth%20of%20field&f=false

Astronomers the maximum iris opening is 7mm this gives a max aperture is f/3.5.
Wikipedia says f/2.1 to f/8.3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apertures

The focal length of the eye is 17 mm http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/JuliaKhutoretskaya.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocal_distance
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertseber/2372620675/ Optimal Aperture For Foreground Sharpness With Infinity Focus
http://www.dofmaster.com/charts.html
http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/technical/dofcalc.html

I have some article on my blog about 3D content issues.
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2010/08/thx-and-blufocus-join-forces-to-certify.html
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-bad-3d-not-3d-glasses-gives-you.html

I thought they fixed that bug during the Chrome release on the 12th, unless I'm delusional :-)

http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/01/chrome-stable-release.html

For advice on stuffing your resume with keywords and experimental results, see

Classic and modern job searching tips.
http://fulldecent.blogspot.com/2010/10/classic-and-modern-job-searching-tips.html

Just don't mention that you are a "specialist" in something.

The word "specialist" contains the word "cialis", which can trip some poor spam filters, throwing your resume into the spam folder.

(I'm not sure if I really believe this "tip" that was told to me by a placement expert, but I found it humorous.)

http://danielkeysmoran.blogspot.com/2008/04/interlude-crystal-wind.html

Cyber Police = "web angels"

For advice on stuffing your resume with keywords and experimental results, see

Classic and modern job searching tips.
http://fulldecent.blogspot.com/2010/10/classic-and-modern-job-searching-tips.html

Nature embodies all that is wrong with scientific journals.

Well, have you heard of the PRISM fiasco? Nature PG is a saint compared to those guys. You can get some starting pointers here: http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2007/08/calling-for-boycott-of-of-aap.html

Advertisers and tracking services will fight this to the bitter end.

Google, as well as other major online ad and tracking services, already support "Do Not Track" mechanisms with similar functionality.

Perhaps you should have the experience of being lased at night while flying. The effect is not momentary. Reflected sunlight is not coherent and happens in bright ambient lighting conditions, when your iris is already contracted, so the overall effect is vastly mitigated. Most laser illuminations happen at night, when the eye is wide open, and the desensitization of the eye happens before either the blink or iris reflex can limit exposure.

Lightning can do the same thing- it will completely overload your retina and makes seeing anything hard until your eye re-adapts.

Compared to that, most bird strikes are non-events- you only find out when you find a dent or find a few feathers stuck in a seam.

http://fairtax.org/ seems like a good alternative which simplifies tax compliance. There are over 60,000 pages of tax law in the current regulations per http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2008/05/67037-pages-of-us-tax-code-vs.html and the FairTax site.

James Hansen is a certified nut job who would prefer we had a Dictatorship than a democracy.

And the AGW people are the ones who made this all Political

Fish and Game Officials Hopeful Wolf Attacks Will Soon Stop

Wolves attack joggers' dogs on Fort Rich

Bold Anchorage wolves attack dogs, circle joggers

Woman, dogs attacked by Alaskan wolves

Teacher killed by wolves in Alaska, police say

Awww man, you only asked for one.