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Cute, but I would argue that the concept of optimizing slow code after the fact is a prima facie thought crime. The biggest performance gains come from choosing the right algorithms in the design stage.

You would be arguing against a number of computer scientists; Donald Knuth, Michal Jackson, and a few more.

Lol I love it...I assume that was an April fool? (Seriously with interaction designers and gestures....its hard to tell!)

Anyway's its still a work in process since I haven't written the full interaction for it but I've been working on a mobile gesture email interface for my os6sense project. about 6:30mins in - I know, its pathetic, just simple scrolling up and down for emails yet but if you look at the air-writing and other pinch based interactions earlier on in the video you can see that its possible to put together a full gestural input system for email.

And shameless plug for myself - looking for peeps to take part in a gesture study...sadly I removed the cut gesture since my pilot study found it too offensive! *grin*
Gesture Survey

Display Survey

Sorry I wouldn't normally tout so shamelessly but the opportunity is just too great :)

Please, point to a time in history when the climate wasn't changing.

I'll point to what I point to every time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg

Look at the 'pulses' in CO2 and temperature every 120,000y or so.
We're due for a pulse now, and we're getting one. Why is this a surprise?

Yes, AGW proponents will claim that the "rate-increase in CO2 is exceptional this time". However, I haven't seen that the Vostok ice cores have a reliable resolution down to centuries, certainly not the decade-detail that would be needed to confirm or refute such an assertion. Lacking a basis for comparison, such a statement is nothing more than a quasi-religious statement of belief.

Further, AGW proponents will point to the "fact" the the current CO2 levels exceed anything in the historical record (usually pointing to the data from Mauna Kea). I'd say that's persuasive, but not conclusively so: assuming that high levels of CO2 cause warming, then logically ice cores are only going to contain atmospheric samples up to a fairly low ambient temperature. The fact that petrified wood is also found in Antarctica would suggest that perhaps ice cores are only registering a cold-biased segment of the data.

A *great* analysis of global warming, particularly in regards the ice-core data is here: http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2009/01/vostok-ice-core-interpretation.html
To pull out one of many interesting points:

In an area of science where experiments are hard to do, nature has given us 4 repetitions. The Vostock core clearly shows that when the temperature reaches 2ÂC a mechanism kicks in which sets the temperature falling again and initiates an ice-age. Since this mechanism has repeatedly worked well after 100,000 years of disuse, it seems to be robust.

Finally, we know that climactic conditions on Earth have been substantially warmer AND colder for long periods of time. Nothing we're experiencing here is outside planetary experience. It may (or may not) be suboptimal for humans and the current crop of lifeforms, but again something like 99% of all species ever existing are extinct today. We adapt or die. Humans are, as far as I'm aware, the most adaptable species we know of. I think we'll be fine.

Lest you think this is some sort of c'est la vie to environmental concerns, that's not true. I don't believe the world has to be ending to practice a 'don't shit where you live' philosophy. However, I simply don't believe that we need to prostrate ourselves before the altar of global warming trying like Lilliputians trying to fix climate to (what we think is) what's perfect for us, today.

Regards,
A Denier.

The polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem describes this (in a humorous fashion) in one of his Ijon Tichy / Professor A. Donda short stories.

Prof. Donda has the theory that information = mass, proceeds to create a new field of study as a pretext to cram the maximum amount of information into the smallest space possible. He succeeds, creating an information singularity that makes all of the fixed, stored information in the universe go kablooie. Tichy and Donda end up somewhere in the jungle, looking at old copies of Playboy magazine.

You'll probably get some opposition to that . . .

WASHINGTON -- Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html

Predator drones use less encryption than your TV, DVDs

Cybersecurity Issues with Predators, Reapers, and Unmanned Aerial Systems

Not Just Drones: Militants Can Snoop on Most U.S. Warplanes

U.S. was Warned of Predator Drone Hacking contains information indicating that the US knew their UAVs had insufficient security as early as 1996.

On the bright side, the command and control systems are not the same as the video output stream... but I still wouldn't rule out some enterprising hacker deciding to fling a few Predators south of the border and see what happens.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/01/google-appartment-view.html

I am not sure what Anonymous is trying to achieve. They certainly might want to be more specific about their guy... On the other hand, I don't know what they are going to achieve by publishing a list of people's names and addresses. Those are sold in Tepito (black market in Mx City) for 12 000 dollars .
  And who will be in the list? The previous governor of Veracruz? Everyone knows where he lives. The ones with power will just deny everything and "swear for the bible" (by which i mean, pay their way out of it IF they get in trouble), since being on a list is no proof of anything.
As for the drug lords being smart, they don't have to be smart, they just have to be smarter than the authorities (or at least the non-corrupted, "good" authorities, which are fewer), which is totally unlikely. Just look for the use of GT 200 in the Mexican war. And the have to have enough money to buy or kill those who are smarter than them... They are like what becomes of a big evil corporation: not smart people, just a good system (one that has evolved to become better and better). And just like in the US there is lobbying, in Mx there is probably lobbying (from them) to not legalize drugs.
That said, maybe it will be harder to recruit new adepts to the cartels, maybe anonymous will actually eventually cause some economical damage to them (together with a few more deaths). But the drug dealing is a far too complex problem :( to be taken down just from the digital front...

---

Alternative neutrino speed theory

This is really more of an OS-level problem. CPU scheduling on multiprocessors needs some awareness of the costs of an interprocessor context switch. In general, it's faster to restart a thread on the same processor it previously ran on, because the caches will have the data that thread needs. If the thread has lost control for a while, though, it doesn't matter. This is a standard topic in operating system courses. An informal discussion of how Windows 7 does it is useful.

Windows 7 generally prefers to run a thread on the same CPU it previously ran on. But if you have a lot of threads that are frequently blocking, you may get excessive inter-CPU switching.

On top of this, the Bulldozer CPU adjusts the CPU clock rate to control power consumption and heat dissipation. If some cores can be stopped, the others can go slightly faster. This improves performance for sequential programs, but complicates scheduling.

Manually setting processor affinity is a workaround, not a fix.

> In the case of code written by others, run it through a pretty-printer. Problem solved.

Ever tried to run code through a pretty-printer?
It doesn't works well: when the initial code has some parts which are aligned for better readability, the pretty-printer destroy the alignment.

Whatever you may say language with significant indentation helps novice, that's a fact (re)discovered several times.
Here's one: http://okasaki.blogspot.com/2008/02/in-praise-of-mandatory-indentation-for.html

Could you please at least try to refrain from running your mouth before you check your facts? The largest owner of American debt is not China- Over 40% of US debt is owned domestically. China owns about 10%. These figures are about a year old, but they've changed significantly.

China is, for all intents and purposes, a single creditor. While domestically held debt is a much larger share of the total debt, that is spread out among millions of individual creditors. So, Chiner is still holds the largest share of US debt than any other creditor.

Could you please at least try to refrain from running your mouth before you check your facts? The largest owner of American debt is not China- Over 40% of US debt is owned domestically. China owns about 10%. These figures are about a year old, but they've changed significantly.

It requires a large amount of chemical fertilizers, and they are not using good farming methods.

Also note that they are experiencing capital flight now, and have imposed rules against taking capital out of the country. They are about to go *poof*.

For further reading on the subject, I would suggest Ferfal's blog: http://ferfal.blogspot.com/2011/10/and-so-it-ends-for-argentina.html He survived the 2000-1 economic collapse, and has blogged about the state of things there for some time.

"We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page (shown above)."

These fresh Windows installs had additional seeded toolbars? I call BS, and if it was a lie this page would not have been up for so long, knocking back every m$ attempt to wriggle out of it you can come up with.
But please, keep trying - watching m$ astroturfers squirm this way is hilarious.

I thought they merely skinned Google and called it their own?

When I was a child in the 60s (and dreams could be held through TV) we had plastic toys that were just like miniature versions of this.

They were made by Marx, I think, and we called them "wickety wackety walking toys".

George Jetson's dog

Pluto the Pup

Barney and Fred Flintstone in a compromising position

Mickey Mouse shamefully abusing Pluto

I had all these except the (apparently rare) Mickey bestiality one, and half a dozen more. They walked down a ramp, swinging their legs, but with no knee flexing. Google "Ramp walker" for more. They'd walk forever if you had an infinitely long ramp or an inclined treadmill.

Can someone please tell my why this does not count as prior art??

Given that the Neonode N1M is likely to be considered prior art, how would one go about getting the patent ruled invalid?

Here is an article from the FOSS Patents Blog with some details on the case ruled on in last August in the Netherlands, which is what I guess is being referred to as "earlier dismissed in Europe". It's certainly amazing how one judge can say "this clearly existed before" and another can say "no it didn't" based on the same info.

Mandate all rich people give poor people everything every other generation?

I've already written once today (in partial jest) that there are two ways to obtain a benefit you haven't earned: through social programs and through inheritance--let's kill both.

There's a raging debate going on in the discussion thread at Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies

I'm an R programmer IRL. I don't have much formal training in statistics, but when I need a second opinion, my bookshelf is stacked with the highest grade of bullshit detector. In the machine learning sector, that's a high grade indeed. You don't ascend to the top of the Kagglestalk by being full of shit. (I have not yet formed an opinion about Kaggle in general.)

My investigations quickly lead me to The Spirit Level Delusion: Chapter 10

I quickly came to the conclusion that the spousal unit of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have way oversold their analysis as an input to public policy. Nevertheless, it ought to be troubling how readily these slopes tip in an ugly direction. In data mining, most of what you get is suggestive. I find their approach closer to data mining than proper statistics. Human cognition for the most part is closer to data mining than proper statistics, so I'm not saying that suggestive signals are slight or worthless. I'm saying that juicy things you pick up off the floor should not enter mouth without second inspection.

From Snowdon's mad dog supplemental chapter:

It is fantastically implausible to think that Wilkinson and Pickett are not aware of the importance of outliers in statistics.

There's a certain type of thinker who loves to stop thinking at the invocation of a categorical word. Outlier is a word of many meanings in statistics. It's not an automatic red flag to invoke the purity reflex (conservatives are sometimes painted as having more intense purity/disgust pathways). An outlier due to a DRAM memory error is best discarded. When the outlier is a big fat juicy data point, you need to engage your brain. Your signal naturally shows up most intensely at the extremes. If you don't want to find a signal, by all means, terminate outliers with extreme prejudice, as Snowdon imprecates the vagrant bastards.

But if they really wished to "avoid being accused of picking and choosing" they would have used the same official measure throughout.

By page 200 or so, he's wound himself up to where he leaves his brain behind. Too bad, because his brain was useful when he used it. He's gone completely insane on the decision process of prudence: trying your best not to shop for the desired outcome, while also trying to step around contaminated inputs. One of the inputs W&P sensibly step around are self-reported psychiatric states. These are known to be dirtier than Netflix ratings. Snowdon by the end is promoting the merest sign of discretion as a hanging offence. I would also like to know why these small acts of discretion were invoked, but I don't immediately fear the worst. W&P could do much better in the scholarship department.

Snowdon loses it completely on race as a confound. Confounds aren't all that important until you get into causative interpretation, often a necessary step on the road to public policy. I don't think W&P is anywhere close to providing a solid foundation for public policy, so this whole causative rebuke leaves me cold. Attack dogs never weary of citing error, long after there was any point. If he's not an attack dog, why does he act like one?

Since there is no relationship between race and mental health, they cannot find a relationship with inequality. But since there are relationships between race and many o

Your steam drill is calling on line one.

Seriously, this is the kind of discussion we get from the economically illiterate. There is a story, frequently attributed to Milton Friedman, regarding this sort of nonsense:

"At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: 'You don't understand. This is a jobs program.' To which Milton replied: 'Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.'"

There would be two different issues at hand here, where local governments certainly could be used (and IMHO ought to be used) for determining who could be issued individual licenses to operate within certain frequencies and established technical standards for those using those frequencies. This could including anything from licensing local television and radio stations to approving cell phone towers... not just the building permits but also the "right" to use certain frequencies in the local area.

This said, when "local" governments get involved in terms of frequency allocation for devices and in determining technical specifications, it gets to be very messy. A good example of that is how the Open BTS guys tried to set up a cell phone network in the country/island of Niue. Since the whole country has the population of a small midwestern town, it is a good case study to see what "local" regulation of frequencies would be like. The whole Niue chronicle is certainly well worth a read on its own (scroll down on the blog... they did the installation back in March 2010, but they also have provided cell phone service during the "Burning Man" events too). When people don't care about frequency allocations and make it a "free for all" in terms of how radio frequencies are being used, it can make life very uncomfortable for those using radio devices of almost any sort.

That's nothing - I've got cells in my body over four feet!

Nassim Taleb on the Moral Hazard and Broken Economic Structure of the Western Crony Capitalists

The key message is that the economic system is broken and that there can be no sustained recovery unless it is repaired: Nassim Taleb on the Moral Hazard and Broken Economic Structure of the Western Crony Capitalists

He paid for his education with military service

So you're saying that he took advantage of a program funded by federal taxes in order to get an education? I'm not saying it's wrong, but it sort of reminds me of Dan Quayle, staunch opponent of affirmative action, who just happened to get into law school via an affirmative action program.

Some times ago, in GNU/Linux Magazine France, someone who signed "Jean-Pierre Troll" wrote an article to protest against the tendancy to put XML everywhere. He for example rightfully shot down XML as a programming language, and as a way to carry binary data. Even for the transmission of structured text data, JSON is a better solution in most cases.

You can find it here.

If you're interested, here's a summary of the attack:

http://practicalcrypto.blogspot.com/2011/10/attack-of-week-xml-encryption.html

Roentgen Satellite (Rosat) is due to return to earth at some point during the weekend - perhaps Sunday. Just as NASA UARS satellite, which crashed into the atmosphere in September, no one can say exactly when and where to get the Rosat What makes it unnecessary to return the German ship is interesting that residues much more at this time are more likely to survive until the earth's surface. www.funzpop.blogspot.com
  Experts estimate that perhaps up to 1.6 tons of debris - more than half the mass of the satellite launch - could drive the destructive forces to return to hit the planet. "

www.funzpop.blogspot.com

Roentgen Satellite (Rosat) is due to return to earth at some point during the weekend - perhaps Sunday. Just as NASA UARS satellite, which crashed into the atmosphere in September, no one can say exactly when and where to get the Rosat What makes it unnecessary to return the German ship is interesting that residues much more at this time are more likely to survive until the earth's surface. www.funzpop.blogspot.com
  Experts estimate that perhaps up to 1.6 tons of debris - more than half the mass of the satellite launch - could drive the destructive forces to return to hit the planet. "

www.funzpop.blogspot.com

>> , was nowhere near the point where it would have posed any danger to the people in the vicinity.

You make bullshit assumptions like people do not stay more than 5 minutes in the same place.

There are places in Tokyo where you get over 57 uSv/Hr, which makes 500 mSv/year. These places ARE NOT SAFE.

source : http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/10/575-microsievertshr-in-kashiwa-city.html

Every depot/mud near a drain, or other place where rain water accumulates is dangerous, especially if it rained there in march/april.

In Yokohama, there was a contaminated spot found with dust of more than 100 000 bq/kg of cesium. All this dust will go airborne if somebody touches it, or ties to clean it with a power washer. The government burns trash from Tohoku, the ashes are even more contaminated than that, and simply dumped in the ground or ocean. airborne dust will be inhalated by people, and give cancers, leukemias, etc.

Tokyo is not safe. The government tries to make it look safe by not testing many problematic spots.
I would recommend you to go south.

absolutely.

http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2011/03/its-time-radiation-stopped-being-scare.html

Ah yes, here it is!

I loved the one asking the USA to help overthrow the tyrannical rule of Princess Celestia. Got taken down, sadly.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V6NUom7FyQU/Tn56zgOhiyI/AAAAAAAAAr4/-7dAR6bjsvY/s1600/ohuguize.png

It's time for an Equestrian Spring. Winter Wrap Up is coming...

Yeah, I know, they've been saying that since March.

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/03/coming-soon-to-google-apps-1-button-and.html?utm_source=entblog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OfficialGoogleEnterpriseBlog+(Official+Google+Enterprise+Blog)

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2011/10/arguing-with-your-crazy-uncle-about.html

http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/10/berkeley-earth-recalculates-global-mean.html

"It is not true that the Berkeley group has found relevant evidence for the core questions in the AGW debate

Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature led by Richard Muller – a top Berkeley physics teacher and the PhD adviser of the fresh physics Nobel prize winner Saul Perlmutter, among others – has recalculated the evolution of the global mean temperature in the most recent two centuries or so, qualitatively confirmed the previous graphs, and got dishonestly reported in the media.

Some people including Marc Morano of Climate Depot were predicting that this outcome was the very point of the project. They were worried about the positive treatment that Richard Muller received at various places including this blog and they were proved right. Today, it really does look like all the people in the "BEST" project were just puppets used in a bigger, pre-planned propaganda game."

1. Driving is a privilege, not a right.

So, how does it feel to shill for the 1%?


3. Out west they've been doing this for decades looking for vehicles trafficking in illegal immigrants and illegal drugs.

Did you know that you can say "no"?


4. Do you mind if we search your computer?

...Or in this case, "yes"?

Not the one linked, but the Google Reader Blog Post. Unless I read that wrong, they are just removing the Reader social stuff in favor of G+'s, and they aren't disabling it as a separate product.

This blog entry suggests either "swap meet" or "tailgate sale" as the nearest U.S. equivalents; but neither term is used as often here, since yard sales and garage sales are more common.

Exactly. And from here:

And in addition to Google+, you'll still be able to share to almost any service using Send To.

It sounds like they may give you ways to share to Twitter and Facebook.

Which is fine. Those are natural for Google+.

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/upcoming-changes-to-reader-new-look-new.html

I'd use Google+ more if it was better integrated into my other Google tools (i.e., Google reader)

Good news, Google+ is coming to Reader very soon.

yes. Really.

http://www.3-mob.com/?p=2140
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/03/22/libya-colonel-gaddafi-in-hiding-guarded-by-a-40-strong-squad-of-gun-toting-female-virgin-bodyguards-115875-23006825/
http://darklochnagar.blogspot.com/2011/07/gaddafi-should-be-let-out-on.html

http://ismaeleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/il-curioso-caso-di-tiziano-motti.html use Google to translate it

He might not like Google, but he's no problem merely skinning their search engine and calling it his own.

Malaria kills about 2414 people per day. But the number one cause of death for women in places like Lagos and Cairo is blood loss during childbirth. The West's invention of a malaria vaccine will be hugely important. But in the meantime, during Cohen's 24 years of working on the vaccines, the west has criminalized the sale of surplus property from USA hospitals to emerging markets. Shredding our own surplus property causes our health care costs to go up, and forces emerging markets to buy brand new equipment they cannot afford, which takes money they need - to buy malaria vaccines. They need computers and need basic things like hospital beds. Here is a link to a story which ran yesterday, that "medical waste" was illegally shipped to Brazil. Had the story translated... it was uniforms and beds. The message is that Western hospitals cannot share surplus property - computers, blood gas analyzers, or beds - with emerging markets. By coincidence, 24 years ago I lived in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer, and had to dig a grave for a colleagues two year old son. I kept links there and have been trying to help the hospitals during the same 24 years. During the past 24 years, while Cohen perfected his vaccine, donations of surplus property to hospitals in Africa has been criminalized. Sometimes simple things, like donating hospital beds, can save as many people over the period as a new vaccine. The system is sick. http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2011/10/headline-medical-waste-exported-to.html

Are they really going to log the information of every satnav that communicates with Galileo, match it up to a car, and then send you a bill in the mail? GPS actually doesn't work like that (The GPS system can't figure out who's listening). Wouldn't you have to register with the Bureau of keeping track of weird things, just for them to know where to send the bill? Assuming this works at all. Which it doesn't. People seem to think that GPS satellites are something like sky cameras, that look down on you and tell you where you are. At least one conspiracy theory *requires this literally* http://ironiestoo.blogspot.com/2010/10/is-galileo-really-just-eu-big-brother.html Miraculously dumbassed stuff (signs on the road indeed!). Didn't we all just read Wikipedia's GPS entry after that CERN thing? And this is not to mention all the other reasons why a GPS system wouldn't (not just couldn't) function as a position monitor, including all those mentioned here, the construction of a multiple other GPS networks in other countries, and the lack of necessity for a NEW system, should the big bad EU want to get up to some mischief. Troll? The fact that there's a chance you're not is sad for us all

Decompile Android apk files http://internetgadgetandtricks.blogspot.com/2011/10/decompile-android-apk-files.html

Actually development is very active and a webOS update for the TouchPad was released just today. This is better support than most Android OEMs who seldomly release any OS updates.