Slashdot Mirror

And yet the official FAQ from Google claims otherwise:

Q: What have you done to inform non-Glass users if a picture or video is being taken?
A: We have built explicit signals in Glass to make others aware of what’s happening. First, the device’s screen is illuminated whenever it’s in use, and that applies to taking a picture or recording a video. Second, Glass requires the user to either speak a command — “OK Glass, take a picture” or “OK Glass, record a video” — or to take an explicit action by pressing the button on the top of Glass’s frame. In each case the illuminated screen, voice command or gesture all make it clear to those around the device what the user is doing.

You might wish or expect that Google Glass has such an indicator light. But it doesn't.

You're quite right; I stand corrected.

Even if it did, who's to say the glasses haven't been rooted, or such a light physically disabled.

If someone wanted to surreptitiously record others, there are better devices to do it with. Built-to-purpose "spy cams" exist, have existed for decades, and are much better at the job -- easier to conceal and not requiring the wearer to stare at their subject to get a steady recording.

So, well, "who's to say" that you aren't already being privately recorded? If someone is motivated enough to void the warranty on a $2000 device to root it, surely they're willing to buy something much, much cheaper.

AdBlock didn't catch anything

No ads are being loaded, just trackers. Abine's DoNotTrackPlus caught CrazyEgg, Google Analytics, Doubleclick, and ChartBeat, but not Google Tag Manager itself.

If a site signs up for Google Tag Manager, it gets DoubleClick tracking whether the site owner wants it or not. Here's what DoubleClick knows about you.

The Tag Manager system has a whole API for snooping on what the user is doing and sending the data back to Google or another server. "For example, you may want to fire a conversion tracking tag when a user clicks the Submit button". The tracker can also grab information from a form being submitted and send it to Google's tag manager server.

AdBlock didn't catch anything

No ads are being loaded, just trackers. Abine's DoNotTrackPlus caught CrazyEgg, Google Analytics, Doubleclick, and ChartBeat, but not Google Tag Manager itself.

If a site signs up for Google Tag Manager, it gets DoubleClick tracking whether the site owner wants it or not. Here's what DoubleClick knows about you.

The Tag Manager system has a whole API for snooping on what the user is doing and sending the data back to Google or another server. "For example, you may want to fire a conversion tracking tag when a user clicks the Submit button". The tracker can also grab information from a form being submitted and send it to Google's tag manager server.

WTF?

Optimizely is a complicated scheme for serving slightly different versions of a site to different people and seeing what that does to usage patterns. This allows testing different advertising approaches, or field-testing new versions of a site to a fraction of the user base. It's not inherently evil.

DoubleClick code is being loaded because HealthCare.gov uses the Google Tag Manager. ("Tag" in this context means "web bug", not "hashtag".) Google Tag Manager is a system for managing sites that have so much web tracking that they need a management system to keep it all straight. The Tag Manager itself doesn't track anything; it just loads other code that does, based on an configuration stored on Google servers. Each tracking code source has its very own privacy policy and intrusiveness. HealthCare.gov is trying (at least for me) to load CrazyEgg, Google Analytics, Doubleclick, and ChartBeat. Which trackers are loaded is controlled by Google's config. Google generates a page of Javascript for each site and injects all the tracking code. This replaces the old approach of putting tracking code directly into web pages. Here's what it injects into Healthcare.gov. (Minified Javascript, not easy to read.)

Google here has the power, should they decide to use it, to extract any data they want from any page or form in Healthcare.gov by downloading a suitable tracker. Whether you think this is evil depends on how much you trust Google.

> IIRC Google has more of the latter and fewer of the former.

Yes, you are correct. More details here:

http://research.google.com/university/exacycle_program.html

"The best projects will have a very high number of independent work units, a high CPU to I/O ratio, and no inter-process communication (commonly described as Embarrassingly or Pleasantly Parallel). The higher the CPU to I/O rate, the better the match with the system. Programs must be developed in C/C++ and compiled via Native Client. Awardees will be able to consult an on-site engineering team."

Native Client: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client

I research hard AI. In my view thinking through and tackling example problems is the best way to explore a topic. If you require your system to mirror our current understanding of neuroscience, then you're essentially researching the algorithms of the brain.

If you're specifically looking into epilepsy and related, consider checking out William Calvin's website. He's an experimental neuroscientist from University of Washington, who wrote many books that explain the neurological foundations of the brain in readable form with good detail.

(1) What are some interesting computational neuroscience simulation problems

Pretty much anything AI falls under that category. Go over to Kaggle.com and check out some of their competitions, including their past competitions. Check out the Google AI lab and see what they're doing, and check out recent publications to see what people are trying to solve. Ask yourself: Are humans better than the computer, and can it be done better?

Here's a video of a system that uses neuron simulation (of a sort) to recognize hand-written digits. A hand-written digits dataset is in the UCI archive below.

(2) Is it easy for a non-academic to get the required data?

Generally, yes. UCI has a repository of machine-learning datasets. The researchers supporting Kaggle competitions frequently release their data.

I've found that researchers are generally approachable, and will give away copies of their data (I have 4 datasets from researchers). As a personal anecdote, last week a researcher from this very forum sent me his dataset of Mars altitude images - I'm trying to come up with an algorithm to recognize craters.

(3) I am familiar with (but not used extensively) simulators like Neuron, Genesis etc. Other than these and Matlab, what other software should I get?

In my view, pick a computer language that has a wide support network of libraries, and code things from scratch.Something like Perl or R. At some point you will want to break open the box and see what's actually happening inside, and familiarity with the system (having constructed it) is key. You will want to insert trace statements, print out intermediate results, and so on. Most of the pre-built systems don't have what you will ultimately want, and building simulation objects isn't terribly hard.

(4) Where online or offline, can I network with other DIY Computational Neuroscience enthusiasts?

Please let me know if you find any (by posting a response).

I've found that most AI enthusiasts are really "big data" enthusiasts, and most of them are all about business rather than AI. The IRC AI chatrooms are all but dead, and most of what is there are students asking for help with their homework. (Although to be fair, the lurkers there know everything about AI and can answer questions and make suggestions if you're stuck.)

The NEAI meetup in Cambridge is mostly spectators - people who want to find out about AI or how to use AI ("how can I use AI to improve the performance of my financial company?"). I hear there's an AI meetup out on the West coast that's pretty good.

See if there's a meetup in your area for something related, or start one and see if anyone shows up.

Please do the responsible thing and file a bug report.

http://star.mit.edu/cluster/

The rest of it is easily scriptable. I have some ebs based AMIs that on bootup, connects to a central server,
registers itself (ticks up a text file, and adds itself to /etc/hosts).

If you combine starcluster for generic cluster management with the existing Amazon provided tools
http://blog.roozbehk.com/post/35277172460/installing-amazon-ec2-tools)
this is really only a days worth of scripting and testing.

There are also several public AMIs on Ec2 that are oriented towards scientific computing.
http://www.google.com/search?q=ec2%20ami%20scientific

This is my day job stuff.

America's system can't ever work, and never really will except for the rich. Everybody else is expendable and 'surplus population'.

Well... 47% of us anyway, if recent memory serves...

http://www.nature.com/news/rat-study-sparks-gm-furore-1.11471 According to this, the conclusions are unobtainable because of 1) small sample size, 2) inappropriate subjects (cancer prone rats), 3) unusually long study on inappropriate subjects (apparently the rats in question suffer higher than 50% cancer rates after a year) 4) inappropriate experiment methods (grown crops should be tested in a way to predict dosages more accurately)... From the nature article: The authors concede that Sprague-Dawley rats may not be the best model for such long-term studies... They admit the study is flawed. Instead of arguing to keep flawed conclusions they should do the study again with better subjects and methods. As it is, this seems like the flawed and misleading studies of saccharine in the 70s which took 20 years for California to withdraw. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&ved=0CGcQFjAJ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcancerres.aacrjournals.org%2Fcontent%2F33%2F11%2F2768.full.pdf&ei=edSYUseBG4jooASo-YCwCg&usg=AFQjCNH4Bo7SBZqLpEPwJ8kmBTzQ-sxckg&sig2=sdNk2Isqa6aryZapEUdVnQ&bvm=bv.57155469,d.cGU&cad=rja

From this article.

Found like this.

dpstream.tv
fifostream.tv
allostreaming.com
alloshowtv.com
allomovies.com
alloshare.com
allomegavideo.com
alloseven.com
allourls.com
fifostream.com
fifostream.net
fifostream.org
fifostreaming.com
fifostreaming.net
fifostreaming.org
fifostreaming.tv

My point is that such a thing as beer as a trade good is not a currency unless you have a doubleplusgood newspeak dictionary that does not have very many words in it.

A currency is simply something that is generally accepted in exchange for goods and services. Generally does not mean universally. I don't know why you're hung up on the word. Bitcon is just as good of a currency as, say, BerkShares. Beer would probably not make a very good currency due to the inconvenience, but I was simply making the point that it could be.

I'm wasting my time aren't I? You are fully aware that traded items are not a currency but you are pretending to be far more stupid than you are to try to win points in some sort of debating game aren't you? Which is it - stupid or playing a game? Do tell.

I guess if someone was trying to teach a pig physics people would think they're pretty stupid. So I guess I'm stupid. I'm sorry I tried to teach you something. Feel free to go back to wallowing and grunting.

This is CBP (customs and border patrol). Although they are a part of DHS now, they've pretty much had free reign to deny people entry at the border for whatever reason long before they became a part of DHS.

I lived in Point Roberts and commuted to Canada for work 5 days a week for 3 years, with weekend shopping trips to mainland Washington. So I got very familiar with how CBP works. You're probably right that it was some border agent power tripping. But aside from U.S. citizens, nobody has an inherent right to enter into the U.S. (and sometimes they even make U.S. citizens feel like you don't have a right to enter). Their default is to deny a foreigner entry unless the agent feels comfortable letting the person in, not let the person in unless the agent can find a reason to deny them entry. If you do or say anything which makes the agent wary or suspicious, you risk being denied entry. If pressed, they will just make up a reason if they're deciding based on a gut feeling. Be polite, answer their questions openly, no veiled insults, no jokes which might be misconstrued, and you'll usually fly right through. If they say something insulting to you, smile and ignore it.

Yes that leaves a lot of opportunity for agents to act like an asshole or practice all sorts of discrimination. It doesn't matter to them. There's very little consequence for them incorrectly denying someone entry, while they suffer huge consequences for incorrectly allowing someone in. Most of the agents I met were polite and professional. All were strict. Only a few were jerks (all of us who commuted cross-border knew who the jerk agents were). Their job isn't to be fair, it's to prevent threats from entering the country. If you're trying to judge them based on fairness, I could write pages of crazy things they did (like strip someone of their Nexus pass for life because a half-eaten sandwich in the car's trash had a slice of tomato, tomatoes being on the USDA's prohibited list that month - yes the list changed monthly). I don't necessarily agree with it, but that's just how CBP works. The whole system is designed to err on the side of the country's safety - denying entry to lots of innocents is considered a worthwhile tradeoff for prohibiting entry to one threat.

And if you need it spelled out to you: Install Rhythm Software File Manager. It can not only browse files stored on your tablet but also copy whole folders on and off a Windows or Samba share.

More expensive than a Raspberry PI, with a slower processor.

I'm sick and tired of seeing the Raspberry Pi, which is essentially a black box run by a binary blob both fully controlled by Broadcom, being compared to proper open source and open hardware platforms, such as Arduino, OLinuXino, Beagleboard and others. Yes they are more expensive for what they do, but that is the cost of not being locked down to proprietary hardware. I'm glad 86Duino and in particular its Vortex86EX SoC is truly open.

Add in the community that has grown up around the Raspberry and I know where my money will be going.

I know where my money goes: to platforms that unreservedly foster education, both civic and technical.

Wow, there's an idiot with mod points doesn't believe me.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=youtube%20cereal%20iron%20filings

Maybe you could search for "list of Google domains" on the Internet. There a website which lets you do that!

Or does anyone have a better suggestion?

Firefox + NoScript + RequestPolicy

First, a brief correction: the author of the op-ed is not an economist. He's a journalist and former financial analyst who writes on economics topics for the NY Times.

Second, the op-ed makes a number of errors:

1. He asserts without evidence that non-government currency is inherently inferior to government currency, without defining the purposes for which it is supposedly inferior and in what ways. Medium of exchange? Unit of account? Store of value?

2. His argument relies upon his unsubstantiated belief that "no bank or bitcoin-emitter can be as public-minded as a government", and that "no private power can raise taxes or pass laws to unwind monetary excesses". This ignores the signficant body of research on the not-so-public-mindedness of public officials. It ignores the fact that the "monetary excesses" he needs to unwind are frequently caused by government monetary policy, rather than being inherent to currency. It also ignores the fact that Bitcoin's cap on supply was designed precisely to avoid such monetary excesses. Perhaps Bitcoin's design in this regard is deficient, but the author apparently could not be troubled to make any argument detailing how.

3. He criticizes "private money" such as Bitcoin for having uncertain value, and for its potential to lose value if users lose faith, despite these problems applying to state-backed currencies as well. It's not as if we've never seen runs on banks, unexpected inflation or even hyperinflation with government fiat currency.

4. He further criticizes Bitcoin for its alleged anonymity and thus a potential for tax evasion, neglecting the fact that Bitcoin is less anonymous than the goverment paper currency known as "cash".

5. He repeatedly makes the argument that because we've had state-backed currencies for a long time, they must be superior. This neglects the possibility that effective non-government currencies were not feasible at scale in the past simply due to a lack of technology (crypto and global instant communications). And it neglects the possibility that the future of currency is not either-or, but both.

This is what happens when the poltical-media establishment tries to shoehorn a story about technology and economics into the same tired left-vs-right, government-as-perfection vs. government-as-catastrophe narratives. You get an incoherent, poorly researched, poorly argued mess. The author may end up being right that Bitcoin won't last, but he's not given us any sound argument to support his claim.

What he said was a joke to make a point.

It wasn't just a joke, it was a full monologue. Lots of profanity, lots of "negative love" applied to the victims. The only point he was making is that he gets paid huge sums to rant about people who have valid medical problems.

Usually human trafficking means getting people (usually men) to perform what is practically slave labor ...

Usually, human trafficking means getting people of any sex to perform what is slave labor. Women and girls are included in that.

However, claims of coercion never seem to be backed up with facts.

You want facts? Okay. How about Ron Wyden, beloved by all progressive human beings for his widly held positions on freedom and government? "Now we have concrete proof that sex trafficking is not just going on in the dark corners of Asia," he said. "Sex trafficking is going on in our community." "The study showed that the average age of victims was 15.5 years when they were first referred to DHS and the Sexual Assault Resource Center. The youngest of them was 8 years old."

Why yes, anonymous coward, making prostitution legal will certainly prevent gangs from putting 8 year old girls out onto the street to turn tricks. Sure.

One more. You know how long it took to find these links? About 640,000 results (0.25 seconds)

Any citation for that?

Nope; as noted, "I haven't run across anyone in my personal life...", so this would fall under the "anecdote" category. :)

I want to see a proper double blind study done of this.

I look at an LCD all day, then sometimes some more at home. I do not suffer from any eyestrain I can detect.

Similar to the anecdote/data duality is the fact that not everyone is affected by things the same way. You may be one of the lucky few or lucky many who aren't negatively impacted by looking at an LCD all day. I know that my nearsightedness is markedly worse at the end of any workweek where I've been staring at the monitor all the time, and that my eyesight is noticeably improved after spending several days not staring at something only a couple feet away. YMMV, and all that.

The impact of backlit screens on circadian rhythms has been studied, if memory serves. Some quick googling pulls up a goodly number of hits, including a couple actual studies just in the first page of hits. Changing from regular web-wide Google to Google Scholar produces more hits for studies.

And more specific to eye strain are these hits. I haven't waded through, but the number of hits (524) and the titles of the first page of hits suggests that this is an area of study. This one in particular sounds like what you might be looking for: Comparison of eye fatigue among readings on conventional book and two typical electronic books equipped with electrophoretic display and LC display . This link to the paper is paywalled, unfortunately, but you might be able to ferret out an open copy of it somewhere.

Cheers,

Any citation for that?

Nope; as noted, "I haven't run across anyone in my personal life...", so this would fall under the "anecdote" category. :)

I want to see a proper double blind study done of this.

I look at an LCD all day, then sometimes some more at home. I do not suffer from any eyestrain I can detect.

Similar to the anecdote/data duality is the fact that not everyone is affected by things the same way. You may be one of the lucky few or lucky many who aren't negatively impacted by looking at an LCD all day. I know that my nearsightedness is markedly worse at the end of any workweek where I've been staring at the monitor all the time, and that my eyesight is noticeably improved after spending several days not staring at something only a couple feet away. YMMV, and all that.

The impact of backlit screens on circadian rhythms has been studied, if memory serves. Some quick googling pulls up a goodly number of hits, including a couple actual studies just in the first page of hits. Changing from regular web-wide Google to Google Scholar produces more hits for studies.

And more specific to eye strain are these hits. I haven't waded through, but the number of hits (524) and the titles of the first page of hits suggests that this is an area of study. This one in particular sounds like what you might be looking for: Comparison of eye fatigue among readings on conventional book and two typical electronic books equipped with electrophoretic display and LC display . This link to the paper is paywalled, unfortunately, but you might be able to ferret out an open copy of it somewhere.

Cheers,

Any citation for that?

Nope; as noted, "I haven't run across anyone in my personal life...", so this would fall under the "anecdote" category. :)

I want to see a proper double blind study done of this.

I look at an LCD all day, then sometimes some more at home. I do not suffer from any eyestrain I can detect.

Similar to the anecdote/data duality is the fact that not everyone is affected by things the same way. You may be one of the lucky few or lucky many who aren't negatively impacted by looking at an LCD all day. I know that my nearsightedness is markedly worse at the end of any workweek where I've been staring at the monitor all the time, and that my eyesight is noticeably improved after spending several days not staring at something only a couple feet away. YMMV, and all that.

The impact of backlit screens on circadian rhythms has been studied, if memory serves. Some quick googling pulls up a goodly number of hits, including a couple actual studies just in the first page of hits. Changing from regular web-wide Google to Google Scholar produces more hits for studies.

And more specific to eye strain are these hits. I haven't waded through, but the number of hits (524) and the titles of the first page of hits suggests that this is an area of study. This one in particular sounds like what you might be looking for: Comparison of eye fatigue among readings on conventional book and two typical electronic books equipped with electrophoretic display and LC display . This link to the paper is paywalled, unfortunately, but you might be able to ferret out an open copy of it somewhere.

Cheers,

>We don't have a liberal arts shortage. We have a STEM shortage.

Looking at the state of architecture across all the non-major towns and cities in the US, there are computers everywhere, but the buildings are hideous and the art is non existent. I suggest we have an arts shortage and plenty of STEM.

Scan round this random sample I plucked from google street view. https://maps.google.com/?ll=45.499826,-122.411803&spn=0.001209,0.001953&t=m&z=19&layer=c&cbll=45.499826,-122.411803&panoid=JdP0_uUuQKlpc5GyXvkw9w&cbp=12,125.12,,0,0

Nah, you've always been that nuts, just in different ways. Remember, you used to have McCarthianism, threw atomic bombs and then built enough hydrogen bombs for a complete annihilation of all life on earth and *then* built the neutron bomb, you killed black citizens or infected them intentionally with syphilis to study the long-term effects, women wore stupid petticoats, and in the 80s you got haircuts like this. All of this might be excusable except for the 80s haircuts!

Anyway, the point is you've always been a bit crazy.

I've hear this criticism leveled at Picasso, but Picasso *could* draw; he'd have been a great realist if he wanted to be. As you begin to study the things that set a good painting apart from a mediocre one, you start to see that not all of them have to do with accurate draftsmanship or the subjects chosen. You begin to pay more attention to the interplay composition, balance, geometry, and shading. These are things that exist *apart* from the things represented; they can exist *without* anything represented at all.

Once you've reached the level of appreciation that understands what sets apart a great painting, it's natural to then begin to focus on those things. That leads to stripping away things which matter not at all (subject matter) or somewhat less (fine detail, accurate perspective), and gradually you find yourself on the road to abstract art. It is this process of thinking about art that I suspect confers cognitive benefits on art students.

Picasso's landscapes are a good place to start to see this process at work. My favorites are the Factory at Horta de Ebro and the Reservoir at Horta, which you can see are still quite representational without being realistic.

Now what the *market* will pay for a piece of art is totally irrelevant to what art is. But a single white line *can* be art. The problem is that you've come in at the end of a long conversation about "what is art?" You've missed everything but the exclamation point at the end.

Think of it this way. I can buy a quality blue crew neck tee shirt for about eight bucks; something you could wear with jeans and look OK. But decorate that tee so it looks like an old London police box, and suddenly the market value goes to $20. Why? We all know what the tardis looks like on the outside. Because it makes you part of a cultural conversation.

The objection to a white stripe being art seems to be, "I could do that, where's my 44 mil?" Without defending the prices paid at auction for any particular piece of art, some of which clearly is driven by greed and irrationality, what collectors are paying for is the exclamation point at the end of the conversation. Sure you could paint a white stripe, but you weren't part of the conversation.

Suppose our Tardis tee shirt is one of a kind, hand-printed and signed by Tom Baker. It goes at auction for $100. Does that seem irrationally high to you, given that you can buy an equally good tee shirt for $8? If I put *my* signature on a Tardis tee shirt, that would actually *lower* its market value, but the signature of one of the actors who played The Doctor *raises* the market value. Does that seem irrational? If you'd never heard of the doctor, science fiction, fandom or TV for that matter, it *would* seem crazy to pay $100 for a tee shirt with a sharpie stain on it.

I've hear this criticism leveled at Picasso, but Picasso *could* draw; he'd have been a great realist if he wanted to be. As you begin to study the things that set a good painting apart from a mediocre one, you start to see that not all of them have to do with accurate draftsmanship or the subjects chosen. You begin to pay more attention to the interplay composition, balance, geometry, and shading. These are things that exist *apart* from the things represented; they can exist *without* anything represented at all.

Once you've reached the level of appreciation that understands what sets apart a great painting, it's natural to then begin to focus on those things. That leads to stripping away things which matter not at all (subject matter) or somewhat less (fine detail, accurate perspective), and gradually you find yourself on the road to abstract art. It is this process of thinking about art that I suspect confers cognitive benefits on art students.

Picasso's landscapes are a good place to start to see this process at work. My favorites are the Factory at Horta de Ebro and the Reservoir at Horta, which you can see are still quite representational without being realistic.

Now what the *market* will pay for a piece of art is totally irrelevant to what art is. But a single white line *can* be art. The problem is that you've come in at the end of a long conversation about "what is art?" You've missed everything but the exclamation point at the end.

Think of it this way. I can buy a quality blue crew neck tee shirt for about eight bucks; something you could wear with jeans and look OK. But decorate that tee so it looks like an old London police box, and suddenly the market value goes to $20. Why? We all know what the tardis looks like on the outside. Because it makes you part of a cultural conversation.

The objection to a white stripe being art seems to be, "I could do that, where's my 44 mil?" Without defending the prices paid at auction for any particular piece of art, some of which clearly is driven by greed and irrationality, what collectors are paying for is the exclamation point at the end of the conversation. Sure you could paint a white stripe, but you weren't part of the conversation.

Suppose our Tardis tee shirt is one of a kind, hand-printed and signed by Tom Baker. It goes at auction for $100. Does that seem irrationally high to you, given that you can buy an equally good tee shirt for $8? If I put *my* signature on a Tardis tee shirt, that would actually *lower* its market value, but the signature of one of the actors who played The Doctor *raises* the market value. Does that seem irrational? If you'd never heard of the doctor, science fiction, fandom or TV for that matter, it *would* seem crazy to pay $100 for a tee shirt with a sharpie stain on it.

I've hear this criticism leveled at Picasso, but Picasso *could* draw; he'd have been a great realist if he wanted to be. As you begin to study the things that set a good painting apart from a mediocre one, you start to see that not all of them have to do with accurate draftsmanship or the subjects chosen. You begin to pay more attention to the interplay composition, balance, geometry, and shading. These are things that exist *apart* from the things represented; they can exist *without* anything represented at all.

Once you've reached the level of appreciation that understands what sets apart a great painting, it's natural to then begin to focus on those things. That leads to stripping away things which matter not at all (subject matter) or somewhat less (fine detail, accurate perspective), and gradually you find yourself on the road to abstract art. It is this process of thinking about art that I suspect confers cognitive benefits on art students.

Picasso's landscapes are a good place to start to see this process at work. My favorites are the Factory at Horta de Ebro and the Reservoir at Horta, which you can see are still quite representational without being realistic.

Now what the *market* will pay for a piece of art is totally irrelevant to what art is. But a single white line *can* be art. The problem is that you've come in at the end of a long conversation about "what is art?" You've missed everything but the exclamation point at the end.

Think of it this way. I can buy a quality blue crew neck tee shirt for about eight bucks; something you could wear with jeans and look OK. But decorate that tee so it looks like an old London police box, and suddenly the market value goes to $20. Why? We all know what the tardis looks like on the outside. Because it makes you part of a cultural conversation.

The objection to a white stripe being art seems to be, "I could do that, where's my 44 mil?" Without defending the prices paid at auction for any particular piece of art, some of which clearly is driven by greed and irrationality, what collectors are paying for is the exclamation point at the end of the conversation. Sure you could paint a white stripe, but you weren't part of the conversation.

Suppose our Tardis tee shirt is one of a kind, hand-printed and signed by Tom Baker. It goes at auction for $100. Does that seem irrationally high to you, given that you can buy an equally good tee shirt for $8? If I put *my* signature on a Tardis tee shirt, that would actually *lower* its market value, but the signature of one of the actors who played The Doctor *raises* the market value. Does that seem irrational? If you'd never heard of the doctor, science fiction, fandom or TV for that matter, it *would* seem crazy to pay $100 for a tee shirt with a sharpie stain on it.

I've hear this criticism leveled at Picasso, but Picasso *could* draw; he'd have been a great realist if he wanted to be. As you begin to study the things that set a good painting apart from a mediocre one, you start to see that not all of them have to do with accurate draftsmanship or the subjects chosen. You begin to pay more attention to the interplay composition, balance, geometry, and shading. These are things that exist *apart* from the things represented; they can exist *without* anything represented at all.

Once you've reached the level of appreciation that understands what sets apart a great painting, it's natural to then begin to focus on those things. That leads to stripping away things which matter not at all (subject matter) or somewhat less (fine detail, accurate perspective), and gradually you find yourself on the road to abstract art. It is this process of thinking about art that I suspect confers cognitive benefits on art students.

Picasso's landscapes are a good place to start to see this process at work. My favorites are the Factory at Horta de Ebro and the Reservoir at Horta, which you can see are still quite representational without being realistic.

Now what the *market* will pay for a piece of art is totally irrelevant to what art is. But a single white line *can* be art. The problem is that you've come in at the end of a long conversation about "what is art?" You've missed everything but the exclamation point at the end.

Think of it this way. I can buy a quality blue crew neck tee shirt for about eight bucks; something you could wear with jeans and look OK. But decorate that tee so it looks like an old London police box, and suddenly the market value goes to $20. Why? We all know what the tardis looks like on the outside. Because it makes you part of a cultural conversation.

The objection to a white stripe being art seems to be, "I could do that, where's my 44 mil?" Without defending the prices paid at auction for any particular piece of art, some of which clearly is driven by greed and irrationality, what collectors are paying for is the exclamation point at the end of the conversation. Sure you could paint a white stripe, but you weren't part of the conversation.

Suppose our Tardis tee shirt is one of a kind, hand-printed and signed by Tom Baker. It goes at auction for $100. Does that seem irrationally high to you, given that you can buy an equally good tee shirt for $8? If I put *my* signature on a Tardis tee shirt, that would actually *lower* its market value, but the signature of one of the actors who played The Doctor *raises* the market value. Does that seem irrational? If you'd never heard of the doctor, science fiction, fandom or TV for that matter, it *would* seem crazy to pay $100 for a tee shirt with a sharpie stain on it.

Actually, that's not true at all. A while back, François Beaufort noted that the extension had been preemptively whitelisted so that it alone doesn't repeatedly need explicit permission to use the microphone. Usually, any website or extension that wants to use the microphone must ask the user for it at least once, repeatedly if the site doesn't use HTTPS. See here: https://plus.google.com/100132233764003563318/posts/YRq7NrS5waS

(The ilnk is messed up; the actual diff of interest is here: https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/browser/media/media_capture_devices_dispatcher.cc?r1=225124&r2=226242&pathrev=226242)

The FEC did NOT say that PACs can't accept Bitcoin. They pretty much unanimously agreed during the meeting (audio) that PACs *can* accept Bitcoin, and the Libertarians and some candidates already were and continue to do so.

They just couldn't decide *how* PACs should accept Bitcoin, and CAF (the requester) didn't ask about accounting standards or the like, so they didn't approve the request. FEC decisions are ternary: yes, no, and nil. This is nil, not no.

Full disclosure: my PAC's comments explaining a bunch of problems with the proposal were one of the primary reasons why they didn't rule on it, and we're intending to file a new request in the very near future. (Comments welcome on our draft of a new safe harbor policy.)

Buy it all, figure out what works, return what sucks...

Yep. Supplementary, before the above, one can still google on the line of:

product_name problem or product_name fails functionality

Substitute product_name and potentialy refine problem/functionality to something that make sense for the product/model and you wouldn't like to happen to you after you buy it.
Something like: https://www.google.com/search?q=belkin+N150+lost+connection or https://www.google.com/search?q=belkin+N150+overheat.

Buy it all, figure out what works, return what sucks...

Yep. Supplementary, before the above, one can still google on the line of:

product_name problem or product_name fails functionality

Substitute product_name and potentialy refine problem/functionality to something that make sense for the product/model and you wouldn't like to happen to you after you buy it.
Something like: https://www.google.com/search?q=belkin+N150+lost+connection or https://www.google.com/search?q=belkin+N150+overheat.

That explains why slashdot is posting it.

What they should have done is get Jeff Bridges to play Whitfield Diffie. Then the jury would be impressed.

What they should have done is get Jeff Bridges to play Whitfield Diffie. Then the jury would be impressed.

that the simpler or more generic the idea, the more time-consuming the search becomes. Because 1) the simpler the idea, the more likely it is that it has already been thought of, and therefore more likely to be patented, and 2) the simpler and more generic the search terms are, the more hits are returned in a search. So this means the simplest of ideas are the hardest ones to verify, and there are many many more of them in a program.

I tested my theory by searching the USPTO database to see if the idea of a calculator program is covered by any patents. Using the Google patent search engine, the search results were overwhelming:

https://www.google.com/search?num=100&site=&tbm=pts&source=hp&q=calculator+program+&oq=calculator+program+&gs_l=hp.3..0l10.6707.22776.0.23191.31.23.6.2.2.1.221.3044.5j17j1.23.0....0...1c.1.32.hp..6.25.2141.3USxvlIs4TQ

I tried reading the first one and gave it an honest try to determine if it covers a generic calculator program, and it seemed to in places, and in other places it seemed not to cover it, But that leaves me with an even larger quandary, if parts of it encompass the generic calculator, does it encompass the generic calculator? So even on the very first one, I would need legal opinion. This is out of my league; in no way can I be expert enough nor have time enough nor resources enough to perform a patent analyses encompassing enough to determine if I should write my generic calculator program. The programming is far more trivial than the search.

Using the USPTO search tool was even worse, I could not even verify that my search was finding what I was looking for.

You could argue that I should then \hire an expert to determine this, but that seems to corroborate that this is an undue burden with somewhat similar legal president, because the IRS is required to make tax filings for individuals able to be reasonably filled out by the individual and not be required to hire an expert to file their taxes for them. Of course a business is different, but to me the burden here is orders of magnitude higher than with a tax filing.

White trash, eh? I know a few high-tech companies that would disagree with you.

You know, small companies that you've probably never heard of, like:
Google ( the Lenoir NC data center is featured: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/streetview/ )
Apple (Their Maiden, NC, data center is a model for green data centers: https://www.apple.com/environment/renewable-energy/ )
EMC (Not only do they have a huge datacenter/Center of Excellence in Durham, which earned LEED Gold status ( http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2013/20130314-01.htm ) but they also manufacture storage arrays in their Apex plant ( http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/us/2006/08082006-4543.htm ) and have a significant R&D presence in RTP)
Facebook ( The Forest City Data Center: https://www.facebook.com/ForestCityDataCenter ) Oh, and Rutherford County is very rural.

Further, North Carolina has one of the world's premier research and education networks, NCREN ( http://ncren.net/ ), which just underwent significant expansion over the last two years.

And the list of high-tech and higher education excellence goes on and on.

North Carolinians even know about Slashdot. :-)

Having read the actual article, and not the biased summary, it seems a reasonable decision for the director to make. There is a place for that type of documentary; and it would certainly be a good thing to show in the right venue. And I'm sure the director had a difficult time with the decision.

But, then again, just exactly what does Slashdot commentary have to do with the scientific process anyway? (Yes, I do understand real science, and I also don't have any need to prove that to anyone).

Apparently Google are planning on doing just that for wifi in Africa.

I presume they'll be anchored to the ground. Don't know about power.

Then these phone companies are wasting perfectly good time and money by cheating on the benchmarks, and there's no harm in 3DMark delisting these phones.

(I'd say that if nothing else, these benchmarks generate news stories promoting the new, allegedly-faster device.)

People may associate themselves with political parties around here. In the US generaly it seems like people arguing about their favorite footall teams. (Not from the US as you can probbly tell). Blues yeh!, Reds woop!

Yeap, I guess that's true

Here you go.

Right now the people in the UK have enough of a social safety net (subsidized health care and education, enough money to afford beer and tv, etc) to maintain a bit more sanity, but their Conservative party wants that stuff taken away because you can't dream when your every waking minute isn't a constant, terrified struggle for survival.

Already on it.

As usual, a Google search provides the answer.

Wasn't CYC supposed to become conscious at some point after reading the Internet?

Google Trends underscores this point.

False dichotomy. The people are not informed, therefor don't know to look for ACA and it's impact. In order for people to search for it, they have to be aware of it. It should be obvious by the November trend that people _would_ be interested if they knew. The peak 2013 is even with the media trying to drown out ACA issues with more Sports, Miley, Zimmerman, etc...

Google Trends underscores this point.

There's an excellent article about how the signs work in Stockholm with some technical details.

Or you could have just used an actual dictionary and seen the word has been in use since at least 1906 and Google's Ngram viewer has it appearing much earlier. Getting angry at the world about the limitations of your vocabulary probably explains why your vocabulary is limited in the first place. I guess you don't care much for fancy book learnin' and just get angry when people use a word you've never heard before. I'm surprised you've moved past grunting and pointing.

First off, who has a monopoly? Is it Monsanto, Syngenta, Pioneer Hi-Bred, BASF, Dow Agrosciences, Bayer Cropsciences, Vilmorin? I don't see anyone forced to choose. Second, the reason only one GE crop (the transgenic papaya ringspot virus resistant papaya developed by the University of Hawai'i) is not produced by a large corporation is because of the extremely, excessively high levels of regulation on GE crops. You think that UH could get the Rainbow papaya through the regulatory hurdles today? I doubt it. Hell, basic research in Hawai'i is getting banned. Or look at Golden Rice...it could save countless lives and there are no corporate strings attached, but because of so much unscientific regulation it isn't being used. You don't want corporate control? Then ignore the anti-GMO fearmongering and tell the government to ease up on the unjustified regulations!