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The only reason franchised dealers were created in the first place was so manufacturers could "shift the responsibility for providing the land, buildings and inventory to dealers". The whole point of the franchise model is so manufacturers can screw their dealers whenever they like.

From the link, this hilarious quote: "Even a small dealership requires an investment of between $12 million and $16 million. ... No successful auto manufacturer could or would want to assume the financial burden of taking over those operational." (He then goes on to claim that dealerships magically produce tax money and jobs that somehow wouldn't exist in a company store or end up back in the consumers' pockets.)

So when a manufacturer comes along with a product that actually makes it cost-effective to properly invest in their customer experience, they get cut out simply because previous companies were too cheap to do it themselves.

If you look at what Bill Gates has been doing with his time and money since he quit Microsoft, it's hard to make the case that he is lacking compassion and humanity.

Really? How about this: http://jennydaviesdevelopment.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/gates-foundation-doing-good-or-causing-harm/

"The Gates Foundation has invested more than $400 million in oil firms in the Niger Delta which are responsible for pollution that many blame for respiratory problems among the local population The Foundation also has investments in sixty-nine of the worst polluting companies in the United States and Canada "

www.climatedepot.com

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/antarctic-sea-ice-to-cover-the-planet-by-november-3054/

No such thing as 'man made global warming'.

CO2 is not the cause of 'warming', the sun is.

The brainwashing here is unbelievable. It's the middle of May in the U.K. and it's FREEZING here - the temperature is 10 degrees C, it feels like February. Where is all this 'warming' the alarmists have been threatening us with?

Their JOBS depend on making out there is a huge problem - no problem - no funding.

http://emphatious.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/warning-this-website-is-upside-down/

Your link states
The philosophy of a design should be to minimize the amount of time a user has to learn the interface and try to be as similar as possible to other interfaces the user has used previously to avoid getting mixed up from time to time.

OK, don't do anything new, copy other interfaces. Great

It then goes on to say:

Almost all websites are like this.

So what it's saying in the second statement is that the standard - new items first - is ubiquitous. The first statement it states this is good. I fail to see the problem.

http://emphatious.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/warning-this-website-is-upside-down/

Where I work, they pay for every engineer to attend a conference of their own choosing. This year, I am going to the Cassandra summit in San Francisco. Last year, I went to the Lucene Revolution conference in Boston. The year before that, I attended Velocity. Zoosk is still a start up but has been around for six years. They run R&D projects about twice a year for new hires and conduct a hack days competion every year. They have one project where six engineers are working with new technology to reinvent their whole stack.

Where I work, they pay for every engineer to attend a conference of their own choosing. This year, I am going to the Cassandra summit in San Francisco. Last year, I went to the Lucene Revolution conference in Boston. The year before that, I attended Velocity. Zoosk is still a start up but has been around for six years. They run R&D projects about twice a year for new hires and conduct a hack days competion every year. They have one project where six engineers are working with new technology to reinvent their whole stack.

Actually I do know how much it is.

It's like 6MB, at worst. While it isn't enough for an uncompressed image, most JPEGS fall under the size limit of this.

http://ryanolson.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/test-how-changing-the-max-amount-of-memory-per-vm-heap-can-effect-your-rom-cyanogen/

Fact: Microsoft is desperately plugging Office 365 to avoid losing its one remaining cash cow, now that Windows is sliding downhill.

Fact: Microsoft are lying about adaption rates in MSM and online media

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2036178/microsoft-says-office-365-adoption-accelerating-but-questions-remain.html

http://blog.bettercloud.com/google-apps-vs-microsoft-office-365/

Fact: Microsoft's Office 365 adoption rates are a fraction of those of Google Apps.

http://blog.useractivation.com/2013/04/11/showdown-google-apps-vs-microsoft-office-365-by-industry-2/

Fact: The only growth market Microsoft has for Office 365 is to government and education (where their underhand "lobbying and personal incentives" practices are less likely to be detected).

Fact: Microsoft uses Burson Marsteller for astroturfing.

http://ucheadline.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/the-biggest-corporations-youve-never-seen-burson-marsteller/

Fact: You are an astroturfer.

http://slashdot.org/~UneducatedSixpack

which is the link listed in the Ars Technica article "Copyright troll Righthaven finally, completely dead" . I guess the editors copied the text from the Ars Technica article including the "(pdf)" parenthetical statement pointing out that the Ars Technica URL link points to a pdf file. Then they inserted the link to the Ars Technica article itself, rather than the link to the pdf file. (why am I bothering writing this?? no one else seems to have noticed the botched and borked link!)

That isn't Sam. Caption from http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/12/ff-john-mcafees-last-stand/all/ "McAfee’s girlfriend Amy Emshwiller, now 18."

http://pandodaily.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/sam-3.jpg?w=584&h=328 Is Samantha Vanegas from http://pandodaily.com/2013/02/23/we-go-on-a-double-date-with-john-mcafee-and-samantha-vanegas/

you having a laugh?? this is the 21st century! why the hell should an accident of birth dictate your station in life or the influence you have over affairs of state???

*Facepalm*

So... inheriting a massive amount of money and majority stock in a large collection of companies with strong political connections ISN'T "an accident of birth giving you lots of influence over the affairs of state"?

Meritocracies only form when everyone starts from zero and earns their way up. That's a pipe dream unless you're seriously proposing breaking up family units by separating all children from their parents at birth and educating them equally until they earn their own way upward.

they also cost the tax payer a fortune but the main point being...

Actually, the royal family owns large amounts of land. The land pays their bills with some left over and parliament gets to spend the extra. If GB became a republic then that land would go private in their hands and would be quite profitable on its own.

[quote]No, it means you need a more complicated password.[/quote] Or better still, generate a key and turn off passwords entirely.

this presumes that the algorithms of the task in question are tractable, and in the brain in a aensible order.

in the cases of some tasks, it's looking like that's not really true. There is a sea of randomly interconnected neurons that get wired together by correlated inputs into the random sea.

These neurons learn they are associated, and wire together.

This may not lead to an extractable algorithm.
I_highly_ recommend the brain science podcast.

http://brainsciencpodcast.wordpress.com/2007/11/16/brain-science-podcast-24-reading-and-the-brain/

This is a highly accessible discussion of various topics in neuroscience.

Here you go https://yallasouriya.wordpress.com/ - a well known "rebel" blog says:

  #yallasouriya 12:39 am on May 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment

#Syria Internet dial up info
Pass this to #Syria, a way to get back into internet

Dial up access #Syria: +46850009990 +492317299993 +4953160941030 user:telecomix password:telecomix OR +33172890150 login:toto password:toto

IT HAS STARTED – INTERNET CONNECTION IS BEGINNING TO GO OUT IN SYRIA!
The local news media in #Homs, Syria said it would happen and it has begun. Warn your Syrian friends to be prepared for the worst, and pray for the best. God Bless Syria!Black heart (cards)

via Anonymous News Network & Hope Merrett

URGENT: Please share with media and humanitarian organisations

Replying to myself a quick googly shows the AAAS has been strongly opposed to teaching creationism, but in some edge cases has been accused of "accommodating" creationists by engaging with them. Or, in a publication for students, telling a little story about a fictional biology student who learns that her Christian faith is compatible with evolutionary science. At the end she is on an archaeology dig, but also prays at sunrise! http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/aaas-also-engages-in-accommodationism/

That may explain the thinking behind the caption, if there was any, but to me it goes over the line. Or is an insulting joke at believers. Bad either way.

> ... they WOULD BE pulling the shit you say they would, right now -- ....

I think that you may not have been paying attention.

The public can video the drone taking some action, but cannot link from that to the operator. If multiple drones are in operation at any one time, with multiple operators, reasonable doubt could be easily established simply by "losing" the drone captured imagery.

The police don't have to prove whatever drone problems they claim, they just have to create reasonable doubt.

Honestly, if it got to that point, I'd expect the gun grabs to end after the first week or so. Because after the first innocent dies in a raid, I expect that "grab raids" getting ambushed, and retribution against politcians and members of grab teams(and their families) will likely start. And if it goes beyond that. . .well, there's always the Bracken Scenario. . .

Well here is a link. 2009 was abnormal. It got only above 60 a few days last year from my friends up there. Fairbanks it just got down to 0 right at the begininng of May which only in 1924 came close. The temperature in Anchorage has dropped 3 degrees F and up to 5F in the aluetian islands since 2000.

P.S. P.S. (since you obviously goaded me with your successful troll) For some extra facts:

I go to LOWES to buy my cow shit, its a viable option.

The oil company doesn't need my help for demonising http://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/page/2/
So many blogs and independant journalists already doing that for them.

I didn't say a damn thing about natural gas or industrial methods. Which are it's own rant.

I said the solution was to subsidize better technology. I didn't even call for throwing anyone in jail or burning them at the stake, no matter how much I would love to see that happen in the case of Big Oil Barons.

Oh yeah, the UK is a regular Utopia, with 8x the violent crime that the US has...

"Your son is dead, ma'am. But you can sleep easy knowing it wasn't a gun that killed him."

There's always Hello Kitty Vader.

If you Google around, you can find a Hello Kitty dildo. Meow!!! Now make that pussy purr!

And a big WHoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooSH to you, fucking moron.

When I first read it I thought you said "fucking Mormon", which was kind of clever what with the "fucking" part in regards to comments about birthrates.

I certainly understood the original poster's reference to various groups having some theological and social pressures towards higher reproduction rates. But none of them comes close to "once per year".
Mormons seem to be about 3.0 births per child - http://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2012/10/03/mormon-fertility-in-the-21st-century/ pretty big but not insane.

You can age beer, too. Probably not 50 years, but 10-20 is possible.

http://zythophile.wordpress.com/2011/09/23/the-lost-art-of-extreme-aged-cask-ale/

Stone did a Vertical Epic Ale that was released on 02.02.02, 03.03.03 ... up to 12.12.12 and meant to be enjoyed together on the last release (if you could wait).

http://www.stonebrewing.com/verticalepic/#4

Actually, Coelurosauria are not the only feathered dinos anymore. I think they have found feather evidence on Carnosaurs as well making pretty much all theropods likely to have been feathered.

And let's not forget the "hairy" tail fans of the Psittacosaurus which certainly indicate that even ornithischians had non-scaly skin covering. Actually there is even more evidence of proto feather like structures in both ornithischians and saurischians.

http://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/blah-blah-feathered-ornithischians-yawn/

All in all one can't discount some sort of skin covering. That being said, I seem to recall reading somewhere that many animals that have coloured covering over their skin (scale, feathers, or hair) often have corresponding matching colouring (or at leasat pattern) on the skin itself. It wouldn't be a complete waste of time in any case.

P.S. I am not an expert either, but David Hone (of archosaur musings is) is, so you can find a bit of good info on his website.

I'm sure he's a man of many positions

Stop looking at the bad reprap prints, and look at this:
http://davedurant.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/ultimaker-faq-but-what-about-the-quality-of-prints/

All done on stock 1200 euro Ultimakers.

> Jesus did exist.

And how do you know this? Because a book says so? A book which was written for propaganda purposes decades after the death of the person in question? A book which draws on many pre-existing myths (immaculate conception, crucifixion for atonement, resurrection) and applies them to one figure? I would say it's more likely that the historical "Jesus" is a composite of many middle-eastern religious figures of the time.

> How can one prove anything in history?

Multiple corroborating historical sources and archaeological evidence. These are both lacking for Jesus. Sorry, but the Shroud of Turin and the Lost Tomb of Jesus don't count, as they have already been debunked.

how is Apple taking all of the mountains of money they earn and putting it into there massive bank account better than them paying a part of their money out to there shareholders as a dividend?

Not only is it not better, it's not even legal. There are limits to how much cash a company can keep on hand before it has to declare it as profit and pay taxes on it. Unfortunately, nobody enforces those silly tax laws anymore if your company is worth at least X billion dollars.

Here near Boston at Alewife they have "Pedal-and-Park". It's a great big cage full of double-decker bike racks, with cameras on it, and a door that is locked and controlled by a (very easily obtained) access card. In the one instance of theft that I've heard of, they caught the thieves. See first and last photos: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/if-you-build-it-they-just-might-come/
And also, look at the induced demand -- for *bicycle parking* -- if you ever doubted that induced demand was possible.

Something similar has also been used more recently to play a record that doesn't exist anymore in physical format, but had a photograph printed in a book that survives. They were able to optically play a scan of the printed photograph of the record.

though not as old (124 years?), a gramophone image printed in a book was restored last year.

There was an article on how Facebook did their software updates. First they compiled their PHP into C, then compiled that to produce a binary that's several gigabytes in size (with all the resources and stuff).

That binary is then sent to their datacenter via Bittorrent so it can replicate itself across all the servers efficiently. The final stage is to bring down the node, swap the binaries and bring it back up.

http://agilewarrior.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/how-facebook-pushes-new-code-live/

There was another article on it from Facebook, but I can't seem to find it.

Yes, but what does it stand for?

as a side note i can't believe there's a website dedicated just to transcripts

Getting off topic here, but this is why I don't download directly from the B&N store to my Nook. I buy online through my PC, download it there, then read it on my Nook. I also tend to buy books that are DRM free or use tools that will let me read my ebooks however I want. Calibre's plug-in architecture makes this possible.

Here's a review of this paper by a researcher who actually works in the field of AI and cognitive psychology:

Interdisciplinitis: Do entropic forces cause adaptive behavior?

Few choice quotes:

Physicists are notorious for infecting other disciplines. Sometimes this can be extremely rewarding, but most of the time it is silly. I've already featured an example where one of the founders of algorithmic information theory completely missed the point of Darwinism; researchers working in statistical mechanics and information theory seem particularly susceptible to interdisciplinitis. The disease is not new, it formed an abscess shortly after Shannon (1948) founded information theory. The clarity of Shannon's work allowed a metaphorical connections between entropy and pretty much anything. Researchers were quick to swell around the idea, publishing countless papers on âoeInformation theory of Xâ where X is your favorite field deemed in need of a more thorough mathematical grounding.

and after he explains what the paper's about and how utterly empty it is, he offers some advice to authors:

By publishing in a journal specific to the field you are trying to make an impact on, you get feedback on if you are addressing the right questions for your target field instead of simply if others' in your field (i.e. other physicists) think you are addressing the right questions. If your results get accepted then you also have more impact since they appear in a journal that your target audience reads, instead of one your field focuses on. Lastly, it is a show of respect for the existing work done in your target field. Since the goal is to set up a fruitful collaboration between disciplines, it is important to avoid E.O. Wilson's mistake of treating researchers in other fields as expendable or irrelevant.

I would prefer something more useful

The thing is, it could be worse than that. It could be much, much worse. Consider it a blessing that biologists are forced to take as much math as they are.

THIS! Two guys with pressure cookers shut down a major american city, innocent American's were deprived of their 4th Amendment rights (just as one example, stripped naked guy) Endless pictures of paramilitary police and armored personell carriers roaming the streets of Boston Door to door searches by police that essentially are indistinguishable from military without search warrants brandishing firearms ... You tell me who won? It certainly isn't the American citizen.

THIS! Two guys with pressure cookers shut down a major american city, innocent American's were deprived of their 4th Amendment rights (just as one example, stripped naked guy) Endless pictures of paramilitary police and armored personell carriers roaming the streets of Boston Door to door searches by police that essentially are indistinguishable from military without search warrants brandishing firearms ... You tell me who won? It certainly isn't the American citizen.

Once you've got the ADE version epub, you can easily strip off the DRM using a calibre plugin, so you don't have to faff about with authorising devices in future when you change reader/app.

I did that with the books I bought for my kobo; I've since upgraded to a kindle paperwhite, and used calibre to convert the drm-removed files to mobi, and can read them on that now. If a higher-res kobo with built in light had been available at the time, I probably would have stuck with that...

Absolutely. And it wasn't just the lockdown of the whole city, but also a "public safety exception" voiding the constitutional right to have a lawyer. I think we witnessed an object lesson in history. How did fascism take over Germany? One perfectly justifiable step after another. Why didn't people object? Only few did and all the others said "shut up".

It was a bleak day. That I won't forget.

Absolutely. And it wasn't just the lockdown of the whole city, but also a "public safety exception" voiding the constitutional right to have a lawyer. I think we witnessed an object lesson in history. How did fascism take over Germany? One perfectly justifiable step after another. Why didn't people object? Only few did and all the others said "shut up".

It was a bleak day. That I won't forget.

I have a Kobo Glo with lots of legitimately purchased ebooks from Amazon and BN on it.

All it takes is the Calibre open source library manager and a couple third-party DRM-stripping plugins. Rarely, converting from AZW, you'll need a bit of CSS skill and a text editor to track down a conversion glitch.

Of course this entails an account at each vendor to buy the books. Downloading is handled by the Amazon and/or Adobe Digital Editions (BN/Kobo) apps used by those accounts. Just don't let the apps fondle your ereader -- that's what Calibre is for.

This technique probably works for Nooks as they're epub-native like Kobo. Not sure how easy or effective converting into AZW/Mobi/etc would be for Kindlers, but these same tools might well do it.

How does replacing a pop-up start menu with a full page start menu, but otherwise make the OS faster in every way (boot, sleep/resume, use) and fully backwards compatible "hamper the hell out of work". I get that the new start menu can be jarring, and that the need to click once to get to traditional desktop mode can be irritating, but I'm really lost in the Slashdot hyperbole of how extremely bad this is.

You don't seem to understand quite what they have done. It's not just the new interface, that disappears with a button click, but rather fundamental features of the OS are hard to use. Sit a person down infront of a Windows 7 machine and ask him to shutdown the computer, takes a few seconds to figure out, now sit him in front of a Windows 8 machine, and in three days when he's still figuring it out show him things like the charm bar which has no visual que in the interface at all.

It's not JUST a fancy start button. It's a whole new way of interface design that has thrown away many years of UI research and made it impossible to figure out how to do basic things without a cheat sheet of how to do things. If that's where it ended then everything would be fine, but they've copied this design into every new product they are releasing. IE10 is a nightmare to use, the email app lacks even the basic functions of the free one that comes with Windows Live, and if you want to see a real clusterfuck of bad UI design take a look at a screenshot of some of the Office 2013 programs, note how they go out of their way to make sure you can't figure out where the content starts and the application ends. It's even worse in Excel.

The problem we have is that the start menu is just the beginning of our problems. It's quite poetic really.

I'll save you the suspense - you aren't getting it. The site exists to collect reports of defensive gun use by citizens. This phenomenon is claimed to not exist by some people, probably like you. Guns do more than protect people from other people with guns. They protect 80 year old men confronted by gangs, 89 year old women from home invaders, women fighting off multiple rapists, and enable a boy to save his family from kidnapping and sexual assault. This sort of thing happens regularly, but is often unreported. If you ban guns, then everyone is at the mercy of the strong and vicious. Things don't get nicer if you ban guns, you simply get more innocent victims. In fact, gun crime can increase. But then violent crime in much of Europe, including the UK, and Australia occurs at a much higher rate than in the United States anyway. The United States does have a higher murder rate than much of Europe, but there is some subtlety in that. European Americans commit murder at rates similar to other Europeans. Where do the rest come from? And no, the United States murder rate is not among the worst in the world, its actually in the middle overall, and much lower in many place in the US. Guns are a useful tool, make for pleasant sport, but they not magic as you seem to believe. I think you have a number of unexamined assumptions that aren't true.

Some things here might be worthy of thinking-about.

I think you'll find the typos are actually Amazon inserting a digital fingerprint in every copy downloaded. I noticed it a while back and checked a book against a friends device that had the same book - the typos were not in the same place.

If true, then that is so grossly unprofessional, it's horrifying. Have you taken this up with Amazon? It should certainly be made public knowledge.

OK, I don't normally use Amazon for my ebook downloads (to be truthful, lately I've been using bittorrent to replace books for which I have already paid in dead-tree format, since I have recently moved home and don't want to have to think about reinforcing floors again to take the weight of bookshelves). But I have found that many retail epub files are inexcusably badly formatted. I don't consider myself a CSS guru, but I have learned enough about it over the last couple of years, since my normal practice is now to process any newly-acquired book through Sigil to get it looking presentable. This has also had the additional benefit of getting my regex skills polished better than hitherto ever been seen.;)

It's a minor PITA that the first thing I have to do is rip out the DRM, but ePUBee (which runs happily under WINE on *nix boxes) copes well with Adobe's Adept. And I have more recently discovered Apprentice Alf which offers even more info re DRM removal, apparently including a plugin (which I have not yet tried) for Calibre.

Was the Deutschmark not money during the hyperinflation of the 1920s?

Apparently they were more useful as building blocks

Yes, nobody ever cracks hashes.

http://contest-2012.korelogic.com/stats.html
http://threatpost.ca/en_us/blogs/anatomy-lulzsec-attack-singles-out-web-20-weakness-052312
http://franx47.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/using-hashcat-to-crack-hash-password/

Bottom line - people pick useless passwords. The time required to brute force a hash given that you have a significant number of hashes to play with is sadly trivial. The various defcon contests are proof of this.

Until users start using random passwords, you don't want the bad guys to get a hold of your hash database. Especially if you're not salting.

Min