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So then why do they hate us? Religious fundamentalism.

And who is responsible for the rise of fundamentalist Islam? You can start by looking at the nearest mirror, and then at our closest "allies".

And don't forget the prior art of this one:
http://gagravaar.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/appleii-right.jpg

Oh, wait...

I need to do better at maintaining this site.. but it is dedicated to Ending the Corn Subsidies.
https://endcornsubsidy.wordpress.com/help/politics/

It does seem insane to be taxing and subsidizing the same thing.... However, it is at different levels of government..

On the good side, President Obama supports getting rid of some of these direct farm subsidies: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/09/19/someday-now-direct-farm-payments-and-president-s-plan-economic-growth-and-deficit-re
Now we just need congress to act...

Heh, do you realize that Canonical is getting ready to do the same thing (i.e. pay the $99 fee) for Ubuntu? Ubuntu is on a downward slide, Red Hat and Fedora are the ones rising.

It's about tactile feedback: look at the "mixing desk" flavor in the animation cycle on their front page...

I suggested something like this back in 2009 when I saw '10 gui', I thinking: pick up where haptic displays (the ones that braile users use) left off, most especially multi-display situations where one or other display might serve largely as a control device with helpful visual feedback when you need to look at it: http://kfsone.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/touchy-feely-10gui/

On a phone: you finish typing your text message and the device drops back to music player mode; the buttons morph into volume slider, play/pause/fwd/etc.

And wouldn't it be nice if you had a tactile guide to where to put your thumb to take a picture when using the phone as a camera - better yet, where NOT to put your thumb while trying to get the shot ;)

Interesting take on that availability: http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-boss-worse-than-the-old-boss-full-post/

TLDR; Arbitration is legally binding across countries, so unless the contract specifies your country as where conflicts will be handled, there are significant risks in terms of fees (in my case $150000) and risk (all my personal assets). The other country may not share your country's view of limited liability, and madman clients may make claims that do not make any sense in your part of the world that you are forced to defend yourself against.

Just a friendly warning to people throwing out arbitration as the solution to many problems. Sometimes arbitration makes matter worse, because they are legally binding across countries. In my case an idiot client went broke, and when he stopped paying I stopped working. The contract had an arbitration clause in it, which would be handled under US law. My client had various issues and excuses for late payments, and eventually I stopped working. I was willing to take a loss of a hundred thousand USD, but my idiot client had another agenda; he wanted me to work for free, until he managed to make money off my product. So despite the fact that he had stopped paying and breached the contract, he said the only settlement he was willing to enter into to avoid suing me in the arbitration courts was if I was willing to work for free until the product made enough money that he could pay me according to our contract. He was in the US, I was in Norway, and the arbitration clause in the contract was under US law (big mistake). I got a legal opinion in Norway about just ignoring the case (it was ridiculous after all), and then defend me when/if he won a claim and came to collect in the Norway. Well, the legal opinion was "you should win the case in the US". Under arbitration law, if I lost in the US, they could collect in Norway. Even worse, in Norway, the goverment actually go a really long way of enforcing such collections, so I could stand to lose my house, car etc. So risking a default judgement (for not showing up) in the US was out of the question. The idiot client sued me, initially for a million USD, although this was later adjusted down. To have any hope of collecting anything in return, I had to counter sue. After spending $150000 in legal fees, I won and was awarded just below $600000 for his breach of contract. But differently from Norway, the US will not help me collect what I won, so I would have to sue him again in his state to collect. And since my claim is against his company, and the fact that he is a fraud, the odds are he would bankrupt his company, stealing any and all assets, and continue as before. So I would have to sue him again personally (with stricter burdens of proof) to demonstrate actual fraud from his side, and hope he has personal assets I could collect. The fraudsters name is Gregory Spear, and his prime vehicles of fraud are companies named Independent Investor, Spear Financial, Spear Publications and more.

If you want to read the whole sad story, I've put it up on http://aboutspearreport.wordpress.com/ .

The one place I can see gTLDs being useful is for companies that host content sites on subdomains. For example, tumblr.com or wordpress.com. Using http://foo.tumblr/ or http://bar.wordpress/ is a little nicer than http://foo.tumblr.com/ or http://bar.wordpress.com/.

not really, Houston is regarded as poor caretakers and presenters of space artifacts. Saturn V rusting away and dirty with bird poop. Visitor center... last I heard it looked like it promotes Nascar. Former Shuttle manager Wayne Hale wrote in his 2011 blog that Houston does not deserve an orbiter, i.e. when was last time Houston mayor visited JSC? (he can't remember), when was last time Gov. visited JSC? (Ann Richards in the 1990s). http://waynehale.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/why-houston-did-not-get-a-shuttle/

no nforce had a built-in ethernet controller.

Yes they did. See the forcedeth driver (nVidia also provided a binary driver, called "nvnet" in Linux).

http://strangerinthisdunya.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/poverty-in-saudi-arabia/

Content owners are also part of "We, The People".

I wouldn't mind colliding with THAT Andromeda!

But not because nobody outside North America has "The Hub" (the channel on which the content is originally aired) that the fans feel they "have to download it" from other sources.

It's because the fanbase produces most of its own content in the form of derivative works (video: spliced from the Indiana Jones tribute. Audio, both music and vocals, entirely fan-made), and in order to meaningfully contribute, you have to have watched the show. Or seen Epic Meal Time (Video and audio entirely fan-made with the exception of a few seconds of bass, but the voices are from fans doing impressions of the characters). Anyone seen GLaDOS lately?)

Even if the content industry solved the distribution/licensing problem by making it possible for viewers to watch the show regardless of geographical limitations, the sorts of draconian IP regimes envisioned by SOPA, ACTA, PIPA, CIPSA, and whatever the next one is, would serve only to prevent the creation of derivative works, parodies, fan mashups and tributes.

Especially apt considering that the idea of medieval lords enjoying the right of prima noctis or droit du seigneur was faked up by later writers. Lords might have abused women on their properties, but it wasn't a legally enshrined right. Somebody just sold you a bill of goods, rather like the Copyright Board's doing here. . . .

Did you even follow read what you cited at infosec? No, I though not.
The link points to a single Jpg in some nondescript blog.
The blog sites the mere presence of a cookie from DoubleClick (now owned by Google) as an infection. It equates a cookie with infection!!!
Any you fall for it! Unbefrickinlievable.

Here in Ann Arbor, the city has allowed local artists to adopt and paint these types of boxes as well as fire hydrants. It's actually pretty neat. It doesn't quite make them disappear into the background but they're not quite the eyesore anymore.

http://julihoffman.wordpress.com/tag/ann-arbor-photos/

I believe there's a product available from South America that can help you out there. Take a look at this helpful information (and no, it's got nothing to do with cleaning PCs).

[citation fucking needed]

http://greenmountainscribes.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/scotus-justice-ginsburg-calls-u-s-constitution-a-bad-example/

“I would not look to the US Constitution if I were drafting a Constitution in the year 2012.” Instead, Justice Ginsburg referred to the constitutions of more supposedly progressive countries, like South Africa, Canada, and the European Convention on Human Rights. She stated, “I can’t speak about what the Egyptian experience should be, because I’m operating under a rather old constitution.”

David Allen Green, Paul Chambers' solicitor, blogs for the New Statesman and under his own name at Jack of Kent and has written about the case a number of times. He has also discussed it on the Without Prejudice podcasts on a number of occasions, e.g. two days ago.

This is not true. Take a look at this post from *today* of Jerry Coyne

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/idiots-once-again-justify-their-name/

In particular this section:

3. Researchers in the lab have successfully created reproductive isolation between forms (“species,” if you will) via artificial selection. This has been done in several studies of Drosophila (see my book with Allen Orr, Speciation). In fact, one experiment by Bill Rice and George Salt produced almost complete ecological isolation between two sublines of a single species (D. melanogaster) within only 30 generations of selection—roughly a year in the lab. That’s remarkable, for, as Rice and Salt say in their paper, “One of the principal difficulties with the study of speciation is that it occurs quite slowly on a microevolutionary scale, despite its apparent rapidity in the fossil record.”

No kidding. Computers will tend to have different working assumptions. As I said here: For example, a bodyless AI might not quite realize just how attached a person is to the person’s own body. “I haven’t lost my mind, its backed up on tape somewhere” is not just a joke for a bodyless computer.

I'd like to also add that GMO technology isn't the only game in town. In the near future robotic and smarter technological cultivation may be far cheaper, effective and safe than furthering the genetic war on weeds and pests. One of my original hesitations of some GMO technologies has been the unintended consequences which may reduce our ability to produce the food necessary for future generations.

Lastly I stand by my statement that Monsanto is not a good corporate citizen. While I think they have made valuable contributions - they have also shown a clear history of intent to monopolize markets, to profit at the expense of ethics and safety, and to manipulate the proper oversight and standards process which protect consumers.

More on this here:
http://corporatecrime.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/monsanto-lies-again-and-again-and-again/

Elbert Dallas Thomason

http://www.mindfully.org/GE/Monsanto-Beats-LA-Farmer.htm

Why would a mysterious agriculture department sprout up months after Monsanto threatens a local farmer and illegally takes samples of his crops?

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18563_162-4048288.html

Or going after the infrastructure that non-Monsanto farmers require to make a living:

http://www.gmwatch.org/gm-videos/6-must-see-videos/12161-monsanto-vs-seed-cleaner-moe-parr

Are you defending Monsanto, or just pointing out that the 400+ patent violation cases instigated by Monsanto that are in the judicial system (as of 1999) and are NOT public record don't count as "monsanto up and suing people"? We can't tell if they are cross-pollenation cases becasue they aren't public record due to uncertain influence of Monsanto at the local level:

http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/cfsmonsantovsfarmerreport1.13.05.pdf

I agree that contract violation is illegal (saving seed and all that). Have you stopped to consider why they sign these contracts that don't allow them to save seed, and force them to buy more each year at increasing prices? Jeez, I'd have to have a gun pointed to my head to sign something so ludicrous. /sarcasm

I also agree that it should be illegal to extort people into having no choice but to buy from Monsanto or go broke. Because I'm sure you can google, and I'm sure you can find limitless cases where Monsanto bullies and threatens farmers.

one word: Digimarc.

Or some other form of steg/watermarking.

Most people who steal images do not even bother to look for watermarks. Ask then answer: how many images are floating the internet? Billions. They start off complacent that their nefarious deeds go unnoticed.

Funny story (yeah, I bet you hear this all the time): I had a photo of me relaxing on my lowrider a few years ago, uploaded it to a social networking site that shall remain nameless, then a year later I found it on a custom bike blog. After contacting the webmaster, she actually wrote back apologising, I just replied "Hey, don't worry, I thought I'd lost the pic after F***B*** had shitcanned my account, I'm glad somebody found use for it."

It's still up. Yep, that's me, the ugly one.

you mistake what he's saying - IPv6 has a feature called "Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6".

This means that your IPv6 address can be randomly generated within your address range handed out by the ISP so that it (to practical purposes) changes all the time. Here's a quick blog entry about it.

There is this perception that all welfare recipients are these irresponsible drags on society who do nothing and just pop out kids. There certainly are these cases but I think they are more likely your outlier than you realize. There is this narrative that anti-government people like to use where the welfare people are all these drug using urban people living off the government teet but I think anyone believing this should step back and think about how reality works in these sorts of narratives. The world is not this simple black and white place and the easy things to believe are not usually the correct ones. Educate yourself on how welfare programs work and what good they do before you offhandedly judge everyone involved.

One interesting article on the topic:
http://womenslawproject.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/debunking-the-myth-of-the-%E2%80%9Cwelfare-queen%E2%80%9D-who-actually-receives-tanf-benefits/

Yea, comparison with Chernobyl were totally unnecessary. Chernobyl was a limited release from a plant operating a residual power (around 7%).

Chernobly was not a limited release. Saying the core was at 7% power is meaningless in an RBMK reactor because of the positive void coefficient. The RMBK reactor is designed to output about 1.5 GW of power. The last reading on the Chernobly controls was 33 GW of thermal power. What happened at Chernobly was the cooling was flash boiled pockets of steam (voids) in the cooling pipes. The positive void coefficient means that when voids form, the reaction speeds up. This increased reaction rate caused more voids to form which caused the reaction to speed up even more. This positive feedback loop continued until the steam pressure caused a steam explosion. Chunks of the reactor were thrown outside the building through the gapping hole in the roof. The reactor core was actually exposed to air. You can see in photographs the biological shield sitting on its side. The residual heat of the reactor continued to meltdown through several layers of concrete eventually solidifying in the basement of reactor building. The graphite moderator, used in the RMBK design, was also on fire spewing large amounts of radio active ash in the atmosphere.

jnthn frequently mentions NQP and almost never mentions how it'll help in porting to other VM backends or that it minimizes Parrot exposure.

Read 6guts.

We need to focus as much effort as we can to be a better VM for Rakudo Perl6, including moving as much custom code from the NQP and Rakudo repos as possible into Parrot core to lower barriers and increase integration.

I've fixed enough of the custom code in Rakudo that I feel confident in saying that big wad of code was a big part of the problem.

You chose your 40-year window quite well. Komarov died in Soyuz 1 in 1967 when his parachutes failed to deploy, and Volkov, Dobrovolski and Patsayev died in Soyuz 11 of a depressurization event in 1971. Since then no other deaths, but there has been two other almost fatal problems with Soyuz capsules, most notably with Soyuz TM5 in 1988.

Overall the fatality rate in Soyuz is 1.75% and the one in the Shuttle is 2%. Not a statistically significant difference in my opinion.

Another angle on this opportunity that we may not be addressing is the working conditions at Amazon fulfillment centers.

Workers in Amazon's fulfillment centers often complain that they are "held to unreasonable metrics" and that they are "worked to death and then fired."

Employees are required to work through burning heat and freezing cold with hand held computers constantly nagging them that they're moving too slow. They have to run from pick job to pick job all day long.

One report claimed that:

"So many ambulances responded to medical assistance calls at the warehouse during a heat wave in May...that the retailer paid Cetronia Ambulance Corps to have paramedics and ambulances stationed outside the warehouse during several days of excess heat over the summer. About 15 people were taken to hospitals, while 20 or 30 more were treated right there, the ambulance chief told The Call."

There are numerous blogs and news stories on the matter, I'll share just a few.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2017901782_amazonwarehouse04.html
http://heizerrenderom.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/om-in-the-news-amazon-warehouse-jobs-push-workers-to-the-limit/
http://www.ohioworkerscompattorneys.com/2012/04/amazon-warehouse-employees-instructed-to-misreport-work-injuries.shtml

or 6.25e14, that's 625 trillion. At a million cracking attemps per second,

that gives 19.8 years for an exhaustive search.

You are right in principle, but your cracking speed is way off - we are not talking millions of attempts per second but instead billions.

Entirely academic. What IT Admin with a brain allows infinite failed attempts on an account ? Even if you could hit the server with BILLIONS of attempts in a second, where is the value when my system will lock that account (and requires a human to manually unlock it) after 5 failed attempts ?

or 6.25e14, that's 625 trillion. At a million cracking attemps per second,

that gives 19.8 years for an exhaustive search.

You are right in principle, but your cracking speed is way off - we are not talking millions of attempts per second but instead billions.

correct - in the netherlands "the pirate bay" and parts of the website of a political party are censored.

https://depiratenpartij.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/brein-wins-democracy-loses/

As long as lobbyists can censor political parties with the copyright law at their side

you tell me which is worse.

and how is this different from internet censorship in belgium, the uk and the netherlands?

https://depiratenpartij.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/brein-wins-democracy-loses/

'it's now really challenging to show where there is no life.

In the atmosphere. You're welcome.

You fail it

The title is misleading if the actual goal of this is to apply an apodizing filter. I suspect the reason it's called "Advanced 96K Upsampling" is because that's much easier to get people to buy into that than a "Apodizing Filter" sticker.

The article explains how the audible benefit comes from the application of the Meridian apodizing filter, which changes the analog signal reproduced from digital data by reducing the pre-ringing. IIRC the trade-off is that post-ringing increases. The claimed benefit is that since the ringing now occurs after the "real" music of larger amplitude and as a result the ringing is masked or could be considered like an acoustic echo that naturally occurs.

The 96K upsampling is just a side-effect of wanting the extra samples when you are applying the filter.

Here's a decent summary of what is supposed to happen to the analog audio signal as a result of the filter application: Technical analysis of the Meridian Apodizing filter.

That being said, from what I've read over the past few years I think people are kind of mixed on whether or not the filter makes things better, worse, or just different but not better.

This would be insightful, if it was true. The truth is that the red states are a charity funded by the blue states.

http://538refugees.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/the-democratic-super-majority-myth/

Over and above the claim that torrents helped pirates, there was the claim that it was a bandwidth-hog.

Well, it aint so! Jim Gettys researched it, and found what the network vendors were seeing was ... bufferbloat! See https://gettys.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/the-next-nightmare-is-coming/

According to http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/nyc_full_tidal_records.jpg, sea level today is rising at a rate of 280 mm per century. This rate has been unchanged since these records began to be kept in the 1850s. It seems wholly insensitive to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
How do you explain that? Strange attractors again?

sounds like a diet that only someone with an above average income could afford

Oh really? I fed myself on a budget of one pound per day for a whole month. Guess what - fresh food is generally *cheaper* than processed. Even something as mundane as instant noodles is more expensive than home-made noodles. Now stop making excuses and get yourself some fresh veg.

I was wondering how long it would be before some sheltered fool claimed America was just as bad.

Actually, it is somewhat worse.

I was wondering how long it would be before some sheltered fool claimed America was just as bad.

Actually, it is somewhat worse.

Could this have anything to do with the large population of Somali immigrants in Minneapolis? There are indications of a criminal minority among them.

"Over the past 25 years, the United States has admitted about 84,000 Somali refugees [they've got that figure about right, but they don't include all those who got in through other immigration programs or who came in illegally and have disappeared---ed]. Close to 40 percent live in Minnesota."
http://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/why-so-many-somalis-in-minneapolis/

To say it is happening in that city is to ignore that it may be targeting a particular population. Or maybe there are other security risks in that city that I am unaware of...

Uh...here's one.

I gotta admit, that was my first reaction, too. Missed it by that much...

As I understand that page, anyone can run the Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration cmdlet without having to pay Microsoft. In such a case, it's almost the same as turning on "Unknown sources" in Android. Or does the "dialog box from which you can acquire a developer license and install it on the local machine" require a payment method?

It does require a Live ID, but no payment. Here is what it looks like (VS automatically invokes this when you try to run a Metro app from it).

It's different from "Unknown sources" on Android in that it expires regularly, so you have to re-apply for it every now and then. For Consumer Preview, at least, the term seems to be one month in practice - though MSDN says that it would be longer if one has a Store account, as well (I don't).

The other difference is the terms of the license - it says "you may use the developer license only for the purpose of developing, testing and evaluating apps". Of course, "evaluating" is quite a catch-all, so I don't know if the difference is meaningful in practice.

The first refinement, which is only available in the five primes case, is to take advantage of the numerical verification of the even Goldbach conjecture up to some large (we take , using a verification of Richstein, although there are now much larger values of – as high as – for which the conjecture has been verified). As such, instead of trying to represent an odd number as the sum of five primes, we can represent it as the sum of three odd primes and a natural number between and . This effectively brings us back to the three primes problem, but with the significant additional boost that one can essentially restrict the frequency variable to be of size . In practice, this eliminates all of the major arcs except for the principal arc around . This is a significant simplification, in particular avoiding the need to deal with the prime number theorem in arithmetic progressions (and all the attendant theory of L-functions, Siegel zeroes, etc.). In a similar spirit, by taking advantage of the numerical verification of the Riemann hypothesis up to some height , and using the explicit formula relating the von Mangoldt function with the zeroes of the zeta function, one can safely deal with the principal major arc . For our specific application, we use the value , arising from the verification of the Riemann hypothesis of the first zeroes by van de Lune (unpublished) and Wedeniswki. (Such verifications have since been extended further, the latest being that the first zeroes lie on the line.)

More to the point, Tao's blog post about this says

though many more ideas would still be needed to tackle the three primes problem, and as is well known the circle method is very unlikely to be the route to make progress on the two primes problem

Work on this problem has been ongoing for about a hundred years now. First, Schnirelmann proved that there was some k such that every even integer could be expressed as a sum of at most k primes. The value for k had then been reduced over time. Vinogradov's proved that the Odd Golbach Conjecture (that every odd integer greater than 7 is the sum of three primes) was true for sufficiently large n. How large sufficiently large is has been slowly reduced. Later in the 1970s, Chen proved that every sufficiently large even integer is the sum of a number that is prime and another number that is either prime or a product of two primes. At this point, Chen's result is the strongest result known.

In general, there are two general methods of attack on this problem, one which uses Schinerlmann's method and variants thereof, and the other which uses sieve theoretic approaches with the Hardy-Littlewood circle method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy-Littlewood_circle_method (Chen used a version of this for his result and Tao's work uses a similar approach). Unfortunately, there's not much work on actually connecting the two methods. There's an excellent piece of Tao at his blog where he discusses his work on the problem and is understandable without much background. http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/every-odd-integer-larger-than-1-is-the-sum-of-at-most-five-primes/. Note that TFA is a little out of date since he announced this result with a preprint a few months ago, and it is only that now the result is being published.

It does not seem that this result really does put us much closer to proving the full Golbach Conjecture. At most this could be used to prove some version of the odd Goldbach Conjecture. The methods used would have a large amount of trouble dropping from 5 to 3. There's some bit of leeway, and if anyone is going to do it, it is going to to be Tao, but right now, I'm not optimistic.