"Honey, I have been to that new page on Comcast site and I realized that we are using only 0.5 GB of bandwidth a month while we are paying for 250 GB, we need to find a way to make this more profitable, download more recipe books and travel agency pamphlets, I don't know, but we have to find some way.
Or just watch a few HQ videos, participate in some [legit] torrents, etc. We easily go far past 250GB per month on our fiber connection (which is uncapped, unthrottled, etc.). Of course, a couple of kids help to push the usage up, but I do enough by myself: last November, I uploaded more than 250GB of Ubuntu torrent. Downloads of various kinds pushed our throughput to well over double that.
Does Comcast still advertise it as an "unlimited" service?
The ultra-modern pharmacy in the local town also uses pneumatic delivery for prescription drugs. You present your prescription at the counter, and the attendant checks it, then keys in the appropriate codes on the terminal. The pills/potion/whatever arrives via pneumatic tube while the instructions & labels are being printed. This is faster then the previous method where the same attendant would have to walk off and fetch the prescription materials.
Some banks also use pneumatic conveyance to send currency between the counters and the vault.
If the math works, then "shut up and calculate" (ascribed to both Dirac and Feynman regarding quantum mechanics). Non-mathematical forms of understanding may follow, eventually, perhaps even including opinions on "truth". If the math does not work, the hypothesis will be quickly abandoned or revised.
Statistics are important; it is highly unlikely that anyone with an MBA will know how or why, but they want them.
In fact, it is almost a certainty that any given MBA will either lack statistical expertise or will misapply it unthinkingly in a cook-book style. The pseudo-statistics behind Six Sigma comes immediately to mind.
I had repeated theoretical discussions with the four MBA experts who "trained" us (a group of six PhDs in Physics & Engineering doing R&D) in the ways of Six Sigma. There were problems with the statistical theory they presented right from the start - and they were clearly unaccustomed to being contradicted along the lines of "that's not right/applicable in this case, and here's why". For instance, they failed to acknowledge that non-Gaussian distributions could exist, then refused to accept that procedures should be adapted to the data if it was non-Gaussian. Next, they adamantly refused to believe that the 1.5 Z shift hypothesis was supported only by a few studies, all relying on a single dataset from the 1950s for die-based manufacture, and totally irrelevant to most other processes. The Six Sigma books all say "many studies" over decades support the Z shift hypothesis, but fail to cite them, and our MBA experts could not cite any such studies either. Thirdly, they refused to accept that an additional mode of variability (not in the Six Sigma beliefs) existed in processes with feedback (such as recycle lines or controllers). In many cases, this mode guarantees non-Gaussian variability in the process output.
Their advice was that to pass the course, we should ignore our knowledge of statistics (which they acknowledged was far better than theirs) and of process variability, and just "apply the documented methods". We did, and we all passed the course. Then we ignored the Six Sigma bogus statistics bullshit and got on with our jobs using proper statistics to analyze and solve problems in variability with the products we were developing.
MBAs seem to want statistics, but the vast majority appear to lack the training in how to generate proper statistics, or how to use them competently if someone else supplies them. Most MBAs appear to think the world is described adequately using Gaussian distributions, and a few "experts" know the Weibull distribution or the t-distribution. Other distribution types (Poisson, discrete/categorical, etc.) are totally foreign, and methods of inference beyond simple unconditional analyses are also quite alien to them.
I also understand that people who are good at it are rare.
Perhaps not as rare as you might think. But those who have some aptitude in statistics know enough to keep their mouths shut when the data tells them to. MBAs on the other hand, ignorant of their own ignorance, are as verbally promiscuous as politicians...
Cash, that is, not just "influence" which might backfire. I heard that Stasi rates were rock bottom, but the US screwy agencies have deeper pockets. Hey, in these challenging times lots of folks would be willing to snitch (perhaps even inventively) on their colleagues and other obstacles to job security or promotion (=boss).
Not being a citizen of any NATO country, they'd probably offer me less, the bastards.
IBM ThinkPad 755CV had a transparent LCD display (VGA resolution) around 1995. It could be detached from the laptop, and placed on an overhead projector, for making PowerlessPointless-style presentations. This was in the days before projectors were common.
Before DNA tests are accepted as conclusive much better studies should be done, particularly for false positives.
I agree with you, but I'd add the caveat that the study shouldn't be done with a Federal database that was never intended for the purpose.
You are probably right, if the only conclusion were to be scientific knowledge, so that the database would exist only in the interests of science. Unfortunately, the principal purpose of the FBI database is the provision of strong/irrefutable evidence to secure convictions. Other purposes are to aid in selecting suspects or to eliminate individuals from suspicion. Its suitability for these purposes is what has been questioned, and has never been empirically assessed. Indeed, the cited studies of comparable databases and of a subset of the FBI dataset suggest that the "genetic matches" are not irrefutable, and may be considerably weaker evidence than presented in court.
The FBI database should be quantitatively assessed for suitability for its intended purpose.
drone, drone, drone, drone, drone, drone...
a spammer hijacked autoreply on less than 0.1% of Hotmail lusers.
drone, drone, drone, drone, drone, drone...
Summarized that for you.
I get very similar spam, often masquerading as replies, but never actually a reply from anyone I sent mail to. It's possible that the "autoreply" is just demonstrating that the bot is smart enough to inspect incoming mail as well as harvest the contact list on the infected machine.
Well, *my* phone obeys the laws of thermodynamics. Have fun storing your smartphone in a cryogenic dewar, or whatever you have to do to get 3 weeks' battery life out of it.
He said Nokia 6310i which is NOT a smartphone. I had one also, and I can vouch for its battery life: with moderate use, it could get past a couple of weeks, easily. Even with quite heavy use, it was good for well over a week.
My current work phone is a Nokia E70 quasi-smart thing (no touchscreen, but with a full qwerty keyboard) which can run GPS navigation, browse the web, etc. Its battery lasts about three days with moderate use as a phone, and rather less if used for continuous web browsing or navigation over a long journey.
South Park gave us one of the more plausible representations of Bono (a floater and maker of floaters). The creators of South Park also let you download the shows for free, providing an illuminating contrast with Bono and his ilk.
I only live at 46.3 degrees north, and it just now got up to 0F for the first time in 3 days.
I live at 62.9 North, and it was a balmy -25C (-13F) over the weekend. The forecast for tomorrow is a more normal -29C (-20F). These polar weather conditions are obviously due to the SRTM-imposed flatness from here to the North Pole.
Actually, the idea of a "Boskop race" or "Boskop Man" is long discredited. The hypothesis occurred by actively selecting the larger skulls from the available set, and misclassifying them as a distinct population.
It turns out that by examining the whole set of preserved skulls, cranium size distributions are similar in South Africa, Europe, and China for the period in question. Skulls of that era with rather large crania (comparable to the Boskop specimens) can be found in all regions.
Cranium size distributions are similar between those regions today also, but the distributions have shifted to slightly smaller sizes than they were around 10000 BCE (probably due to agriculture & civilization). http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/lynch-granger-big-brain-boskops-2008.html
Then this would confuse people, because, you know, they're so used to the round traffic light design.
One of the smarter things in Quebec province is that many of their traffic lights use shape as well as color to distinguish between the three states. One is square (red), one round (yellow), and one triangular (green). While differing shapes increase discrimination only slightly over the differing colors, it is an increase in suitability for purpose. Also, since each light fits into the same "bounding box", this means that in area of the light, red > yellow > green, which is also a small bias on the side of safety, making red slightly more visible in adverse conditions.
For an example of what NASA TV should have as filler between live stories, try this http://www.vimeo.com/7852885 The first few minutes are slow-paced, then it's all action.
If you really want an ugly XP look on top of Gnome, then just use the InstallXpGnome.sh script, as illustrated in this French video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FocT2fFBU50
Why do such a perverted thing to Ubuntu? To get it past the thought police at work, perhaps. Of course, they might wonder why your PC looks different on the network, and find out the truth when attempting to apply policies (like pushing updates to antivirus or windows) or other Microsoft domain masochistic practices.
50,000 light years away and did all that? Imagine if it was say only 500 ly. We are kind of lucky that we don't have any flaky stars nearby....or do we?.....(cue scary music).
Eta Carinae is expected to go supernova real soon (astronomical time scale - could be tomorrow, could be 10^6 years from now). It's less than 8000 ly away which is not very close, but much closer than 50000ly. And when it goes pop, Eta Carinae will be a pretty big one. Its rotation axis does not point towards us, so effects would be mostly limited to satellites and anything in the upper atmosphere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae
Mandatory bacon sandwiches before boarding the plane. Everybody wins.
Accompanied by a snifter of fine cognac. Or at least a shot of cheap vodka. No swallow - no fly.
Damn, I'd even pay a couple of bucks for that kind of security...
To be fair, while I have tried every video editor that runs on Linux and found every single one lacking, it isn't entirely their fault. They can't import, or see the camera at all, and I assume that's a problem in the system, not the application.
Well, something is screwed up somewhere, because "seeing" and controlling a DV camera over a Firewire connection is a pretty trivial and well-understood affair.
Indeed, it is simple. But allowing user level program access to firewire is actually a significant security risk, so most distros restrict access to/dev/raw1394,/dev/dv1394,/dev/video1394, or whatever the local device names are. This is probably the issue that GP is encountering. I make a shell script with the requisite "sudo chmod a+rwx/dev/dv1394" type commands to be run before invoking the program which is to control the dv camera and grab the video. These privileges should be revoked afterwards (and will be revoked on the next system boot, anyway).
I find I can get a nice burst for the first couple of megabytes then Im throttled pretty badly. Id like to know which carrier doesnt do this. It doesnt look related to reception.
Short answer: it seems that all US carriers do this, either because (i) they underestimated demand and under-invested in infrastructure, or (ii) because they can maximize their revenues while minimizing their costs, and the customers are trapped into long term contracts.
This sort of throttling by carriers is unheard-of in more advanced countries, such as Finland or Sweden. None of the carriers do that here; if they tried it, they'd have no customers left within a month or two (terminating a contract is trivial, and does not entail penalties). There are no usage caps on 3G either - unlimited actually does mean unlimited.
Slashdot Mirror
"Honey, I have been to that new page on Comcast site and I realized that we are using only 0.5 GB of bandwidth a month while we are paying for 250 GB, we need to find a way to make this more profitable, download more recipe books and travel agency pamphlets, I don't know, but we have to find some way.
Or just watch a few HQ videos, participate in some [legit] torrents, etc. We easily go far past 250GB per month on our fiber connection (which is uncapped, unthrottled, etc.). Of course, a couple of kids help to push the usage up, but I do enough by myself: last November, I uploaded more than 250GB of Ubuntu torrent. Downloads of various kinds pushed our throughput to well over double that.
Does Comcast still advertise it as an "unlimited" service?
If the math works, then "shut up and calculate"
Sorry, but experiments trump math.
And what do you think "if the math works" means, to a physicist?
The ultra-modern pharmacy in the local town also uses pneumatic delivery for prescription drugs. You present your prescription at the counter, and the attendant checks it, then keys in the appropriate codes on the terminal. The pills/potion/whatever arrives via pneumatic tube while the instructions & labels are being printed. This is faster then the previous method where the same attendant would have to walk off and fetch the prescription materials.
Some banks also use pneumatic conveyance to send currency between the counters and the vault.
I have a gut feeling that golden ratio will fit into all this somewhere.
Provided the golden ratio is exactly 42.
If the math works, then "shut up and calculate" (ascribed to both Dirac and Feynman regarding quantum mechanics). Non-mathematical forms of understanding may follow, eventually, perhaps even including opinions on "truth". If the math does not work, the hypothesis will be quickly abandoned or revised.
Statistics are important; it is highly unlikely that anyone with an MBA will know how or why, but they want them.
In fact, it is almost a certainty that any given MBA will either lack statistical expertise or will misapply it unthinkingly in a cook-book style. The pseudo-statistics behind Six Sigma comes immediately to mind.
I had repeated theoretical discussions with the four MBA experts who "trained" us (a group of six PhDs in Physics & Engineering doing R&D) in the ways of Six Sigma. There were problems with the statistical theory they presented right from the start - and they were clearly unaccustomed to being contradicted along the lines of "that's not right/applicable in this case, and here's why". For instance, they failed to acknowledge that non-Gaussian distributions could exist, then refused to accept that procedures should be adapted to the data if it was non-Gaussian. Next, they adamantly refused to believe that the 1.5 Z shift hypothesis was supported only by a few studies, all relying on a single dataset from the 1950s for die-based manufacture, and totally irrelevant to most other processes. The Six Sigma books all say "many studies" over decades support the Z shift hypothesis, but fail to cite them, and our MBA experts could not cite any such studies either. Thirdly, they refused to accept that an additional mode of variability (not in the Six Sigma beliefs) existed in processes with feedback (such as recycle lines or controllers). In many cases, this mode guarantees non-Gaussian variability in the process output.
Their advice was that to pass the course, we should ignore our knowledge of statistics (which they acknowledged was far better than theirs) and of process variability, and just "apply the documented methods". We did, and we all passed the course. Then we ignored the Six Sigma bogus statistics bullshit and got on with our jobs using proper statistics to analyze and solve problems in variability with the products we were developing.
MBAs seem to want statistics, but the vast majority appear to lack the training in how to generate proper statistics, or how to use them competently if someone else supplies them. Most MBAs appear to think the world is described adequately using Gaussian distributions, and a few "experts" know the Weibull distribution or the t-distribution. Other distribution types (Poisson, discrete/categorical, etc.) are totally foreign, and methods of inference beyond simple unconditional analyses are also quite alien to them.
I also understand that people who are good at it are rare.
Perhaps not as rare as you might think. But those who have some aptitude in statistics know enough to keep their mouths shut when the data tells them to. MBAs on the other hand, ignorant of their own ignorance, are as verbally promiscuous as politicians...
Cash, that is, not just "influence" which might backfire. I heard that Stasi rates were rock bottom, but the US screwy agencies have deeper pockets. Hey, in these challenging times lots of folks would be willing to snitch (perhaps even inventively) on their colleagues and other obstacles to job security or promotion (=boss).
Not being a citizen of any NATO country, they'd probably offer me less, the bastards.
This year, however, might be the year of Linux if not on the desktop, then at least on your other computing devices.
2009 was the first year of linux dominating on TVs and STBs since 2009, and probably the year of *nix on smartphones as well.
IBM ThinkPad 755CV had a transparent LCD display (VGA resolution) around 1995. It could be detached from the laptop, and placed on an overhead projector, for making PowerlessPointless-style presentations. This was in the days before projectors were common.
Before DNA tests are accepted as conclusive much better studies should be done, particularly for false positives.
I agree with you, but I'd add the caveat that the study shouldn't be done with a Federal database that was never intended for the purpose.
You are probably right, if the only conclusion were to be scientific knowledge, so that the database would exist only in the interests of science. Unfortunately, the principal purpose of the FBI database is the provision of strong/irrefutable evidence to secure convictions. Other purposes are to aid in selecting suspects or to eliminate individuals from suspicion. Its suitability for these purposes is what has been questioned, and has never been empirically assessed. Indeed, the cited studies of comparable databases and of a subset of the FBI dataset suggest that the "genetic matches" are not irrefutable, and may be considerably weaker evidence than presented in court.
The FBI database should be quantitatively assessed for suitability for its intended purpose.
drone, drone, drone, drone, drone, drone...
a spammer hijacked autoreply on less than 0.1% of Hotmail lusers.
drone, drone, drone, drone, drone, drone...
Summarized that for you.
I get very similar spam, often masquerading as replies, but never actually a reply from anyone I sent mail to. It's possible that the "autoreply" is just demonstrating that the bot is smart enough to inspect incoming mail as well as harvest the contact list on the infected machine.
Well, *my* phone obeys the laws of thermodynamics. Have fun storing your smartphone in a cryogenic dewar, or whatever you have to do to get 3 weeks' battery life out of it.
He said Nokia 6310i which is NOT a smartphone. I had one also, and I can vouch for its battery life: with moderate use, it could get past a couple of weeks, easily. Even with quite heavy use, it was good for well over a week.
My current work phone is a Nokia E70 quasi-smart thing (no touchscreen, but with a full qwerty keyboard) which can run GPS navigation, browse the web, etc. Its battery lasts about three days with moderate use as a phone, and rather less if used for continuous web browsing or navigation over a long journey.
South Park gave us one of the more plausible representations of Bono (a floater and maker of floaters). The creators of South Park also let you download the shows for free, providing an illuminating contrast with Bono and his ilk.
I only live at 46.3 degrees north, and it just now got up to 0F for the first time in 3 days.
I live at 62.9 North, and it was a balmy -25C (-13F) over the weekend. The forecast for tomorrow is a more normal -29C (-20F). These polar weather conditions are obviously due to the SRTM-imposed flatness from here to the North Pole.
Actually, the idea of a "Boskop race" or "Boskop Man" is long discredited. The hypothesis occurred by actively selecting the larger skulls from the available set, and misclassifying them as a distinct population.
It turns out that by examining the whole set of preserved skulls, cranium size distributions are similar in South Africa, Europe, and China for the period in question. Skulls of that era with rather large crania (comparable to the Boskop specimens) can be found in all regions.
Cranium size distributions are similar between those regions today also, but the distributions have shifted to slightly smaller sizes than they were around 10000 BCE (probably due to agriculture & civilization). http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/lynch-granger-big-brain-boskops-2008.html
Then this would confuse people, because, you know, they're so used to the round traffic light design.
One of the smarter things in Quebec province is that many of their traffic lights use shape as well as color to distinguish between the three states. One is square (red), one round (yellow), and one triangular (green). While differing shapes increase discrimination only slightly over the differing colors, it is an increase in suitability for purpose. Also, since each light fits into the same "bounding box", this means that in area of the light, red > yellow > green, which is also a small bias on the side of safety, making red slightly more visible in adverse conditions.
For an example of what NASA TV should have as filler between live stories, try this http://www.vimeo.com/7852885 The first few minutes are slow-paced, then it's all action.
If you really want an ugly XP look on top of Gnome, then just use the InstallXpGnome.sh script, as illustrated in this French video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FocT2fFBU50
Why do such a perverted thing to Ubuntu? To get it past the thought police at work, perhaps. Of course, they might wonder why your PC looks different on the network, and find out the truth when attempting to apply policies (like pushing updates to antivirus or windows) or other Microsoft domain masochistic practices.
50,000 light years away and did all that? Imagine if it was say only 500 ly. We are kind of lucky that we don't have any flaky stars nearby....or do we?.....(cue scary music).
Eta Carinae is expected to go supernova real soon (astronomical time scale - could be tomorrow, could be 10^6 years from now). It's less than 8000 ly away which is not very close, but much closer than 50000ly. And when it goes pop, Eta Carinae will be a pretty big one. Its rotation axis does not point towards us, so effects would be mostly limited to satellites and anything in the upper atmosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae
If you take the antidote without consuming the synthehol, will you become excessively sober?
Mandatory bacon sandwiches before boarding the plane. Everybody wins.
Accompanied by a snifter of fine cognac. Or at least a shot of cheap vodka. No swallow - no fly.
Damn, I'd even pay a couple of bucks for that kind of security...
To be fair, while I have tried every video editor that runs on Linux and found every single one lacking, it isn't entirely their fault. They can't import, or see the camera at all, and I assume that's a problem in the system, not the application.
Well, something is screwed up somewhere, because "seeing" and controlling a DV camera over a Firewire connection is a pretty trivial and well-understood affair.
Indeed, it is simple. But allowing user level program access to firewire is actually a significant security risk, so most distros restrict access to /dev/raw1394, /dev/dv1394, /dev/video1394, or whatever the local device names are. This is probably the issue that GP is encountering. I make a shell script with the requisite "sudo chmod a+rwx /dev/dv1394" type commands to be run before invoking the program which is to control the dv camera and grab the video. These privileges should be revoked afterwards (and will be revoked on the next system boot, anyway).
I find I can get a nice burst for the first couple of megabytes then Im throttled pretty badly. Id like to know which carrier doesnt do this. It doesnt look related to reception.
Short answer: it seems that all US carriers do this, either because (i) they underestimated demand and under-invested in infrastructure, or (ii) because they can maximize their revenues while minimizing their costs, and the customers are trapped into long term contracts.
This sort of throttling by carriers is unheard-of in more advanced countries, such as Finland or Sweden. None of the carriers do that here; if they tried it, they'd have no customers left within a month or two (terminating a contract is trivial, and does not entail penalties). There are no usage caps on 3G either - unlimited actually does mean unlimited.
'Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2 Wow.
Vol 1 wasn't enough? Wow indeed!
Did they finally add vertical tabs on the side of the window rather than on top?
This was already in earlier versions. I use it in 10.10 in Linux.