Like many people, I had an instant dislike for the new format. It seems to be deliberately dumb downed. Formerly they provided statistics about how many news items were there for a certain story. Thus readers could apply different believability weights, if there are only three or four news items versus 500+ news items for a story.
Google is also not providing a way to access news in the old format. Given this, what other news aggregators are out there that covers news in the old (classic?) format?
"ET couldn't confirm the names of the banks and the pharmaceutical company or the total number of computers that were compromised." So it is possible that the whole story is made up.
"In May last year, two Indian conglomerates had to pay about $5 million each after hackers breached their systems. The hackers, suspected to be operating from the Middle East, threatened to leak information to the Indian government if the ransom wasn't delivered. Both are said to have paid up."
So in May the hackers were in Middle East and now they are in Russia? Looks like these hackers are going around the world and paying for their trip by hacking systems.
Please somebody google the news "Standard & Poor's Clarifies Assumption Used On Discretionary Spending Growth" over the last two days from multiple places.
Quite possible, GS may be telling the truth here about "intense media coverage." GS folks may not be saints in any sense of the word, but in public perception in US, everything they do currently is unholy. If some US investor looses money in this venture, GS will certainly be blamed, if not sued. Then again, GS may be doing US investors a favor, if Facebook follows MySpace trajectory.
IT never fails to amaze me that NASA does not send a balloon to 100,000 feet and load it up with all kinds of scientific equipment. That way, they would have advantages of being almost in space, but for a fraction of the cost of sending anything in space.
sending the sail roughly 1 million kilometers off course by the time it reaches the Oort Cloud.
Is there a specific part of the Oort Cloud they want to go to?
May be they are worried aiming antenna on spaceship properly? Some signal or other should reaches earth from that antenna for an expedition to have some value (at least for earth bound folks).
As others posted here, it is virtually impossible to buy certain products like cell phones, or cable TV service without giving SSN. Much more surprising was having to give SSN for garbage collection service and even to submit my resume for a job few years ago.
Talking with various people involved in these interactions was a real eye opener. Most of them said their IT system would not allow them to go forward without SSN, as these systems uses SSN as a unique key. So you have to thank these IT system designers for their lack of imagination to come up with a random key, at least for a major part of the problem.
In isolation, some NASA engineers may be smart. But they may not be the people who probably are making these decisions. Highly likely that it is some internal group that is charged with consistency or similar title. They may loose power or may even become superfluous, if NASA goes metric.
On a different note, how much confidence do you have in an agency like NASA that is charged with exploring space, when they cannot even do what school kids all over world do with ease?
Up front, let me say that my response will be colored by the fact that I was in running for a CTO position of a fairly large company. I do not have any government background also.
CTO jobs generally mean different things in different companies. In situations where there is a CIO and CTO, generally CTO works within guidelines and strategies visualized by CIO and other C-level executives. CTO is concerned primarily with operational parameters like capacity building, capability building, and even confidence building.
CTO generally understands current technology trends, has an antenna up for receiving tectonic technology shifts, and can visualize alignment of company's business goals and technology goals.
Somebody from Silicon Valley will have feelers for technology shifts that may be difficult to replicate elsewhere. Aneesh Chopra, from limited background given in submitted story, may excel at alignment, particularly in a government position with multitude of stake holders. He seems quite capable of understanding current technology trends as any person from Silicon Valley.
So the question basically boils down to this - if CTO of USA is mainly responsible for operational issues as defined above, he is an excellent choice. On other hand, if CTO of USA is charged with coming up technology that nobody can even visualize now, there may be better choices.
From aviationweek.com article
"International news media trumpeted the water ice confirmation, which was not a surprise to any of the Phoenix researchers. "They have discovered water on Mars for the third or fourth time," one senior Mars scientists joked about the hubbub around the water ice announcement.
Not just international media, even "/. scientists" in a previous discussion were speculating that text books will be written about discovering water - for fourth time:-)
Since this news is about potential for Mars Life, it follows that NASA is going by âoeSETI Post Detection Protocol.â Special Issue Acta Astronautica, Vol. 21, No. 2, J.C. Tarter and M.A. Michaud (eds.) (1990) or its variants.
http://www.setileague.org/iaaseti/protdet.htm"The discoverer should inform his/her or its relevant national authorities." This is in Step 2 of the protocol. The implication is that Step 3 will not happen, unless Step 2 is allowed.
This practice is not anything new. When Mars meteorite ALH 84001 was suspected to have fossilized life, previous White House administration was notified. Only after getting permission from White House (took about couple of weeks) was that news even published.
Absolutely nothing. NASA seems to move at a glacial pace. Their science experiments are all geology related. How many times have we seen the headline that water has been discovered on Mars? They discovered it with remote sensing, photography and now on a first hand (shovel) basis.
From the article "One surprise is how the soil is behaving. The ice-rich layers stick to the scoop when poised in the sun above the deck, different from what we expected from all the Mars simulation testing we've done"
Has these people ever used a shovel on earth in a wet and cold environment? Above statement implies that payload scientists really did not expect to encounter ice on Mars. As far as next steps go, they will design better shovels. No astrobiology experiments.
Now on to more frustratingly slow search for water in still other ways.
Human vision and associated perception has confounded AI folks right from the beginning.
After examining the results, the researchers 'believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex.' How long until we can simulate the entire brain?"
There are researches who believe that humans use their whole brain to "see." If that is true, the claims of these researchers are highly premature with respect to vision. Everything from stored patterns to extrapolation is used to determine what we see. Even familiarity is used in perception - that is why there is this urban myth that "foreign" people look the same. If one were to ask those foreigners, they will say all indigenous people are totally different.
Humanity, whatever that means, improves along an exponential curve. We are always at the knee of the curve.
Do humans become robots because they use contact lenses, laser surgeries or artificial limbs? DVDs, powerful PCs, Internet searches are things that were unimaginable even couple of decades ago. Soon people will figure out how to interface to a computer without keyboards. Would we be robots then? My point is that what is considered as "human" will change.
There will be purists, few and far between, who may not use "new fangled" inventions. But rest of humanity will be swept up in the wave and will never really question what it is to be a human. Most people even now conveniently leave those things to religion and worry more about what to do for coming weekend.
There are two different questions in your post - subject line and slightly different focus in comments.
Tolerance is not an issue here. It is highly likely that all components used were machined with a very high degree of tolerance (say +/-.01% or better of nominal value). Size of that opening 1mm, probably what you are talking about, is very close to what is used in an ordinary sieve. If soil is wet or even damp, it would not get through, as you mention. May be NASA thought that when they blasted the ground with retro rocket fire used in landing , it would have vaporized most of the water in soil, including any sign of possible life:-) Soil made sterile and powdery, just great for studying geological composition of Martian soil.
Your questions "What were they thinking?" is lot more provocative. Though these missions come under general category of "search for life," somebody pointed out that even if an alien is come and dance in front of that craft, NASA will not know it. There are no biological experiments that are in this mission. At best, NASA may infer possible potential life signs indirectly. These are geology experiments. It looks like geologists have bigger political clout in NASA currently than astrobiologists. May be fine particles are fine for geology. To answer your question, NASA was thinking like a geologist - totally interested in their field to the exclusion of everything else.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080602/stocks_real_time_quotes.html?.v=3
BATS provides free real time quote to Yahoo. So Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. had to respond to that.
Their business model is slightly different from BATS. After all BATS is trying to become an national securities exchange!
Some companies specifically forbid using Virtual cards. Their contract specifies a monetary value that a customer must pay, if one signs up using one these cards.
Re:The French news is the most interesting
on
UFOs In the News
·
· Score: 1
There are other interesting reports out there like
Buzz Aldrin talks about UFO during Apollo 11.
There is a big giggle factor associated with UFOs. In US, it seems to be worse
judging by the fact that NASA's "Search for Life" program does not include even
one instrument for detecting possible life. As somebody once remarked, NASA has
been taken over by "rock hounds" (geologists). Compare that to ESA's Beagle.
Unfortunate thing is that most people prejudge UFOs as alien or hoax, depending
on their bias. It would be nice to research this scientifically.
What point is one supposed to get from Minority Report?
Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ
Above clip is Jeff Han give a demo at TED about multi-touch sensing.
Combine this with "Wii UI" and one has Minority Report UI.
(TED - Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference http://ted.com/
Slashdot Mirror
Like many people, I had an instant dislike for the new format. It seems to be deliberately dumb downed. Formerly they provided statistics about how many news items were there for a certain story. Thus readers could apply different believability weights, if there are only three or four news items versus 500+ news items for a story.
Google is also not providing a way to access news in the old format. Given this, what other news aggregators are out there that covers news in the old (classic?) format?
"ET couldn't confirm the names of the banks and the pharmaceutical company or the total number of computers that were compromised." So it is possible that the whole story is made up.
"In May last year, two Indian conglomerates had to pay about $5 million each after hackers breached their systems. The hackers, suspected to be operating from the Middle East, threatened to leak information to the Indian government if the ransom wasn't delivered. Both are said to have paid up."
So in May the hackers were in Middle East and now they are in Russia? Looks like these hackers are going around the world and paying for their trip by hacking systems.
Please somebody google the news "Standard & Poor's Clarifies Assumption Used On Discretionary Spending Growth" over the last two days from multiple places.
Quite possible, GS may be telling the truth here about "intense media coverage." GS folks may not be saints in any sense of the word, but in public perception in US, everything they do currently is unholy. If some US investor looses money in this venture, GS will certainly be blamed, if not sued. Then again, GS may be doing US investors a favor, if Facebook follows MySpace trajectory.
IT never fails to amaze me that NASA does not send a balloon to 100,000 feet and load it up with all kinds of scientific equipment. That way, they would have advantages of being almost in space, but for a fraction of the cost of sending anything in space.
sending the sail roughly 1 million kilometers off course by the time it reaches the Oort Cloud.
Is there a specific part of the Oort Cloud they want to go to?
May be they are worried aiming antenna on spaceship properly? Some signal or other should reaches earth from that antenna for an expedition to have some value (at least for earth bound folks).
As others posted here, it is virtually impossible to buy certain products like cell phones, or cable TV service without giving SSN. Much more surprising was having to give SSN for garbage collection service and even to submit my resume for a job few years ago.
Talking with various people involved in these interactions was a real eye opener. Most of them said their IT system would not allow them to go forward without SSN, as these systems uses SSN as a unique key. So you have to thank these IT system designers for their lack of imagination to come up with a random key, at least for a major part of the problem.
In isolation, some NASA engineers may be smart. But they may not be the people who probably are making these decisions. Highly likely that it is some internal group that is charged with consistency or similar title. They may loose power or may even become superfluous, if NASA goes metric.
On a different note, how much confidence do you have in an agency like NASA that is charged with exploring space, when they cannot even do what school kids all over world do with ease?
Up front, let me say that my response will be colored by the fact that I was in running for a CTO position of a fairly large company. I do not have any government background also.
CTO jobs generally mean different things in different companies. In situations where there is a CIO and CTO, generally CTO works within guidelines and strategies visualized by CIO and other C-level executives. CTO is concerned primarily with operational parameters like capacity building, capability building, and even confidence building.
CTO generally understands current technology trends, has an antenna up for receiving tectonic technology shifts, and can visualize alignment of company's business goals and technology goals.
Somebody from Silicon Valley will have feelers for technology shifts that may be difficult to replicate elsewhere. Aneesh Chopra, from limited background given in submitted story, may excel at alignment, particularly in a government position with multitude of stake holders. He seems quite capable of understanding current technology trends as any person from Silicon Valley.
So the question basically boils down to this - if CTO of USA is mainly responsible for operational issues as defined above, he is an excellent choice. On other hand, if CTO of USA is charged with coming up technology that nobody can even visualize now, there may be better choices.
Not just international media, even "/. scientists" in a previous discussion were speculating that text books will be written about discovering water - for fourth time :-)
http://www.setileague.org/iaaseti/protdet.htm "The discoverer should inform his/her or its relevant national authorities." This is in Step 2 of the protocol. The implication is that Step 3 will not happen, unless Step 2 is allowed.
This practice is not anything new. When Mars meteorite ALH 84001 was suspected to have fossilized life, previous White House administration was notified. Only after getting permission from White House (took about couple of weeks) was that news even published.
Now what?
Absolutely nothing. NASA seems to move at a glacial pace. Their science experiments are all geology related. How many times have we seen the headline that water has been discovered on Mars? They discovered it with remote sensing, photography and now on a first hand (shovel) basis.
From the article "One surprise is how the soil is behaving. The ice-rich layers stick to the scoop when poised in the sun above the deck, different from what we expected from all the Mars simulation testing we've done"
Has these people ever used a shovel on earth in a wet and cold environment? Above statement implies that payload scientists really did not expect to encounter ice on Mars. As far as next steps go, they will design better shovels. No astrobiology experiments.
Now on to more frustratingly slow search for water in still other ways.
IT budget and spending has a negative correlation with efficiency of operation of whole enterprise.
After examining the results, the researchers 'believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex.' How long until we can simulate the entire brain?"
There are researches who believe that humans use their whole brain to "see." If that is true, the claims of these researchers are highly premature with respect to vision. Everything from stored patterns to extrapolation is used to determine what we see. Even familiarity is used in perception - that is why there is this urban myth that "foreign" people look the same. If one were to ask those foreigners, they will say all indigenous people are totally different.
Humanity, whatever that means, improves along an exponential curve. We are always at the knee of the curve.
Do humans become robots because they use contact lenses, laser surgeries or artificial limbs? DVDs, powerful PCs, Internet searches are things that were unimaginable even couple of decades ago. Soon people will figure out how to interface to a computer without keyboards. Would we be robots then? My point is that what is considered as "human" will change.
There will be purists, few and far between, who may not use "new fangled" inventions. But rest of humanity will be swept up in the wave and will never really question what it is to be a human. Most people even now conveniently leave those things to religion and worry more about what to do for coming weekend.
There are two different questions in your post - subject line and slightly different focus in comments.
.01% or better of nominal value). Size of that opening 1mm, probably what you are talking about, is very close to what is used in an ordinary sieve. If soil is wet or even damp, it would not get through, as you mention. May be NASA thought that when they blasted the ground with retro rocket fire used in landing , it would have vaporized most of the water in soil, including any sign of possible life :-) Soil made sterile and powdery, just great for studying geological composition of Martian soil.
Tolerance is not an issue here. It is highly likely that all components used were machined with a very high degree of tolerance (say +/-
Your questions "What were they thinking?" is lot more provocative. Though these missions come under general category of "search for life," somebody pointed out that even if an alien is come and dance in front of that craft, NASA will not know it. There are no biological experiments that are in this mission. At best, NASA may infer possible potential life signs indirectly. These are geology experiments. It looks like geologists have bigger political clout in NASA currently than astrobiologists. May be fine particles are fine for geology. To answer your question, NASA was thinking like a geologist - totally interested in their field to the exclusion of everything else.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080602/stocks_real_time_quotes.html?.v=3 BATS provides free real time quote to Yahoo. So Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. had to respond to that. Their business model is slightly different from BATS. After all BATS is trying to become an national securities exchange!
10 billion years for search sounds about right, if ET uses Windows or Java.
Looks perfect for making daleks.
Some companies specifically forbid using Virtual cards.
Their contract specifies a monetary value that a customer
must pay, if one signs up using one these cards.
There is a big giggle factor associated with UFOs. In US, it seems to be worse judging by the fact that NASA's "Search for Life" program does not include even one instrument for detecting possible life. As somebody once remarked, NASA has been taken over by "rock hounds" (geologists). Compare that to ESA's Beagle.
Unfortunate thing is that most people prejudge UFOs as alien or hoax, depending on their bias. It would be nice to research this scientifically.
What point is one supposed to get from Minority Report? Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ Above clip is Jeff Han give a demo at TED about multi-touch sensing. Combine this with "Wii UI" and one has Minority Report UI. (TED - Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference http://ted.com/