People with kids in the US care about Christmas, unless they do Hanukkah instead. Very few care about the religious nature of the date. (2/3s of Americans are "Christians", but only about 1/6th are "religious").
Falcon 9 recovers and re-uses the first stage: the easy one
The part that makes sense, you mean. Nothing good will come of the nerd obsession with "just like the cover art of my SF novel" SSTO approaches. Re-use of the orbiter is just dumb until the day comes when re-fueling in orbit is so cheap that aero-braking isn't needed.
Many mainstream cultures have some sort of gift-giving celebration around the Winter Solstice more-or-less (basically all of Western Civ + Japan and a few others). A big exception is India, where Diwali is mid-Fall instead.
China sadly lost most of its cultural traditions thank to Murderin' Mao. Single's Day may be the world's biggest shopping day, but it's not the same.
If you have any sort of salaried professional job, then "having everything you want" is mostly a matter of adjusting your wants. (Not to minimize the ruinous cost of Exchange health care plans in the states where there's only one provider left - those can screw anyone).
NASA doesn't build rockets (they only build paperwork). Lockheed Porkem et al does. It's just moving rocket building from cost-plus porktractors towards COTS rockets. It's the private sector building the rockets either way.
The first re-usable rocket to launch to orbit was, of course, the space shuttle. So, NASA started doing reusable rocket launches back when Elon Musk was 11 years old.
Total pork-barrel. Some of the "re-usable" shuttle was actually more expensive than building new each time (largely due to the work being geographically allocated by political influence, not logistical sanity), but the pork must flow.
SpaceX made "economically re-usable" happen. The more corrupt the government, the more the private sector makes sense (and vice versa of course).
We should just arrest all black males because most of them have committed a crime. That would get the streets safe again. Amazing how a 6% minority can account for ~ 55% of all murders and nearly 60% of all robberies and yet they complain about being "profiled".
Even if those dubious stats were true, that's not how this works. Profiling requires Bayesian reasoning.
If more than half of black people were guilty of some crime, then sure, being black would be probable cause for searching. But even if all crime was done by black people, but only 2% of black people were criminals, being black isn't material evidence of anything.
If you have a profile where more than half the people you identify are actually guilty, that is in fact "probable" cause. That almost never happens, though. Even if you accept a lower bar than "probable", with something like airport security, it should be explicit what that bar is.
I was on a Jury where someone took the risk and got lucky. I'm not sure justice was done, but I feel quite good about the outcome. Mostly because the prosecutor was politically connected instead of competent, and didn't actually bother to attack the defense's case. She had this attitude of "this is all too silly to respond to", which was a mistake.
I don't think I'd take that risk myself, but if I did I'd want that defense lawyer!
I doubt it, if the guy had any insight. Jar Jar is a WMD disguised as a lifeform.
There's was a great bit in the Clone Wars cartoon about this. Bunch of troopers along with Jar Jar walking cross country after their ship crashed. An enemy tank approaches. They just send Jar Jar out to make friends with the nice tank crew. Only takes about 30 seconds from Jar Jar's clumsiness to destroy the tank.
STTNG is just so much better if you treat the first season like the Matrix sequels.
TOS was a bunch of SF short stories, written by a variety of SF writers of the day. In all its glory, and all its suckage, it was very free-form and very different from normal Hollywood writing. It's not really comparable to any of the other ST because of that.
ST:V was entirely episodic after the premier. Nothing changed, beyond a couple of cast changes pushed by the money guys.
Had it been a real ongoing plot, they would have had crew leave or join at every nice planet, the first Voyager would have been lost at the end of the first season, and the ship's name go along with a series of ships over the course of the story. It should have ended with a tramp steamer returning to the Federation with none of the original crew, but a bunch of people with different motivations for being there.
That's what a good long-term plot looks like. Sadly incompatible with the way Hollywood makes TV.
Meh, it's still Star Trek even so. Try reversing the polarity of the neutron flux for real entertainment. Then you'll get time travel devices that make some kind of sense.
shouldn't you provide your business to whomever provides the best service? I'm all for supporting mom & pop - don't get me wrong
When I recently bought a large TV from Amazon last summer, I opted for their special delivery and setup service. That service turned out to be literally a mom-and-pop outfit: a couple renting a truck, with their 10-ish daughter in tow. They did a great job setting up my TV though!
Point is, it's not either-or. The TV was made by a giant Korean conglomerate, sold by a giant US conglomerate, but delivered by a mom-and-pop operation, and I was quite happy with the service. The mom-and-pop operation had to register in some way with Amazon, but they were clearly independent.
To me, the primary reassuring thing about all of this is that the normal Amazon store freely lists competitors products alongside Amazon-sold products on the main page. If Amazon is just running the shopping portal, but any competitor (who meets the government procurement requirements etc) can list alongside them on that same portal, then more power to them.
A monopoly on items sold is troubling. A monopoly on the portal software? Meh.
his thinking across American business is whats killing American retail. Why buy crap from Sears or Wall-Mart when I can get slightly better crap faster on Amazon? Or if you don't mind waiting, roll the dice and order your crap directly from China.
In related news, China's dictator recently announced a crackdown on fraudulent Chinese sellers to overseas markets. If ordering direct from China stops being a risk, look out US retail! Even Amazon will be threatened.
There's a good wikipedia page on SIFT as well, but note that it's one of many.
There was also a lot of classified work done in this area (and there still is AFAIK) ahead of what's publicly known, as being able to steer a weapon (with very limited compute) into a target based on a photo of the target is desirable (which would be a tilted/rotated/differently lit/etc picture to be matched with a camera stream). Heck, just determining the exact coordinates of a picture taken from a plane is a big deal.
Citation please. Hashes are very fragile, that is why we use them to detect data errors and securely store passwords.
The initial papers were published from Stanford, quite a few years ago (and so are hidden form the internet). There were a few startups, back in the day, around this.
These signatures are based around decomposing anything: image, video,,text document, etc, into a series of signals (e.g., series of words in a doc), then hashing each signal to a bit in your signature, then accumulating a weight for that bit based on how common the signal is among similar documents.
The devil is in the details, of course, but you can see how resilient these signatures are but looking at attempts to evade YouTube's contentID system.
The point is that facebook would need to store more than just a hash to accomplish their goal -- they need ways to deal with the image being scaled, rotated, run through a filter, etc. In other words... they need to keep a likeness of the original image.
There are simple image signature algorithms that are stable across all those transformations (unless the filter is extreme), but will still make random collisions unlikely. Old technology at this point.
It's probably an image signature, not literally a hash. But yeah, if the real intent was as stated, they'd release an app that uploads just the signature. This plan can only end in lulz.
The Opposite works for me. I get a key to the Amazon warehouse. I drive in, take what I ordered, and leave. Amazon should trust its customers. Customers should not trust Amazon. I'm sure if they use the Amazon camera, and Amazon Alexa, nothing could go wrong.
You do know that's exactly the model they're experimenting with for convenience stores, right? I'm not convinced they'll ever take it beyond an experiment, but it would be awesome to have no checkout line at a grocery store.
Not to me: I'm first concerned with the vendor not looking at my data! Of course, just encrypt everything and it doesn't matter, but that's impractical for email.
My grandmother needed assistance for a year or so to help clean up, make sure she took her medicine, after my grandfather passed away. So a couple times a day, various nurses and health care workers showed up. She's since moved into a home. As her sons (my father and uncle); went through her home packing things up and sorting things out they discovered an incredible amount of theft had taken place. Jewellery, china, coats, silverware...
Yeah, there's a whole industry of stealing form the elderly and infirm. Painkillers too! There's often more money in prescription painkillers than all the jewellery etc. Stealing from the most vulnerable under color of helping them is vile.
Slashdot Mirror
People with kids in the US care about Christmas, unless they do Hanukkah instead. Very few care about the religious nature of the date. (2/3s of Americans are "Christians", but only about 1/6th are "religious").
Falcon 9 recovers and re-uses the first stage: the easy one
The part that makes sense, you mean. Nothing good will come of the nerd obsession with "just like the cover art of my SF novel" SSTO approaches. Re-use of the orbiter is just dumb until the day comes when re-fueling in orbit is so cheap that aero-braking isn't needed.
The goal isn't "reusable" but "cheap".
Many mainstream cultures have some sort of gift-giving celebration around the Winter Solstice more-or-less (basically all of Western Civ + Japan and a few others). A big exception is India, where Diwali is mid-Fall instead.
China sadly lost most of its cultural traditions thank to Murderin' Mao. Single's Day may be the world's biggest shopping day, but it's not the same.
If you have any sort of salaried professional job, then "having everything you want" is mostly a matter of adjusting your wants. (Not to minimize the ruinous cost of Exchange health care plans in the states where there's only one provider left - those can screw anyone).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
NASA doesn't build rockets (they only build paperwork). Lockheed Porkem et al does. It's just moving rocket building from cost-plus porktractors towards COTS rockets. It's the private sector building the rockets either way.
The first re-usable rocket to launch to orbit was, of course, the space shuttle. So, NASA started doing reusable rocket launches back when Elon Musk was 11 years old.
Total pork-barrel. Some of the "re-usable" shuttle was actually more expensive than building new each time (largely due to the work being geographically allocated by political influence, not logistical sanity), but the pork must flow.
SpaceX made "economically re-usable" happen. The more corrupt the government, the more the private sector makes sense (and vice versa of course).
We should just arrest all black males because most of them have committed a crime. That would get the streets safe again. Amazing how a 6% minority can account for ~ 55% of all murders and nearly 60% of all robberies and yet they complain about being "profiled".
Even if those dubious stats were true, that's not how this works. Profiling requires Bayesian reasoning.
If more than half of black people were guilty of some crime, then sure, being black would be probable cause for searching. But even if all crime was done by black people, but only 2% of black people were criminals, being black isn't material evidence of anything.
If you have a profile where more than half the people you identify are actually guilty, that is in fact "probable" cause. That almost never happens, though. Even if you accept a lower bar than "probable", with something like airport security, it should be explicit what that bar is.
I was on a Jury where someone took the risk and got lucky. I'm not sure justice was done, but I feel quite good about the outcome. Mostly because the prosecutor was politically connected instead of competent, and didn't actually bother to attack the defense's case. She had this attitude of "this is all too silly to respond to", which was a mistake.
I don't think I'd take that risk myself, but if I did I'd want that defense lawyer!
Wow, we actually agree on something. First time for everything.
I doubt it, if the guy had any insight. Jar Jar is a WMD disguised as a lifeform.
There's was a great bit in the Clone Wars cartoon about this. Bunch of troopers along with Jar Jar walking cross country after their ship crashed. An enemy tank approaches. They just send Jar Jar out to make friends with the nice tank crew. Only takes about 30 seconds from Jar Jar's clumsiness to destroy the tank.
tl;dr: a Sith Lord is a valuable asset.
STTNG is just so much better if you treat the first season like the Matrix sequels.
TOS was a bunch of SF short stories, written by a variety of SF writers of the day. In all its glory, and all its suckage, it was very free-form and very different from normal Hollywood writing. It's not really comparable to any of the other ST because of that.
ST:V was entirely episodic after the premier. Nothing changed, beyond a couple of cast changes pushed by the money guys.
Had it been a real ongoing plot, they would have had crew leave or join at every nice planet, the first Voyager would have been lost at the end of the first season, and the ship's name go along with a series of ships over the course of the story. It should have ended with a tramp steamer returning to the Federation with none of the original crew, but a bunch of people with different motivations for being there.
That's what a good long-term plot looks like. Sadly incompatible with the way Hollywood makes TV.
Try reversing the phase. You'll enjoy it more.
Meh, it's still Star Trek even so. Try reversing the polarity of the neutron flux for real entertainment. Then you'll get time travel devices that make some kind of sense.
shouldn't you provide your business to whomever provides the best service? I'm all for supporting mom & pop - don't get me wrong
When I recently bought a large TV from Amazon last summer, I opted for their special delivery and setup service. That service turned out to be literally a mom-and-pop outfit: a couple renting a truck, with their 10-ish daughter in tow. They did a great job setting up my TV though!
Point is, it's not either-or. The TV was made by a giant Korean conglomerate, sold by a giant US conglomerate, but delivered by a mom-and-pop operation, and I was quite happy with the service. The mom-and-pop operation had to register in some way with Amazon, but they were clearly independent.
To me, the primary reassuring thing about all of this is that the normal Amazon store freely lists competitors products alongside Amazon-sold products on the main page. If Amazon is just running the shopping portal, but any competitor (who meets the government procurement requirements etc) can list alongside them on that same portal, then more power to them.
A monopoly on items sold is troubling. A monopoly on the portal software? Meh.
his thinking across American business is whats killing American retail. Why buy crap from Sears or Wall-Mart when I can get slightly better crap faster on Amazon? Or if you don't mind waiting, roll the dice and order your crap directly from China.
In related news, China's dictator recently announced a crackdown on fraudulent Chinese sellers to overseas markets. If ordering direct from China stops being a risk, look out US retail! Even Amazon will be threatened.
There's a good wikipedia page on SIFT as well, but note that it's one of many.
There was also a lot of classified work done in this area (and there still is AFAIK) ahead of what's publicly known, as being able to steer a weapon (with very limited compute) into a target based on a photo of the target is desirable (which would be a tilted/rotated/differently lit/etc picture to be matched with a camera stream). Heck, just determining the exact coordinates of a picture taken from a plane is a big deal.
Citation please. Hashes are very fragile, that is why we use them to detect data errors and securely store passwords.
The initial papers were published from Stanford, quite a few years ago (and so are hidden form the internet). There were a few startups, back in the day, around this.
These signatures are based around decomposing anything: image, video, ,text document, etc, into a series of signals (e.g., series of words in a doc), then hashing each signal to a bit in your signature, then accumulating a weight for that bit based on how common the signal is among similar documents.
The devil is in the details, of course, but you can see how resilient these signatures are but looking at attempts to evade YouTube's contentID system.
The point is that facebook would need to store more than just a hash to accomplish their goal -- they need ways to deal with the image being scaled, rotated, run through a filter, etc. In other words... they need to keep a likeness of the original image.
There are simple image signature algorithms that are stable across all those transformations (unless the filter is extreme), but will still make random collisions unlikely. Old technology at this point.
It's probably an image signature, not literally a hash. But yeah, if the real intent was as stated, they'd release an app that uploads just the signature. This plan can only end in lulz.
Great link, thanks for making this more visible.
The Opposite works for me. I get a key to the Amazon warehouse. I drive in, take what I ordered, and leave. Amazon should trust its customers. Customers should not trust Amazon. I'm sure if they use the Amazon camera, and Amazon Alexa, nothing could go wrong.
You do know that's exactly the model they're experimenting with for convenience stores, right? I'm not convinced they'll ever take it beyond an experiment, but it would be awesome to have no checkout line at a grocery store.
Not to me: I'm first concerned with the vendor not looking at my data! Of course, just encrypt everything and it doesn't matter, but that's impractical for email.
My grandmother needed assistance for a year or so to help clean up, make sure she took her medicine, after my grandfather passed away. So a couple times a day, various nurses and health care workers showed up. She's since moved into a home. As her sons (my father and uncle); went through her home packing things up and sorting things out they discovered an incredible amount of theft had taken place. Jewellery, china, coats, silverware...
Yeah, there's a whole industry of stealing form the elderly and infirm. Painkillers too! There's often more money in prescription painkillers than all the jewellery etc. Stealing from the most vulnerable under color of helping them is vile.