True, but that's usually the problem - alpha emitters getting into air or food. A gamma emitter big enough to be a hazard is easy to detect and tends to be noticed. Japan has a decent monitoring system, and the US has a paranoid one since 9/11.
(Back in 1983, there was an incident where a scrapyard in Mexico got a big cobalt-60 radiation source and recycled it into steel. Radiation detectors then went in at US border crossings.)
Monitoring milk is a good check for airborne radioactives, because cows concentrate the radioactives from a large amount of grass. The US EPA stepped up monitoring of milk from March to June 2011, and they were able to detect some iodine-131, about 5000 times below allowed levels. It's an isotope with an 8-day half life, so it faded out quickly.
The New York Daily News has an article on the PR operation behind that. It's a fairly standard white collar fraud story - initial success, overexpansion, arrogance, losses, fraud to cover up the losses, collapse, prosecution, jail. Enron and Worldcom come to mind.
Plus general ineptitude. The business (a kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa) managed to get in trouble with PETA, EPA, OSHA, DOL, and INS, and that was before the fraud. A professor of food science: "If you can figure out a law to break, they broke it." Head of kosher supervision: "They're just kids from Brooklyn who were suddenly running a big meat plant. They didn't realize that they had to hire professionals to take care of things."
There's a lot of religious politics surrounding this mess, but basically, it's the story of an inept businessman who used fraud to cover up the ineptitude and got caught.
No one argues he didn't do the crime. The sentence may be harsh, but it's what the current guidelines list. The dollar numbers were big enough to kick the sentence up, and the judge went by the book and gave him 27 years.
It's not up to the US. The current Iraqi government wants US troops out. That's their decision,and they made it. This isn't new news; it's been underway for almost two years.
Many states have initiative, referendum, and recall, and they have real effect. Not necessary good effect, but effective. In California we got Proposition 13 (extreme tax limits) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (as Governor) that way.
As for the White House site, it's too broken to use. I'm getting a 404 error on login attempts. Somebody didn't test the error handling. There's no obvious way to send a bug report. "Contact" just sends you to the "write the President" page.
Being a "fabless automaker" doesn't work all that well. You can get exotics made that way, but it's too expensive for a production product.
Tesla's great achievement was that they finally made a usable, fun to drive electric car. It's overpriced, but it does work. I see them on the road all the time in Silicon Valley. I hope Tesla can actually get their sedan product to profitability. Tesla was lucky to pick up the NUMMI plant cheaply; they got a modern small car auto assembly plant in good condition, although it's far bigger than they need and they're only using part of it.
There are plenty of defunct auto plants for sale in the US. Of course, those are the ones auto companies decided they didn't want to keep. Most of them are huge plants full of very specialized but obsolete machinery for making engines, transmissions, or body stampings in huge quantity. GM also dumped two assembly plants, both of which are for making pickups, SUVs, and Suburban/Hummer sized vehicles. Nobody wants those.
This isn't exactly new. LISP had it from the early days. It's an idea that's been tried before, now available with more modern buzzwords, like "the compiler as a service".
.NET as a virtual machine environment has become somewhat pointless, since the Windows/.NET environment is pretty much "write once, run on X86" now. Itanium support was dropped in 2010, and Microsoft's "Windows 8 for ARM" is apparently Metro-only.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? The only reason anybody would ever not reach the organic results is if the targeted ads showed them the thing they were searching for first.
No, I'm looking at
eye tracking studies. These give an indication of where users actually look. They don't go very far down the page. After about 6 seconds without finding something, users are more likely to enter a new query than scroll down.
View and click rates are well-studied. Positioning really, really matters. There are whole conferences on this stuff.
This is going to cost RIM money. BBX, Business Basic eXtended, was a bigger deal 20 years ago than it is now, but it still has some user base. 3 letters, though, are a weak trademark, unless very well known. For a rather lame choice of letters, though, this was dumb.
Apple had to settle with Cisco over "IPhone"'; Cisco did in fact have a VoIP phone system called that. Apple over the years had to pay off McIntosh Amplifiers and Apple Records (both notable brands in the 1960s). Apple had a second round of trouble when they moved into the music industry, and had to pay out even more money to Apple Records.
General Motors got into trouble with Beretta (GM: cars, Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta: guns), and settled that one relatively inexpensively.
Do you even read your own links? Neither of those is talking about search quality whatsoever.
From Rhode Island U.S. Attorney Peter Neronha, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal
"Google admitted wrongdoing in the high-profile settlement, although executives repeatedly testified before Congress that they had 'rigorous' controls to weed out the illegal ads from Canadian pharmacies aimed at U.S. consumers, the Journal reported. Neronha told the Journal those efforts were 'window dressing.'"
Yes, that's an ad quality issue. Since Google started putting ads above search results, in the same column, the distinction between the two is not that great. Especially when the ad results, the places results, and the in-house Google results combine to push the organic results below the fold and unlikely to be clicked. Prof. Eidelman's note "Remedies for Search Bias" has more to say on this.
Actually, you want programmers who are good at design and reliably competent, but not overly clever, at code. "Cute" code is very '70s.
Incidentally, the "why are manhole covers round", which appeared on the 1971 Comprehensive Examination in Computer Science at Stanford and was widely copied from there, is almost always misunderstood. While it's nice to have a lid you can't drop through the hole, that's not the reason. Many modern covers are rectangular. It's because manhole covers and their matching rings are 19th century technology, from the day when casting, planing, drilling, and turning were the main metalworking operations. Those limit the shapes you can make cheaply. Look at a steam locomotive built prior to 1920. Every machined surface is circular or flat. Manhole covers were made by casting with a single clamping on a lathe to clean up the outside edge. Similarly, the matching rings were cast and got a quick trim on a lathe to true them up. This gives you a matched pair that won't rattle or clang.
Cleaning up an inside rectangular edge requires a milling machine, which was an exotic precision device until about 1930 or so.
So that's why manhole covers are round. Low manufacturing cost.
The site has an "unboxing video", but not a demo video. Here's a demo video. That was version 0.3. It looks like a rather lame screen saver. Here's version 1.0 from a techno party in Berlin. It's still rather lame.
I'm all in favor of good nightclub video, but this isn't it.
This is just a law to keep scrap dealers from buying stolen metal. There's been trouble with people stealing copper power lines (this usually makes the news when someone tries to steal an energized one), manhole covers, and the aluminum access covers at the base of street light poles.
Much of the bill is about people selling railroad tracks and parts thereof. Railroad tracks? Do you realize what it takes to lift and move a railroad rail? That's not something one homeless guy could do. It takes teams, cranes, and trucks.
This will be a big boost to "purchaseplusone.com", "googleplus1supply.com", "buyrealplusone.com" (a Google advertiser, no less) and "plusonehero.com", "buyplusoneservice.com", "buygoogleplus1.net", "buyplusonenow.com", and "plusonesbuilder.com". It will be even easier for them to acquire Google accounts and create "+1" value for their customers.
Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social. As soon as a social service provides a boost to search ranking, it gets spammed. Heavily. This has happened to Google Places., Yelp, Citysearch (really bad there), Twitter (this is why your Twitter feeds are full of spam links), Facebook "likes", and now Google +1. From a spammer perspective, social spamming is easy and cheap. Setting up a link farm requires web sites, unique content, and ongoing site maintenance. Social spam just requires phony free accounts. The social services host your spam for you, for free.
Presumably the smart people at Google have figured this out by now, but they've been told that 2011 employee bonuses depends on Google's success at social. So, from a Google employee perspective, sacrificing search quality for social features makes sense. Google top management got paranoid about Facebook, which is about 1/5 the size of Google and peaked a few months back. (Social networks grow and die like nightclubs, which have a limited lifetime of coolness. Remember AOL, Geocities, Friendster, Orkut, Yahoo 360, Myspace...)
Nobody on the Right ever seems to suggest eliminating the Department of Agriculture, which operates various welfare programs for farmers. 3/4 of farm subsidies go to the top 10% of farms.There are still tobacco subsidies and cotton subsidies, and those aren't even foods.
The original designer of QNX died, the company was sold twice (to Harmon, then RIM), the product went from closed source to open source to closed source to open source to closed source, and the real-time customer base was fed up.
DoD embarked on a major program about ten years ago to get all DoD equipment running on one fuel: JP-8 with a corrosion inhibitor. This will work in jet engines, diesels, and heaters. DoD has been using some biodiesel, and it has to meet the specs for JP-8. That's what this is about.
DoD has been almost all diesel for years. Gasoline tankers have no place on today's battlefields, where there's no secure rear area.
Bitcon is a solution to the problem of irrevocable unidirectional decentralized remote money transfer between anonymous parties. This is the scammer's dream - there's no way the mark can even find the hustler. Sure enough, the Bitcoin world has been full of scams, such as "online wallet" operations that took the money and ran, "exchanges" that went out of business and kept the customer's money, and much hype from a promoter who turned out to have been running a mortgage scam in Chicago. Then there's "Global Standard Bank", the "Bitcoin bank" in Montreal, which isn't a bank, ran phony Photoshopped pictures of their bank building, and is still on eBay selling "Bitcoin cards".
A distributed currency might be possible, but Bitcoin isn't it.
The speculative side of Bitcoin is a straight pyramid scheme. The people behind the scheme, who got in early, win, and everybody else loses. I said this on Downside on June 11, 2011 right after the peak.
The IRS has the statutory authority to ask a judge for a warrant if they start a criminal investigation. It's not clear why they didn't do that here. The problem may be that they want to find the money, not prosecute the guy, and that's not a valid use of search warrant authority.
An interesting point is that the consumer protection agencies, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, don't have statutory authority to even request a search warrant.
You could theoretically use a Kinect to figure out where the image should be projected, however you're not really solving the problem of having an image that can't be viewed from multiple angles and it would only work if the viewers were sitting next to each other at which point you might as well just manually adjust it yourself..
Displays which track the user's point of view have been built, and they are very neat. (Although the tracking device was rather bulky back then.) The effect only works for one viewer at a time, of course. Someone must have done this with a Kinect by now. The tracking has to be very smooth, or you lose the illusion.
AI problems that people actually solve are very task-oriented.
That's OK. Problems that evolution solves are very task-oriented.
What I find encouraging is how much progress has been made with vision. Fifteen years ago, vision processing of unstructured scenes could barely do anything.. Today, face recognition is everywhere, visual SLAM works fine, and analyzing moving objects in front of each other is a routine part of video compression.
Slashdot Mirror
alpha isn't a problem unless you eat the emitter
True, but that's usually the problem - alpha emitters getting into air or food. A gamma emitter big enough to be a hazard is easy to detect and tends to be noticed. Japan has a decent monitoring system, and the US has a paranoid one since 9/11. (Back in 1983, there was an incident where a scrapyard in Mexico got a big cobalt-60 radiation source and recycled it into steel. Radiation detectors then went in at US border crossings.)
Monitoring milk is a good check for airborne radioactives, because cows concentrate the radioactives from a large amount of grass. The US EPA stepped up monitoring of milk from March to June 2011, and they were able to detect some iodine-131, about 5000 times below allowed levels. It's an isotope with an 8-day half life, so it faded out quickly.
The New York Daily News has an article on the PR operation behind that. It's a fairly standard white collar fraud story - initial success, overexpansion, arrogance, losses, fraud to cover up the losses, collapse, prosecution, jail. Enron and Worldcom come to mind.
Plus general ineptitude. The business (a kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa) managed to get in trouble with PETA, EPA, OSHA, DOL, and INS, and that was before the fraud. A professor of food science: "If you can figure out a law to break, they broke it." Head of kosher supervision: "They're just kids from Brooklyn who were suddenly running a big meat plant. They didn't realize that they had to hire professionals to take care of things."
There's a lot of religious politics surrounding this mess, but basically, it's the story of an inept businessman who used fraud to cover up the ineptitude and got caught.
No one argues he didn't do the crime. The sentence may be harsh, but it's what the current guidelines list. The dollar numbers were big enough to kick the sentence up, and the judge went by the book and gave him 27 years.
It's not up to the US. The current Iraqi government wants US troops out. That's their decision,and they made it. This isn't new news; it's been underway for almost two years.
Many states have initiative, referendum, and recall, and they have real effect. Not necessary good effect, but effective. In California we got Proposition 13 (extreme tax limits) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (as Governor) that way.
As for the White House site, it's too broken to use. I'm getting a 404 error on login attempts. Somebody didn't test the error handling. There's no obvious way to send a bug report. "Contact" just sends you to the "write the President" page.
Being a "fabless automaker" doesn't work all that well. You can get exotics made that way, but it's too expensive for a production product.
Tesla's great achievement was that they finally made a usable, fun to drive electric car. It's overpriced, but it does work. I see them on the road all the time in Silicon Valley. I hope Tesla can actually get their sedan product to profitability. Tesla was lucky to pick up the NUMMI plant cheaply; they got a modern small car auto assembly plant in good condition, although it's far bigger than they need and they're only using part of it.
There are plenty of defunct auto plants for sale in the US. Of course, those are the ones auto companies decided they didn't want to keep. Most of them are huge plants full of very specialized but obsolete machinery for making engines, transmissions, or body stampings in huge quantity. GM also dumped two assembly plants, both of which are for making pickups, SUVs, and Suburban/Hummer sized vehicles. Nobody wants those.
If your idea is unique enough to get a patent, patent it. Not everybody who can invent wants to run a company.
This isn't exactly new. LISP had it from the early days. It's an idea that's been tried before, now available with more modern buzzwords, like "the compiler as a service".
Are you being intentionally obtuse? The only reason anybody would ever not reach the organic results is if the targeted ads showed them the thing they were searching for first.
No, I'm looking at eye tracking studies. These give an indication of where users actually look. They don't go very far down the page. After about 6 seconds without finding something, users are more likely to enter a new query than scroll down.
View and click rates are well-studied. Positioning really, really matters. There are whole conferences on this stuff.
This is going to cost RIM money. BBX, Business Basic eXtended, was a bigger deal 20 years ago than it is now, but it still has some user base. 3 letters, though, are a weak trademark, unless very well known. For a rather lame choice of letters, though, this was dumb.
Apple had to settle with Cisco over "IPhone"'; Cisco did in fact have a VoIP phone system called that. Apple over the years had to pay off McIntosh Amplifiers and Apple Records (both notable brands in the 1960s). Apple had a second round of trouble when they moved into the music industry, and had to pay out even more money to Apple Records.
General Motors got into trouble with Beretta (GM: cars, Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta: guns), and settled that one relatively inexpensively.
Do you even read your own links? Neither of those is talking about search quality whatsoever.
From Rhode Island U.S. Attorney Peter Neronha, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal "Google admitted wrongdoing in the high-profile settlement, although executives repeatedly testified before Congress that they had 'rigorous' controls to weed out the illegal ads from Canadian pharmacies aimed at U.S. consumers, the Journal reported. Neronha told the Journal those efforts were 'window dressing.'"
Yes, that's an ad quality issue. Since Google started putting ads above search results, in the same column, the distinction between the two is not that great. Especially when the ad results, the places results, and the in-house Google results combine to push the organic results below the fold and unlikely to be clicked. Prof. Eidelman's note "Remedies for Search Bias" has more to say on this.
Milkdrop 2 is pretty good. It makes this thing look pathetic.
Actually, you want programmers who are good at design and reliably competent, but not overly clever, at code. "Cute" code is very '70s.
Incidentally, the "why are manhole covers round", which appeared on the 1971 Comprehensive Examination in Computer Science at Stanford and was widely copied from there, is almost always misunderstood. While it's nice to have a lid you can't drop through the hole, that's not the reason. Many modern covers are rectangular. It's because manhole covers and their matching rings are 19th century technology, from the day when casting, planing, drilling, and turning were the main metalworking operations. Those limit the shapes you can make cheaply. Look at a steam locomotive built prior to 1920. Every machined surface is circular or flat. Manhole covers were made by casting with a single clamping on a lathe to clean up the outside edge. Similarly, the matching rings were cast and got a quick trim on a lathe to true them up. This gives you a matched pair that won't rattle or clang.
Cleaning up an inside rectangular edge requires a milling machine, which was an exotic precision device until about 1930 or so.
So that's why manhole covers are round. Low manufacturing cost.
The site has an "unboxing video", but not a demo video. Here's a demo video. That was version 0.3. It looks like a rather lame screen saver. Here's version 1.0 from a techno party in Berlin. It's still rather lame.
I'm all in favor of good nightclub video, but this isn't it.
This is just a law to keep scrap dealers from buying stolen metal. There's been trouble with people stealing copper power lines (this usually makes the news when someone tries to steal an energized one), manhole covers, and the aluminum access covers at the base of street light poles.
Much of the bill is about people selling railroad tracks and parts thereof. Railroad tracks? Do you realize what it takes to lift and move a railroad rail? That's not something one homeless guy could do. It takes teams, cranes, and trucks.
This will be a big boost to "purchaseplusone.com", "googleplus1supply.com", "buyrealplusone.com" (a Google advertiser, no less) and "plusonehero.com", "buyplusoneservice.com", "buygoogleplus1.net", "buyplusonenow.com", and "plusonesbuilder.com". It will be even easier for them to acquire Google accounts and create "+1" value for their customers.
Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social. As soon as a social service provides a boost to search ranking, it gets spammed. Heavily. This has happened to Google Places., Yelp, Citysearch (really bad there), Twitter (this is why your Twitter feeds are full of spam links), Facebook "likes", and now Google +1. From a spammer perspective, social spamming is easy and cheap. Setting up a link farm requires web sites, unique content, and ongoing site maintenance. Social spam just requires phony free accounts. The social services host your spam for you, for free.
Presumably the smart people at Google have figured this out by now, but they've been told that 2011 employee bonuses depends on Google's success at social. So, from a Google employee perspective, sacrificing search quality for social features makes sense. Google top management got paranoid about Facebook, which is about 1/5 the size of Google and peaked a few months back. (Social networks grow and die like nightclubs, which have a limited lifetime of coolness. Remember AOL, Geocities, Friendster, Orkut, Yahoo 360, Myspace...)
Google search quality efforts are mostly "window dressing", as the U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island put it in his statement about Google's non-prosecution agreement. When ad revenue conflicts with search quality, ad revenue wins. Prof. Ben Eidelman of the Harvard Business School has analyzed this in detail.
Nobody on the Right ever seems to suggest eliminating the Department of Agriculture, which operates various welfare programs for farmers. 3/4 of farm subsidies go to the top 10% of farms.There are still tobacco subsidies and cotton subsidies, and those aren't even foods.
Texas, Ron Paul's state, is #1 nationally in farm subsidies.
I wonder what it's like now.
The original designer of QNX died, the company was sold twice (to Harmon, then RIM), the product went from closed source to open source to closed source to open source to closed source, and the real-time customer base was fed up.
It's still an elegant microkernel.
Now watch the non-ad non-hosted version of WordPress begin to suck.
DoD embarked on a major program about ten years ago to get all DoD equipment running on one fuel: JP-8 with a corrosion inhibitor. This will work in jet engines, diesels, and heaters. DoD has been using some biodiesel, and it has to meet the specs for JP-8. That's what this is about.
DoD has been almost all diesel for years. Gasoline tankers have no place on today's battlefields, where there's no secure rear area.
Bitcon is a solution to the problem of irrevocable unidirectional decentralized remote money transfer between anonymous parties. This is the scammer's dream - there's no way the mark can even find the hustler. Sure enough, the Bitcoin world has been full of scams, such as "online wallet" operations that took the money and ran, "exchanges" that went out of business and kept the customer's money, and much hype from a promoter who turned out to have been running a mortgage scam in Chicago. Then there's "Global Standard Bank", the "Bitcoin bank" in Montreal, which isn't a bank, ran phony Photoshopped pictures of their bank building, and is still on eBay selling "Bitcoin cards".
A distributed currency might be possible, but Bitcoin isn't it.
The speculative side of Bitcoin is a straight pyramid scheme. The people behind the scheme, who got in early, win, and everybody else loses. I said this on Downside on June 11, 2011 right after the peak.
The US killed three monkeys and a mouse in rockets before the first successful landing.
The IRS has the statutory authority to ask a judge for a warrant if they start a criminal investigation. It's not clear why they didn't do that here. The problem may be that they want to find the money, not prosecute the guy, and that's not a valid use of search warrant authority.
An interesting point is that the consumer protection agencies, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, don't have statutory authority to even request a search warrant.
You could theoretically use a Kinect to figure out where the image should be projected, however you're not really solving the problem of having an image that can't be viewed from multiple angles and it would only work if the viewers were sitting next to each other at which point you might as well just manually adjust it yourself..
Displays which track the user's point of view have been built, and they are very neat. (Although the tracking device was rather bulky back then.) The effect only works for one viewer at a time, of course. Someone must have done this with a Kinect by now. The tracking has to be very smooth, or you lose the illusion.
Who needs it? It's hard for mainstream America to take you seriously if you dress in rags, have long unkempt hair and reek of patchouli.
See this video of a Tea Party march in Washington.
AI problems that people actually solve are very task-oriented.
That's OK. Problems that evolution solves are very task-oriented.
What I find encouraging is how much progress has been made with vision. Fifteen years ago, vision processing of unstructured scenes could barely do anything.. Today, face recognition is everywhere, visual SLAM works fine, and analyzing moving objects in front of each other is a routine part of video compression.