Google sells very little, other than advertising. If they sold something for money, customers would insist on support. Almost the only thing Google sells directly to customers is the Google Search Appliance, which is available as a 1U or 4U rackmount server. The low-end version, the Google Mini, is sold with no support and a two-year replacement warranty. After two years, you're supposed to replace the entire unit. Google tried selling phones directly, and that lasted only for five months of 2010.
So it's not surprising that Google would drop a commercial software product. They don't sell any.
Chip and PIN is the most retarded use of two factor authentication I have ever seen.
Certainly the UK version is. Read pages 16 and 17 of the thesis.
What's so lame about this is that it's a reasonably recent system design. How to do this right has been understood since the 1980s, and getting enough CPU power into the card to do an encryption isn't that big a deal.
The way this is done right is that the bank and merchant send the transaction details to the device, where the user checks them and signs the transaction using their PIN and crypto within the device. The bank and merchant confirm that the transaction is signed properly and the bank confirms the account information. The merchant system never sees the PIN or the customer's private key.
Of course, the problem with doing it right is that to do a true mutually mistrustful system, the customer has to have a device with a keyboard and display, plus some CPU power. If the merchant owns the PIN pad, that's a vulnerability. That's usually a phone, not a dedicated device, which opens up a new range of vulnerabilities.
To understand wind power, look at the wind map of the United States. Wind turbines aren't useful unless the average wind speed is in the 8 m/sec range and up. Note the huge high-wind area from the Texas panhandle up to Canada. That's where Pickens wanted to operate. Good place for wind turbines, but no nearby place that needs the power. So some long transmission lines were needed. The problem is not that "regulators" wouldn't let Pickens build transmission lines. It's that he wanted governments to pay for them. See Pickens' testimony before Congress. He wanted eminent domain powers and tax credits for high-tension lines. Back in 2009, though, he couldn't raise the $2 billion needed to build them.
Those wind charts come in much finer detail. Look at the California wind map. There are four really good wind areas in California, and they all have large wind farms operating. There's room for further expansion out at Mojave, but the other three sites are essentially full.
Those are all successful operations, because they're reasonably near big loads.
Also, the Pickens claim that collecting wind power over a large area would provide significant base load capacity may be bogus. See the live data for the PJM grid. (This brings up a big Flash application showing what the power grid for the Northeastern US is doing. Switch one of the panels to "Wind Power" and set the scale to "All Data".) Within a 3-day period, total wind power for the entire Northeast US can range over an 8 to 1 range. That's from real, operating wind farms.
Consumer GPS units aren't supposed to work above 60,000 feet or 1,000 MPH. Otherwise, they're subject to US military export controls. Of course, since Android units are probably made outside the US, that doesn't apply.
(The US needs to give up on export controls in the electronics area. It's just a headache for US firms, and everybody else can get everything they need elsewhere.)
Who buys this crap? A surprisingly large number of people.
There are about 62 yachts in the world over 250 feet in length.
There are about 120 private jets in the Boeing 747 size and up. Some are used by heads of state, but most are owned by private parties.
Big jets are popular with Russian oligarchs; if you have business interests in Siberia, going there in comfort needs proper support facilities.
There are people who are just into buying expensive stuff, most of which they don't use. I've known a few people like that. It's a status thing. I'm in Silicon Valley, where you see a little of that. There's a guy who collects and restores tanks and other large military vehicles; he has
about a hundred vehicles. I know some people who have Tesla cars. Being a horse person, I know people with expensive horses. But they ride them; they don't just collect them. Really overdoing it in Silicon Valley is somewhat frowned upon. Larry Ellison is snickered at by the Woodside crowd for building a house the size of a mall and redoing the surrounding terrain, which is sequoia country, to look like a misty Japanese hillside. (The fog machine was just tacky.) In Switzerland, someone might have expensive paintings in their house, but building some flamboyant mansion is seen as un-Swiss.
In Russia and Dubai, though, there's no limit to blatantly conspicuous consumption.
"Details" magazine went through this twice. The original Details magazine, in the 1980s, was targeted to the hip New York City club crowd.
The typical Details reader had probably met Madonna before she was famous, while dancing at Danceteria or Area. The people mentioned in Details read Details to see what their friends were doing. Ads were for little boutiques in SoHo.
Today's "Details" is like GQ or Esquire, with a heavy emphasis on shopping.
The Polar Express seemed to have "rubbery" motion capture. I used to see this problem at trade shows like SIGGRAPH. The electromagnetic motion capture people would have a stage with a live dancer wearing sensors at her joints, and screens showing the CG character driven from the dancer. The CG character always moved worse than the live dancer. If the dancer did a hard stop, the CG character would show much less abrupt deceleration. That's because the electromagnetic systems were noisy, and had to be low-pass filtered.
There were also alignment problems. The hand positions were usually off. Metal in the area would distort the fields slightly.
Around 2000 or so, errors of several inches were still common. I asked one of the demo dancers to touch her fingertips together, and the CG character was off by the breadth of a hand. The Polar Express animation had a similar slightly-off look.
This got better once motion capture started using multiple cameras at much higher frame rates than the animation. There's still some noise and filtering is still needed, but the noise is up at a few hundred Hz and the filters have higher cutoff frequencies. By the time the motion is downconverted to 24FPS, the effects of the filtering have disappeared.
The DARPA Grand Challenge was actually Dr. Tony Tether's way of getting a message through to the academic robotics community - "get results or else". DARPA had been putting money into robotics work, and specific automatic driving work, at MIT, Stanford, and CMU since the 1960s, without getting anything that was close to useful. When the Grand Challenge was first announced, all three of those schools didn't intend to enter, and in fact, months into the competition, none of them had. Many non-academic entrants had signed up, but the big schools weren't in it.
Then something happened. I gather that it was made clear to the major research groups that if the Grand Challenge resulted in better technology than what DARPA had received from academia, academic funding would be turned off.
Suddenly, all three schools cranked up huge efforts, tying up a substantial fraction of their CS departments. Nobody had ever had 100-person crash programs in academic robotics before, let alone ones funded by the universities themselves.
It worked. But it wasn't the carrot of winning that drove the major schools. The prize was only $1 million. It was the big stick of funding cuts.
In terms of social influence though, music has a huge advantage.
Music used to have considerable social influence, but that was a long time ago, back in the 1960s.
At one time, music as a social force ranked above organized religion in the US. The Beatles once
said "We're bigger than Jesus now".
Today, it's just another branded product. Most popular music is used as background ambiance while
you're doing something else. Concert attendance is down, despite frantic marketing efforts.
9 of the top 10 musicians (by sales) are from a decade or two (or three) ago.
Rap had a message. But not much of one. in the end, rap doesn't seem to have changed anything. Although it did sell many shiploads of baggy clothes.
The entire music industry, worldwide, only sold $15.8 billion in product last year. For comparison, worldwide liquor sales were about $220 billion, and a single booze company, Diageo (Smirnoff Vodka, Johhny Walker, José Cuervo, Baileys, and Guinness Stout) has more revenue than the entire music industry. On a worldwide scale, the music industry is tiny.
On the movie side, MGM just came out of bankruptcy, and Warner is close to it. Hollywood Video went bust months ago, and Blockbuster is in bankruptcy. (Many Blockbuster stores will close after the holiday season.)
In computing, Apple's revenue for fiscal 2010 is about $63 billion. Microsoft revenue was about $60 billion. HP annual revenue is about $120 billion. Dell annual revenue is about $52 billion. Google is around $23 billion. Comcast is around $36 billion. AT&T is at $124 billion. Any of those players could buy out the entire libraries of most music and movie companies.
I'm surprised that Apple hasn't just bought out the music industry, rather than negotiating with it.
Some in their 50s or so may remember "New Math", which was an attempt to teach elementary math with more emphasis on the underlying theory. It's now widely considered to have been a disaster. The author of the original article seems to date from that era.
One of the approaches to fundamental mathematics is to start with axiomatic set theory and build up from there. (That's not the only approach; one can also start with the Peano axioms and build up to set theory via lists, as is done in constructive Boyer-Moore theory.) This is minimalist and elegant (which is why mathematicians like it) but it requires considerable theoretical development before you get to addition. Teaching kids arithmetic that way was a disaster.
Euclid's approach to axiomatic geometry is like that, too. There's a lot of abstract logical structure that has to be built up before you can do anything. That's how math was taught up to 1900 or so, and 7th grade geometry is still often taught that way.
That's the "liberal arts" approach to mathematics. It's an intellectual exercise forced onto little kids. Even if you use advanced mathematics in your work, it's very rare to need either axiomatic set theory or axiomatic plane geometry.
A completely different approach can be found in some math courses given during WWII courses to soldiers who needed to do technical work. These were utterly practical. Trigonometry was taught with direct applications to surveying and static structural analysis. After that trig course, you could calculate the size of the beams required for a truss bridge. The calculus course covered subjects like the ballistics of big guns. (I especially liked the "tables method" of integration, which taught you how to use those tables of integrals in the back of the book.)
There's a mindset in math teaching that math is about "puzzles". It's not. (Mathematics in England at the university level went off into that dead end for a century, with rated "wranglers" and "senior wranglers", until Hardy kicked them out of it.) But the school version of mathematics overstresses puzzles, because they're easy to assign and grade. That's a bigger problem than the "liberal" aspect.
For a non-puzzle curriculum, see PSSC Physics, which was taught in the 1960s. Lots of little experiments which required some calculation and data analysis.
Net neutrality is an issue because Internet access has become a near-monopoly service. Few people today buy residential Internet connectivity from someone other than their monopoly telco or monopoly cable provider. For both of those monopolies, Internet access is a tie-in sale - both want to sell customers a "bundle" with telephony, video, and Internet connectivity. In some areas, there's only one provider.
We've already lost one deregulation battle - the right to use any ISP you want over the monopoly telco wires. The FCC changed the rules on that back in 2003. Until then, telcos had to provide raw DSL connections from an ISP to a customer at prices no higher than they charged their own internal ISP. Once the FCC dropped that, the ISP business became a monopoly.
Further back, telcos used to be regulated common carriers. We lost that back in the 1990s.
"Net neutrality" is the last stop before total monopoly control.
Wireless doesn't help. "Deregulation" also allowed wire-line and wireless carriers to merge, which is why AT&T is back in the cellular business. Nor does cable/telco competition. Mergers in that area are coming. In the end, you'll have one connection to the outside world, with a boot ready to step on your tube if you get out of line.
I'm beginning to wonder if AnonOps/Anonymous is a false flag operation. They seem to be doing more harm than help to Wikileaks. Their targeting is inept (they previously targeted the wrong DNS provider), their timing is inept, and Wikileaks doesn't need them to stay on line.
I'm also surprised at how low the wages are at this Turk thing.... I thought spammers had to at least sweat through that manual task by themselves.
It's like $0.25 per human-generated spam. Automation seems to be coming. I'm seeing mentions on black hat SEO forums that an automated tool for doing this in bulk will be released early next month.
Marketing fake numerical addresses in between legit ones ensures that Google Pagerank rates your "unique" business as #1...
Sometimes. That technique is mostly used to give real businesses extra bogus locations. Check out "New York City locksmith", for example. Other heavily spammed terms are "carpet cleaning" and "divorce lawyer".
This week's new technique is described at
"How To Spam Google Maps For Top Google Place Listings". This is like SQL injection for mailing addresses. The trick depends on Google's parsing of mailing addresses from the top, while USPS standards say they should be parsed from the bottom line upward. So a mailing address with two street addresses is parsed differently by the USPS and Google, allowing the spammer to redirect Google's confirmation postcard to some mail drop.
Google seems to be out to lunch in this area. The same exploits have been working for months. Yet Google doesn't list any such issues under "Known Issues.
Over on Matt Cutts' blog, where you'd expect to see some discussion of this, he reports that he's writing a novel.
It's even worse at Bing. Bing emulated Google's October 27th merger of Places into web search within a few days. But they weren't ready. Look up "New York City locksmith" in Bing, and the five "Places" entries are all the same business.
That data is from two months back, before Google Places appeared in web search. Now, it's worse. There's a whole mini-industry in the "black hat" search engine "optimization" community creating phony Google Places entries. Here's an ad on Mechanical Turk today:
Reno Gym - Google Maps Promotion (Client QMDHKOB)
Requester: Smartsheet.com Clients
HIT Expiration Date: Dec 18, 2010 (10 hours 52 minutes)
Time Allotted: 60 minutes
Reward: $0.25
HITs Available: 2
Description:
Follow Instructions on PDF attached for BUSINESS ADDRESS (1)
Repeat Instructions on page 5 to 14 for BUSINESS ADDRESS (2) and (3) below. GMAIL ADDRESS: [Create a new Gmail Account] PASSWORD: BUSINESS ADDRESSES:
(1) 6370 Mae Anne Avenue, Reno, NV 89523
(2) 4784 Caughlin Parkway, Reno, NV 89519
(3) 18603 Wedge Parkway, Reno, NV 89511
BUSINESS TITLE AND FULL ADDRESSES:
(1) Anytime Fitness 6370 Mae Anne Avenue, Reno, NV 89523 (775) 746-8400
Google Places spamming hasn't been fully automated yet, so we get to watch spammers outsource their manual spamming. Spamming Google Places is incredibly easy, much easier than creating the link farms required to spam Google's old web search. See the instructions in "Dominating Google Maps- The Most Effective Spam Ever And What You Can Learn From It".
I tried a few sites of mine. "Downside.com", which has financial predictions (the dot-com crash, the mortgage meltdown, the oil spike, the auto industry bankruptcies), is rated mostly "intermediate", although the material there is heavy going unless you're up to speed on finance. "Animats.com", which has theory papers on some subjects in computer graphics and physics engines, is mostly rated "intermediate".
On the other hand, my fun site for steampunk stuff, "aetherltd.com", is mostly rated as "advanced", presumably because it's deliberately written in an archaic style.
I suspect it's just one of those sentence length and word length count algorithms.
They claim to get their process heat from combustion of their own process gases, so it's not a scam like ethanol from corn. Many US ethanol-from-corn plants are fueled by natural gas. They get the subsidy on the ethanol coming out, and aren't required to fuel their process from its own output. Thus, they can make money even if there's a net energy loss.
If the plant is self-powering, though, it's hard for it to be a net energy loss.
Terrible idea. If Wikipedia starts running ads, the better volunteers will quit. Who wants to work for someone else for free?
Look what happened to Wikia. It was supposed to be the commercial version of Wikipedia, with ads. So what's on Wikia? The Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft] wikis. The "Cocktails" wiki. The travel wiki. The coffee wiki. Wikia does junk culture. Nobody serious goes there, and it doesn't make much money.
Wales thought he could take the Wikipedia concept and monetize it. He was very wrong. He thought he'd get a private jet out of the deal. He was wrong. He thought that Wikia Search would rival Google. That shut down in 2009.
Everybody else who's tried to monetize this idea has failed, too. Citizendium, Google Knol - all flops.
It takes an incredible amount of volunteer effort and organization to keep Wikipedia from turning into junk. Lose those volunteers and you're toast.
This is the trouble with "single login" systems. Now there's a single point of failure.
Single login requires a trusted organization with a good reputation willing to contractually commit to paying for the damages if they screw up. But look who's in the business: Gawker. Facebook. Microsoft. Google. That's no good.
If anyone were to do this well, it might be Amazon. Amazon is not an advertising-supported business. They take orders, accept payments, and ship real products. As a major credit card merchant selling physical objects for which they pay real money, they constantly have people trying to steal merchandise from them. So their management has to understand the risks of authentication failures.
Amazon has a powerful and well-respected distributed computer infrastructure, which tends to stay up despite problems. So they could probably implement a single login system that could be trusted.
There's no respect any more when it's done for real.
There's a minor movie in which the female hero runs down the side of a 40-story building with a rope reeling out behind her for support.
As she nears the ground, she flips to land feet-first, and starts shooting. That was real. The run down the side of the building was done by a stuntwoman, and the landing and shooting was done by the star of the film. Most viewers assume it was faked. It wasn't.
Overdoing it can make things worse. "Kick-Ass" has Hit Girl in three fights. The first two were plausible, which made Hit Girl credible - she had the right weapons and tactics to benefit from her small size and speed. The final one was overdone, with flying on wires, an impossible reloading sequence, and dumb tactics.
The trouble with "the cloud" is that it's ended up like this:
All your data belong to us.
We're not responsible if we lose your data.
We can send you as many ads as we want, and you can't stop us.
"But it's free." That's how it starts. Look at the pricing history of cable TV. Watch what's happening to TV on the Internet. For a while, you could watch reruns broadcast shows on the Internet for free. Now, shows are becoming less available, more ads are inserted, and shows are disappearing behind the iTunes, Hulu, and Amazon paywalls. That's for reruns of content previously broadcast free to air.
Slashdot Mirror
Modern IDEs tend to auto-complete
If you type reasonably well, auto-completion just slows you down. (Especially the really crappy implementation in OpenOffice Writer.)
Google sells very little, other than advertising. If they sold something for money, customers would insist on support. Almost the only thing Google sells directly to customers is the Google Search Appliance, which is available as a 1U or 4U rackmount server. The low-end version, the Google Mini, is sold with no support and a two-year replacement warranty. After two years, you're supposed to replace the entire unit. Google tried selling phones directly, and that lasted only for five months of 2010.
So it's not surprising that Google would drop a commercial software product. They don't sell any.
Chip and PIN is the most retarded use of two factor authentication I have ever seen.
Certainly the UK version is. Read pages 16 and 17 of the thesis.
What's so lame about this is that it's a reasonably recent system design. How to do this right has been understood since the 1980s, and getting enough CPU power into the card to do an encryption isn't that big a deal.
The way this is done right is that the bank and merchant send the transaction details to the device, where the user checks them and signs the transaction using their PIN and crypto within the device. The bank and merchant confirm that the transaction is signed properly and the bank confirms the account information. The merchant system never sees the PIN or the customer's private key.
Of course, the problem with doing it right is that to do a true mutually mistrustful system, the customer has to have a device with a keyboard and display, plus some CPU power. If the merchant owns the PIN pad, that's a vulnerability. That's usually a phone, not a dedicated device, which opens up a new range of vulnerabilities.
To understand wind power, look at the wind map of the United States. Wind turbines aren't useful unless the average wind speed is in the 8 m/sec range and up. Note the huge high-wind area from the Texas panhandle up to Canada. That's where Pickens wanted to operate. Good place for wind turbines, but no nearby place that needs the power. So some long transmission lines were needed. The problem is not that "regulators" wouldn't let Pickens build transmission lines. It's that he wanted governments to pay for them. See Pickens' testimony before Congress. He wanted eminent domain powers and tax credits for high-tension lines. Back in 2009, though, he couldn't raise the $2 billion needed to build them.
Those wind charts come in much finer detail. Look at the California wind map. There are four really good wind areas in California, and they all have large wind farms operating. There's room for further expansion out at Mojave, but the other three sites are essentially full. Those are all successful operations, because they're reasonably near big loads.
Also, the Pickens claim that collecting wind power over a large area would provide significant base load capacity may be bogus. See the live data for the PJM grid. (This brings up a big Flash application showing what the power grid for the Northeastern US is doing. Switch one of the panels to "Wind Power" and set the scale to "All Data".) Within a 3-day period, total wind power for the entire Northeast US can range over an 8 to 1 range. That's from real, operating wind farms.
Consumer GPS units aren't supposed to work above 60,000 feet or 1,000 MPH. Otherwise, they're subject to US military export controls. Of course, since Android units are probably made outside the US, that doesn't apply.
(The US needs to give up on export controls in the electronics area. It's just a headache for US firms, and everybody else can get everything they need elsewhere.)
Among the steps needed is for hardware makers to create ARM-compatible drivers
That's really Microsoft's problem, not the hardware makers.
Who buys this crap? A surprisingly large number of people.
There are about 62 yachts in the world over 250 feet in length. There are about 120 private jets in the Boeing 747 size and up. Some are used by heads of state, but most are owned by private parties. Big jets are popular with Russian oligarchs; if you have business interests in Siberia, going there in comfort needs proper support facilities.
There are people who are just into buying expensive stuff, most of which they don't use. I've known a few people like that. It's a status thing. I'm in Silicon Valley, where you see a little of that. There's a guy who collects and restores tanks and other large military vehicles; he has about a hundred vehicles. I know some people who have Tesla cars. Being a horse person, I know people with expensive horses. But they ride them; they don't just collect them. Really overdoing it in Silicon Valley is somewhat frowned upon. Larry Ellison is snickered at by the Woodside crowd for building a house the size of a mall and redoing the surrounding terrain, which is sequoia country, to look like a misty Japanese hillside. (The fog machine was just tacky.) In Switzerland, someone might have expensive paintings in their house, but building some flamboyant mansion is seen as un-Swiss.
In Russia and Dubai, though, there's no limit to blatantly conspicuous consumption.
"Details" magazine went through this twice. The original Details magazine, in the 1980s, was targeted to the hip New York City club crowd. The typical Details reader had probably met Madonna before she was famous, while dancing at Danceteria or Area. The people mentioned in Details read Details to see what their friends were doing. Ads were for little boutiques in SoHo.
Today's "Details" is like GQ or Esquire, with a heavy emphasis on shopping.
Byte is doing much the same thing.
The Polar Express seemed to have "rubbery" motion capture. I used to see this problem at trade shows like SIGGRAPH. The electromagnetic motion capture people would have a stage with a live dancer wearing sensors at her joints, and screens showing the CG character driven from the dancer. The CG character always moved worse than the live dancer. If the dancer did a hard stop, the CG character would show much less abrupt deceleration. That's because the electromagnetic systems were noisy, and had to be low-pass filtered.
There were also alignment problems. The hand positions were usually off. Metal in the area would distort the fields slightly. Around 2000 or so, errors of several inches were still common. I asked one of the demo dancers to touch her fingertips together, and the CG character was off by the breadth of a hand. The Polar Express animation had a similar slightly-off look.
This got better once motion capture started using multiple cameras at much higher frame rates than the animation. There's still some noise and filtering is still needed, but the noise is up at a few hundred Hz and the filters have higher cutoff frequencies. By the time the motion is downconverted to 24FPS, the effects of the filtering have disappeared.
The DARPA Grand Challenge was actually Dr. Tony Tether's way of getting a message through to the academic robotics community - "get results or else". DARPA had been putting money into robotics work, and specific automatic driving work, at MIT, Stanford, and CMU since the 1960s, without getting anything that was close to useful. When the Grand Challenge was first announced, all three of those schools didn't intend to enter, and in fact, months into the competition, none of them had. Many non-academic entrants had signed up, but the big schools weren't in it.
Then something happened. I gather that it was made clear to the major research groups that if the Grand Challenge resulted in better technology than what DARPA had received from academia, academic funding would be turned off. Suddenly, all three schools cranked up huge efforts, tying up a substantial fraction of their CS departments. Nobody had ever had 100-person crash programs in academic robotics before, let alone ones funded by the universities themselves.
It worked. But it wasn't the carrot of winning that drove the major schools. The prize was only $1 million. It was the big stick of funding cuts.
In terms of social influence though, music has a huge advantage.
Music used to have considerable social influence, but that was a long time ago, back in the 1960s. At one time, music as a social force ranked above organized religion in the US. The Beatles once said "We're bigger than Jesus now".
Today, it's just another branded product. Most popular music is used as background ambiance while you're doing something else. Concert attendance is down, despite frantic marketing efforts. 9 of the top 10 musicians (by sales) are from a decade or two (or three) ago.
Rap had a message. But not much of one. in the end, rap doesn't seem to have changed anything. Although it did sell many shiploads of baggy clothes.
The entire music industry, worldwide, only sold $15.8 billion in product last year. For comparison, worldwide liquor sales were about $220 billion, and a single booze company, Diageo (Smirnoff Vodka, Johhny Walker, José Cuervo, Baileys, and Guinness Stout) has more revenue than the entire music industry. On a worldwide scale, the music industry is tiny.
On the movie side, MGM just came out of bankruptcy, and Warner is close to it. Hollywood Video went bust months ago, and Blockbuster is in bankruptcy. (Many Blockbuster stores will close after the holiday season.)
In computing, Apple's revenue for fiscal 2010 is about $63 billion. Microsoft revenue was about $60 billion. HP annual revenue is about $120 billion. Dell annual revenue is about $52 billion. Google is around $23 billion. Comcast is around $36 billion. AT&T is at $124 billion. Any of those players could buy out the entire libraries of most music and movie companies.
I'm surprised that Apple hasn't just bought out the music industry, rather than negotiating with it.
Some in their 50s or so may remember "New Math", which was an attempt to teach elementary math with more emphasis on the underlying theory. It's now widely considered to have been a disaster. The author of the original article seems to date from that era.
One of the approaches to fundamental mathematics is to start with axiomatic set theory and build up from there. (That's not the only approach; one can also start with the Peano axioms and build up to set theory via lists, as is done in constructive Boyer-Moore theory.) This is minimalist and elegant (which is why mathematicians like it) but it requires considerable theoretical development before you get to addition. Teaching kids arithmetic that way was a disaster.
Euclid's approach to axiomatic geometry is like that, too. There's a lot of abstract logical structure that has to be built up before you can do anything. That's how math was taught up to 1900 or so, and 7th grade geometry is still often taught that way.
That's the "liberal arts" approach to mathematics. It's an intellectual exercise forced onto little kids. Even if you use advanced mathematics in your work, it's very rare to need either axiomatic set theory or axiomatic plane geometry.
A completely different approach can be found in some math courses given during WWII courses to soldiers who needed to do technical work. These were utterly practical. Trigonometry was taught with direct applications to surveying and static structural analysis. After that trig course, you could calculate the size of the beams required for a truss bridge. The calculus course covered subjects like the ballistics of big guns. (I especially liked the "tables method" of integration, which taught you how to use those tables of integrals in the back of the book.)
There's a mindset in math teaching that math is about "puzzles". It's not. (Mathematics in England at the university level went off into that dead end for a century, with rated "wranglers" and "senior wranglers", until Hardy kicked them out of it.) But the school version of mathematics overstresses puzzles, because they're easy to assign and grade. That's a bigger problem than the "liberal" aspect.
For a non-puzzle curriculum, see PSSC Physics, which was taught in the 1960s. Lots of little experiments which required some calculation and data analysis.
Net neutrality is an issue because Internet access has become a near-monopoly service. Few people today buy residential Internet connectivity from someone other than their monopoly telco or monopoly cable provider. For both of those monopolies, Internet access is a tie-in sale - both want to sell customers a "bundle" with telephony, video, and Internet connectivity. In some areas, there's only one provider.
We've already lost one deregulation battle - the right to use any ISP you want over the monopoly telco wires. The FCC changed the rules on that back in 2003. Until then, telcos had to provide raw DSL connections from an ISP to a customer at prices no higher than they charged their own internal ISP. Once the FCC dropped that, the ISP business became a monopoly.
Further back, telcos used to be regulated common carriers. We lost that back in the 1990s.
"Net neutrality" is the last stop before total monopoly control.
Wireless doesn't help. "Deregulation" also allowed wire-line and wireless carriers to merge, which is why AT&T is back in the cellular business. Nor does cable/telco competition. Mergers in that area are coming. In the end, you'll have one connection to the outside world, with a boot ready to step on your tube if you get out of line.
Such services are available now. There are "Christian ISPs", with heavy filtering at the server. They have very few customers.
I'm beginning to wonder if AnonOps/Anonymous is a false flag operation. They seem to be doing more harm than help to Wikileaks. Their targeting is inept (they previously targeted the wrong DNS provider), their timing is inept, and Wikileaks doesn't need them to stay on line.
I'm also surprised at how low the wages are at this Turk thing. ... I thought spammers had to at least sweat through that manual task by themselves.
It's like $0.25 per human-generated spam. Automation seems to be coming. I'm seeing mentions on black hat SEO forums that an automated tool for doing this in bulk will be released early next month.
Marketing fake numerical addresses in between legit ones ensures that Google Pagerank rates your "unique" business as #1...
Sometimes. That technique is mostly used to give real businesses extra bogus locations. Check out "New York City locksmith", for example. Other heavily spammed terms are "carpet cleaning" and "divorce lawyer".
This week's new technique is described at "How To Spam Google Maps For Top Google Place Listings". This is like SQL injection for mailing addresses. The trick depends on Google's parsing of mailing addresses from the top, while USPS standards say they should be parsed from the bottom line upward. So a mailing address with two street addresses is parsed differently by the USPS and Google, allowing the spammer to redirect Google's confirmation postcard to some mail drop.
Google seems to be out to lunch in this area. The same exploits have been working for months. Yet Google doesn't list any such issues under "Known Issues. Over on Matt Cutts' blog, where you'd expect to see some discussion of this, he reports that he's writing a novel.
It's even worse at Bing. Bing emulated Google's October 27th merger of Places into web search within a few days. But they weren't ready. Look up "New York City locksmith" in Bing, and the five "Places" entries are all the same business.
That data is from two months back, before Google Places appeared in web search. Now, it's worse. There's a whole mini-industry in the "black hat" search engine "optimization" community creating phony Google Places entries. Here's an ad on Mechanical Turk today:
Google Places spamming hasn't been fully automated yet, so we get to watch spammers outsource their manual spamming. Spamming Google Places is incredibly easy, much easier than creating the link farms required to spam Google's old web search. See the instructions in "Dominating Google Maps- The Most Effective Spam Ever And What You Can Learn From It".
Google Places has been 0wned.
Someone was showing this off at TechShop last evening. Very nice.
I tried a few sites of mine. "Downside.com", which has financial predictions (the dot-com crash, the mortgage meltdown, the oil spike, the auto industry bankruptcies), is rated mostly "intermediate", although the material there is heavy going unless you're up to speed on finance. "Animats.com", which has theory papers on some subjects in computer graphics and physics engines, is mostly rated "intermediate".
On the other hand, my fun site for steampunk stuff, "aetherltd.com", is mostly rated as "advanced", presumably because it's deliberately written in an archaic style.
I suspect it's just one of those sentence length and word length count algorithms.
They claim to get their process heat from combustion of their own process gases, so it's not a scam like ethanol from corn. Many US ethanol-from-corn plants are fueled by natural gas. They get the subsidy on the ethanol coming out, and aren't required to fuel their process from its own output. Thus, they can make money even if there's a net energy loss.
If the plant is self-powering, though, it's hard for it to be a net energy loss.
Terrible idea. If Wikipedia starts running ads, the better volunteers will quit. Who wants to work for someone else for free?
Look what happened to Wikia. It was supposed to be the commercial version of Wikipedia, with ads. So what's on Wikia? The Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft] wikis. The "Cocktails" wiki. The travel wiki. The coffee wiki. Wikia does junk culture. Nobody serious goes there, and it doesn't make much money.
Wales thought he could take the Wikipedia concept and monetize it. He was very wrong. He thought he'd get a private jet out of the deal. He was wrong. He thought that Wikia Search would rival Google. That shut down in 2009.
Everybody else who's tried to monetize this idea has failed, too. Citizendium, Google Knol - all flops.
It takes an incredible amount of volunteer effort and organization to keep Wikipedia from turning into junk. Lose those volunteers and you're toast.
This is the trouble with "single login" systems. Now there's a single point of failure.
Single login requires a trusted organization with a good reputation willing to contractually commit to paying for the damages if they screw up. But look who's in the business: Gawker. Facebook. Microsoft. Google. That's no good.
If anyone were to do this well, it might be Amazon. Amazon is not an advertising-supported business. They take orders, accept payments, and ship real products. As a major credit card merchant selling physical objects for which they pay real money, they constantly have people trying to steal merchandise from them. So their management has to understand the risks of authentication failures. Amazon has a powerful and well-respected distributed computer infrastructure, which tends to stay up despite problems. So they could probably implement a single login system that could be trusted.
There's no respect any more when it's done for real.
There's a minor movie in which the female hero runs down the side of a 40-story building with a rope reeling out behind her for support. As she nears the ground, she flips to land feet-first, and starts shooting. That was real. The run down the side of the building was done by a stuntwoman, and the landing and shooting was done by the star of the film. Most viewers assume it was faked. It wasn't.
Overdoing it can make things worse. "Kick-Ass" has Hit Girl in three fights. The first two were plausible, which made Hit Girl credible - she had the right weapons and tactics to benefit from her small size and speed. The final one was overdone, with flying on wires, an impossible reloading sequence, and dumb tactics.
The trouble with "the cloud" is that it's ended up like this:
"But it's free." That's how it starts. Look at the pricing history of cable TV. Watch what's happening to TV on the Internet. For a while, you could watch reruns broadcast shows on the Internet for free. Now, shows are becoming less available, more ads are inserted, and shows are disappearing behind the iTunes, Hulu, and Amazon paywalls. That's for reruns of content previously broadcast free to air.
So don't expect the "cloud" to stay free.