I wonder how many smaller cities have already done this?
Redwood City, CA, near where I am, is doing it. It's striking, because Redwood City standardized on yellow sodium lamps some time in the 1930s. You know you're in Redwood City when the street lights turn yellow. The new daylight LEDs are a big improvement.
If your community is doing this, push for solar power on some of the lights. Not necessarily all of them, but at least at street corners. That way, no matter what disaster happens, some lights will stay on.
Maybe time to resurrect the pink/tan background Google used to put on ads. Over time, the ad background became lighter and lighter. At one time, Google was under a Federal Trade Commission ruling requiring them to clearly distinguish ads from content. Google seems to have escaped from that.
It's getting harder to tell content from ads. Google Shopping is an interesting case. Everything on Google Shopping is a paid ad now. Google Shopping used to be a price search engine, but in 2012, it became strictly pay to play. For a while after the transition, our Ad Limiter was trimming down Google Shopping pages to one entry, because the links there are ad links. That was overkill - you got a nearly blank page with one result. So we backed off on that.
Google Shopping also has explicit ads on top of the search results, which are ads too. Google is overdoing it there.
Ad recognition is an interesting problem. We do it by looking at where links go. Then we analyze the page layout in the add-on to find the boundaries of the ad. This is quite different from most screen-scrapers, which rely on specific named CSS tags. So we don't have to update our add-on very often, and it recognizes most new kinds of ads automatically.
AdBlock Plus has a big file of regular expressions for recognizing ads, which are frantically updated as sites change their HTML and CSS. Advertisers can pay to not have your ad blocked by AdBlock Plus. That's the problem with an add-on that's high-maintenance. Somebody has to pay for the maintenance.
Please add a feature to let me change the background of all AD's on google so they are obvious to older people.
Now that's an interesting idea. We dim out lower-rated search results slightly, but it's so subtle visually that few people notice. We certainly could do something to make it easier to identify ads.
Best ads...who is "we"? Is there a community voting mechanism or is "we" strictly within your company walls?
If it's the former, you've got a good chance at succeeding.
What we do is find info about the company from public records, business databases, etc. If we can't find the real-world business behind the web site, we downrate it. It's a filter for "bottom-feeders", businesses hiding behind a web site and an email address.
I'm the author of Ad Limiter, which blocks most ads in search results from Google and Bing. By default, it lets just one ad display, the best one based on our site legitimacy ratings.
So this is something else to identify, rate and block.
(I'm surprised that Google is getting into banners. Targeted search ads are much more valuable than banners. Banner ad click-through rates are so low as to barely be measurable.)
Back in 2011, I wrote a paper, "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" There, I described the social spam ecosystem, from the SEO firms to the phony account generators to the proxy sellers. I named some of the big social spammers.
Most of the same companies are still social spamming. In the paper, I mentioned "Google Plus1 Supply". They're still active. They're still selling "+1"s. Their site looks almost exactly the same as in 2011. But their prices have gone down, and their number of fake "+1"s sold has increased from 4 million to 33 million. BuyPlus1Fans.com is still up.
Where do they get the accounts? BulkAccounts.com is still up, just like they were two years ago. They're an outsourcing firm, using low wage labor to create new accounts. For an automated approach, there's JetBots, which claims to be able to create 250,000 new accounts per day on a fast connection. They offer "CAPTCHA Bypasser", which runs CAPTCHA's through OCR, and when that doesn't work, ships them to an outsourcing firm for manual recognition. Once the account is established, their "voter bots" add any desired number of stars to reviewed items.
Facebook is no better.
BulkLikes.com is still up. In 2011, they charged $260 for 500 Facebook fans. Now, it's only $70 for 1000 fans.
Old-style link spamming was expensive - spammers had to set up content farms, run servers, refresh them with interesting content, and worry about their farm being blacklisted. Social spamming is cheap - Google, Facebook, and Yelp host the spam for free. Yelp tries to push back against social spam; they've sued some spammers. But Google and Facebook don't seem to be trying at all. The fact that the big spammers of two years ago are still big spammers clearly show this.
This is an awful bill from the inventor perspective. With the "loser pays" rule, trying to enforce a patent, which costs about $1 million and up, becomes even more expensive. Now, suing a big company means you may have to pay for their lawyers. Patent cases are won by patent holders about 40%to 50% of the time, so you have to risk bankruptcy to enforce a patent.
This is worse than the previous "SHIELD act" from earlier this year. That exempted three groups from the "loser pays" scheme - the original patent holder, anyone manufacturing the patented thing, and universities. This new bill doesn't have those exemptions.
Who's pushing this? The American Association of Advertising Agencies. The Consumer Electronics Association, which by now mostly represents Chinese manufacturers.
Congress has been making it harder to make money as an inventor for over two decades now. First came the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to patent inventions made with Government funding. So now you have to compete with big Government funded universities.
Then Congress took away the possibility of triple damages for willful infringement, by redefining "willful infringement" as requiring "recklessness". So worst case for the infringer is to pay what they would have paid if they licensed.
Then there was a court decision that restricted injunctions in patent cases. A patent is supposed to be the right to exclude others from doing something. But in the US, it's hard to do that. Back when injunctions were available, Kodak tried copying Polaroid's instant-film technology. Kodak lost a patent lawsuit and had to stop making the film and buy all the cameras for it back.
Then, with the "America Invents Act", Congress added more "post-grant opposition" proceedings. So now, if you try to enforce a patent, infringers can stall and harass you through those proceedings.
Most of the whining about "patent trolls" comes from people who want to copy a good idea, instead of coming up with their own.
The paper doesn't suggest that putting this device on the same chip as an IC with other functions is possible. But it does indicate a promising material.
This is still at the level of "cool effect seen at microscopic level". It's not yet at "experimental device built, cycled for many cycles, here are the results", let alone "prototype demonstrated".
Of course Wikipedia editing is declining. The articles that matter were done years ago. Most new articles are on very minor subjects.
Print encyclopedias were like that as well. Writing the original Encyclopedia Brittanica was a huge job, but ongoing maintenance required only a modest staff.
Some of the decline comes from Wikia, which is a hosting services for obsessed fans. Many of the people obsessed with popular-culture trivia content are adding it to Wikia, which monetizes it with ads. Wikia doesn't have a notability requirement, so fans can add as much trivia as they like.
The whole point of all that byte-code stuff and just-in-time compilation was to keep Java programs in a sandbox where they couldn't affect the rest of the system.
Some of the paid PR I've seen recently has been on biographies of living persons, especially rich ones. Lots of happy talk about their charitable work and affiliations gets put in. Stuff about their career failures, lawsuits, and criminal history gets taken out. This is tougher to fight, because Wikipedia has a "biography of living persons" policy which discourages negative comments for anything short of a felony conviction. (Even after a felony conviction, sometimes.)
On the product and business side, though, pushing back against paid editing usually works.
rather than putting up a strawman completely unrelated to anything the author actually claims.
The author addresses many of the same issues I addressed:
"Moreover, the number of relatively short programs
that can run for arbitrarily long times before halting is in some sense small. Indeed, Aaronson argues, proofs of uncomputability on its own are often less relevant to real-world behavior than issues
of computational complexity" - This is part of why formal undecidability is a minor problem in the real world.
"The uncomputability of the decision making process doesn't mean that all decisions are unpredictable, but some must always be." That's a property of many algorithms - there's are pathological cases that reach undecidability, but they may not come up that often. This is related to the class of algorithms that are NP-hard for the worst case or the absolutely optimal solution, but only P-hard for most cases or a near-optimal solution. The traveling salesman problem is such a problem. So is linear programming.
"There is a subtlety here in that computational universality requires that you be able to add new memory to the computer or smart phone when it
needs more -- for the moment let's assume that additional memory is at hand." -- This is the escape hatch for the finite state problem. With infinite memory, you can get undecidability from a deterministic system. Without infinite memory, you can't.
"That is, any general technique for deciding what deciders decide has
to sometimes take longer than
the deciders themselves." That's his big result, on page 9. All it shows is that the worst case takes longer. It's like the proof that, for all lossless compression algorithms, there must exist some input for which the compressed version is longer than the uncompressed version.
It's quite possible to get into a philosophical tangle in this area, but it's not productive to do so.
Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see. -- Bishop Berkeley
In the US, the regulations on "experimental" aircraft are quite lenient. The main limitation is that you can't operate an experimental aircraft in a densely populated area or major airway without special permission. Permission is usually granted after successful flight tests.
The main place for testing unusual civilian aircraft and rockets in the US is Mojave Air and Space Port. They're authorized as both a launch site and an airport. SpaceShip One, the Voyager, and the EZ-Rocket first flew there. There's plenty of room over the desert in case things go wrong.
"You want to test a rocket engine? This is a place where you can do that." - Mojave Air and Space Port Board of Directors
Again, someone ran into the halting problem and thought they could say something profound about it. Worse, they got tangled up with "free will", which is theology, not physics or compute science.
A deterministic machine with finite memory must either repeat a state or halt. The halting problem applies only to infinite-memory machines. A halting problem for a finite program can be made very hard, even arbitrarily hard, but not infinitely hard.
As a practical matter, there's a widely used program that tries to solve the halting problem by formal means - the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier. Every signed driver for Windows 7 and later has been through that verifier, which attempts to formally prove that the driver will not infinitely loop, break the system memory model with a bad pointer, or incorrectly call a driver-level API. In other words, it is trying to prove that the driver won't screw up the rest of the OS kernel. This is a real proof of correctness system in widespread use.
The verifier reports Pass, Fail, or Inconclusive. Inconclusive is reported if the verifier runs out of time or memory space. That's usually an indication that the driver's logic is a mess. If you're getting close to undecidability in a device driver, it's not a good thing.
The Microsoft KB says that all they changed was the user-agent string, taking out the "MSIE". Changing it back supposedly makes Google work. This implies Google has special-case code for Internet Explorer.
I thought that went out with IE 6.
But people who will be quite happy to exploit your deregulated society will be right there with you!
Right. Look at Bitcoin. Most of the standard financial scams have been replicated in the Bitcoin world. Ponzi schemes, fake stocks, fake stock markets, brokers who took the money and ran, crooked escrow services, "online wallet" services that stole customer funds - that's Bitcoin. In the US banking crisis, depositors didn't lose their money. Even Madoff's customers are slowly getting about half their money back, as the liquidator sues everybody who made a big profit.
Scamming is such a big part of the Bitcoin economy that almost nobody is using it for anything legitimate. The latest thing seems to be a big run-up caused by the use of Bitcoin to get around China's tight exchange controls. That will probably be shut down by the People's Bank of China, so there seems to be a rush to turn yuan into dollars and euros.
Not seeing any concrete plans here. Some of the ideas are silly, such as Blueseed, the scheme to have a ship just outside of US waters full of programmers. That's just a tax shelter. Of course, they want the U.S. Coast Guard to help them if they get in trouble, as their prospectus says. And they want a large ferry dock and a freighter doc in San Mateo County's Pillar Point small-boat harbor. And they want ICE to make that small-boat harbor a US entry point, so people don't have to go up to San Francisco on a boat to visit the US. They also wanted to set up a microwave link at the USAF radar station at Pillar Point. But they don't want to pay for any of this.
Then there was CITE, a small city to be built in New Mexico. No people - it was supposed to be just for testing "new technologies". The company behind it turns out to be basically one guy without much money and a lot of clip art. Got a lot of press, and even some political support, then the vaporware project went away. The business model made no sense.
Further back, there was the high-tech Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which Walt Disney was going to build. Disney World has EPCOT today, but it's a theme park; nobody lives there. Disney did eventually build Celebration, FL, which is a retro-looking subdivision.
Some very top-down countries have done things like this: Tsukuba Science City, Guangzhou Science City, King Khalid Military City, and Brasilia. Those are all Government projects. The US private sector has a long history of "company towns", most of it not too good.
Wikipedia needs to embrace that companies want to get their products on a website with that much traffic
No we don't. It's one of the most successful web sites on the planet, and arguably the most successful example of collaboration in human history. Why would we possibly want to change that?
Exactly. It really annoys parts of Corporate America that they can't get their way on Wikipedia. That's a good thing.
I've encountered paid editing a few times. Carnival Cruises really, really wanted to make all the references to their various disasters (the Costa Concordia sinking, the Costa Allegra fire, the Carnivale Tropicale fire, the Carnival Splendor fire, the Carnival Triumph fire (ship adrift for four days), etc.) go away. Big editing battles. Finally the paid editors were kicked off.
There are a few individuals with promotional editors for their own bio articles. Michael Milken, the "Junk Bond King" who did time in a Federal pen, tried very hard to keep himself from being labelled as an ex-con. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has had people trying to keep the poor financial results of his hedge fund out of the article. Vivek Wadwa, who's heavily into self-promotion, put his grad students on pumping up his reputation, and seems to have an in with Jimbo Wales. It's an ongoing headache, but usually the good guys win.
There was a hack in some early NTSC TV sets which actually did have a bias for white people. NTSC has a luminance channel and two color channels, which are converted to three color channels to drive the CRT. Because the color channel bandwidth was limited and the signal level wasn't that consistent, some early color receivers had a special case for "skin color". When the two color channels, treated as a vector, were in the "skin color cluster region", they were pulled to that value, which was set for "white" people. Even if the other colors were way off, the skin colors would be consistent.
I have Abine's Do Not Track, and have local Flash storage disabled. The major TV networks now send me the same commercial over and over while viewing the same show.
That movie had a roadable version of the car and a submersible version, but not one that could do both. The submersible version wasn't dry; the operator was wearing scuba gear.
I'm starting to worry that Elon Musk is getting spread too thin. Space-X, Tesla, Hyperloop, automatic driving, plus this. We really need for Space-X and Tesla to succeed.
People who want to buy goods priced in yuan. China's exchange-control scheme allows flows of yuan for sales of goods. But "capital flows" and external debts in yuan are tightly controlled. It's possible to try to evade the exchange controls by selling goods in exchange for something else, like real estate. But trading a container load of manufactured goods for a house in London is difficult to arrange and involves high conversion costs if you're not in the export business. Bitcoins are more portable.
Whether the People's Bank of China will do something about this remains to be seen. So far, the CNY/USD rates on the Bitcoin exchanges remain close to the official exchange rate. So this isn't a strain on official exchange rates, which is their top priority. Bitcoin is just too tiny to affect exchange rates between the two biggest economies on the planet.
It may or may not be a good idea, but it's not new. The
article is not very good, either. It's all over the place, from punched cards to XML.
Data flow programming has been tried many times. It's used heavily in GPUs, where pipelines are the only way to get work done. So there's reasonably good understanding today of what can and can't be done by data flow methods.
If you like "flow-based programming", one easy way to do it is to write programs in single-assignment style. Assign to each variable only once, and make it "const" or read-only if your language supports it. This makes your program a directed acyclic graph. Single assignment is a lot like functional programming, but values have names and the nesting depth of calls doesn't get so deep. It's also possible to use the same result as input to more than one function, which is hard to do in pure functional programming (That's the difference between a directed acyclic graph and a tree.)
The use of pure functions makes for cleaner programs, but more data copying. Data copying isn't necessarily bad today. It's cheap to copy data you just used or created, because it's in the cache. Modern CPUs have wide buses, are good at copying, and can probably do the copy in parallel with something else. Don't avoid copying data to "improve performance" unless the data item is large.
The place where this all comes unglued is when the program's goal is to affect something, not grind data down to a "result". Trying to write a GUI in a functional style is tough. (I once wrote a GUI in pure Prolog. Very bad idea.)
It's a neat idea. It's very testable. Now they have to find some new materials which this theory predicts will superconduct and check them out.
If it checks out, it's comparable to the early research on semiconductors which led to understanding that phenomenon. There were some early attempts at a transistor, but until there was some theoretical understanding of what electrons were doing in a crystal, nobody could make even make a reliable one, let alone figure out what materials would be better than germanium. Once there was some theory, there was more of an idea what materials to make.
New materials may have to be made. Semiconductors are usually made of ultra-pure silicon with the addition of tiny amounts of specific impurities. Those are invented materials - nothing like that exists in nature. With some theory for guidance, new superconducting materials may be created. The ones now known were more or less discovered by trial and error.
"Science is prediction, not explanation" - Fred Hoyle.
Right. China has tight exchange controls - it take special permission from the State Ministry for Foreign Exchange to exchange yuan for dollars, euros, or yen. But at present, China residents can buy Bitcoins with yuan. They can also sell Bitcoins for dollars, bypassing exchange controls. So if you've made money in China and want, say, to buy an apartment in London, Bitcoin provides a way to bypass the government exchange controls.
That seems to be what's pushing up the price of Bitcoin. The volume on exchanges in China is way up, while volume at Mt.Gox is way down.
However, there's no guarantee that this situation will last. The People's Bank of China can change this policy at any time. There's plenty of info available about PBOC policy; it's as least as important as US Fed policy. But that's enough for Slashdot readers.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how many smaller cities have already done this?
Redwood City, CA, near where I am, is doing it. It's striking, because Redwood City standardized on yellow sodium lamps some time in the 1930s. You know you're in Redwood City when the street lights turn yellow. The new daylight LEDs are a big improvement.
If your community is doing this, push for solar power on some of the lights. Not necessarily all of them, but at least at street corners. That way, no matter what disaster happens, some lights will stay on.
Time to resurrect the blinky tag?
Maybe time to resurrect the pink/tan background Google used to put on ads. Over time, the ad background became lighter and lighter. At one time, Google was under a Federal Trade Commission ruling requiring them to clearly distinguish ads from content. Google seems to have escaped from that.
It's getting harder to tell content from ads. Google Shopping is an interesting case. Everything on Google Shopping is a paid ad now. Google Shopping used to be a price search engine, but in 2012, it became strictly pay to play. For a while after the transition, our Ad Limiter was trimming down Google Shopping pages to one entry, because the links there are ad links. That was overkill - you got a nearly blank page with one result. So we backed off on that. Google Shopping also has explicit ads on top of the search results, which are ads too. Google is overdoing it there.
Ad recognition is an interesting problem. We do it by looking at where links go. Then we analyze the page layout in the add-on to find the boundaries of the ad. This is quite different from most screen-scrapers, which rely on specific named CSS tags. So we don't have to update our add-on very often, and it recognizes most new kinds of ads automatically.
AdBlock Plus has a big file of regular expressions for recognizing ads, which are frantically updated as sites change their HTML and CSS. Advertisers can pay to not have your ad blocked by AdBlock Plus. That's the problem with an add-on that's high-maintenance. Somebody has to pay for the maintenance.
Please add a feature to let me change the background of all AD's on google so they are obvious to older people.
Now that's an interesting idea. We dim out lower-rated search results slightly, but it's so subtle visually that few people notice. We certainly could do something to make it easier to identify ads.
Best ads...who is "we"? Is there a community voting mechanism or is "we" strictly within your company walls? If it's the former, you've got a good chance at succeeding.
We know that "community voting" doesn't work. It's so heavily spammed it's useless.
What we do is find info about the company from public records, business databases, etc. If we can't find the real-world business behind the web site, we downrate it. It's a filter for "bottom-feeders", businesses hiding behind a web site and an email address.
I'm the author of Ad Limiter, which blocks most ads in search results from Google and Bing. By default, it lets just one ad display, the best one based on our site legitimacy ratings.
So this is something else to identify, rate and block.
(I'm surprised that Google is getting into banners. Targeted search ads are much more valuable than banners. Banner ad click-through rates are so low as to barely be measurable.)
Back in 2011, I wrote a paper, "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" There, I described the social spam ecosystem, from the SEO firms to the phony account generators to the proxy sellers. I named some of the big social spammers.
Most of the same companies are still social spamming. In the paper, I mentioned "Google Plus1 Supply". They're still active. They're still selling "+1"s. Their site looks almost exactly the same as in 2011. But their prices have gone down, and their number of fake "+1"s sold has increased from 4 million to 33 million. BuyPlus1Fans.com is still up.
Where do they get the accounts? BulkAccounts.com is still up, just like they were two years ago. They're an outsourcing firm, using low wage labor to create new accounts. For an automated approach, there's JetBots, which claims to be able to create 250,000 new accounts per day on a fast connection. They offer "CAPTCHA Bypasser", which runs CAPTCHA's through OCR, and when that doesn't work, ships them to an outsourcing firm for manual recognition. Once the account is established, their "voter bots" add any desired number of stars to reviewed items.
Facebook is no better. BulkLikes.com is still up. In 2011, they charged $260 for 500 Facebook fans. Now, it's only $70 for 1000 fans.
Old-style link spamming was expensive - spammers had to set up content farms, run servers, refresh them with interesting content, and worry about their farm being blacklisted. Social spamming is cheap - Google, Facebook, and Yelp host the spam for free. Yelp tries to push back against social spam; they've sued some spammers. But Google and Facebook don't seem to be trying at all. The fact that the big spammers of two years ago are still big spammers clearly show this.
This is an awful bill from the inventor perspective. With the "loser pays" rule, trying to enforce a patent, which costs about $1 million and up, becomes even more expensive. Now, suing a big company means you may have to pay for their lawyers. Patent cases are won by patent holders about 40%to 50% of the time, so you have to risk bankruptcy to enforce a patent.
This is worse than the previous "SHIELD act" from earlier this year. That exempted three groups from the "loser pays" scheme - the original patent holder, anyone manufacturing the patented thing, and universities. This new bill doesn't have those exemptions.
Who's pushing this? The American Association of Advertising Agencies. The Consumer Electronics Association, which by now mostly represents Chinese manufacturers.
Congress has been making it harder to make money as an inventor for over two decades now. First came the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to patent inventions made with Government funding. So now you have to compete with big Government funded universities.
Then Congress took away the possibility of triple damages for willful infringement, by redefining "willful infringement" as requiring "recklessness". So worst case for the infringer is to pay what they would have paid if they licensed.
Then there was a court decision that restricted injunctions in patent cases. A patent is supposed to be the right to exclude others from doing something. But in the US, it's hard to do that. Back when injunctions were available, Kodak tried copying Polaroid's instant-film technology. Kodak lost a patent lawsuit and had to stop making the film and buy all the cameras for it back.
Then, with the "America Invents Act", Congress added more "post-grant opposition" proceedings. So now, if you try to enforce a patent, infringers can stall and harass you through those proceedings.
Most of the whining about "patent trolls" comes from people who want to copy a good idea, instead of coming up with their own.
The paper doesn't suggest that putting this device on the same chip as an IC with other functions is possible. But it does indicate a promising material.
This is still at the level of "cool effect seen at microscopic level". It's not yet at "experimental device built, cycled for many cycles, here are the results", let alone "prototype demonstrated".
Of course Wikipedia editing is declining. The articles that matter were done years ago. Most new articles are on very minor subjects.
Print encyclopedias were like that as well. Writing the original Encyclopedia Brittanica was a huge job, but ongoing maintenance required only a modest staff.
Some of the decline comes from Wikia, which is a hosting services for obsessed fans. Many of the people obsessed with popular-culture trivia content are adding it to Wikia, which monetizes it with ads. Wikia doesn't have a notability requirement, so fans can add as much trivia as they like.
The whole point of all that byte-code stuff and just-in-time compilation was to keep Java programs in a sandbox where they couldn't affect the rest of the system.
FAIL.
Some of the paid PR I've seen recently has been on biographies of living persons, especially rich ones. Lots of happy talk about their charitable work and affiliations gets put in. Stuff about their career failures, lawsuits, and criminal history gets taken out. This is tougher to fight, because Wikipedia has a "biography of living persons" policy which discourages negative comments for anything short of a felony conviction. (Even after a felony conviction, sometimes.)
On the product and business side, though, pushing back against paid editing usually works.
rather than putting up a strawman completely unrelated to anything the author actually claims.
The author addresses many of the same issues I addressed:
It's quite possible to get into a philosophical tangle in this area, but it's not productive to do so.
Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see. -- Bishop Berkeley
In the US, the regulations on "experimental" aircraft are quite lenient. The main limitation is that you can't operate an experimental aircraft in a densely populated area or major airway without special permission. Permission is usually granted after successful flight tests.
The main place for testing unusual civilian aircraft and rockets in the US is Mojave Air and Space Port. They're authorized as both a launch site and an airport. SpaceShip One, the Voyager, and the EZ-Rocket first flew there. There's plenty of room over the desert in case things go wrong.
"You want to test a rocket engine? This is a place where you can do that." - Mojave Air and Space Port Board of Directors
Again, someone ran into the halting problem and thought they could say something profound about it. Worse, they got tangled up with "free will", which is theology, not physics or compute science.
A deterministic machine with finite memory must either repeat a state or halt. The halting problem applies only to infinite-memory machines. A halting problem for a finite program can be made very hard, even arbitrarily hard, but not infinitely hard.
As a practical matter, there's a widely used program that tries to solve the halting problem by formal means - the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier. Every signed driver for Windows 7 and later has been through that verifier, which attempts to formally prove that the driver will not infinitely loop, break the system memory model with a bad pointer, or incorrectly call a driver-level API. In other words, it is trying to prove that the driver won't screw up the rest of the OS kernel. This is a real proof of correctness system in widespread use.
The verifier reports Pass, Fail, or Inconclusive. Inconclusive is reported if the verifier runs out of time or memory space. That's usually an indication that the driver's logic is a mess. If you're getting close to undecidability in a device driver, it's not a good thing.
The Microsoft KB says that all they changed was the user-agent string, taking out the "MSIE". Changing it back supposedly makes Google work. This implies Google has special-case code for Internet Explorer. I thought that went out with IE 6.
But people who will be quite happy to exploit your deregulated society will be right there with you!
Right. Look at Bitcoin. Most of the standard financial scams have been replicated in the Bitcoin world. Ponzi schemes, fake stocks, fake stock markets, brokers who took the money and ran, crooked escrow services, "online wallet" services that stole customer funds - that's Bitcoin. In the US banking crisis, depositors didn't lose their money. Even Madoff's customers are slowly getting about half their money back, as the liquidator sues everybody who made a big profit.
Scamming is such a big part of the Bitcoin economy that almost nobody is using it for anything legitimate. The latest thing seems to be a big run-up caused by the use of Bitcoin to get around China's tight exchange controls. That will probably be shut down by the People's Bank of China, so there seems to be a rush to turn yuan into dollars and euros.
Not seeing any concrete plans here. Some of the ideas are silly, such as Blueseed, the scheme to have a ship just outside of US waters full of programmers. That's just a tax shelter. Of course, they want the U.S. Coast Guard to help them if they get in trouble, as their prospectus says. And they want a large ferry dock and a freighter doc in San Mateo County's Pillar Point small-boat harbor. And they want ICE to make that small-boat harbor a US entry point, so people don't have to go up to San Francisco on a boat to visit the US. They also wanted to set up a microwave link at the USAF radar station at Pillar Point. But they don't want to pay for any of this.
Then there was CITE, a small city to be built in New Mexico. No people - it was supposed to be just for testing "new technologies". The company behind it turns out to be basically one guy without much money and a lot of clip art. Got a lot of press, and even some political support, then the vaporware project went away. The business model made no sense.
Further back, there was the high-tech Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which Walt Disney was going to build. Disney World has EPCOT today, but it's a theme park; nobody lives there. Disney did eventually build Celebration, FL, which is a retro-looking subdivision.
Some very top-down countries have done things like this: Tsukuba Science City, Guangzhou Science City, King Khalid Military City, and Brasilia. Those are all Government projects. The US private sector has a long history of "company towns", most of it not too good.
Wikipedia needs to embrace that companies want to get their products on a website with that much traffic
No we don't. It's one of the most successful web sites on the planet, and arguably the most successful example of collaboration in human history. Why would we possibly want to change that?
Exactly. It really annoys parts of Corporate America that they can't get their way on Wikipedia. That's a good thing.
I've encountered paid editing a few times. Carnival Cruises really, really wanted to make all the references to their various disasters (the Costa Concordia sinking, the Costa Allegra fire, the Carnivale Tropicale fire, the Carnival Splendor fire, the Carnival Triumph fire (ship adrift for four days), etc.) go away. Big editing battles. Finally the paid editors were kicked off.
There are a few individuals with promotional editors for their own bio articles. Michael Milken, the "Junk Bond King" who did time in a Federal pen, tried very hard to keep himself from being labelled as an ex-con. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has had people trying to keep the poor financial results of his hedge fund out of the article. Vivek Wadwa, who's heavily into self-promotion, put his grad students on pumping up his reputation, and seems to have an in with Jimbo Wales. It's an ongoing headache, but usually the good guys win.
There was a hack in some early NTSC TV sets which actually did have a bias for white people. NTSC has a luminance channel and two color channels, which are converted to three color channels to drive the CRT. Because the color channel bandwidth was limited and the signal level wasn't that consistent, some early color receivers had a special case for "skin color". When the two color channels, treated as a vector, were in the "skin color cluster region", they were pulled to that value, which was set for "white" people. Even if the other colors were way off, the skin colors would be consistent.
But that hack went out with vacuum tubes.
I have Abine's Do Not Track, and have local Flash storage disabled. The major TV networks now send me the same commercial over and over while viewing the same show.
At least I know the block is working.
That movie had a roadable version of the car and a submersible version, but not one that could do both. The submersible version wasn't dry; the operator was wearing scuba gear.
I'm starting to worry that Elon Musk is getting spread too thin. Space-X, Tesla, Hyperloop, automatic driving, plus this. We really need for Space-X and Tesla to succeed.
so who is ending up with yuan instead of dollars?
People who want to buy goods priced in yuan. China's exchange-control scheme allows flows of yuan for sales of goods. But "capital flows" and external debts in yuan are tightly controlled. It's possible to try to evade the exchange controls by selling goods in exchange for something else, like real estate. But trading a container load of manufactured goods for a house in London is difficult to arrange and involves high conversion costs if you're not in the export business. Bitcoins are more portable.
Whether the People's Bank of China will do something about this remains to be seen. So far, the CNY/USD rates on the Bitcoin exchanges remain close to the official exchange rate. So this isn't a strain on official exchange rates, which is their top priority. Bitcoin is just too tiny to affect exchange rates between the two biggest economies on the planet.
It may or may not be a good idea, but it's not new. The article is not very good, either. It's all over the place, from punched cards to XML.
Data flow programming has been tried many times. It's used heavily in GPUs, where pipelines are the only way to get work done. So there's reasonably good understanding today of what can and can't be done by data flow methods.
If you like "flow-based programming", one easy way to do it is to write programs in single-assignment style. Assign to each variable only once, and make it "const" or read-only if your language supports it. This makes your program a directed acyclic graph. Single assignment is a lot like functional programming, but values have names and the nesting depth of calls doesn't get so deep. It's also possible to use the same result as input to more than one function, which is hard to do in pure functional programming (That's the difference between a directed acyclic graph and a tree.)
The use of pure functions makes for cleaner programs, but more data copying. Data copying isn't necessarily bad today. It's cheap to copy data you just used or created, because it's in the cache. Modern CPUs have wide buses, are good at copying, and can probably do the copy in parallel with something else. Don't avoid copying data to "improve performance" unless the data item is large.
The place where this all comes unglued is when the program's goal is to affect something, not grind data down to a "result". Trying to write a GUI in a functional style is tough. (I once wrote a GUI in pure Prolog. Very bad idea.)
It's a neat idea. It's very testable. Now they have to find some new materials which this theory predicts will superconduct and check them out.
If it checks out, it's comparable to the early research on semiconductors which led to understanding that phenomenon. There were some early attempts at a transistor, but until there was some theoretical understanding of what electrons were doing in a crystal, nobody could make even make a reliable one, let alone figure out what materials would be better than germanium. Once there was some theory, there was more of an idea what materials to make.
New materials may have to be made. Semiconductors are usually made of ultra-pure silicon with the addition of tiny amounts of specific impurities. Those are invented materials - nothing like that exists in nature. With some theory for guidance, new superconducting materials may be created. The ones now known were more or less discovered by trial and error.
"Science is prediction, not explanation" - Fred Hoyle.
Right. China has tight exchange controls - it take special permission from the State Ministry for Foreign Exchange to exchange yuan for dollars, euros, or yen. But at present, China residents can buy Bitcoins with yuan. They can also sell Bitcoins for dollars, bypassing exchange controls. So if you've made money in China and want, say, to buy an apartment in London, Bitcoin provides a way to bypass the government exchange controls.
That seems to be what's pushing up the price of Bitcoin. The volume on exchanges in China is way up, while volume at Mt.Gox is way down.
However, there's no guarantee that this situation will last. The People's Bank of China can change this policy at any time. There's plenty of info available about PBOC policy; it's as least as important as US Fed policy. But that's enough for Slashdot readers.