I almost wonder if it was deliberately done to make a quick buck off a short sell.
I would assume so. The question is whether the people behind it had enough money available to make a big profit. The drop was only about 2%, so if you had $10 million to invest, you'd only make $200K if you timed it perfectly. Realistically, $50K to $100K. Not worth it.
Metal-air batteries don't even pretend to be rechargables.
Right. Remember, primary batteries have higher energy densities than rechargable batteries. An electric car loaded up with non-rechargeable lithium batteries would have a range over twice what it has with rechargeables. Then the batteries would have to be replaced.
Someone might do this for a race car. As a production product, not too useful.
There's still some "hard SF" being written. But the era of hard science juveniles has been over for a long time. Heinlein wrote most of his juveniles for "Boys Life", the Boy Scouts magazine. Really.
Looking through the SF section today, it's "vampire", "vampire", "werewolf", "demon", "comic book spinoff", "Star [Trek|Wars] spinoff", and an occasional space opera. Over in the teen section, there's two cases of Teen Paranormal Romance, one of New Teen Paranormal Romance, and, more recently, Hunger Games clones.
There's a little good stuff. Stross's "Accelerando" is a good standalone book. Ringo's Troy Rising series is close to hard SF, but it's a long series, and some schools may object to his rather right-wing politics. (Ringo is of the "Peace through Superior Firepower" school.)
Google uses dinner as a form of manipulation. It's considered bad form to eat dinner at Google and then go home. It's like training animals with food rewards.
True. It detects incompetent spammers. Remember when warnings about spam and phishing included the suggestion to look for bad spelling? Remember when warnings about mail bombs included looking for excessive wrapping tape? It's like that.
What you can do with a 91% successful classifier is ignore the item for search purposes.
All the software and systems for this are already in place for 24 states. There are services which will do a sales tax calculation for you, or you can download all the data files The required inputs are ZIP code (9 digit ZIP code in a few cases where a ZIP code crosses a tax boundary), product class, and date (for "sales tax holidays"). It's complex because the interstate consortium that does this has to accommodate all the vagaries of state sales tax law in each state.
The idea is that small businesses sign up with a service provider, and send them one check for all state taxes plus an XML file of the transactions. Big businesses will probably run their own software. Expect to see this as a standard component of most shopping cart programs.
What the Federal law is about is getting all the states on board for this, and applying it nationally. There's even a huge loophole - "Online sellers with less than $1,000,000 in remote sales annually will be exempt from collection requirements. Remote sales are sales to customers in states where the seller does not already have a physical presence." eBay lobbied for that, yet they're still whining about the law.
Disney has an official Crap Sequels Division - Disneytoons. "DisneyToon Studios is a vibrant group of filmmakers, artists, and production teams focused on creating timeless stories with Disney's most beloved characters." They are responsible for Pocahontas II, The Lion King II (and 1 1/2), The Little Mermaid II, Lady and the Tramp II, Cinderella II and III, The Hunchback of Notre Dame II, 101 Dalmatians II, Mulan II, Tarzan II, The Jungle Book 2, Bambi II, Lilo and Stitch 2, and a number of titles with "Return" in them. Many of these can be found in the bargain bin at your local DVD retailer.
They shouldn't have any problem grinding out similar crap for another franchise. Since John Lasseter of Pixar took over DisneyToons, all films must be connected to a Disney Consumer Products franchise. So we can expect a large supply of injection-molded plastic to come with the movies.
Wilson is (or was) an observational biologist and naturalist. His book "The Ants" is great, but it's a picture book with essays.
For a science to lead to applications, it must have predictive ability. The hard line on this is from Sir Fred Hoyle: "Science is prediction, not explanation". Much of engineering is about prediction - being able to figure out what will work before you make it. Without that, you can't build anything big or complicated and get it to work.
The market for scientists in fields with no applications is small.
I've been getting what I thought were phony LinkedIn invites. I thought they were some kind of spam, and set up a mail filter to drop them. Is LinkedIn itself sending those?
There's the part about managing network address space in one's own internal network, which is reasonable enough. Then there's the part that says A can't talk to B unless Master Control says it can. That's what the misnamed "OpenFlow" is about. This is OpenFlow in a nutshell:
Each flow-entry has a simple action associated with it;
the three basic ones (that all dedicated OpenFlow switches must support) are:
1. Forward this flow's packets to a given port (or ports). This allows packets to be routed through the network.
In most switches this is expected to take place at line rate.
2. Encapsulate and forward this flow's packets to a controller. Packet is delivered to Secure Channel, where it is encapsulated and sent to a controller. Typically
used for the first packet in a new flow, so a controller
can decide if the flow should be added to the Flow
Table. Or in some experiments, it could be used to
forward all packets to a controller for processing.
3. Drop this flow's packets. Can be used for security, to
curb denial of service attacks, or to reduce spurious
broadcast discovery traffic from end-hosts.
So there it is - built in, scalable, universal wiretapping, connection monitoring, and censorship. It's what the RIAA, the MPAA, the FBI, and the Great Firewall of China operators all want.
Putting the smarts in the network means cable tv and POTS.
More like cellular. At least on POTS the telco doesn't do anything with what you're sending.
The internet would be nothing more than the home shopping channel had they gone that route.
Yes. And those of us who were there at the beginning were against that. Centralized "software defined networks" already existed. Tymnet, Telenet, and X.25 were all centrally controlled, along with Prestel (UK), Minitel (France), and Qube (Columbus, Ohio). We knew what that world looked like, and rejected it.
The model for "software defined networking" is that users talk mostly to a limited number of sites (Google, Facebook, Youtube, Comcast, etc.) In that model, the service provider would like to control where their users connect to the many locations of the service. Google previously was pushing for a non-cached non-anonymous DNS system, so that the identity of the user determined where a DNS reference resolved. Nobody liked that much.
Both gold and silver have considerable volatility. Silver once had a Bitcoin-like spike, back in 1980, when the Hunts cornered the market. But silver hasn't been a currency since the 1960s or so.
Bitcoin behaves like a penny stock. The market is small enough that it's easily manipulated, and it is.
Bitcoin was supposed to be a currency, but it's used mostly as a speculative vehicle. Now the volatility is too high for it to be used as a currency. If you can't convert a Bitcoin to another currency within a few minutes, you can lose big. You can't price anything in Bitcoins unless it has a huge markup.
It doesn't help that most of the "Bitcoin exchanges" and almost all the "Bitcoin wallets" either went bust, turned out to be crooks, or both. Mt. Gox is widely suspected of front-running (putting favored orders ahead of others) during periods of rapid price changes.
The article is about semi-automated cars, not fully automated ones. Semi-automated cars are iffy. We already have this problem with aircraft, where the control systems and the pilot share control. Problems with being in the wrong mode, or incorrectly dealing with some error, come up regularly in accident reports. Pilots of larger aircraft go through elaborate training to instill the correct procedures for such situations. Drivers don't.
A big problem is that the combination of automatic cruise control (the type that can measure the distance to the car ahead) plus lane departure control is enough to create the illusion of automatic driving. Most of the time, that's good enough. But not all the time. Drivers will tend to let the automation drive, even though it's not really enough to handle emergency situations. This will lead to trouble.
On the other hand, the semi-auto systems handle some common accident situations better than humans. In particular, sudden braking of the car ahead is reacted to faster than humans can do it.
The fully automatic driving systems have real situational awareness - they're constantly watching in all directions with lidar, radar, and cameras. The semi-auto systems don't have that much information coming in. The Velodyne rotating multibeam LIDAR still costs far too much for commercial deployment. (That's the wrong approach anyway. The Advanced Scientific Concepts flash lidar is the way to go for production. It's way too expensive because it's hand-built and requires custom sensor ICs. Those problems can be fixed.)
Now there's another opportunity for Linux on the desktop. The Linux community can be relied on to blow it. They blew it when XP was late. They blew it when everybody hated Vista. They blew it when Windows wouldn't fit on netbooks.
The open source community will never get "user-friendly" right. It's just not a high enough priority.
The Boston Globe talked to the major carriers, and they all report heavy calling but not an outage. AT&T mentions that their temporary WiFi set up for the event is up and will be kept up for "an extended timeframe".
Probably just out of bandwidth. Verizon says their 4G service in the area is overloaded but texting is working. Boston.com was redirecting to their own blog for a while, but now they're back up on their main site.
Meanwhile, Space-X is building the Falcon Heavy, with twice the payload of the Space Shuttle. The Falcon Heavy is three Falcon-9s. The Falcon-9, which is in current production and has been launched successfully several times, uses 9 Merlin engines. The Merlin engine is in current production, and about 400 a year are being manufactured. The first Falcon Heavy launch is scheduled for this year. For an actual commercial customer.
So why is NASA trying to build a big booster again?
If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized, and the currency is adopted for widespread commerce, the power demands of bitcoin mines would rise dramatically.
It doesn't work that way.
Bitcoin mining is set up to be a diminishing-returns thing, as the maximum number of Bitcoins, 21 million, is approached. Over half of those have already been generated. The "difficulty level" is already high enough that "mining" with an ordinary CPU is futile, mining with GPUs is marginal (currently, it seems to pay for the power used but not new hardware), mining with custom FPGAs is still profitable, and mining with custom ASICs is just becoming available. This last threatens to make everything else unprofitable.
There's a fixed number of Bitcoins generated per unit time, and the system increases the "difficulty" to adjust that rate. The more computational effort put into mining, the less cost-effective it becomes. This is completely independent of the number of users.
See "Magnet Ingestions in Children Presenting to United States Emergency Departments from 2002 to 2011." "A national estimate of 16,386 (95% CI: 12,175-20,598) children The incidence of visits increased 8.5-fold (0.45 per 100,000 to 3.75 per 100,000) from 2002 to 2011 with a 75% average annual increase per year. The majority of patients reported to have ingested magnets were under 5 years (54.7%). From 2009-2011 there was an increase in older children ingesting multiple small and/or round magnets, with a mean average age of 7.1+-0.56 years over the study period. "
Slashdot Mirror
I almost wonder if it was deliberately done to make a quick buck off a short sell.
I would assume so. The question is whether the people behind it had enough money available to make a big profit. The drop was only about 2%, so if you had $10 million to invest, you'd only make $200K if you timed it perfectly. Realistically, $50K to $100K. Not worth it.
Metal-air batteries don't even pretend to be rechargables.
Right. Remember, primary batteries have higher energy densities than rechargable batteries. An electric car loaded up with non-rechargeable lithium batteries would have a range over twice what it has with rechargeables. Then the batteries would have to be replaced.
Someone might do this for a race car. As a production product, not too useful.
There's still some "hard SF" being written. But the era of hard science juveniles has been over for a long time. Heinlein wrote most of his juveniles for "Boys Life", the Boy Scouts magazine. Really.
Looking through the SF section today, it's "vampire", "vampire", "werewolf", "demon", "comic book spinoff", "Star [Trek|Wars] spinoff", and an occasional space opera. Over in the teen section, there's two cases of Teen Paranormal Romance, one of New Teen Paranormal Romance, and, more recently, Hunger Games clones.
There's a little good stuff. Stross's "Accelerando" is a good standalone book. Ringo's Troy Rising series is close to hard SF, but it's a long series, and some schools may object to his rather right-wing politics. (Ringo is of the "Peace through Superior Firepower" school.)
Google uses dinner as a form of manipulation. It's considered bad form to eat dinner at Google and then go home. It's like training animals with food rewards.
This is pretty much useless.
True. It detects incompetent spammers. Remember when warnings about spam and phishing included the suggestion to look for bad spelling? Remember when warnings about mail bombs included looking for excessive wrapping tape? It's like that.
What you can do with a 91% successful classifier is ignore the item for search purposes.
All the software and systems for this are already in place for 24 states. There are services which will do a sales tax calculation for you, or you can download all the data files The required inputs are ZIP code (9 digit ZIP code in a few cases where a ZIP code crosses a tax boundary), product class, and date (for "sales tax holidays"). It's complex because the interstate consortium that does this has to accommodate all the vagaries of state sales tax law in each state.
The idea is that small businesses sign up with a service provider, and send them one check for all state taxes plus an XML file of the transactions. Big businesses will probably run their own software. Expect to see this as a standard component of most shopping cart programs.
What the Federal law is about is getting all the states on board for this, and applying it nationally. There's even a huge loophole - "Online sellers with less than $1,000,000 in remote sales annually will be exempt from collection requirements. Remote sales are sales to customers in states where the seller does not already have a physical presence." eBay lobbied for that, yet they're still whining about the law.
[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;
Right. Regulating state taxes is well within the Commerce Clause. What states can't do by themselves is force other states to collect taxes for them.
Disney has an official Crap Sequels Division - Disneytoons. "DisneyToon Studios is a vibrant group of filmmakers, artists, and production teams focused on creating timeless stories with Disney's most beloved characters." They are responsible for Pocahontas II, The Lion King II (and 1 1/2), The Little Mermaid II, Lady and the Tramp II, Cinderella II and III, The Hunchback of Notre Dame II, 101 Dalmatians II, Mulan II, Tarzan II, The Jungle Book 2, Bambi II, Lilo and Stitch 2, and a number of titles with "Return" in them. Many of these can be found in the bargain bin at your local DVD retailer.
They shouldn't have any problem grinding out similar crap for another franchise. Since John Lasseter of Pixar took over DisneyToons, all films must be connected to a Disney Consumer Products franchise. So we can expect a large supply of injection-molded plastic to come with the movies.
Wilson is (or was) an observational biologist and naturalist. His book "The Ants" is great, but it's a picture book with essays.
For a science to lead to applications, it must have predictive ability. The hard line on this is from Sir Fred Hoyle: "Science is prediction, not explanation". Much of engineering is about prediction - being able to figure out what will work before you make it. Without that, you can't build anything big or complicated and get it to work.
The market for scientists in fields with no applications is small.
I've been getting what I thought were phony LinkedIn invites. I thought they were some kind of spam, and set up a mail filter to drop them. Is LinkedIn itself sending those?
Google isn't forbidding advertising on Glass. They're forbidding non-Google advertising.
There's the part about managing network address space in one's own internal network, which is reasonable enough. Then there's the part that says A can't talk to B unless Master Control says it can. That's what the misnamed "OpenFlow" is about. This is OpenFlow in a nutshell:
Each flow-entry has a simple action associated with it; the three basic ones (that all dedicated OpenFlow switches must support) are:
So there it is - built in, scalable, universal wiretapping, connection monitoring, and censorship. It's what the RIAA, the MPAA, the FBI, and the Great Firewall of China operators all want.
Unless you're a Microsoft developer, what would anyone want a "Microsoft account" for? Hotmail?
Putting the smarts in the network means cable tv and POTS.
More like cellular. At least on POTS the telco doesn't do anything with what you're sending.
The internet would be nothing more than the home shopping channel had they gone that route.
Yes. And those of us who were there at the beginning were against that. Centralized "software defined networks" already existed. Tymnet, Telenet, and X.25 were all centrally controlled, along with Prestel (UK), Minitel (France), and Qube (Columbus, Ohio). We knew what that world looked like, and rejected it.
The model for "software defined networking" is that users talk mostly to a limited number of sites (Google, Facebook, Youtube, Comcast, etc.) In that model, the service provider would like to control where their users connect to the many locations of the service. Google previously was pushing for a non-cached non-anonymous DNS system, so that the identity of the user determined where a DNS reference resolved. Nobody liked that much.
Both gold and silver have considerable volatility. Silver once had a Bitcoin-like spike, back in 1980, when the Hunts cornered the market. But silver hasn't been a currency since the 1960s or so.
Bitcoin behaves like a penny stock. The market is small enough that it's easily manipulated, and it is. Bitcoin was supposed to be a currency, but it's used mostly as a speculative vehicle. Now the volatility is too high for it to be used as a currency. If you can't convert a Bitcoin to another currency within a few minutes, you can lose big. You can't price anything in Bitcoins unless it has a huge markup.
It doesn't help that most of the "Bitcoin exchanges" and almost all the "Bitcoin wallets" either went bust, turned out to be crooks, or both. Mt. Gox is widely suspected of front-running (putting favored orders ahead of others) during periods of rapid price changes.
The article is about semi-automated cars, not fully automated ones. Semi-automated cars are iffy. We already have this problem with aircraft, where the control systems and the pilot share control. Problems with being in the wrong mode, or incorrectly dealing with some error, come up regularly in accident reports. Pilots of larger aircraft go through elaborate training to instill the correct procedures for such situations. Drivers don't.
A big problem is that the combination of automatic cruise control (the type that can measure the distance to the car ahead) plus lane departure control is enough to create the illusion of automatic driving. Most of the time, that's good enough. But not all the time. Drivers will tend to let the automation drive, even though it's not really enough to handle emergency situations. This will lead to trouble.
On the other hand, the semi-auto systems handle some common accident situations better than humans. In particular, sudden braking of the car ahead is reacted to faster than humans can do it.
The fully automatic driving systems have real situational awareness - they're constantly watching in all directions with lidar, radar, and cameras. The semi-auto systems don't have that much information coming in. The Velodyne rotating multibeam LIDAR still costs far too much for commercial deployment. (That's the wrong approach anyway. The Advanced Scientific Concepts flash lidar is the way to go for production. It's way too expensive because it's hand-built and requires custom sensor ICs. Those problems can be fixed.)
They did make it so you can make your own UI and replace theirs, what else can you want?
That kind of answer is why open source consistently loses on the desktop.
Now if we can just stop the trend of dumbed down web sites composed of big square buttons with uniform shading.
Now there's another opportunity for Linux on the desktop. The Linux community can be relied on to blow it. They blew it when XP was late. They blew it when everybody hated Vista. They blew it when Windows wouldn't fit on netbooks.
The open source community will never get "user-friendly" right. It's just not a high enough priority.
The Boston Globe talked to the major carriers, and they all report heavy calling but not an outage. AT&T mentions that their temporary WiFi set up for the event is up and will be kept up for "an extended timeframe".
Probably just out of bandwidth. Verizon says their 4G service in the area is overloaded but texting is working. Boston.com was redirecting to their own blog for a while, but now they're back up on their main site.
With in-depth analysis like that who needs the full article.........
Right. This is just a troll for a short blog posting. There are no benchmarks or examples at all. This looks like "sponsored content".
Meanwhile, Space-X is building the Falcon Heavy, with twice the payload of the Space Shuttle. The Falcon Heavy is three Falcon-9s. The Falcon-9, which is in current production and has been launched successfully several times, uses 9 Merlin engines. The Merlin engine is in current production, and about 400 a year are being manufactured. The first Falcon Heavy launch is scheduled for this year. For an actual commercial customer.
So why is NASA trying to build a big booster again?
If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized, and the currency is adopted for widespread commerce, the power demands of bitcoin mines would rise dramatically.
It doesn't work that way.
Bitcoin mining is set up to be a diminishing-returns thing, as the maximum number of Bitcoins, 21 million, is approached. Over half of those have already been generated. The "difficulty level" is already high enough that "mining" with an ordinary CPU is futile, mining with GPUs is marginal (currently, it seems to pay for the power used but not new hardware), mining with custom FPGAs is still profitable, and mining with custom ASICs is just becoming available. This last threatens to make everything else unprofitable.
There's a fixed number of Bitcoins generated per unit time, and the system increases the "difficulty" to adjust that rate. The more computational effort put into mining, the less cost-effective it becomes. This is completely independent of the number of users.
The risk for teenagers comes from attempts to use magnets to simulate piercings.
See "Magnet Ingestions in Children Presenting to United States Emergency Departments from 2002 to 2011." "A national estimate of 16,386 (95% CI: 12,175-20,598) children The incidence of visits increased 8.5-fold (0.45 per 100,000 to 3.75 per 100,000) from 2002 to 2011 with a 75% average annual increase per year. The majority of patients reported to have ingested magnets were under 5 years (54.7%). From 2009-2011 there was an increase in older children ingesting multiple small and/or round magnets, with a mean average age of 7.1+-0.56 years over the study period. "