What worries me are all those reactors which will melt down if there's a full station blackout. This is a generic problem with all GE Mark I reactors, like Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania. One hour to core damage, 14 hours to meltdown. This has been known since 1972. The US still has 23 such reactors.
There have been some fixes over the years. Fukushima had the emergency venting fix, but it didn't work because, with no power, the vents couldn't be operated. The NRC has insisted that all US Mark I reactors have extra Diesel generators and pumps beyond the original complement. On at least one occasion, they've been needed.
So in other words you redefine business review sites as social?
Google's own reviews are "social" - you have to have a Google account to add one, and Google has access to all your Google-collected "social" data when evaluating the value of your review. Twitter links fed into Google ratings for a while, although Google seems to have stopped doing that for competitive reasons.
There are forms of social spamming that get spammers into your "circles". Check out "JET Google+ Circles Adder", which creates about 250,000 Google profiles a day per computer and sends out friend requests. If you're getting friend requests from 20something women you've never heard of, that's probably JetBots. Or one of their competitors that does the same thing using outsourcing to low-wage countries, like BuyCircles Followers. There's a whole industry out there spamming Google and Facebook.
This makes one wonder how big those social networks really are. If one computer can create 250,000 fake accounts in one day, tens of millions, and perhaps hundreds of millions, of "users" must be fake. That happened to Craiglist years ago.
Google's social-enhanced search only applies social signals from people that you personally have identified as your friends (have circled). Unless you've circled spammers, you'll get no spam signals.
Wrong. Log out of Google, if you're logged in. Go to Google Maps. Search for "carpet cleaning san francisco". Click on "Sparkling Carpets". Note rating of 4 out of 5 stars. Note obvious spam review reading "Great Service -- awesome folks and awesome job. A+++++ ". That's social spamming, affecting Google results while not even logged into Google.
For an overview of local search ranking factors as of mid-2011, see this article.
As more and more people have focused on 'winning' the search results on google, I've gotten more and more 'wrong' results there. Bing has caught up with the google of today, and sadly neither can compete with the google of 4 years ago.
That's what comes from using "social" signals in search. "Social" is very easy to spam. Fake reviews, fake "likes", fake "+1s"... The social networks even host the spam for free - no expensive link farm to host and update.
Google tried their "real names" policy on Google+ to put a stop to that. That failed. Then they tried correlating what all their users are doing across all their services. That has over 30 US state attorneys general and the European Union after them. Fail.
Part of Bing's problem is that they're trying to be "as good as Google". They need to be better than Google to catch up. Bing still has half the market share of Google. Most of Bing's traffic is from Internet Explorer, where Bing is the default browser. Few people use Bing by choice.
Google has its vulnerabilities. The quality of the business data in Google Places is pathetic. Small businesses complain constantly about Google Places, but it's not their fault. Google can't even get the big ones right. Google Places sometimes thinks Ford Motor Company headquarters is a medical clinic, that WalMart headquarters is a pharmacy, and that Fannie Mae headquarters is permanently closed. It also thinks that Coit Tower, a San Francisco landmark, is a carpet cleaning service. Try searching for Fortune 1000 companies in Google Places. The results for major companies are often just wrong. Google's approach to business locations is still very keyword-oriented, which makes it error-prone and easily spammed. It's quite common for a search for a major company to map to a hotel near their HQ.
These are "Places" queries. If you ask that question of a map system, you probably want to go there.
These are queries for which there is a right answer. It's not an opinion. It's not a popularity contest. It's not "social". Google can't handle that.
Bing could win by getting that right. Real data is available about businesses and business locations.
It's now possible to make imagers with so many pixels that finding some way to use them is a problem. This is one way. Another way is to have more colors. There's a camera with around 100 different color filters, which is interesting for some scientific applications and for machine vision. 3 color sensing is a human eye thing. Some birds have 22 different spectral sensors, which is useful in picking targets through foliage. There's also interest in having more dynamic range, so that you don't have to worry about exposure or lighting as much.
The next thing may be image polarization, by having multiple polarizers per picture. This would be useful in eliminating glare after the fact.
It's an entertainment device. Look at what's in the example tiles. They're all either entertainment, shopping, or ads. Those are all output-mostly applications. It's a boob tube for the desktop.
This "fence" system, like some earlier fence systems, is called that because it's a bistatic (or multistatic) radar. The transmitters and receivers are at different locations, and the transmitted beam is not steered. Targets are located by time differences between what's received at multiple receivers.
The previous system had three transmitter sites and six receiver sites, spread across the US.
Fence systems are somewhat specialized, but a good way to find everything that crosses the fence volume. Once the RF gear is in place, it's mostly a processing problem. Unlike regular radars, there's no useful information without correlating multiple receiving stations.
Right. That's called an "edit decision list". It would be amusing to have a setup where you could order all the components from Netflix, then run a program which assembled them appropriately. Lucas still gets paid, and Jar-Jar gets cut out.
Hobbyist robotics seemed to be stuck in the mid-1980s for several decades. The hardware got cheaper, but the systems remained about as dumb as 1980s industrial robots. Lego Mindstorms is an example. In the last few years, though, there's been more movement. Hobbyist robots are starting to use SLAM, vision processing, laser rangefinders, Kinect devices, and machine learning. All that stuff can be done on low-end hardware now. (At the $1000 level, anyway. We're not down to $100 yet.)
There's now enough code available that people can use those technologies without learning the underlying math. That's what's making it happen.
A basic problem with some reactor designs is that a loss of control power causes core damage. The GE Mark 1 will suffer core damage after only one hour of station blackout, and a meltdown after about 14 hours. This was well known in the industry.
A few weeks ago, Slashdot posted transcripts of meetings after the Fukushima disaster. The NRC people immediately referred to the studies of the Peach Bottom plant (a GE Mark 1 in Pennsylvania), knowing quite well that a station blackout or loss of cooling water supply would cause a meltdown. There was no argument at the NRC meeting - everyone in the meeting was familiar with that risk.
Could he have ever imagined the repercussions of his attack?
He did. Read "bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America". This was written before 9/11, and includes many of bin Laden's own comments. He recognized that America was too strong to take down, and had to be weakened internally first. His plan was to destroy America's moral authority in the world. He wanted a more oppressive and heavy-handed America, to help build hate and opposition in the rest of the world. That was the objective of his terrorism.
He succeeded.
It's hard to remember now, but just before 9/11, the US didn't have any serious enemies. The big players, Russia, China, Japan, and the European Union, were on good terms with the US. The Middle East was intimidated, but reassured by the fact that, once the US was finished liberating Kuwait, all the US troops packed up and went home.
If the US had simply focused on cleaning up the mess and finding bin Laden, we would have been far better off.
I met him in his later years, after the bomb-pumped X-ray laser missile defense idea he was touting had fizzled. At the time, he was pitching precision-guided crowbars dropped from orbit.
"Venus Equilateral" - the ultimate gadget geek novel. The protagonist is an electrical engineer who runs a space station. Everything runs on vacuum tubes, and there's a lot of detail about them.
"Edison's Conquest of Mars" - a terrible novel from the late 19th century. Introduced spaceships and disintegrators.
"Ralph 124C 41+" - Hugo Gernsback''s first novel. 1911.
Schmitz's Federation of the Hub series - back in print via Baen Books. The Nile Etland and Trigger Argee stories are the best reads.
Heinlein's short stories - "The Roads Must Roll", "Blowups Happen", "The Man who Sold the Moon", "We Also Walk Dogs".
then why am I allowed to watch it as many times as I want? It seems like being able to have unlimited free viewings of the movie would infringe on some sort of DRM protections.
Because the use-counter ratchet mechanism which someone once tried to put in VHS cassettes isn't compatible with DVDs.
If it weren't for the fact that all popular music has its dynamic range compressed to provide maximum loudness for the entire song, dynamic range would be be a problem.
The problem is that, on soft passages, where the high 8 or 10 bits are zero, you're listening to 8 or 6 bit audio. That quantization can be heard. This is a problem for classical recordings made without any dynamic range compression. Of which there are very few.
This is an issue only if you listen to classical music in a very quiet environment. It doesn't matter for car audio. It doesn't matter for Apple's trendy crap earbuds. So almost nobody cares.
It's getting to the point where I feel like I need an application to read Captchas for me.
Right. ReCaptcha, especially. As book scanning OCR gets better, reCaptcha, which uses OCR rejects, tends to display things which are not words typeable on my keyboard. I've seen ink blots, mathematical formulas, and Cyrillic. If today's OCR systems can't read printed text with context information (adjacent words, what the fonts on the page look like) available, a human probably can't read it without context.
How long will the books stay around?
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What bothers me about e-readers is the impermanence of the content. If the service goes away, will the content go away? That's happened many times with on-line music. Remember Wal-Mart Music? PlaysForSure? MTV Urge? Zune? If the service goes down, can you move your content to a new device? This is really tough with devices that talk to nothing but the service. Can you back up your e-reader? Maybe, sort of, sometimes.
Even if the content is on the reader, will the service push an update that makes the reader dependent on the service? That's happened with games. There have been updates that made e-books go away.
And don't even think about leaving your books to your kids.
Slashdot Mirror
What worries me are all those reactors which will melt down if there's a full station blackout. This is a generic problem with all GE Mark I reactors, like Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania. One hour to core damage, 14 hours to meltdown. This has been known since 1972. The US still has 23 such reactors.
There have been some fixes over the years. Fukushima had the emergency venting fix, but it didn't work because, with no power, the vents couldn't be operated. The NRC has insisted that all US Mark I reactors have extra Diesel generators and pumps beyond the original complement. On at least one occasion, they've been needed.
So in other words you redefine business review sites as social?
Google's own reviews are "social" - you have to have a Google account to add one, and Google has access to all your Google-collected "social" data when evaluating the value of your review. Twitter links fed into Google ratings for a while, although Google seems to have stopped doing that for competitive reasons.
There are forms of social spamming that get spammers into your "circles". Check out "JET Google+ Circles Adder", which creates about 250,000 Google profiles a day per computer and sends out friend requests. If you're getting friend requests from 20something women you've never heard of, that's probably JetBots. Or one of their competitors that does the same thing using outsourcing to low-wage countries, like BuyCircles Followers. There's a whole industry out there spamming Google and Facebook.
This makes one wonder how big those social networks really are. If one computer can create 250,000 fake accounts in one day, tens of millions, and perhaps hundreds of millions, of "users" must be fake. That happened to Craiglist years ago.
If you have more than one thing to control, you'll need some encoding scheme, like Morse code. This won't scale up well.
Google's social-enhanced search only applies social signals from people that you personally have identified as your friends (have circled). Unless you've circled spammers, you'll get no spam signals.
Wrong. Log out of Google, if you're logged in. Go to Google Maps. Search for "carpet cleaning san francisco". Click on "Sparkling Carpets". Note rating of 4 out of 5 stars. Note obvious spam review reading "Great Service -- awesome folks and awesome job. A+++++ ". That's social spamming, affecting Google results while not even logged into Google.
For an overview of local search ranking factors as of mid-2011, see this article.
"Bing executive: 'We have caught up' to Google in search quality" - Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2010.
One point in that RFP is that the contractor cannot create new gTLDs without permission of the U.S. Government. All they can do is recommend them.
As more and more people have focused on 'winning' the search results on google, I've gotten more and more 'wrong' results there. Bing has caught up with the google of today, and sadly neither can compete with the google of 4 years ago.
That's what comes from using "social" signals in search. "Social" is very easy to spam. Fake reviews, fake "likes", fake "+1s"... The social networks even host the spam for free - no expensive link farm to host and update.
Google tried their "real names" policy on Google+ to put a stop to that. That failed. Then they tried correlating what all their users are doing across all their services. That has over 30 US state attorneys general and the European Union after them. Fail.
Part of Bing's problem is that they're trying to be "as good as Google". They need to be better than Google to catch up. Bing still has half the market share of Google. Most of Bing's traffic is from Internet Explorer, where Bing is the default browser. Few people use Bing by choice.
Google has its vulnerabilities. The quality of the business data in Google Places is pathetic. Small businesses complain constantly about Google Places, but it's not their fault. Google can't even get the big ones right. Google Places sometimes thinks Ford Motor Company headquarters is a medical clinic, that WalMart headquarters is a pharmacy, and that Fannie Mae headquarters is permanently closed. It also thinks that Coit Tower, a San Francisco landmark, is a carpet cleaning service. Try searching for Fortune 1000 companies in Google Places. The results for major companies are often just wrong. Google's approach to business locations is still very keyword-oriented, which makes it error-prone and easily spammed. It's quite common for a search for a major company to map to a hotel near their HQ.
These are "Places" queries. If you ask that question of a map system, you probably want to go there. These are queries for which there is a right answer. It's not an opinion. It's not a popularity contest. It's not "social". Google can't handle that.
Bing could win by getting that right. Real data is available about businesses and business locations.
It's now possible to make imagers with so many pixels that finding some way to use them is a problem. This is one way. Another way is to have more colors. There's a camera with around 100 different color filters, which is interesting for some scientific applications and for machine vision. 3 color sensing is a human eye thing. Some birds have 22 different spectral sensors, which is useful in picking targets through foliage. There's also interest in having more dynamic range, so that you don't have to worry about exposure or lighting as much.
The next thing may be image polarization, by having multiple polarizers per picture. This would be useful in eliminating glare after the fact.
It's an entertainment device. Look at what's in the example tiles. They're all either entertainment, shopping, or ads. Those are all output-mostly applications. It's a boob tube for the desktop.
This "fence" system, like some earlier fence systems, is called that because it's a bistatic (or multistatic) radar. The transmitters and receivers are at different locations, and the transmitted beam is not steered. Targets are located by time differences between what's received at multiple receivers. The previous system had three transmitter sites and six receiver sites, spread across the US.
Fence systems are somewhat specialized, but a good way to find everything that crosses the fence volume. Once the RF gear is in place, it's mostly a processing problem. Unlike regular radars, there's no useful information without correlating multiple receiving stations.
Right. That's called an "edit decision list". It would be amusing to have a setup where you could order all the components from Netflix, then run a program which assembled them appropriately. Lucas still gets paid, and Jar-Jar gets cut out.
Google, Facebook and Twitter.
That's exactly what I was going to say.
Imagine Facebook Timeline for your entire life. Including everything your phone ever did. Being monitored by Homeland Security.
At least you should be able to look at it yourself.
Hobbyist robotics seemed to be stuck in the mid-1980s for several decades. The hardware got cheaper, but the systems remained about as dumb as 1980s industrial robots. Lego Mindstorms is an example. In the last few years, though, there's been more movement. Hobbyist robots are starting to use SLAM, vision processing, laser rangefinders, Kinect devices, and machine learning. All that stuff can be done on low-end hardware now. (At the $1000 level, anyway. We're not down to $100 yet.)
There's now enough code available that people can use those technologies without learning the underlying math. That's what's making it happen.
A basic problem with some reactor designs is that a loss of control power causes core damage. The GE Mark 1 will suffer core damage after only one hour of station blackout, and a meltdown after about 14 hours. This was well known in the industry.
A few weeks ago, Slashdot posted transcripts of meetings after the Fukushima disaster. The NRC people immediately referred to the studies of the Peach Bottom plant (a GE Mark 1 in Pennsylvania), knowing quite well that a station blackout or loss of cooling water supply would cause a meltdown. There was no argument at the NRC meeting - everyone in the meeting was familiar with that risk.
Could he have ever imagined the repercussions of his attack?
He did. Read "bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America". This was written before 9/11, and includes many of bin Laden's own comments. He recognized that America was too strong to take down, and had to be weakened internally first. His plan was to destroy America's moral authority in the world. He wanted a more oppressive and heavy-handed America, to help build hate and opposition in the rest of the world. That was the objective of his terrorism.
He succeeded.
It's hard to remember now, but just before 9/11, the US didn't have any serious enemies. The big players, Russia, China, Japan, and the European Union, were on good terms with the US. The Middle East was intimidated, but reassured by the fact that, once the US was finished liberating Kuwait, all the US troops packed up and went home.
If the US had simply focused on cleaning up the mess and finding bin Laden, we would have been far better off.
The ACLU routinely wins these cases. See "A federal judge today ruled that a local school district violated the free speech rights of a student when it kicked him off the volleyball team because he posted an Internet message from home criticizing an art teacher." The controlling Supreme Court decision is Tinker vs. Des Moines.
I met him in his later years, after the bomb-pumped X-ray laser missile defense idea he was touting had fizzled. At the time, he was pitching precision-guided crowbars dropped from orbit.
Some classics:
Perhaps whatever it is designed to target doesn't need to be targeted just yet.
"In your face from outer space" - motto of the USAF Space Warfare Center
then why am I allowed to watch it as many times as I want? It seems like being able to have unlimited free viewings of the movie would infringe on some sort of DRM protections.
Because the use-counter ratchet mechanism which someone once tried to put in VHS cassettes isn't compatible with DVDs.
A supermarket in Japan tried that back in 1985. It's in the book "The Best of Japan 1985". It wasn't a commercial success.
If it weren't for the fact that all popular music has its dynamic range compressed to provide maximum loudness for the entire song, dynamic range would be be a problem.
The problem is that, on soft passages, where the high 8 or 10 bits are zero, you're listening to 8 or 6 bit audio. That quantization can be heard. This is a problem for classical recordings made without any dynamic range compression. Of which there are very few.
This is an issue only if you listen to classical music in a very quiet environment. It doesn't matter for car audio. It doesn't matter for Apple's trendy crap earbuds. So almost nobody cares.
It's getting to the point where I feel like I need an application to read Captchas for me.
Right. ReCaptcha, especially. As book scanning OCR gets better, reCaptcha, which uses OCR rejects, tends to display things which are not words typeable on my keyboard. I've seen ink blots, mathematical formulas, and Cyrillic. If today's OCR systems can't read printed text with context information (adjacent words, what the fonts on the page look like) available, a human probably can't read it without context.
What bothers me about e-readers is the impermanence of the content. If the service goes away, will the content go away? That's happened many times with on-line music. Remember Wal-Mart Music? PlaysForSure? MTV Urge? Zune? If the service goes down, can you move your content to a new device? This is really tough with devices that talk to nothing but the service. Can you back up your e-reader? Maybe, sort of, sometimes.
Even if the content is on the reader, will the service push an update that makes the reader dependent on the service? That's happened with games. There have been updates that made e-books go away.
And don't even think about leaving your books to your kids.