Actually, in the U.S., we're still using the "first to invent" system, not the "first to file" system. The rest of the world uses first to file, because it's far easier to determine who was the first filer. The U.S. occasionally investigates making the switch (because first to invent disputes cost the courts a lot of time and money), but hasn't done so yet. And since the inventors are in Colorado, they're subject to U.S. law. All they'd need to do to "prove" first to invent is mail themselves a sealed copy of the plans for their invention and they wouldn't need to file if they didn't want to. That said, once they're going public, it's probably better to file, just to avoid the "first to invent" problems I just mentioned.
I know that's a joke, but at work you likely experience greater anonymity than at home (from the website operator at least, can't say if your company monitors). At home, your computer is likely to have an eclectic mix of plugins, more or less up to date browser, OS, etc., all of which make you easy to profile. At work, you're often subject to the demands of the IT department, and the IT department likes uniformity; it's easier to support. So when you surf for porn at work, odds are the website can't distinguish you from anyone else at your office, since you all broadcast the same configuration data.
Collecting the oil appears to be necessary. If you set up a collection rig, you only need to stifle the pressure from the oil you don't collect. If you try to block it entirely, you need to block *all* the pressure. The latest attempt to cap the well failed due to pressure and buoyancy created by the well and its byproducts, even though it allowed some of the oil through for collection. Do you think an identical cap that tried to block it completely would be more successful? I'm not a fan of BP, but I don't think they're trying less plausible solutions solely to save themselves the cost of drilling a new well. Given the payouts the U.S. will likely extract to cover damages (legislation to raise the cap is already in progress, and their public promise to make good is hard to renege on), they're better off capping as fast as possible and drilling anew.
Not really. Anyone who actually examined the link target would see the "goatkcd" in the URL (and the "I'm Feeling Lucky" lets you know you're not actually visiting Google itself).
BTW, I agree on most points, but I should point out that Sony, the last CRT holdout, released a number of HD CRTs with widescreen display. And glare isn't a guaranteed benefit; too many damn glossy LCD screens out there to make it a clear distinction.
When I was using a key "wallet" in my back pocket, and when I first started carrying them on a key ring in my front pocket. It got better over time though; once I realized how much damage they were doing, I started being more careful to arrange the keys on the key ring pointy side up before putting them in my pocket, so the part of the ring touching the bottom of the pocket was just the round loop and the soft tag. I haven't had a hole since then. Also makes for less of the whole "stabbing myself in the thigh" problem. A pen or pencil inserted pointy side up can still form holes if you sit down wrong due to the length and the sharp point, but unless you've got really long, really sharp keys and/or really shallow pockets, keys shouldn't cause the same problem.
I do use a hosts file. But again, not as flexible. If I want the page but not a specific image, hosts won't do me much good (and no good at all on my work computer where I don't have the privileges to edit it).
Privoxy saves you some download bandwidth, but now you have to wait on the proxy itself. And of course, I use AdBlock for non-ad related purposes such as:
Removing NSFW or just plain unpleasant images from webpages
Disabling annoying "helpful" JavaScript (like the idiotic word lookup JavaScript used in New York Times articles)
AdBlock, for me, isn't just about ads, it's about making web surfing faster, more convenient and less aggravating. I use Greasemonkey to rewrite pages at frequently used websites (e.g. I go straight from the main page to the print friendly version at every news site I frequent). All of this relies on some level of local control. Sure, Privoxy is a nice fire-and-forget solution for non-technical people you are helping out, and it even provides a layer of privacy that AdBlock can't, but you could get that with any proxy service. If you want more control and more flexibility, Firefox extensions are the best option available at present.
I've never figured out why Chrome is as fast as it is on Linux while Firefox feels like driving an 18-wheeler dragging a stadium behind it (while on Windows and Mac it feels just fine)
Probably because Google spent the money on developers to optimize the Linux specific portions of the code. Mozilla has less reliable developer support, and needs to direct it to the areas that get the most use.
Though from my understanding, the AdBlock equivalent can only hide ads, not prevent them from downloading in the first place. I like AdBlock on Firefox because it actually makes the web faster by avoiding unnecessary downloads, not just because it removes screen clutter.
Mostly correct. One additional note: Many ISPs and routers don't do IPv6 well. So even in the "good IPv6 server, good IPv4 backup" case, many people will be hitting these delays because their ISP or router isn't IPv6 friendly. Since the web server can't force your ISP/router to upgrade, they have a choice. Do they serve only over IPv4 and get guaranteed performance, or do they move to IPv6 with an IPv4 fallback, thereby guaranteeing that their site will be dog slow for a fixed percentage of their users? We want them to move to IPv6 so the transition can occur smoothly over time. But a reasonable website operator might put off the move until the absolute last second, hoping that more ISPs and routers will be ready when they do switch. But of course, if no one is serving content over IPv6, ISPs have less motivation to upgrade. Yay Catch-22 situations!
Basically, if these browsers used the IPv4 fallback path smoothly, the IPv6 transition would be more painless; site operators would have one less reason to delay the switch, which would lead ISPs to have one more reason to speed the switch. But it all relies on the damn browsers behaving properly in the first place.
I'm amused that you think that any legislator's vote on an abortion bill is influenced by arguments presented in session. There are three things that influence the vast majority of legislators when it comes to abortion (in no particular order, since it's different for each individual):
Personal opinion: If they really think it's murder, they'll always vote for more restrictions; the only possible exceptions being for the life of the mother, and maybe rape and/or incest if they are fine with a little sophistry
Constituent/donor pressure: If they think it's likely to kill their reelection bid (or their campaign coffers) to vote a particular way, they'll vote the other way or find some way to abstain
Party pressure: Related to donor pressure, if their party is pushing a particular vote, they may go along with it to avoid being primaried or cut off from party funds
Abortion is far too polarized an issue for a speech on the floor to affect any legislator's vote. I don't know anything about this legislator, and even if I lived in his district, my opinion of him would not be affected one whit by this event.
Stop harping on the "taxpayer" thing. If he's your state Senator, and you think he is less effective because of it, work to vote someone else in. That's it. Spoiler alert: The replacement won't spend every waking minute advancing the interests of his district.
Every white collar organization has some level of waste. Guess what? They hire *people*. People aren't perfect. When you purchase a product, part of the cost of the product was the cost of smoke breaks. Or the cost of their marketing department surfing for porn (or Slashdot for that matter). Expecting every single individual in a government job to be 100% efficient at all times is expecting the impossible, because unlike Santa, we don't have the ability to enslave ceaselessly industrious elves to do all our work for us. Unusual levels of waste should be called out, but checking e-mail (and clicking a link sent to you) while a bill is endlessly rehashed on the floor isn't the same as ordering gold toilets for your office bathroom.
And FYI, I posted a nearly identical defense of the SEC. The staffer who was surfing for porn 8 hours a day should be fired, but for the other guys who did it once or twice a week for a few weeks should be warned and otherwise ignored (assuming no aggravating circumstances). Surfing for porn in a private office is no worse than occasionally browsing Slashdot. This isn't political for me, this is realism. Rejecting every person who occasionally takes a wasteful work break from government employment would mean a government with no employees.
It shows he needs faster hard disks and/or more disks (so his build is reading from one set and writing to another, never reading and writing to the same disk). Could also mean he needs more memory, or faster memory (though memory speed is unlikely to be the issue here). Either that or he needs a compiler that isn't a twenty year old mostly single-threaded piece of crap.
Well, assuming you count numbers as words, you needed to manually correct 2 out of 47 words. So you still had to correct over 4% of all words spoken (and that's assuming your final sentence was part of the count). My father might not get 96% of the individual words, but he'd probably get the meaning of your sentence as a whole. The question is whether Google could convey the meaning of the sentence despite missing those words. And remember, Google gets to hear you up close. Will it do nearly as well when Jean Luc Picard tells it to go to Maximum Warp, while sitting in a chair fifteen feet from the microphone? Or will it make the jump to Mardi Gras Wart?
Just as an example, my father is partially deaf. No hearing in one ear, and less than a quarter of human baseline in the other. But with a hearing aid (which still doesn't get him to full functionality), he gets 95% accuracy or better in regular conversation, and it gets better as the conversation progresses. It's not because the hearing aid is fixing the underlying problem (it can't, since the problem is in the inner ear). But if he knows the general topic, and picks up on 50% of the phonemes, he can fill in the blanks and figure out the gist of the sentence, despite hearing it in bits and pieces. As the conversation progresses, his accuracy improves because he is supplying the prompts; if the responses fall into the set of "expected" responses, filling in the gaps becomes even easier. By contrast, if you change topics abruptly or go off on a tangent, you may need to repeat yourself half a dozen times. Now a computer will have better "hearing", but if it doesn't know the topic before you start, it's going to have the same problem anytime you slur a word, elide a syllable, or clear your throat mid-sentence. People expect to speak to a computer and have it understand, forgetting that people aren't usually expected to interpret a sentence in isolation, with no idea of the topic.
Natural language processing *is* AI. And high accuracy speech recognition requires natural language processing if we expect to have accuracy rates approaching that of a human. Humans hear words partially or incorrectly all the time. We fill in the gaps from context, and we correct if the course of the conversation reveals that the original interpretation is wrong. Expecting computers to do better, when half the time the problem is the speaker, not the listener, means you need it to be able to make the same corrections from limited information on the fly, and after the fact that a human brain makes.
Just for the record, federal government inefficiency and local government inefficiency are two different things. The feds can't help you with your DMV problems.
Beyond that, the public has just as many morons as the government. If you installed your machine printing devices, the smart half of the public might actually get better service. But the morons would still screw it up, and now you've got to train the desk staffers to help people with the computer system, when the reason you put them at a desk is that they're not that great on a technical level in the first place. Sometimes, a one-size-fits-all system, while inefficient at the micro level is more efficient at the macro level. I'm not saying that's always the case (inertia does tend to set in for any established process), but your personal delays aren't always a "problem" from an organizational standpoint. I've lived in Washington State, where they outsource their vehicle registration. You have a dozen different outlets to choose from, but they all have the same cruddy service. Hell, you pay extra for the privilege of using them, but all you're really paying for is convenient locations; there's usually a location within a mile or two (instead of 10 miles or more in other states), but the service once you get there is exactly the same cruddy service you're used to in any other state.
Also remember that sometimes governments *like* creating job programs. You're not allowed to pump your own gas in New Jersey because they wanted to create a class of jobs that could be done by completely unskilled laborers (and note; the gas stations get a tax credit due to this, so effectively the pumpers are state employees). Some federal jobs exist for the same reason.
Sometimes it's not an issue of either job creation or privacy problems, it's accountability. The paperless office was never implemented at a federal level because we *want* paper trails. If someone misuses their position, by embezzling, stalking a romantic interest, handing contracts to favorite nephews, etc., we want the paper trail to make it harder to get away with. Every person working for the federal government filing papers isn't just compensating for inefficient processes, they're an integral part of the accountability system.
No need to come up with more examples. It's possible to make any industry produce more electricity than it generates as long as it uses an energy source other than electricity, or someone else is expending the energy on your behalf. For the former, just hook your machinery up to enough windmills or waterwheels to fully power it, then use any excess kinetic energy to drive a turbine. Battery manufacturers are basically doing the latter, since an alkaline battery uses zinc. Zinc does not occur in a pure form in nature (at least, not in usable quantities on this planet's surface). So they have to purify it, either by a two stage heating process or by passing electricity through it. Either way, more energy was used to make the battery than it will ever produce, and in the latter case, it's electrically negative even before you create the actual battery.
Also, the maximum sentence is 20 years, not the average sentence. Obstruction of justice covers a lot of scenarios, so the 20 years is for the guy who goes around cleaning the blood and fingerprints off the murder weapons of a friend of his (yes, accomplice after the fact to murder would cover this, but you get the idea). I have a really hard time believing this guy will get anything close to 20 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, in the U.S., we're still using the "first to invent" system, not the "first to file" system. The rest of the world uses first to file, because it's far easier to determine who was the first filer. The U.S. occasionally investigates making the switch (because first to invent disputes cost the courts a lot of time and money), but hasn't done so yet. And since the inventors are in Colorado, they're subject to U.S. law. All they'd need to do to "prove" first to invent is mail themselves a sealed copy of the plans for their invention and they wouldn't need to file if they didn't want to. That said, once they're going public, it's probably better to file, just to avoid the "first to invent" problems I just mentioned.
I know that's a joke, but at work you likely experience greater anonymity than at home (from the website operator at least, can't say if your company monitors). At home, your computer is likely to have an eclectic mix of plugins, more or less up to date browser, OS, etc., all of which make you easy to profile. At work, you're often subject to the demands of the IT department, and the IT department likes uniformity; it's easier to support. So when you surf for porn at work, odds are the website can't distinguish you from anyone else at your office, since you all broadcast the same configuration data.
Well, wouldn't that just make it really easy to boost staffing levels?
Collecting the oil appears to be necessary. If you set up a collection rig, you only need to stifle the pressure from the oil you don't collect. If you try to block it entirely, you need to block *all* the pressure. The latest attempt to cap the well failed due to pressure and buoyancy created by the well and its byproducts, even though it allowed some of the oil through for collection. Do you think an identical cap that tried to block it completely would be more successful? I'm not a fan of BP, but I don't think they're trying less plausible solutions solely to save themselves the cost of drilling a new well. Given the payouts the U.S. will likely extract to cover damages (legislation to raise the cap is already in progress, and their public promise to make good is hard to renege on), they're better off capping as fast as possible and drilling anew.
Not really. Anyone who actually examined the link target would see the "goatkcd" in the URL (and the "I'm Feeling Lucky" lets you know you're not actually visiting Google itself).
So you're saying a gradual process of game evolution would not allow you to present complex situations in a simple way? *ducks*
BTW, I agree on most points, but I should point out that Sony, the last CRT holdout, released a number of HD CRTs with widescreen display. And glare isn't a guaranteed benefit; too many damn glossy LCD screens out there to make it a clear distinction.
Given that the "bomb" was a laughable piece of junk, I think the "he's stupid" hypothesis holds up.
When I was using a key "wallet" in my back pocket, and when I first started carrying them on a key ring in my front pocket. It got better over time though; once I realized how much damage they were doing, I started being more careful to arrange the keys on the key ring pointy side up before putting them in my pocket, so the part of the ring touching the bottom of the pocket was just the round loop and the soft tag. I haven't had a hole since then. Also makes for less of the whole "stabbing myself in the thigh" problem. A pen or pencil inserted pointy side up can still form holes if you sit down wrong due to the length and the sharp point, but unless you've got really long, really sharp keys and/or really shallow pockets, keys shouldn't cause the same problem.
I do use a hosts file. But again, not as flexible. If I want the page but not a specific image, hosts won't do me much good (and no good at all on my work computer where I don't have the privileges to edit it).
AdBlock, for me, isn't just about ads, it's about making web surfing faster, more convenient and less aggravating. I use Greasemonkey to rewrite pages at frequently used websites (e.g. I go straight from the main page to the print friendly version at every news site I frequent). All of this relies on some level of local control. Sure, Privoxy is a nice fire-and-forget solution for non-technical people you are helping out, and it even provides a layer of privacy that AdBlock can't, but you could get that with any proxy service. If you want more control and more flexibility, Firefox extensions are the best option available at present.
I've never figured out why Chrome is as fast as it is on Linux while Firefox feels like driving an 18-wheeler dragging a stadium behind it (while on Windows and Mac it feels just fine)
Probably because Google spent the money on developers to optimize the Linux specific portions of the code. Mozilla has less reliable developer support, and needs to direct it to the areas that get the most use.
Though from my understanding, the AdBlock equivalent can only hide ads, not prevent them from downloading in the first place. I like AdBlock on Firefox because it actually makes the web faster by avoiding unnecessary downloads, not just because it removes screen clutter.
Mostly correct. One additional note: Many ISPs and routers don't do IPv6 well. So even in the "good IPv6 server, good IPv4 backup" case, many people will be hitting these delays because their ISP or router isn't IPv6 friendly. Since the web server can't force your ISP/router to upgrade, they have a choice. Do they serve only over IPv4 and get guaranteed performance, or do they move to IPv6 with an IPv4 fallback, thereby guaranteeing that their site will be dog slow for a fixed percentage of their users? We want them to move to IPv6 so the transition can occur smoothly over time. But a reasonable website operator might put off the move until the absolute last second, hoping that more ISPs and routers will be ready when they do switch. But of course, if no one is serving content over IPv6, ISPs have less motivation to upgrade. Yay Catch-22 situations!
Basically, if these browsers used the IPv4 fallback path smoothly, the IPv6 transition would be more painless; site operators would have one less reason to delay the switch, which would lead ISPs to have one more reason to speed the switch. But it all relies on the damn browsers behaving properly in the first place.
Abortion is far too polarized an issue for a speech on the floor to affect any legislator's vote. I don't know anything about this legislator, and even if I lived in his district, my opinion of him would not be affected one whit by this event.
Stop harping on the "taxpayer" thing. If he's your state Senator, and you think he is less effective because of it, work to vote someone else in. That's it. Spoiler alert: The replacement won't spend every waking minute advancing the interests of his district.
Every white collar organization has some level of waste. Guess what? They hire *people*. People aren't perfect. When you purchase a product, part of the cost of the product was the cost of smoke breaks. Or the cost of their marketing department surfing for porn (or Slashdot for that matter). Expecting every single individual in a government job to be 100% efficient at all times is expecting the impossible, because unlike Santa, we don't have the ability to enslave ceaselessly industrious elves to do all our work for us. Unusual levels of waste should be called out, but checking e-mail (and clicking a link sent to you) while a bill is endlessly rehashed on the floor isn't the same as ordering gold toilets for your office bathroom.
And FYI, I posted a nearly identical defense of the SEC. The staffer who was surfing for porn 8 hours a day should be fired, but for the other guys who did it once or twice a week for a few weeks should be warned and otherwise ignored (assuming no aggravating circumstances). Surfing for porn in a private office is no worse than occasionally browsing Slashdot. This isn't political for me, this is realism. Rejecting every person who occasionally takes a wasteful work break from government employment would mean a government with no employees.
It shows he needs faster hard disks and/or more disks (so his build is reading from one set and writing to another, never reading and writing to the same disk). Could also mean he needs more memory, or faster memory (though memory speed is unlikely to be the issue here). Either that or he needs a compiler that isn't a twenty year old mostly single-threaded piece of crap.
I'm pretty sure that was chickens, not sheep. And it's not as common as people think even in chickens.
Well, assuming you count numbers as words, you needed to manually correct 2 out of 47 words. So you still had to correct over 4% of all words spoken (and that's assuming your final sentence was part of the count). My father might not get 96% of the individual words, but he'd probably get the meaning of your sentence as a whole. The question is whether Google could convey the meaning of the sentence despite missing those words. And remember, Google gets to hear you up close. Will it do nearly as well when Jean Luc Picard tells it to go to Maximum Warp, while sitting in a chair fifteen feet from the microphone? Or will it make the jump to Mardi Gras Wart?
Just as an example, my father is partially deaf. No hearing in one ear, and less than a quarter of human baseline in the other. But with a hearing aid (which still doesn't get him to full functionality), he gets 95% accuracy or better in regular conversation, and it gets better as the conversation progresses. It's not because the hearing aid is fixing the underlying problem (it can't, since the problem is in the inner ear). But if he knows the general topic, and picks up on 50% of the phonemes, he can fill in the blanks and figure out the gist of the sentence, despite hearing it in bits and pieces. As the conversation progresses, his accuracy improves because he is supplying the prompts; if the responses fall into the set of "expected" responses, filling in the gaps becomes even easier. By contrast, if you change topics abruptly or go off on a tangent, you may need to repeat yourself half a dozen times. Now a computer will have better "hearing", but if it doesn't know the topic before you start, it's going to have the same problem anytime you slur a word, elide a syllable, or clear your throat mid-sentence. People expect to speak to a computer and have it understand, forgetting that people aren't usually expected to interpret a sentence in isolation, with no idea of the topic.
Natural language processing *is* AI. And high accuracy speech recognition requires natural language processing if we expect to have accuracy rates approaching that of a human. Humans hear words partially or incorrectly all the time. We fill in the gaps from context, and we correct if the course of the conversation reveals that the original interpretation is wrong. Expecting computers to do better, when half the time the problem is the speaker, not the listener, means you need it to be able to make the same corrections from limited information on the fly, and after the fact that a human brain makes.
Just for the record, federal government inefficiency and local government inefficiency are two different things. The feds can't help you with your DMV problems.
Beyond that, the public has just as many morons as the government. If you installed your machine printing devices, the smart half of the public might actually get better service. But the morons would still screw it up, and now you've got to train the desk staffers to help people with the computer system, when the reason you put them at a desk is that they're not that great on a technical level in the first place. Sometimes, a one-size-fits-all system, while inefficient at the micro level is more efficient at the macro level. I'm not saying that's always the case (inertia does tend to set in for any established process), but your personal delays aren't always a "problem" from an organizational standpoint. I've lived in Washington State, where they outsource their vehicle registration. You have a dozen different outlets to choose from, but they all have the same cruddy service. Hell, you pay extra for the privilege of using them, but all you're really paying for is convenient locations; there's usually a location within a mile or two (instead of 10 miles or more in other states), but the service once you get there is exactly the same cruddy service you're used to in any other state.
Also remember that sometimes governments *like* creating job programs. You're not allowed to pump your own gas in New Jersey because they wanted to create a class of jobs that could be done by completely unskilled laborers (and note; the gas stations get a tax credit due to this, so effectively the pumpers are state employees). Some federal jobs exist for the same reason.
Sometimes it's not an issue of either job creation or privacy problems, it's accountability. The paperless office was never implemented at a federal level because we *want* paper trails. If someone misuses their position, by embezzling, stalking a romantic interest, handing contracts to favorite nephews, etc., we want the paper trail to make it harder to get away with. Every person working for the federal government filing papers isn't just compensating for inefficient processes, they're an integral part of the accountability system.
No need to come up with more examples. It's possible to make any industry produce more electricity than it generates as long as it uses an energy source other than electricity, or someone else is expending the energy on your behalf. For the former, just hook your machinery up to enough windmills or waterwheels to fully power it, then use any excess kinetic energy to drive a turbine. Battery manufacturers are basically doing the latter, since an alkaline battery uses zinc. Zinc does not occur in a pure form in nature (at least, not in usable quantities on this planet's surface). So they have to purify it, either by a two stage heating process or by passing electricity through it. Either way, more energy was used to make the battery than it will ever produce, and in the latter case, it's electrically negative even before you create the actual battery.
Yeah, that bothers me too. I'm not in favor of punishing the cover up more harshly than the crime.
Also, the maximum sentence is 20 years, not the average sentence. Obstruction of justice covers a lot of scenarios, so the 20 years is for the guy who goes around cleaning the blood and fingerprints off the murder weapons of a friend of his (yes, accomplice after the fact to murder would cover this, but you get the idea). I have a really hard time believing this guy will get anything close to 20 years.