Have a look at actual military spending figures world wide. If anyone is going to be using any swarming tactics, it's the US, not Korea or China. Land war, of course China is going to have more boots on the ground - but not more drones/missiles etc. at their current spending levels.
You ever wonder why the US is having economic problems? Here's a hint: Have a look at what happened to the USSR. Perhaps if less money was actually spend on weapons and technology to blow shit up, and more was spend on capital infrastructure that is actually useful for production, the US wouldn't be in as big an economic the hole it is these days.
Robot Odyssey ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odysseyrel=url2html-3550http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey> got me started in digital electronics when I was a kid. It was very addictive to play, and educational at the same time - requiring you to wire up the bot's thrusters and various sensors so that it would navigate around a room to get past an obstacle that you could not.
It is a shame there aren't more adventure games. You could make sub-circuits that were effectively like IC's, that you could design and incorporate together to make more complex circuits There was even an on/off remote control / aerial that could be wired in, so if you were smart enough you could create a serial encoder/decoder and control the bot's thrusters more directly.
Unfortunately, in modern games, even in sci-fi based games that purportedly have you crack some kind of electronic code or puzzle to get past various doors, they never actually use anything even remotely resembling real world electronics - even though there is obviously a good opportunity to do so in such games.
Apparently it's about $587.50 USD per month for a western equivalent 2 bed apartment.http://matadorabroad.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-live-in-china/ For a little more you get much more ($2 a week) that you could not get in the west for the same price - eg. a maid, cleaning staff, etc, and the basica like food and energy are much cheaper than in the west.
However, your quoted average Chinese income of $2,025 per year (ie. $168.75 per month) is obviously well below this level.
so no, just halving the number of prisoners alone would not solve the budget crisis - but some percentage of them would be paying taxes, and generally participating in the economy of the state which would further increase revenues, instead of each of them being a $47,000 a year money pit.
Additionally, the guards etc. that are needed to guard them would be engaged in some other part of the economy which would also increase growth. Having a guard watching over a prisoner is the economic equivalent of having the state employ people to dig holes and fill them in again - it keeps people busy but does not help with the growth of the economy. If the prisoners really need to be in jail then it's worth while, but if they are there because of laws that tend to be "jail happy" ( like trigger happy) then it is a waste of resources to keep them there and a waste of their potential contribution to society. Leep jail for the really bad crooks - not the idiots that decided to smoke the wrong substance - those guys need education/rehabilitation, not jail.
no, I do not think that society wants to make everyone equal - which is why the idealized version of communism will always fail - everyone is most certainly not equal, and people who put in the effort to better themselves and are more productive should be better rewarded for their efforts.
I think the real problem is rampant crony-ism in both China and in Western countries, where there is a huge disparity between the pay for top level jobs versus average jobs.
The 10x figure was not completely out of my ass, by the way. The average worker salary in the US is about $50,000, and in the 80's the salary used to be 42x the average working salary. President Obama has set the salary cap at 500,000 for any of the companies that the government bailed out (ie. 10x), and that seems like a reasonable starting point to me.
You can only live in one house, cruise around in one boat and drive one car at a time. At a certain point, bigger and bigger salaries for top CEO's stop increasing the real quality of life of an executive and instead just becomes a way of keeping track of how much better than the next CEO they are - ie. the marginal utility of every extra dollar a CEO earns approaches zero, but it is in our nature to always want more, so the salaries grow way beyond the point at which further increases are meaningless.
The same amount of money however, makes a much bigger difference to employees at the bottom end of the pay scale, and would overall improve the standard of the average employee much more, and generally make for happier employees.
I am not saying everyone should get paid identically - of course individual talents and skills have to be recognized and rewarded. I am just questioning the huge disparity between the top levels and the bottom levels, which are by and large maid at the expense of the guys on the bottom rung.
The other difference is in the US, workers are sold the dream that anyone has an equal chance to make it big if they work hard enough at it, and workers are free to complain long and loud about the system , their bosses, how much the government sucks, etc.
In China, they had a revolution that was supposed to make everyone equal, but the workers are still getting screwed over and getting bugger all for their efforts, without any accompanying freedoms that US workers enjoy.
Of course in both systems, the workers are getting screwed, and will probably always get screwed, because those in charge of the means of production, (ie. factory owners, Intellectual property owners, land owners etc.) will always find a way to justify why their time and effort is worth so much more per hour than the ordinary employees.
There is definitely a case for CEOs getting paid more than a regular worker, (say, 10x), as they do have a great deal more responsibility and a rarer set of skills compared to the average worker, but that level of difference is a sign of a broken and unfair system, just as it is in China.
The sad fact is, although it sucks to live in China due to censorship and general lack of political freedom, I don't think the US is really as free as everyone seems to think - after all, the US has the largest percentage of its population out of any country:
Figures are for the number of people jailed per 100,000 population, for 2007. There is a more up to date list (7th edition) but I couldn't find a link for it that didn't require a PDF download. USA: 714 China: 117 Japan: 58 Australia: 117 UK: 142 (England and Wales)
So don't sit back and congratulate yourself too much for living in a free and open country if you are in the US. Of course, for many crimes in China you get a bullet in the back of the head - and it is estimated that there are thousands of executions per year.
About half the US population is sitting in jail as a result of drug related offences - due the the war on drugs and 3 strikes policies there. It's also a big part of the reason why California is going bankrupt.
Of course, as everyone know, Australia is entirely populated by criminals, which may account for the relatively low percentage of us locked up here.
All that said - if China is so damned worried about Facebook being a tool of subversion, - they should start subverting the US using the same tools, if the Chinese system of government is supposed to be so damned good...
The real cost is not storing it - but rather the cost in recording all that info in the first place. Someone has to type in all that data to start with, and possibly someone else has to at least glance at the resulting reams of reports that are produced from it.
It is all too tempting to create database apps to record all sorts of information "just in case", but more often than not all you end up doing is making the system more complex than it has to be, and more time consuming in maintenance of both the application and the data.
I like this idea a lot - someone definitely needs to develop a phone answering bot that could detect when the telemarketer has finished giving their spiel, so it could let the telemarketer give their spiel, then respond with one of several pre-recorded messages that are selected by the GA, and as you suggest, have it keep trying different combinations so that it selects the sorts of responses that keep the telemarketer tied up as long as possible.
I get one or two calls every day from someone wanting donations for some charity or other, informing me that I have won a special holiday discount deal, or trying to convince me to change providers. Even more annoying are the calls that just hang up when you answer, probably because the telemarketer dialer dialed me but they didn't have any drones handy to give me their extra special deal spiel.
This problem has not been stated sufficiently clearly in the summary:
"I have two children, one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?"
The way I read it, the answer is 50%, if we assume that the distribution of sexes is even - with the first sentence only there to mislead. The problem should have been more clearly stated - for example: "If I have two children, what is the probability that both are boys if one is a boy born on a Tuesday?"
The original question does not tie the first sentence into the probability question correctly. You might have well asked "I have two children, one of whom is a boy with red hair. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?"
I am not generally picky about grammar, but in this case, where the question is obviously designed to be some sort of "trick question", the submitter has to be a much more careful in how the question is stated.
China steals 5 pieces of tech for every 1 they build
This kind of thinking is why the US and other western countries are going to fail in the long term. Just like Japan in the 50's, China right now is largely perceived as being a country that makes cheap knock offs of products that are invented in the US or Europe, with no real innovation of their own. The reality of course, is that we mostly only see the cheap crappy products that importers are willing to import - China actually has some pretty good tech of their own that does not get exported. They are already the main producers of our favorite tech toys - iPads, iPhones, etc etc.
When I lived in Japan I was always surprised to see how far behind the "latest and greatest" consumer goods were back in my own country (eg. video cameras) compared to what was available in Japan. I would be very surprised if this is not already the case with stuff coming out of China too - we only see the goods here that importers are willing to import, which seems to be mostly the cheap knockoff stuff.
China is now greatly out-pacing the rest of the world in terms of growth in scientific research, and it already massively exceeds Japan - 125,000 in 2009 vs 72,000 from Japan) it will only be 6 or 7 years before it passes the US too.
The we keep believing the myth that the only the US or Europe is capable of producing innovative products, the further behind we will slide in science and technology, until we wake up one day and wonder why it is that the only thing that we are producing is the very goods that we used to ascribe to third world countries - ie. agricultural and primary products like ore ore and coal, with perhaps a few Britney CDs thrown in too.
The amount of money that was spent to reach the moon during the space race was astronomical - and justifiable at the time due the the cold war. To really get back in the space business properly, there has to be a good commercial reason to get there, and it has to be private companies that do it. What we should really be doing is encouraging more private enterprises to get into the field by having more schemes like the X prizes, which has so far been very successful at helping drive private industry into the field. The problem with large publicly funded NASA driven projects is it just generates way too much pork barrel inefficiencies, with relatively little return for all that public spending compared to what can be achieved by private companies for the same money.
I would like to see someone actually start trying to do something like actually capture an asteroid (or use some of the existing hunks of rock) at one of the Lagrange points as the basis for industrial mining, processing and fabrication of stuff in space - as ultimately this is probably going to be the most affordable way to build substantial structures up there, as opposed to pushing up every single component on rockets at thousands of dollars per Kg. Perhaps it is time for an X prize type competition for the first company who can actually make something from stuff that is already out there in space, so we can finally start building real space based industries.
Hell just derive quaternions from scratch and then write a program to use them to implement some kind of armature system. That should leave plenty of scars on your brain - no need for a tattoo at all!
My CD's are working fine too - wish I could say the same about the numerous CD and DVD dives or players I have had over the years.
I really hate CDs and DVDs - the medium itself is way too easy to damage, but worse, the bloody CD drives / players just have too many points of failure in them. I had yet another DVD drive fail on me this week - I don't watch that many movies or burn a lot of stuff, but I have gone through at least 4 DVD drives, and quite a few CD drives over the years, not to mention 3 stand alone DVD players ie. that you plug into your TV.
I still have the first CD I bought, which still plays, but the CD player in the first stereo I bought to play it in died years ago - even though the radio and tape player in the same unit work fine. I had several walkman CD players too, that have call rapped out over the years too. The CD and DVD players are just too damn flakey and prone to going out of alignment or having their lasers burn out or something. I even had one DVD burner somehow leave a burn mark on a game CD when it failed! (it created a partly melted spot on the original game CD (which has to be in the drive when playing the game) which has rendered it unusable
Anything which depends on mechanical parts that have to line up precisely for successful reading and writing is just asking for trouble, and never going to be a good long term storage solution.
The good thing about solid state storage is there are no moving parts to go wrong - so as long as the device is designed to be adequately protected from static discharge, it's going to be a lot better, in my books.
I personally cant wait to see the death of CD/DVD (or for that matter, anything involving a spinning disk) to go the way of the dinousar once and for all.
hopefully this will bring in solid state storage to replace CD's and DVD's for everything - the sooner the better.
I considered doing this, but I sometimes hand my business card out to people, which has my skype details on it.
In the same way that you wouldn't want to block people from calling your phone unless they were on your friends list, I do not want to block people from skyping me if they are not on my contacts list.
I do however want to be able to eliminate the lamer contacts.
If there were some way to tell how long a skype account had been active, Ideally, I would like to have a filter so that I could only be contacted by people that had some minimum skype credit, or that had an account that was more than say, a month old, or block messages from accounts that had sent messages to more than 100 people today.
If the skype admins cancel accounts that are reported as being abusive from several people, then that should be pretty effective at completely eliminating spam from the skype network.
The other major feature I wish a skype front end had, is the ability to have video conference calls tiled, so that the multiple contacts were in a grid or something like that. The other thing that is missing on Linux skype is a 2d or 3d sketch program of some sort so that you can have a shared sketch area. Since I work from home and use skype to communicate with my client in another city, this would be tremendously helpful for a lot of the conversations I have when talking about the project.
It should be making them a profit - I only use Linux and use Skype for nearly all my calls and have been doing so for several years now, since August 2006. I have a skype-Out account, and regularly make calls to mobile phones and land-lines, and occasionally overseas, and I have a skype-in number too. So far in 2010, I have spent $63 with them.
Surely I can't be the only one. I definitely feel like a second class citizen in the Skype world though, with a UI that has been in beta for a year, and is significantly lagging the windows versions.
From what I understand of the situation, Skype is restricted in what they can release as open source, due to licensing of certain technologies they have in their codecs - not much can be done about that I suppose, short of a complete rewrite or finding a suitable replacement that is not so encumbered.
If the released API makes it possible to create calls, send & receive video and fetch on-line info about your contacts, then great! At last it will be possible to write a decent front end!
I Really don't know why the front end wasn't written using QT, so that it wouldn't be such a big deal to keep all platforms on the same version of UI, , but I sure intend to have a stab at writing a front end in QT/C++ if I can get my grubby little hands on a copy of the API and libraries.
First thing I will be implementing in my front end for skype: Some kind of filter so I stop getting those damn penis enlargment ads / chat with Mis-sxyxxx chick etc. that keep popping up every few days.
I use WPA on my wifi, so they can't sniff. I do it because there are a lot of people out there who feel that a non-protected wifi link is theirs for the using.
The problem is there are some people/organizations who run nodes that ARE free to use - so if you don't want people to use your network uninvited, the simplest thing to do is close the door as you have done. Even the very weakest encryption would be enough to indicate that you do not intend your network to be used publicly. Simply having SSID broadcast turned off with no encryption at all would also indicate you do not intend it to be public, however, if you have your router happily broadcasting it's SSID, with no encryption and transmitting strongly enough to be received by a car driving down the street, well that's basically saying "come use me!"
Although it is worth investigating exactly what information Google collected and why, that is not what the suit is going to be about - it's going to be a great big money grab by a bunch of lawyers on behalf of a bunch of people who couldn't be bothered to make their wireless networks private, and who lost absolutely nothing at all and were not damaged in any way by Google's actions. (Did Google start using captured credit card details or start spamming some private email address that was captured, or selling any of the private data that was captured other than perhaps the name and location of the node? I think not.)
Oh and for anyone who whines "oh not everyone is a geek who can understand how to configure a router" RTFM! that's what it is for. It really isn't that hard!
If I remember correctly, I believe that something like (paraphrased) "Why build just one for a few billion when you can build two for twice the price?"
I dont entirely disagree with you, but I think at the end of the day, whether it could be considered cracking or not depends on the intent of the owners of the site.
You could argue that the web pages were not ever intended to be accessed in the way that they were, because firstly the site's owner does not provide direct orindirect links to those pages, and secondly, the URL's used to get to the page are obviously being used as an extraordinarily weak form of secority (ie. through obscurity).
Now that is just plan stupid on behalf of AT&T, but so is having your email password set to "12345", yet if someone accessed your email or other system you owned through by going to the login screen and guessing your password, or writng a script to try obvious passwords, it would certainly be considered hacking - because that person has not been authorized to have access to that system.
At the end of the day, it is the courts and possibly a jury that will determine whether this is considered a hack (in the system cracking sense). Since the goatse security guys obviously do not actually have a legitimate reason to access any of those pages of info, and they are using a script to do the accessing in a way that is a litle similar to how password guessing programs work, I would say that this will eventually be considered a hack, by the court system.
If the justice system court can convict a someone of murder even without an actual murder weapon, witness or definitive motive (Not thinking of a particular case, but I am sure there are plenty) , I am pretty sure it wont have too much trouble nailing these guys for hacking if it so wishes.
The stupid thing about this, is that according to the article, te SPOT eachnique used to pick out potential suspects supposedly wrks by observing small micro-expressions made by the suspect - an eyebrow twitch, stiffening of the lips, etc. Therefore, anyone who uses Botox should be right up there in the most suspicious group - as this could easily be used to put a nice dead expression on your would-be terrorist's face.
One thing that I find extremely irritating is how much TV time is spent televising sports - half the news programs here are about sports, there are many hours of TV time dedicated to sorts, not to mention whole free to air sports channels. After discussing this sad fact with my girlfriend just this weekend, we came to the conclusion that the reason why there is so much sport on TV versus say, coverage of computer games etc, is that of course sports events offer advertising agencies huge amounts of revenue, with the many ad placement opportunities that exist.
I have often wondered why it is that people who dedicate their lives to playing an absolutely meaningless pass-time, such as playing cricket, soccer or rugby, can become such national heroes, whearas there is no equivalent adulation for someone who participates in an equally meaingless game, such as say, striving to become the top ranked WoW arena combatant.
If there were actual in - game advertisements or places for product endorsement in computer games, do you think there would actually be more coverage, or does the fundamental difference in the games preclude this? Ie. televised sports have mostly been set up for the viewers, whereas computer games are mostly set up for the players.
Wow that would have to have sucked. I bet whoever let the last cinder snuff it took a long time to live that one down. I mean, it wouldn't have been so bad losing fire up around say, Cairns - but down in Tasmania? Brr!
Crappy brain dead design strikes again. Why on earth are mobile phone apps even allowed to make calls in the first place, without some sort of specificaly made user authorization?
Surely that should be something that has to be done on a per-application basis, and only after the user has allowed it by entering an authorization password to allow the app to access those parts of the phone!? There should also be a way to limit the number or costs of calls (per application) that is built in at the lowest possible level too.
Its funny how the whale hunting nations love to spout on about it being part of their cultural heritage.
I have no problem with people hunting and eating whales as part of their cultural heritage, as long as they do it in the traditional way - from a kayak or other small boat with a hand thrown harpoon and in their own territorial waters. It is certainly NOT part of the Japanese cultural heritage to go sailing the high seas down around Antarctica with explosive harpoons, hunting types of whales that they would never have been able to from traditional watercraft.
There are very few environmentalists and other eco-warriors that are up in arms about the Inuits in Alasks hunting whales, because they DO hunt them in the traditional way, in a limited region, and for their own use, not for resale to the highest bidder. If Japan also did this, hunting in their own territorial waters, then there would be a whole lot less for everyone to be complaining about.
Worse yet is the claim that the whale hunt is "for science".
At the very least, if it is really so necessary to do all this important scientific research ( by the way, just how many papers have the whalers published recently?) then the whales should be ditched overboard, not be allowed to be resold. Yes, it is a waste, but do you think it would be at all helpful to elephants for example, if it was allowable to sell the ivory from ones that had died naturally or had died during the course of scientific investigations? Of course it wouldn't - you'd suddenly have a lot more people wanting to do lethal elephant experiments, just to get the ivory.
I love Japan, Japanese culture, and certainly respect traditional customs - I lived there for over 6 years, so I am definitely not anti-Japanese - but on this issue, they definitely suck. (so do the Norwegians, though I understand they are generally very nice people - haven't known any personally though)
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Have a look at actual military spending figures world wide. If anyone is going to be using any swarming tactics, it's the US, not Korea or China. Land war, of course China is going to have more boots on the ground - but not more drones/missiles etc. at their current spending levels.
http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
You ever wonder why the US is having economic problems? Here's a hint: Have a look at what happened to the USSR. Perhaps if less money was actually spend on weapons and technology to blow shit up, and more was spend on capital infrastructure that is actually useful for production, the US wouldn't be in as big an economic the hole it is these days.
Robot Odyssey ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odysseyrel=url2html-3550http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey> got me started in digital electronics when I was a kid.
It was very addictive to play, and educational at the same time - requiring you to wire up the bot's thrusters and various sensors so that it would navigate around a room to get past an obstacle that you could not.
It is a shame there aren't more adventure games. You could make sub-circuits that were effectively like IC's, that you could design and incorporate together to make more complex circuits There was even an on/off remote control / aerial that could be wired in, so if you were smart enough you could create a serial encoder/decoder and control the bot's thrusters more directly.
Unfortunately, in modern games, even in sci-fi based games that purportedly have you crack some kind of electronic code or puzzle to get past various doors, they never actually use anything even remotely resembling real world electronics - even though there is obviously a good opportunity to do so in such games.
Apparently it's about $587.50 USD per month for a western equivalent 2 bed apartment.http://matadorabroad.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-live-in-china/
For a little more you get much more ($2 a week) that you could not get in the west for the same price - eg. a maid, cleaning staff, etc, and the basica like food and energy are much cheaper than in the west.
However, your quoted average Chinese income of $2,025 per year (ie. $168.75 per month) is obviously well below this level.
There are 170,000 prisoners in California.
it costs $47,102 per prisoner to keep them in jail. http://www.lao.ca.gov/laoapp/laomenus/sections/crim_justice/6_cj_inmatecost.aspx?catid=3
Total cost: $8 billion
California Budget deficit: $19 Billion
so no, just halving the number of prisoners alone would not solve the budget crisis - but some percentage of them would be paying taxes, and generally participating in the economy of the state which would further increase revenues, instead of each of them being a $47,000 a year money pit.
Additionally, the guards etc. that are needed to guard them would be engaged in some other part of the economy which would also increase growth.
Having a guard watching over a prisoner is the economic equivalent of having the state employ people to dig holes and fill them in again - it keeps people busy but does not help with the growth of the economy. If the prisoners really need to be in jail then it's worth while, but if they are there because of laws that tend to be "jail happy" ( like trigger happy) then it is a waste of resources to keep them there and a waste of their potential contribution to society. Leep jail for the really bad crooks - not the idiots that decided to smoke the wrong substance - those guys need education/rehabilitation, not jail.
no, I do not think that society wants to make everyone equal - which is why the idealized version of communism will always fail - everyone is most certainly not equal, and people who put in the effort to better themselves and are more productive should be better rewarded for their efforts.
I think the real problem is rampant crony-ism in both China and in Western countries, where there is a huge disparity between the pay for top level jobs versus average jobs.
The 10x figure was not completely out of my ass, by the way. The average worker salary in the US is about $50,000, and in the 80's the salary used to be 42x the average working salary. President Obama has set the salary cap at 500,000 for any of the companies that the government bailed out (ie. 10x), and that seems like a reasonable starting point to me.
You can only live in one house, cruise around in one boat and drive one car at a time. At a certain point, bigger and bigger salaries for top CEO's stop increasing the real quality of life of an executive and instead just becomes a way of keeping track of how much better than the next CEO they are - ie. the marginal utility of every extra dollar a CEO earns approaches zero, but it is in our nature to always want more, so the salaries grow way beyond the point at which further increases are meaningless.
The same amount of money however, makes a much bigger difference to employees at the bottom end of the pay scale, and would overall improve the standard of the average employee much more, and generally make for happier employees.
I am not saying everyone should get paid identically - of course individual talents and skills have to be recognized and rewarded. I am just questioning the huge disparity between the top levels and the bottom levels, which are by and large maid at the expense of the guys on the bottom rung.
The other difference is in the US, workers are sold the dream that anyone has an equal chance to make it big if they work hard enough at it, and workers are free to complain long and loud about the system , their bosses, how much the government sucks, etc.
In China, they had a revolution that was supposed to make everyone equal, but the workers are still getting screwed over and getting bugger all for their efforts, without any accompanying freedoms that US workers enjoy.
Of course in both systems, the workers are getting screwed, and will probably always get screwed, because those in charge of the means of production, (ie. factory owners, Intellectual property owners, land owners etc.) will always find a way to justify why their time and effort is worth so much more per hour than the ordinary employees.
For example, do you think that the average CEO of a company really does such a magnificent job compared to the average employee, that they should be paid 531 times the average hourly worker? http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/a/CEOsOverpaid.htm
There is definitely a case for CEOs getting paid more than a regular worker, (say, 10x), as they do have a great deal more responsibility and a rarer set of skills compared to the average worker, but that level of difference is a sign of a broken and unfair system, just as it is in China.
The sad fact is, although it sucks to live in China due to censorship and general lack of political freedom, I don't think the US is really as free as everyone seems to think - after all, the US has the largest percentage of its population out of any country:
Figures are for the number of people jailed per 100,000 population, for 2007.
There is a more up to date list (7th edition) but I couldn't find a link for it that didn't require a PDF download.
USA: 714
China: 117
Japan: 58
Australia: 117
UK: 142 (England and Wales)
So don't sit back and congratulate yourself too much for living in a free and open country if you are in the US.
Of course, for many crimes in China you get a bullet in the back of the head - and it is estimated that there are thousands of executions per year.
About half the US population is sitting in jail as a result of drug related offences - due the the war on drugs and 3 strikes policies there.
It's also a big part of the reason why California is going bankrupt.
Of course, as everyone know, Australia is entirely populated by criminals, which may account for the relatively low percentage of us locked up here.
All that said - if China is so damned worried about Facebook being a tool of subversion, - they should start subverting the US using the same tools, if the Chinese system of government is supposed to be so damned good...
The real cost is not storing it - but rather the cost in recording all that info in the first place. Someone has to type in all that data to start with, and possibly someone else has to at least glance at the resulting reams of reports that are produced from it.
It is all too tempting to create database apps to record all sorts of information "just in case", but more often than not all you end up doing is making the system more complex than it has to be, and more time consuming in maintenance of both the application and the data.
I like this idea a lot - someone definitely needs to develop a phone answering bot that could detect when the telemarketer has finished giving their spiel, so it could let the telemarketer give their spiel, then respond with one of several pre-recorded messages that are selected by the GA, and as you suggest, have it keep trying different combinations so that it selects the sorts of responses that keep the telemarketer tied up as long as possible.
I get one or two calls every day from someone wanting donations for some charity or other, informing me that I have won a special holiday discount deal, or trying to convince me to change providers. Even more annoying are the calls that just hang up when you answer, probably because the telemarketer dialer dialed me but they didn't have any drones handy to give me their extra special deal spiel.
It's the karmic company cycle.
One of these days IBM will die and then reincarnate as the new Google.
This problem has not been stated sufficiently clearly in the summary:
"I have two children, one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?"
The way I read it, the answer is 50%, if we assume that the distribution of sexes is even - with the first sentence only there to mislead.
The problem should have been more clearly stated - for example:
"If I have two children, what is the probability that both are boys if one is a boy born on a Tuesday?"
The original question does not tie the first sentence into the probability question correctly. You might have well asked
"I have two children, one of whom is a boy with red hair. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?"
I am not generally picky about grammar, but in this case, where the question is obviously designed to be some sort of "trick question", the submitter has to be a much more careful in how the question is stated.
China steals 5 pieces of tech for every 1 they build
This kind of thinking is why the US and other western countries are going to fail in the long term.
Just like Japan in the 50's, China right now is largely perceived as being a country that makes cheap knock offs of products that are invented in the US or Europe, with no real innovation of their own.
The reality of course, is that we mostly only see the cheap crappy products that importers are willing to import - China actually has some pretty good tech of their own that does not get exported.
They are already the main producers of our favorite tech toys - iPads, iPhones, etc etc.
When I lived in Japan I was always surprised to see how far behind the "latest and greatest" consumer goods were back in my own country (eg. video cameras) compared to what was available in Japan. I would be very surprised if this is not already the case with stuff coming out of China too - we only see the goods here that importers are willing to import, which seems to be mostly the cheap knockoff stuff.
China is now greatly out-pacing the rest of the world in terms of growth in scientific research, and it already massively exceeds Japan - 125,000 in 2009 vs 72,000 from Japan) it will only be 6 or 7 years before it passes the US too.
The we keep believing the myth that the only the US or Europe is capable of producing innovative products, the further behind we will slide in science and technology, until we wake up one day and wonder why it is that the only thing that we are producing is the very goods that we used to ascribe to third world countries - ie. agricultural and primary products like ore ore and coal, with perhaps a few Britney CDs thrown in too.
The amount of money that was spent to reach the moon during the space race was astronomical - and justifiable at the time due the the cold war. To really get back in the space business properly, there has to be a good commercial reason to get there, and it has to be private companies that do it. What we should really be doing is encouraging more private enterprises to get into the field by having more schemes like the X prizes, which has so far been very successful at helping drive private industry into the field. The problem with large publicly funded NASA driven projects is it just generates way too much pork barrel inefficiencies, with relatively little return for all that public spending compared to what can be achieved by private companies for the same money.
I would like to see someone actually start trying to do something like actually capture an asteroid (or use some of the existing hunks of rock) at one of the Lagrange points as the basis for industrial mining, processing and fabrication of stuff in space - as ultimately this is probably going to be the most affordable way to build substantial structures up there, as opposed to pushing up every single component on rockets at thousands of dollars per Kg. Perhaps it is time for an X prize type competition for the first company who can actually make something from stuff that is already out there in space, so we can finally start building real space based industries.
Hell just derive quaternions from scratch and then write a program to use them to implement some kind of armature system. That should leave plenty of scars on your brain - no need for a tattoo at all!
My CD's are working fine too - wish I could say the same about the numerous CD and DVD dives or players I have had over the years.
I really hate CDs and DVDs - the medium itself is way too easy to damage, but worse, the bloody CD drives / players just have too many points of failure in them.
I had yet another DVD drive fail on me this week - I don't watch that many movies or burn a lot of stuff, but I have gone through at least 4 DVD drives, and quite a few CD drives over the years, not to mention 3 stand alone DVD players ie. that you plug into your TV.
I still have the first CD I bought, which still plays, but the CD player in the first stereo I bought to play it in died years ago - even though the radio and tape player in the same unit work fine. I had several walkman CD players too, that have call rapped out over the years too. The CD and DVD players are just too damn flakey and prone to going out of alignment or having their lasers burn out or something. I even had one DVD burner somehow leave a burn mark on a game CD when it failed! (it created a partly melted spot on the original game CD (which has to be in the drive when playing the game) which has rendered it unusable
Anything which depends on mechanical parts that have to line up precisely for successful reading and writing is just asking for trouble, and never going to be a good long term storage solution.
The good thing about solid state storage is there are no moving parts to go wrong - so as long as the device is designed to be adequately protected from static discharge, it's going to be a lot better, in my books.
I personally cant wait to see the death of CD/DVD (or for that matter, anything involving a spinning disk) to go the way of the dinousar once and for all.
hopefully this will bring in solid state storage to replace CD's and DVD's for everything - the sooner the better.
you mean there's a better formula than this to calculate the great circle distance between two decimal GPS coordinates?
distance = 6371.01 * ATAN2(SIN(RADIANS(from_lat))*SIN(RADIANS(to_lat))+COS(RADIANS(from_lat))*COS(RADIANS(to_lat))*COS(RADIANS(to_long-from_long)), SQRT((COS(RADIANS(to_lat))*SIN(RADIANS(to_long-from_long)))^2 + ((COS(RADIANS(from_lat))*SIN(RADIANS(to_lat)))-SIN(RADIANS(from_lat))*COS(RADIANS(to_lat))*COS(RADIANS(to_long-from_long)))^2))
I considered doing this, but I sometimes hand my business card out to people, which has my skype details on it.
In the same way that you wouldn't want to block people from calling your phone unless they were on your friends list, I do not want to block people from skyping me if they are not on my contacts list.
I do however want to be able to eliminate the lamer contacts.
If there were some way to tell how long a skype account had been active, Ideally, I would like to have a filter so that I could only be contacted by people that had some minimum skype credit, or that had an account that was more than say, a month old, or block messages from accounts that had sent messages to more than 100 people today.
If the skype admins cancel accounts that are reported as being abusive from several people, then that should be pretty effective at completely eliminating spam from the skype network.
The other major feature I wish a skype front end had, is the ability to have video conference calls tiled, so that the multiple contacts were in a grid or something like that.
The other thing that is missing on Linux skype is a 2d or 3d sketch program of some sort so that you can have a shared sketch area. Since I work from home and use skype to communicate with my client in another city, this would be tremendously helpful for a lot of the conversations I have when talking about the project.
It should be making them a profit - I only use Linux and use Skype for nearly all my calls and have been doing so for several years now, since August 2006. I have a skype-Out account, and regularly make calls to mobile phones and land-lines, and occasionally overseas, and I have a skype-in number too. So far in 2010, I have spent $63 with them.
Surely I can't be the only one. I definitely feel like a second class citizen in the Skype world though, with a UI that has been in beta for a year, and is significantly lagging the windows versions.
From what I understand of the situation, Skype is restricted in what they can release as open source, due to licensing of certain technologies they have in their codecs - not much can be done about that I suppose, short of a complete rewrite or finding a suitable replacement that is not so encumbered.
If the released API makes it possible to create calls, send & receive video and fetch on-line info about your contacts, then great! At last it will be possible to write a decent front end!
I Really don't know why the front end wasn't written using QT, so that it wouldn't be such a big deal to keep all platforms on the same version of UI, , but I sure intend to have a stab at writing a front end in QT/C++ if I can get my grubby little hands on a copy of the API and libraries.
First thing I will be implementing in my front end for skype: Some kind of filter so I stop getting those damn penis enlargment ads / chat with Mis-sxyxxx chick etc. that keep popping up every few days.
I use WPA on my wifi, so they can't sniff. I do it because there are a lot of people out there who feel that a non-protected wifi link is theirs for the using.
The problem is there are some people/organizations who run nodes that ARE free to use - so if you don't want people to use your network uninvited, the simplest thing to do is close the door as you have done. Even the very weakest encryption would be enough to indicate that you do not intend your network to be used publicly. Simply having SSID broadcast turned off with no encryption at all would also indicate you do not intend it to be public, however, if you have your router happily broadcasting it's SSID, with no encryption and transmitting strongly enough to be received by a car driving down the street, well that's basically saying "come use me!"
Although it is worth investigating exactly what information Google collected and why, that is not what the suit is going to be about - it's going to be a great big money grab by a bunch of lawyers on behalf of a bunch of people who couldn't be bothered to make their wireless networks private, and who lost absolutely nothing at all and were not damaged in any way by Google's actions. (Did Google start using captured credit card details or start spamming some private email address that was captured, or selling any of the private data that was captured other than perhaps the name and location of the node? I think not.)
Oh and for anyone who whines "oh not everyone is a geek who can understand how to configure a router"
RTFM! that's what it is for. It really isn't that hard!
If I remember correctly, I believe that something like (paraphrased) "Why build just one for a few billion when you can build two for twice the price?"
I dont entirely disagree with you, but I think at the end of the day, whether it could be considered cracking or not depends on the intent of the owners of the site.
You could argue that the web pages were not ever intended to be accessed in the way that they were, because firstly the site's owner does not provide direct orindirect links to those pages, and secondly, the URL's used to get to the page are obviously being used as an extraordinarily weak form of secority (ie. through obscurity).
Now that is just plan stupid on behalf of AT&T, but so is having your email password set to "12345", yet if someone accessed your email or other system you owned through by going to the login screen and guessing your password, or writng a script to try obvious passwords, it would certainly be considered hacking - because that person has not been authorized to have access to that system.
At the end of the day, it is the courts and possibly a jury that will determine whether this is considered a hack (in the system cracking sense). Since the goatse security guys obviously do not actually have a legitimate reason to access any of those pages of info, and they are using a script to do the accessing in a way that is a litle similar to how password guessing programs work, I would say that this will eventually be considered a hack, by the court system.
If the justice system court can convict a someone of murder even without an actual murder weapon, witness or definitive motive (Not thinking of a particular case, but I am sure there are plenty) , I am pretty sure it wont have too much trouble nailing these guys for hacking if it so wishes.
The stupid thing about this, is that according to the article, te SPOT eachnique used to pick out potential suspects supposedly wrks by observing small micro-expressions made by the suspect - an eyebrow twitch, stiffening of the lips, etc.
Therefore, anyone who uses Botox should be right up there in the most suspicious group - as this could easily be used to put a nice dead expression on your would-be terrorist's face.
One thing that I find extremely irritating is how much TV time is spent televising sports - half the news programs here are about sports, there are many hours of TV time dedicated to sorts, not to mention whole free to air sports channels.
After discussing this sad fact with my girlfriend just this weekend, we came to the conclusion that the reason why there is so much sport on TV versus say, coverage of computer games etc, is that of course sports events offer advertising agencies huge amounts of revenue, with the many ad placement opportunities that exist.
I have often wondered why it is that people who dedicate their lives to playing an absolutely meaningless pass-time, such as playing cricket, soccer or rugby, can become such national heroes, whearas there is no equivalent adulation for someone who participates in an equally meaingless game, such as say, striving to become the top ranked WoW arena combatant.
If there were actual in - game advertisements or places for product endorsement in computer games, do you think there would actually be more coverage, or does the fundamental difference in the games preclude this? Ie. televised sports have mostly been set up for the viewers, whereas computer games are mostly set up for the players.
Wow that would have to have sucked. I bet whoever let the last cinder snuff it took a long time to live that one down.
I mean, it wouldn't have been so bad losing fire up around say, Cairns - but down in Tasmania? Brr!
Crappy brain dead design strikes again.
Why on earth are mobile phone apps even allowed to make calls in the first place, without some sort of specificaly made user authorization?
Surely that should be something that has to be done on a per-application basis, and only after the user has allowed it by entering an authorization password to allow the app to access those parts of the phone!?
There should also be a way to limit the number or costs of calls (per application) that is built in at the lowest possible level too.
Its funny how the whale hunting nations love to spout on about it being part of their cultural heritage.
I have no problem with people hunting and eating whales as part of their cultural heritage, as long as they do it in the traditional way - from a kayak or other small boat with a hand thrown harpoon and in their own territorial waters.
It is certainly NOT part of the Japanese cultural heritage to go sailing the high seas down around Antarctica with explosive harpoons, hunting types of whales that they would never have been able to from traditional watercraft.
There are very few environmentalists and other eco-warriors that are up in arms about the Inuits in Alasks hunting whales, because they DO hunt them in the traditional way, in a limited region, and for their own use, not for resale to the highest bidder. If Japan also did this, hunting in their own territorial waters, then there would be a whole lot less for everyone to be complaining about.
Worse yet is the claim that the whale hunt is "for science".
At the very least, if it is really so necessary to do all this important scientific research ( by the way, just how many papers have the whalers published recently?) then the whales should be ditched overboard, not be allowed to be resold.
Yes, it is a waste, but do you think it would be at all helpful to elephants for example, if it was allowable to sell the ivory from ones that had died naturally or had died during the course of scientific investigations? Of course it wouldn't - you'd suddenly have a lot more people wanting to do lethal elephant experiments, just to get the ivory.
I love Japan, Japanese culture, and certainly respect traditional customs - I lived there for over 6 years, so I am definitely not anti-Japanese - but on this issue, they definitely suck.
(so do the Norwegians, though I understand they are generally very nice people - haven't known any personally though)