>>Heh... Enjoy the fun you're going to have with the Secret Service for sharing that gem with us... >:-D
Osama != Obama, sheesh.
Not that I don't get enough trouble going through airport security as it is. 6 months ago I got pulled out of the line when my plane was boarding for additional screening for wearing a Rodrigo Gracie t-shirt that said "I don't need a weapon." I'm not sure what they were expecting to find, considering my shirt expressly said... I didn't need a weapon.
Me and a Korean War vet in a wheelchair, actually. I knew he was a Korean War vet because that's what his hat said. The American flags all over his wheelchair must have looked suspicious to the TSA super-duper security team, though.
>>...do you really think the TSA's antics have anything to do with the 9/11 attacks? Other than using the attacks as an excuse.
Of course they were a response to 9/11. Do you really think the massive increase in homeland security spending (let alone the creation of the DHS) had nothing to do with 9/11?
From the TSA's website: "We were created in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to strengthen the security of the nation's transportation systems."
Their molestation of passengers and endless luggage screening queues are the direct result of that. Note that I'm not saying they do any good, just that there was a causal effect between 9/11 and our new body-groping overlords.
>>What will happen to Sony as a result of this? Nothing. All the muppets out there will continue to do business with this incompetent, morally bankrupt, behemoth
You forget that millions of gamers suddenly became unable to play Portal 2 right after it was released. Or any of their online games for an entire week.
If you think there's no nerd rage over *that*, then sure. But I'd be buying stock in Microsoft right now. Even my wife (who is only a gamer nerd by marriage) is pissed off at Sony right now.
Labradoodles are both real, *and* a blasphemous abomination before the Lord.
Seriously. Labs and Poodles should never be in the same room together, let alone mated. They're the most disgustingly horrific dog to have ever been successfully bred this side of Lovecraft's fecund imagination.
It's easy to get started in them but, no matter how easy they make it, eventually you get bogged down in trying to look up the particular name for a block that does X, because any logic that takes more than two lines of real code or relies on tight loops can't be programmed literally in the visual way.
Yeah, that was the same problem I saw with it. I am going to run through the tutorials in TFS just to make sure that I wasn't missing something, but it seems far too limited to even write Checkers or something like that.
>>Btw: The price per watt is useless as a metric because most of the time the cells don't give you their maximum power rating. What is interesting is the price per unit of energy averaged over a year. I.e $/kWh.
Right, for example SunPower makes much more efficient panels than the ones I bought, but since I had plenty of square-footage on my rooftop, I went with the ones that provided the best bang for the buck, instead of bang per sqft.
Efficiency of a panel is only one component - price is ultimately what gets people to buy one.
He's probably talking about all the ridiculous MTBF estimates that are basically developed from putting 1M widgets in a room for a month, and then when one fails, say that the MTBF on the device is a million months.
Because, you know, there's no such thing as corrosion or rust or wear or whatever...
>>I hear witchdoctors have a success rate equal to chiropractors.
Can witch doctors cure back pain?
Because Chiros are actually really good at that. It's just all the other, vaguely related stuff that is nonsense. But when a dickhead in jiu-jitsu knocked my vertebrae out of alignment (sideways), I could barely stand up until a Chiropractor fixed it.
>>Coal will eventually peak, too. And if coal consumption increases due to coal for liquefaction, the peak will be reached sooner
Under the Shaka Energy Plan, we'll use coal for gas (and we have plenty of reserves), and nuclear (with solar/wind if they become cost-efficient) for energy - freeing up all those glorious petrochemicals for gasoline. =)
Gasoline imports drop to zero, coal consumption stays about the same, nuclear consumption goes up. We're given 100 more years to figure out cold fusion.
That may be so, but some politicians, analysts and CEOs are then very good at pretending they do believe oil won't run out in a century and/or alternatives will be found fast. Anyways, the IEA recently acknowledged that peak of conventional (easy, cheap) oil had happened already http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-11-11/iea-acknowledges-peak-oil . We may find alternatives, but economic growth is heavily dependent on cheap oil, which is becoming scarce fast. I guess nuclear power plants are going to stay with us for a while, even after the Fukushima incident and subsequent panic.
>>It looked so freaking dangerous, I was concerned enough to call with the local train authorities, and they were like "Yeah, that's normal. Why you think we make the freight trains move so slow in the first place" and basically hung up on me without wanting to even know exactly where.
The high speed rail network in California will use different tracks from the freight lines, though they will be in the same right-of-way in a lot of places.
App store is the very definition of a generic trademark, and so should have very little protection.
But then again, I thought trademarking footlong (tm) sandwiches should be impossible (descriptive trademark), so maybe our legal system IS broken, I dunno.
At the University of California researchers, both faculty and students, are required to inform a technology transfer office of any discovery that is potentially patentable. This agency handles all the paperwork and other legal issues, and it also handles licensing the patent to interested commercial organizations. The fees collected for the licensing gets split: *** 25% for the researcher *** 25% for the researcher's department 50% for the UC system
I remember when that changed - when I started at UC San Diego, it was only 10% for the researcher, IIRC. I guess they figured that pissing off people that could just leave the university to get 100% from their ideas wasn't maybe the most optimal strategy to take.
Quite correct. I worked for a company that made an intelligence test that many people on/. have probably taken at some point.
We had shelves full of variations of the tests all designed (and validated against) test takers from all over the world. In short, if you can't understand a question because of a language or cultural bias in the question, or because the question is worded difficultly, it doesn't mean you're dumber than me. That's not what these tests are after.
That's kind of my point though - as a Communications minor (technically, area of study, but people don't know what that is), we studied linguistic genius, and how it was being ignored on intelligence tests for this and other reasons.
Which goes against our common sense definition of "smart", if you think about it - when you meet someone who can express their ideas quickly or cleverly, you think to yourself "Ah, he's a really smart person!" regardless of whether or not he knows what Kuru is.
The native English speaking population of America is certainly large enough to normalize and validate a test that can assess this sort of thing. I'd maybe use the SAT writing test as an example, except it is also (unfortunately) a test of handwriting as well.
WTF? A month is a "reasonable" amount of time? Should I really devote a month of my life towards taking a test to prove to the world how smart I am? Already, by the very construction of this test, there will only be a small subset of the population that passes it, since in order to take it you either have to be motivated to spend a lot of time proving how smart you are or just really enjoy solving puzzles.
Heh heh. That's exactly what TFA is about - motivating has a very high correlation with how well people do in IQ tests.
Maybe they just gave a bunch of kids the Titan test and told them they had a month to solve it. =)
>>The PhD program is too focused on solving problems that Google or Microsoft kinds might also be tackling; like text data mining
Is that what TFA means when he says "They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population"?
Or does the Columbia professor really want to task all of America's PhDs onto solving a problem we already solved a long time ago?
>>That is not an assumption, it's a part of the definition of the term IQ. Read more here:
No, it really is an assumption about human intelligence. After IQ scores are collected, they are forced onto a bell curve, whether the distribution matches the normal curve or not. This is a statistical fallacy.
If you think intelligence is a collection of random processes, I think you have a very dim view of intelligence.
>>They'd be right...but measuring that ability on a standardized test is very difficult because language is different for everybody and depends a lot on cultural factors.
It doesn't need to be standardized. If the point of an IQ test is to identify gifted students so you can track them separately, then you can have counselors give the tests one on one.
>>Uh, MIT still has their class A to this day, re-ip'ing everything on campus would be a huge undertaking and besides having every end station using a publicly routable IP is the ideal situation since it ensures the original end to end design of the internet.
Hmm, I thought I'd read something about them returning their class A a while back. It looks like I'm wrong.
Does MIT really need 16 million IP addresses? Seriously, the IANA should charge a cent per IPv4 address per year.
> Why do we ass that IQ follws a Gaussian distribution?
because that's what happens when you sum a collection of uniform random variables
why is IQ a sum of uniform random variables?
by design.
derp.
Ok, genius, now show either that 1) humans are a collection of random processes or 2) that the questions on an IQ test have no correlation to each other.
I'll wait for your well reasoned response....
Ok, no, I won't. The IQ test they gave me in 2nd grade involved 50% jigsaw puzzle solving, 25% vocab ("What is a caterpillar?") and 25% math ("2 + 5 = ?"). The problem is, once you know addition, you can solve 100% of them correctly. They are NOT independent from each other, so applying a Gaussian to the results should only be done if the test designer is as naive as you.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Do you think that just by killing bin laden Al Queda will just magically vanish?
It took place on the same day (or close enough) Pope John Paul II was beatified.
I'm not a Catholic, but I'm going to give him credit for Miracle #1 here.
>>Heh... Enjoy the fun you're going to have with the Secret Service for sharing that gem with us... >:-D
Osama != Obama, sheesh.
Not that I don't get enough trouble going through airport security as it is. 6 months ago I got pulled out of the line when my plane was boarding for additional screening for wearing a Rodrigo Gracie t-shirt that said "I don't need a weapon." I'm not sure what they were expecting to find, considering my shirt expressly said... I didn't need a weapon.
Me and a Korean War vet in a wheelchair, actually. I knew he was a Korean War vet because that's what his hat said. The American flags all over his wheelchair must have looked suspicious to the TSA super-duper security team, though.
>>...do you really think the TSA's antics have anything to do with the 9/11 attacks? Other than using the attacks as an excuse.
Of course they were a response to 9/11. Do you really think the massive increase in homeland security spending (let alone the creation of the DHS) had nothing to do with 9/11?
From the TSA's website: "We were created in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to strengthen the security of the nation's transportation systems."
Their molestation of passengers and endless luggage screening queues are the direct result of that. Note that I'm not saying they do any good, just that there was a causal effect between 9/11 and our new body-groping overlords.
>>As for the cryptanalysis problem, simply use a salt the same size as the card number and XOR the card number with it.
You're trying to tell this to Sony, who fucking kept their passwords in PLAINTEXT in their database.
I mean, lord, everyone else on the planet figured out why that was a bad idea back in the *70s*.
>>What will happen to Sony as a result of this? Nothing. All the muppets out there will continue to do business with this incompetent, morally bankrupt, behemoth
You forget that millions of gamers suddenly became unable to play Portal 2 right after it was released. Or any of their online games for an entire week.
If you think there's no nerd rage over *that*, then sure. But I'd be buying stock in Microsoft right now. Even my wife (who is only a gamer nerd by marriage) is pissed off at Sony right now.
Fortunately, TSA agents are starting to get in trouble for their molestation of thousands of innocent passengers each day.
Oh, sorry, not for the actual molestation, you know, but joking about it afterward.
I wish I could have shot Osama myself for all the wasted hours I've spent in TSA lines because of his antics.
Labradoodles are both real, *and* a blasphemous abomination before the Lord.
Seriously. Labs and Poodles should never be in the same room together, let alone mated. They're the most disgustingly horrific dog to have ever been successfully bred this side of Lovecraft's fecund imagination.
Yeah, that was the same problem I saw with it. I am going to run through the tutorials in TFS just to make sure that I wasn't missing something, but it seems far too limited to even write Checkers or something like that.
>>Btw: The price per watt is useless as a metric because most of the time the cells don't give you their maximum power rating. What is interesting is the price per unit of energy averaged over a year. I.e $/kWh.
Right, for example SunPower makes much more efficient panels than the ones I bought, but since I had plenty of square-footage on my rooftop, I went with the ones that provided the best bang for the buck, instead of bang per sqft.
Efficiency of a panel is only one component - price is ultimately what gets people to buy one.
>>.. a vulnerability in the process for finding new ICANN VPs has recently been discovered.
Didn't the ICANN just recently switch to electronic voting?
He's probably talking about all the ridiculous MTBF estimates that are basically developed from putting 1M widgets in a room for a month, and then when one fails, say that the MTBF on the device is a million months.
Because, you know, there's no such thing as corrosion or rust or wear or whatever...
>>I hear witchdoctors have a success rate equal to chiropractors.
Can witch doctors cure back pain?
Because Chiros are actually really good at that. It's just all the other, vaguely related stuff that is nonsense. But when a dickhead in jiu-jitsu knocked my vertebrae out of alignment (sideways), I could barely stand up until a Chiropractor fixed it.
>>Coal will eventually peak, too. And if coal consumption increases due to coal for liquefaction, the peak will be reached sooner
Under the Shaka Energy Plan, we'll use coal for gas (and we have plenty of reserves), and nuclear (with solar/wind if they become cost-efficient) for energy - freeing up all those glorious petrochemicals for gasoline. =)
Gasoline imports drop to zero, coal consumption stays about the same, nuclear consumption goes up. We're given 100 more years to figure out cold fusion.
Coal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process
>>It looked so freaking dangerous, I was concerned enough to call with the local train authorities, and they were like "Yeah, that's normal. Why you think we make the freight trains move so slow in the first place" and basically hung up on me without wanting to even know exactly where.
The high speed rail network in California will use different tracks from the freight lines, though they will be in the same right-of-way in a lot of places.
App store is the very definition of a generic trademark, and so should have very little protection.
But then again, I thought trademarking footlong (tm) sandwiches should be impossible (descriptive trademark), so maybe our legal system IS broken, I dunno.
I remember when that changed - when I started at UC San Diego, it was only 10% for the researcher, IIRC. I guess they figured that pissing off people that could just leave the university to get 100% from their ideas wasn't maybe the most optimal strategy to take.
That's kind of my point though - as a Communications minor (technically, area of study, but people don't know what that is), we studied linguistic genius, and how it was being ignored on intelligence tests for this and other reasons.
Which goes against our common sense definition of "smart", if you think about it - when you meet someone who can express their ideas quickly or cleverly, you think to yourself "Ah, he's a really smart person!" regardless of whether or not he knows what Kuru is.
The native English speaking population of America is certainly large enough to normalize and validate a test that can assess this sort of thing. I'd maybe use the SAT writing test as an example, except it is also (unfortunately) a test of handwriting as well.
Heh heh. That's exactly what TFA is about - motivating has a very high correlation with how well people do in IQ tests.
Maybe they just gave a bunch of kids the Titan test and told them they had a month to solve it. =)
>>Linguistic fluency is not an accurate measurement. Take a French speaker taking a test in English.
It's more about being quick witted than technical accuracy. But you're right, non-native speakers would need a different sort of test.
>>The PhD program is too focused on solving problems that Google or Microsoft kinds might also be tackling; like text data mining
Is that what TFA means when he says "They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population"?
Or does the Columbia professor really want to task all of America's PhDs onto solving a problem we already solved a long time ago?
>>That is not an assumption, it's a part of the definition of the term IQ. Read more here:
No, it really is an assumption about human intelligence. After IQ scores are collected, they are forced onto a bell curve, whether the distribution matches the normal curve or not. This is a statistical fallacy.
If you think intelligence is a collection of random processes, I think you have a very dim view of intelligence.
>>They'd be right...but measuring that ability on a standardized test is very difficult because language is different for everybody and depends a lot on cultural factors.
It doesn't need to be standardized. If the point of an IQ test is to identify gifted students so you can track them separately, then you can have counselors give the tests one on one.
>>Uh, MIT still has their class A to this day, re-ip'ing everything on campus would be a huge undertaking and besides having every end station using a publicly routable IP is the ideal situation since it ensures the original end to end design of the internet.
Hmm, I thought I'd read something about them returning their class A a while back. It looks like I'm wrong.
Does MIT really need 16 million IP addresses? Seriously, the IANA should charge a cent per IPv4 address per year.