Protecting an entire building from lightning is a solved problem. You need a lightning rod.
My aunt and uncle live in a hundred year old farm house. It has a lightning rod. Their butter churn has never had to be replaced due to a blown circuit.
I am teaching my nephews how to program during their week off from school. I went with a platform that all households had readily available: Excel. Excel VBA is robust enough to create fun games from the Atari generation, forgiving enough to keep new programmers from being frustrated quickly, and the skills learned will carry my wards into many business environments for years to come. Even if Excel goes away, learning to manipulate data, graphics, and data in a spreadsheet program will be useful some day.
I notice that there are massive differences between turn signals between cars. Leds & halogens. Stylish and garish. Round and boxy. High or low. Wide or slim.
The government, we the people, will have to be careful to set the regulations such that innovation is not stifled.
As Green Car Reports notes, the legislation would allow for a common set of standards, rather than than a motley crew of approaches attempted by various automakers.
Brilliant. Legislate away the possibilities for innovation before the new market has a chance to solve the problem. Is it only in America that "leaders" push science and math and the entrepreneurial spirit, and then quickly make it illegal to innovate lest anyone gets hurt? sheesh
What this country needs is a good five cent nickel.
PVP Online makes comedy out of the discomfort some people feel in the presence of a potty mouth.
Personally, my belief in free speech is strong enough that I do not care what words a person uses to express ideas. However, there are ramifications for how a person expresses those ideas; similar to how there are consequences for how society reacts to the clothes a person wears.
Did George ever getting around to suing Blizzard for including a brightly lit and lightweight sabre in Diablo 2? Just ridiculous if he did not go after those deep pockets. He's had 10 years to sue, so I guess if he has not gotten to it by now it might not happen...
Most students get help and do not even realize it. Many States use money from the tax coffers to make higher education more affordable. Even people who beg, borrow, or steal the money to "pay their own way" through a university in these states are getting help from all tax payers.
State Share of Instruction To supplement the general operation of the state's 13 four-year universities, 24 regional branch campuses, one free standing medical college, 15 community colleges, and eight technical colleges, H.B. 119 appropriates over $3.5 billion in the fiscal years 2008-2009 biennium for unrestricted operating subsidies through the State Share of Instruction (SSI) line item.....
Are there any bright spots? Yes--Africa and Asia. The African church has grown from 55 million in 1978 to 150 million today. "The church has provided, in many cases, the voice that stands on behalf of the voiceless," says the Rev. Emmanuel Katongole, a leader in the Ugandan church. In Asia, church membership increased 80 percent since 1978, while the number of priests rose 74 percent. In fact, Africa and Asia now supply priests to the rest of the world, with about 300 coming to U.S. parishes every year. But the church faces problems in the developing world, too. Evangelical Protestantism is making inroads, and many African priests live openly with wives and children, in defiance of the Vatican's celibacy requirement.
... if it were simpler. Why is the Federal Tax Code 3.7 million words? If the tax code were simpler, then those servers would have a much easier time of it.
Scanning today's news turns up a lot of good examples for how the code could be simplified.
1) Ethanol credits increase the price of food, and give paper manufacturers more money in credits than they make from selling paper. 2) Exemption for inherited stock-gains. 3) Mortgage-interest deduction encourages people to buy as much house as they can afford, and encourages owning over renting to the detriment of other investments. 4) Exemption on employer-provided health insurance encourages employers to give more health insurance instead of wage increases, and discourages health insurers from competing on price. 5) Municipal-bond-interest exclusion gives more benefit to rich bond owners than it does to the municipalities that issue the bonds.
The Associated Press Story is a bit more informative than the USA Today blog entry in TFA.
This is the part that boggles me...
Southworth also argued that teaching contraceptive use encourages sexual behavior among children, which equates to sexual assault because minors can't legally have sex in Wisconsin.
The arbitrary line between "minors" and "adults" having sex is strange enough. Any law forbidding consenting adults is completely ridiculous. Saying that two "minors" can't go at it truly boggles because who's going to know, who's going to care, and what punishment could be worse than NOT fulfilling the biological urge with someone else who has that urge?... I figure that is how many teens are looking at it, anyhow.
I wonder if the law also intends that minors can not legally have solo-sex? Craziness...
Having my head 1 meter from a 100+ decibel turbo props for 30 minutes at a time does not sound like a good idea. Crashing in the equivalent of a flying motorcycle (human body moving fast on a structure required to hold a combustion engine) does not sound good for my health either.
This reminds me of the BIG BALL OF MUD theory by Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder at the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Shantytowns are squalid, sprawling slums. Everyone seems to agree they are a bad idea, but forces conspire to promote their emergence anyway. What is it that they are doing right?
Shantytowns are usually built from common, inexpensive materials and simple tools. Shantytowns can be built using relatively unskilled labor. Even though the labor force is "unskilled" in the customary sense, the construction and maintenance of this sort of housing can be quite labor intensive. There is little specialization. Each housing unit is constructed and maintained primarily by its inhabitants, and each inhabitant must be a jack of all the necessary trades. There is little concern for infrastructure, since infrastructure requires coordination and capital, and specialized resources, equipment, and skills. There is little overall planning or regulation of growth. Shantytowns emerge where there is a need for housing, a surplus of unskilled labor, and a dearth of capital investment. Shantytowns fulfill an immediate, local need for housing by bringing available resources to bear on the problem. Loftier architectural goals are a luxury that has to wait.
All too many of our software systems are, architecturally, little more than shantytowns. Investment in tools and infrastructure is too often inadequate. Tools are usually primitive, and infrastructure such as libraries and frameworks, is under-capitalized. Individual portions of the system grow unchecked, and the lack of infrastructure and architecture allows problems in one part of the system to erode and pollute adjacent portions. Deadlines loom like monsoons, and architectural elegance seems unattainable.
Clicky the linky above to read the whole paper. It is full of useful insights for many disciplines besides computer science.
A while back I heard a story that went like this: in a certain aquarium, fish kept disappearing from one of the tanks late at night. Baffled, the staff put up cameras to find out what was going on, and discovered that an octopus was climbing out of its tank, eating the fish, then crawling back to its own tank.
Though the story is not verified, directly, there is consensus that the story is possible and is even likely to have occurred.
Question: What Does Tethering Mean? Answer: In relation to cell phone use, tethering has two definitions and both can apply to mobile professionals' use of their cell phone.
1. The first definition of tethering refers to using a cell phone as a modem for your laptop or PDA. Creating a connection either with cables or wirelessly "tethers" your cell phone to your other mobile device.
When reading User Agreements for cell phone service providers make sure to pay attention if the Agreement prohibits the use of "tethering your cell phone" or using your cell phone in a "tethered capacity".
If you do not have a cell phone service package that allows you to use your cell phone as a modem you could be in violation of your User Agreement and lose your service. You may also find that you have incredibly high bills for your connection time.
Tether the tether by tethering the tethered tether to another tether. sheesh
I am not sure the proposed law does much if redaction is all it takes to get a pass. From Law.com:
Electronic Redaction Doesn't Always Hide What It's Supposed to Hide Paralegals need to know how to keep information confidential
Dana J. Lesemann. The Recorder. May 05, 2006
With the issue of intentional government leaks of classified information frequently in the news, the problem of unintentional leaks of classified and sensitive information is frequently overlooked. The examples are numerous and startling.
Last year, U.S. military commanders in Iraq released a long-awaited report of the American investigation into the fatal shooting of an Italian agent escorting a freed hostage through a security checkpoint. In order to give the classified report the widest possible distribution, officials posted the document on the military's "Multinational Force-Iraq" Web site in Adobe's portable document format, or PDF. The report was heavily redacted, with sections obscured by black boxes.
Within hours, however, readers in the blogosphere had discovered that the classified information would appear if the text was copied and pasted into Microsoft Word or any other word-processing program. Stars and Stripes, the Department of Defense newspaper, noted that the classified sections of the report covered "the securing of checkpoints, as well as specifics concerning how soldiers manned the checkpoint where the Italian intelligence officer was killed. In the past, Pentagon officials have repeatedly refused to discuss such details, citing security concerns." Soon after, the report was removed from the Web site.
Copies of the improperly redacted report, however, live on. We at the consulting firm of Stroz Friedberg, too, were able to remove the redaction and save the clear text in a Word document. Forensic examiners in our office found that the document had been produced directly from Microsoft Word using Adobe Acrobat 6.0's PDFMaker. The redacted text simply had been highlighted in black. As a result, to reveal the classified information, the steps are simple: Highlight the text with the "select text" button on the PDF toolbar, copy the text by typing "control C," open a new document in a word-processing program and paste the text into the new document.
I doubt that $10 million is enough to get very far in reverse engineering biological bees, much less building a colony of robo-bees with features similar to bio-bees. Nature has spent millions of years on a massively parallel R&D project to create bees as we see them today. At MIT rates, $10 million should be just enough to get some professors by until they need more grant money, and maybe pad the resumes of some grad students. There will be no robo-bee overlords anytime soon.
Aug 6th 2009
From The Economist print edition
An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world
IT IS an oft-told story, but it does not get any less horrific on repetition. Fifteen years ago, a paedophile enticed seven-year-old Megan Kanka into his home in New Jersey by offering to show her a puppy. He then raped her, killed her and dumped her body in a nearby park. The murderer, who had recently moved into the house across the street from his victim, had twice before been convicted of sexually assaulting a child. Yet Megan's parents had no idea of this. Had they known he was a sex offender, they would have told their daughter to stay away from him.
In their grief, the parents started a petition, demanding that families should be told if a sexual predator moves nearby. Hundreds of thousands signed it. In no time at all, lawmakers in New Jersey granted their wish. And before long, "Megan's laws" had spread to every American state.
America's sex-offender laws are the strictest of any rich democracy. Convicted rapists and child-molesters are given long prison sentences. When released, they are put on sex-offender registries. In most states this means that their names, photographs and addresses are published online, so that fearful parents can check whether a child-molester lives nearby. Under the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, another law named after a murdered child, all states will soon be obliged to make their sex-offender registries public. Such rules are extremely popular. Most parents will support any law that promises to keep their children safe. Other countries are following America's example, either importing Megan's laws or increasing penalties: after two little girls were murdered by a school caretaker, Britain has imposed multiple conditions on who can visit schools.
Which makes it all the more important to ask whether America's approach is the right one. In fact its sex-offender laws have grown self-defeatingly harsh (see article). They have been driven by a ratchet effect. Individual American politicians have great latitude to propose new laws. Stricter curbs on paedophiles win votes. And to sound severe, such curbs must be stronger than the laws in place, which in turn were proposed by politicians who wished to appear tough themselves. Few politicians dare to vote against such laws, because if they do, the attack ads practically write themselves.
A Whole Wyoming of Offenders
In all, 674,000 Americans are on sex-offender registries--more than the population of Vermont, North Dakota or Wyoming. The number keeps growing partly because in several states registration is for life and partly because registries are not confined to the sort of murderer who ensnared Megan Kanka. According to Human Rights Watch, at least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of "distributing child pornography" to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends.
How dangerous are the people on the registries? A state review of one sample in Georgia found that two-thirds of them posed little risk. For example, Janet Allison was found guilty of being "party to the crime of child molestation" because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married. But Ms Allison will spend the rest of her life publicly branded as a sex offender.
Several other countries have sex-offender registries, but these are typically held by the police and are hard to view. In America it takes only seconds to find out about a sex offender: some states have a "click to print" icon on their websites so that concerned citizens can put up posters wit
Let alone, if we have nearly unlimited electricity what will we do with the heat?
If human machines take energy from the wind, do work, and return waste heat to the atmosphere, then I think the cycle would repeat itself: The warmer air near the concentrations of machines (cities) would cause weather and wind just like the uneven heating of land and water does.
Doesn't every YouTube video that is entirely quiet violate copyrights on 4'33"? If so, then the copyright holder of that 'song' could dispute many videos, and potentially open the path to new revenue by getting all those copyright pirates to buy a license for the use of silence.
According to a report by Credit Suisse, YouTube is on track to lose roughly $470 million in 2009. No matter Google's $116 billion market cap: a half-billion dollar loss on a single property, even one as large as YouTube, is a bitter pill to swallow...
Since the majority of Google's costs for the service are pure variable costs of bandwidth and storage, and since they've already reached the point at which no greater economies of scale remain, the costs of the business will continue to grow on a linear basis. Unfortunately, far more user-generated content than professional content makes its way onto the site, which means that while costs grow linearly, non-monetizable content is growing geometrically as compared against the monetizable content that YouTube really wants and needs to survive. This means less and less of YouTube's library will be revenue-contributing, while the costs of delivering that library will continue to grow.
If you really want to hurt Google, then post more and raise their costs. A boycott right now would actually help them balance the books and make it easier for them to justify continuing the service.
If it costs $100 million to make the first game on a console, then it should cost less than half of that to make the second and even less to make the third. Publishers should look at themselves as manufacturers. If they take the time to produce a good factory, including tools and entire game engines, then they can reuse mechanics from their initial development to speed-up and reduce costs each time they develop a game.
For that matter, I bet there is still good money is producing game engines and then licensing. Wasn't Id following this model for a while? I thought they made Doom 3 as a demonstration of a game engine they planned to license like crazy. Licensing a code base that handles the physics, graphics, controls, and would mechanics must be cheaper than crafting one from scratch each game.
I think the $100 million production cost is too high for some games that are routinely block busters. Considering that each new Madden football game is marketed based on one or two little tweaks to game play, they must be reusing most of the code from the previous game.
Slashdot Mirror
Protecting an entire building from lightning is a solved problem. You need a lightning rod.
My aunt and uncle live in a hundred year old farm house. It has a lightning rod. Their butter churn has never had to be replaced due to a blown circuit.
Such a law would be a joy for military recruiters. Click the links below to be put onto a French terrorist watch list!
Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines!
Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines!
I suppose the French President meant violence he does not agree with should be prosecuted. That makes more sense.
I am teaching my nephews how to program during their week off from school. I went with a platform that all households had readily available: Excel. Excel VBA is robust enough to create fun games from the Atari generation, forgiving enough to keep new programmers from being frustrated quickly, and the skills learned will carry my wards into many business environments for years to come. Even if Excel goes away, learning to manipulate data, graphics, and data in a spreadsheet program will be useful some day.
Fair points.
I notice that there are massive differences between turn signals between cars. Leds & halogens. Stylish and garish. Round and boxy. High or low. Wide or slim.
The government, we the people, will have to be careful to set the regulations such that innovation is not stifled.
That is all.
Brilliant. Legislate away the possibilities for innovation before the new market has a chance to solve the problem. Is it only in America that "leaders" push science and math and the entrepreneurial spirit, and then quickly make it illegal to innovate lest anyone gets hurt? sheesh
What this country needs is a good five cent nickel.
PVP Online makes comedy out of the discomfort some people feel in the presence of a potty mouth.
Personally, my belief in free speech is strong enough that I do not care what words a person uses to express ideas. However, there are ramifications for how a person expresses those ideas; similar to how there are consequences for how society reacts to the clothes a person wears.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
Did George ever getting around to suing Blizzard for including a brightly lit and lightweight sabre in Diablo 2? Just ridiculous if he did not go after those deep pockets. He's had 10 years to sue, so I guess if he has not gotten to it by now it might not happen...
Most students get help and do not even realize it. Many States use money from the tax coffers to make higher education more affordable. Even people who beg, borrow, or steal the money to "pay their own way" through a university in these states are getting help from all tax payers.
Citation: Ohio's Office Of Budget Management Budget Highlights
From Catholics in Crises
Scanning today's news turns up a lot of good examples for how the code could be simplified.
The five dumbest parts of the U.S. tax code
1) Ethanol credits increase the price of food, and give paper manufacturers more money in credits than they make from selling paper.
2) Exemption for inherited stock-gains.
3) Mortgage-interest deduction encourages people to buy as much house as they can afford, and encourages owning over renting to the detriment of other investments.
4) Exemption on employer-provided health insurance encourages employers to give more health insurance instead of wage increases, and discourages health insurers from competing on price.
5) Municipal-bond-interest exclusion gives more benefit to rich bond owners than it does to the municipalities that issue the bonds.
Congressman Wyden leads effort to simplify tax code
Taxes: There is a Better Way by U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg
The Associated Press Story is a bit more informative than the USA Today blog entry in TFA.
This is the part that boggles me...
The arbitrary line between "minors" and "adults" having sex is strange enough. Any law forbidding consenting adults is completely ridiculous. Saying that two "minors" can't go at it truly boggles because who's going to know, who's going to care, and what punishment could be worse than NOT fulfilling the biological urge with someone else who has that urge? ... I figure that is how many teens are looking at it, anyhow.
I wonder if the law also intends that minors can not legally have solo-sex? Craziness...
The Sultan was recently featured in a PvP comic classic.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Having my head 1 meter from a 100+ decibel turbo props for 30 minutes at a time does not sound like a good idea. Crashing in the equivalent of a flying motorcycle (human body moving fast on a structure required to hold a combustion engine) does not sound good for my health either.
This reminds me of the BIG BALL OF MUD theory by Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder at the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Clicky the linky above to read the whole paper. It is full of useful insights for many disciplines besides computer science.
This reminds me of the story I have been telling for years whenever someone asks me why I do not eat Octopus.
From Snopes
Though the story is not verified, directly, there is consensus that the story is possible and is even likely to have occurred.
http://mobileoffice.about.com/od/usingyourphone/f/tethering.htm
Tether the tether by tethering the tethered tether to another tether. sheesh
I am not sure the proposed law does much if redaction is all it takes to get a pass. From Law.com:
Read more...
The /. quote right now...
Everybody has something to conceal. -- Humphrey Bogart
I doubt that $10 million is enough to get very far in reverse engineering biological bees, much less building a colony of robo-bees with features similar to bio-bees. Nature has spent millions of years on a massively parallel R&D project to create bees as we see them today. At MIT rates, $10 million should be just enough to get some professors by until they need more grant money, and maybe pad the resumes of some grad students. There will be no robo-bee overlords anytime soon.
If human machines take energy from the wind, do work, and return waste heat to the atmosphere, then I think the cycle would repeat itself: The warmer air near the concentrations of machines (cities) would cause weather and wind just like the uneven heating of land and water does.
Doesn't every YouTube video that is entirely quiet violate copyrights on 4'33"? If so, then the copyright holder of that 'song' could dispute many videos, and potentially open the path to new revenue by getting all those copyright pirates to buy a license for the use of silence.
As seen Apr. 9, 2009, 6:30 AM on http://www.businessinsider.com/is-youtube-doomed-2009-4
If you really want to hurt Google, then post more and raise their costs. A boycott right now would actually help them balance the books and make it easier for them to justify continuing the service.
If it costs $100 million to make the first game on a console, then it should cost less than half of that to make the second and even less to make the third. Publishers should look at themselves as manufacturers. If they take the time to produce a good factory, including tools and entire game engines, then they can reuse mechanics from their initial development to speed-up and reduce costs each time they develop a game.
For that matter, I bet there is still good money is producing game engines and then licensing. Wasn't Id following this model for a while? I thought they made Doom 3 as a demonstration of a game engine they planned to license like crazy. Licensing a code base that handles the physics, graphics, controls, and would mechanics must be cheaper than crafting one from scratch each game.
I think the $100 million production cost is too high for some games that are routinely block busters. Considering that each new Madden football game is marketed based on one or two little tweaks to game play, they must be reusing most of the code from the previous game.