If you're wearing a bullet-proof vest, the clipboard can presumably protect your head,
which the vest doesn't. This way all basic vital organs will have some protection. (Well,
you still have to choose between your head and "down there", depending on which you
think is more important...)
Overall I like the idea of a PDF, since it provides a kind of permanence
and also makes it easier to reference page numbers in the future. An associated discussion
forum would be fine, but the PDF itself should be frozen, with any errata placed in future
issues. Otherwise a library wanting to archive it
would never know which is the "final" version, and future references might
be confusing if page numbers etc. kept changing.
.
The margins waste space in fit-width view on a small screen, and
trial-and-error zooming and horizontal scrolling to get the text to fit maximally is annoying.
You may want to consider two versions of the PDF, a "printable" version
with the margins as they are now (or corresponding to whatever size you want for the
printed version), and a "viewable" version with trimmed
margins. These would have exactly the same layouts and page breaks (important for
page number references).
Also, I think the journal would look much more professional if it
were properly typeset with a program like LaTeX. It is obviously the
output of a word processor program and frankly looks, well, "cheap".
Overall, I think the journal is a great idea and I wish it success.
Scientific papers are done primarily in LaTeX. I'm guessing you don't actually write science papers, eh?
Yes, in they usually are done in LaTeX in math and physics.
However, the resulting PDF (or less frequently, PostScript) is what
is distributed and viewed.
I have published many papers myself and have
never had a reprint request for the original
LaTeX, only for the PDF.
The LaTeX goes to the publisher
(usually written to the journal's standards using
highly customized
formatting packages), who
redistributes it in a printed journal and usually on-line in PDF form
(unfortunately for a price).
Some journals force you to use a two-column format, which I agree
with another poster is awful to read on-screen; I have no control
over that.
When the publisher allows, I put a preprint in PDF format
on arxiv.org where you can get it for free.
A problem with a flowing text document format is that
the page numbers are variable, making references to specific
pages and paragraphs impossible. I also tend to have a
"page memory" where I can recall roughly what the page looked like and
where on the page an item I want to find is positioned. I think a lot
of people have had the experience of not remembering exactly in a book
something was, but they remembered where it was on the page it and can
quickly find it by thumbing through pages. I am not as good at remembering
where something was in a flowing document and have to resort to a search,
which is doesn't work too well for equations and symbols.
I have a large collection of scientific paper PDFs that I constantly
reference. One thing I do (when the publisher doesn't lock the PDF)
is
trim off the margins so that fill-width view automatically fits the full
text on screen without having to zoom by trial-and-error and
futz with the horizontal
scroll bars. Actually even when the publisher locks it, if it is
a paper I reference frequently I'll print it to a PDF, then trim the
annoying margins and re-OCR it.
If you started just took down every name/number in a phonebook and sold
your own copy of that list, that'd be a copyright violation. You're
supposed to get the phone numbers yourself, not rely on the other
company doing the hard work and profiting of the effort.
As I understand Feist v. Rural (ianal) you could sell your own
copy of the list, although reformatting it (so as not to violate
copyright on a creative layout) might be a good idea. You couldn't sell a
copy of the cover, prefaces, or end material.
The "hard work" of collecting facts is irrelevant
to copyright law. This is probably one of the most common misconceptions
of copyright law, that it exists to protect "hard work".
The only thing that is
relevant is the extent to which creative expression is
involved.
On the other hand, this:
Regularly there are fake entries put into the listings, to catch others
who copy them.
brings up an interesting point, since arguably fake entries
are creative. On the other hand, they are also fraudulent if
the phone company represents the list as factual.
So maybe a suit/countersuit for copyright/fraud would cancel
each other?:)
...except for the fact that just about every Google service is free.
You are confusing their product with their customers. You, who use
their free services, are not Google's customer. You are
their product. They use their free
search engine and other services to entice you into viewing pages.
Otherwise, they could care less about you.
Their customers are the ones who buy ad space on those pages
that you view.
Check out their prices; they are far from free.
They collect information about you (the product)
and your actual or inferred buying
habits to attempt to make their ad placements more relevant, so they can charge
their customers even higher prices for them.
What I think needs to happen is for fines to be based on a percent of
income or assets rather than a fixed dollar amount. (I think some
countries do this for speeding fines). Only then will it a proper disincentive
for wealthy people, as opposed to just being a minor inconvenience
as a "cost of doing business". In fact, make the percentage
"progressive", like income tax, so the wealthier you are, the higher the
percentage: fining a a poor person 50% of their assets would cause them
hardship, whereas fining a billionaire 50% of their assets would hardly
affect their lifestyle at all. I think the prospect of a billionaire losing
98% of their assets (and being left with "only" 20 million)
would be a far greater deterrent than spending 6 months
in a country-club prison.
First of all, I think anyone putting in a "market order" to buy or
sell is a fool. You're essentially saying to the HFTers (and others) "I'm a
chump, rip me off."
Since I invest for the long term and don't care about short-term
fluctuations, I almost always put in limit orders slightly below the
current bid (if buying) and slightly above the current ask (if selling)
and if necessary wait a few days. Only rarely am I disappointed, and
worst-case I just adjust the price in a few days if it doesn't get
executed.
I never use stop-loss orders, which are essentially market orders
triggered by a falling price. I did a long time ago and got burned
once when there was a (probably HFT-induced) sudden drop, causing my
stock to sell way below the stop price, only to see it recover the next
day. Instead, I use stop-limit orders, which - if the price goes below
a certain amount - a limit order is created. I have stop limit orders
on virtually all my stocks, so I don't have to constantly monitor the
market all the time. In the last few years, I have never had a
stop-limit order that did not execute (in other words it always
recovered, at least to the level of my limit order, from the sudden short-term drop that triggered the order).
As far as I can tell, with limit orders I am immune to HFT, since either
I get the price I want or there is no trade.
If not, can someone explain to me how an HFT trader can profit
from my limit orders?
It seems this kind of scam has been going on for at least
50 years. A friend from Rio (Brazil) told me that in the early 60's,
you could buy cheap D cells that when you opened them up, inside
was an AA-sized cell with the rest just loose filler like dirt or something. They'd pass the standard
battery check when new but of course wouldn't last nearly as long. This was quite a rip-off of
poor people who lived in areas with no electricity and depended on these for
powering their radios, since the batteries were a significant expense given their
meager incomes.
This is impressive and seems
to have essentially reached a goal of emulating
a human arm.
What really impressed me, though, was the modularity of the arm.
Presumably this would allow configurations other than
human-imitating arms. One could imagine
post-human configurations - whether for
prosthetic purposes, extending the capabilities of a
normal human, or as a stand-alone robot for specialized tasks.
E.g. (off the top of my head) would 7 fingers be more
useful than 5, or perhaps an arm with two (or several)
elbow joints, or auxilliary fingers along the arm, or a
robot with 3 or 4 arms?
Or is the human arm - "perfected" by evolution -
the most effective configuration possible?
Perhaps we should encourage this trend. In
China there are already
32 million more boys than girls
due to the preference for boys.
"Love dolls", especially if not considered a
social stigma, would be a better solution than
social upheaval and violence that may eventually
result.
In Texas, for example, it is officially recognized that at least 21% of vehicles are uninsured, but that more than half of all car accidents involve at least 1 uninsured driver.
While your statistics might be right, they may or may not
prove that
"suspended/uninsured drivers cause most of the accidents."
If exactly 21% are uninsured, then by random chance alone there is already
a (1-(1-0.21)^2)*100% = 38% chance that in any
two-car collision at least one is uninsured
(not a 21% chance as a naive person may think and/or the
media might imply).
And
if "at least 21%" really means 29%, then there is a 50%
chance that one car is uninsured, which might mean that being uninsured
would have nothing to do with it.
If you have insurance, there is a very good chance the car that hit you does not.
Yes, but it might not be nearly as high as "more than half", since
you're conditioning the problem on "at least one car insured".
You may say its retaliation. I say its because of the software. Think
about it. Google has this huge search engine that goes through the
Internet. I am betting the news.google.com is a service that sits ontop
of the search engine. So now Google has to remove the websites in
question. They can do it one of two ways:
1) Create a "don't use this content link" in news.google.com, which
means changing their software.
2) Add the websites in question to do not crawl thus removing them from
everything.
It is hard for me to believe that this is a Google software
limitation. My bet would be that they already have a list of what sites
qualify as "newspapers", otherwise you'd get all kinds of random
blogs and spam sites on the Google News page. All they would
have to do (if they wanted to play nice) would be to remove the Belgium sites from the list
qualifying as "newspapers" for the purpose of the Google News page,
but leave them in the search engine (with caching disabled, an ability they also
have now).
what I hate is websites that force PDF files to be downloads instead of letting my browser handle them.
The problem is that the web site incorrectly specifies the file mime type as e.g. "Content-Type=text/html"
instead of "Content-Type=application/pdf".
While in theory the ".pdf" extension or content inspection could be
used to guess it, Firefox (for example) does not use mime type guessing since it is a security issue:
What should Firefox do with this file?.
I wonder how long it will be before we have a genetically-engineered
yeasts that produce THC, morphine, amphetamines, cocaine, etc., so that
anyone could make what they
want in a small Petri dish, starting from a microscopic amount of
starter yeast. How would society deal with this?
One of the oddest things I saw in the
Wikipedia article was "SIGABA is described in U.S. Patent 6,175,625, filed in 1944 but not issued until 2001". I wonder if that is some kind of record.
A feature I've missed, which was on my first Gateway laptop in the
mid-90s, is a potentiometer-type volume control. It was just a simple
thumbwheel on the side of the laptop, like the ones on cheap transistor
radios dating back to the 60s. Since it was connected to the final
audio stages, it was easy to get the volume you wanted immediately,
with instant feedback. Most important, if you accidentally went to an
obnoxious site playing loud backgroud audio, a quick flick would lower the
volume to a quiet, tolerable level or dismiss
it completely (important while at work...).
Fast-forward to around 2000, and the potentiometer was replaced with
3 buttons on the side, volume up, down, and mute. These buttons where
sluggish in responding, especially if the computer was busy.
I kept forgetting which was the mute when I was panicked by an
obnoxious site at work. Trying all 3 wasn't useful since it took a
couple of seconds to see if they worked, and looking for the
low-contrast mute icon embossed in the plastic required lifting the
laptop so I could see it in the light. More than once, my panicked
solution was to hold down the power button for several seconds to force
power-down. But those several seconds could be embarrassing.
There was one point where I planned to add a physical
switch to the actual speaker wires, although I never got around to that.
Now, of course, even the volume side buttons are gone. The mute
function key does work and responds quickly, but there's still that
slight extra delay finding it - it's not something I use so often that
it comes naturally. Usually, I just leave the computer always in mute
unless there is something specific I want to listen to.
Remember that light is made of photons, which are much much smaller than 1 nm. It's a quantum particle.
It's not as simple as that. In the double-slit experiment, which gives an interference pattern
even if you fire one photon at a time, the photon is influenced by both slits (several hundred nm
apart or more). If you cover
one slit, the interference disappears.
You may be right. The company has 13.4 million
shares outstanding, making the current market capitalization
$106 million (at the $7.90 per share current price), vs. $3.3 million
this morning (at $0.25 per share, which I think was quite reasonable).
A little pricey for a company with $2.7 million sales and
$400k income. The investor has to gamble on significant future growth
to justify the price/sales ratio of 40. By comparison, AAPL p/s is 3.7 and GOOG is 5.6.
for these articles that nothing more than paid publicity.
Well, it seems to be working. The stock price has
increased from 0.25 to 7.50 in the last
5 hours. So already the company is worth 30 times more than it was
earlier today. At that rate, they will be billionaires in no time.
Speaking of publicity, how is www.xipher.net working out for ya?
It seems TFA is giving 403 errors, but Google's
300 DPI PDFs that you can download for public domain books often
have incredibly poor quality, much poorer than you get with 300 DPI on
a cheap home scanner. While they might be marginally acceptable
for novels, for the old math books I'm interested in, the
Google PDFs are mostly useless. Often you can't
disambiguate small blurry subscripts by eye, never mind OCR.
On the other hand, I have never had a problem reading
300DPI subscripts on scans I make at home, and they usually will OCR
fine. too, unless they are tiny subscripts of subscripts.
I wrote about this
here.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't vote for him even if I could, but I don't see why does anyone deserve to see his grades, or how is that relevant.
If I interview someone to work for me, I will often ask for his/her college record (and actually I have never been refused).
Depending on and combined with other factors, of course it can be relevant. Why should it be different for
the president, who is (supposedly) working for the American people in a far more important position?
I did vote for him, but in retrospect it was based on nothing but what turned out to be empty promises.
No, it will mean that when a big company gets a patent on
basically the same damn thing as you, you will be forced to fight about
it after the fact in court. This is something most small businesses
cannot afford.
So an unopposed patent on 1-click shopping is OK as long as the little guy gets it?
Anyway, the mechanism could be set up so that the
patent examiner is the only one involved in evaluating an objection, no courts,
prior to patent issue. Require that all objections be
limited to 1 page in plain language referencing the claimed prior art,
and also allow the examiner to ignore it without comment for whatever reason,
such as if the examiner thinks it's harrassment BS from a large company.
Despite binging and googling with all my might,
I was unsuccessful at finding
what the acronym CHEETAH stands for. (Actually, I'm still
working on the HAM radio so often mentioned here...)
Slashdot Mirror
If you're wearing a bullet-proof vest, the clipboard can presumably protect your head, which the vest doesn't. This way all basic vital organs will have some protection. (Well, you still have to choose between your head and "down there", depending on which you think is more important...)
.
The margins waste space in fit-width view on a small screen, and trial-and-error zooming and horizontal scrolling to get the text to fit maximally is annoying. You may want to consider two versions of the PDF, a "printable" version with the margins as they are now (or corresponding to whatever size you want for the printed version), and a "viewable" version with trimmed margins. These would have exactly the same layouts and page breaks (important for page number references).
Also, I think the journal would look much more professional if it were properly typeset with a program like LaTeX. It is obviously the output of a word processor program and frankly looks, well, "cheap".
Overall, I think the journal is a great idea and I wish it success.
Yes, in they usually are done in LaTeX in math and physics. However, the resulting PDF (or less frequently, PostScript) is what is distributed and viewed. I have published many papers myself and have never had a reprint request for the original LaTeX, only for the PDF.
The LaTeX goes to the publisher (usually written to the journal's standards using highly customized formatting packages), who redistributes it in a printed journal and usually on-line in PDF form (unfortunately for a price). Some journals force you to use a two-column format, which I agree with another poster is awful to read on-screen; I have no control over that. When the publisher allows, I put a preprint in PDF format on arxiv.org where you can get it for free.
A problem with a flowing text document format is that the page numbers are variable, making references to specific pages and paragraphs impossible. I also tend to have a "page memory" where I can recall roughly what the page looked like and where on the page an item I want to find is positioned. I think a lot of people have had the experience of not remembering exactly in a book something was, but they remembered where it was on the page it and can quickly find it by thumbing through pages. I am not as good at remembering where something was in a flowing document and have to resort to a search, which is doesn't work too well for equations and symbols.
I have a large collection of scientific paper PDFs that I constantly reference. One thing I do (when the publisher doesn't lock the PDF) is trim off the margins so that fill-width view automatically fits the full text on screen without having to zoom by trial-and-error and futz with the horizontal scroll bars. Actually even when the publisher locks it, if it is a paper I reference frequently I'll print it to a PDF, then trim the annoying margins and re-OCR it.
As I understand Feist v. Rural (ianal) you could sell your own copy of the list, although reformatting it (so as not to violate copyright on a creative layout) might be a good idea. You couldn't sell a copy of the cover, prefaces, or end material.
The "hard work" of collecting facts is irrelevant to copyright law. This is probably one of the most common misconceptions of copyright law, that it exists to protect "hard work". The only thing that is relevant is the extent to which creative expression is involved.
On the other hand, this:
brings up an interesting point, since arguably fake entries are creative. On the other hand, they are also fraudulent if the phone company represents the list as factual. So maybe a suit/countersuit for copyright/fraud would cancel each other? :)
You are confusing their product with their customers. You, who use their free services, are not Google's customer. You are their product. They use their free search engine and other services to entice you into viewing pages. Otherwise, they could care less about you. Their customers are the ones who buy ad space on those pages that you view. Check out their prices; they are far from free.
They collect information about you (the product) and your actual or inferred buying habits to attempt to make their ad placements more relevant, so they can charge their customers even higher prices for them.
What I think needs to happen is for fines to be based on a percent of income or assets rather than a fixed dollar amount. (I think some countries do this for speeding fines). Only then will it a proper disincentive for wealthy people, as opposed to just being a minor inconvenience as a "cost of doing business". In fact, make the percentage "progressive", like income tax, so the wealthier you are, the higher the percentage: fining a a poor person 50% of their assets would cause them hardship, whereas fining a billionaire 50% of their assets would hardly affect their lifestyle at all. I think the prospect of a billionaire losing 98% of their assets (and being left with "only" 20 million) would be a far greater deterrent than spending 6 months in a country-club prison.
Since I invest for the long term and don't care about short-term fluctuations, I almost always put in limit orders slightly below the current bid (if buying) and slightly above the current ask (if selling) and if necessary wait a few days. Only rarely am I disappointed, and worst-case I just adjust the price in a few days if it doesn't get executed.
I never use stop-loss orders, which are essentially market orders triggered by a falling price. I did a long time ago and got burned once when there was a (probably HFT-induced) sudden drop, causing my stock to sell way below the stop price, only to see it recover the next day. Instead, I use stop-limit orders, which - if the price goes below a certain amount - a limit order is created. I have stop limit orders on virtually all my stocks, so I don't have to constantly monitor the market all the time. In the last few years, I have never had a stop-limit order that did not execute (in other words it always recovered, at least to the level of my limit order, from the sudden short-term drop that triggered the order).
As far as I can tell, with limit orders I am immune to HFT, since either I get the price I want or there is no trade. If not, can someone explain to me how an HFT trader can profit from my limit orders?
It seems this kind of scam has been going on for at least 50 years. A friend from Rio (Brazil) told me that in the early 60's, you could buy cheap D cells that when you opened them up, inside was an AA-sized cell with the rest just loose filler like dirt or something. They'd pass the standard battery check when new but of course wouldn't last nearly as long. This was quite a rip-off of poor people who lived in areas with no electricity and depended on these for powering their radios, since the batteries were a significant expense given their meager incomes.
What really impressed me, though, was the modularity of the arm. Presumably this would allow configurations other than human-imitating arms. One could imagine post-human configurations - whether for prosthetic purposes, extending the capabilities of a normal human, or as a stand-alone robot for specialized tasks. E.g. (off the top of my head) would 7 fingers be more useful than 5, or perhaps an arm with two (or several) elbow joints, or auxilliary fingers along the arm, or a robot with 3 or 4 arms? Or is the human arm - "perfected" by evolution - the most effective configuration possible?
Here are 34 bugs for you just on the home page. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=facebook.com&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
Perhaps we should encourage this trend. In China there are already 32 million more boys than girls due to the preference for boys. "Love dolls", especially if not considered a social stigma, would be a better solution than social upheaval and violence that may eventually result.
While your statistics might be right, they may or may not prove that "suspended/uninsured drivers cause most of the accidents."
If exactly 21% are uninsured, then by random chance alone there is already a (1-(1-0.21)^2)*100% = 38% chance that in any two-car collision at least one is uninsured (not a 21% chance as a naive person may think and/or the media might imply).
And if "at least 21%" really means 29%, then there is a 50% chance that one car is uninsured, which might mean that being uninsured would have nothing to do with it.
Yes, but it might not be nearly as high as "more than half", since you're conditioning the problem on "at least one car insured".
It is hard for me to believe that this is a Google software limitation. My bet would be that they already have a list of what sites qualify as "newspapers", otherwise you'd get all kinds of random blogs and spam sites on the Google News page. All they would have to do (if they wanted to play nice) would be to remove the Belgium sites from the list qualifying as "newspapers" for the purpose of the Google News page, but leave them in the search engine (with caching disabled, an ability they also have now).
The problem is that the web site incorrectly specifies the file mime type as e.g. "Content-Type=text/html" instead of "Content-Type=application/pdf". While in theory the ".pdf" extension or content inspection could be used to guess it, Firefox (for example) does not use mime type guessing since it is a security issue: What should Firefox do with this file?.
I wonder how long it will be before we have a genetically-engineered yeasts that produce THC, morphine, amphetamines, cocaine, etc., so that anyone could make what they want in a small Petri dish, starting from a microscopic amount of starter yeast. How would society deal with this?
How do you explain the large number of children not having excess cancer, living near the other thousands of high-powered radio aerials in the world?
One of the oddest things I saw in the Wikipedia article was "SIGABA is described in U.S. Patent 6,175,625, filed in 1944 but not issued until 2001". I wonder if that is some kind of record.
Fast-forward to around 2000, and the potentiometer was replaced with 3 buttons on the side, volume up, down, and mute. These buttons where sluggish in responding, especially if the computer was busy. I kept forgetting which was the mute when I was panicked by an obnoxious site at work. Trying all 3 wasn't useful since it took a couple of seconds to see if they worked, and looking for the low-contrast mute icon embossed in the plastic required lifting the laptop so I could see it in the light. More than once, my panicked solution was to hold down the power button for several seconds to force power-down. But those several seconds could be embarrassing. There was one point where I planned to add a physical switch to the actual speaker wires, although I never got around to that.
Now, of course, even the volume side buttons are gone. The mute function key does work and responds quickly, but there's still that slight extra delay finding it - it's not something I use so often that it comes naturally. Usually, I just leave the computer always in mute unless there is something specific I want to listen to.
It's not as simple as that. In the double-slit experiment, which gives an interference pattern even if you fire one photon at a time, the photon is influenced by both slits (several hundred nm apart or more). If you cover one slit, the interference disappears.
You may be right. The company has 13.4 million shares outstanding, making the current market capitalization $106 million (at the $7.90 per share current price), vs. $3.3 million this morning (at $0.25 per share, which I think was quite reasonable). A little pricey for a company with $2.7 million sales and $400k income. The investor has to gamble on significant future growth to justify the price/sales ratio of 40. By comparison, AAPL p/s is 3.7 and GOOG is 5.6.
Well, it seems to be working. The stock price has increased from 0.25 to 7.50 in the last 5 hours. So already the company is worth 30 times more than it was earlier today. At that rate, they will be billionaires in no time.
Speaking of publicity, how is www.xipher.net working out for ya?
It seems TFA is giving 403 errors, but Google's 300 DPI PDFs that you can download for public domain books often have incredibly poor quality, much poorer than you get with 300 DPI on a cheap home scanner. While they might be marginally acceptable for novels, for the old math books I'm interested in, the Google PDFs are mostly useless. Often you can't disambiguate small blurry subscripts by eye, never mind OCR. On the other hand, I have never had a problem reading 300DPI subscripts on scans I make at home, and they usually will OCR fine. too, unless they are tiny subscripts of subscripts. I wrote about this here.
If I interview someone to work for me, I will often ask for his/her college record (and actually I have never been refused). Depending on and combined with other factors, of course it can be relevant. Why should it be different for the president, who is (supposedly) working for the American people in a far more important position? I did vote for him, but in retrospect it was based on nothing but what turned out to be empty promises.
So an unopposed patent on 1-click shopping is OK as long as the little guy gets it?
Anyway, the mechanism could be set up so that the patent examiner is the only one involved in evaluating an objection, no courts, prior to patent issue. Require that all objections be limited to 1 page in plain language referencing the claimed prior art, and also allow the examiner to ignore it without comment for whatever reason, such as if the examiner thinks it's harrassment BS from a large company.
Despite binging and googling with all my might, I was unsuccessful at finding what the acronym CHEETAH stands for. (Actually, I'm still working on the HAM radio so often mentioned here...)