In 3 days Apple's stock has gone down a huge 5%, costing
Apple and their shareholders millions of dollars...
Why is that people just toss around meaningless "millions of dollars",
"billions of dollars", etc. that it's costing stockholders, when it's so
easy to look up the actual numbers? Look, just to go finance.yahoo.com
(or an equivalent site) and type in AAPL. Click on "Key Statistics".
You'll see the market cap is $232 billion. If the stock price goes down
5%, then it "costs" the stockholders $11.6 billion. So, it's already
more than discounted a $1.5 billion recall. (Actually it looks like
the stock is up 3% today.)
Certainly it's not going to "be useful only as wallpaper by the weekend"
as another poster suggested.
For people on this site who are generally technically savvy, there's
something about stocks and money that seems to make them lose
analytic ability, tossing around "millions" and "billions" as if
they were the same order of magnitude, mixing up profits and
revenues, etc. It's almost as bad as reporters for the major
news media, who do this all the time.
It's really hard at times for those of us up in the 140s to conceive of
why a lot of this stuff isn't common sense. And hence end up spending a
lot of time being misunderstood or explaining what ought to be perfectly
obvious.
Perhaps your IQ isn't quite high enough then, since it is hard for you to
conceive that. Some of the most accomplished scientists
are often also the best teachers, since they are intelligent enough
not only to understand the material but also to understand their
audience.
My wife is driven batty, tossing and turning and unable to sleep, with the constant clickety-click of the mouse I use with my netbook for reading/browsing in bed. I have tried several models and picked the quietest, but still there's an audible click that either gets me kicked out of bed eventually or forces me to use the (for me) less efficient trackpad. I've tried to test different models in the store, but it's hard to judge accurate through the thick clamshell packaging. Ideally what I'd like is a portable (small) mouse, preferably wireless, that has no audible click but does provide enough tactile feedback to know that you've clicked it. Any suggestions?
FYI, domestic cats purr when in pain or in distress.
Well, all I can say is that she didn't flinch or seem bothered by it,
and once in place she didn't try to scratch it off or anything. This contrasts to her yowling when I - and the vet - poked the tiny hole to drain
her.
Somewhat off-topic (but the story is about cat surgery, so...), over
the past year, a cyst/tumor started to grow on my cat's forehead. When it grew
to about 1.5cm diam., the vet said it would keep growing, eventually
into her eye, if it wasn't removed. She quoted $850 for the surgery,
much of it the cost of anesthesia and monitoring. After fretting over
it for some weeks, and draining it every few days (which the vet said
I'd have to do for the rest of her life without the surgery) to keep the
pressure down and make it grow slower, I had an idea. Cat fur
is very loose and pliable, so I pulled the tumor away from her skull,
formed it into a kind of ball, and tied a rubber band very tightly
around the base to cut off the circulation. (I don't think this caused
her any pain; she was purring during the whole procedure.) Within a
week and a half it dried up and shrank to the size of a raisin. The skin just
under the rubber band fused together, and last week, about 6 weeks
later, the tumor
fell off by itself (rubber band still attached). Now there is just a
tiny reddish spot where the tumor used to be. I thought that perhaps I should
patent my "method to cure cat skin tumors with a rubber band", but upon
researching it, I found that apparently Hippocrates suggested this
technique in 460 BC.
That said plugging the hole isn't that implausibly
difficult. Plugging it so the pipe doesn't burst 100 feet down and leak
oil out of every ocean floor crack within 500 feet is. That's what
they're really worried about.
So you're saying that even if the BOP did work,
it would have been pointless since the pipe under it would have
burst 100 feet down and leaked
oil out of every ocean floor crack within 500 feet?
Micro-timing has no purpose other than to take advantage of ordinary
investors who don't have access to this information. It basically
amounts to a kind of insider trading.
I would propose that
ultra-short-term profits should be taxed at a punitive rate, perhaps approaching 100%, to
discourage this kind of cheating of ordinary traders.
Already, short-term capital gains are taxed at a different rate
than long-term gains, in order to encourage long-term investment.
Micro-timing is short-term trading taken to an extreme, so
why not tax it accordingly?
There is no valid reason why anyone should trade a stock multiple
times per day - either it is pure gambling or there is some
inside information behind it. Companies report their revenues
and profits on a quarterly basis, not microsecond by microsecond.
(Of course news stories may affect a stock, but even news stories
rarely change more than once per day.)
I should clarify that by "filter" I mean a birefringent filter
such as calcite, where the photon decides on one of two paths
based on its polarization. Two detectors, one in each path,
determines which was taken by the photon. So the compound setup
of filter + 2 detectors is in effect the "detector that
measures spin" that you refer to.
Unfortunately this only detects if the photon hits. It does not measure
anything like spin.
No photon detector "measures anything like spin". The polarization is
determined by a filter prior to detection. Which direction the filter
should be oriented is part of the quantum cryptography protocol, and the
filter is followed by a detector that needs only to determine the
presence or absence of a photon passing through the filter.
But at what dark-count rate? There are always trade-offs.
The dark count is essentially zero. That's what makes this breakthrough so
impressive.
FTA I linked:
"When these detectors indicate they've spotted a photon, they're trustworthy. They don't give false positives," says Nam, a physicist with NIST's Optoelectronics division. "Other types of detectors have really high gain so they can measure a single photon, but their noise levels are such that occasionally a noise glitch is mistakenly identified as a photon. This causes an error in the measurement. Reducing these errors is really important for those who are doing calculations or communications."
One the main contributors to the error rate is the photon detection
efficiency, where 80% or better is considered "good". In a major
breakthrough last month, NIST (yes, the National Institute
of Standards and Technology, not some startup company's marketing hype)
has achieved a record single-photon
detection rates of 99% - and possibly better, since there currently
exists no metrology to test that level of efficiency. So
in terms of that source of error, things are looking up.
I hadn't visited OpenStreetMaps in several years (it was an interesting
project, but a little crude and sparse back then), so out of curiosity
(prompted by your post) I went there
to see how it has progressed. I am impressed! I
don't know about how it fares overall, but someone has put an awful of
work into Lexington, MA where I live. What most impressed me the most
is that it includes the walking trails in the conservation land areas,
which Google does not.
Compare Whipple Hill on
OpenStreetMap with
Whipple Hill on Google Maps. (The hyperlinks are much shorter too...)
So, finally I don't have to guess when I encounter partially
overgrown trails on my frequents walks through them.
This project needs to be more widely publicized. I had no
idea how much it has improved.
Screw it, for $700, I'll deal with Adobe's lousy customer service rather than some OSS prima donna.
For $700 you could probably get some attention from most
prima donnas. Try that with Adobe, if you can even get connected to
someone without a heavy accent and not reading scripted information you can find on the
web anyway.
These "electronic defects" apparently discriminate against
the elderly, just as the sudden acceleration of Audis and GM autos did
before them.
Could it also be that the software was
designed and tested for "typical" driving? Perhaps there is be a bug
such as an overflow error on a timer or arithmetic operation, a race
condition, etc. that is only triggered by a certain timing pattern that
occurs more often with elderly drivers.
If there are really "100
million lines of code" as I have read so often, then a tiny such mistake
buried deep inside wouldn't be surprising. Indeed it would be surprising
if there weren't quite a few such tiny mistakes, waiting to be
discovered in the future at the worst possible moment.
Of course, we will never
know, since the code is secret. So have fun playing Russian roulette with
your car's software.
Before anyone asks, the article is clearly wrong in the statement "The new process causes the polymer to conduct heat very efficiently in just one direction...", the heat moves along one dimensions, in 2 directions.
Right, the article isn't talking about a
heat diode.
Why is it that reporters
seem incapable of distinguishing revenue from
profit?
I'm no fan of Cablevision, but let's get the facts straight.
$8 billion is their revenue. The actual amount they
"pocketed" i.e. kept (the rest going to expenses)
is their net income or profit, which was $285 million.
This still is a pretty large amount, but the $40 million ABC
wants represents a very large chunk of that income, paid
to a single programming supplier. I'm in no position to judge
whether or not this is fair, but it is natural that any company
would look very carefully at such a large percent of their profit.
Not only that, the actual scene data (skidmarks, etc) are much more
valuable to accident reconstruction and investigation than the black
box. It's only a small bit of data they can use, it can't be the sole
one. Especially if for example, the car gets rolled over - even if it
happened at 40mph, the free spinning wheels would show that the car
suddenly went from 40mph to 80mph..
I don't disagree actual scene data isn't essential, but the
example you picked is a highly useful supplement to that data. If
the speed suddenly increases from 40 to 80, obviously that
happened at the instant the tire lifted off the road, since
it is physically impossible for the car to accelerate from
40 to 80 suddenly.
So, from the black box data we now have a record of exactly when the
tire left the road, plus we have the speed of the car just
before the accident happened (which would be more accurate than
a skid mark estimate, esp. if the road was icy or slippery), and we have the fact that the driver's
foot (or in Toyota's case possibly the computer)
was pressing the accelerator since otherwise it wouldn't
have sped up to 80. So what was the driver trying to do at the
instant of the accident, and why were both the brake (skid mark) and
accelerator (sudden tire speed up) being pressed simultaneously, etc.?
Combining black box data with the scene data could provide a
far more accurate reconstruction of the accident than scene data alone.
Of course it doesn't replace the accident scene data - no one
is saying that the scene data should be ignored, as your straw man argument seems to imply.
.
The thing is in a medical image couldn't that actually remove a small
growth or lesion?
While I'm certainly no expect on this, it seems almost everyone here
is being mislead by the word "noise". From what I gather, this
is not cleaning up noise, it is filling in missing pieces
in data whose samples are assumed to be noise-free. This is
drastically different from "smoothing" that is intended to
filter out noise.
So, in the case of a small growth or lesion, as long as there is
at least one sample of it that is different from the surrounding
area, the "sparsity" (this is my guess based on a quick
reading of the article and some related ones) would result in an
identifiable spot of some kind. This would be due
to the fact that that the one pixel sample of the lesion
is different from its closest available neighbors. This difference
would be assumed by the algorithm
to be an accurate representation of that pixel, not a random
speck of noise. So, something would show up, say a small blob,
that would be obviously different in the reconstructed image.
Now the less pixels you have of this lesion, the less accurate
the shape and size of that blob will be, but nonetheless it is
something that would stand out and warrant further investigation.
The rule is that global entropy increases.
On a local scale, it can decrease by "stealing" low-entropy
energy such as from the sun; otherwise life (and humans)
couldn't exist. While we would find it odd if a broken cup suddenly
reassembled itself, everyday there are random chunks of
silicon being turned into exquisitely crafted microcircuits.
So, if the arrow of time corresponds to an increase in entropy,
does that mean that on a local scale (such as the reproduction of
a cell or the manufacture of a microcircuit) we have miniature
time reversals?
Is the very act of my writing this post creating a local, microscopic
warp in the fabric of space-time, at the expense, perhaps, of the
rest of the universe
growing older at some imperceptably faster rate? (Which might be
compensated by an increase of confusion, i.e disorder, in my brain
as I think about such things...)
Or, could there perhaps be a flaw in the hypothesis that
the time arrow corresponds to entropy increase? We observe
time moving forward, and we observe entropy increasing globally.
Does that warrant concluding the two are one and the same?
Here is what I am confused about. The controversy seems to be about
whether Google has the right to display excerpts from books they've
copied, without permission from the copyright holder.
However, I haven't seen anyone question the fact that Google has
already copied millions of entire books that they didn't purchase
and don't physically own. When did this become legal, and why can't I
do the same (or can I)?
Google has presumably saved $100s of millions by not
having to purchase the books they are scanning, like ordinary people (in
the U.S.) are expected to. (And I get the sense that ordinary people
may even be taking a legal risk by scanning books they do own,
because then they won't have to buy the ebook version.) What makes
Google special in this regard? Why aren't they subject to a $200,000
per book (or even per chapter, if based on the RIAA model) copyright
violation suit?
I have an interest in this, because I am collecting PDFs of my own
library (which I have purchased and physically own). Yet it seems that
I may be skirting the law, particularly if I download the PDFs from
piratebay etc., risking a possible huge infringement suit.
Actually, I would pay a reasonable price for a clean, unsecured PDF of
better quality and smaller file size than what I can download or scan
myself, for my permanent electronic library, but publishers have chosen
not to offer this. But I will never buy a DRMed ebook that in I can't
read on any device I want, that will stop working when the approved
reader dies or the company changes its mind or goes out of business.
Just like a my physical library of fine books, I want a permanent
electronic library of high-quality PDFs.
You missed the point. The neat thing is that water was
liquid, and then they WARMED it, and it froze. [...] they reversed the
normal COLD-WARM SOLID-LIQUID order.
In this supercooled
water experiment
video, notice that the supercooled water freezes after
the bottle is tapped. So energy is put into it, meaning
that it is warmed up slightly.
Isn't this also reversing the cold-warm solid-liquid order?
Soon after that: "Since it monitors so much already, it won't
cost much more to monitor the substances ingested by the user,
so that appropriate interception can take place if necessary
to help lower health costs."
I have never understood the obsession of separating sexes in the bathroom. What possible reason could there be? Except maybe a few swinging dicks if the ladies did their best to look over the separators between urinals.
In Amsterdam they don't even bother with the bathroom (well, for men at least):
street urinals
Slashdot Mirror
Why is that people just toss around meaningless "millions of dollars", "billions of dollars", etc. that it's costing stockholders, when it's so easy to look up the actual numbers? Look, just to go finance.yahoo.com (or an equivalent site) and type in AAPL. Click on "Key Statistics". You'll see the market cap is $232 billion. If the stock price goes down 5%, then it "costs" the stockholders $11.6 billion. So, it's already more than discounted a $1.5 billion recall. (Actually it looks like the stock is up 3% today.)
Certainly it's not going to "be useful only as wallpaper by the weekend" as another poster suggested.
For people on this site who are generally technically savvy, there's something about stocks and money that seems to make them lose analytic ability, tossing around "millions" and "billions" as if they were the same order of magnitude, mixing up profits and revenues, etc. It's almost as bad as reporters for the major news media, who do this all the time.
Perhaps your IQ isn't quite high enough then, since it is hard for you to conceive that. Some of the most accomplished scientists are often also the best teachers, since they are intelligent enough not only to understand the material but also to understand their audience.
You're right, I skimmed through the comments too fast. Anyway thanks for answering. This seems to be what I'm looking for, and I ordered one.
My wife is driven batty, tossing and turning and unable to sleep, with the constant clickety-click of the mouse I use with my netbook for reading/browsing in bed. I have tried several models and picked the quietest, but still there's an audible click that either gets me kicked out of bed eventually or forces me to use the (for me) less efficient trackpad. I've tried to test different models in the store, but it's hard to judge accurate through the thick clamshell packaging. Ideally what I'd like is a portable (small) mouse, preferably wireless, that has no audible click but does provide enough tactile feedback to know that you've clicked it. Any suggestions?
Well, all I can say is that she didn't flinch or seem bothered by it, and once in place she didn't try to scratch it off or anything. This contrasts to her yowling when I - and the vet - poked the tiny hole to drain her.
Somewhat off-topic (but the story is about cat surgery, so...), over the past year, a cyst/tumor started to grow on my cat's forehead. When it grew to about 1.5cm diam., the vet said it would keep growing, eventually into her eye, if it wasn't removed. She quoted $850 for the surgery, much of it the cost of anesthesia and monitoring. After fretting over it for some weeks, and draining it every few days (which the vet said I'd have to do for the rest of her life without the surgery) to keep the pressure down and make it grow slower, I had an idea. Cat fur is very loose and pliable, so I pulled the tumor away from her skull, formed it into a kind of ball, and tied a rubber band very tightly around the base to cut off the circulation. (I don't think this caused her any pain; she was purring during the whole procedure.) Within a week and a half it dried up and shrank to the size of a raisin. The skin just under the rubber band fused together, and last week, about 6 weeks later, the tumor fell off by itself (rubber band still attached). Now there is just a tiny reddish spot where the tumor used to be. I thought that perhaps I should patent my "method to cure cat skin tumors with a rubber band", but upon researching it, I found that apparently Hippocrates suggested this technique in 460 BC.
So you're saying that even if the BOP did work, it would have been pointless since the pipe under it would have burst 100 feet down and leaked oil out of every ocean floor crack within 500 feet?
I would propose that ultra-short-term profits should be taxed at a punitive rate, perhaps approaching 100%, to discourage this kind of cheating of ordinary traders.
Already, short-term capital gains are taxed at a different rate than long-term gains, in order to encourage long-term investment. Micro-timing is short-term trading taken to an extreme, so why not tax it accordingly?
There is no valid reason why anyone should trade a stock multiple times per day - either it is pure gambling or there is some inside information behind it. Companies report their revenues and profits on a quarterly basis, not microsecond by microsecond. (Of course news stories may affect a stock, but even news stories rarely change more than once per day.)
I should clarify that by "filter" I mean a birefringent filter such as calcite, where the photon decides on one of two paths based on its polarization. Two detectors, one in each path, determines which was taken by the photon. So the compound setup of filter + 2 detectors is in effect the "detector that measures spin" that you refer to.
No photon detector "measures anything like spin". The polarization is determined by a filter prior to detection. Which direction the filter should be oriented is part of the quantum cryptography protocol, and the filter is followed by a detector that needs only to determine the presence or absence of a photon passing through the filter.
The dark count is essentially zero. That's what makes this breakthrough so impressive.
FTA I linked:
"When these detectors indicate they've spotted a photon, they're trustworthy. They don't give false positives," says Nam, a physicist with NIST's Optoelectronics division. "Other types of detectors have really high gain so they can measure a single photon, but their noise levels are such that occasionally a noise glitch is mistakenly identified as a photon. This causes an error in the measurement. Reducing these errors is really important for those who are doing calculations or communications."
One the main contributors to the error rate is the photon detection efficiency, where 80% or better is considered "good". In a major breakthrough last month, NIST (yes, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, not some startup company's marketing hype) has achieved a record single-photon detection rates of 99% - and possibly better, since there currently exists no metrology to test that level of efficiency. So in terms of that source of error, things are looking up.
Yes, I would prefer that the surgeon have both hands free during my operation and not have to scroll around a computer screen image.
I hadn't visited OpenStreetMaps in several years (it was an interesting project, but a little crude and sparse back then), so out of curiosity (prompted by your post) I went there to see how it has progressed. I am impressed! I don't know about how it fares overall, but someone has put an awful of work into Lexington, MA where I live. What most impressed me the most is that it includes the walking trails in the conservation land areas, which Google does not. Compare Whipple Hill on OpenStreetMap with Whipple Hill on Google Maps. (The hyperlinks are much shorter too...) So, finally I don't have to guess when I encounter partially overgrown trails on my frequents walks through them. This project needs to be more widely publicized. I had no idea how much it has improved.
For $700 you could probably get some attention from most prima donnas. Try that with Adobe, if you can even get connected to someone without a heavy accent and not reading scripted information you can find on the web anyway.
Could it also be that the software was designed and tested for "typical" driving? Perhaps there is be a bug such as an overflow error on a timer or arithmetic operation, a race condition, etc. that is only triggered by a certain timing pattern that occurs more often with elderly drivers.
If there are really "100 million lines of code" as I have read so often, then a tiny such mistake buried deep inside wouldn't be surprising. Indeed it would be surprising if there weren't quite a few such tiny mistakes, waiting to be discovered in the future at the worst possible moment.
Of course, we will never know, since the code is secret. So have fun playing Russian roulette with your car's software.
Right, the article isn't talking about a heat diode.
I'm no fan of Cablevision, but let's get the facts straight. $8 billion is their revenue. The actual amount they "pocketed" i.e. kept (the rest going to expenses) is their net income or profit, which was $285 million. This still is a pretty large amount, but the $40 million ABC wants represents a very large chunk of that income, paid to a single programming supplier. I'm in no position to judge whether or not this is fair, but it is natural that any company would look very carefully at such a large percent of their profit.
I don't disagree actual scene data isn't essential, but the example you picked is a highly useful supplement to that data. If the speed suddenly increases from 40 to 80, obviously that happened at the instant the tire lifted off the road, since it is physically impossible for the car to accelerate from 40 to 80 suddenly.
So, from the black box data we now have a record of exactly when the tire left the road, plus we have the speed of the car just before the accident happened (which would be more accurate than a skid mark estimate, esp. if the road was icy or slippery), and we have the fact that the driver's foot (or in Toyota's case possibly the computer) was pressing the accelerator since otherwise it wouldn't have sped up to 80. So what was the driver trying to do at the instant of the accident, and why were both the brake (skid mark) and accelerator (sudden tire speed up) being pressed simultaneously, etc.?
Combining black box data with the scene data could provide a far more accurate reconstruction of the accident than scene data alone. Of course it doesn't replace the accident scene data - no one is saying that the scene data should be ignored, as your straw man argument seems to imply. .
While I'm certainly no expect on this, it seems almost everyone here is being mislead by the word "noise". From what I gather, this is not cleaning up noise, it is filling in missing pieces in data whose samples are assumed to be noise-free. This is drastically different from "smoothing" that is intended to filter out noise.
So, in the case of a small growth or lesion, as long as there is at least one sample of it that is different from the surrounding area, the "sparsity" (this is my guess based on a quick reading of the article and some related ones) would result in an identifiable spot of some kind. This would be due to the fact that that the one pixel sample of the lesion is different from its closest available neighbors. This difference would be assumed by the algorithm to be an accurate representation of that pixel, not a random speck of noise. So, something would show up, say a small blob, that would be obviously different in the reconstructed image. Now the less pixels you have of this lesion, the less accurate the shape and size of that blob will be, but nonetheless it is something that would stand out and warrant further investigation.
Well, yes, but...
The rule is that global entropy increases. On a local scale, it can decrease by "stealing" low-entropy energy such as from the sun; otherwise life (and humans) couldn't exist. While we would find it odd if a broken cup suddenly reassembled itself, everyday there are random chunks of silicon being turned into exquisitely crafted microcircuits.
So, if the arrow of time corresponds to an increase in entropy, does that mean that on a local scale (such as the reproduction of a cell or the manufacture of a microcircuit) we have miniature time reversals?
Is the very act of my writing this post creating a local, microscopic warp in the fabric of space-time, at the expense, perhaps, of the rest of the universe growing older at some imperceptably faster rate? (Which might be compensated by an increase of confusion, i.e disorder, in my brain as I think about such things...)
Or, could there perhaps be a flaw in the hypothesis that the time arrow corresponds to entropy increase? We observe time moving forward, and we observe entropy increasing globally. Does that warrant concluding the two are one and the same?
However, I haven't seen anyone question the fact that Google has already copied millions of entire books that they didn't purchase and don't physically own. When did this become legal, and why can't I do the same (or can I)?
Google has presumably saved $100s of millions by not having to purchase the books they are scanning, like ordinary people (in the U.S.) are expected to. (And I get the sense that ordinary people may even be taking a legal risk by scanning books they do own, because then they won't have to buy the ebook version.) What makes Google special in this regard? Why aren't they subject to a $200,000 per book (or even per chapter, if based on the RIAA model) copyright violation suit?
I have an interest in this, because I am collecting PDFs of my own library (which I have purchased and physically own). Yet it seems that I may be skirting the law, particularly if I download the PDFs from piratebay etc., risking a possible huge infringement suit.
Actually, I would pay a reasonable price for a clean, unsecured PDF of better quality and smaller file size than what I can download or scan myself, for my permanent electronic library, but publishers have chosen not to offer this. But I will never buy a DRMed ebook that in I can't read on any device I want, that will stop working when the approved reader dies or the company changes its mind or goes out of business. Just like a my physical library of fine books, I want a permanent electronic library of high-quality PDFs.
In this supercooled water experiment video, notice that the supercooled water freezes after the bottle is tapped. So energy is put into it, meaning that it is warmed up slightly. Isn't this also reversing the cold-warm solid-liquid order?
Soon after that: "Since it monitors so much already, it won't cost much more to monitor the substances ingested by the user, so that appropriate interception can take place if necessary to help lower health costs."
In Amsterdam they don't even bother with the bathroom (well, for men at least): street urinals