Imagine, as a thought experiment, if 90% of the people who owned Exxon stock sold it all. And no one else bought it because of principle. Exxon would continue to function, exactly as it is now, except the remaining 10% would get massive dividends.
True. Moreover, if 90% of the stock was suddenly put up for sale "at market" with no
significant buyers (assuming potential buyers would shun it as
a matter of principle), the price would plummet to near zero, well below
even the cash assets of the company. The company (having no such
principles) would buy up
its own stock at a pittance. The remaining stockholders would then own
the entire company instead of 10% of it.
Take it to an extreme and assume that every stockholder is swept up
emotionally by the stigma of owning the stock and thus disposes it at any price. Then the company could
buy back all of its shares for essentially nothing and be owned by no
one! The board of directors would then have no stockholders to answer
to and could vote to pay themselves multi-billion dollar salaries as well as
to do far more evil.
If you want to influence the direction of a company, you would want to
own as much of its stock as possible, not get rid of it. If you are
extremely wealthy, you can just buy all of the company's shares and have
total control over its direction.
Does a "utility" mean that we could finally have true net neutrality
and use the internet as it was designed, such as having unblocked
incoming ports 80/443? I use alternate ports to route around this to
access my files remotely, but strictly speaking I'm violating the ISP
T&C by having a "server" at home.
However, I often want to access my home files from wifi access points
such as hospitals where outgoing 80/443 are the only ports open (no
outgoing ssh, etc. allowed). But my cable provider blocks incoming
80/443, so I'm completely cut off from my home files. I would rather
not pay to put a TB of files on the "cloud" or pay some 3rd party
service to reroute ports or whatever.
As a first rough pass at identifying the people in 250,000 images, they could use facial recognition against the ID photos of all past employees (assuming they saved them). That way, interested past employees would only have to look at much smaller samples to confirm and describe the images.
This reminds me of my showerhead thermometer. All I wanted was a
device to tell me the shower temperature and nothing else. Instead, the
only thing I could find were units with all sorts of "features" I didn't
want.
The one I finally bought has a built-in clock for displaying time
when not measuring temperature, a temperature alarm system for when the
water is too hot, a shower timer, modes for deg-F/deg-C (maybe necessary, but I'd
prefer a hidden switch inside the battery compartment to simplify everyday use), and
probably other features I never bothered to learn about. So, when I
want to use it I have to be very careful to press the buttons in just
the right order to invoke the temperature mode (it has to be done each
use since it shuts off after 5 minutes to conserve the battery), and if
I make a mistake it gets stuck in some setup sequence that's almost
impossible to exit from without consulting the manual. I've given up on
telling guests how to use it.
I'd pay considerably more to have a unit that just displays
temperature and nothing else, with a single button to turn it on, but it
seems such a thing is not available.
I once knew a traffic-light engineer who was an EE with a BS. I mentioned that I thought it was
annoying not to have sensors on lights in rarely-used cross streets,
since it wastes a lot of gas to have the main throughway traffic
constantly stopping for no reason, not to mention wasting people's time.
He said that if you put in a sensor, people will get used to the light
always being green, and in the rare case it turns red they will tend not
to stop and will cause more accidents. He was very strongly opposed to
such sensors - arguing supposedly from experience as a professional and
an expert - and our argument started to become, well, heated, so I just
let it go. I really doubt what he said is supported by statistics,
but his attitude was an example of the thinking of the people designing the lights.
(This was a couple of decades ago. Maybe the thinking has changed since
I do see more sensors these days, but still not nearly enough. Often they seem
poorly designed, such as unnecessarily waiting a full cycle before changing even
if there is no cross traffic.)
I am in the USA and tried to watch it. The commercial played beautifully. Then after the commercial, just a black screen. I waited 5 minutes and gave up. Anyone else have this experience?
Spectrum is something you only have a license to a small amount of. As such, the total bandwidth you can put out has a hard limit on it. Everyone on a tower shares that bandwidth and there's just nothing you can do to increase it. You can't "lay more fiber" or "use another laser" or anything like that which you can do on wired connections. On a given segment, there is just only so much bandwidth nature and regulations will let you have.
The solution is to add more cells (towers). That's the whole idea behind cell phones. How do you think the humongous bandwidth used by say downtown Manhattan cell phones is achieved?
While I agree the extra precision is misleading, the real problem is that they don't provide confidence intervals. Even a rounded 80% could be misleading if it could fall between 60% and 90% due to sparse data.
On the other hand, if in their report details they said "84.38% with a 99% confidence interval of 72.27% to 94.49%", then the extra precision is no longer necessarily misleading (it is just the calculational result of the model used) and, although it is a little pedantic and redundant, I would have no fundamental problem with it. It might even be argued that it is infinitesimally more precise, allowing the calculations to be confirmed by an independent researcher. However, for presentation in summary form, it would be much better to say "between 72% and 94% with 99% confidence".
People are constantly losing their "home" for as minor a reason as losing their job and having to
transfer to another city. Call me a coward, but I'd move if my city was under long-term, constant attack.
But regardless of your personal motivation,
why would you want to traumatize your children by having them grow up in the midst of such
fear and violence?
Over the years, I've tried to use Unicode for math symbols on various web pages and
tend to revert back to GIFs or LaTeX-generating tools due to problems
with symbols missing from the font used by this or that browser/OS
combination, or even incorrect symbols
in some cases.
IMO
the biggest problem with Unicode is the lack of a public domain
reference font. Instead, it is a mishmash of proprietary fonts each of
which only partly implements the spec. Even the Unicode spec itself
uses proprietary fonts from various sources and thus cannot be freely
reproduced (it says so right in the spec), a terrible idea for a supposed "standard".
I'd love to see a plain, unadorned public-domain reference font that
incorporates all defined characters - indeed, it would seem to me to be the
responsibility of the Unicode Standard committee to provide such a font.
Then others can use it as a basis for their own fancy proprietary font
variations, and I would have a reliable font I could revert to when necessary.
What you can do is use quantum teleportation to "transmit" (in a manner of speaking)
a real (or complex) number, i.e. a quantum superposition,
which in theory could contain infinite information, by using only
a couple of classical bits. This real number can't be observed directly - you can only
tell whether it's less than or greater than a specified number by appropriately designing
your observation - but until you observe it, it can be further processed in its
full precision as a superposition at the receiver end using quantum operations.
What you can do with this internal (uncollapsed) infinite information is up to you, e.g. as part of
a quantum factoring or search algorithm, until you finally collapse it and read out some yes/no answer.
All in theory of course; in practice you have noise and other sources of error.
I do this. Also, once every year or two, I scan all the pages and make a nice pdf file of each volume. I put bookmarks on pages that I think I may want to look up quickly (often these correspond to physical bookmarks such as little sticky notes) and also bookmark start of month or start of new project. My bookshelf, with 5 linear feet of notes over the years, fits on a thumb drive. In practice, I typically look up things in the pdfs rather than the physical notes. I intend to dispose of the physical notes someday, at least the very old ones (ego has prevented me from doing so thus far), but even if my house burns down my
notes are safely stored away on a remote backup.
Beano works for me. However, for it to really work well, I've found you need 2-3 pills per serving of food, typically 6-9 pills per meal, which (even for the generic version) can cost more than the meal itself!
On my 2GHz laptop, the CPU is pinned to 100%, and all I see are frozen frames that skip through the video every few seconds. The dragging response is so sluggish as to be meaningless since any visual feedback is delayed many seconds. I guess this technology isn't ready for prime time unless you have a bleeding edge gamer GPU or something.
Be careful with priracetam. There is
anecdotal
evidence that although it may make people with low IQ/memory problems smarter, it might
also make people with high IQ dumber. Personally, I tried it for a while and it seemed to make no
difference. (Does that mean I have an unremarkable IQ?:-) )
Buttons vs Touch screens? I must be really ancient, because I still hate the replacement of
Knobs with Buttons. There is nothing more user-friendly than a rotating volume control
knob you can reach for in the dark without taking your eyes off the road,
vs. finding a little button and hoping it's not set to the wrong mode.
Oh and while I'm at it, what's the deal with the "fade-in" response volume control knobs where
when you turn up the volume, it only increases a half-second later? Give me the old-fashioned
potentiometers that respond instantly.
Slashdot Mirror
True. Moreover, if 90% of the stock was suddenly put up for sale "at market" with no significant buyers (assuming potential buyers would shun it as a matter of principle), the price would plummet to near zero, well below even the cash assets of the company. The company (having no such principles) would buy up its own stock at a pittance. The remaining stockholders would then own the entire company instead of 10% of it.
Take it to an extreme and assume that every stockholder is swept up emotionally by the stigma of owning the stock and thus disposes it at any price. Then the company could buy back all of its shares for essentially nothing and be owned by no one! The board of directors would then have no stockholders to answer to and could vote to pay themselves multi-billion dollar salaries as well as to do far more evil.
If you want to influence the direction of a company, you would want to own as much of its stock as possible, not get rid of it. If you are extremely wealthy, you can just buy all of the company's shares and have total control over its direction.
Does a "utility" mean that we could finally have true net neutrality and use the internet as it was designed, such as having unblocked incoming ports 80/443? I use alternate ports to route around this to access my files remotely, but strictly speaking I'm violating the ISP T&C by having a "server" at home.
However, I often want to access my home files from wifi access points such as hospitals where outgoing 80/443 are the only ports open (no outgoing ssh, etc. allowed). But my cable provider blocks incoming 80/443, so I'm completely cut off from my home files. I would rather not pay to put a TB of files on the "cloud" or pay some 3rd party service to reroute ports or whatever.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." - Yogi Berra
As a first rough pass at identifying the people in 250,000 images, they could use facial recognition against the ID photos of all past employees (assuming they saved them). That way, interested past employees would only have to look at much smaller samples to confirm and describe the images.
Oh, and I'm sure the NSA could be of assistance.
This reminds me of my showerhead thermometer. All I wanted was a device to tell me the shower temperature and nothing else. Instead, the only thing I could find were units with all sorts of "features" I didn't want.
The one I finally bought has a built-in clock for displaying time when not measuring temperature, a temperature alarm system for when the water is too hot, a shower timer, modes for deg-F/deg-C (maybe necessary, but I'd prefer a hidden switch inside the battery compartment to simplify everyday use), and probably other features I never bothered to learn about. So, when I want to use it I have to be very careful to press the buttons in just the right order to invoke the temperature mode (it has to be done each use since it shuts off after 5 minutes to conserve the battery), and if I make a mistake it gets stuck in some setup sequence that's almost impossible to exit from without consulting the manual. I've given up on telling guests how to use it.
I'd pay considerably more to have a unit that just displays temperature and nothing else, with a single button to turn it on, but it seems such a thing is not available.
Everyone knows that Ed is the standard text editor.
I once knew a traffic-light engineer who was an EE with a BS. I mentioned that I thought it was annoying not to have sensors on lights in rarely-used cross streets, since it wastes a lot of gas to have the main throughway traffic constantly stopping for no reason, not to mention wasting people's time. He said that if you put in a sensor, people will get used to the light always being green, and in the rare case it turns red they will tend not to stop and will cause more accidents. He was very strongly opposed to such sensors - arguing supposedly from experience as a professional and an expert - and our argument started to become, well, heated, so I just let it go. I really doubt what he said is supported by statistics, but his attitude was an example of the thinking of the people designing the lights.
(This was a couple of decades ago. Maybe the thinking has changed since I do see more sensors these days, but still not nearly enough. Often they seem poorly designed, such as unnecessarily waiting a full cycle before changing even if there is no cross traffic.)
I am in the USA and tried to watch it. The commercial played beautifully. Then after the commercial, just a black screen. I waited 5 minutes and gave up. Anyone else have this experience?
The solution is to add more cells (towers). That's the whole idea behind cell phones. How do you think the humongous bandwidth used by say downtown Manhattan cell phones is achieved?
While I agree the extra precision is misleading, the real problem is that they don't provide confidence intervals. Even a rounded 80% could be misleading if it could fall between 60% and 90% due to sparse data.
On the other hand, if in their report details they said "84.38% with a 99% confidence interval of 72.27% to 94.49%", then the extra precision is no longer necessarily misleading (it is just the calculational result of the model used) and, although it is a little pedantic and redundant, I would have no fundamental problem with it. It might even be argued that it is infinitesimally more precise, allowing the calculations to be confirmed by an independent researcher. However, for presentation in summary form, it would be much better to say "between 72% and 94% with 99% confidence".
People are constantly losing their "home" for as minor a reason as losing their job and having to transfer to another city. Call me a coward, but I'd move if my city was under long-term, constant attack.
But regardless of your personal motivation, why would you want to traumatize your children by having them grow up in the midst of such fear and violence?
Yes, but they can't do 2^512 (2 to the 512th power) calculations simultaneously in mere millionths of a second.
Of course, this would be for an ideal quantum computer with 512 qubits. There's still some confusion about what the D-Wave "is".
Over the years, I've tried to use Unicode for math symbols on various web pages and tend to revert back to GIFs or LaTeX-generating tools due to problems with symbols missing from the font used by this or that browser/OS combination, or even incorrect symbols in some cases.
IMO the biggest problem with Unicode is the lack of a public domain reference font. Instead, it is a mishmash of proprietary fonts each of which only partly implements the spec. Even the Unicode spec itself uses proprietary fonts from various sources and thus cannot be freely reproduced (it says so right in the spec), a terrible idea for a supposed "standard".
I'd love to see a plain, unadorned public-domain reference font that incorporates all defined characters - indeed, it would seem to me to be the responsibility of the Unicode Standard committee to provide such a font. Then others can use it as a basis for their own fancy proprietary font variations, and I would have a reliable font I could revert to when necessary.
What you can do is use quantum teleportation to "transmit" (in a manner of speaking) a real (or complex) number, i.e. a quantum superposition, which in theory could contain infinite information, by using only a couple of classical bits. This real number can't be observed directly - you can only tell whether it's less than or greater than a specified number by appropriately designing your observation - but until you observe it, it can be further processed in its full precision as a superposition at the receiver end using quantum operations. What you can do with this internal (uncollapsed) infinite information is up to you, e.g. as part of a quantum factoring or search algorithm, until you finally collapse it and read out some yes/no answer. All in theory of course; in practice you have noise and other sources of error.
I do this. Also, once every year or two, I scan all the pages and make a nice pdf file of each volume. I put bookmarks on pages that I think I may want to look up quickly (often these correspond to physical bookmarks such as little sticky notes) and also bookmark start of month or start of new project. My bookshelf, with 5 linear feet of notes over the years, fits on a thumb drive. In practice, I typically look up things in the pdfs rather than the physical notes. I intend to dispose of the physical notes someday, at least the very old ones (ego has prevented me from doing so thus far), but even if my house burns down my notes are safely stored away on a remote backup.
Beano works for me. However, for it to really work well, I've found you need 2-3 pills per serving of food, typically 6-9 pills per meal, which (even for the generic version) can cost more than the meal itself!
You are confusing copyright with patents. TFA is about "patent-free" seeds, not GPL copyrighted seeds (if there even is such a thing).
So how come I have no problem with streaming video, youtube, etc. which typically use about 20% of the CPU? What makes this so special?
On my 2GHz laptop, the CPU is pinned to 100%, and all I see are frozen frames that skip through the video every few seconds. The dragging response is so sluggish as to be meaningless since any visual feedback is delayed many seconds. I guess this technology isn't ready for prime time unless you have a bleeding edge gamer GPU or something.
I don't see what this has to do with "copyright infringement". Anyway, from what I could tell, Tip4Commit takes a 5% cut.
Yes, but for those of us who know how to root it, your old one will keep up the house and intelligently manage half of your assets.
Be careful with priracetam. There is anecdotal evidence that although it may make people with low IQ/memory problems smarter, it might also make people with high IQ dumber. Personally, I tried it for a while and it seemed to make no difference. (Does that mean I have an unremarkable IQ? :-) )
Tantalum is rare, and it is a conflict metal, but it is not a rare earth metal. Nor does TFA claim that.
Buttons vs Touch screens? I must be really ancient, because I still hate the replacement of Knobs with Buttons. There is nothing more user-friendly than a rotating volume control knob you can reach for in the dark without taking your eyes off the road, vs. finding a little button and hoping it's not set to the wrong mode.
Oh and while I'm at it, what's the deal with the "fade-in" response volume control knobs where when you turn up the volume, it only increases a half-second later? Give me the old-fashioned potentiometers that respond instantly.
And get off my lawn.