I, too, have wondered why Lenovo would pay so much for IBM's PC division. I expect we'll see a new logo almost immediately: most likely the current IBM logo with a small "powered by Lenovo" line underneath. In a few years, the logos will be reversed, with Lenovo's name as the more prominent one. Within five years, the logo will have no reference to IBM. This is the route IBM took with Lexmark when they spun them off.
Damn it! That was the uninformed speculation I was going to make! But it's really the only thing they can do.
I think they'll leave the IBM trademarks intact for the first six months to a year but still include the Lenovo logo seperately. Then they'll integrate the logos and start introducing new product lines with names that are variants on existing IBM trademarks. I'd guess that they'll use "Think-" heavily since ThinkPad is probably the IBM brand name that gets the broadest recognition. Then they can use these to transition to new brandnames not derived from IBM trademarks.
It would be kind of like when Palm (US Robotics at the time) lost the case against Bic and couldn't use the name Pilot anymore and they changed it to PalmPilot and eventually Palm. Using an intermediate brand name allowed them to change the brand name without losing all of the recognition the original had.
I'd guess that IBM is holding that chunk of Lenovo to maintain some influence over Lenovo since they'll probably use them as a supplier of PCs for their services business for some time to come.
I think we should follow Iceland's model. We need to find a way to control the weather with the power of the fiery magma beneath the earth's crust.
This also has a secondary effect. Our use of geothermal power will bring all of the world's greatest mad scientists to the US. Mad scientists are naturally drawn to geothermal power like moths to flame. Sure, mad scientists may be unpredictable, but at least some of them will do spectacular things to benefit humanity and I think it's worth the risk of a cataclysm or two.
DDOS attacks do not target individuals regardless of how pleasant it is to think so. If you're sending a server enough traffic to be a nuisance, that traffic will be a nuisance elsewhere as well.
Saying that it's okay to DDOS spammers is especially obnoxious given that the most important argument against spam isn't that it's annoying but rather that it is a waste of bandwidth that other people are paying for.
I don't think the government should make laws regarding the sexual orientation of emails. What they do in the privacy of their own homes is their business.
That's what Diebold thought according to the leaked memos. Most of Diebold's screwup are a result of executives not taking the project seriously.
Testing is the biggest problem. Each component of the software and hardware needs to be tested thoroughly. This includes any drivers being used (especially if you're using drivers not supplied by the OS maker). You need people to spend some time thinking about all of the possible ways that the product can be used or misused and test these cases. Then you need to get some actual users and let them fool around with it until you realize how many things you needed to test for that you overlooked. Most of these systems seem to require that the poll works do some things to set the machines up and you need to make the software attempt to diagnose and report any misconfiguration.
Sure, at its core a voting system should be relatively simple, but once you begin trying to account with all of the crap that people will put it through, it's going to get much more complex.
That would be an approximation algorithm. There are in fact approximation algorithms for the traveling salesman problem. The simplest one yields a tour no more than twice the length of the optimal tour. There is a better ones that gives a tour no more than 3/2 times the length of the optimal tour though and you can get a better approximation for some special cases.
There is a lot of effort going into finding approximation algorithms. Some problems seem to be harder to find good approximations for than others, but it's not possible to take an approximation from one NP-complete problem to generate an approximation for all other NP-complete problems.
The reason for this is that formally, NP-complete problems are phrased as decision problems. A decision problem basically amounts to "Does this data have the X property?" For the traveling salesman problem you would phrase the decision problem as "Does this weighted graph have a tour visiting each vertex of weight less than N?" The mapping between two NP-complete problems is a mapping for the data that each problem takes as input. This mapping does not provide you with a mapping between near-optimal solutions to one problem and near-optimal solutions to another. Furthermore, some NP-complete problems can only be phrased as a decision problem. For these problems, there are no near-optimal solutions; for all data, the answer is either yes or no.
But despite that, yes approximation algorithms really are a big deal and private companies are giving grants to people working on commercially applicable ones. Right now I'd say that the study of approximation algorithms and probabilistic algorithms (i.e. algorithms that yield a correct answer most of the time) are where we're seeing the most development in computer science.
I used to be a libertarian. The reason I no longer consider myself a libertarian is that I never saw any adequate explanation of why a laissez-faire market will always serve the best interests of society. I was turned off by libertarian pipe dreams such as the idea of privatized regulatory bodies certifying products for a profit (the main problem with this is who will regulate the regulatory bodies and how can anyone keep track of which ones are real and which ones are just industry fronts to push scam products).
Libertarianism is a dedication to a single unadulterated ideal and to an extent I can respect that. However, it's an ideal that would benefit from being adulterated just a bit.
The market is just a mechanism for rewarding those who do well. But it is an imperfect mechanism toward that end. I don't demand that every market be perfect, but I think that the price of a product should roughly reflect its quality rather than its advertizing and branding. The government is here to do whatever the market cannot do on its own. Libertarians say they believe the government's role is to prevent people from using force against others. But misdirection is just as effective for subverting the market as force is, possibly even moreso.
I believe that government needs to set simpler goals. Providing universal healthcare is an unreasonable goal, but doing something like giving doctors incentives to volunteer their spare time at free clinics seems like a good idea. I think that welfare needs to be greatly reduced (e.g. shorter expiration date on temporary assistance, replacement of monetary aid with job training where practical, taking people's children into custody if they can't support them rather than giving them more money) but I don't think it needs to be eliminated. Government programs should be heavily monitored for their effectiveness and altered or even dismantled if they are not effective.
A platform of supporting more effective government is at least slightly more appealing to most voters than a platform of minimal government. Another problem is that like the most third parties, the libertarians are proposing sweeping changes. They need to propose a plan for gradually implimenting the changes they seek.
Take a look at the exit polls. When the results were broken down into categories by demographics, in most cases it was a 60/40 split or closer than that. There are some demographic groups that showed a much stronger correlation, but these groups are too narrow for the absentee ballots to be entirely made up of these people. Plus, at least a decent chunk of the absentee ballots are from people in the military which can be expected to be made up of more Republicans than Democrats.
While technically the popular vote is irrelevent, many people do take it as a guideline toward who deserves to win. If Kerry challenged the results he would greatly anger the majority of Bush voters in addition to angering some of his own voters. If he challenged the results he would face massive public resistance and might even destroy his career.
I saw a presentation by Jane Wang about this work last year. She's also done a lot of work on the dynamics of insect flight which she considers to be a closely related problem to this one.
Sorry, but coffee is supposed to be brewed that hot. The guideline I've heard is it should be no less than 170 degrees. If you go lower it won't absorb as much from the grinds. In fact, a little search has found that the Specialty Coffee Association of America reccomends brewing at 195-203 degrees.
Some people have been saying that even if it's supposed to be brewed that hot that it shouldn't be served that hot. The problem is, I've never seen a drip coffee maker designed to keep a pot of coffee below brewing temperature. Also, most coffee drinkers want their coffee served as hot as possible, even if it means letting it cool for a bit because if it cools too much it becomes undrinkable.
I have yet to see any evidence that McDonalds did anything inconsistent with the standard practices expected by their customers.
As for the coffee at Tim Hortons, I would imagine it is brewed at a higher temperature but the pot is taken off of the heating element more often allowing it to cool slightly.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
While things like slogans can be trademarked, they generally aren't considered writings. However, that doesn't matter since the clause that allows Congress to create a trademark system is the commerce clause.
Before 1870, when the first US trademark law was passed, some states had already passed their own trademark laws. From this perspective, national trademarks can be justified as neccessary for the purpose of resolving trademark disputes that cross state lines. Of course, you could argue that the Federal government has no business meddling in trademark disputes that don't cross state lines, but that is irrelevent now as in 1941 the Supreme Court ruled that it is impossible to properly distinguish between intra-state and inter-state trade.
Anyway, trademarks are based on the idea that a company has an exclusive right to the reputation it has earned. Patents and copyrights are supposed to have time limits because it benefits society in the long run while providing authors, artists, inventors, etc. with a motivation for creating things. There is no benefit to society from having trademarks expire after a fixed length of time and there's really not any reason to not let a company keep it's name, logo, etc. for as long as it exists.
Trademarks are at times overextended, but despite this, trademarks are still a weaker form of intellectual property than copyrights or patents. There are many more defenses against accusations of trademark infringment than there are defenses against patent and copyright infringement.
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I'm not sure, but I don't think it was from the Onion.
Damn it! That was the uninformed speculation I was going to make! But it's really the only thing they can do.
I think they'll leave the IBM trademarks intact for the first six months to a year but still include the Lenovo logo seperately. Then they'll integrate the logos and start introducing new product lines with names that are variants on existing IBM trademarks. I'd guess that they'll use "Think-" heavily since ThinkPad is probably the IBM brand name that gets the broadest recognition. Then they can use these to transition to new brandnames not derived from IBM trademarks.
It would be kind of like when Palm (US Robotics at the time) lost the case against Bic and couldn't use the name Pilot anymore and they changed it to PalmPilot and eventually Palm. Using an intermediate brand name allowed them to change the brand name without losing all of the recognition the original had.
I'd guess that IBM is holding that chunk of Lenovo to maintain some influence over Lenovo since they'll probably use them as a supplier of PCs for their services business for some time to come.
I think we should follow Iceland's model. We need to find a way to control the weather with the power of the fiery magma beneath the earth's crust.
This also has a secondary effect. Our use of geothermal power will bring all of the world's greatest mad scientists to the US. Mad scientists are naturally drawn to geothermal power like moths to flame. Sure, mad scientists may be unpredictable, but at least some of them will do spectacular things to benefit humanity and I think it's worth the risk of a cataclysm or two.
13.5%, and that's my final offer.
Throughout the history of the United States, parties have used the limited government and states' rights rhetoric whenever they were out of power.
The fact is that everyone is opposed to larger government except when the government is doing something that they deem good and proper.
And FIV is specifically adapted to cats. And SIV is specifically adapted to monkeys.
HIV is specifically adapted to humans.
What you're talking about isn't impossible but it's very unlikely.
DDOS attacks do not target individuals regardless of how pleasant it is to think so. If you're sending a server enough traffic to be a nuisance, that traffic will be a nuisance elsewhere as well.
Saying that it's okay to DDOS spammers is especially obnoxious given that the most important argument against spam isn't that it's annoying but rather that it is a waste of bandwidth that other people are paying for.
I don't think the government should make laws regarding the sexual orientation of emails. What they do in the privacy of their own homes is their business.
If this sort of thing escalates, the internet will become unuseable. DDOS attacks affect more than just the intended target.
I don't really see anything wrong with subisidizing medicine for humans and livestock by overcharging pet owners. Sounds like a good plan to me.
That was some pretty fucking weak satire.
Looks like you shifted the decimal one place to the right by accident.
I won't believe it until some runs a deaf test.
Yes, it was very popular, but few (or possibly even no) games are really popular enough to warrant these inflated scores.
Given the choice, I'd rather be given the job of securing a compiler and run-time environment than the task of securing 1000 C or C++ programs.
It's probably just all of the people who bought Xboxes to try to bankrupt MS and then broke down and bought games anyway.
That's what Diebold thought according to the leaked memos. Most of Diebold's screwup are a result of executives not taking the project seriously.
Testing is the biggest problem. Each component of the software and hardware needs to be tested thoroughly. This includes any drivers being used (especially if you're using drivers not supplied by the OS maker). You need people to spend some time thinking about all of the possible ways that the product can be used or misused and test these cases. Then you need to get some actual users and let them fool around with it until you realize how many things you needed to test for that you overlooked. Most of these systems seem to require that the poll works do some things to set the machines up and you need to make the software attempt to diagnose and report any misconfiguration.
Sure, at its core a voting system should be relatively simple, but once you begin trying to account with all of the crap that people will put it through, it's going to get much more complex.
That would be an approximation algorithm. There are in fact approximation algorithms for the traveling salesman problem. The simplest one yields a tour no more than twice the length of the optimal tour. There is a better ones that gives a tour no more than 3/2 times the length of the optimal tour though and you can get a better approximation for some special cases.
There is a lot of effort going into finding approximation algorithms. Some problems seem to be harder to find good approximations for than others, but it's not possible to take an approximation from one NP-complete problem to generate an approximation for all other NP-complete problems.
The reason for this is that formally, NP-complete problems are phrased as decision problems. A decision problem basically amounts to "Does this data have the X property?" For the traveling salesman problem you would phrase the decision problem as "Does this weighted graph have a tour visiting each vertex of weight less than N?" The mapping between two NP-complete problems is a mapping for the data that each problem takes as input. This mapping does not provide you with a mapping between near-optimal solutions to one problem and near-optimal solutions to another. Furthermore, some NP-complete problems can only be phrased as a decision problem. For these problems, there are no near-optimal solutions; for all data, the answer is either yes or no.
But despite that, yes approximation algorithms really are a big deal and private companies are giving grants to people working on commercially applicable ones. Right now I'd say that the study of approximation algorithms and probabilistic algorithms (i.e. algorithms that yield a correct answer most of the time) are where we're seeing the most development in computer science.
I used to be a libertarian. The reason I no longer consider myself a libertarian is that I never saw any adequate explanation of why a laissez-faire market will always serve the best interests of society. I was turned off by libertarian pipe dreams such as the idea of privatized regulatory bodies certifying products for a profit (the main problem with this is who will regulate the regulatory bodies and how can anyone keep track of which ones are real and which ones are just industry fronts to push scam products).
Libertarianism is a dedication to a single unadulterated ideal and to an extent I can respect that. However, it's an ideal that would benefit from being adulterated just a bit.
The market is just a mechanism for rewarding those who do well. But it is an imperfect mechanism toward that end. I don't demand that every market be perfect, but I think that the price of a product should roughly reflect its quality rather than its advertizing and branding. The government is here to do whatever the market cannot do on its own. Libertarians say they believe the government's role is to prevent people from using force against others. But misdirection is just as effective for subverting the market as force is, possibly even moreso.
I believe that government needs to set simpler goals. Providing universal healthcare is an unreasonable goal, but doing something like giving doctors incentives to volunteer their spare time at free clinics seems like a good idea. I think that welfare needs to be greatly reduced (e.g. shorter expiration date on temporary assistance, replacement of monetary aid with job training where practical, taking people's children into custody if they can't support them rather than giving them more money) but I don't think it needs to be eliminated. Government programs should be heavily monitored for their effectiveness and altered or even dismantled if they are not effective.
A platform of supporting more effective government is at least slightly more appealing to most voters than a platform of minimal government. Another problem is that like the most third parties, the libertarians are proposing sweeping changes. They need to propose a plan for gradually implimenting the changes they seek.
Take a look at the exit polls. When the results were broken down into categories by demographics, in most cases it was a 60/40 split or closer than that. There are some demographic groups that showed a much stronger correlation, but these groups are too narrow for the absentee ballots to be entirely made up of these people. Plus, at least a decent chunk of the absentee ballots are from people in the military which can be expected to be made up of more Republicans than Democrats.
While technically the popular vote is irrelevent, many people do take it as a guideline toward who deserves to win. If Kerry challenged the results he would greatly anger the majority of Bush voters in addition to angering some of his own voters. If he challenged the results he would face massive public resistance and might even destroy his career.
Yeah, but he was never very good at the oil baron gig.
I saw a presentation by Jane Wang about this work last year. She's also done a lot of work on the dynamics of insect flight which she considers to be a closely related problem to this one.
Sorry, but coffee is supposed to be brewed that hot. The guideline I've heard is it should be no less than 170 degrees. If you go lower it won't absorb as much from the grinds. In fact, a little search has found that the Specialty Coffee Association of America reccomends brewing at 195-203 degrees.
Some people have been saying that even if it's supposed to be brewed that hot that it shouldn't be served that hot. The problem is, I've never seen a drip coffee maker designed to keep a pot of coffee below brewing temperature. Also, most coffee drinkers want their coffee served as hot as possible, even if it means letting it cool for a bit because if it cools too much it becomes undrinkable.
I have yet to see any evidence that McDonalds did anything inconsistent with the standard practices expected by their customers.
As for the coffee at Tim Hortons, I would imagine it is brewed at a higher temperature but the pot is taken off of the heating element more often allowing it to cool slightly.
While things like slogans can be trademarked, they generally aren't considered writings. However, that doesn't matter since the clause that allows Congress to create a trademark system is the commerce clause.
Before 1870, when the first US trademark law was passed, some states had already passed their own trademark laws. From this perspective, national trademarks can be justified as neccessary for the purpose of resolving trademark disputes that cross state lines. Of course, you could argue that the Federal government has no business meddling in trademark disputes that don't cross state lines, but that is irrelevent now as in 1941 the Supreme Court ruled that it is impossible to properly distinguish between intra-state and inter-state trade.
Anyway, trademarks are based on the idea that a company has an exclusive right to the reputation it has earned. Patents and copyrights are supposed to have time limits because it benefits society in the long run while providing authors, artists, inventors, etc. with a motivation for creating things. There is no benefit to society from having trademarks expire after a fixed length of time and there's really not any reason to not let a company keep it's name, logo, etc. for as long as it exists.
Trademarks are at times overextended, but despite this, trademarks are still a weaker form of intellectual property than copyrights or patents. There are many more defenses against accusations of trademark infringment than there are defenses against patent and copyright infringement.