I never even thought to conflate Std Deviation and Mean Deviation prior to reading this article/summary. I just thought of Std Deviation as that bit of the normal distribution which captures ~68.2% of the values (for +/- 1 sigma). And Yes, I knew how it is calculated, my mind just didn't go that direction.
I've had an account at/. for over 15 years; [. ..]/. has never been solely about "science and technology". It's always had a very strong political part to it, and this cock up at US Customs plays to that part of the site.
15 years?... Newbie. (but I agree with you. Some people just need to relax a little.)
If you've ever played around with conversing with Cleverbot (Google it ha ha!), an online AI that supposedly learns from its conversations, you'll find that "conversing" with humans, at least the sort it apparently meets on the internet, is turning it into a disturbed individual, or whatever.
Well with a name that sounds like a tool used by a meat packer, CleaverBot, who wouldn't be disturbed. Oh, wait... Clever like smart... same comment.
I want to read about its success in navigating some of the highway system surrounding the twin cities in Minnesota.
I remember once merging onto an interstate there (from the right) only to need to cross four lanes so that I could catch my exit (on the left) what seemed to be only a half-mile later. I probably endangered myself, my passengers and fellow motorists making that maneuver. This would be a good place to reduce accident risk.:)
You probably weren't supposed to use that entrance/exit combination. I know of at least two other cities where such a situation exists and they have solid white lines (not dashed) and signage specifically instructing you not to do it. (people still do, and accidents still happen). In both cases there were surface street exits that very quickly convey one to the same place as the freeway multiple-lane-crossing maneuver winds up.
Sorry to hear about your accident and injuries, but you lost me when you wrote "...when you are between a concrete barrier and an elderly driver that doesn't notice your horn there aren't many options." Now, I admit that I wan't there, and there may not have been any options as you assert, but generally if one is hitting the horn, one would be better served taking some other action instead; like hitting the brakes or otherwise taking evasive manuvers.
You mentioned defensive driving courses. As I understand it, one of the main tenents of defensive driving is "be prepared to control your vehicle, because you can't control the other persons vehicle" (Blowing the horn is essentially attempting to control the other vehicle.)
To get back on topic: This is the thing that the autonomous cars are actually quite good at, reacting to exactly what is happening, not what the "driver" is expecting to happen. That and not over-reacting; such as the tendency for people to steer out of one accident and right into another (often a worse, head on accident).
The Muslim Brotherhood made things even more unstable in Egypt. Fatah is so weak they've effectively ceded all control over the Gaza Strip to Hamas. Hezbollah sparked a devastating conflict with Israel which effectively kicked the country's development 20 years backwards.
If THATS "offering to build and staff schools, give them food, add some stability, and provide some sense of a security force", then the Taliban is the greatest government in the world.
Replace the groups above with "The Democrat Party" and the change the country to the US and, unfortunately, it still applies. (Ok, you can't literally do the subsitiution and have it work, but the thought is the same. Promises, promises--> election -> things go downhill. )
The worse part is that Republicans in the last 20 years or so haven't been much better (only slightly). Thus the problems that we are in domestically.
As I understand it DDT was used in matresses specifically to kill/prevent bed-bugs, and was very effective. This is part of the reason that the US/Canada has had many decades of being reletively bed-bug worry-free (or at least it has been uncommon). The problem with DDT was that it was found to persist into the environment, would get into the fish, which were then eaten by birds, which resulted in soft egg-shells and the decline of species such as the California condor and bald eagle. This is why it was banned in 1972.
It has taken 30-40 years, the eagle population has returned, but so have the bed bugs.
The problem is not Obamacare. The problem is the disgusting, predatorial healthcare system in the US. The problem is that the US doesn't follow every other developed country in the world and treats healthcare as a privilege instead of a right. As such, the monopolies that run the healthcare system exploit the lack of competitive pressure since people in the hospital frequently can't "shop around" for better & cheaper service. This leads to the practice of charging patients literally 10x to 100x what things actually cost.
I think you are slightly confused. You have it right when you are talking about the lack of competitive pressure increasing prices, but the solution is not to remove even more competitive pressure by switching to one plan to rule them all, which is essentially what Obamacare does. (You can have "competiting" plans, but they have to be the same, or you get hit for having a "cadillac plan".) The solution is to restore competitive pressure by implementing things like healthcare spending accounts (HSA) etc. which would place the consumer in the drivers seat for their own care. "... but doctor, is there a less expensive med that I can take?" (or test, or proceedure, etc.)
But this is where others start complaining that this leaves out the poor, etc. since they can't afford to contribute to a HSA. (I am afraid I don't have a good answer, except to say that Obamacare isn't shaping up to fix this issue either.)
Don't forget, there are people in Canada who come to the US to use our "shit" system, because they can't get care in a reasonable time-frame in their socialized healthcare system. It is well and good to have a "right" to healthcare, but if you have to wait in line for a year to treat something that is going to kill you in six months without treatment, it doesn't do you any good.
This is illustrated by the fact that, in this very case, the judge ordered the man to decrypt his hard drives (which is a fairly uncontroversial example of "testifying" against oneself as a defendant's password is private knowledge that must be produced by the defendant) or be held in contempt of court.
Let me expand on this post slightly. I too was going to point at the case currently in question as one of the better examples, but I was going to suggest that you have a hard drive that has NO encryption on it, but does have some unused partition space. (Perhaps from an old install of another OS, swap space, or some other ligitimate reason. In any case there is non-zero "noise" in the unused partition.) You are, in fact, innocent of any crimes, but have been accused of some data related crime. The police confiscate your hard drive and, finding the "empty" partition space, the courts say "You obviously have some sort of truecrypt volume here. Give us the password."
Since you never actually created a truecrypt volume, you can't provide the key, because it doesn't exist.
Without the Fifth Ammendment, you could be held in contempt of court for not complying with the court order. By claiming the Fifth, you are able to say "sorry, but no" to the order to provide the non-existant key.
How would you react if the government proposed to ban certain words or phrases because you don't really "need" to use them in everyday speech?
Political correctness (PC) attempts to do just that. Of course, that was probably exactly the point that you were trying to make.
The worst part of it is that, if you consider how closely connected linguistics and the formation of rational thought is, (non)PC is tanamount to establishing thoughtcrime.
I used to work as an Advance Quality Engineer in the automotive seating industry. Part of my job involved regularly reviewing the JD Power results for the platforms on which I worked.
The most "amusing" results were when JD Power asked people to rate the ease of movement of the headrest, on a seat which had a fixed/non-movable headrest. (hint... you can't... at least not without "special" tools) Of course, people rated that the headrest was too difficult to move. (duh!) There were lots of questions like that.
I am not saying that JD Power has no value... just that you have to be careful not to take any survey too seriously. Too much depends on the validity of the questions.
Don't feel too bad, even the guy who did his research didn't really... According to the above referenced Wikipedia article:
In 1897, a bill was introduced in the Michigan legislature asking for a ten-year closed season on passenger pigeons. This was a futile gesture. This was a highly gregarious species—the flock could initiate courtship and reproduction only when they were gathered in large numbers; it was realized only too late that smaller groups of passenger pigeons could not breed successfully, and the surviving numbers proved too few to re-establish the species.[3] Attempts at breeding among the captive population also failed for the same reasons.
So, unless they can make a very large quantity of them, it will be difficult to restart the passenger pigeon.
His sig has to be one of the best I have seen. I have almost been caught by it on several occasions, but in each case I realized it was meant to be humor just before I clicked Reply.
Any technology that has been sold or in use for over a year is unpatentable.
Except if you have applied for the patent prior to it being offered for sale. In theory you then have only a year after the application to get the patent, but there are ways that patent attorneys can stretch this out by making amendments, etc. to the patent application.
I have a couple of applications pending from a previous employer. It has been about three years, and it seems like each year, around August, I get a call/email from the patent attorney asking me to sign another version of the application.
This brings up a point that I have wondered about. The "shutterspeed" on a digital camera.
I always assumed that this was just another word for "how much motion blur do you want?" or "how many sensor refreshes do you want to average together?" and not that the sensor actually has a shutter preventing light from hitting the sensor at any time. So at that point there isn't any difference between the "live-view light costantly flood[ing] the sensor" and when the actual picture is taken.
Same for the "iso speed". It seems like a very artificial analogy back to film for what is really a software brightness setting. In fact, given that both of these probably change multiple things to achieve the effect of shutterspeed or film-speed, I wonder if it might be easier to control and more accurate if the cameras presented the real digital variables to be changed (or something more representative of what is actually happening in the digital camera.)
However, I admit that I don't know if any of this is true. It is a speculation and a request for clairification from anybody out there who is actually programming/designing digital cameras.
The airlines that do that will also deny you the use of the return portion of a ticket if you fail to show up for the incoming flight. How did you get around that?
Good catch! I almost mentioned that too, but thought it sounded too much like a rant and detracted from my point.
I managed it like this: I was able to cancel (surrender) the incoming flight in advance. Which meant I now had two one-way tickets.
To make matters even worse, I had to fly into one airport and leave at another. I totaled 5 different airports in 3 days, booked through three separate systems. It was a mess, costly, and I wouldn't count on being able to pull it off again, but I got the job.
Slashdot Mirror
Adobe's ebook DRM is used by OverDrive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OverDrive,_Inc. to let more than 27,000 public libraries and schools lend ebooks to citizens and students.
THANK YOU! This makes the motives clear. The attempt is not to kill the ebook industry, just the ebook LENDING that libraries and schools allow.
So there shouldn't by a problem... Afterall, this is slashdot.
Sunshine, love, and beer probably do [have intrinsic value] as well, though I'm only 99.9% certain of those.
Love may have intrinsic value, but unless you are in one of a few counties in Nevada, trying to extract that value may end with your arrest.
MSRT could also be MicroSoft Removal Tool... but that would just be a Linux install disk of whatever flavor you choose.
(what's new right?)
I never even thought to conflate Std Deviation and Mean Deviation prior to reading this article/summary. I just thought of Std Deviation as that bit of the normal distribution which captures ~68.2% of the values (for +/- 1 sigma). And Yes, I knew how it is calculated, my mind just didn't go that direction.
I've had an account at /. for over 15 years; [. . .] /. has never been solely about "science and technology". It's always had a very strong political part to it, and this cock up at US Customs plays to that part of the site.
15 years? ... Newbie.
(but I agree with you. Some people just need to relax a little.)
If you've ever played around with conversing with Cleverbot (Google it ha ha!), an online AI that supposedly learns from its conversations, you'll find that "conversing" with humans, at least the sort it apparently meets on the internet, is turning it into a disturbed individual, or whatever.
Well with a name that sounds like a tool used by a meat packer, CleaverBot, who wouldn't be disturbed. Oh, wait... Clever like smart... same comment.
I want to read about its success in navigating some of the highway system surrounding the twin cities in Minnesota.
I remember once merging onto an interstate there (from the right) only to need to cross four lanes so that I could catch my exit (on the left) what seemed to be only a half-mile later. I probably endangered myself, my passengers and fellow motorists making that maneuver. This would be a good place to reduce accident risk. :)
You probably weren't supposed to use that entrance/exit combination. I know of at least two other cities where such a situation exists and they have solid white lines (not dashed) and signage specifically instructing you not to do it. (people still do, and accidents still happen). In both cases there were surface street exits that very quickly convey one to the same place as the freeway multiple-lane-crossing maneuver winds up.
Sorry to hear about your accident and injuries, but you lost me when you wrote "...when you are between a concrete barrier and an elderly driver that doesn't notice your horn there aren't many options." Now, I admit that I wan't there, and there may not have been any options as you assert, but generally if one is hitting the horn, one would be better served taking some other action instead; like hitting the brakes or otherwise taking evasive manuvers.
You mentioned defensive driving courses. As I understand it, one of the main tenents of defensive driving is "be prepared to control your vehicle, because you can't control the other persons vehicle" (Blowing the horn is essentially attempting to control the other vehicle.)
To get back on topic: This is the thing that the autonomous cars are actually quite good at, reacting to exactly what is happening, not what the "driver" is expecting to happen. That and not over-reacting; such as the tendency for people to steer out of one accident and right into another (often a worse, head on accident).
The Muslim Brotherhood made things even more unstable in Egypt.
Fatah is so weak they've effectively ceded all control over the Gaza Strip to Hamas.
Hezbollah sparked a devastating conflict with Israel which effectively kicked the country's development 20 years backwards.
If THATS "offering to build and staff schools, give them food, add some stability, and provide some sense of a security force", then the Taliban is the greatest government in the world.
Replace the groups above with "The Democrat Party" and the change the country to the US and, unfortunately, it still applies. (Ok, you can't literally do the subsitiution and have it work, but the thought is the same. Promises, promises--> election -> things go downhill. )
The worse part is that Republicans in the last 20 years or so haven't been much better (only slightly). Thus the problems that we are in domestically.
As I understand it DDT was used in matresses specifically to kill/prevent bed-bugs, and was very effective. This is part of the reason that the US/Canada has had many decades of being reletively bed-bug worry-free (or at least it has been uncommon). The problem with DDT was that it was found to persist into the environment, would get into the fish, which were then eaten by birds, which resulted in soft egg-shells and the decline of species such as the California condor and bald eagle. This is why it was banned in 1972.
It has taken 30-40 years, the eagle population has returned, but so have the bed bugs.
The problem is not Obamacare. The problem is the disgusting, predatorial healthcare system in the US. The problem is that the US doesn't follow every other developed country in the world and treats healthcare as a privilege instead of a right. As such, the monopolies that run the healthcare system exploit the lack of competitive pressure since people in the hospital frequently can't "shop around" for better & cheaper service. This leads to the practice of charging patients literally 10x to 100x what things actually cost.
I think you are slightly confused. You have it right when you are talking about the lack of competitive pressure increasing prices, but the solution is not to remove even more competitive pressure by switching to one plan to rule them all, which is essentially what Obamacare does. (You can have "competiting" plans, but they have to be the same, or you get hit for having a "cadillac plan".) The solution is to restore competitive pressure by implementing things like healthcare spending accounts (HSA) etc. which would place the consumer in the drivers seat for their own care. "... but doctor, is there a less expensive med that I can take?" (or test, or proceedure, etc.)
But this is where others start complaining that this leaves out the poor, etc. since they can't afford to contribute to a HSA. (I am afraid I don't have a good answer, except to say that Obamacare isn't shaping up to fix this issue either.)
Don't forget, there are people in Canada who come to the US to use our "shit" system, because they can't get care in a reasonable time-frame in their socialized healthcare system. It is well and good to have a "right" to healthcare, but if you have to wait in line for a year to treat something that is going to kill you in six months without treatment, it doesn't do you any good.
This is illustrated by the fact that, in this very case, the judge ordered the man to decrypt his hard drives (which is a fairly uncontroversial example of "testifying" against oneself as a defendant's password is private knowledge that must be produced by the defendant) or be held in contempt of court.
Let me expand on this post slightly. I too was going to point at the case currently in question as one of the better examples, but I was going to suggest that you have a hard drive that has NO encryption on it, but does have some unused partition space. (Perhaps from an old install of another OS, swap space, or some other ligitimate reason. In any case there is non-zero "noise" in the unused partition.) You are, in fact, innocent of any crimes, but have been accused of some data related crime. The police confiscate your hard drive and, finding the "empty" partition space, the courts say "You obviously have some sort of truecrypt volume here. Give us the password."
Since you never actually created a truecrypt volume, you can't provide the key, because it doesn't exist.
Without the Fifth Ammendment, you could be held in contempt of court for not complying with the court order. By claiming the Fifth, you are able to say "sorry, but no" to the order to provide the non-existant key.
A nice quotation which is attributed to Thomas Jefferson (but for which the Monticello site finds no citation) is:
"The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it."
and/or
"The people will not understand the importance of the Second Amendment until it is too late."
If Jefferson didn't say it, he should have.
How would you react if the government proposed to ban certain words or phrases because you don't really "need" to use them in everyday speech?
Political correctness (PC) attempts to do just that. Of course, that was probably exactly the point that you were trying to make.
The worst part of it is that, if you consider how closely connected linguistics and the formation of rational thought is, (non)PC is tanamount to establishing thoughtcrime.
There's no reason for attackers to focus on a single browser any more when they can instead target a plugin like Java that works across all browsers.
Java... Write once, Infect everywhere!
Gee, from your description of "the garden" you could almost be describing the the original "Garden"... Eden.
(assuming you slightly merge God in the descriptions, but the concepts are closely related anyway.)
I used to work as an Advance Quality Engineer in the automotive seating industry. Part of my job involved regularly reviewing the JD Power results for the platforms on which I worked.
The most "amusing" results were when JD Power asked people to rate the ease of movement of the headrest, on a seat which had a fixed/non-movable headrest. (hint... you can't... at least not without "special" tools) Of course, people rated that the headrest was too difficult to move. (duh!) There were lots of questions like that.
I am not saying that JD Power has no value... just that you have to be careful not to take any survey too seriously. Too much depends on the validity of the questions.
No, too much Tolkien...
AuOrchs = Golden Orchs???
Don't feel too bad, even the guy who did his research didn't really... According to the above referenced Wikipedia article:
In 1897, a bill was introduced in the Michigan legislature asking for a ten-year closed season on passenger pigeons. This was a futile gesture. This was a highly gregarious species—the flock could initiate courtship and reproduction only when they were gathered in large numbers; it was realized only too late that smaller groups of passenger pigeons could not breed successfully, and the surviving numbers proved too few to re-establish the species.[3] Attempts at breeding among the captive population also failed for the same reasons.
So, unless they can make a very large quantity of them, it will be difficult to restart the passenger pigeon.
His sig has to be one of the best I have seen. I have almost been caught by it on several occasions, but in each case I realized it was meant to be humor just before I clicked Reply.
Thanks. You have dispelled a few wrong assumptions on my part. This makes much more sense now.
Any technology that has been sold or in use for over a year is unpatentable.
Except if you have applied for the patent prior to it being offered for sale. In theory you then have only a year after the application to get the patent, but there are ways that patent attorneys can stretch this out by making amendments, etc. to the patent application.
I have a couple of applications pending from a previous employer. It has been about three years, and it seems like each year, around August, I get a call/email from the patent attorney asking me to sign another version of the application.
This brings up a point that I have wondered about. The "shutterspeed" on a digital camera.
I always assumed that this was just another word for "how much motion blur do you want?" or "how many sensor refreshes do you want to average together?" and not that the sensor actually has a shutter preventing light from hitting the sensor at any time. So at that point there isn't any difference between the "live-view light costantly flood[ing] the sensor" and when the actual picture is taken.
Same for the "iso speed". It seems like a very artificial analogy back to film for what is really a software brightness setting. In fact, given that both of these probably change multiple things to achieve the effect of shutterspeed or film-speed, I wonder if it might be easier to control and more accurate if the cameras presented the real digital variables to be changed (or something more representative of what is actually happening in the digital camera.)
However, I admit that I don't know if any of this is true. It is a speculation and a request for clairification from anybody out there who is actually programming/designing digital cameras.
The airlines that do that will also deny you the use of the return portion of a ticket if you fail to show up for the incoming flight. How did you get around that?
Good catch! I almost mentioned that too, but thought it sounded too much like a rant and detracted from my point.
I managed it like this: I was able to cancel (surrender) the incoming flight in advance. Which meant I now had two one-way tickets.
To make matters even worse, I had to fly into one airport and leave at another. I totaled 5 different airports in 3 days, booked through three separate systems. It was a mess, costly, and I wouldn't count on being able to pull it off again, but I got the job.