No, there's no reason their actual spatial motion needs to be away from us. They could well be moving towards us through space, but it's going to be dwarfed by the expansion of space that makes it look like they're moving away from us. The actual motion term in the velocity equation is so small in relation to the spacial expansion term, it might as well be zero.
But there _is_ information linking the result with the query. The user visited that site after making the query.
Note in the article the google engineers were told to click on the links. By doing so they now have linked the result to the query.
I would be very _very_ surprised if google doesn't do the exact same thing in their system. The site that most people visit when searching for a term will bubble to the top. The only difference is they probably only do it with their own searches, whereas the Bing toolbar reports all searches, irrespective of which engine is used for the search.
The submitter obviously did not read his own links. While the universe is only 14 billion years old, the _observable_ universe is > 90 billion light years across.
This is due to expansion, which stretched the wavelength of the light coming towards us, so redshifting those galaxies. It also makes those galaxies appear to be moving away from us at many multiples the speed of light, although they're not really moving at all, space is expanding. An explanation
It's not cheating, for one simple reason. Google is intimating that it's targeting them, but what's actually happening, if you read the article, is that Bing Toolbar is recording your searches, and which site _you_ found most relevant (by selecting it from the search results) and then using that data to improve it's searches. If you were using Bing as a search engine, it would target that, if you use Yahoo, it targets that. It's not "copying" anything, it's just using actual user data as a weighting function in it's search algorithm.
I find his examples impressive, but even more impressive is the study that shows the placebo effect works even when you know it's a placebo.
Essentially, because we've been told that the placebo effect is real, our bodies will do the right thing _because we know the placebo effect is real_. I would like to see a study where they differentiate between telling people "This is a placebo" and "This doesn't do anything, you're just a control". Then we'll see if there's a placebo effect placebo effect.
He said that the people who took the muscle relaxant, and were _told_ they were getting the muscle relaxant had higher concentrations of the muscle relaxant in their blood plasma than the other two groups that also received an identical dose of the muscle relaxant.
That part is fact. He speculated on what could cause this. But just the fact by itself is pretty freaky.
No, they calculated the actual private key, because the static value caused an intractible problem to be turned into a simple one solved by simultaneous differential equations.
Indeed, in Sony's signing algorithm, there are two private unknowns, the private key, and a random number. If implemented correctly, you can never solve for the private key, since the number of unknown variables will always be 1 more than you can solve for.
Sony set the random number to the same number every time, making it trivial, ie, 10th grade math level, to determine the private key.
In the talk they joke about how Sony's "rand()" function for the signature algorithm is essentially just "return 4;"
That's how they fucked up, and that's why it's an EPIC FAIL, as opposed to just a normal fail.
It's diesel engine, so you can happily be burning corn instead of fossil fuels.
They say they have practically eliminated the turbo lag too. So a powerful (> 300hp and good torque), light, simple and modular engine that runs on biofuel and doesn't have a lot of the disadvantages of current biofuel engines. I'm guessing they have a winner.
Not by the rules of capitalism they're not. As far as I remember the rule is to charge what the market will bear. The higher the demand, the higher the price you can charge. Since we're making obscene profits, I assume the demand is still there and we're balancing demand and price reasonably well.
If no one was buying them, then they'd be overpriced. At the moment it looks like they're priced just right.
Same thing for Kinect. Everyone complains that it's too expensive, but the initial allocations are selling out and the demand is still high, so it looks like it's priced fine too.
Microsoft would be doing that calculation whether they gave money to charities or not. About the only people who could complain about the amount of donations MS gives are the shareholders.. Bunch of scrooges..:)
If you can afford to pay cash for ER visits or other high cost medical expenses, you can also afford a slightly higher tax bill.
And if you really prefer paying cash, get a high deductible really cheap plan and pair it with a HSA. That way you get to pay cash, you get to pay with _untaxed_ cash, you get negotiated rates (often half to a third of the normal doctor charges), and you avoid the extra taxes.
It's completely free. You don't get punished, you just pay more taxes. This seems perfectly reasonable. You still have all the choices you had before, only now when you get drunk and crash into a telephone pole, the expensive medical care you didn't want to buy insurance for will be partially paid for by the extra taxes you paid.
We also donate more (per employee) to non-profits than any other sector. Dunno about other companies, but Microsoft will match your charitable giving dollar for dollar up to $12K a year, and will match hours volunteered by donating $17 per hour as well.
I'm much happier seeing corporate money going to these programs than lining some politician's pockets. At least charities have rules about how much overhead they're allowed to have.
I went with 30% for the agency model comparison. B&N and Amazon combine the wholesale and retail portions of the equation (around 40% in my calculations) so I don't think it's too far off. Also publishers make most of their money in the hardback edition, so by the time they're putting out the paperback, their pre-production costs have been covered. Doesn't stop them from gouging their portion, of course.
This would be reasonable if the digital versions cost less than the paper. This is often not the case. (Dammit Slashdot, fix your comment system, I had to type the entire URL because for some reason I'm not allowed to paste...)
Let's look at a $7.99 paperback: (like this one) Components making up the selling of this book are: Retail Markup: (30-45% for B&N) (We'll go with 30 for simplicity):$2.40 Wholesale Markup: 10%: $0.79 Author Royalties: 8-15% (Lets be generous, publishers rarely are): $1.20 (I normally hear around $0.70 per paperback, but we're being generous) Printing: 10%: $0.79 Pre-production (editing etc): 10-15%: $1.20 Other (Marketing, lunches, power ties...): The rest.: $1.60
With an Ebook, you can cut out the wholesaler and the printing cost. Marketing is probably a lot cheaper too, since it's taken care of for you by the digital seller (amazon, itunes). No big cardboard cutouts, no phoning stores asking them to stock the book etc. Pre-production is slightly cheaper, since you don't have to worry nearly as much about absolutely perfect layout, since the ebook formats don't support it anyway. (As far as I've noticed, they don't even bother proofreading the ebook versions...)
We've cut out at least $1.50 from the costs, and probably closer to $2-3. Unfortunately, if we just reduced the selling price by that much, the author would get screwed (they get a percentage), so authors need to think about that when negotiating. I would say reasonable royalties on ebooks are 25%. So for the author to get the same $1.20, the selling price of the ebook should be around $4.80. With the agency model, that would be $1.44 for the retailer, $1.20 for the author, and $2.16 for the publisher, which would easily take care of their associated costs.
Of course, that's not what happens. As we see, the books sell for about the same (maybe $1 less), and the publisher skims twice their normal share.
Baen, the only enlightened ebook publisher, has a guideline that they sell their e-books for around 75% of the lowest cost paper edition, capped at about $6. It's done very well for them, but it's going to take years for the dinosaurs in the rest of the publishing business to die out and be replaced by people that actually know what's going on.
Re:In the End...
on
Why Microsoft?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
(can you use Linux machines as an MS employee without working in their "Linux lab"? What about Firefox? What if I deliberately choose not to use the MS tools and/or develop cross-platform tools to get my job done? Can't see MS releasing those to the public, or even allowing them in the first place)
Yes, although you'll probably have hassles connecting it to the network and accessing internal resources, reading your mail, checking out code (Our source repository is windows only), etc. Also, if you install a version of Linux that has source code included, you will be considered "tainted" and none of the code you write is allowed to be included in shipping products. (Just common sense, considering the viral nature of GPL code) Yes, a lot of us use firefox, but you can't visit internal sites with it since it doesn't support NT Authentication. (Chrome, however, does) Lots of people have developed very useful tools, but you are correct that they wouldn't be released to the public.
Washington state does have a corporate "income" tax. It's a little different than the federal version, since it gets around the tricks companies use to lower their tax bill (inflating expenses, re-investing, etc) by using a very low tax rate (something like 0.025% I can't remember exactly, I haven't run my business in a while) on gross receipts with essentially no deductions. There are caveats for a few large companies that managed to threaten their way into lower taxes, but for the vast majority of businesses in Washington, that's how it works.
Sorry, wrong again. The fees make up a small portion of the tab, and are not significantly different from what they were before Eyman took it upon himself to "fix" our problems. You have the $30 fee that Eyman got passed, a $10 "weight based fee" ($20 if you have an exceptionally heavy SUV), $3 filing fee and 0.75 service fee.
The RTA tax was voted in by the voters, so it wasn't a "fee" added by our "kind hearted lawmakers".
Of course, a side effect of the Eyman initiative is that vehicle registration is now a fee instead of what it used to be (an excise tax) and so can no longer be deducted from your income for federal tax purposes, which you could do before.
Rubbish. Tim Eyman, the Horses Ass, successfully got rid of the percentage tab fee, now all vehicles pay $30 for their tabs. This is one of the major reasons the state has to consider other forms of income. The largest portion of the dollars in your yearly license fee is a tax for the RTA to fund the Light Rail and other transit initiatives. If you don't like it, move out of the 3 counties it's implemented in. If you have noticed that it's now faster for you to drive your single occupant SUV to work in the morning than it was 10 years ago, this tax is one of the reasons. The RTA tax is.3% of the value of your vehicle, so to get a bill for "thousands" of dollars, you had to buy a vehicle over 330K MSRP. I bought a brand new vehicle for about 30K last year, and my tab renewal was just over $100.
Gold? You know it's a worthless metal, right? Sure, it's shiny, but the only reason it has value is _because we say it does_. Exactly the same as paper currency. You can't eat it and it's too soft to work into anything useful.
Now if you were investing in cans of Spam, or solar panels, or anything that would actually be _useful_ in this apocalyptic world you're envisioning, then you'd have a chance.
I'd sure as hell be more likely to trade my services or goods for a can of spam than a lump of useless gold.
OMG! Someone wrote it in a book, so it _must_ be true!
Again, most rapists can easily find willing participants to fulfill sexual desires. They instead choose to rape someone who is not willing. This indicates that it's not about sex (which they could get easily), it's about power and control.
There are many cases of rape where full sexual intercourse does not happen. There are also cases of rape where the actions don't involve sexual organs at all (think broomsticks), and there are cases of females raping males, which cannot possibly be motivated by a desire to maximise offspring.
Human animals, as well as quite a few other species often use sex for things other than procreation. We use it for fun, for showing intimacy, for cementing relationships, and for control (even in normal relationships, sex can be used as a form of control - just try pissing off your significant other sometime to see that in action). The simplistic view that rape is all about increasing your number of offspring is just that... simplistic.
Wow, a lot of heated opinions here. Seriously though, you have to look at track records. The party that has a platform of less government and fiscal (and personal) responsibility has been at the helm of the largest government increases and spending excesses in history, as well as trying it's damnedest to legislate personal responsibility right out of existence (abortion decisions, porn, religion, etc), and the party that has the platform of larger government, more social nets and more social control has been the only one in decades to reduce the deficit, and believes that people should have more liberty (abortion decisions, gay marriage, etc).
Huh, maybe they should just swap names and get on with it. As far as I can tell, the party platform is only there to sucker the idiots...
Slashdot Mirror
No, there's no reason their actual spatial motion needs to be away from us. They could well be moving towards us through space, but it's going to be dwarfed by the expansion of space that makes it look like they're moving away from us. The actual motion term in the velocity equation is so small in relation to the spacial expansion term, it might as well be zero.
Yes. Microsoft is a patent holder in the H.264 patent pool.
But there _is_ information linking the result with the query. The user visited that site after making the query.
Note in the article the google engineers were told to click on the links. By doing so they now have linked the result to the query.
I would be very _very_ surprised if google doesn't do the exact same thing in their system. The site that most people visit when searching for a term will bubble to the top. The only difference is they probably only do it with their own searches, whereas the Bing toolbar reports all searches, irrespective of which engine is used for the search.
The submitter obviously did not read his own links. While the universe is only 14 billion years old, the _observable_ universe is > 90 billion light years across.
This is due to expansion, which stretched the wavelength of the light coming towards us, so redshifting those galaxies. It also makes those galaxies appear to be moving away from us at many multiples the speed of light, although they're not really moving at all, space is expanding.
An explanation
It's not cheating, for one simple reason. Google is intimating that it's targeting them, but what's actually happening, if you read the article, is that Bing Toolbar is recording your searches, and which site _you_ found most relevant (by selecting it from the search results) and then using that data to improve it's searches. If you were using Bing as a search engine, it would target that, if you use Yahoo, it targets that. It's not "copying" anything, it's just using actual user data as a weighting function in it's search algorithm.
I find his examples impressive, but even more impressive is the study that shows the placebo effect works even when you know it's a placebo.
Essentially, because we've been told that the placebo effect is real, our bodies will do the right thing _because we know the placebo effect is real_. I would like to see a study where they differentiate between telling people "This is a placebo" and "This doesn't do anything, you're just a control". Then we'll see if there's a placebo effect placebo effect.
He said that the people who took the muscle relaxant, and were _told_ they were getting the muscle relaxant had higher concentrations of the muscle relaxant in their blood plasma than the other two groups that also received an identical dose of the muscle relaxant.
That part is fact. He speculated on what could cause this. But just the fact by itself is pretty freaky.
No, they calculated the actual private key, because the static value caused an intractible problem to be turned into a simple one solved by simultaneous differential equations.
Indeed, in Sony's signing algorithm, there are two private unknowns, the private key, and a random number. If implemented correctly, you can never solve for the private key, since the number of unknown variables will always be 1 more than you can solve for.
Sony set the random number to the same number every time, making it trivial, ie, 10th grade math level, to determine the private key.
In the talk they joke about how Sony's "rand()" function for the signature algorithm is essentially just "return 4;"
That's how they fucked up, and that's why it's an EPIC FAIL, as opposed to just a normal fail.
It's diesel engine, so you can happily be burning corn instead of fossil fuels.
They say they have practically eliminated the turbo lag too. So a powerful (> 300hp and good torque), light, simple and modular engine that runs on biofuel and doesn't have a lot of the disadvantages of current biofuel engines. I'm guessing they have a winner.
Not by the rules of capitalism they're not. As far as I remember the rule is to charge what the market will bear. The higher the demand, the higher the price you can charge. Since we're making obscene profits, I assume the demand is still there and we're balancing demand and price reasonably well.
If no one was buying them, then they'd be overpriced. At the moment it looks like they're priced just right.
Same thing for Kinect. Everyone complains that it's too expensive, but the initial allocations are selling out and the demand is still high, so it looks like it's priced fine too.
Microsoft would be doing that calculation whether they gave money to charities or not. About the only people who could complain about the amount of donations MS gives are the shareholders.. Bunch of scrooges.. :)
If you can afford to pay cash for ER visits or other high cost medical expenses, you can also afford a slightly higher tax bill.
And if you really prefer paying cash, get a high deductible really cheap plan and pair it with a HSA. That way you get to pay cash, you get to pay with _untaxed_ cash, you get negotiated rates (often half to a third of the normal doctor charges), and you avoid the extra taxes.
Geez, people are such whiners...
It's completely free. You don't get punished, you just pay more taxes. This seems perfectly reasonable. You still have all the choices you had before, only now when you get drunk and crash into a telephone pole, the expensive medical care you didn't want to buy insurance for will be partially paid for by the extra taxes you paid.
Arnie is married to a Kennedy for goodness sake. No self respecting conservative could do that :)
We also donate more (per employee) to non-profits than any other sector. Dunno about other companies, but Microsoft will match your charitable giving dollar for dollar up to $12K a year, and will match hours volunteered by donating $17 per hour as well.
I'm much happier seeing corporate money going to these programs than lining some politician's pockets. At least charities have rules about how much overhead they're allowed to have.
I was using Chrome. I'd think it would be supported.
I went with 30% for the agency model comparison. B&N and Amazon combine the wholesale and retail portions of the equation (around 40% in my calculations) so I don't think it's too far off. Also publishers make most of their money in the hardback edition, so by the time they're putting out the paperback, their pre-production costs have been covered. Doesn't stop them from gouging their portion, of course.
This would be reasonable if the digital versions cost less than the paper. This is often not the case. (Dammit Slashdot, fix your comment system, I had to type the entire URL because for some reason I'm not allowed to paste...)
Let's look at a $7.99 paperback: (like this one) :$2.40
Components making up the selling of this book are:
Retail Markup: (30-45% for B&N) (We'll go with 30 for simplicity)
Wholesale Markup: 10%: $0.79
Author Royalties: 8-15% (Lets be generous, publishers rarely are): $1.20 (I normally hear around $0.70 per paperback, but we're being generous)
Printing: 10%: $0.79
Pre-production (editing etc): 10-15%: $1.20
Other (Marketing, lunches, power ties...): The rest.: $1.60
With an Ebook, you can cut out the wholesaler and the printing cost. Marketing is probably a lot cheaper too, since it's taken care of for you by the digital seller (amazon, itunes). No big cardboard cutouts, no phoning stores asking them to stock the book etc. Pre-production is slightly cheaper, since you don't have to worry nearly as much about absolutely perfect layout, since the ebook formats don't support it anyway. (As far as I've noticed, they don't even bother proofreading the ebook versions...)
We've cut out at least $1.50 from the costs, and probably closer to $2-3.
Unfortunately, if we just reduced the selling price by that much, the author would get screwed (they get a percentage), so authors need to think about that when negotiating. I would say reasonable royalties on ebooks are 25%. So for the author to get the same $1.20, the selling price of the ebook should be around $4.80. With the agency model, that would be $1.44 for the retailer, $1.20 for the author, and $2.16 for the publisher, which would easily take care of their associated costs.
Of course, that's not what happens. As we see, the books sell for about the same (maybe $1 less), and the publisher skims twice their normal share.
Baen, the only enlightened ebook publisher, has a guideline that they sell their e-books for around 75% of the lowest cost paper edition, capped at about $6. It's done very well for them, but it's going to take years for the dinosaurs in the rest of the publishing business to die out and be replaced by people that actually know what's going on.
(can you use Linux machines as an MS employee without working in their "Linux lab"? What about Firefox? What if I deliberately choose not to use the MS tools and/or develop cross-platform tools to get my job done? Can't see MS releasing those to the public, or even allowing them in the first place)
Yes, although you'll probably have hassles connecting it to the network and accessing internal resources, reading your mail, checking out code (Our source repository is windows only), etc. Also, if you install a version of Linux that has source code included, you will be considered "tainted" and none of the code you write is allowed to be included in shipping products. (Just common sense, considering the viral nature of GPL code)
Yes, a lot of us use firefox, but you can't visit internal sites with it since it doesn't support NT Authentication. (Chrome, however, does)
Lots of people have developed very useful tools, but you are correct that they wouldn't be released to the public.
Washington state does have a corporate "income" tax. It's a little different than the federal version, since it gets around the tricks companies use to lower their tax bill (inflating expenses, re-investing, etc) by using a very low tax rate (something like 0.025% I can't remember exactly, I haven't run my business in a while) on gross receipts with essentially no deductions. There are caveats for a few large companies that managed to threaten their way into lower taxes, but for the vast majority of businesses in Washington, that's how it works.
Sorry, wrong again. The fees make up a small portion of the tab, and are not significantly different from what they were before Eyman took it upon himself to "fix" our problems. You have the $30 fee that Eyman got passed, a $10 "weight based fee" ($20 if you have an exceptionally heavy SUV), $3 filing fee and 0.75 service fee.
The RTA tax was voted in by the voters, so it wasn't a "fee" added by our "kind hearted lawmakers".
Of course, a side effect of the Eyman initiative is that vehicle registration is now a fee instead of what it used to be (an excise tax) and so can no longer be deducted from your income for federal tax purposes, which you could do before.
Rubbish. Tim Eyman, the Horses Ass, successfully got rid of the percentage tab fee, now all vehicles pay $30 for their tabs. This is one of the major reasons the state has to consider other forms of income. The largest portion of the dollars in your yearly license fee is a tax for the RTA to fund the Light Rail and other transit initiatives. If you don't like it, move out of the 3 counties it's implemented in. If you have noticed that it's now faster for you to drive your single occupant SUV to work in the morning than it was 10 years ago, this tax is one of the reasons. The RTA tax is .3% of the value of your vehicle, so to get a bill for "thousands" of dollars, you had to buy a vehicle over 330K MSRP.
I bought a brand new vehicle for about 30K last year, and my tab renewal was just over $100.
Gold? You know it's a worthless metal, right? Sure, it's shiny, but the only reason it has value is _because we say it does_. Exactly the same as paper currency. You can't eat it and it's too soft to work into anything useful.
Now if you were investing in cans of Spam, or solar panels, or anything that would actually be _useful_ in this apocalyptic world you're envisioning, then you'd have a chance.
I'd sure as hell be more likely to trade my services or goods for a can of spam than a lump of useless gold.
OMG! Someone wrote it in a book, so it _must_ be true!
Again, most rapists can easily find willing participants to fulfill sexual desires. They instead choose to rape someone who is not willing. This indicates that it's not about sex (which they could get easily), it's about power and control.
There are many cases of rape where full sexual intercourse does not happen. There are also cases of rape where the actions don't involve sexual organs at all (think broomsticks), and there are cases of females raping males, which cannot possibly be motivated by a desire to maximise offspring.
Human animals, as well as quite a few other species often use sex for things other than procreation. We use it for fun, for showing intimacy, for cementing relationships, and for control (even in normal relationships, sex can be used as a form of control - just try pissing off your significant other sometime to see that in action). The simplistic view that rape is all about increasing your number of offspring is just that... simplistic.
Wow, a lot of heated opinions here. Seriously though, you have to look at track records. The party that has a platform of less government and fiscal (and personal) responsibility has been at the helm of the largest government increases and spending excesses in history, as well as trying it's damnedest to legislate personal responsibility right out of existence (abortion decisions, porn, religion, etc), and the party that has the platform of larger government, more social nets and more social control has been the only one in decades to reduce the deficit, and believes that people should have more liberty (abortion decisions, gay marriage, etc).
Huh, maybe they should just swap names and get on with it. As far as I can tell, the party platform is only there to sucker the idiots...