These gerbils, are they playing chess yet? Was this research conducted by NIMH?
Honestly, with all the trouble we have just getting one person's body not to reject another person's organ after a transplant, human stem cells can thrive and reconnect the hearing of a GERBIL? Does this mean that, if the every sperm is sacred wankers keep the lid on human stem cell research that we could use gerbil (or whatever more convenient nonhuman species) neural stem cells to treat human hearing problems, or maybe even Alzheimer's?
The thing about netbooks is that since they have smaller screens and CPUs they can also work much longer on light batteries. I have a bottom of the line EEEpc (one of the last sold with XP) and it gets 4 hours on a charge, which makes it the first laptop I've ever owned that is practical for airplane use. For a bit more money I could have got a 10 hour battery.
CSIRAC's design was probably very tightly coupled to the characteristics of those delay lines. If you look at all the pictures you'll see that there are even (shorter) delay lines which are part of the ALU. Upgrading would have amounted to a floor-up redesign -- and there were better technologies breaking out for all the parts of the computer, not just the delay line RAM.
...so they're just now hearing the Titanic send out its SOS, and we still have a couple of decades to invent FTL and divert them from that Nazi experimental TV broadcast which figured so prominently in Contact.
...then get back to me on what a good idea all-electronic currency is. At least the state can't just make your Benjamins disappear when you become an unperson.
I got Netflix in the first place because my most reliable option for high speed internet is wireless 3G, thanks to the crappy wiring in an inaccessible alley behind my house. And it's capped at 5 Gb/month, and video stalls frequently during periods of high usage. So I did the same thing, switched to 2 DVD's, and I'm getting a lot more content for just a little more money. Thanks, Netflix!
The reason movies go in and out of streaming availability is that the whole licensing practice is based on an obsolete series of tiers that went roughly theatre, cable, VHS, broadcast. A movie licensed in one stream can't be broadcast in another. Now once a videocassette, DVD, or blu-ray is pressed those disks exist and they can be rented regardless of future broadcast licensing deals. But streaming is a bastard child that is generally lumped in with cable. Thing is, when a movie drops out of cable into broadcast, it can't be put on cable any more -- and that might mean it can't be streamed any more either. This is also why some movies are available for streaming before they're on DVD. The whole arrangement is a mess and nobody seems to have any idea how to fix it, since there are thousands of contracts that would have to be rewritten for all the individual properties affected by a sea change in the system.
However, I can't stream video; the only reliable ISP for me is Verizon 3G, which is capped at 5G/month and I get pretty close to that without watching any online video at all. So I took the opportunity to add two bucks to my bill and take two DVD's out at a time. It's actually a better deal. I'd rather wait for the mailman and watch a 480p DVD than crappy 360p at best and often 240p if I don't want it to stutter streaming video anyway. And I think as more ISP's start capping (though probably not at the miserly 5G offered by the wireless ISP's) Netflix will probably find its cool plan to get rid of the mail and physical disc expenses backfiring in a major way.
The problem is that sales taxes are a patchwork nightmare. Not only do different states have different rates, different collection mechanisms, and different auditing requirements, so do counties and municipalities. Just doing sales taxes for a small company that does business in 3 or 4 states is a nightmare; for a national company, it would be almost impossible. Then if you don't collect the right amount of tax, when the offended entity gets around to auditing you they hand you a bill for the tax on every transaction you've ever done since their last audit. I can understand why Bezos is so adamant about this; it's not about civic duty, but about practical possibility. If the tax was flat across the country and there was a single unified mechanism for remitting it, I doubt he would care so much.
If by "the same VB style language" you mean "a completely incompatible language that was bout as much like VB as C is like Java with a crappy migration tool that usually didn't work" then sure they continued supporting it.
When they threw every existing VS6 app under the bus, I knew it was only a matter of time before.NET followed so they could cram the next shiny object down our throats. Maybe ReactOS will be up to running VS6 apps reliably by the time Microsoft decides to rewrite the whole OS in HTML.
When you have a crap keyboard such as a membrane or chiclet pad, that bleep replaces the usual tactile feedback you'd get from a non-crap keyboard that your keypress has registered and you can go on to the next one.
How would Bing know to associate the honeypot page with the bogus search term that had been sent to Google? Somehow Bing had to get both the bogus search term and the honeypot page URL. Even supposing the browser gave them a "search agnostic" request saying what the search term was, before including it in their own search results Bing should have at least looked at the page and observed that it was not in fact relevant. Instead, they trusted some other search engine enough to include results that were in fact irrelevant. It's really hard to believe that happened without them deliberately cribbing from what they thought was a better algorithm.
According to TFA Google created a bogus search term and a honeypot webpage that didn't even contain the bogus search term, and wrote one-time custom code to force their engine to return the fake webpage as top result. Very soon after running some Google searches for the bogus term through IE with the Bing toolbar where Google returned the fake result, Bing started returning the same fake result. The only way that could happen is if they were copying Google's results without even examining why Google was returning them.
The Earth is not at all placid on any scale longer than a few centuries. Within the last few hundred thousand years the sea level has fluctuated hundreds of feet as glaciers have overtaken vast tracts of land, often in a matter of a few years because of snow refusing to melt, and then retreated even more violently releasing meltwater lakes like the one that created the Snake River. The ocean heat transport currents have hiccupped causing smaller ice ages and large areas of verdant forest have turned to desert. The magnetic field periodically reverses and we don't even know what that looks like on the ground (though, thankfully, we can be pretty sure it looks nothing like the movie 2012).
The climate has changed in very recent memory more than most of us would ever believe. As recently as the 19th century it was not uncommon for ice floes to make it to New Orleans along the Mississippi River -- something that would have been unthinkable throughout the 20th century. The Earth's climate and geology are capable of rapid change and they experience rapid change much more often than we like to think. Every time we think we have a handle on that, something turns up that makes it obvious it changes more often and more violently than we believed possible before.
Chaos theory only applies to certain kinds of systems, which for well defined reasons might demonstrate sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Turbulence is chaotic. However, bulk hydrodynamic flow is not; it can be showed at a large range of scales that simple equations and models map pretty closely to reality. The low-level turbulence averages out and doesn't affect the final result much.
Computer models of chaotic systems may not reflect the exact performance of what they are modeling, but they can demonstrate the range of possible and likely results.
And the model is not just based on mountain streams; it is also based on some much larger and more recent events, such as the creation of the Snake River Gorge (300 meters deep in a matter of weeks) and the flooding of the English Channel. Water has enormous power to carve up rock, and the conclusion of the study is not in any way extraordinary; it's what anyone who has ever stood at the bottom of the Snake River Gorge would even find rather obvious.
The problem is that throughout the colonial era it was widely assumed by learned men that the Earth is a stable place where a comfortable equilibrium reigns. What we have found in the last 40 years or so is that the Earth is actually an extraordinarily violent and often inhospitable place, and the relative stability of the last few centuries is an exception, not the rule. If we hang around here long enough we will have to deal with violent changes, and efforts to engineer such a complex and sensitive system might make things worse. The problem is that we are engineering it by pumping carbon into the atmosphere, and a sensible person might conclude knowing what the system is capable of that kicking it might not be such a good idea.
Actually, the cold snap that hit the central US last week is partly due to an extremely cold air mass moving down from the arctic. In years past that air has tended to stay parked in the arctic, but now as it moves out it is replaced by warmer air. So yes, it snows in Texas, but as a side effect of previously permanent arctic ice melting. The distribution of solar heat energy from the tropics to the poles is fairly complex, and sensitively dependent on the shape of the oceans. It has not been entirely stable even in historical times and weather extremes of all kids are likely as it seeks a new equilibrium.
A typical cable modem block services around 100 end users. They all share the pipe. In order for the pipe to work at all the end user hardware must cooperatively multitask on the uplink channel. In such a shared environment it would be very difficult to design a protocol that makes it impossible to build a cheating node -- and a DOS attack against your neighbors is always possible.
SRSLY the hardware in question was state of the art in 1994, which was when I bought a spiffy new DX266 instead of a then-dodgy P75. If you think 2009-1994=20 then I suspect you're using one of those dodgy early Pentiums.
It's an heretical thing when mapmakers do it, lying (even trivially) and corrupting their craft because of the threat of being copied. It should not be tolerated there nor should the practice claimed by this patent application be tolerated, not because the patent is bad but because the practice itself is an affront to all of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Several weeks ago, and that the water was flowing and about waist deep.
These gerbils, are they playing chess yet? Was this research conducted by NIMH? Honestly, with all the trouble we have just getting one person's body not to reject another person's organ after a transplant, human stem cells can thrive and reconnect the hearing of a GERBIL? Does this mean that, if the every sperm is sacred wankers keep the lid on human stem cell research that we could use gerbil (or whatever more convenient nonhuman species) neural stem cells to treat human hearing problems, or maybe even Alzheimer's?
The thing about netbooks is that since they have smaller screens and CPUs they can also work much longer on light batteries. I have a bottom of the line EEEpc (one of the last sold with XP) and it gets 4 hours on a charge, which makes it the first laptop I've ever owned that is practical for airplane use. For a bit more money I could have got a 10 hour battery.
CSIRAC's design was probably very tightly coupled to the characteristics of those delay lines. If you look at all the pictures you'll see that there are even (shorter) delay lines which are part of the ALU. Upgrading would have amounted to a floor-up redesign -- and there were better technologies breaking out for all the parts of the computer, not just the delay line RAM.
...so they're just now hearing the Titanic send out its SOS, and we still have a couple of decades to invent FTL and divert them from that Nazi experimental TV broadcast which figured so prominently in Contact.
...then get back to me on what a good idea all-electronic currency is. At least the state can't just make your Benjamins disappear when you become an unperson.
I got Netflix in the first place because my most reliable option for high speed internet is wireless 3G, thanks to the crappy wiring in an inaccessible alley behind my house. And it's capped at 5 Gb/month, and video stalls frequently during periods of high usage. So I did the same thing, switched to 2 DVD's, and I'm getting a lot more content for just a little more money. Thanks, Netflix!
The reason movies go in and out of streaming availability is that the whole licensing practice is based on an obsolete series of tiers that went roughly theatre, cable, VHS, broadcast. A movie licensed in one stream can't be broadcast in another. Now once a videocassette, DVD, or blu-ray is pressed those disks exist and they can be rented regardless of future broadcast licensing deals. But streaming is a bastard child that is generally lumped in with cable. Thing is, when a movie drops out of cable into broadcast, it can't be put on cable any more -- and that might mean it can't be streamed any more either. This is also why some movies are available for streaming before they're on DVD. The whole arrangement is a mess and nobody seems to have any idea how to fix it, since there are thousands of contracts that would have to be rewritten for all the individual properties affected by a sea change in the system.
However, I can't stream video; the only reliable ISP for me is Verizon 3G, which is capped at 5G/month and I get pretty close to that without watching any online video at all. So I took the opportunity to add two bucks to my bill and take two DVD's out at a time. It's actually a better deal. I'd rather wait for the mailman and watch a 480p DVD than crappy 360p at best and often 240p if I don't want it to stutter streaming video anyway. And I think as more ISP's start capping (though probably not at the miserly 5G offered by the wireless ISP's) Netflix will probably find its cool plan to get rid of the mail and physical disc expenses backfiring in a major way.
The problem is that sales taxes are a patchwork nightmare. Not only do different states have different rates, different collection mechanisms, and different auditing requirements, so do counties and municipalities. Just doing sales taxes for a small company that does business in 3 or 4 states is a nightmare; for a national company, it would be almost impossible. Then if you don't collect the right amount of tax, when the offended entity gets around to auditing you they hand you a bill for the tax on every transaction you've ever done since their last audit. I can understand why Bezos is so adamant about this; it's not about civic duty, but about practical possibility. If the tax was flat across the country and there was a single unified mechanism for remitting it, I doubt he would care so much.
If by "the same VB style language" you mean "a completely incompatible language that was bout as much like VB as C is like Java with a crappy migration tool that usually didn't work" then sure they continued supporting it.
When they threw every existing VS6 app under the bus, I knew it was only a matter of time before .NET followed so they could cram the next shiny object down our throats. Maybe ReactOS will be up to running VS6 apps reliably by the time Microsoft decides to rewrite the whole OS in HTML.
Disguise your rig as a powerful cement pump and ship it to Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. They will be glad to irradiate it for you.
TV's don't sync to the power line. They convert incoming power to DC then work from that.
When you have a crap keyboard such as a membrane or chiclet pad, that bleep replaces the usual tactile feedback you'd get from a non-crap keyboard that your keypress has registered and you can go on to the next one.
How would Bing know to associate the honeypot page with the bogus search term that had been sent to Google? Somehow Bing had to get both the bogus search term and the honeypot page URL. Even supposing the browser gave them a "search agnostic" request saying what the search term was, before including it in their own search results Bing should have at least looked at the page and observed that it was not in fact relevant. Instead, they trusted some other search engine enough to include results that were in fact irrelevant. It's really hard to believe that happened without them deliberately cribbing from what they thought was a better algorithm.
According to TFA Google created a bogus search term and a honeypot webpage that didn't even contain the bogus search term, and wrote one-time custom code to force their engine to return the fake webpage as top result. Very soon after running some Google searches for the bogus term through IE with the Bing toolbar where Google returned the fake result, Bing started returning the same fake result. The only way that could happen is if they were copying Google's results without even examining why Google was returning them.
Logan's Google?
...but not in a form that is archived and searchable until the end of time, and can't be cancelled or amended if you're later found innocent.
The climate has changed in very recent memory more than most of us would ever believe. As recently as the 19th century it was not uncommon for ice floes to make it to New Orleans along the Mississippi River -- something that would have been unthinkable throughout the 20th century. The Earth's climate and geology are capable of rapid change and they experience rapid change much more often than we like to think. Every time we think we have a handle on that, something turns up that makes it obvious it changes more often and more violently than we believed possible before.
Computer models of chaotic systems may not reflect the exact performance of what they are modeling, but they can demonstrate the range of possible and likely results.
And the model is not just based on mountain streams; it is also based on some much larger and more recent events, such as the creation of the Snake River Gorge (300 meters deep in a matter of weeks) and the flooding of the English Channel. Water has enormous power to carve up rock, and the conclusion of the study is not in any way extraordinary; it's what anyone who has ever stood at the bottom of the Snake River Gorge would even find rather obvious.
The problem is that throughout the colonial era it was widely assumed by learned men that the Earth is a stable place where a comfortable equilibrium reigns. What we have found in the last 40 years or so is that the Earth is actually an extraordinarily violent and often inhospitable place, and the relative stability of the last few centuries is an exception, not the rule. If we hang around here long enough we will have to deal with violent changes, and efforts to engineer such a complex and sensitive system might make things worse. The problem is that we are engineering it by pumping carbon into the atmosphere, and a sensible person might conclude knowing what the system is capable of that kicking it might not be such a good idea.
Actually, the cold snap that hit the central US last week is partly due to an extremely cold air mass moving down from the arctic. In years past that air has tended to stay parked in the arctic, but now as it moves out it is replaced by warmer air. So yes, it snows in Texas, but as a side effect of previously permanent arctic ice melting. The distribution of solar heat energy from the tropics to the poles is fairly complex, and sensitively dependent on the shape of the oceans. It has not been entirely stable even in historical times and weather extremes of all kids are likely as it seeks a new equilibrium.
A typical cable modem block services around 100 end users. They all share the pipe. In order for the pipe to work at all the end user hardware must cooperatively multitask on the uplink channel. In such a shared environment it would be very difficult to design a protocol that makes it impossible to build a cheating node -- and a DOS attack against your neighbors is always possible.
SRSLY the hardware in question was state of the art in 1994, which was when I bought a spiffy new DX266 instead of a then-dodgy P75. If you think 2009-1994=20 then I suspect you're using one of those dodgy early Pentiums.
It's an heretical thing when mapmakers do it, lying (even trivially) and corrupting their craft because of the threat of being copied. It should not be tolerated there nor should the practice claimed by this patent application be tolerated, not because the patent is bad but because the practice itself is an affront to all of us.